Although I don’t have all the answers, I do have a number of questions that serve as food for thought.

How many people have gotten sick, been injured, or died as a result of:
a. Collection and mining of fossil fuels
b. Energy production with fossil fuels
c. Pollution generated by fossil fuels
d. Climate change and the extreme weather that results from it
e. Oil-related wars

How different would the world be if the Arab countries in the middle east didn’t enjoy so much power as a result of their oil supply? How much better off would our own economy be if we hadn’t gotten into wars in that region? How many lives would have been spared?

How much better off would the Arab people themselves be if their leaders weren’t so complacent because of oil riches and power, and instead worked to educate their people and modernize their countries?

How much better off would we be today if we hadn’t had a knee-jerk reaction to Three Mile Island? How much less oil-addicted would we be? Would we have gone to war in the middle east? Would we have had to suck up to leaders in the middle east who, but for oil, are truly not our friends? Had we not had such ties in the middle east, would 9-11 have happened? Would al Qaeda be a household word and would there be a need for a war on terrorism?

And how badly off will the world be when the oil runs out if we don’t find alternatives?

Nuclear energy comes with risk. But so does other forms of energy. Maybe nuclear is just a stop-gap measure until renewable, environmentally friendly energy sources can completely take over. But to shy away from nuclear energy in Three Mile Island style is just not a well thought out plan.

Facebook and other new social media seem to fall outside any conventional rules of etiquette that apply to more traditional means of communication. We sometimes talk about our personal speech filters. The speech filter is the deliberate or intuitive mechanism that helps us decide which of our thoughts to share when speaking and which of our thoughts to leave unspoken. Our speech filter is what prevents us from making negative (or even positive) comments on a person’s appearance in spite of what we might be thinking. It prevents us from making politically incorrect statements. It prevents us from asking the teacher if there will be any homework.

We tune our speech filter differently based upon the setting and the audience. We tune differently when speaking with business colleagues, coworkers, friends, and family. We tune differently when speaking in front of an audience. We tune differently if we are in a public setting such as a restaurant where surrounding people may hear. We tune differently when speaking with children.

But what about the written word? In the case of the written word, we have the luxury of time to think about what we write. Our filters can be more deliberate. We can edit and reedit our written word before anybody else reads it. For example, I had thought about writing two paragraphs up that that our speech filter prevents us from calling somebody ugly. But I chose not to include that example in that paragraph because it might be politically incorrect.

My Facebook friend’s point was that Facebook users have a wide range of filter settings. The question that intrigues me is this. Given that people have time to think before posting on Facebook, what are people’s thought processes? In other words, how do people set their Facebook Post Filters? What makes a thought or event worthy of posting? What are the criteria?

I have three criteria:
1. Should I share this information with my Facebook friends?
2. Will others find this information interesting?
3. Will I offend anybody by posting this information?

The second question is at the heart of my Facebook friend’s point. Most of us have dozens or hundreds of Facebook friends. If we were to restrict our posts to those that we believe would be interesting to all our friends, we wouldn’t be posting much at all. And our perception of what may be interesting may be completely out of sync with that of our Facebook friends. Is this the reason that some people post uninteresting minutia on an hourly basis? Or is it that their filters don’t include question #2?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AND ENJOYMENT

Adaptive Digital Technologies is pleased to introduce Snowbot (TM) 1.0. Snowbot isn’t much to look at, but it packs plenty of Digital Signal Processing horsepower. The first its kind, Snowbot’s senses are driven by eight Texas Instruments TMS320C6000 series Digital Signal Processors (DSP) chips. Two DSPs at the top of Snowbot’s face handle the vision and five DSPs formed in an arc at the bottom of Snowbot’s face handle audio and speech. And within the the eighth DSP, positioned in the center of the Snowbot’s face, Adaptive Digital introduces Olfactory Signal Processing or OSP, which provides the snowbot with its sense of smell.

OSP is a field of study that is still in its infancy, but Adaptive Digital expects it to become as ubiquitous as the telephone within the coming decade as companies roll out the Smelliphone. The current state of the art is limited to the ability to identify smells by analyzing chemical makeup. But the smelliphone will be able to transmit information about the chemical makeup, along with voice and video information, across a Voice Over IP (VoIP) channel to the other party on a smelliphone call. The smelliphone on that end will recreate the smell by synthesizing the appropriate chemical compound.

The eight DSP chips provide a combined processing power of 4.8 GHz and can execute 38.4 billion operations per second. This is far greater than the capability of a typical desktop PC. But as we all know, a PC’s electronics require much power and hence dissipate so much heat that the PC requires a fan to keep it cool. The TI DSPs draw so little power and run so cold that they can be placed on Snowbot’s face without affecting its crystalline structure.

A Snowbot kit will be available in the 2010 holiday season. Using the kit, children and adults alike will be able to build their own snowbots. Availability will be limited to winter months in cooler climates.

Snowbot is a trademark of Adaptive Digital Technologies, Inc.

Happy Holidays!
Your friends at Adaptive Digital (ADT)

About Adaptive Digital Technologies (http://www.adaptivedigital.com)

Adaptive Digital continues to meet and exceed the current and future requirements of service providers, equipment manufacturers, system integrators and developers by bringing superior voice quality to speech-based applications. Adaptive Digitals highly optimized DSP Algorithms/Solutions include network, line, and acoustic echo cancellation, high-density conferencing, speech compression, telephony, and voice quality algorithms. Recognized internationally for its quality software, Adaptive Digitals customers include British Telecom, Cisco Systems Inc., Cantata Technology, Digium, General Dynamics, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Sonus, and Texas Instruments.

Adaptive Digital is a member of the Texas Instruments Third Party Developer Network and is located in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA).

Most of us subscribe to a philosophy that encourages the sharing of technology and technical know-how. We teach science and mathematics in school for the good of our children and for the good of society. University researchers publish their work so that others can learn and build upon that research. One open-source philosophy is based upon the same principle – building upon the work of others.

So, why shouldn’t businesses share technology with each other? In a capitalist society, the answer is pretty clear. Businesses succeed when they offer products or services that maintain a competitive advantage. By sharing trade secrets, a business loses its advantage. If a business cannot profit from its innovation, there is no financial incentive to innovate.

This aspect of capitalism has been recognized by none other than the Chinese government. Historically, China completely ignored software piracy and theft of intellectual property. Chinese companies were allowed to clone and sell products at will. But somewhere along the way, the Chinese government realized that there was little incentive for Chinese companies to innovate if their Chinese competitors were allowed to clone and sell their products. So the Chinese government has started to mend its ways. Imagine that! But I digress.

Besides philosophy and the greater good, why would a business open its trade secrets to its competitors? The answer is, of course, the bottom line – profit. One example is in the semiconductor industry. A company that makes money selling microprocessor chips is often happy to give away software that runs on its microprocessor chips. By providing that software, the company expects to sell more chips.

But there is a delicate balance to be weighed. If the semiconductor company gives away software, it discourages other companies from developing software that runs on that microprocessor. There is no business in trying to sell software that competes with free software. How can you compete with free? By giving away software, the semiconductor company may therefore stifle innovation that would otherwise expand the market for its microprocessor chip!

Now that I think about it, I have to wonder if I am hurting the newspaper business by making this article available for free. By being one of the many free media outlets, am I contributing to the decline in newspaper circulation? I certainly hope not. The professional journalists are good for society. But the web, like open-source software, is a disruptive technology that brings with it both good and bad.

There is a reason that some things are free and others are not. You usually get what you pay for. As a blogger, I have not been schooled in the ethics of journalism and I have no editor reviewing my work. If I did, could I have ended the first sentence in this paragraph with a preposition? Similarly, when you get software for free, quality control may be non-existent, and you won’t be receiving a warranty or any support.

Now comes the religion part. There are those who not only want to open up their software source code, they want to make everybody else do so through strings attached to their open-source software licenses. I’ll call them the open-source religious extremists. That’s where I draw the line. If you choose to share your source code, that’s your choice. But don’t demand or expect that everybody else do the same. Two of the biggest problems in this world are extremism and intolerance. Let’s keep that type of thinking out of the world of science and technology. Let’s all try to keep open minds when it comes to open-source.

 First, I should offer disclosure so you know where I’m coming from. I don’t work for an oil, energy, or computer company. I drive a Prius; I believe we need to reduce our dependency on oil, reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emission. But, I’m by no means a tree-hugger. I am an electrical engineer so I do know something about computers.

Let’s take a historical look at the desktop computer from the point of view of capabilities, speed, and CPU power consumption. (CPU stands for Central Processing Unit, the chip that is the “brain” of the computer.) I purchased my first computer, an Apple II, back in 1982. It had a CPU that ran at a clock speed of 1 Megahertz (MHz). The clock speed of a CPU is a measure of how many arithmetic instructions it can perform per second. One MHz translates into one million instructions per second. Today’s computers are measured in Gigahertz (GHz). One GHz translates to one billion instructions per second, or 1000 times faster than a one MHz.

While I’m at it, I should say that my Apple II had a whopping 64 K bytes of RAM and a floppy disk that could hold a few hundred K bytes of data. (K stands for thousand). Today’s computer memories, measured in gigabytes, have 10,000 times as much memory and the disk drive sizes have increased by as an even larger proportion.

My one MHz, 64 K Apple II could handle word processing, spreadsheet, computer programming languages, and many programs similar to what we use today. It may not have performed these functions quite as quickly, or with today’s wiz-bang graphics and features. But do we really have 1000 times the functionality or performance as we had in 1982? (As a side note, my Apple II powered up faster than today’s computers do.)

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might have to propose that there has been a conspiracy between the CPU vendors, the memory chip vendors, and the software vendors. Each time the CPU vendors come out with faster, more capable CPUs and the memory chip vendors cram more space onto their memory chips, the software manufacturers write software that sucks up all the newly available resources. We buy a computer. Then we buy software. Before too long, we have to buy a faster computer because the software starts to bog down the computer. Then the software manufacturers release newer versions of software. The cycle seems to be endless.

Let’s get back to the $5000 computer. The advertisement said that it is overclocked as if that is a good thing. Computer chips are rated by their manufacturers with maximum clock speeds. Under a specified set of conditions, including operating temperature range, the manufacturer states that a chip can run at a specified maximum speed. In some engineering circles, overclocking is a taboo practice because it means that you are clocking the CPU at a speed faster than that recommended by the manufacturer. If you can guarantee the right operating conditions (such as keeping the CPU cool), perhaps you can get away with overclocking as long as you test the heck out of your overclocked product before selling it.

What does this all have to do with my aforementioned environmentally unfriendly 1000 watt power consumption of this quad core, overclocked, liquid cooled computer? The faster you clock a chip, the more power it consumes. That goes not only for the CPU chip, but other chips inside the computer. It just happens that the CPU is clocked at the highest speed. Furthermore, this monster computer has a quad core CPU, which means that it has four CPUs built into a single processor. Power consumption also increases with the number of cores. So not only does this chip consume more power due to overclocking, it also consumes nearly four times the power as a single-core CPU running at the same speed.

And, to add insult to injury, the consumer is expected to pay not only for an expensive quad-core CPU, not only for the electricity to power this monster, but also for the high-tech liquid cooling that is required to cool the monster CPU. Power consumption results in heat, and you can’t run the CPU quickly unless it stays cool. The computer manufacturer is spinning the liquid cooling as a cool feature – be the first on your block to have a liquid cooled computer. Brilliant marketing? Are you going to buy a $5000 computer? Do you really need that kind of power? Not I.

To be perfectly fair, I should note that features are built into the CPUs so that they consume far less power when they are idle. But an idle condition may not be as frequent as you think. Does your virus scanner run every night? Once a week? Does it run for an hour? Two hours? That’s not idle time.

A few more statistics for comparison and I’ll get off my soap box. The quad-core CPU consumes 130 watts by itself. A similar single core CPU consumes 30 watts. You know how much a 100 watt light bulb consumes, I hope. A CPU in a cell phone or PDA consumes less than one watt. A television consumes a few hundred watts. Yes, the bigger the screen, the more power it consumes.

But the TV leads me to my parting thoughts. How about all our home electronics? The TV, the cable converter, the VCR, the DVD player, the stereo equipment. Most modern home electronics consume power whether they are powered on (active) or powered off (standby). Some have built-in clocks. Equipment that includes remote control must have circuitry that receives the remote control’s infrared signal. This circuitry is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some equipment requires a watt or two of standby power. But some televisions burn 25 watts or more when powered OFF! By default, digital video recorders (DVRs) are never truly in standby. They are always recording the current TV channel, thereby consuming far more than a trickle of standby power.

Next time you open your electric bill, maybe you’ll have something new to think about. Next time you buy some electronics, maybe you’ll look at the power consumption – both active and standby. After researching this article, I know I will.

I never thought I’d begin a story using the words “when I was growing up”, but here I go. When I was growing up, we had a single black and white television in the living room. Using an antenna, we could receive three or four channels of programming. I think we had a better chance of finding something worth watching back then compared with today with our hundreds of channels of mostly garbage on digital cable, but I digress.

We were told by our parents not to sit too closely to the television because it was bad for our vision. When we finally got a color television, around 1982, the word was that if we sat too closely to it, we would be exposed to harmful radiation. I think these fears have since been debunked as wives’ tales. (Is that politically incorrect? Husbands can tell tales also.)

I have to wonder what effect there may be on a person’s vision if he or she watches too much Squint TV. I’m sure it will be debated and studied for years to come. Common sense as well as my own astigmatism and worsening far-sightedness after years of staring at computer monitors makes me think so. One might argue that age has something to do with it, but who wants to hear that argument. I am 45 years young.

Just as my father was slow to adopt the latest technological gadgets, I have a similar history. I was the last person I know to purchase a CD player and a microwave oven. I held out quite a while before purchasing a cell phone, and when I did it was the day I became stranded on the road –after the stranding, not before.

The problem is this. I know that everybody can make a choice about whether or not to adopt a new technology. But now that I have a cell phone, I can’t imagine being without one. I even gave in recently and upgraded to a Treo and I feel the same way about the Treo. Once I got a taste of it, I now feel that I “need” to be able to access e-mail wherever I am.

Please don’t get me hooked on Squint TV! My high school physical education/health teacher at Eastern Regional High School, Mr. K (his last name was difficult to pronounce and more difficult to spell), said something to our class that I have never forgotten. When talking about recreational drugs, he said that he refused to try them because he was afraid he might like them. That’s how I feel about some of these new technologies.

If the market demands Squint TV, I can’t stop it. And if I can’t trust myself not to get hooked, I guess my only recourse is not to try it in the first place.