I'll be Watching You

Every step you take,
I'll be watching you
-lyrics by Sting

My wife has frequently said that our next car should have "OnStar" becuase it sounds so useful and appropriate for emergency preparedness. But Wired Magazine reports something unsettling about OnStar, even if you unsubscribe and stop paying the monthly fee of $19-$29, they may still continue to track your vehicle. OnStar claims this is to make it “easier to re-enroll” in the program if you decide to come back. But more likely OnStar wants your travel history so they can make money selling it. A new privacy policy from OnStar makes it clear that they have the right to sell GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.

A spokesman for the General Motors subsidiary, said OnStar does not currently sell customer data, but it reserves that right. He said both the new and old privacy policies allow OnStar to chronicle a vehicle’s every movement and its speed. “We hear from organizations periodically requesting our information,” he said.

An example would be for the Michigan Department of Transportation “to get a feel for traffic usage on a specific section of freeway.”

Bottom Line
OnStar can be a life saver. But it should leave you alone if you cancel. Canceling customers must explicitly opt out of the continued surveillance monitoring program. If you don't trust OnStar to honor your opting out, the Consumerist recommends checking your user manual for the location of the OnStar fuse and removing it.

Oh Where, oh Where Can He Be?

Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?

Oh where, oh where can he be?

With his ears cut short, and his tail cut long,

Oh where, oh where is he?

- Septimus Winner

Here's a clever use of technology, Snaptracs is selling the Tagg Pet Tracker which uses GPS to locate your pet. Now this alone is nothing new. I understand there are GPS tags you can attach to children to find them if they wander. What I find clever is that the Tagg monitors your pet's location and sends you email or a text message if your pet wanders outside a geographic area that you've specified. Optional you can also have an email or text message sent to your next door neighbor who might be able to retrieve your pet while you're at work.

This service comes at a price: $200 for the pet-tracking Tagg and one year of wireless service for the Tagg to send its position back to Snaptracs. $140 for each additional pet & Tagg. $60 per year renewal fee. The cost includes a recharging station, which you'll need, since the battery in the Tagg only lasts about 30 days.

According to the Motely Fool, the CEO admits the Tagg is not yet perfected (e.g battery life is too short) but the public response was so great that they went to market early. I hope, as they improve the Tagg, it will become smaller (it's not recommended for pets under 10 lbs given the size of the device that is attached to a pets collar), and that the battery will last longer.

Keep in mind that you're paying for the tracking service. If the company goes out of business, the GPS chip is worthless to you. And the device won't help if the wireless connection fails - e.g. pet is inside a building that blocks reception, the pet is out of range of a cell tower, there's a power outage, or the device becomes broken. And I wish I knew how frequently the Tagg reports its position; I did not find that mentioned on the corporate website. I also don't know if there's a warning or indicator when the battery charge is low. If you forget to recharge (or recharge too late) then the device is useless.

Bottom Line

My wife's family had two beagles when she was a child in Los Angeles. They were escape artists - one climbed a chain link fence with a broken leg! Once both got loose together and did not come back. Lost posters were placed around and someone called - I have found two beagles but I'm 20 miles away from your home, could these possibly be yours? They were! The beagles had wandered 20 miles away so driving around the neighborhood calling out their names was not going to bring them back.

According to the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, hundreds of thousands of pets go missing every year, yet only 15 to 20% of lost dogs and only about 2% of lost cats are ever returned to their owners. If you have a pet that wanders (or might wander) consider implanting a micro-chip with recovery information. Most use RFID technology (like security tags on clothes at stores) with no battery required. The sole problem with micro-chips is that there are many competing standards so the shelter that takes in your pet might not have the right scanner to read it.

Technology

Energy and persistence conquer all things.
-Benjamin Franklin

When you think "big" technology perhaps your mind goes to the military with tanks, battleships, the Pentagon building (world's largest office building in floor space). But this is peanuts compared to civil engineering. Imagine the size of hydroelectric dams, skyscrapers, thousands of miles of roads through all types of terrain, etc. And then think of the equipment used to make these. Giant dump trucks with tires taller than a person. Cranes as large as a city block.

The Shell gas company is creating a new entry in the competition for "big". The Prelude Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) facility will be nearly one-third of a mile long and tip the scales at up to 600,000 tons; that's six times heavier than America's largest aircraft carrier. FLNG will be a floating drilling rig and refrigerator used to extract, cool and offload liquefied natural gas into tanker ships. Starting in 2017 it will stay permanently moored at the Prelude gas field northwest of Australia for the next 25-plus years.

Bottom Line

Ann Pickard, chair of Shell in Australia, says that the Prelude FLNG facility will be a "game changer for the energy industry."

Is Progress Slowing Down?

“When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.”

-Walter Cronkite

An editorial by Matt Patterson at pajamasmedia.com asks if the times are a'changing.

In his penetrating new book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen ... calls the period from roughly the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries the era of “low hanging fruit.” According to Cowen, technological advances in this period were relatively easy to produce and exploit, resulting in a staggering explosion of living standards.
But by around 1970, most of this low hanging fruit had been plucked and growth rates began to slow. Indeed, growth rates are “lower today than before 1973, no matter what exact numbers you settle on for the absolute living standard.”

There are at least two reasons for this.

1. The age of cheap resources is ending. Many companies relied on cheap water, electricity, iron, etc for production. We've used up the easily accessible resources ("low hanging fruit") so what remains costs more to process and there is now global competition to use it as China and India industrialize and extend middle class comforts to billions of people.

2. The complexity of manufacturing keeps increasing. Compare the engine of a car from 1950 to today. Robots help with the assembly but there are more moving parts and of greater sophistication. Consider the clean room requirements and requirements of perfection on a small scale to create computer microchips.
Complexity makes it harder to create and produce new products.

There is an interesting flip side to the second point. This is the Information Age and while computer software also increases in complexity, well built software hides the complexity to produce "tools" that are easy to use and promote the creation of more information products. Anyone now can create publication ready books, art works, web services, etc on computers. So complexity enables information products and hinders physical products.

You may think, no problem, we'll just transition to an information society where the majority of workers are information workers. In the past the “creative destruction” of progress might end one industry like horse buggy making but resulted in an even bigger automotive industry. However software advances don't do that. Advances in software tend to decrease or eliminate jobs like travel agents. McDonald’s plans to eliminate cashiers in many of its European restaurants, replacing them with touch-screen ordering systems.

Internet companies can be worth more than old fashion manufacturing and reach hundreds of millions of customers and yet employ very few.

[Economist Tyler] Cowen notes that Google employs a mere 20,000; the increasingly ubiquitous Twitter only 300. Facebook has millions of users, but only about 1,700 workers.

For comparison, General Motors employs 209,000 people around the world.

Bottom Line

Again from Matt Patterson,

Unfortunately, politicians in the “low hanging fruit” period made policy decisions based on the assumption that the growth rates of that era — and their corresponding tax revenues — would continue indefinitely. And the American public, seeing successive generations do better than prior ones, came to expect this was the natural order of things. Both governments and individuals borrowed against a future they assumed would be richer and more technologically wondrous than the present.

Patterson observes from history that no civilization lasts forever.The ancient Greeks created the myth of the Cyclops to explain even more ancient fortresses with walls of giant stones that no one knew how to move. It must have been built by giants. In reality it was the Greeks own ancestors several hundred years before.  "The Great Pyramid of Cheops was the largest building in the world until well into the modern era, and still stands after nearly five millennia". And yet a few centuries after its making, Egypt fell and the world forgot how to make them.

Bubbles result when people say, "This time it's different". But the Internet bubble burst, the housing bubble burst (many times) when expectations exceed reality. Have we been living in a technology bubble of 200 years?

The Future of Advertising

"At bottom, robotics is about us. It is the discipline of emulating our lives, of wondering how we work."

-ROD GRUPEN, Discover Magazine, June 2008

I like to keep on eye on technology and how it changes our life. Recently Toyota annouced a new spokeswoman, Hatsune Miku, a young Japanese singer who has been extremely popular in her homeland. Nothing unusual about that. Until you learn that Hatsune is computer-generated based upon a poplar anime character.

There have been computer generated actors in the past. Long ago there was Max Headroom. And more recently Jar Jar Binks. Usually these are rendered over a human actor who supplies the motions. I suspect Hatsune is totally drawn from comptures but she does use samplings of real human voices.

Bottom Line

Personally I'm not suprised by this. I'm actually more suprised that we have not seen more of this. Most animated films are now computer drawn with robotic models, not hand drawn. As the cost comes down I expect computer actors will replace live one with greater frequency.

Smart-phone Apps

"O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
Shakespeare's, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1

I love the information explosion that modern technology makes possible. Twenty years ago I bought reference works, maps, etc to gather facts. Now it's all at my fingertips on the Internet.

On the flip side, I hate spending lots of money on technology. So I wait for prices to come down which can mean waiting several years. For example, my phone is NOT a smart phone. They look fun and perhaps will be within my budget soon. My cellphone contract expires this month so who knows what I'll get as the upgrade.

If you have a smart-phone you may appreciate this article by the Christian Science Monitor,
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2011/0201/The-10-weirdest-uses-for-a-smartphone/

"The current generation of iPhones and Android phones have processors that are about 500 times faster than the computer onboard the Apollo Lunar Module (with the added benefit of not weighing 70 pounds). All this computing power can be used to tackle ... humanity's most vexing problems:"

10. Solving a Rubik’s Cube

9. Creating fine art (the May 2009 cover of the New Yorker was made on a smart phone)

8. Avoiding police speed traps

7. Performing live music on the subway

6. Piloting an augmented-reality drone quadricopter

5. Monitoring earthquakes

"Researchers at Berkeley have developed an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone to measure the intensity of an earthquake."

4. Solving Sudoku puzzles

3. Annoying teenagers
 An iPhone app named "Annoy-a-Teen" emits frequencies above 16 kHz that only children can hear.

2. Piloting a satellite
British researchers have developed an 8-pound satellite with a smartphone as its brain: The STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator).

1. Blowing out a candle
 The app "Blower" uses the smart phone speaker to create a very weak fan effect.

Bottom Line

What new uses have you discovered for a smart phone?

Check out http://gizmodo.com/#!5781077/the-apps-you-need-to-prepare-yourself-for-a-disaster for low cost apps that give emergency & First Aid advice.

The Value of Free Goods

"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free."
Ronald Reagan

Today I came across several instances of the value of "Free" at Techdirt.com,  a website offering "insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies ability to innovate and grow."  The site itself is an example of what it preaches. The blog is free, with no registration required, and an interesting daily read. The owner of the site hopes that you'll recognize his analytic skills and hire his company for personalized news and advice.

Google is another example of free (but with a twist). Originally Google hoped you'd be impressed by their free search engine and hire them to provide searches on your company documents and email. Now I wonder if they don't make more money from the ads shown while you google. Also Google's algorithms watch what you search for and what you pick from the list and they use this to improve future searches. So in essence you're doing work for google for free.

Anyhow, the first Techdirt story was about the TED Conference. The annual meetings on Technology, Entertainment and Design used to be by invite only and very secretive with non-disclosures signed by attendees. Only the rich and famous and powerful knew about it. Now you can watch past presentations for free at Ted.com. Instead of weakening the product this has created a HUGE surge in attendance, higher prices for seats, and sister conferences around the world.

The second story is about a Swedish truck company that discovered knock-offs of their trucks being made in China. They knew a lawsuit would be pointless so instead they worked with the Chinese company to help it find a truck design of their own that would sell and not be a knock-off. This is a classic Covey Win-Win story where free advice helped everyone.

Bottom Line

Free samples at stores. A free test drive of a car. A free download of trial software. A small free giveaway can lead to read dollar purchases of something larger.

Mt Everest WiFi

Ncell, a subsidiary of Swedish TeliaSonera, has set up a high-speed cell tower at an altitude of 17,000 feet, about 3 miles high, near Gorakshep village at the base of Mt. Everest. Amazing that at three miles elevation Everest is only beginning. In comparison, Denver, CO, the mile-high city, has an altitude of (you guessed it) one mile. The peak of Everest is 29,000 feet, about 5.5 miles high, and reachable from the new cell tower so when you reach the summit you can now whip out your cell phone and call home, update your Facebook page, and check your email without the need of an expensive satellite phone.

Climbing to the top demands strength, whether it is to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career. - Abdul Kalam

Wikipedia has lots of great information on Mt. Everest. It's called the "tallest" mountain since its summit is the highest point on Earth above sea level. But there are other ways to measure height that give alternatives for the "tallest" mountain on Earth. Mauna Kea in Hawaii is tallest when measured from its base; it rises over 6.3 mi from the ocean floor but is only 13,796 ft above sea level. If instead you measure the distance from base to summit, which is the height you really see, Mount McKinley, in Alaska, is tallest. McKinley is "merely" 20,320 ft above sea  level but it has a very low base yielding a height above base of over three miles (Everest's peak is 2.5 miles above its base).

The summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador farther from the Earth's center than Everest because the Earth bulges at the Equator. However, Chimborazo attains a height of only 20,561 ft above sea level, and by this criterion it is not even the highest peak of the Andes.

Bottom Line

The world is getting smaller as technology makes all places reachable.

When GPS goes Bad

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

I love GPS; my wife does not. She does not trust it and would rather use a paper map. And she's right. GPS is a great tool but never trust it 100%.

When we drove from NY to Winnipeg, Canada, last summer, the GPS led us to a bridge that no longer exists. We could see that there was once a bridge but it had been torn down and replaced by a new bridge perhaps a mile away. This was a case where we had to trust our eyes and overrule the GPS.

A similar event occurred to a man in Spain but with tragic result. Man Drowns After GPS Guides Him Into a Lake. "The driver was following the GPS directions when the car fell into the water, sinking in just a few minutes. Apparently, it was a very dark night in a bad rural road. The man was a foreigner who didn't know the area. When he saw the end of the road, it was too late. He didn't have time to stop the car."

The day before in Switzerland, a van became stuck on a "glorified goat trail" while following GPS instructions (pictured above). The van was air-lifted out.

A friend of ours said no one would believe that her GPS sent her on to dirt roads during a trip. We replied that we understood perfectly. The same happened to us last summer as we experience many dirt roads in the farm country of Wisconsin.  Many new GPS have a travel setting to exclude dirt roads from trip routes.

Another thing to keep in mind is that GPS positioning is not 100% accurate. We often find our GPS is about 100 yds off in predicting when to turn. Once I was on an access road adjacent to and parallelling a highway and the GPS thought I was on the highway and was not helping us in finding an on-ramp.
Bottom Line

Trust your eyes, not the GPS.

If you speed on strange roads at night or in fog you might not be able to brake or stop if the road suddenly curves or ends. I recall two such incidents. Once in the fog I was cruising down an empty road I'd never driven before when suddenly there was a barrier and the road ended without warning. (maybe I missed the warning?) Another time I drove nearly the entire North-South length of Idaho on a mountain highway. I thought the speed signs on curves were mostly for trucks and that I could safely do 10 mph higher than the suggested speed in my car. And I could, usually, except once. There was one very sharp curve that got my adrenaline pumping as I had to fight for control to keep my car within my lane and not drifting in to oncoming traffic. Lesson learned - don't speed on unfamiliar roads.

Distant planets observed

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It seems not so very long ago that astronomers were only able to deduce the existence of planets around other stars by observing wobbles in the star's motion. But telescope technology has improved and we are now starting to see extra-solar planets. Here is the first photo of a distant planet, 500 light-years away, photographed in 2008 but only recently confirmed.

The star pictured is similar in size to the sun but a million times younger, just a few million years old instead of Sol's 5 billion. The planet (upper-left) is about 8 times the size of Jupiter and still glowing hot from creation.

The Magic of GPS

Though the mountains divide,
And the oceans are wide,
It's a small world after all.
-Lyrics to It's a Small World

As I’ve commented before, my wife and I are not anti-technology, we’re just cheap. So we are late adopters of technology – waiting for the prices to come done to affordable levels. But once purchased and used for awhile, it’s hard to look back and imagine how we ever lived without it. A friend recently told us about being stuck outside her locked office without a ride home “in pre-cell phone days”. And who can imagine driving without a GPS? It’s like a magic map!

Do you know the history and workings of GPS? Well here are some interesting GPS factoids courtesy of pingdom.com

• There are always at least 24 active GPS satellites circling Earth, although today there are more than 30, including a couple of spares. Their orbits are spread out so that no matter where on Earth you are, you will have at least six of them in your line of sight.

• Each GPS satellite goes around the world once every 12 hours. The satellites travel 12,500 miles (20,000 km) above us at roughly 7,000 miles per hour (11,000 km per hour). They have small boosters so they can adjust their path when needed.

• The first full constellation of 24 satellites was completed in 1994. The first of those 24 satellites was sent up in 1989.

• To get a reliable position reading, your GPS receiver will have to combine the signals from at least four satellites, although in some special cases, three are enough.

• GPS was made public due to a tragedy. In 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 entered Soviet airspace after a navigation error and was shot down, killing all 269 passengers. This incident resulted in President Ronald Reagan ordering the Unites States military to make the Global Positioning System available for civilian use once it was completed, so that similar incidents could be avoided in the future.

• NAVSTAR is the US military name for the Global Positioning System.

• GPS isn’t just for navigation. It can also be used to get a very exact time stamp. Every GPS satellite has multiple atomic clocks and the time is included in the signal it sends out. With the help of these signals, a GPS receiver can determine the current time within 100 billionths of a second. These signals are for example used to synchronize base stations in cell phone networks.

• Relativistic effects. The clocks on the satellite are subject to the effects of Einstein’s theory of relativity, running slightly slower than those on Earth. This is corrected by control signals from Earth Ground antennas spread around the world.

• The 50th Space Wing of the United States Air Force operates the GPS satellites.

• Until 2000, civilian GPS use was crippled by a feature called Selective Availability. It introduced a random error of up to 328 feet (100 meters) in the civilian signal to make GPS less useful for precision navigation. (GPS has different signals for military and civilian use.) Selective Availability was deactivated in May 1, 2000. The United States still has the ability to deactivate the civilian signal, if need be even for specific regions.

• NAVSTAR GPS isn’t the only game in town. There are several other Global Navigation Satellite Systems in existence or on their way: The European Union is working on a system called Galileo, Russia has GLONASS (completed in partnership with India), and China has plans for a system called Compass. There are also systems that offer specific regional coverage, for example Japan’s QZSS and China’s Beidou.

Bottom Line

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Stolen Laptop

"UNIVAC: a device, which contained 20,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,500 square feet and weighed 40 tons; there was also a laptop version weighing 27 tons."- Dave Barry

The Consumerist recommends 7 Things You Should Do Before & After Your Laptop Is Stolen.

BEFORE

• Have Serial Number and Receipt On File - this will be necessary to prove you are the rightful owner.

• Backup Your Hard Drive (this is also protection should your hard drive fail. Mine has)

• Install Tracking Software – who knew there is LoJack for Laptops?

AFTER

• File A Report With Your Laptop Manufacturer —In case the new owner attempts to have your laptop repaired by the manufacturer.

• File a Police Report —they’ll want the serial number.

• Call the Pawn Shops —They might have bought it or remember someone trying to sell it.

• Check Online Marketplaces like Ebay and Craigslist for someone selling your laptop

BOTTOM LINE

I’d add three more BEFORE steps.

1. Decorate your laptop in some unique way that makes it stand out and easily spotted during a search. Like a bumper sticker.

2. Be careful what you store on your laptop. We keep a list of passwords, bank accounts, etc in Word documents but the documents are password protected. Apply a password to anything you don't want others to read.

3. Your laptop may be stolen at your workplace. Could be the cleaning staff, someone who broke in, or a late working co-worker. You never know. I purchased a lock and chain to attach the laptop to my desk. Sort of like a bicycle chain.

P.S.

Laptops are an amazing achievement of technology. Check out http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/18/amazing-facts-and-figures-about-the-evolution-of-hard-disk-drives/ for a history of hard drive sizes. I never knew there were refrigerator-sized hard drives in the 70’s. My oldest memory is from the 80s when the hard drive looked like a stack of vinyl LP records.

The State of the Internet

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”-Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

http://www.focus.com/ has published a beautiful series of graphs called the State of the Internet. Here is a summary of the results

- An equal number of men and women use the Internet (74%)

- Age matters. 93% of young adults 18-29 use the Internet while only 38% of senior citizens do.

- Income matters. Those with more money have faster Internet access.

- Education matters. Users without a high school education: only 39% while 94% of college graduates use the Internet.

- The most surprising graphic to me was the frequency of Internet use, pictured above. Only 38% of those surveyed say they use the Internet several times a day. %21 once a day. The majority are infrequent users. This explains my sister who does not check her email very often.

- Laptops are now in 46% of all homes.

- Scandinavia has the best Internet penetration into homes. Nothing else to do in the dark, cold, winter perhaps? The US is #5 after Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Netherlands.

- The US is horribly behind in Internet speed. Appx 5 mbps vs 61 mbps in Japan. (mbps = megabits per second)

Bottom Line

I’ve been an Internet user since the 1980’s when my college, Michigan State, gave everyone access. Then AOL in the early 1990’s, then Netscape and now mostly IE. I consider it one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

I used to buy reference books or seek out information at reference sections of libraries. But informational books can quickly become dated. Now I take for granted the easy access to global information on any subject – for example, yesterday I was looking for vendors of Pinewood Derby tracks for Cub Scouts and the costs. Did you know tracks come in wood, plastic and metal with laser controlled times on the finish line?

For more interesting Internet facts check out http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/08/15-fantastic-firsts-on-the-internet/ which describes 15 firsts like the first email, first spam, first web site, etc.

Back from RSNA

“Don't misinform your Doctor nor your Lawyer”- Benjamin Franklin

I’m back from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Conference in Chicago. There were over 600 vendors with thousands of products on three giant sized convention floors. There were also over 2000 educational exhibits on a fourth floor. Plus lecture rooms, classrooms, and online-computer training.

Though targeted to Radiologists there was also in attendance technicians and physicians from other disciplines. For me, a computer programmer, the most interesting parts of the show were the medical machines and the amazing medical images. I quickly had to master an alphabet soup of machine types (or Modalities as they are called in the industry).

The oldest medical imaging, from 1895, is the is X-ray film machine. It is still used today. For example my dentist uses X-ray film although I’ve noticed over the years that the film has become much more sensitive allowing for shorter doses of x-ray radiation to look for cavities.

Computed Radiography (CR) is a X-ray machine with a removable sensor plate and was invented by Fuji in the 1960s. The imaging plate is put into the film slot, X-ray taken, then the plate removed, scanned, digitized, wiped clean and reused. The plate scanners resemble big paper shredders. FujiFilm Medical Systems now has a FCR machine where the imaging plate comes with a cable and the X-ray image can be downloaded directly into a computer; no plate scan required.

Competing with CR is Digital Radiography (DR) where the imaging plate is built into the machine and images go directly to a computer for storage. CR is popular with hospitals upgrading film X-ray machines to digital at minimal cost. DR is popular if you have the money to buy a brand new machine and you have computer cables connected to the X-ray room. Since CR does not require a computer connection, the CR machine can be more easily moved to from room to room to patients or used outside the hospital at accident sites.

Mammography (MG) is an X-ray machine specialized for Breast exams. It can be film, CR or DR. FujiMed demonstrated a 3D Mammogram using two X-ray images and 3D viewing glasses.

The ultimate in X-ray technology is computed tomography (CT, previously CAT). These machines look like a giant vertical doughnut. As the body on a table moves slowly through the doughnut hole, X-ray images are recorded. The result is dozens or hundreds of 2D body slices (called Tomograms, hence Tomography). The cutting edge today is using compture software to convert CT slices into 3D colorized images.

A variation on X-ray single exposure imaging is Fluoroscopy. These machines produce real-time images on a TV monitor using continuous low-dosage X-rays. Doctors use the monitor to help guide needles and during some surgery. Flouroscopy is also great for observing a contrast agent (like a barium drink) move through the body. Sonograms (which use sound instead of radiation) can also used for continuous imaging. I saw a sonogram demo where the monitor predicts the projected path of the needle so you can see if you’ll hit the tumor or biopsy site you’re aiming for.

MR or (MRI) MRI provides greater contrast between different soft tissues than X-ray and is useful for imaging the brain, muscles, heart, and tumors. No radiation is used. Instead powerful magnets are used to align all the water molecules in a section of your body. Then radio waves are used to knock the water molecules off balance causing them to emit a pulse that is recorded. Water rich tissue will appear brighter than drier tissue. MRI was invented in 1973 and older machines have a deep and confining tunnel for the body to fit into. Newer machines provide more space inside the tunnel. With Open or Coreless MRI the machine looks like a hamburger with the magnets as the bun and the person placed in the center as the meat. I also saw pediatric mini-MRI’s used to teach children not to be afraid of the machine.

With Positron emission tomography (PET) a short-lived radioactive tracer isotope is injected (usually into the blood). A radiation scanner then detects where the tracer moves to and where it concentrates at. PET can be combined with CT machines so both images are recorded at the same time – a dynamic & fluid image via PET with the static underlying structrues via CT.

Bottom Line
Radiology has greatly changed in the past 40 years. Science has digitized the old workhorse, X-rays, and added some new techniques:

MRI – molecular spin alignment via radio waves
PET – radioactive isotopes
Sonogram – sound
3D images – computer enhancement of CT slices
(pictured at right)

I expect we’ll see more advances in the 21st century.

Smart Guns

“Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand guns” -
Mitch Ratcliffe

I read an interesting article on “The Volokh Conspiracy” (a legal blog – not conspiracy theory). (Why is it that some of the leading bloggers are also laywers? Volokh, Instapundit, Althouse) The topic of discussions is “Smart Guns” As I understand it, a smart gun has an embedded chip that restricts its use to the original owner (or keeper of the electronic gun “key” embedded in a finger ring). This prevents a child from firing the gun by accident. (Unless you store the “key” with the gun of course!) Newer smart guns hope to use biometrics like the shape of your hand to determine the “owner”.
The idea of smart guns is popular for those who wish to protect children and prevent stolen guns from being used by felons. Some like it so much they want the government to make smart guns mandatory for all gun sales. This is where Volokh comes in with valid questions.
A smart gun won’t work if the embedded computer chip is jammed or fried. An EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack or even a massive solar flare could melt the chip leaving you with a worthless lump of metal. So it’s possible your smart gun could fail when “the worst” happens and you really need it. Is this an acceptable risk?
The Supreme Court has allowed guns laws that “do not materially interfere with the right to keep and bear arms”. Would requiring you to own ONLY a smart gun be a serious interference?

Bottom Line

As I’ve said before, technology is a mixed blessing. It can make some wonderful preparedness tools (like GPS) but can also fail us when a crisis occurs. Use the best of old and new. Take advantage of modern technology but keep the old fashion tools on hand as standby.

All your eggs in one basket

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too. - Peter De Vries

This not a product endorsement but I did want to point out a product with an amazing name: American Red Cross FR150 Microlink Solar-Powered, Self-Powered AM/FM/Weatherband Portable Radio with Flashlight and Cell Phone Charger which sells for $30 on amazon.com.

During an emergency technology can be a blessing and a curse. I love gadgets that do multiple things - less for me to pack. But if the gadget above breaks, then I don't have a radio, flash light or cell phone charger. The wisest course is to plan on backups.

Bottom Line
When packing go-kits for a family, each individual's kit should be self-sufficient. If you pack just one radio for the family in Johnny's kit and that kit is lost or left behind, you're out of luck.

Here are two opposing points to consider when packing multiple kits:

1. Pack different products for the same equipment in each kit. This way if you find that one radio is really cheap and won't work, another kit will have a radio of a different manufacturer that might work better.

2. Pack the same or compatible equipment in each kit. It may be cheaper to buy in bulk, you can share batteries, and you won't have to learn how to use many different products.

Here's how I would resolve these opposing points of view...

1. Buy the same equipment for each individual kit. But be sure to test it and try it out before you need it.

2. Pack one extra kit - the family kit. This contains more expensive items that you can not afford to put in each individual kit. This is kit contains items that are not necessary but make life more pleasant like a butane stove, collapsible water buckets, a fancy combo-radio, extra fishing gear, etc.