Sep
25
Pipe dream to tailpipe?
Filed Under Science, Technology, Environment/Energy, Wired, Recent stories | 2 Comments
My latest feature for Wired, about the science of cellulosic ethanol, begins its run on newsstands this week. The full story is also online, here. That’s a stalk of switchgrass adorning the cover, but the cellulosic ethanol described in the story actually involves making fuel from a wide variety of different plants—e.g. poplar trees, wood chips, other grasses. (Call it editorial discretion, but illustrating the cover line “THESE PLANTS ARE THE FUTURE OF ENERGY” might have cluttered things.)
The current method of producing ethanol (in the U.S.), from corn kernels, has been much castigated in the news lately. Although it seems a lot of the ethanol backlash is only tenuously based on actual research (especially when it comes to the energy balance of what goes into corn ethanol versus what you get out), there’s little doubt that corn ethanol has serious problems, enough to at least call its massive subsidies into question.
There is, however, another way of making ethanol, using a biological or chemical process to extract the cellulose, or “structural” part, from plants (rather than the starch, as in the case of corn ethanol, or the sugar, as in the case of the sugarcane ethanol in Brazil). Cellulosic ethanol usually makes the last couple paragraphs of ethanol stories; it’s declared to be some indeterminate number of years off, a biofuel holy grail awaiting a scientific breakthrough. There is general agreement that if we could make it, cellulosic fuel avoids most if not all of the problems of corn ethanol. Meanwhile, our federal energy targets (which are closer to hopes than targets, really) essentially assume that hundreds of millions of gallons cellulosic ethanol will soon be arriving. So, what gives? Read more
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
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27
Armchair cartography
Filed Under Technology, Wired, Recent stories | 1 Comment
“Cartographers manufacture power,” the eminent geographer J.B. Harley once wrote. So what happens to that power when cartography goes digital? That’s the question I endeavor to tackle in my latest feature for Wired, “The Whole Earth Catalogued.” It’s just out, in the July issue that features the Transformers movie on the cover (or alternately, if you for some reason elected to have your cover “personalized,” it features my story and you on the cover. It’s just like that booth at Six Flags!) In any case, the story is also online here.
As the online version’s headline implies (or possibly, overstates to the point of self-parody), it’s about how Google Maps and Google Earth are altering the way people relate to geography. Perhaps more interestingly, it’s about how thousands of people have taken the tools made by Google and other companies to become their own mapmakers.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
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27
A Medici of modern scientific exploration
Filed Under Discover, Technology, Recent stories | Leave a Comment
The most recent issue of Discover magazine (not yet online online here) contains a long interview I did with Paul Allen late last fall. Allen, of course, in addition to being the cofounder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, is the owner of the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers and a prolific technology investor and philanthropist.
For Discover, though, we were most interested in his appetite for scientific and exploration projects. Raised on science fiction (he opened a science fiction museum in Seattle, in fact), Allen has put huge chunks of money towards efforts like SpaceShipOne, the Allen Brain Atlas, and SETI. In the interview, he talks about how he picks his scientific spots, where he’s going next, and a few old times with Mr. Gates.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
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26
Software on the brain
Filed Under Technology, Wired, Recent stories | 5 Comments
My latest feature in Wired is just out (on the newsstands at the moment; not yet online but I’ll post it when it is online here). It’s a profile of Numenta, a new company founded by Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo. Hawkins has been studying neuroscience on his own for the last couple of decades, and co-wrote a book about the fundamentals of intelligence and the human cortex, called On Intelligence, back in 2005. Numenta is his attempt to put the ideas from the book into practice, and build a new kind of artificial intelligence technology. It looks something like this:
Make sense? Well, hopefully the story explains in a somewhat intelligible fashion. I’m hoping to elaborate on a few things in the article here over the next week — there are some tricky issues in discussing any technology at such an early stage — but in the meantime feel free to offer opinions in the comments, or send me an email at the address to the right.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007
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1
What’s the meaning of this?
Filed Under Technology, Wired, Recent stories | Leave a Comment
My most recent feature for Wired, which has been out on the newsstands for a couple weeks, went up online today, here. It’s about a New York company, Meaningful Machines, that has come up with a novel technology for doing machine translation — software-based translation of text from one language to another. I wrote about the company briefly in Safe, when they were at a much earlier stage. The original ideas behind the software, which are simple but fairly ingenious, sprung from the mind of Eli Abir, a former used car salesman in New Jersey with no college education and no formal training in computers, artificial intelligence, or linguistics.
Machine Translation, or MT, is a thorny problem, and the field has gone through years of eye-rolling hype and resultant vaporware. For a great comprehensive look at the area, check out Steve Silberman’s Wired story from a few years ago. But expectations are so low now (given the limitations of older systems like those currently used by Babelfish and most of Google Translate), that perhaps some new advances are being overlooked. The hottest area developing over the past few years has been statistical MT, the use of parallel translated text to train MT systems using statistical algorithms. As the story mentions, the outfits getting the best results with that method are Google (who hasn’t yet put many of their research systems up on Google Translate), Language Weaver, and IBM. Both Language Weaver’s and IBM’s are being used extensively by the military and a growing number of businesses.
Unfortunately the latest results from the NIST evaluation, which looks at MT systems head-to-head, weren’t out when the story closed. You can now find those here. Google, for the second year running, came out on top, and Language Weaver fared quite well. (Despite NIST’s new, bright-red disclaimer that its evaluation is not a competition, everyone in the MT research world still considers it the big show).
Meaningful Machines has yet to enter the NIST (non)competition, which is the most common criticism I heard about them. So there’s really no way yet to know whether their early promise will translate into a system that trumps the state-of-the-art, or they’ll end up on the scrap heap of MT failures. They, at least, believe they are on their way to human-quality translation.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006
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