January 28, 2004
"Electronic Teats"
There are three great problems/opportunities in computer electronics today: batteries, small flexible displays(epaper) and high bandwidth wireless.
Neat article from Sciam - Light-emitting organic materials offer brighter and more efficient displays than LEDs. And you'll be able to unroll them across a tabletop.
Scientific American: Better Displays with Organic Films
There is also a nice article in New Scientist about GPRS, EDGE, 3G etc. Apparently Nokia is racing ahead and Qualcomm is producing a chip which works on different networks. You need 200-300K bandwidth for video and GPRS only provides 20-50K.
Once these three technologies come together and intelligent agents are available we will have the "electronic teat" that egan discribes in "Distress".
January 20, 2004
Rush to be the biggest bank?
The JP Morgan and Bank One merger continues with the consolidation we have been seeing in the US for a while. A rush to merge and get bigger.
Citigroup $1.2 trillion Assets
J.P. Morgan-Bank One $1.1 trillion - 2,330 Branches
Bank of America/FleetBoston $966.4 billion
Wells Fargo $369.6 billion - 5,900 Branches
Wachovia Corp. $364.3 billion - 2,600 Branches
Interestingly this merged bank will only have 2,330 branches. Agriculture bank of China has something like 58,000. This for me raises some questions. Are there economies of scale in banking? If retail/small business banking is won street corner by street corner and customer by customer like Fifth Third president says then there isn't a huge advantage in being large. Both Fifth Third and Bank of Scotland use this strategy, using multiple brand names and allowing branches more control. This is the Proctor and Gamble approach to banking. A CEO of a midwest bank said that believes there are no economies of scale in banking above the $20 Billion in asset mark. "At that point you can pretty much offer your clients every service". This article confirms this for europe.
Perhaps there are economies of scale in Investment Banking? Goldman Sachs - with over 350 Billion in assets is by no means small in asset size. They have only 22,000 employees. Throughout their annual report they extoll the virtuals of their team playing employees, not their 350 Billion asset base. Goldman, had 11.7% of last years’s $209 billion market for IPOs and stock sales by companies that are already traded. That’s down from 14.3% in 2002 and 16% in 2001, data from Bloomberg shows. Citigroup, closed the gap in market share with Goldman, to 0.5 percentage point from 5.3% two years ago.
If this is true then perhaps retail banking (and perhaps insurance sales) are simply an inexpensive source of funds to be used in the highly profitable (an risky) investment banking market.
Information Technology represents one of the largest expense for Banks. Are there economies of scale in IT for banking? Tony Comper, a former systems analyst and currently president of BMO Financial Group (top 100 Bank) says that he believes 80% of IT expenditures for his bank are wasted. If that is true than most probably there are no economies of scale in IT for banks.
January 15, 2004
Automated Transit
When the International Union of Public Transport published its worldwide study of fully automated, driverless metros in 1998, only eight of the systems had operating experience dating back to 1981: four light metros in France, two automated people movers in Japan, the London Docklands Light Railway, and SkyTrain in Vancouver, B.C. Two more have opened since then: the Paris Meteor heavy rail segment, which carried 30,000 passengers per hour and direction, and the financially troubled Putra light rail system of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which aims for a similar figure but has thus far reached less than half its ridership projections.
Save your eyes
Ran into a decent faq on how to save your eyes when using computers.
Use LCD when possible instead of CRT
With CRT ensure refresh is at least 85 Hz
Look away every 20 min or so
Make sure there is decent lighting
Black background is easier on the eyes.
Learning lisp
Finally decided to take on learning lisp.
So far so good. A nice book online. Also discovered lemondor weblog. Its written by John Wiseman who works for Evolution - the markers of the ER-1 robot and vision system.
Paterns of Software is now available online.
Franz also has a decent online tutorial
. On a side note here is a neat chart by Hans Moronvic on the progress of AI.
January 14, 2004
Greg Egan - mind blowing stuff
After a long hiatus from reading science fiction I recently picked up a greg egan book - Distress. His books were recommended by AI + MIT prof Marvin Minsky in a seminar at CMU.
I couldn't put down the book. Although it isn't shakespeare, it was chock full of mind blowing ideas. Amazingly, it was written in 1994 - before the Internet and wireless networking became mainstream.
This is "Hard SF" - the ideas, and science are all plausable. But if you are not familiar with Quantum Theory, String Theory etc, much of it will be little hard to grasp at times.
CMU preparing for DARPA's Grand Challenge
Some interesting links describing what they are doing to get their modified hummer ready.
From Intel:
A video display typically requires processing of about 30 frames-per-second. Creating machine perception with stereo vision means two cameras are needed, hence twice the frame rate. Furthermore, the Red Team will also use laser range-finders to scan the terrain in front of the vehicle. And perceiving terrain is only the start.
http://www.intel.com/labs/features/rs12032.htm
We'll be using 1.5 terabytes of data to generate high-resolution maps of the desert," he said. "Our planning software will process the maps to classify the terrain, reach the waypoints, avoid difficulties, determine our speeds and optimize our route."
http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/031113_hummer.html
They currently have path tracking of 34 mph.
http://www.redteamracing.org/racelogs.htm
January 08, 2004
Brain Transplants
Brain and Head transplants have been done with monkeys by Dr White - formally of Case Western. A human would in fact be easier than a monkey - because the stature is larger.
"All over the world there are lots of brain dead people with healthy bodies, and brain alive people with virtually dead bodies; and there should come a time when one could match them up and make two into one.”
You could for example take stephen hawking and put his brain into a perfectly healthy body.
January 02, 2004
Using OpenOffice 1.x in a Corporate Environment
For the past while I have primarly been consulting with a large Canadian financial institution and for the last year I commited myself to only using OOo (OpenOffice.Org) the free open source Office Suite and removed MS Office from the machine they provided. I consider myself a limited power user. I can figure out most of the features of MS Office, but I don't personally use them.
Here are some lessons learned and tips that I came upon during my one year of OOo on a Windows 2000 box. Note this would apply equally on my home machine or laptop that use Mandrake.
1. Focus on data and then add formating
If you are working with someone who has MS Office on a presentation or document work on the content first without formatting. Later apply a template.
2. Change all the associations in your browser and ensure they work.
I primarily use Firebird and was lazy about changing the associations - they didn't initially work, which wasted time.
3. Beware Office Automation Lock-in
The main issue I had over the course of the year was in house applications which call Word or Excel via COM. The smarter developers export to .csv or save as a generic doc file (word 6) and then allow you to re-attach or
edit the file.
4. No Outlook or Access replacement
I used Lotus Notes or MySQL as a replacement.
5. Expect a learning curve
Take some time to explore the features when you are not under pressure. When the presure mounts and you have to get that perfect Presentation in by 6 PM you may feel the desire to switch back. Use the web for support. I found the forums helpfull.
6. No filters for Lotus 123 or Word Perfect
When I started using OOo in windows Lotus Notes exported to 123 files only. With Notes 6.5 there is now a CSV export option.
Word Perfect has been less of an issue, although expect this to be fixed soon by libwd.
7. Ensure you have enough RAM
Requirements for OOo are closer to those of Office 2003 than Office 97.
8. Small Changes to documents and Esthetics
You will see small changes to Powerpoint and word documents. Most are minor and I ignored them. For example Revision tracking between Word and OpenOffice is not guaranteed to be perfect. Roll-out on a large scale will generate some calls to the help desk unless there is user education.
Printing of Presentation files (which I do a lot of) has less options than Word and the print dialog is quite different.
9. PDF integration is excellent.
I use send document as pdf attachments all the time.
How much could the bank save if they switched? It pays $236 per license of Office (Roughly $110 per copy of Windows). If half of the 22,000 MS Office Users switched, assuming support costs remain the same, it would save the bank about $23 Million if you value it as a perpetuity.
Not huge money - but nothing to sneeze at.
Challenges going forward: Email + Calendaring.
Options are Web based email such as IBM Domino 6.5, Squirrelmail or the Ximian Evolution product.