Google+ Auto Backup

Google does not talk to Google, or rather I should say Picasa does not talk to Blogger. Or, whatever.

I put the images for this blog on a folder called Google+Photos on my machine, downloaded the Google+ Auto Backup app and pointed it to this folder. It only took little time, but it was wasted time.

1. For images, Google+ Auto Backup supports only the file formats jpg, webp and gif. Hello Google, GIF is an ancient file format for 8-bit images encoded with LZW; it has long been replaced by PNG, which uses the superior Flate encoding (LZ followed by Huffman) and supports both 8-bit and 24-bit images (yes, the latter is important because light typefaces can get destroyed by anti-aliasing).
2. The uploaded JPEG images are visible on Google+, but not in Blogger, although Blogger has a tab called Select a file From Picasa Web Albums. Hello Google, why can your Blogger app not see images uploaded by your Google+ Auto Backup app?

Purple disk

Last year I wrote about Western Digital color-coding their hard disk drives to make it easier to find the optimal drive for an application. We saw that blue is for everyday use (about 40 hours per week in a PC), black for high performance, green for low power, and red for NAS (continuous operation, low power, vibration tolerance, error correction, streaming).

Now Western Digital has a new line color-coded purple. Purple is similar to red: it is aimed at surveillance video and meant to be always on, be deployed in bunches (vibration control), and used for streaming (different cache optimization). Although you could use red disks for video surveillance, the purple disks have an AllFrame firmware technology that reduces video frame loss.

Seagate's corresponding Surveillance HDD line has a turquoise label.

What is your energy footprint?

In the USA, tucked into a 1,500-page budget bill now moving through Congress is a Republican provision that would restore the incandescent light bulbs that were supposed to be phased out in favor of greener lighting technology. Defenders of the traditional bulb say the government is again overreaching, that the marketplace should decide what kind of bulbs are manufactured in the USA. Led in the House by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, Republicans got the funding cutoff provision inserted into an energy and water spending bill that President Obama signed into law in mid-January 2014.

With this freedom of conspicuous consumption, according to the Wikipedia the average USA person consumes 12,000 watts of energy. By comparison, a person in Bangladesh on the average consumes 300 watts. The world average is approximately 2000 watts. Of course, the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world would like to enjoy the same conspicuous consumption as USA people, so world energy production should increase to 7,148,400,000 × 12,000 = 85,780,800,000,000 watt.

Or not.

As Dr. Marco Morosini wrote in a paper on the 2000 Watt Society, in the last decades some authors suggested to consider the opportunity of a voluntary ceiling to the amount of primary energy used per capita. Wolfram Ziegler proposed a voluntary limit in the use of primary energy in central Europe under the level of 0.16 W/m² (Ziegler 1979; 1996); this level was based on ecological arguments and was intended to limit the anthropic pressure on biodiversity. Starting from Ziegler's arguments and data, Dürr calculated and suggested a global value of 9 TW as a voluntary limit in the use of primary energy by mankind (Dürr 1993); this level would be around one fifth of the amount of solar energy transformed by terrestrial organisms, estimated by Dürr at 40–50 TW, for a human population of 6 billions at the end of the last century, Dürr suggested consequently the vision of a "1500-watt society." Goldemberg et al. (1985; Goldemberg 2004) claimed that 1000 watt of primary energy per capita would cover "basic needs and much more." Spreng et al. (2002) suggested to steer human societies towards an "energy window," defined by a lower social limit and an upper ecological limit in the use of primary energy. In Switzerland, the idea of setting a ceiling to energy usage was formulated at the beginning of the '90s (Imboden et al. 1992; Imboden 1993). Paul Kesselring (Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland), and Carl-Jochen Winter (German Aerospace Research Establishment, DLR) punctually suggested a "2000-watt society" as worldwide plausible vision achievable within 50–100 years (Kesselring and Winter 1994).

Primarily through the tireless efforts of Prof. Dieter Imboden, Switzerland is now on the path of a 2000 Watt Society.

If you want to learn more on the 2000 Watt Society, the best source is the brochure Smarter Living made available by Novatlantis. A 2000 watt person would consume 17,500 kilowatt hours or 1750 liters of petroleum over the course of a year.

What is your energy footprint?

You can easily calculate this number from the information provided by your utility company. For example, in Palo Alto you go to www.CityofPaloAlto.org/HomeEnergyReports.

In my case, from 18 June 2009 to 21 January 2014 I have used on average 308 watt of electricity and 1092 watt of gas for a total of 1400 watt, so at first sight I might have reached the year 2050 goal. However, the standard deviation of my gas energy usage is 1070, so clearly the average is not meaningful and I have to look at all the data.

My problem is that in the cool season I use too much natural gas for heating. The baseline for gas are the on-demand water heater and the cooking stove, while the baseline for the electricity are the refrigerator, lighting, and the electronics. In the cool season electricity use goes up a little because the heating furnace uses an electric fan.

As explained on page 16 in the Smarter Living brochure, only 20% of the overall heating energy demand can be determined by the behavior of the building's occupants. 80% of the ultimate energy needs are determined at the planning stage of a building. In 1960, when the Swiss were using 2000 watt, I was living in a new building made of bricks, cement, insulation, double pane windows, and rolling shutters. In 2014 I live in a typical 1948 California ranch house with no insulation, so I cannot do much better. In fact, according to the utilities department I even use less natural gas than my neighbors.

The reason I use more gas energy is that my neighbor's houses are mostly newer and therefore have solid plywood walls and some insulation. By efficient neighbors, the utility department refers to the most efficient 20 percent of my immediate neighbors.

Also my electricity use is not out of line with that of my neighbors.

This means that even with the 20% savings maximally possible with a retrofit, if I really want to be a 2000 watt person in Palo Alto I would have to tear down my house and rebuild it. This might be possible in rich Switzerland, but not in the impoverished USA.

There could be a potentially different way out. In 1960 we had a very low energy use because we were 5 people living in a two bedroom apartment, while now the occupancy of the current 176 m² three bedroom house is much lower.

Indeed, my route to work is now 23.5 km and there is no usable public transportation. My car uses about 17 liters per 100 km or 4 liters per trip. This is a lot of gasoline and I keep it lower by car-pooling and dividing the number by 2. Similarly, I could reduce my energy use at home by increasing the number of residents.

In the intrest of full disclosure, here is the data provided by the City of Palo Alto and used in the graphs above.

year	month	electricity	gas	total
2009	July	265.0 W	183.3 W	448.3 W
2009	August	286.7 W	117.3 W	404.0 W
2009	September	299.4 W	248.9 W	548.3 W
2009	October	265.2 W	130.4 W	395.5 W
2009	November	300.0 W	989.9 W	1,289.9 W
2009	December	392.6 W	2,042.2 W	2,434.8 W
2010	January	322.7 W	1,095.0 W	1,417.6 W
2010	February	309.7 W	1,627.3 W	1,937.0 W
2010	March	248.9 W	1,216.6 W	1,465.5 W
2010	April	272.9 W	963.7 W	1,236.5 W
2010	May	253.8 W	364.1 W	617.9 W
2010	June	281.3 W	330.0 W	611.2 W
2010	July	321.4 W	202.3 W	523.7 W
2010	August	286.5 W	227.1 W	513.5 W
2010	September	232.9 W	209.5 W	442.4 W
2010	October	251.0 W	242.7 W	493.8 W
2010	November	261.9 W	984.0 W	1,245.9 W
2010	December	289.7 W	1,941.8 W	2,231.5 W
2011	January	322.8 W	2,265.5 W	2,588.2 W
2011	February	287.7 W	2,081.5 W	2,369.2 W
2011	March	298.5 W	1,850.0 W	2,148.5 W
2011	April	241.4 W	849.6 W	1,090.9 W
2011	May	230.0 W	293.3 W	523.3 W
2011	June	166.3 W	146.6 W	312.9 W
2011	July	204.0 W	234.6 W	438.6 W
2011	August	320.0 W	217.3 W	537.3 W
2011	September	163.8 W	293.3 W	457.0 W
2011	October	251.3 W	256.6 W	507.9 W
2011	November	254.3 W	1,466.5 W	1,720.8 W
2011	December	304.3 W	2,555.9 W	2,860.2 W
2012	January	313.8 W	2,639.7 W	2,953.4 W
2012	February	287.1 W	2,178.8 W	2,465.9 W
2012	March	281.4 W	1,969.3 W	2,250.7 W
2012	April	247.5 W	1,136.5 W	1,384.0 W
2012	May	231.4 W	251.4 W	482.8 W
2012	June	220.0 W	195.5 W	415.5 W
2012	July	214.7 W	156.4 W	371.1 W
2012	August	219.3 W	161.8 W	381.1 W
2012	September	233.8 W	110.0 W	343.7 W
2012	October	217.8 W	130.4 W	348.1 W
2012	November	224.8 W	970.9 W	1,195.7 W
2012	December	309.0 W	2,063.2 W	2,372.2 W
2013	January	655.0 W	3,629.6 W	4,284.6 W
2013	February	533.3 W	3,345.8 W	3,879.1 W
2013	March	512.6 W	2,433.3 W	2,945.9 W
2013	April	432.5 W	806.6 W	1,239.1 W
2013	May	374.3 W	377.1 W	751.4 W
2013	June	355.7 W	377.1 W	732.8 W
2013	July	351.5 W	284.4 W	635.9 W
2013	August	362.8 W	283.2 W	645.9 W
2013	September	354.8 W	264.9 W	619.8 W
2013	October	385.8 W	794.7 W	1,180.5 W
2013	November	487.4 W	2,389.8 W	2,877.2 W
2013	December	541.5 W	3,970.8 W	4,512.3 W
2014	January	418.8 W	3,482.9 W	3,901.7 W

Quoting in LaTeX

Quotes have always been a little confusing in LaTeX. First there are two different environments for single (quotation) and multiple (quote) quotations. Second, the environments cannot be parametrized. Last but not least, both environments have some glitches.

Thomas Titz introduced a new package called quoting that addresses these problems by being parameterizable. For example, you can set the font and formatting options in the package declaration and you can even specify beginning and ending strings for the quotes, resulting in guaranteed typographic consistency across your document.

The package being new, it still has some shortcomings. For example, you might want to use dingbats for the begin and end texts, but quoting does not yet allow commands as values in the parameter lists, so you have to set them in every quote.

Example:

\usepackage{pifont}

\usepackage[font={itshape,raggedleft}]{quoting}

…

\begin{quoting}

\ding{125}Here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity\ding{126}

end{quoting}

Before you try this, you may want to update your installation with TeX Live Utility, because the current version is from a couple of weeks ago.

Amorphous iridescence from 3D printer

The research group of Prof. Frank Scheffold at the University of Fribourg has succeed in creating iridescent plastic cylinders with a 3D printer.

Microscopic or nanoscopic structures can make an object appear to have color, without use of pigment. Examples in nature include butterfly wings and bird feathers, but these are ordered, crystalline structures. Using a high definition 3D printer, a research group at the University of Fribourg has produced a new amorphous (non-crystalline) material with interesting capabilities in this field. The material is an irregular network of microscopic plastic cylinders. It selectively reflects light in the infrared range, and also dramatically reduces transparency. The new class of material has a wide range of potential applications, from packaging, automobile paint, and cosmetics to the processing and transmission of optical signals.

Press release

Pretty faces

You probably saw dozens of people’s faces today, many more if you live in a city. You may not have been conscious of it, but you were subtly judging every one by its beauty. Your eyes are drawn to more attractive faces, and the almost inescapable result is that more attractive people have advantages in almost every aspect of life, from job interviews to prison sentencing.

What drives us to crave beauty? According to one theory, gazing upon beauty stimulates the brain’s μ-opioid receptors (MOR), thought to be a key part of our biochemical reward system. At least in rodents, stimulating or inhibiting MOR neurotransmission not only tweaks the animals’ appetite for sex or food, but also the strength of their preferences for particular foods or mates.

Is our preference for pretty faces driven by the same biochemical reward circuit? To find out, researchers invited 30 heterosexual men to browse a series of female faces on a computer. Each man received either a dose of the MOR-stimulating drug morphine, the opioid receptor–inhibiting drug naltrexone, or a placebo.

The results, published today in Molecular Psychiatry (membership required), suggest that we seek out beautiful faces at least in part because our brains reward us. Not only did stimulating MOR neurotransmission cause men to linger longer on faces that they rated as more beautiful, but the beauty rating also became more extreme, with beautiful faces rated as even more attractive relative to the rest of the faces. Inhibiting MOR had the opposite effects.

The findings are yet more evidence that our social interactions are strongly influenced by the invisible hand of evolution, pushing us to find attractive mates. But the question remains, how do we decide which face is attractive in the first place?

Radically different color vision

When we snorkel in a tropical coral reef we are amazed at the colorful displays of the marine fauna and flora. Then we wonder why some of the fish are so flashy, making them conspicuous to predators.

As we wrote in our post on Why are animals colourful? Sex and violence, seeing and signals, Justin Marshall first showed a video snorkeling in a coral reef with a camcorder with spectral sensitivities close to ours, then he showed the same scene using a camcorder with spectral sensitivities close those of coral fish and all the sudden the fish could no longer be distinguished from the background.

In his presentation, Justin Marshall also described how stomatopods like the mantis shrimp are masters of color vision because on top of multiple spectral channels they have sensors for both linear and circular polarization. Shortly thereafter we reported in Nature's almost perfect quarter-wave retarder on Justin Marshall's new paper revealing how the mantis shrimp detects polarization.

How color vision works in the mantis shrimp had remained a mystery, at least until now. Justin Marshall and his collaborators have just published the paper A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp in Science 24 January 2014: Vol. 343 pp. 411-413 (membership required, or check in your local library). It turns out that unlike other animals, mantis shrimp do not have a color-opponent coding system based on a processing system of multiple dichromatic comparisons.

Instead, it appears that their color vision system is based on temporal signaling combined with scanning eye movements, enabling a type of color recognition rather than color discrimination. This would enable the mantis shrimp to make quick and reliable determinations of color, without the processing delay required for a multidimensional color space. This fits their rapid-fire lifestyle of combat and territoriality.

The next step could be to unveil the details of the neural processing from the receptors.

The 2014 (30th) Japan Prize

On 23 April 2014, Yasuharu Suematsu, Honorary Professor of Tokyo Institute of Technology, will be bestowed the 2014 (30th) Japan Prize in Electronics, Information and Communication for his pioneering research on semiconductor lasers for high-capacity long-distance optical fiber communication

Dr. Yasuharu Suematsu pioneered the way for high-capacity long-distance optical fiber communication, which is the core technology in our information networks, especially the Internet. It was realized through the development of semiconductor lasers capable of operating with optical fibers at a wavelength band having low transmission loss, as well as operating with stable wavelength under high-speed modulation.

The prosperity of the Internet would not have been possible without the high-capacity long-distance optical fiber transmission system using combination of light sources, which can generate high-speed modulation optical signal, and low-loss optical fiber, which can transmit optical signal across long distances. Despite the demonstration of semiconductor lasers in 1962 and the prediction of the nature of low-loss property of optical silica fiber in 1966, scientific and technological breakthroughs were still needed to establish the core technologies for such transmission systems. In particular, semiconductor lasers at the time were not applicable for such systems due to the instability of the lasing wavelength under rapid output power modulation to generate information signal.

From early on, Dr. Suematsu was proposing a high-performance transmission system using optical fiber. He identified the requirements of lasers and led the development of semiconductor lasers for high-capacity long-distance optical fiber transmission from an engineering approach, covering a wide range of disciplines from theory to materials. In 1974, Dr. Suematsu proposed the integration of reflectors with phase-shifted periodic structures into semiconductor lasers, which led to the concept of dynamic single-mode lasers having stable lasing wavelength even under high-speed modulation. He also realized in 1979, the room-temperature continuous-wave operation of InGaAsP lasers in the 1.5-μm band, the wavelength range with lowest loss in the optical fiber.

In 1981, he combined these technologies and achieved the room-temperature continuous-wave operation of an InGaAsP laser integrated with phase-shifted reflectors in the 1.5-μm band, thereby becoming the world’s first to demonstrate dynamic single mode operation. Before his achievement, realization of integrated lasers was considered technologically too difficult, however, his efforts finally opened up the way for high-capacity long-distance optical fiber communication. Dynamic single mode lasers have become the standard for light sources in present-day high-capacity optical fiber transmission systems in overland cables and intercontinental submarine cables.

Today, there is an ever-growing demand for high-capacity long-distance optical fiber communication, which has now become a part of our social infrastructure. It is expected that the future growth in the capacity of optical transmission systems will not only benefit ordinary communications and video transmissions, but will also lead to the dissemination of new systems in our society, such as telemedical services with real-time transmission of ultra high-resolution video.

Anticipating the future requirements, Dr. Suematsu combined theory and experiments to open up a new paradigm in semiconductor lasers. Furthermore, his approach in achieving dynamic single-mode operation at the optical transmission wavelength was an excellent example of how an engineering research should be. As a result, he has made indispensable contributions to forming the foundation of today’s information society. Dr. Suematsu’s pioneering research achievements are thereby deemed most eminently deserving of the 2014 Japan Prize given to honor contributions in the field of “Electronics, Information and Communication.”

末松安晴博士は、光ファイバーの損失が最小となる波長の光を発し、かつ高速変調時に波長変動が抑制できる半導体レーザーを実現して、インターネットをはじめとする情報ネットワークを支える大容量長距離光ファイバー通信に道を拓いた。

インターネットは、高速変調が可能な光源と低損失の光ファイバーを用いた大容量長距離光通信により支えられている。しかし1962年に半導体レーザーが作られ、1966年に光ファイバーの低損失予測が提唱されても、その根幹を支える技術が確立するまでには、学術的・技術的ブレークスルーが必要であった。特に、当時の半導体レーザーは高速変調時の発振波長が変動することから、大容量の光ファイバー通信に適用することができなかった。

末松博士は、光ファイバーを使用する高性能伝送システムを早くから提唱し、実現すべきシステムから必要とされるレーザーの特性を定めて、理論から材料までの広範な分野をカバーした工学的アプローチで大容量長距離通信用途の半導体レーザー開発を先導した。まず1974年に位相シフトを有する周期的構造を用いた反射器を半導体レーザーに集積することを提案し、高速変調時に発振波長が安定する動的単一モードレーザーの概念へと発展させた。並行して、光ファイバーの損失が最小となる1.5µm帯で発振するInGaAsPレーザーの室温連続発振を実現した。1981年には、これらの技術を組み合わせ、位相シフトを有する反射器を集積したInGaAsPレーザーを1.5µm帯で室温連続発振させ、動的単一モード動作を世界で初めて実証した。当初、集積レーザーは技術的に難しいとみられていたが、これを覆して大容量長距離光ファイバー通信への道を拓いたのである。現在、動的単一モードレーザーは、大容量光ファイバー通信の光源として、陸上光幹線、大陸間海底光幹線に遍く使われている。

今日、社会基盤となった大容量長距離光ファイバー通信への要求はとどまるところがない。今後、光通信が一層大容量化することにより、通常の通信や動画配信にとどまらず、超高精細画像の実時間伝送による遠隔医療など新たなシステムが社会に広く普及していくと期待されている。

要求される性能を予想し、理論と実験を組み合わせて新たなパラダイムを通信用半導体レーザーにもたらし、光通信波長で動的単一モード発振を実現した末松博士の業績は、工学研究のあるべき姿を示しており、世界を先導して現在の情報化社会の基盤の形成に不可欠な貢献をした。末松安晴博士の業績は「エレクトロニクス、情報、通信」分野における貢献を称える2014年日本国際賞にふさわしいと考える。

Data-Driven Discovery Initiative

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced an open call for applications for its brand-new Data-Driven Discovery Investigator competition. The foundation’s science program expects to offer about 15 awards this year to selected investigators at ~$1.5 million each ($200-300K/year for five years).

This represents a major investment—likely the largest private investment—in individuals who are pushing the frontiers of a new kind of data-driven science—inherently multidisciplinary, combining natural sciences with methods from statistics and computer science. The competition seeks innovators with bold ideas and a willingness to strike out in new directions and take risks with the potential for huge payoffs in data-intensive science.

Apply Here

Storage Investments in 2013

The investments statistics in the storage market for 2013 are out. There has been the same number of merger and acquisition deals as in 2012, namely 25, for a total of $9.5 billion. The median deal size for 2013 was $110 million, with a price to revenue median of 5×. Seventeen of the transactions were technology focused (median size $98, median P/R 6×) and eight were business focused ($214 million, resp. 1×).

As for venture funding in storage, there has been a slight decline from $978 million in 2012 to $955 million last year. These investments consisted of 43 rounds of $22.2 million average size. The second half of the calendar year was particularly strong with $249 million in the 3rd quarter and $249 million in the 4th quarter.

Both Seagate and Western Digital introduced very competitively priced high quality data center grade 4 TB hard disk drives. Solid state drives (flash memory) has become much faster by moving from the SATA to the PCI interface, while prices kept coming down. When you are bound by I/O rate and durability, flash memory has become less expensive than hard disks.

While storage drives have become very inexpensive on a per TB price, business people have learned the virtues of data mining, now called big data analytics. This combination of low storage price and new analytic skills is prompting organizations to retain more of their data and harvest it. Data has become the new gold.

Just having petabytes of data is not very useful: you have to be able to access and deliver it. This is not straightforward and this is why so much investment is occurring in the storage industry. Those who can solve the data access and delivery problem will be the ones building long lasting successful businesses and are receiving the investors' attention.