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December 19, 2006

Knee-jerk of the week

Dan Gillmor is either a stranger to the art of the magazine cover-line or didn't think too hard when providing his commentary on Time magazine's cover about the sudden realisation that a lot of people can now put their stuff online and that, apparently, gangs of machine-gun touting record company executives no longer force consumers to buy Michael Jackson CDs.

Amid the congratulations for writing about blogging - something that Gillmor likes a lot - he comes out with a sentence that makes you wonder whether he has ever considered what is in the mind of someone who reads a magazine or, indeed, anything:

But there’s a tiny bit of reality in the fact that the cover didn’t say “Us” instead of “You” — in part because it was a vestige of the magazine’s traditional, royal thinking wherein they told us everything they thought we needed to know (and what to think about it). Our role: We bought it or didn’t.

It didn't say "Us", I have no doubt, because it would have been the most confusing cover-line ever committed to print. Anyone scanning the magazine racks would have wondered why Time staff in a fit of hubris voted themselves their people of the year. And we'd have Gillmor bitching about the "them and us" philosophy of that. Luckily for them, the editors at Time do at least consider what is in the mind of someone who is working out what they'd like to read at the airport. "You" was the obvious choice for that cover - which, in itself, was a bit obvious. But, ignoring that makes it easier to bang on about the ideology of what Gillmor now calls "citizen media".

So, it still seems strange, as Venture Voice points out, that the citizen media ideologues still need daddy's approval:

However, what does it say that a silly magazine award (published by the "M.S.M." no less) can still set the blogosphere a flutter?

Posted by Chris at 8:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2006

Robots? Windows? Help!

I'm sure not whether to be very scared about Microsoft's plan to dominate the world of robotics software, or feel relieved. The press release that breathlessly introduces us to the glorious new world of robots - with control presumably wrestled from the grip of Far Eastern technocrats who want everybody to feel the cold metal embrace of in-home automatons - tells us about "surveillance robots that can defuse roadside bombs" and "robotic arms that perform surgeries" as well as "automatons that seek out and smash all forms of Macintosh computer". Sorry, I made that last bit up.

But it's hard to get over the fact that this is Microsoft we're talking about. The company that wrote the operating system that now powers many cash registers in shops - something I have recently become aware of after watching several crash in quick succession. Well, the crashes were quick. The reboots were the painful bits as the queues behind doubled in size.

You can imagine that bomb defusing robot getting to the blue wire, red wire decision suddenly discovering that two security updates and a new version of AntiBomb are now available - "You must restart now for these updates to take effect", as the LED counts down to the last five seconds.

The good news is that we need no longer fear an army of unstoppable Terminators bent on the destruction of the human race. Only bot-net armies reprogrammed by spammers to sell V!@gra door to door.

Posted by Chris at 8:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

The airport WiFi sweepstake

It was perhaps the look of resignation in the eyes of the check-in clerk for British Airways that settled the choice of how long I should order for the WiFi connection. Turning up two hours before the flight was due to take off from Lyon Saint-Exupéry, the signs were already showing a delay of one hour. Not a good sign.

Then she said, pointing to the boarding time on the ticket. "At 6:10, if you want to come back here to the check-in desk, we can update you with more information on the flight."

"Is it worth going through through security?" I asked.

She shook her head. No, that was a bad idea. "Aah, right. I see what you mean," I said, adding a quick thank you as I wandered in search of a cafe where I could hold up for a few hours.

Logging on to the airport Wifi, it asked if I wanted 30 minutes - too optimistic by far - an hour for €10, two hours for 50 per cent more or a whole day for double. I thought about it for a minute, did a quick calculation and plumped for the 24-hour pass. I'm not expecting to get out of this airport fast.

Once through the paywall, I saw the story about the North London tornado. Nice weather we're having. It's just tipping it down in southern France.

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December 4, 2006

Chip consolidation starts here

For years, the semiconductor industry has been under threat of consolidation as companies try to build enough scale to let them fund successive generations of high-integration devices. But the consolidation has failed to happen, much to the bemusement of analysts and other observers. It remains a process that is about to happen.
Wolfgang Ziebart, president of German chipmaker Infineon Technologies, pointed out at the recent Electronica trade show that the process is not likely to be a repeat of what happened in industries such as aluminium and steel. Instead specialists will form that dominate niches but are barely heard of outside their chosen markets. Weaker players will retreat from niches that they cannot control or influence rather than face price wars at the bottom of the market.

One of the vaunted reasons for massive consolidation to happen was the rising cost of building semiconductor fabs. People used to think $2bn was a lot - now $6bn is what you need to build an efficient, next-generation plant. Very few companies have the kind of business that can support that kind of investment. You need at least $2bn in annual sales just to think about it. And even then it would not be a wise investment. Because you have to fill it and keep it full to make any money at all.
Chipmaking is extremely sensitive to fab utilisation. Anything below 85 per cent full, three shifts a day, seven days a week, and you might as well heat it by burning dollar bills. But, that doesn't matter anymore to most chipmakers. They don't, for the most part, actually own the most advanced fabs.
Specialist foundry operators have built up the capital needed to keep much of the semiconductor industry on its roadmap to satisfy Moore's Law. By going fabless, suddenly it's someone else's problem to keep a fab full.
"Consolidation happened through the fabless model," said Wim Roelandts, president of Xilinx and one of the first companies to exploit the fabless model. "Without that there would have been a consolidation."
However, going fabless does not mean scale is no longer an issue. A startup can potentially break into a competitive business because it only has to fund the design and marketing of a single chip. However, chip design is getting more costly to finance. It used to be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, you are unlikely to see much change from $20m for any significantly different design, and the number keeps going up. To play in the bigger markets, you need to spend a lot more. This is forcing a rethink at even bigger chipmakers.
There is a catalyst for change that was not present until 2006. The arrival of serious amounts of private-equity money in the semiconductor business - $28bn has gone on just two companies, Freescale Semiconductor and NXP Semiconductor - has clearly focused minds. Potentially any operation with an apparent opportunity for carve-outs or sell-on is now vulnerable to one of the most buoyant private-equity markets for years.
No-one wants to admit that private equity has convinced them to face hard truths, but with the investigation of so many companies behind the scenes by financiers, it's hard to see what other factors could have been such efficient catalysts for change. Decisions that were unthinkable before, largely for reasons of corporate hubris, have suddenly become easy to make - better to make the changes yourself as a board of directors rather than have someone come along and tell you what to do.
But, there is a bigger trend that lies behind the decision by companies to either strip out businesses they no longer want - as with International Rectifier's recent move to sell its power transistor operation to Vishay - or to join with other similarly sized players to seek market-share gains.
The decision of LSI Logic and Agere to combine operations in a 52/48 per cent deal is not just two former custom chipmakers huddling for protection but reflects a bigger change in the current environment for chipmakers.
Some claim that private equity is interested in the semiconductor business because "the cycles are over". Only the most deluded executives can think this is the case. As Roelandts pointed out, the time-scales in chipmaking are so different to those in the consumer markets that now dominate the spending on semiconductor components, cycles are inevitable. It's a cyclical business, always has been and seems likely to be so for the forseeable future.
No, the real reason is that companies have found that they have the choice to concentrate on only a few markets rather than try to build scale from whatever markets they found themselves to be in just so they can fill their fabs up.
CEOs of several of the major chipmakers pointed out in a panel session at Electronica that they have to be at the top of the list of suppliers in each market they serve, or expect to lose the money they spend on R&D to stay in that market. The message is: if you're not number three at least, get the hell out of that business.
However, former integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) are not quite ready to specialise in just one market. For the new LSI Logic, that would be a simple choice: storage electronics. Top disk-drive maker Seagate is Agere's number-one customer, accounting for a whopping quarter of the chipmaker's sales. At LSI right now, Seagate is hovering around the 10 per cent mark. Combined, the company will have close to $1.3bn in sales of chips to the storage sector alone: more than a third of the company's total revenues, with almost half of the purchases coming from Seagate. The drive maker is likely to end up with around a 17 per cent contribution to the greater LSI's sales.
Although the company has weaker positions in consumer electronics and Agere's other specialism, communications, the stated intent is to use the larger operation to try to build scale in those markets, while the older broad-based custom-chip operations are left to slowly wither away. Other parts may be sold off once an integration team has worked out how the two companies will really fit together. Talwalkar has not ruled out selling chunks of the new company off, although most of it was accounted for in a presentation to analysts made shortly after the announcement of the merger went out on the wires.
The handset baseband business is one of that could ultimately face a sell-off, although it fits into the consumer category that LSI wants to push. As cellphones mutate into personal entertainment products, it's not a bad fit. And Agere president and CEO Rick Clemmer was keen to stress its position in Samsung, providing two-thirds of the Korean giant's 2.5G baseband needs. However, baseband selection is not an area where handset makers expect to spend a lot of time in the future, making it easier for companies who can sell applications processors alongside basebands. It's not clear what LSI will have to offer in terms of applications engines for phones, other than experience in media decoders from its days as a settop-box chip supplier: companies such as Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Freescale look to be better positioned.
The networking business of Agere is likely to stay. It forms one of the three legs of LSI's strategy for the combined operation alongside storage and consumer products. As a former arm of AT&T and Lucent, communications infrastructure runs through Agere like the writing in a stick of rock and the company continues to have significant business in this area, although it was badly hit by the recession of 2001.
As president and CEO of LSI, former Intel executive Talwalkar has demonstrated that he is prepared to make major changes to a company. He reversed the decision to spin out the storage systems business of LSI shortly after taking over. Earlier this year, he decided that it was time to sell the company's flagship chip-production plant and not just go fab-light, as Agere has done, but fabless. And he killed off the short-lived but expensive-to-develop RapidChip custom-IC project. It's easy to see Talwalkar, in charge of a larger LSI, deciding to sell the bits that no longer fit. It's the kind of approach that is likely to become fashionable as the top-50 players work out where their true businesses really lie.

Posted by Chris at 5:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 3, 2006

Polonium's smoky history

It was going to happen eventually - that the latest polonium scare would end up being tied to a different kind of radiation scare 40 years in the past.

Like a lot of people after the death of Alexander Litvinenko, I did a bit of a Google to get more familiar with a poison that is "a trillion times more toxic than cyanide". I vaguely recalled how the Curies gave the element its name but little else. References to smoking and polonium kept popping up - but with very little evidence of what researchers had actually said.

Polonium in cigarette smoke is something that has popped up about every ten years since the publication of a paper in the journal Science in early 1964. It's strange because very little in the way of new work actually seems to drive the stories about polonium in smoke.

The problem with the story of polonium and smoke is similar to the problem people have today with assessing the risk of polonium on planes and in hotels and sushi bars. That word "significant" keeps coming up and in relation to tiny numbers. The trouble is, the inability to visualise what tiny numbers mean lead people to the wrong conclusions. You can see the logic that Proctor is applying. Litvinenko was poisoned by a tiny amount of polonium. There is a tiny amount of polonium in cigarette smoke. There is, in fact, a tiny amount of polonium in the food we eat. Oh crap. We're in trouble.

Only kidding: there is a yawning gap between the numbers involved.

It's Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, who we can thank for raising the issue of polonium in tobacco once again. He wrote an opinion column, "Puffing on polonium", for the New York Times about a much larger source of polonium-210 than what is apparently available to shady hitmen. "The [tobacco] industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium...about a quarter of a curie of one of the world’s most radioactive poisons is inhaled along with the tar, nicotine and cyanide of all the world’s cigarettes smoked each year. Pack-and-a-half smokers are dosed to the tune of about 300 chest X-rays," he wrote. It's that word "significant" again.

I wondered, if that is the case, and polonium could so easily be the cause of lung cancer, why are the references to it pretty much reserved to fringe sites on the Web? It turns out that, over the course of the last 40 years, no-one has been able to draw any firm conclusions. The only clue as to whether polonium is really a primary cause of lung cancer in smokers is the way that the research largely fizzled out 20 years ago. That would seem to make the answer to the question "is polonium in smoke the culprit behind lung cancer?" a no - if it was a promising line of research, people would have continued to go after it. But so much in this story is inconclusive, even where the polonium comes from.

The trail started in 1964. Working at the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers Edward Radford and Vilma Hunt uncovered a possible radioactive link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer: polonium-210. Radford and Hunt estimated that the smoke produced by a single cigarette had enough polonium-210 to emit 0.1picoCurie of radiation. That is about 100 million times lower than what is considered to be the lethal dose for humans if polonium-210 is inhaled.

A later study by Thomas Kelley of Bio-Research Consultants in Massachusetts, again published in Science estimated that around 0.03 to 0.04picoCurie found their way into smokers. For some reason, Proctor points to "secret" research carried out "using precision analytic techniques" by the American Tobacco Company in 1968 to come up with roughly the same figure of 0.04picoCurie.

Controversy raged between academics as to whether lung cancer could be ascribed to the radiation in cigarette smoke or the various other nasties - there are, after all, quite a few to choose from. Radford and Hunt claimed that the levels of polonium in the urine of three smokers were six times higher than those of non-smokers, but there was no direct link between emitters of alpha radiation and lung cancer in smokers. Even though the levels of polonium were higher in smokers, it was difficult to see how the amounts involved could provoke tumours unless the radiation were confined to key parts of the body, a theory that Radford and Hunt entertained.

The other question, asked a little more quietly, was where was the polonium coming from? In Science in July 1965, LP Gregory of the New Zealand National Radiation Laboratory reported the results of a survey of the amount of polonium-210 found in various types of leaf tobacco. Curiously, New Zealand had half the polonium content of American tobacco, and less than a third that of Rhodesian leaves. There were about 0.4 picoCurie per gram of polonium in the US tobacco, on average.

A 1984 document from Philip Morris indicated that the cigarettes you really wanted to avoid if you were worried about polonium-210 came from Central and South America - they contained twice as much as US makes.

After looking at Gregory's work TC Tso, Naomi Harley and LT Alexander at the US Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland and the Atomic Energy Commission decided to grow their own samples and found, in 1966, that most of the polonium and its precursors were absorbed from the soil. Although the researchers did not finger fertiliser as the source of the radiation there were clear differences in the content of polonium-210 and its radon-226 in the nutrients they used to grow the tobacco.

Some people thought there was a strong link between polonium and superphosphate fertilisers, although there was a problem with the theory. The case for superphosphate being the source was that the deposits mined for the fertiliser tended to be comparatively rich in uranium. It's the decay series of uranium that leads to polonium-210 and lead-210, which is often found in tobacco as well. It was a theory that attracted radiochemist Edward Martell.

In November 1974, TS Laszlo at Philip Morris wrote in favour of the idea of the company making a few thousand cigarettes from tobacco grown without superphosphate fertiliser at the request of radiochemist Edward Martell, who "appeared to be very eager to discuss his theory and findings in annoying and repetitive details". Martell claimed that the polonium originated in phosphates: Philip Morris considered, at least briefly, whether using tobacco grown without superphosphates might be a bit safer than the regular stuff for making gaspers. Later on, in the 1980s, they'd hatch a scheme to get chimps to smoke specially polonium-enriched cigarettes to try to work out whether they promoted cancers. However, it's not clear that the project got off the ground. The problem that many of the researchers found when trying to finger polonium as the prime carcinogen was that, even among heavy smokers, it was hard to find enough polonium. The only possible answer, if polonium were to blame, was if the element concentrated in key parts of the lung. The evidence there was inconclusive.

Among others, according to the documents released as the result of recent class actions, Philip Morris's scientists were also perplexed by the source of the polonium-210 - finding that superphosphates could not explain the presence of the element in tobacco alone.

Slowly, the trail of research into polonium and smoking ran cold - very little seems to exist after the mid-1980s from what I can find. It was just one of those bits of research that ran out of angles, but without concluding that polonium was unlikely to be the major source of cancers in smokers.

I can understand the anti-smoking lobby wanting to use radiation as a way to convince smokers they should give up. Yet, if it were that simple, the tobacco companies could have easily dealt with the issue - the reality is that smoking's role in cancer is much more complex. That is something that helped the tobacco companies for years, and now is the rope from which they will hang - there is nothing that can create a 'safe' cigarette.

Just imagine how pleased the tobacco suppliers might have been were radiation from polonium-210 the main culprit. It might have made the Stauffer Chemical Company rich, as that operation obtained a patent on a method to cut the polonium and lead content in tobacco tenfold. But, life is never that simple. Unfortunately, you are going to see a lot more claims about radioactive fags and their role in lung cancer. Just wait until they get started on the polonium in your food - all thanks to non-organic superphosphate fertilisers.

Posted by Chris at 6:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

It's English, but not as we know it

For a moment I thought it was next stop schadenfreude as I happened across a post at Sally Flood's Getting Ink blog about Strumpette's idea of having a "copy journalist sub the copy posted by a 'communications' expert".

However, the guilty pleasure was shortlived as I noticed a comment from Rob Buckley about the sub-editor's stone-casting credentials:

"(WHY THE PASSIVE VOICE?)" in reference to "a serious newspaper is grappling", when that's actively voiced present continuous tense..."

Strumpette aka Amanda Chapel, but is really someone else entirely, claims she/he engaged the services of "a newspaperman to proofread" the copy of Text 100 CEO Aedhmar Hynes. It's strange how Chapel refers to the process as proofreading when he/she was after a copy-edit. I don't know many proofreaders on newspapers. OK, I don't know any. They're generally called sub- or copy-editors because that's what they do. Want a proofreader? Try book publishing.

Apparently, Chapel's 'newspaperman' is not up for any freelance work. That's a relief, because he seems to share Chapel's wayward approach to English.

Take the preceding post on Britney Spears' need for a more discrete form of PR where, apparently the flack "must be facile with blogging and podcasting" and would be advised to have "Turrets Syndrome". OK, I can guess the name that was meant to go with "syndrome" there, but I'm having some difficulty working out which word Chapel was reaching for when she/he alighted on "facile".

Back to our anonymous sub:

"(WRONG WORD. “LITANY” IS NOT A MERE PLURAL ADJECTIVE LIKE “HOST.” THE WORD MEANS “A LIST OF COMPLAINTS OR PROBLEMS.” NOT QUITE RIGHT IN THIS CONTEXT.)

Err...right. May I recommend a dictionary for Christmas for the Chapel household? There should be a word that means "a list of complaints or problems" but litany is not it. Maybe a "tedious recital" or a "series of prayers", but not what Chapel, er, Chapel's sub thinks it is.

The piece goes on in the same vein, and makes you wonder whether Hynes is all that bad as a writer. That illusion does soon go away when you look at the original but I feel I might need a dictionary from a parallel universe should I ever come across work from the pen of Strumpette in real life.

Posted by Chris at 5:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack