Advancing Technology for Humanity

November 2011, Vol. 59, No. 11

New York City’s Marathon covering 26 miles of roads through its five boroughs stands as a test of physical endurance and sheer determination independent of race,

creed or color. The picture of the start of the November 7, 2011 race was taken from a TV broadcast

To skip more photographs of the 2011 Marathon click here

Some 47,000 people enrolled in the New York City’s 41st annual race making it still the most famous Marathon in the world

The invincible lot! You give us the inspiration for facing challenges

Catch her! New York City Marathon 2011

We, at the New York Section of the IEEE congratulate all

who ran the race. You helped our city to continue as unique on this planet!

“The important thing is to know how to take all things

quietly” – Michael Faraday

IEEE New York Monitor

November, 2011

Editor: Amitava Dutta-Roy, PhD, Life Fellow

CONTENTS

Cover page: New York City Marathon, November 5, 2011

Calendar of technical events in and around the NY Section (posted separately, please see the

anchor page)

A few words from the editor

Section activities Election of Section officers for 2012

Election of officers of LMAG for 2012 See the results Election of officers of PES/IAS for 2012 See the results

Election of officers of EDS/SSCS for 2012 See the results

Activities

In this Section you will find abridged reports of the activities of chapters and affinity groups within the New York Section

Read more

Leon Knock on continuing education at New York Section. In this article he explains the offerings of the continuing education program at the Section and how to enroll in them.

Read the article IEEE - USA

Book announcement

Feature article Growing up with the Internet Age: Part V by John LeGates, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Mr. LeGates continues with his journey within the labyrinth of networking and business politics.

Read the article

Unexpected magnetism discovered in gold nano-structures turns the noble metal even more at-tractive. Dr. Simon Trudel, Univ. of Calgary, Alber-ta, Canada explains this new phenomenon. Nan-structures of gold may soon have interesting ap-plications in science and engineering.

Read the article

Nobel prizes in 2011 Read about the Nobel medals and the list of the laureates in 2011 Read more

Notables in science and technology we lost in recent months Click here to access the section

Review of Motorola Bluetooth Roadster 505 Tidbits

Contributors:

We would like to thank Leon Nock of the IEEE NY Section, John Legates of Harvard University, Dr. Simon

Trudel of University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada and William Coyne, chair of the bylaws committee at the

New York Section for their time and effort to contribute articles and news items to the Monitor. We also

thank Nobel.org and World Gold Council for the permission to reproduce the photographs that appears

on their Web sites.

A few words from the editor

The glorious autumn days are over and we are now on our path to the wintry days again. But I suppose

this has some hidden benefits. Most of us dread to go outside and that gives us more time to get some

work done. I may change my tune if the long-range forecasters and the Old Farmers Almanac prove to

be right. They are expecting a terrible winter in 2012. Be prepared!!

We offer you a lot to read and ponder in this issue of the Monitor. We have had an excel-

lent presentation by Ms. Yuri Estrada who represented the non-profit Engineers without

Border (EWB-USA). I imagine that the idea of founding EWB came from the work of Doc-

tors without Borders that do marvelous work in many parts of the world, especially in

disaster areas such as Haiti, Turkey and Guatemala. I always wanted to know if the engi-

neers could do similar work in giving a hand to other fellow human beings who find them

in less fortunate situations. I admit that it is not easy for engineers to suddenly arrive at a disaster-

stricken place and jump headlong into a project. In such situations engineers and doctors are viewed

from totally different angles. The doctors usually arrive in a disaster area ready with their medical kits

and immediately try to alleviate pain of the victims. The needs for non-local engineers are not the same

as that for doctors. Even then we can do a lot for our communities and the world. EWB is a starting

place. We should seriously look into the idea, what we as engineers can do. The IEEE has already set its

motto as “advancing technology for humanity.”

You will find that the anchor page of this issue has changed. I would invite your opinions on this change.

With every issue we try to embellish the pages of the Monitor. It has been a gradual transformation of

the publication since January, 2011 when yours truly started to post it online. Thank you for your sup-

port.

In this issue we have an article on magnetism in nanoparticles of gold. This property of the noble metal

is new to many engineers. I am sure that before long we will find novel applications.

We have also included a section on 2011 Nobel prizes. You will notice that most the prize winners are

from this country. The ceremonies around the award of the prizes will start on December 5 in Stockholm

and continue until December 9 in Oslo.

Under the heading Tidbits we have cited a gizmo the link of which was sent by Bill Coyne, chair of the

bylaws committee. If you find anything that might interest our colleagues please send the item, article

or link to us. We will be happy to post all interesting items. Dissemination of information is our task.

Hope you will enjoy reading the Monitor!

Section activities

Election of the 2012 Section officers

The annual election of the 2012 officers for the IEEE New York Section was held on November 15,

2011. The positions and the names of the elected officers are given below.

Section Chair: Balvinder Denarine (née Blah) Section vice chair for chapter operations: Shu-Ping Chang Section vice chair for section activities: Kai Chen Section Treasurer: Michael Haroutunian Section Secretary: Wilson Milian Chapter organization committee chair: Darlene Rivera Historian: Mel Olken Long-range planning committee chair: William Perlman Special events committee chair: Ralph Tapino By-laws committee chair: William Coyne Publications committee chair: Darlene Rivera Webmaster committee chair: Harold Ruchelman The 2012 chair of the New York section Ms. Balvinder Deonarine obtained

the degree of Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from City College of New

York and an MBA from Fordham University. She also has a Project Management Certification and cur-

rently is a manager at Consolidated Edison Company of NY. She has been volunteering at IEEE over ten

years. Her volunteer positions have included: student activities chair in the society as well as the NY

Section; NY Section secretary; NY Section treasurer; NY Section vice chair; and Industry Application So-

ciety Chapter Awards Chair.

In her acceptance speech chair-elect Ms. Deonarine reflected on her association with the New York Sec-

tion and emphasized that she will make every effort to foster an atmosphere replete with mutual re-

spect, credibility and congeniality. She envisions that, with collaboration and goodwill, of all members

the Section will be a happy and active forum to achieve the noble goals of the IEEE.

More elections at the New York Section

Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG)

The election of the 2012 officers of the LAMG was also held immediately following that of the 2012

Section officers. The following were elected.

Chair: Ralph Mazzatto Vice chair: Amitava Dutta-Roy Member-at-large: Roland Plottel Treasurer: Ralph Tapino Secretary: Michael A. Miller Program chair: Lewis Terman

The joint PES/IAS chapter

The election of 2012 officers of the joint PES/IAS chapters was also held following that the LMAG. The

newly elected officers are:

Chair: Arnold Wong Vice Chair: Paul Sartori Treasurer: Sharene Williams Secretary : Sukumar Alampur Senior Member-at-Large: Thomas Villani Junior Member-at-Large: Thomas Li

EDS/SSCS joint chapter

We were informed by the EDS/SSCS Joint Chapter at the New York Section that the following 2012 offic-

ers were elected.

Chair: Harish Krishnaswamy (http://www.ee.columbia.edu/fac-bios/Krishnaswamy/faculty.html)

EDS Vice-chair: Ioannis Kymissis (http://kymissis.columbia.edu/john-kymissis)

SSCS Vice-chair: Mingoo Seok (http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~mgseok/team.html)

Treasurer: Peter Kinget (http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~kinget)

The Monitor congratulates all elected officers and pledges to give

support during their tenures

Chapter and affinity group activities

PES/IAS joint chapters and the Life Members Affinity Group

On October 23 the group sponsored a presentation on “Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law and Murphy’s Law – Success and Failure with New Technology” by Simon Maddison. Drawing from his 40 plus years’ expe-rience working for many large and small companies in the field of telecommunications, Maddison learned that all moons must be in alignment before a new technology can become universally popular and financially successful. Hitting the magic point on the ‘hockey-stick’ curve is the dream of every hi-tech entrepreneur. But how does this happen, and what are the factors that result in an explosive success? Invariably a number of things has to come together at the right time.

Maddison described the three laws that often apply to the success of any new technology

(Gordon) Moore’s law - transistor density in IC chips doubles every 18 months while cost of a chip remains constant

(Robert) Metcalfe’s law – the value (usefulness) of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users

(Robert) Murphy’s law - if anything can go wrong, it will Mr. Maddison said that review of some successes such as Group 3 fax, PC, GSM cell phones, SMS text messaging, and Facebook, makes some of the moons easier to comprehend. So, what are those moons? Some frequently encountered moons include: common industry standards that break down the barriers erected around proprietary silos held by individual companies; reduced size, weight and cost; improved performance that pushes up sales volumes; and, most importantly, the first- to-market advantage. When the moons are not in alignment Murphy’s Law can kick in and that may result in a failure, as hap-pened with BetaMax, WAP, Token Ring and 3G. Some common negative moons include: premature technology; not the first company to market; and no real market need.

IEEE New York Chapters of Power & Energy Soc. (PES), Industrial Applications Soc. (IAS), Women in Engineering (WIE) and Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG)

On November 22 the four groups sponsored a presentation on the objectives and practical aspects of an organization known as Engineers without Borders – USA (EWB-USA.) The organization envisions a world in which all communities have the capacity to meet their basic human needs. The realization of that vi-sion is actively being pursued by engaging engineers in community-driven programs through design and implementation of sustainable engineering projects. Note that the objective of EWB meshes well with the objective of the IEEE: advancing technology for humanity.

The speaker Yuri Estrada who is currently a project manager within Global Program Management at AE-COM Technology Inc., has been with EWB-USA for five years as an adviser and project leader. She has traveled to Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Kenya and Australia on behalf of EWB-USA and knows first-hand the pros and cons of getting involved in a project abroad. She mainly worked on transportation and bridge building projects in which she has specialized in her regular job. She elaborated on education, training, work opportunities and internships. She also showed the times that a volunteer in various ca-pacities is expected to spend on a project. This time could vary from 2 – 5 hours a week in mentoring to several weeks on the site of a project. An interesting discussion followed the presentation and it was heartening to see many in the audience felt encouraged to join the group.

Continuing Education and Professional Engineering Licensure

The Roles of the IEEE and the New York Section

Leon L. Nock*

Why continuing Education?

As technology continuously ascends to higher levels of complexity, it becomes increasingly important for engineering professionals to keep abreast of the latest developments, both in their own fields of exper-tise as well as in many other related disciplines. Engineers must also be aware of the impact of the de-velopments of technology on the environment and society in general. The focus of engineering has in-deed changed during the last couple of decades and continuing education (CE) has become a major ve-

hicle for expanding one’s knowledge of engineering and has turned out to be a pre-requisite for renew-ing professional engineering (PE) licensure in the state of New York.

Professional engineering licensure is generally a requisite for the practice of engineering involving projects or endeavors on which public safety strongly depends. The licensure involves passing of nation-ally approved licensing examinations, the attainment of relevant experience and the participation in continuing education programs. PE licensure, however, is not a requirement for engineers practicing in areas of electronics or computer science unless their responsibilities concern safety issues, for example, instrumentation for public security or avionics, etc. However, continuing engineering education keeps an advanced practitioner at the edge of cutting technologies. Additionally, the mention of participation in continuing education programs in resumes of new applicants is very favorably seen by employers in today’s fiercely competitive job market. The participation in CE programs is also beneficial to existing employees seeking promotions or new positions within their corporate structures.

The diversity of present offerings in continuing engineering education has increased immensely in recent years. In the past, CE offerings in subjects related to civil, mechanical and power engineering predomi-nated, as professional engineering licensing exams stressed those areas. Thus, courses were closely re-lated to engineering safety matters such as fire protection, strength of materials, plant design and new construction techniques as well as the familiarity with official safety codes. Newer and more advanced topics in engineering were not emphasized.

Now, emerging fields of computer engineering/technology, data processing and data storage as well as solid state circuitry, communication technology, digital design, and communication protocols have be-come increasingly important as has the need for new educational offerings.

Providers of CE courses

Since some of the newer areas are still not being covered by traditional bachelors or masters degree engineering courses or in community college associate degree programs, they are being taught, both in classrooms and online by institutions such as the Cooper Union and New York University, not as part of their degree programs, but as CE courses accredited for professional licensing purposes.

Many independent for-profit providers have also jumped into the foray to fill the void caused by the lack of adequate CE courses on newer technologies. They offer both in-premises and online courses. Compa-nies such as Verizon and AT&T pay for these courses to be taught in their own brick and mortar offices and they may last from six to eight weeks. The advantage of in-premises courses is that the employees do not have to leave their places of work and take the courses during periods that are either convenient for them or have been negotiated between the employees’ unions and their employers. Some of the course providers are accredited by Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), but they are expen-sive and may cost anywhere up to $2,000 per course per student. Naturally, the students may be reluc-tant to take these courses on the own initiative unless they are paid for by their employers.

Continuing Education - role of the IEEE

The IEEE and other similar professional engineering associations have for years been staunch propo-nents of engineering education both in the traditional sense and through continuing education pro-grams covering emerging technologies. As a collective body, the IEEE has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the fields of electrical engineering and the physical sciences. The IEEE also publishes learned journals in many technical fields including those related to power and energy and communica-

tions and computer engineering. The IEEE holds conferences and symposia in these fields and sponsors lectures and courses.

However, the IEEE has not, until recently, begun to associate these offerings with continuing education (CEU) credits. Since one of the primary goals of the IEEE includes helping engineering professionals to keep abreast of the newer technologies and thus assisting them in fulfilling their requirements for con-tinuing education credits needed for professional licensure, the IEEE is now beginning to do so on a regular basis and in an affordable manner. The IEEE Sections announce the availability of CEU credits through its courses and seminars on the respective web sites and in their publications such as the Moni-tor. Since the IEEE is a not-for-profit organization, it can keep the tuition fees down to a nominal amount only to cover the administrative expenses. Announcements of seminars and courses sponsored by the IEEE show the availability of the CEUs. A technical seminar lasting two hours is worth 2 professional de-velopment hours (PDH) and 10 PDHs are equivalent to 1 CEU. Courses that continue for longer periods would offer more CEUs.

Continuing Education – offerings of the New York Section

The New York Section is active in stimulating continuing education. For example, the Vehicular Technol-ogy Society (VTS) Chapter in New York and the Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG) recently sponsored a joint seminar on electric vehicles that was worth 2 professional development hours. Also, for quite some time now, the New York chapter of the Power and Energy Society (PES), the Industrial Applications Society (IAS) and the LMAG have been jointly organizing monthly technical presentations in each of the 12 months of the year. Each of these presentations awarded 2 PDHs to the attendees. Engineers attend-ing all 12 presentations can earn 24 PDHs or 2.4 CEUs. During May and June, 2011 the PES Chapter sponsored an 8-week course (2 hours/week) on arc flash hazard analysis that was worth 1.6 CEUs.

Usually, the accreditation of the CEUs is done once a year, at the end of each year. In 2010, the IEEE charged an administrative fee of $25.00 for the issuance of a CEU certificate to course attendees for all courses attended during that year by the applicant of the certificate.

Though the IEEE has the capacity to offer continuing education seminars and courses given by its volun-teers and guest speakers, it has been found that consulting engineers, in general, may be more readily prepared and have more experience in teaching longer courses at a proper professional level. Some of these instructors are teachers at local universities and charge professional fees for their classes. Addi-tionally, these instructors may schedule their workload in a fashion that is not practical for members who are employed in jobs that require full-time dedication.

The New York Section would only charge attending students enough to cover the costs. The fee for the arc flash hazard course cited above was fixed at $495 for each attending IEEE member student. Fees for non-members taking continuing education courses are always slightly higher than they are for members. Even then, the IEEE sponsored courses always cost much less than those offered by for-profit institu-tions. In 2010, a significant number of engineers were awarded CEUs through the IEEE. It is to be noted that accreditation by the IEEE is widely recognized and highly respected, not only in the USA but in most countries of the world.

The New York State Education Department requires that registered professional engineers renew their PE licenses tri-annually. To renew their licenses for an up-coming three year period, engineers must af-firm that they have completed 36 contact hours (PDHs) of continuing engineering education courses

during the previous three year period. The PEs who are able to regularly attend the IEEE-sponsored ses-sions on a continuous basis could easily meet their licensing requirements.

The Education Committee of the IEEE New York Section will provide advice to and work with the local Chapters in offering courses and lectures, and to accredit those courses. Ms. Celeste Torres, CEU Admin-istrator at the IEEE is responsible for assigning and providing CEU credits for new course offerings. She can be contacted by e-mail at: c.torres@ieee.org or reached by phone at: (732) 981 3435.

This author of this article, Leon Nock, currently the chair of New York Section’s education committee is available to provide advice and to facilitate the process relating to IEEE’s accreditation of courses. In-formation relating to IEEE continuing education programs/processes can be accessed through the IEEE home page (www.ieee.org) and by choosing the “Education and Careers” tab. The application and the forms required to be filed for accreditation can be accessed by highlighting the “IEEE Continuing Educa-tion Units” (CEU) bullet in the “Technical Education” section of the webpage and then highlighting the “Application Process” bullet in the left sidebar. Instructions for filing the application and the associated forms are also accessible through the webpage. Leon Nock can be reached at leonnock@yahoo.com

The New York Section of the IEEE, in its monthly on-line posting of the MONITOR has been and will con-tinue to regularly announce all courses, seminars and events being offered. These announcements will indicate whether CEU credits will be available. To place such announcements in the Monitor and to give maximum publicity to them, the chapter chairs that undertake to offer the CEU’s are requested to con-tact the editor of the Monitor by email at a.dutta-roy@ieee.org.

The IEEE Region 1 Website (www.ewh.ieee.org/reg/1/ieeer1redesign) now contains a link under the “Region 1 Section Links” caption relating to its Education Activities and recommends that its members review it. It contains information and links relating to State Certification Guidelines and State Education Guidelines for the states in its region as well as to the offerings from the local chapters of the National Society for Professional Engineers (NSPE).

Continuing Education – Future at New York Section

The New York Section of the IEEE is dedicated to serve its members and the community in keeping the pledge of the IEEE in advancing technology for humanity. We hope to increase the number of seminar and course offerings to cater to all technical society Chapters of the Section. Presently, the Monitor, the Section’s monthly publication is also looking at the technical and financial viabilities of offering online webinars, and real-time or learn-at-your-own-pace distant learning courses of longer durations. It is en-visaged that such online courses, when available, will focus on the needs of the Section’s Chapters and affinity groups. Furthermore, online courses will be offered only if we get the CEU accreditation from the IEEE so that the registrant to these courses will have the certainty of attending a course that will bring recognition.

------------------------------------------------

*Leon Nock, Life Senior Member is currently the chair of the education committee of the New York Sec-tion. He graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the City College of New York (CCNY). He also has a Masters degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA degree from New York University. His association with the IEEE began as a student member in the early 1960s. He was a mem-ber/officer of IEEE's New York Consultant Network in the 1990's, has been a PACE Vice Chair. Mr. Nock

worked for the American Electric Power Company (AEP) and recently retired from the New York Power Authority (NYPA). He taught EE at CCNY’s graduate center as an adjunct professor and is a PE.

News from the IEEE-USA that you may have missed

As a special benefit of IEEE membership for November, IEEE-USA is offering a free e-book, "Engineer's Guide to Lifelong Employability: The Transition from School to Work."

This e-book, prepared by the IEEE-USA Employment and Career Services Committee, provides a road map for the student preparing to enter the job market -- what employers are looking for, how they can best find a job and what career paths are open to a new grad. Topics include:

* Finding a Job the Old-Fashioned Way * Networking * The Campus Interview * Making up Your Mind * Four Career Paths * Business -- Big or Small? * A Non-Technology Company "Demand for new BSEEs may be soaring, but so are employer's standards and expectations," writes Jean Eason, IEEE-USA Employment and Career Services Committee member. "Good grades and technical ex-pertise aren't enough anymore."

From Nov. 1 through Nov. 30, "Engineer's Guide to Lifelong Employability: The Transition from School to Work" can be downloaded at www.ieeeusa.org/communications/ebooks for free to IEEE Members. The nonmember price is $5.99.

Members can purchase other IEEE-USA E-Books at deeply discounted prices and download other free e-books.

In December the free publication will be book three in the "Engineer's Guide to Lifelong Employability" series: "What Are You Worth?"

Download the book, read it and send us a review. We’ll post it online

under your name which will come up after a search operation in the

Internet!

Growing up with the Information Age (Part V) John LeGates [In the following we publish Part V of the article by Harvard University PIRP’s John LeGates. (The copy of the article reproduced here is as it appears at PIRP and is unedited by us.) It is fascinating to read his en-counters with the legendary figures’ of the Internet and his involvement in the process. The URL of Har-vard University is www.harvard.edu and that of the Program for Information Resources Policy: www.pirp.harvard.edu – Editor]

Spread the news

Among your

family, friends, colleagues and the community

that we, at the IEEE, are dedicated to advancing

technology for humanity

(continued from the October issue)

NINE

With the failure of the Consumer Communications Reform Act, the monopolies had lost their final of-fense, and were now on the defensive. The market was rushing out from under them. They fought it inch by inch, and lost each battle. When they could no longer own all the telephones in your house, for example, they came up with “the primary instrument”. This doctrine asserted that the phone company needed to own at least one handset at each number, in order to properly test the line. Before they lost this one, the formal proceedings bought them about a year.

Telco-bashing was still an easy game, and very profitable for the competition. Aside from opening mar-kets it also created an anti-monopoly climate that pervaded government action. Bills were proposed in Congress that broke up, rather than preserving, the incumbents’ monopolies. They too failed, but set the scene for more action. The initiative passed to the Department of Justice and its antitrust case against AT&T.

The antitrust proceedings ground slowly through their normal channels. Behavior, structure and size were all scrutinized. Logic aside, it seemed almost certain that something major would happen, because of the antimonopoly climate.

In the proceedings:

- AT&T argued that it could not be punished for its behavior, as it had never done anything without full due process and approval by the government. This argument was perfectly true, but seemingly not per-suasive.

- As to structure the company missed its best bet. It could have argued that its big customers had fled the monopoly and built their own telephone companies: hence that AT&T was no longer dominating the market. Instead they argued that the customer had choice, but they didn’t produce statistics about how much had been chosen. Such numbers were not part of the public record. However we believed that a little sleuthing would produce robust estimates for what we called “off the screen” infrastructure devel-opment .

- On size, they just didn’t have a case. How could the largest company in history claim that it wasn’t big?

A faction within the company argued that by demanding to “keep it all”, AT&T was making “the mistake of the century”. AT&T was a vertical monopoly. It owned local telephony, long distance, basic research, equipment design, manufacturing, and ownership of the wires and gear on the customer’s site. The ar-gument centered on that last one - gear on the customer’s site.

The “keep it all” argument centered on the unitary nature of the network. If anything wasn’t done “right” then the whole system was in jeopardy. It looked like an OK place to draw the line.

However the “foreign attachments” debate had already been lost. It is our Program’s practice not to take sides, but if there is only one side we come down forcefully on it. There was no other side. With some attention to quality and interfaces, you can interconnect pretty much anything. Furthermore, people had been doing it for some time, and it worked. We articulated this case, as did of course the competitors. The “mistake of the century”, according to its detractors, was to insist on keeping foreign attachments. Had the company given them away, the “keep it all” argument might have held for the rest.

Recriminations about the decision to go for it all surfaced again in The Wall Street Journal of September 5, 1997 as part of an article about John Zieglis’ fitness to be Chairman.

In 1982 the antitrust suit took a sudden and unexpected procedural turn. There were several possible outcomes on the table. In a classic regulatory or courtroom format, the procedures would have called for laboriously picking each one, laying out all the logic and subjecting its acceptance to an open vote. Instead the key players went into smoke-filled-back-room-horse-trading mode - the classic political for-mat. After a quick bargaining session, the company and the government emerged holding hands, and announced the basic structure that has shaped the business ever since. The agreement would take ef-fect on 1/1/84, and was formally called the “modification of final judgment (MFJ)”. It was commonly called “the divestiture”.

Incidentally the MFJ was also commonly called “telephone deregulation”. The vocabulary in Washington at the time used polar opposites: Would we have monopoly and regulation, or would it be competition and deregulation? The divestiture was a philosophical endorsement of competition. But deregulation it wasn’t. Since 1/1/84, the budgets, the head count, and the lines of code at almost all state and govern-ment agencies concerned with telephones, have gone up. Even more dramatic has been the increased involvement of the courts. It turns out that the conflicting stakeholders didn’t evaporate on the passage of the MFJ; they just had to learn a new collection of governmental levers to manipulate.

The decision broke AT&T into one long distance company and eight local ones. It invented “Local Access and Transport Areas” (LATAs) roughly paralleling one or more pre-existing area codes. AT&T kept the traffic among the LATAs, as well as equipment manufacturing and much of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Local transport was given to the new companies, combining the 22 local operating companies into seven “Regional Bell Operating Companies” or RBOCs. Informally these were called the “baby bells”

After a bitter post-agreement battle with the babies, AT&T was stripped of the rights to the word “Bell”, although only three of the RBOCs chose to use it in their corporate name.

Part of the Venerable Bell Telephone Laboratories (whose annual budget was bigger than Harvard’s en-dowment) became AT&T Laboratories. The other part (about 8000 people) was jointly owned by the RBOCs and was renamed Bell Communications Research Corporation (BellCore). Local carriers were called “local exchange carriers (LEC’s). Non-Bell LECs were CLECs or Competetive Local Exchange Carri-ers.

After the divestiture, a list of the ten largest “utilities” in the United States read like this: 1 AT&T, 2-8 the RBOCs, 9 General Telephone and Electronics, 10 Pacific Gas and Electric. Each of the fragments, and also the largest of the independents was larger than the largest non-telephone utility. All of them were For-tune 500 size.

A rule of government, when possible, is “first, do no harm”. Satisfying it required some financial contor-tions in the way divestiture was organized. You may remember that by virtue of earlier financial contor-

tions, prices equaled costs. Divestiture broke that chain. AT&T got fifty percent of the billable revenue stream, but inherited only 20% of the costs. Simple arithmetic suggested that local prices would rise hugely to make up the difference. The burden would fall on end users, aka voters - a political no-no.

The solution was called “access charges”. AT&T would pay originating access charges to pick up a call from a local exchange carrier, and also pay terminating access charges to hand the call over to the carri-er at the receiving end.

Access charges immediately raised the price of an AT&T-carried call by 80% to (guess what!) exactly the price before divestiture. Access money was passed on directly to the LEC’s rather than being available to AT&T. Access revenue provided about half of all RBOC revenue, allowing them to keep prices at (guess what!) exactly pre-divestiture levels. However if you were a competing long-distance carrier (at first) or an enterprise network or data network provider (to this day) you were exempt from paying access charges. Access charges instantly provided a big incentive to get off the AT&T network. But incentives play out after the next election.

The baby Bells were also born with three prohibitions: no equipment manufacturing, no provision of “information services” over their own lines, and no interLATA carriage. Equipment manufacturing and interLATA carriage might be considered a reasonable outcome of the horse trading - dividing up the goodies among the parties. But the old AT&T had never been in the business of selling information; where did that one come from?

You guessed it - a concession to the newspaper business.

TEN

Between the cost/revenue split, and the restrictions on the Bells, it was widely claimed that AT&T would soar out of the utility world and become a high-tech high flyer, while the Bells would remain stodgy, re-gulated utilities with utility p/e ratios. Investors bet big money on it. They were wrong.

AT&T’s story is the easier to tell. The 1984 star-struck business to be in was computers, and everyone presumed that was where AT&T would go. It was also presumed that the company would lay off excess staff and rid itself of the monopoly mentality. It would of course also grow with the data business, which would of course amount to half the traffic in three years.

The company’s costly disasters with computers are now well known. Its first billion-dollar-plus write-down-and-layoff were greeted with rave reviews by Wall Street. So were its second. There was a litany of praise of the “this company has become lean and mean and gotten its act together" sort. 141

Shortly after the third writedown, a cover article appeared in Fortune that said “wait a minute”. Any wri-tedown after the first is an admission that the last one didn’t work. It went on to detail negative earn-ings, destruction of value, managerial incompetence and inconsistent strategy. Overnight, it seemed, AT&T flipped from golden boy to whipping post, where it sits as of this writing.

AT&T’s woes, however, were not entirely of its own doing:

First it had to fight for equal treatment with other carriers on the access charges. It had to pay them, they didn’t. Even when it won something on this problem, it won in little steps, with several years of im-proving-but-not-yet equal treatment. With some carriers, most notably enterprise networks, it has nev-er reached parity.

Second, it became the first example of the now-world standard of “asymmetrical regulation”. Asymme-trical regulation is supposed to be a transition between regulation and free market competition. On day one of competition, the incumbent carrier obviously has all the market and the power to crush the new entrants. Hence a regulatory counterweight has to balance the scales while the competition grows up. The competition was free to enter markets, negotiate deals and set prices at will, but AT&T had a long fight for those privileges. Furthermore it was exposed to open hearings, in which the competition could find out what AT&T was doing and even shape its actions.

ELEVEN

Now for the Bells: The press was down on the Bells from day one. “Stuck with the dregs”, “No chance for growth”, “Utility margins and p/e ratios”, “Over regulated”, “Stodgy monopoly mentality”, “No control over half their income (access charges)”, “Too many employees, and unionized to boot”, “product turn-ing into a commodity”, “saturated mature market”, “wide open to unregulated competition” were all among the common views. Not us, however. We saw them as having the biggest and best monopoly going; with monopoly being just as good in 1984 as it was a century before when the robber barons (if you’re a Democrat) / captains of industry (Republican) so overtly lusted after it.

To this mountain of complaints, the Bells added their own special grievance, as well as a shot or two in the foot.

The grievance (completely missed by the press) grew out of the RB/ROR formula, which specified that earnings were nothing but a government-set percentage of the book value of the plant. We quickly pointed out, and they agreed, that RB/ROR ganged up with “smaller, faster, cheaper, better” to create a very nasty bind.

“Smaller, faster, cheaper, better” has a simple corollary. If you provide the same amount of service, and the cost of the gear over which you do it is dropping through the floor, then the value of your plant will decrease. In an unregulated business - great! Ross Perot rode Electronic Data Systems to a vast fortune by exploiting that truism. He signed up ten-year contracts to provide computer services at a reasonable price, and then watched as his costs went through the floor over the ten years.

But if your costs drop under RB/ROR you’re dead in the long run. In fact you’re dead twice: once be-cause you have to drop your prices, and once because your earnings fade away.

And if by some miracle you can avoid dropping your prices, then the Second Ozark Plan (remember those cost-allocation schemes) leaves you wide open to the competition. Costs had been disproportio-nately allocated to business customers, and also to urban ones.“Value-of-service pricing” usually meant that if there were more people in your local exchange, then you charged them more.

In a 1990 paper, I compared the Bells’ situation to a popular parody of the three laws of thermodynam-ics: You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.

- “Win” to a businessman, means earnings growth that beats inflation by more than three percentage points. Or at cocktail parties it means doing better than the average of the other businessmen at the party. But the Bells’ future was threatened by nothing less than their past success: universal service, the only engine of growth the industry ever had, was finished.

- With no engine of growth, is there still chance of breaking even? Unfortunately that’s where the RB/ROR formula and “smaller faster cheaper better” now gang up on you.

- But can you get out of the game? With problems so fundamental and dramatic, what’s a poor RBOC to do?

TWELVE

The Bell’s came up with responses fully as fundamental and dramatic as the challenges.

There were three big strategies, and a potent tactic. They were tried by not only the Bells, but by other telcos in the US, and around the world as well. Here they are in roughly chronological order.

The tactic, which would not seem dramatic in an unregulated industry, was called “rate rebalancing”. This fancy phrase meant two things. One was “deaveraging”, or the power to charge different prices in different places. The other was to adjust the income stream between residential and business custom-ers.

The competition rushed to business customers like filings to a magnet. If it were only a matter of eco-nomics, the Bells could reallocate some common costs away from these customers and serve business with lower prices (and you thought prices were already reflecting true costs). But if they did so, the oth-er end of the balance scale would go up. Those were residential customers. Oops I mean voters - sorry about that. After thirteen years of hard combat with the governments (lustily supported by the competi-tion) we’ve seen only modest progress.

THIRTEEN

Strategy one was “abolish regulation, or at least RB/ROR”. In the “deregulation” euphoria, the Bells all believed briefly that government had faded away, or at least that the regulators would topple with a small push. (It was during this euphoria that they laid off their cost-allocation wizards) But the competition, the governments, and the even the Bells themselves (eager to use regulation against the competition) wouldn’t let it happen. The state was stronger than the company. The RBOC's spread themselves out on a continuum from “work with them to keep them happy” (BellSouth, Bell Atlantic) to “fight ‘em to the death” (USWEST), with the others in between. USWEST launched a nationally-famous publicity drive against the regulators, using cowboy images and slogans (“if you don’t make dust, you eat dust”). The Chairman of one of their Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) kept one in his office that showed two male buffalo bashing heads in a courstship battle. “It re-minds me of the company”, he told me: “big, aggressive, stupid.” In the end this tactic cost them and their stockholders a great deal of money, probably billions.

The PUC’s came to recognize themselves in a changed role, at least in telecommunications. Most had been established in what might be called “the late robber baron” era. They have charters that mandate them to guarantee utility benefits to the public, and to protect the public from utility abuses. By 1980, that had come to be the minority portion of what they were doing. Instead they had become the arbi-trators among business interests, mostly between telcos and competitors. They had become the tools whereby interest groups and telcos manipulated each other for their own purposes.

To put it another way, the good news is that government is a fair and open forum. That can also be the

bad news. There would almost always be a session in which the government body would turn to the

stakeholders and say “if you will work this out among yourselves, I’ll enact it.” If they didn’t, then gov-

ernment would work out a solution that gave a little something to everyone. By now, the stakeholders

couldn’t agree on much.

Telcos were very slow to recognize that influencing government no longer meant taking a commissioner

out to lunch. Now they had to reach compromises in advance with the other players before going to

government. And compromises meant giving something away, a hard sell for the internal decision mak-

ers in a traditional monopoly.

The attack on RB/ROR seemed to have better odds. The state governments were the fields where many

flowers bloomed, and several alternatives budded forth. They included “social contract” (I’ll guarantee

not to raise residential rates, you let me alone otherwise), “banded pricing” (freedom to adjust prices

within limits), “profit sharing” (divide the extra profits between shareholders and customers), and “price

caps” (freedom to lower, but not raise rates). Some ideas dealt with prices, some with profits, and some

with a diminution of public proceedings. Our own inquiry, which dissected these alternatives into their

logically pure components, remains the most comprehensive to this day.

In the end, most states adopted an alternative to RB/ROR. “Price cap regulation” became the almost

universal term. However different states came out with different meanings, and none of them was a

“pure” concept, but a mix.

But a funny thing happened on the way to reregulation. No company had significantly better earnings

than it would have had under RB/ROR. Indeed many states kept a shadow RB/ROR in place, along with

the power to reinvoke it if the company did too well. Some states adopted schemes that one company

characterized to me as “RB/ROR in drag.”

Yet another natural constant appeared circa 1985 - “two years.” This was the time that the Bells be-

lieved it would be until the big three federal restrictions were abolished. Like the “three years until data

is half of all traffic” constant, it influenced strategic planning, and it rolled ever forward out of reach.

The RBOCs had one very bad break, illustrating beautifully the role of randomness in industry structure.

Oversight of the decree was kept by the court - specifically Judge Harold Greene. The court had great

latitude both as to the aggressiveness of its oversight and the range of its interpretation. Greene took an

aggressive stance. His strong anti-Bell, and frequently sarcastic, opinions were a brick wall against lati-

tude. When freedom from the court finally came, the act of Congress that brought it was nicknamed

“The Harold Greene Retirement Bill of 1996."

FOURTEEN

Strategy two: “get out of the telephone business”. Within three years, each RBOC had approximately

100 subsidiaries, spanning everything from computer stores to real estate to fleet management.

We worked closely with all of them as they made these decisions. Lots of different kinds of thinking

were tried. Let me try to explain some of them using our “Information Business Map”.

The Map is one of those ideas which is hard to come to, but stunningly simple once you do. Tony and I

had been trying for years to invent a visual representation for our field. It wasn’t until 1978 that one of

our colleagues, John McLaughlin, finally cracked it. The essence was picking the right axes for a two-

dimensional display. The vertical axis (going up) is simply “product” vs. “service”, which turns out not to

be polar, but a continuum. The horizontal (as you move right) is “conduit” vs. “content”, or more flexi-

bly, “form” vs. “substance”. Once you've chosen these basic things to measure, you can then find a

unique spot for any item on the market. It’s all explained in our publication “Mapping the Information

Business” by John McLaughlin and Ann Louise Antonoff.

An empty piece of stationery is all form and all product, with no aspects of content or service. It lives in

the bottom left-hand corner. Make it into a blank business form, and it has a little more content. It lives

to the right of the empty one. Filling in the form moves it further right (more content). Make it a form

you fill out on a screen, and it moves upwards on the map - it’s now a service. The upper right hand cor-

ner (all content - all service), is occupied by consultants and doctors. The middle is computers. You can

fill in the map with the items you care about, and you now have a map of the whole industry. We called

ours “The Map of the Information Industries”.

Now the fun begins. You can start drawing footprints. A blob that encompasses all the items your com-pany sells is the footprint of your company. You can also draw your regulators, your anticipated future, your competition etc. You can add a third dimension. Pick what you care about: size, growth rate, em-ployment level, profitability, amount of unionization - you can put it on there. We've heard the quote "half the information/communications 500 used your map as the central tool for their strategizing." We worked with many of them ourselves. The map kept coming back to us translated into new languages - 17 at latest count. The Dutch version was done and handed to us in person by the CEO of Elsevier. The Map appeared, among other places, on the cover of a Southwestern Bell Annual Report, with planners hunched over it. One kind of “get out of the business” Bell thinking went like this: Executives would visit us, shut the door, pull down the curtains, get out the map, and ask, “where are people making money?”. This was a good question and we checked it out. The answer: “everywhere on the map, people are making money and people are losing money.” Ergo the real question is “where can I go that I’ll be advantaged over whoever else is there?”

A lot of lists were drawn up, purporting to name the strengths and weakness of an RBOC. I marveled at how different they were, even coming from different people in the same company.

- One obvious answer is that they were good at the RBOC business. More than one reasoned that the answer was to buy another RBOC. Somehow this seemed the wrong end to an exercise that began with the assumption that they had to get out of the business they were in.

- Another was to suppose that they were good at what they did internally, even though the customer didn’t see it as a product. Telcos own a great deal of prime urban real estate, and manage a lot of trucks, for example. Some went into real estate, fleet management, facilities management, equipment repair, personnel services, contract billing and the like.

- Another answer was that the essence of telco success was management of large networks. Some of them spawned contract network design or management divisions.

- Yet another was that we’re good at lobbying and managing utility regulatory environments. Some Bells tried to get into water, gas, or electricity.

- “We’re in the information business” - hence a try at any dimension of the same. Some companies set up information utilities. Because they were prohibited from selling their own content, the utilities ma-naged other peoples’ content. Gateway services, messaging services, and Minitel-like operations were all tried.

- Another mode of thinking was more directly based on our map. Any number of business-school studies have shown that the remoter a new business (or acquisition) may be from the traditional business of a company, the greater its likelihood of failure; and conversely. This alone may explain why new industries (say computers, cable TV) have been dominated by new companies, rather than assimilated into older dominant companies. This effect can be portrayed clearly and simply on the map. The remoteness of another business from yours is simply the distance on the map. Adjacency means that you add or sub-tract some element of content or conduit, or make it a little more or less producty or servicey. The less distance you have to go, the more of your current skills, capital base, existing customers, etc. are usea-ble. An example of this reasoning: if you are familiar with providing telephony (a service), why not also sell telephone network gear to corporate networks (a product)? All seven of the Bells became distribu-tors of Northern Telecom’s “Meridian” line of switches.

The territory adjacent to yours on the map is your most logical place to expand. It follows usefully that it is also the most likely locus of companies who might expand into your territory - “competition out of the woodwork” in traditional business language. The map helped a lot of companies avoid surprises.

Before we leave it, let me mention a couple of interesting asides about the map. First, the map is ex-pandable in a fractal fashion. If you take a piece of it, and fill in the products and services at the next level of detail, it fills up again. It’s like the starry sky. If you take a stronger telescope, you see more stars, rather than running out of them. Many of our affiliates have taken the part of the map that con-cerned them most and expanded it to see finer grain in their neighborhoods. Second, a time series over the history of the US begins with businesses that are all in the corners, and then later fill the center.

There was a considerable flap over the “videotext” (sometimes called “videotex) business. Videotext was a dial-up information service, provided over a terminal. Either a specially provided dumb terminal, like Minitel, or a computer and modem would work. The information could be anything, but usually ran to local information, such as city guides, airline reservations or restaurant menus.

Several major newspapers, including Times Mirror and Knight Ridder, set up videotext divisions. It was rumored that one of their motives was to show good faith to Congress, after getting the Bells shut out.

Many foreign telcos tried as well. Perhaps you remember Antiope, PresTel, Bildschirmtext. The Bells were prohibited by the content restriction, and were livid with envy. They lobbied constantly, as well as planning to do it in two years when the restriction would of course be lifted. The newspapers editoria-lized against letting the telcos in. Of all the editorials I saw, only The Wall Street Journal consistently admitted its own stake.

The business was a bust worldwide. The screens were slow and annoying, content providers didn’t flock to the opportunity, and no good model emerged for a revenue stream. Who came out ahead? The Bells. While the videotext operators were losing their shirts, they were also paying their telephone bills. 165

Minitel deserves a footnote. As part of a much-needed plant modernization in the seventies, France leapfrogged the world in installing digital lines, and also uniquely provided small domestic terminals to the home. The stated goal was to subsidize a technical advance, and then sell it to the world, as France had done with railroad and subway technology. They put on a good sales show, and for several years, telcos elsewhere were mesmerized with the prospect of a Minitel-like enhanced basic telephone (see strategy three, below). A closer look at Minitel economics, however, suggested that the stated cost was achieved by ignoring a lot of development costs and overhead, and the stated usage ran heavily to por-nography and chat lines. Over half of all users polled said that they would drop Minitel if charged only $1/month for it. We described Minitel as a flop masquerading as a triumph.

Minitel, purchased or copied from the French, was tried in several other places, including by two of the Bells. Nowhere did it prove viable. In France it is still there. A European Commission survey in 1995 dis-covered that awareness and usage of the Internet was significantly lower in France than in other devel-oped countries - and even than in less-developed European countries, such as Greece and Portugal. Good or bad, this gap is usually laid to Minitel.

Minitel was only one of several technologies that intrigued the Bells; and other companies, investors and policy makers as well. It seemed to be a trait of information technologies generally that they ex-ploded in popularity and produced vibrant, rapidly-growing, profitable industries. Consider the copier, television, the calculator, color TV, the computer, cable TV, the VCR, the personal camera, the telephone itself; and later the fax machine and the Internet - blockbusters each one. Collectively they had evolved the world from the industrial age into the information age. Surely the next success story would be ________ (fill in your next product aspiration).

The success of information technologies is especially impressive if you forget the failures, like picture-phone, the paperless society, cashless society, the Japanese fifth-generation computer and analog HDTV. The Bells, based on their own history of success, were quick to assume that any prospects in their own business - like Minitel or Videotex - would surge as well. In fact if they failed last try, it was only be-cause of a little glitch, (screen too slow, cost a tad too high, customers not ready) but the future was theirs.

FIFTEEN

After a few burned fingers, the companies (I am now speaking of the Bells plus almost everyone else, including the computer, media, and consumer electronics industries. We worked with all of them) be-came more sophisticated.

Questions like “when will it take off”, and “what will the user use” became much more prevalent by the mid eighties in all industries. We developed a few techniques to help.

Looking more closely at these questions produces some useful information. For example.

- The technology that “takes off” is rarely new. If you’re looking for something that is going to take off, you can probably find it in technology that's been around for a while, and not in something brand new. This remark usually causes some spluttering followed by a counterexample or two, usually including the fax machine. We have always been able to counter the counterexamples by citing their lengthy history. The fax machine itself makes a particularly good one. Can you estimate the year in which the following quote appeared?

The probable simplification of the fac-simile [sic] system of Caselli, by which an exact copy of anything that can be drawn or written may be instantaneously made to appear at a distance of hundreds of miles from the original; and the countless other applications of electricity to the transmission of intelligence yet to be made, ---- must sooner or later interfere most seriously with the transportation of letters by the slower means of post.

It’s from the Annual Report of the Postmaster-General of the United States for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1872.

- However by itself the idea that the technology is already around doesn’t do the whole job. There are lots of technologies around, and most of them will fail. How do you find the winner? There are two forks to this exercise:

- - One is to look at the function that the technology will perform. If the function is already being per-formed, and there is a budget for it, and the technology will do it smaller, faster, cheaper, better etc., then the stage is set for the next iteration. Otherwise you can probably forget it. Thus it’s no surprise that the big four personal computer “killer applications” - word processing, graphics, spreadsheets and databases - are what they are. People have always done those things. Thinking about serving existing functions is a powerful tool for evaluating the prospects of a new company.

- - The other is to look for early adopters. The marketing community has a well-developed language for the penetration groups, including “early adopters”, “shoulder”, “early mass” and so on. Lots of technol-ogies have no adopters. They’re probably not about to take off. Early adopters are usually found in iden-tifiable communities, such as large corporations, the military, and the affluent. Then they trickle down. Examine where something is now and it becomes easier to guess where it might go next.

The Bells supposed that the best market for advanced phone services was the Fortune 500. Once they had developed that one, the market would move down to the larger number of smaller companies. They were right and wrong. Right that the Fortune 500 were the early adopters. Wrong that they were a Bell market. The Fortune 500 were big enough to offer these services to themselves. The real Bell market was the medium-size firm.

- The knee-jerk commercial response to a new product (service, technology etc.) is to do a market pro-jection, complete with focus groups, interviews, trial markets, price-sensitivity studies and the like. These tools are knee-jerk because they have an excellent historical record and are used every day with great success. But there’s a limit to the environments in which they work. The customer has to be al-ready familiar with the function performed by the product. No problem for soap and automobiles. But for technologies that do something the customer hasn’t done before, the findings are bogus. Videocon-

ferencing, Teletext, and interactive TV have come in way under the study results. Mobile phones have come in way over them.

SIXTEEN

Yet another kind of thinking, value-added-chain analysis, led the Bells to yet other business ideas. The dreaded word “commodity” was beginning to crop up in conversations about their traditional service. Their offerings were turning into platforms, on which other people built things that made better mar-gins. IBM and DEC were having the same problem. Where could they themselves capture margins like that?

Two answers presented themselves: applications and content. Applications meant solving specific problems for specific market segments. IBM had made some money that way, but had been slowly forced back into the large-scale systems-integration business. The vast multiplicity of little high-margin applications was too diverse for them. The same turned out to be true for the Bells. Telephones and computing had become too easy to use. To serve application niches, you needed to know more about the niche than about computing and telephony. In most cases, these niches were being served by entrepreneurs coming out of the niches, not out of the information industries.

It is true that the successes made splendid returns. But the analyses that I saw the Bells do did not average the successes with the failures. I haven’t done the arithmetic, but I suspect that if you count both the successes and the failures, you get an average return that’s below the Bells’.

Content seemed to fascinate the Bells - as it has fascinated others. Once they were free to offer it, three of them set up a Hollywood enterprise, and hired Michael Ovitz as CEO. Then they lost him to Disney. I was told that the surviving Hollywood and telco people fell to squabbling with each other until the outfit was shut down. In various regulatory and legislative drafts, the Bells got permission for a kind of “video dial tone” regu-lation that would permit them to provide their own content like a cable-TV company. But this hybridiza-tion made a lot of content suppliers nervous about equality of access - the essence of the principle of common carriage.

SEVENTEEN

By now we know that overall these “get out of telephone business” ventures have added up to a costly failure. And RB/ROR has gone away mostly in name. We also know that the Bells haven’t gone down the drain - in fact they’ve outperformed the Dow as investments. What’s the story?

The most common explanation for the failure of the RBOCs’ other ventures is their own ineptitude. What can you expect of an ex-monopoly?

I will grant some truth to this reason. Their planning cycles were too long. They were too slow about recognizing and shutting down failures. Legal departments were accustomed to saying “no”, rather than “how can we do this without setting a precedent”. They hadn’t honed their

skills in a bruising marketplace. Incentive structures weren’t tied closely enough to performance. But “ineptitude” fails to describe the Bells’ staying power, smart people and capacity to learn.

There is another reason, and it became clear to us as we worked with the new or “unregulated” divisions. It derived from the old cost allocation problem, and the persistence of regulation. Regulators, egged on by the competition, were nervous about unfair competition. “How do we assure that you’re not subsidizing the competitive products from the monopoly ones”, or alternatively phrased “how do we assure that you’re not benefitting the shareholders at the expense of the ratepayers?” It’s a good question, considering that there’s a huge common cost pool and no true cost of anything. The regulators responded by putting burdens on the unregulated businesses to satisfy the noisy competitors. There were obligations for a percentage of any profits, licensing fees for the use of the Bell name, mandatory assignment of overhead costs; surcharges for any personnel who moved from the regulated side to the unregulated; you name it. By the late 1980's we found ourselves working with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who had concocted a business because it was in competition with the Bells. They figured it was good business to compete with someone who opened a market and then must serve it with one foot nailed down. Just about a decade after my presentation to the Newspaper publishers, I was asked to do it again. “I was right the first time”, we agreed. “The electronic information business is worth watching. But forget my example of the local telephone company and the weather forecast. They won’t be the player to beat. When this business becomes viable, I’ll consider quitting Harvard, getting an honest job, and setting up LeGates Enterprises. I won’t be hobbled like the telcos and I’ll be a more formidable opponent. I won’t do it though, because I can’t think of anyone who has a natural advantage over you yourselves. You have the brand name, you own the content, you have the eye of the user, and you have financial and political muscle.” It looks like a business in which newspapers have the natural advantage. Nonetheless, the Association President, Catherine Black, insisted for another year that: “mission number one is keeping the telcos out of classified ads.” The mission only died when ANPA merged with the Newspaper Advertising Bureau (NAB) to form the National Newspaper Association (NNA). NAB won most of the internal power struggles, and the ANPA agenda faded.

But if the Bells didn’t forecast their failures, they also didn’t expect their successes. Four relatively straightforward businesses did very well for them - as our map would have anticipated.

- One was the traditional yellow-page directories. On divestiture the Bells were given the yellow pages in order to help subsidize local service. Earnings (from none to all, depending on the state) were imputed for that purpose. Senior telco management considered these divisions too humdrum for serious attention. Almost all directory companies tried to redefine themselves into something sexier, and to build higher-tech businesses. “We match buyers to sellers”, “we are a marketing organization who can market other things”, “we can print specialized directories” and “we can do all this on-line” were all redefinitions of what the business was deep down inside. Money didn’t seem to come naturally in the fancy stuff, but the basics turned out to be a growth business with 100% margins.

- One was cellular telephony. We argued from the beginning that cellular was not a different business, but the ordinary telephone of the future. Each US geographic market was allotted two cellular carriers by the FCC. One was the local landline carrier, the other a new competitor. The landline carriers pretty quickly bought up most of the new competitors, but only in someone else’s territory. It too was a very profitable high-growth business.

- One was telephony overseas. Service may be excellent and penetration may approach 100 percent in the US, but in few other places. By and large your regulators don’t mind if you make a killing on customers, so long as they’re somewhere else. The Bells have done well by doing good abroad. But both foreign regulators and currency exchange uncertainties have prevented this one from being a blockbuster thus far.

- Last was the surprise growth in extra access lines. At least partly at our urging, the Bells set up second accounting systems that didn’t rely on regulator-assigned costs. These systems suggested that they didn’t necessarily lose their shirts on each local loop, especially if they used long-run incremental costing methods. Second lines began to be sold for the teenagers or whatever. Then came computer modems, fax machines and finally the Internet. The “mature” market turned out to have a lot more growth in it.

EIGHTEEN – PERSONAL DIGRESSION

Now that I was at Harvard and relating to a new collection of characters, I started getting a different kind of unsolicited job offer. I was asked, for example, to be Federal Under Secretary of Commerce for Telecommunications and Information. I was asked to be the Massachusetts “information czar”. I was invited to join the Boards of several of our affiliates, including Apple Computer and one RBOC. Two high-tech multinationals and one startup asked me to be CEO. I considered all the full-time positions, and decided that I was happier doing what I was doing. I would have enjoyed being on Boards, but I had to turn them down to maintain the Program’s impartiality. Tony and I often described ourselves as having taken vows of poverty and chastity.

One offer was particularly tempting. After divestiture, Wall Street smelled money in the (allegedly) newly freed telcos. I was asked by Robert Fomon, Chairman of E. F. Hutton to join the firm. If I would bring my understanding and contacts, he would teach me the investment banking business (“you will not find this challenging to learn”) and put me in charge of all the information/telecommunications industries, a #2 slot in the company. I might have done it, but a temporary (I didn’t know it was temporary at the time) back problem was too troublesome.

Most of these invitations were appealing. I had a fondness the for-profit environment. Most offers started above triple my current pay plus equity. It took a strong love of what I was doing to make me say “no.”

. NINETEEN The third Bell strategy for beating the RB/ROR bind gets us into the front-page issues of the 1990s - “convergence”, “the information superhighway”, “the national information infrastructure”, “the new communications act”. It was also their principal shot to the foot. In essence it’s “redefine basic service upward”. Or, “if the plain-old-telephone-service market is saturated (universal service), then make something grander the new universal norm.”

Telcos had been incrementally creeping up on broader-bandwidth offerings. “Big pipes” were already being sold to the commercial market. They had been in use for internal communication among major switches for many years. A service called “ISDN” which offered two channels of 64 kilobits/second plus a smaller signaling channel (full-motion video-cassette-quality movies require about 1500 kilobits/second) had been on the market for some time, but hadn’t found a clear application. Doubters said that it was an acronym for “I Still Don’t Know”. Nippon Tel. in Japan announced a plan to fiber the whole country in 25 years, and then abandoned it. Doubters called it “the high fiber diet”. Various Bell plans were floated, Congressional hearings were held, and all that.

Ideas this big and this public come with not only business plans, but with vocabularies and social philosophies. The full-blown version was the “information superhighway” fever of the 1990's. It held that society had a lot to gain. These lists usually began with telemedicine, telelearning, telecommuting (and therefore less pollution), access to job opportunities for the poor and homeless, and the like. They neglected to point out that earlier advances in information, from Gutenberg through Minitel, had been driven by pornography, entertainment, and chit-chat.

We testified before both the House and the Senate in 1990 that the economics of universal-fiberto- the-home didn’t look good. The telcos themselves floated costs of 200 to 400 billion dollars to provide connections. What would go over these fibers and what would people pay for it? We pointed out that the only proven product was video entertainment. People already had that in the form of cable TV and video rentals, providing a rough check on the revenue opportunity. The entire industry brought in gross revenues of about thirteen billion dollars, with profits running about 10 per cent. Even assuming that the telcos captured 100 percent of that revenue (meaning that the cable guys rolled over and died when confronted with competition), the business was a loser.

[The last part of memoirs of John LeGates — Part VI — will be posted in next month’s Monitor+

Unexpected magnetism in gold nanostructures that makes the noble metal even more attractive

Simon Trudel*

[Editor’s notes: Gold has been considered a precious material for time immemorial. Since the ancients discovered gold the fascination for the material has never subsided. For some reason people have faith in the metal. Thousands of years ago it was used for making ornaments. World’s museums are full of an-cient gold artifacts. It is said that first gold coins were minted in Asia in 610 BC. In recent times gold was also used for currency conversion. In 1944 the Bretton Woods Agreement established the U.S. dollar as an international standard for conversion of world’s currencies and one ounce of gold was pegged to USD35. On August 15, 1971 President Nixon terminated the hitherto conversion rate between gold and dollar. Now the price of gold has skyrocketed.

Gold is extensively used in electronics, as a material for good electrical contacts and it is used extensively also in the fabrication of integrated circuit chips. However, magnetism in gold nanoparticles is a relatively new finding that could be a boon to many applications in electronics. It is possible that with time the magnetic properties will find their mag-netic properties of the nanoparticles will find their ways into electronic engineering. Dr. Simon Trudel of University of Calgary in Canada has been dedicating time and effort in discovering magnetic properties of gold. Recently he wrote a paper on this topic in the learned journal “Gold Bulletin", a publication of the nonprofit World Gold Council and Springer Verlag, a well known pub-lisher of scientific journals. This paper reviews the most recent scientific studies on this topic. Since most

of our readership may not be familiar with the terminology and its terminology we requested Dr. Trudel if he could write its salient points in plain language. We are happy to publish the summarized plain-language version of Dr. Trudel’s review. To view the world Gold Coun-cil journal please visit: http://www.springer.com/materials/special+types/journal/13404.

And to download the paper please go tot: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v4qn44x550125588/ . An ac-companying video clip may be viewed at www.gold.org/media. More information on gold may be found in

http://www.onlygold.com/tutorialpages/WorldGoldDemandFS.htm ]

anoscience is currently attracting considerable attention, especially in the light of its newly found useful and intriguing properties that are present in finely granulated materials not found in their bulk forms. Magnetism is one such phenomenon discovered in these materials and it is ripe with many nanoscale effects caused by either the reduced size of the material under inves-

tigation or a break in the symmetry of its surface structure. One of the more surprising recent incarna-tions of such novel behaviors is the magnetic property observed also in gold-based nanostructures that

N

has recently been reviewed in the Gold Bulletin. *See the editor’s notes above for the references.+ This review discusses the salient experimental results, a theoretical model by highlighting possible industrial applications of magnetic gold nanostructures.

Gold nanostructures, written as Au NPs, are widely being studied principally because of possible appli-cations of their hitherto unknown optical, electronic, and biocompatible properties. One striking exam-ple of such properties is the dark red color of organic solvents containing Au NPs, caused by the surface plasmon resonance of the nanoparticles. This property of colored colloidal gold probably makes it the oldest form of nanotechnology; it was used as early as the fourth century of the Common Era to deco-rate the Lycurgus Cup (on display at the British Museum, London). Colloidal gold was also used for mak-ing stained glass, and as a pigment in the decoration of porcelain. The properties of gold nanostructures (and in particular, nanoparticles) make them very attractive for a variety of applications, including catalysis, therapeutics, diag-nostics, sensing, and nanoelectronics. Now we can add magnet-ism to the list of desirable attributes of gold nanoparticles.

The unexpected magnetism in gold nanoparticles is believed to be a result of the predominant effect of surfaces at the nanos-cale, whereas the surface to volume ratio dramatically increases as the volume decreases. Thiol molecules (such as hydrocarbon chains ending with a chemical group containing a sulfur atom) avidly bind to the surface of gold – including nanoparticles – forming a strong gold-sulfur bond. The synthesis of gold nanoparticles coated with a single layer of thiol molecules took flight with a method for making Au NPs in solution devised by Prof. Mathias Brust of the University of Liverpool, UK. Self-assembled thiol monolayers are well-known chemical modifiers enabl-ing tuning of the surface properties of a material. That is to say, the underlying electronic and magnetic properties of thiol-capped particles differ from the bulk, as a result of the Au-to-S surface bond.

The obvious question one is faced with is whether the observed magnetism is an intrinsic property of the gold though this has been supported by a variety of high-end spectroscopic investigations. While the occurrence of magnetism in gold nanoparticles is now well established, the observed magnetization span a wide range, from almost indiscernible to magnetizations comparable to that of bulk nickel, a well-known magnetic metal. While so far we have focused on Au nanoparticles, it is worth noting that magnetic properties can also be imparted to gold thin films.

While there is a clear dichotomy between the nanoscaled magnetic and bulk non-magnetic gold, a clear understanding of the exact size at which this transition occurs is still elusive and requires further investi-gation. Some theoretical models have been proposed to explain the range of magnetization observed in gold nanoparticles and thin films, as well as other characteristic magnetic properties such as the ease to reverse the direction in which the magnetization is pointing. However, several theoretical predictions resulting from these models have yet to be experimentally verified, which will enhance our understand-ing of this unexpected magnetism.

In the short-term, one may expect that the magnetism of gold nanostructures will be coupled to pre-viously known properties of gold. A first niche application would be gold nanoparticle-based catalysis. The magnetic properties could provide a means to recover the catalyst once the chemical reaction is completed. By applying a magnetic field the catalyst remains in the reaction vessel while the desired product is drained out. After new starting material is added, the catalyst could be used again and again, thereby resulting in lower costs of production. Gold nanostructures have already demonstrated their

tremendous potential in diagnostics and therapeutics. Adding magnetism to Au nanoparticles could make them a silver (well, technically, golden) bullet. New functionality towards magnetic resonance im-aging (MRI) and magnetic hyperthermia (which have up to now been the fiefdom of magnetic metal oxide nanoparticles) would considerably enhance the existing long list of desirable attributes of gold na-noparticles towards biomedically engineered healthcare solutions.

Applications of the unexpected magnetism in gold nanostructures present several challenges, before we can fully understand the physical and chemical handles governing it. However, it also presents new op-portunities to test our understanding of the electronic properties of finely divided matter. It could open up new industrial avenues towards the design of new functional materials. Noticeably, applications in catalysis, biomedicine, and information technology can be anticipated as the new properties of these fascinating new gold-based nanomaterials are harnessed. Gold has indeed become even more attractive in its own new special way.

_______________________________________________

*Simon Trudel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanoscience Program at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University (Bur-naby, Canada) after studying novel magnetism in amorphous metal oxide thin films and nanocompo-sites. In 2008 and 2009, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship with which he joined the group of Prof. Dr. Burkard Hillebrands at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany, where he conducted magneto-optical investigations of Heusler compound thin films. His cur-rent research interests at the University of Calgary include the study of non-conventional magnetism in gold and metal oxide nanostructures, the synthesis and characterization of high spin polarization nano-materials, and the development of new catalysts for the oxidation of small molecules.

We thank the World Gold Council for the photographs taken from its web site <gold.org>.

Nobel prizes

Amitava Dutta-Roy

Do you remember how many Nobel prizes are given each year? How many of them were thought of by Alfred Nobel himself and which prize has been added to the list since then? No, these are not Jeopardy quizzes! Many of you must have read about the origin of the Nobel prizes but now may not remember those facts. As the December 5, the first day of the celebrations around the Nobel prizes approaches we’ll refresh your memory. The ceremonies will begin in Stockholm, Sweden and end on December 11 with a concert in Oslo, Norway which also the place where the prize for peace is awarded. All other No-bel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.

Photograph of the Nobel medal© Copyright of by Nobel.org

Reproduced with permission

The medal of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences represents Nature in the form of a goddess re-sembling Isis, emerging from the clouds and holding in her arms a cornucopia. The veil which covers her cold and austere face is held up by the Genius of Science.

The inscription reads: Inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes, loosely translated "And they who bet-tered life on earth by their newly found mastery." (Word for word: inventions enhance life which is beautified through art.) The name of the Nobel Laureate is engraved on the plate below the figures, and the text "REG. ACAD. SCIENT. SUEC." stands for The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Up to 1980 the "Swedish" medals, each weighing approximately 200 g and with a diameter of 66 mm, were made of 23-karat gold. Since then they have been made of 18-karat green gold plated with 24karat gold. ©® [The above text has been reproduced here with permission from Nobel foundation’s Web page <nobelprize.org>.]

According to the wishes of Alfred Nobel, from 1901 until 1968, only five Nobel prizes were awarded. Those were for outstanding contributions in literature, physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology and peace. Later, in 1968 the Swedish bank Sveriges Riksbank established a Nobel prize in economic sciences in the memory of Alfred Nobel. Each of the laureates receives a citation, a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award.

The Nobel laureates of 2011

Literature: Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden)

Physics: Saul Perlmutter (USA), Brian P. Schmidt (USA) and Adam G. Riess (USA)

Chemistry: Dan Schechtman (Israel)

Medicine: Bruce A. Beutler (USA), Jules Hoffmann (Luxemburg) and Ralph M. Steinman (Canada)

Peace: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia), Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman (Yemen)

Economic sciences: Thomas Sergent (USA) and Cristopher A. Sims (USA)

It is interesting that all of the 2011 peace prize winners are women. Ms. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the president of Liberia. We take our hats off to all laureates — both women and men — for their contribu-tions to humanity.

Alas, there is no Nobel prize for engineering. However, today the boundary between electronic technol-ogy and physics is blurred. Research, discoveries and inventions in physics often lead to new technolo-gies. Use of semiconductors and superconductors are two of the finest examples of this phenomenon. Who does not remember that transistors electronics evolved from the research in physics by the three 1956 laureates in phsics: William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain? All three did their work at (old) Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. The whole world has changed because of their discovery of majority and minority carrier effects in semiconductor p-n junctions.

The name of another Nobel laureate comes to mind: that of Denis Gabor who was actually a professor of electrical engineering at Imperial College, London. In 1971, he was awarded the Nobel prize for phys-ics for “his invention and development of the holographic method.” I should remember, since I had the privilege to study under him. Today holography is used in fabrication of credit cards and in surgery. New York City had a Museum of Holography on Mercer Street, SoHo. Unfortunately, it lacked funds to con-tinue and closed a few months ago.

I was also lucky to have attended the lectures of Prof. P.M.S. Blackett who received the Nobel prize for physics in 1948 for his development of Wilson cloud chamber method and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation. Prof. Blackett’s methods are extensively used in the technology for detection of cosmic rays and their incoming path. (On a personal note: the professor was a gentle and humble person. I remember that at an annual dinner after the food was consumed the MC introduced him to the attendees and said that Prof. Blackett had advised many doctoral candidates but he himself had no doctorate. At that remark the professor smilingly declared that it was true that he did not have a doctorate. Did he really need a doctorate to get the Nobel prize? I wonder!)

All Nobel laureates have been leaving their mark for the posterity and that is why they are so respected.

The notables in science and technology we lost in recent months

John McCarthy

Dr. John McCarthy was a computer scientist and professor at Stanford University. He was credited with

many important contributions in artificial intelligence. He died in his home in Stanford, CA on October

24 at the age of 84. You can see more details in: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-mccarthy-computer-science-pioneer-dies-at-

84/2011/10/25/gIQACZlAMM_story.html

Denis Ritchie

Mr. Denis Ritchie was a computer scientist who was also the principal designer of the C programming

language. He was also a co-developer of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs, NJ. He lived in Berkley

Heights, NJ and died on October 12 at the age of 70. Details at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-

70.html

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Young Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of the social network Diaspora*. The goal of Diaspora* was

the opposite to that of Facebook in the sense that the goal of the former was to give emphasis on priva-

cy and decentralized data collection. Zhitomirskiy died at his home in San Francisco. He was only 22. His

idea of a very private social network had much potential. More details at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-

at-22.html?scp=1&sq=Ilya%20Zhitomirskiy%20&st=cse

Har Gobind Khorana

Prof. Khorana was born in Raipur, India and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. Later, he moved to MIT, Cambridge. Mass. In 1068 he was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine for his (and that of his co-sharers) “interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis." He died on November 9 last at the age of 89. More details at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1968/khorana-bio.html.

Review Motorola Roadster, a Bluetooth enabler Amitava Dutta-Roy

When we purchased a Hyundai Elantra two years ago we had no choice of models or features. We were in a hurry to get a car that we needed urgently and the one that was available had Bluetooth and XM satellite radio etc. I thought I would not need all those gizmos. A few months later we bought a couple of new LG Sentio cell phones that offered Bluetooth. To test them I paired the two phones (my wife’s and mine) with the Hyundai’s Bluetooth system. It took us a fair amount of time to get used to the Blu-etooth voice prompts. Once we got used to them it became pretty easy to call hands-free, especially the frequently called numbers.

Well, we got so used with the Bluetooth in the car that we started missing such a device in our older car, a Nissan Altima that does not have it. Though we generally do not engage in idle conversations over the cell phone there are moments when there is no other alternative but to call over the cellular phone. I know perfectly well that it is dangerous and il-legal to use cell phones while driving. That is why I have been looking for an accessory that would allow us to use the Bluetooth feature of our cell phones to be used in a car that does not have it. I found the device I was looking for a couple of months ago in the Consumer Electronics Associa-tion’s Line Show in New York. It is called Motorola Roadster. It acts as a proxy for the car Bluetooth. It has a little built-in speaker that generates sound at quite an adequate level inside a car. The gizmo comes with a cord that can be plugged into the car power socket. The other end of the cord has a mini-USB plug that goes into the device. I found that the Roadster can be used even if it is not fully charged. If you should want to test or configure the sys-tem sitting on your sofa you may have to get a home battery charger that gives 5volt DC through a mini-USB port. It is possible to transmit music from the MP3 player of the phone to the Roadster using the Bluetooth frequency. The music is then retransmitted to the car radio over an unused FM band. The device has a clip that conveniently attaches to the sunshade above driver’s head. The device’s switches are easy to reach and light up when the apparatus is in use. The Roadster shuts itself off if it is not used for a few

minutes. However, it springs to life as soon as it senses the presence of a paired cellular phone.

To pair and configure any two Bluetooth devices takes quite a bit of

patience and the Roadster is no exception. However, if the instructions

are followed in a logical fashion it is not all that difficult to pair a cellular

phone and the Roadster. During the pairing you may hear a voice

prompt: “if necessary enter zero-zero-zero-zero in your phone.” But it

may not be necessary to enter those zeroes. Most phones will pair au-

tomatically. If the pairing is successful you will hear another message: “Motorola 550 is now connected.”

Remember that Bluetooth devices take a few seconds to go through the algorithms before they are

ready. So, give them some time!

Sadly, I found the Quick Start Guide is hopelessly inadequate. This is a characteristic I find in numerous such guides, especially those printed abroad. I blame this on the sloppy work of whoever writes and whoever reviews that writing. I had to call the Motorola customer service a couple of times and to my surprise I found it to be very good. The response was prompt without endless voice prompts to press buttons. The agents are knowledgeable and helpful.

My experience with Roadster is that the device responds best if you say the name (not the number) of the person to be called when you hear “say a voice command.” The Roadster has no built-in address book. Instead, it relies on the address book of your phone. (The Bluetooth devices in most cars have their own address books that you can train.) I also discovered that longer the name better is the voice recognition. For example, I had my “home” in the telephone address book. The Roadster had difficulty in recognizing home when I replied back to its voice prompt for a command. So, when I changed “home” to “residence” and it worked like a charm. It has no problem in recognizing my wife’s name Cristina, since it has a lot of “meat’ to chew in its algorithm. But I encounter problem if I call Cris instead of Cristi-na. These are idiosyncrasies in every Bluetooth device. My suggestion would be that if you wish to call, for example, Bob change the name Bobone, Bobtwo or a word that is long enough and at the same time identifies the person you want to call. I imagine that the Bluetooth technology coupled with voice rec-ognition has yet to mature fully. In the meantime, if you do not yet have a hands-free phone in your car it is worth installing such a device at $60 rather than get into a traffic accident or getting a police ticket for holding a cellular phone while driving.

Before you decide to install any hands-free phone system you may find the following facts enlightening

Drivers are much distracted while texting while driving (65.62%), eating (1.87%), putting on make-ups (7.44%), reading a book/magazine (18.56%) and talking on a cell phone (6.51%).

According to a survey by Nationwide Insurance found the following.

Distraction from cell phone use while driving (hand held or hands free) extends a driver's reac-tion as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent. (University of Utah)

The No.1 source of driver inattention is use of a wireless device. (Virginia Tech/NHTSA) Drivers that use cell phones are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure

themselves. (NHTSA, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) 10 percent of drivers aged 16 to 24 years old are on their phone at any one time. Driving while distracted is a factor in 25 percent of police reported crashes. Driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by

37 percent (Carnegie Mellon)

I think the worst thing is to injure or kill another innocent driver, passenger or a pedestrian.

We urge you to visit the Web site of the National Highway Safety Administration (<nhtsa.gov>) and Gov-ernors Highway Safety Association (<ghsa.gov>). Both give the latest news and statistics on cell phone uses and rules in all states in this country. Please tell your family members, friends and colleagues to refrain from using cell phones while driving unless they have some kind of hands-free device.

Disclaimer: The above is a completely independent review of the Motorola Roadster. The re-viewer has no explicit or implicit financial interest in the vendor company.

Tidbits

Amitava Dutta-Roy

Four degrees of freedom

Have you ever imagined how small the world is? Suppose you want to know somebody who may live near or far from you and who is unknown to you. What do you do? You might ask a friend who knows somebody who knows somebody else who knows the person you really want to know at that moment. That is what people did and still do networking.

In 1929 the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy proposed that anybody in this world can be connected to anybody else through a chain of five acquaintances. Based on this supposition Karinthy wrote a short story and gave it a title “Chains.”

In 1967 the American sociologist Stanley Milgram decided to put the idea to test. He asked a group of people in the mid-West to send a postcard to a recipient in Massachusetts who was unknown to them.

Only the name, occupation and a rough idea of location of the recipient were disclosed to the first group of senders. Each person in this group would send the postcard to another friend or acquaintance who would be the most likely to know the final recipient. The second group of intermediaries in their turns would also do the same as the first group. The chain reaction continued until the final recipient received the postcard intended for him. To his astonishment Milgram found that each postcard needed between five and seven intermediaries to reach a complete stranger. Milgram published the results Psychology Today where he coined the term “six degrees of separation.” Later, Milgram’s findings were found to be flawed. His population sample was considered too small for the study. But the catchy expression “six degrees of freedom” continued to exist.

Years later, in 1990 in fact, dramatist John Guare wrote a script based on the six degrees of freedom and produced a play under the same title.

Now that social networking through the Internet is in vogue there is a renewed scientific interest in the topic. Scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan conducted their studies and came to the con-clusion that the “gap” between two people in this world is not six persons but 4.74. Of course, their find-ings will generate much discussion, since the population sample consisted of 721 million people, all of them Facebook users. You may have found the results in the Facebook Web site. You can also read a nice article on the topic written by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta that appeared in the New York Times on November 21. Visit the following URL to access the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?ref=sominisengupta&pagewanted=print

Adult gizmos

Our own Bill Coyne, the chair of by-laws at the New York Section seems to be an avid Internet watcher of the newest virtual toys. He sent the following URL. Check it out. I am sure you will like it. Have pa-tience to let the commercial on the YouTube clip end. Then you will see a spherical flying machine that has been developed by the Japanese Ministry of Defense. Very interesting indeed! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF0uLnMoQZA&feature=player_embedded

This is the end of the November 2011 issue

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