« May 2008 | Main | July 2008 »

June 29, 2008

Rebuttal of the Overmind proposition: short version

Chris Anderson, George Dyson and Kevin Kelly reckon we are better off letting computers understand everything for us. I was going to quote some lengthy passage from "Brave New World". But, as always, comedy has the answers.

Posted by Chris at 6:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A huge evergrowing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld*

Whenever I read something from the Cult of the Singularity, I find it hard to not conjure up the hectoring tones of Johnny from Mike Leigh's film Naked. You have to wonder how many spurious factoids David Thewlis had to commit to memory to get his improvised monologues* to work:

"And every barcode is divided into two sections by three markers and those markers are always represented by the number six. Six, six, six

"And what they’re planning to do, in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society…and they’ve already tested it on the American troops: they’re going to subcutaneously laser-tattoo that mark onto your right hand or onto your forehead. They’re going to replace plastic with flesh!

"Fact!"

I'll spare you the whole tirade but it leads up to the point where Johnny and the Singularists come together as one:

"And no, we’re not going to sprout extra limbs and wings and things because evolution itself is evolving. When it comes, the apocalypse itself will a part of the process of that leap of evolution. By the very definition of apocalypse, mankind must cease to exist, at least in a material form. We’ll have evolved into something that transcends matter, into a species of pure thought. Are you with me?"

And so, there I was reading Kevin Kelly's exposition of the OneMachine made out of old PCs yoked together that thinks with hyperlinks, mentally adding an extra "Fact!" at the end of every paragraph to complete the effect:

"Each new link wires up a subroutine, creates a loop, and unleashes a cascade of impulses. As waves of links surge around the world, they resemble the thought patterns of a very large brain."

Fact!

"By 2040, the planetary computer will attain as much processing power as all 7 billion human brains on Earth."

Fact!

And what do these computers actually do when harnessed as one? Some of them do something useful such as perform quantum mechanical calculations to predict protein folding. Unfortunately, they are more likely to be sending out tons of spam. But no mind, "we are headed toward a singular destiny: one vast computer composed of billions of chips and billions of brains, enveloping the planet in a single sphere of intelligence".

Fact! The techalypse is coming.

But there was one thing niggling at me: where were the figures coming from to support the contention that the One Machine rivals even one brain today? And this is assuming you accept Giulio Tononi's assertion that intelligence comes as a function of complexity, that you can just slam a bunch of circuits together and automatically get something that thinks. Towards the bottom of the page are some figures in a diagram.

By far the oddest one is the choice of 70MHz for the brain's operating frequency: "grey matter is about as speedy as an original Pentium". That sounds pretty quick to me given that the calcium induced cascade that triggers a neural response takes on the order of 200µs. That gives you a maximum frequency — even working on the basis that neurons switch like electronic transistors, which they don't — of tens of kilohertz. By that token, the human brain can barely keep up with a Sinclair ZX80. The actual frequency is probably way lower than that as neural signalling seems to rely on pulse trains that take tens of milliseconds to transmit from one neuron to another. The brain makes up for that sluggishness by not trying to work like an electronic computer. The transistor, as it turns out, is a pretty rotten analogue for a neuron, although maybe not nearly as bad as equating a hyperlink with a synapse.

But I'm really curious about the 70MHz. Where does that figure come from? Surely it can't be derived from Bruce Tainio who claimed in the early 1990s to have found a relationship between frequency and disease. According to Tainio's measurements, the brain has a 'bio-frequency' of 72MHz to 90MHz — genius intelligence is at the upper end, apparently. Fans of the woo business will be delighted to know that you can buy 'essential oils' that resonate in the same range and so help you get a better brain. And not those nasty gigahertz frequencies, like 2.4GHz, that mess your brain up. I can't find any paper from Tainio that explains his conclusions, just references on essential-oil websites, found courtesy of the resident Overmind otherwise known as Google. However, if I suspect my neurons to be running at 70MHz, I'm going to be ringing the doctor pronto, assuming that I'm actually able to.

* Sorry Orb fans, this post has approximately zero to do with Minnie Ripperton done ambient stylee, but here's a link to the video if that's all you wanted. But thanks to the Orb for sampling so much of Naked on S.A.L.T. (Orblivion) to save the aggro of fast-forwarding through the film to find the monologues.

Posted by Chris at 6:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Loren Feldman: fighting for old media one blogger at a time

In the wake of the uneasy truce between Loren Feldman and Shel Israel, it seems that Feldman has been able to do both things from the most famous quote from John Dryden's "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire":

"Yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place."

In ruthlessly taking Israel apart with the humour equivalent of a rusty meat cleaver, Feldman co-opted Israel into saving the finer cuts for social media in general.

"And now it’s done, my little experiment with Social Media. I beat you with your own tools, in the arena in which you bill yourself an expert. You are an amateur Shel, an amateur, always remember that."

With the puppet, Feldman did distinctly old-media things. For one thing, it's all fake. It's a puppet pretending to be some other guy. Out through the window goes the social media stricture of "authenticity". Although the puppet was a goof, it was a lovable goof – the kind of thing old TV loves. And the set-ups were straight from from pro-TV school. It's just as well. Israel's videos were self-satirising: the one of him waving a boom mic around like a balloon on a stick in front of a bleary-eyed Jeremiah Owyang while supping disinterestedly on a latté is unforgettable. And not in a good way.

Feldman called the puppet "more real": a classic bit of legerdemain. Israel was very real during the whole spat. He was angry. He was upset. He wanted to get even. Faced with what Feldman was doing to him, what would you want to do? Social media's advice: be real, be honest.

But nobody believed the advice. The sensible advice to Israel was to bottle it up, act nice. And that probably would have worked. Had Israel gritted his teeth and pretended that he really loved the puppet, he would probably have come out of the whole episode more famous and better off. In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: Be inauthentic. You can't blog or tweet your way out of a crisis any more than you can knit your way out of a burning building.

And don't forget Feldman's position of being a pro versus Israel's amateur in what was meant to be an amateur's game.

And that is the Feldman's gift to social media in a situation where most in the club seem to have ignored the puppet sites's tag line: "A parody of Social Media’s impact on business & culture".

But what about the position of Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis in this? Israel seems to believe that Arrington's hand was behind the puppet all of the time. Feldman's response:

"You chose to blame Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, and myself when you should have been blaming yourself. Mike is busy taking on AP and the NY Times. Jason is taking on Google. I’m taking on TV, do you think anyone of us have the time or even give a shit enough about you to plot a conspiracy?"

Or, to paraphrase with a slant on social media: these people are building media empires, do you imagine they give a shit about some social-media revolution? It's been good to them, it's been a laugh, but there's a lot more money in replacing the 'old-media' companies.

Now it seems to be Dave Winer's turn. The joke's just not so funny second time around but the ability of some of social media's voices to self-satirise, who knows what's possible.

Posted by Chris at 5:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 25, 2008

Scientific method's death a little premature

Chris Anderson of Wired has declared scientific method dead. And it's all thanks to Google, apparently, and the mass of data it is accummulating. Maybe Google really is making us stupid after all because the reasoning behind Anderson's conclusion is built on some shaky foundations.

Did Peter Norvig, Google's research director, really say: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them"? Because, if so, he seems to have misinterpreted what his own company has been doing. Yes, search and its related technologies do not rely on language models. But the core of all that Google does right now is based on a statistical approach that makes some basic assumptions about how language works. You might call it a model.

Anderson postulates a world based on machine learning, where the computer crunches through the data to come up with predictions.

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear...With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

Yet, machine-learning algorithms depend on the construction of some kind of model. It is not necessarily a deterministic model in the way that classical mechanics is, but just because it invokes statistics does not make it any less a model-based technique. What are models for? They allow you to make predictions about what will happen given some inputs.

OK, some branches of science are terrifyingly complex. Biology is the poster child for complexity. If you just take how DNA gets transcribed into RNA in a simple bacterium, there are thousands of potential interactions that get you to an RNA that will ultimately produce a protein. You get proteins sitting on the DNA that either encourage transcription or slow it down. Others bend the DNA round in weird shapes to activate a gene, but only when the conditions are just right. Yes, building a model of all these interactions is tough. But it is probably the only way of making sense of the processes and it is the way that biologists are making sense of the deluge of data. This is what systems biology is about.

They are using machine-learning and data-mining techniques to uncover patterns in the data. They are dredging through the seemingly countless genome and other 'ome databases to find data that they can plug into — yes, you guessed it — models.

Professor Jaroslav Stark of Imperial College sees modelling as a key to understanding what goes on inside living systems precisely because models are often inaccurate. For him, the fact that a model diverges from reality provides important clues to interactions that need to be taken into account. And they can provide a way to probe interactions where it is simply not possible to use traditional methods such as turning genes off selectively because that introduces other interactions.

The problem with Anderson's argument on this point is that, because what gets taught at school on biology has turned out to be inaccurate, we are getting further away from understanding through models. But that is what science is like: it finds new information, assimilates it and moves on. The biologists aren't finished yet, and aren't likely to be for another 30 years or so, even if they're lucky.

Anderson cites the work by J Craig Venter to sequence bacterial life in the oceans. A yacht is sailing around the world with a bucket to collect samples that get progressively filtered down until all you have left is bacterial DNA. This then gets dumped into an massive array of gene sequencers that randomly chop up the DNA with enzymes to produce fragments that can be separated to indicate the nucleic acids they contain. Computers then attempt to crunch through that data to reassemble the sequences into individual genomes. In practice, it's not possible to do that final step. At least, not right now. But, it is possible to see how much genes diverge among similar bacteria.

Venter has not really discovered unknown species of bacteria as Anderson writes because genetic sequence alone does not identify a species. Some of the putative genomes are very different to others, but Venter himself says that there is no percentage difference between genomes that will indicate a new species.

Basically, to identify a species, you have to go and look at how it lives and what it looks like. Maybe there is a shortcut to that process that involves the genome but until biologists fully understand the interplay between genes and the other bits of the genome, that is not going to be possible. It's probably easier with bacteria as they have comparatively little junk DNA, but it could still take some time. And the only way to build that model — even if it's a statistical one — is to assemble the genomes individually and examine the organisms. Not simply take a best guess as to how millions of fragments might match up in a genome.

What did Venter's team find? Based on predictions of the proteins that the assembled genomes produce, it seems that bacteria can have tuned versions of the light-sensitive protein proteorhodopsin. A single amino acid change in that sequence can alter the wavelength of light that the proteins absorbs and helps convert to energy. But that did not come just from blind number-crunching of the kind that Anderson suggests is the future. It was based on having a model of how rhodopsin works and then matching the gene data to it. Statistics helps, but there's still a model in there.

Big computers can certainly help with the creation and execution of models. But it seems unlikely that unleashing petaflops and petaflops on a problem blind is going to do much for machine learning.

Update: Now Kevin Kelly has chipped in, citing Google's translation system as evidence for the "stick it all in the Overmind/OneMachine" approach. Statistical language models have been kicking the structural models around the park for close to 40 years, and the techniques that work for search have some features in common with those that work in translation. What's happened with the web is that researchers have access to a huge corpus of text on which to train the systems. People are still working on the algorithms and they have to carefully pick the training corpus so as not to pollute the learning algorithm: the computers are just doing the boring legwork.

Kelly discounts idea of the approach killing scientific method. But dreams up a new term for it: "correlative analytics". This is hardly new. And questionably useful. As Robin comments below on the original version of this post, the finance community has been there, done that. Momentum trading is one 'algorithm' at the simple end of the spectrum. But it's basically taking outputs from a system and trying to use them as inputs. Not surprisingly, the results aren't all that spectacular.

However, if people want to believe that they can teach their computer biology by stuffing it full of all the genomics, proteomics, and other 'omics databases they can lay their hands on, I see no harm in letting them do it. However, the people doing real work on this stuff will be asking themselves: how was the data collected; what were the conditions? In short, while they may not read the data, they will attempt to understand how it came into being and then try to fit it into a model. It will get easier to automate some of those steps as labs adopt more standardised ways of generating the data, but we're still a long way from just stuffing bytes into a machine and let it figure it out for itself.

Posted by Chris at 12:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

And your effect on this company is...?

In 2003, Bill Gates channelled just about every user of Windows and its arcane ways in a memo dredged out of the antitrust actions by the Seattle PI. All he wanted to do was download Moviemaker but the Windows designers had other ideas:

"So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."

It did not get better for Billg and his download past that point. However, Todd Bishop's post has a sting in the tail. He asked Gates on his departure about the email, sent almost five-and-a-half years ago:

As for the message, Gates smiled and said, "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail. That's my job."

When people ask what Microsoft will be like now that Gates has left the building, this memo and the idea that Gates sent lots of them should be the clue. Nothing. Because if any of these memos had any effect, Windows would be a rather different piece of software. The structures that Microsoft built over the last 30 years effectively nullified any direct control that Gates had over software development. I'm sure people who weren't directly responsible for the problems Gates had with the download nodded and agreed with what he had to say, and they all listened intently to his speeches. But they then went on their way to product-planning meetings that not only created these hindrances but ossified them into place.

Posted by Chris at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2008

Symbian's open road leads away from the smartphone

The obvious question when faced with today's decision by Nokia to buy out Symbian and release the software as open source was: if you have shipped 200 million handsets, what was the problem that forced you to do this? During the presentation that attempted to explain the move, executives such as Nokia executive vice president Kai Öistämö used the not-so-convincing argument that because Symbian has a 60 per cent share of the market, having charged up to $5 a handset to manufacturers, everything was going to be even better now that it is going to be free. Somehow, making it open source would dragoon in a bunch of application developers and convince everyone that Symbian is the only game in town in handsets. Forget Android, forget Limo and definitely don't bother about the closed-like-a-clam Apple iPhone.

Yet, despite having had ten years to build an unbeatable handset operating system, Symbian almost stumbled at the last hurdle. Nokia's majority ownership of the software maker has been a stumbling block with manufacturers, some of whom chose to build other user interfaces on top of the operating system to prevent Nokia from maintaining a stranglehold with the Series 60 environment. That is where environments such as UIQ and MOAP – used largely in Japan – have come in.

The situation has irritated operators such as Vodafone who find themselves having to deal with three different flavours of mobile phone built on ostensibly the same base when they have tried to tie back the number of platforms they support. Several years ago, Vodafone decided to try to restrict the amount of time it spent on software by picking three platforms: Limo; Microsoft; and Symbian. The idea of being able to bring Symbian back to one piece of software is far more attractive than the current situation.

The other problem for Symbian is that, since the iPhone, everyone has stopped caring about the operating system. All that mattered is who owned it and now, although Nokia takes on all the developers, the manufacturers seem happy with the source code going into a foundation. But, when it comes to phone design, it's now all about the user experience and having three or four companies slug it out over calendar applications and the like is not helping them sell more phones or more airtime. That is where Series 60, UIQ and MOAPS come in: they are where the action is for the handset makers and operators. The underlying operating system is simply a substrate.

This is where the picture of what actually happens with the Symbian Foundation gets hazy. Nokia is already some way down the road of deciding what software will be open-sourced, a process that could take two years to complete. The other players have agreed to sign up but it's unclear how much of UIQ and MOAPS will be in the final environment. Lee Williams, senior vice president for S60 software at Nokia said he reckoned the core environment will be based largely on S60 with components coming from the other guys. UIQ, for example, has a lot of touchscreen support that S60 does not.

Although the UIQ shareholders have agreed to back the Symbian Foundation by offering the environment up royalty free, some things have still to be decided, said Alain Mutricy, senior vice president of Motorola. "We are discussing right now with the UIQ management team how to restructure UIQ within the new ecosystem that is created by this move." He added later: "If we talk about two years down the road, we have to discuss with the shareholders and management team how their business model will adapt to the new ecosystem. But we will contribute the UIQ technology as and when the foundation is established."

For Vodafone, Symbian is still not the only game in town. Guido Arnone, director of Vodafone, said the company is continuing to work on the Linux-based Limo. "There is some competition but I believe it can be very complementary. Limo is relevant to higher end mobile touchscreen devices. Symbian is more lower tier. There is an air of competition for sure but there are areas where they are complementary to each other."

Tommi Uhari, executive vice president of STMicroelectronics, said he thought the removal of the royalty would help lower the point at which handset makers use Symbian. Although it was originally devised to drive the smartphone business, it now seems to be heading towards the featurephone. There is still the Linux option for handset makers and operators looking at the business Symbian might once have expected to command: the higher-end smartphones and mobile internet devices.

Posted by Chris at 4:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 20, 2008

A funny kernel panic happened on the way to the supermarket

People in the computer business just can't resist those Moore's Law versus the car analogies. Today's exhibit is Professor Steve Furber of the University of Manchester:

One litre of fuel would serve the UK for a year and oil reserves would last the expected lifetime of the solar system - if efficiency in the car industry had improved at the same rate as in the computer world - a leading computer scientist will tell an audience in Manchester, UK, on Friday 20 June 2008.

I bet he won't be telling them about the motorways clogged with automobiles stranded at odd angles as their drivers phone into call centres to be told: "Just try taking the battery out, then put it back in and start the car up. We can see if it happens again."*

Sorry, it's an old joke, but someone's got to do it.

* I once hired a Smart ForFour with an ECU that crashed so badly - in the middle of Wimbledon in rush hour - the only option was to reboot the car. When I next hired a car from them, I noticed that the ForFour was no longer on the list of vehicles.

Posted by Chris at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 19, 2008

More Mentor

I've posted a couple of pieces on the attempt by Cadence Design Systems to buy Mentor Graphics at the Shrinking Violence blog, which I've set up to mainly cover the electronics business as silicon heads into its final decade of Moore's Law scaling.

The current design is temporary, which is why it's on a standard Movable Type template but that will change.

Posted by Chris at 6:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bioscience can't take on all the ethics issues

Last week, a group of social scientists from the University of Nottingham released their report on the ethical problems facing the technology of synthetic biology. Commissioned by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the report called for a "thorough review of existing controls and safeguards" to extend them to synthetic biology.

Not just that. The public needs to be involved and may even be in the position to stop certain kinds of research: "It is vital to recognise the importance of maintaining public legitimacy and support. In order to achieve this, scientific research must not get too far ahead of public attitudes and potential applications should demonstrate clear social benefits."

This is from a different section but covers similar ground: "Partnership with civil society groups, social scientists and ethicists should be pursued as a highly effective way of understanding critical issues, engaging with publics and winning support for emerging scientific fields. However, at the same time it must be recognised that this is a two-way process and that some ethically problematic scientific projects and potentially controversial technologies may have to be abandoned in order to maintain trust."

This all sounds good in principle. But it is a process that could lead to some seriously strange decisions being made as to which branches of biological research are pursued and which are terminated. For a good many of the ethical issues that surround synthetic biology do not lie in the research but in the application. And in many cases, the economics of the application.

Take biofuels, for example. The lead story in today's Guardian by Julian Borger and John Vidal covers the contents of the Gallagher report, due to be published next week, on the role of biofuels in the current food shortage. Organisations are trading numbers as to what degree the production of biofuel feedstocks has had on the supply of food. But it seems the team led by Professor Ed Gallagher, head of the Renewable Fuels Agency, has concluded that EU governments were wrong to set targets for biofuel adoption without taking land use into account.

According to the story, the report draws a distinction between the first generation of biofuels - basically those in production today - and the second generation which will expand the amount of plant material that can be used to produce ethanol and other fuels. My piece in the technology section looks at the role that synthetic biology is likely to play in the development of those fuels as well as the following generations, which will attempt to substitute hydrogen for carbon-based fuels.

In principle, feedstock plants for the second-generation fuels will not displace food crops. In some cases, they could be one and the same. The stover from maize could go into fuel production with the main crop being used for animal feed, if not corn-on-the-cob. As some crops, such as the one planned by Agrivida, will modify the genes of a maize plant, the latter is less likely - most of today's genetically modified maize goes either into fuel or animal feed - but there are companies working on bugs that can digest leaves and stalks without needing an altered plant. Which direction the industry takes will depend on how efficient the processes are and it is way too early to decide on that one.

However, that "in principle" is a big assumption. There is no guarantee that a technique based on synthetic biology can guarantee that economic conditions will lead to an undesired effect. One, as yet unanswered question in the use of 'waste' biomass for producing fuel is how much of the plant do you need to lead behind in the ground. If you removed everything during the harvesting process, you would be creating the conditions for a dustbowl. How much biomass need to remain behind is currently an open question. In the case of corn stover, it is far from being all of it. But there is an upper limit. It's a similar situation for rice, rape, sugar and the forests that could potentially produce bug-ready biomass.

There is no-one involved in biofuel-technology research who wants to create a dustbowl. Or, if there is, I haven't found them yet. However, it is economic incentives and regulations such as those imposed by the EU on the current generation of biofuels that can distort a market effectively enough for the conditions to be right to wreak havoc on the agricultural system. It is practically impossible for any researcher to design out that possibility from what are going to be pretty fundamental technologies. And the more you look into an area such as synthetic biology, you realise how many different research themes are intertwined. Even if you thought banning one of them would prevent the dustbowl scenario, which one would you ban?

It is worth bearing in mind that previous interventions using food crops in the widest sense have caused more localised disruption. The World Bank and others spent years telling some countries they should plant more coffee, only for those robusta producers to find they were feeding their produce into a massive world glut, and not from potentially more lucrative cash food crops. It's hardly a surprise that similar things should have happened with the biofuels business.

Over-promise is a problem with any technology. LS9's contention that it could serve the US demand for petrol with a biorefinery the size of Chicago seems not unreasonable, especially when you divide that down into smaller producers, although perhaps not as many as Rob Carlson envisages - he is looking forward to the day when every home has its own refinery. However, what is not clear is just how much sugar or biomass has to go in through the gate to produce 140 million barrels a week. The US Department of Agriculture was a lot more circumspect about using biomass for fuel in its 2004 report: a third of the US fuel demand looked ambitious then and it still is, although it is not impossible as long as some technologies come good.

It's hard to argue against having a more open dialogue in and around science. But pushing the ethical debate too far upstream is not going to achieve the effect that anyone wants. Except for the fundamental ethical issues - things such as cloning - it can work. But, very often, the potential ethical nightmares do not reveal themselves until much later. Blaming basic science for them is not going to achieve better results.

Posted by Chris at 2:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2008

Chart-tastic

eMusic is running a survey to try to find its subscribers' favourite album. Well, the best one that eMusic can supply, which narrows the field quite some way. But it means that, whatever the winner, it's not going to be some multi-platinum monstrosity.

With the help of iTunes Statistician and the power of memory, I came up with a list fairly quickly, although some things I could swear I got from the paid-for download site have since disappeared, which entailed a bit of rejigging.

On top of that, the number one is a bit of a ringer as I didn't get it off eMusic. However, the live album they put up on the service for free was the come-on I needed to try eMusic in the first place.

And the winner is: The Pixies with Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim.

Followed by:

2. Twin Cinema - The New Pornographers
3. The Greatest - Cat Power
4. Walls - Apparat
5. The Life Pursuit - Belle & Sebastian

That is all.

Posted by Chris at 9:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 17, 2008

Mentor's big decision

There is clearly something in the water on the West Coast as hostile takeover fever is taking hold. Away from the Microsoft/Yahoo soap opera, another, somewhat smaller bid battle is gearing up. Mentor Graphics has rejected today's offer from Cadence Design Systems, citing antitrust issues among the reasons:

"As we recently indicated to Cadence, we reviewed Cadence's proposal and analyzed both the price proposed and the risks associated with obtaining antitrust approval for a combination between the companies,” said Walden C. Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics. "Following this review, we concluded that not only was the price insufficient to support a transaction but that the risks of not gaining regulatory approval were sufficiently high that the ability of the parties to consummate the transaction would be in jeopardy. For these and other reasons, our Board unanimously rejected the proposal."

On the conference call, Cadence did not distance itself from the idea that CEO Mike Fister could play the role of Steve Ballmer against who some analysts are setting up as the Jerry Yang in this battle, Mentor's CEO and chairman Wally Rhines. The script is similar: Mentor did not want to negotiate, and is not interested in providing value to shareholders.

However, Fister could equally be the loser in this particular contest as it's not entirely clear how much Cadence would gain from the $1.6bn deal against the risks of having to suffer scrutiny from either the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission over antitrust issues. We are dealing here with two of the top three companies in the electronic design automation market. It's worth about $3bn, with almost all of the money going to just five companies.

Even if it succeeds, the risks to Cadence are huge. The deal is only 'accretive' — it boosts the earnings per share — if you assume pro-forma, non-GAAP accounting. The kind of accounting where the CFO decides which numbers are relevant rather than actual accounting standards. And it does not take into account the effect of having to report Mentor's numbers in a different way to which they are now.

Anyone who has followed EDA financials for any amount of time will curse the words 'ratable', 'revenue' and 'recognition'. These words define when the software companies decide to book the money they take for their tools. And they all do it differently. Not only that, every three or four years, they change the way they do it. This makes comparisons over any lengthy period of time a nightmare.

The upshot is that, if Mentor does succumb to a proxy war or decide to agree to a merger, the numbers will not quite be as good as everyone expects because Cadence will delay booking some of the money that the Mentor business units take in. Now, this is arguably a cleaner approach for a company that sells software licences, but it makes predictions of the value of the Mentor deal much harder to calculate.

Then you have the product risk, which is what most of the people watching this deal will care about. Gabe Moretti invokes the spectre of the Daisy/Cadnetix takeover from the early 1990s. This did not go well, although you could argue that these companies were on the way out anyway and they might as well have gone down together. This was the point where upstarts like Cadence and Synopsys — today's top two — were coming through. It's worth noting that Mentor stumbled at this point, reinventing itself under Rhines during the 1990s when he crossed over from chipmaker Texas Instruments.

Overlap is a big issue. On the Cadence conference call, Merrill Lynch senior analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer, who has covered EDA for some time, pointed out that Cadence has more than a little overlap with Mentor: "I can think of five areas where you and Mentor currently overlap, including verification and physical," he said and cited the example of Synopsys and Avant, where the two companies had comparatively complementary product lines. "It took Synopsys years to get the full benefit of Avant."

It's actually easier to count up the areas where Cadence and Mentor don't have competing product lines. It basically comes down to FPGA design and embedded software and, on the latter, Cadence has 'Project Sydney' coming up, which has a software verification component to it.

Here's Fister on the overlap problem raised by Vleeschhouwer: "I think the EDA market is full of subsegments. And certainly now many of the customers operate heterogeneous flows, a combination of points of light. That is where the extreme complement comes from. In my time I think we have demonstrated an ability to integrate not only the historic acquisitions but the ones we have embraced in the last four years. We developed a great capability to do that; the stucture of the holistic solutions engages in a collaborative fashion some of the rest of the industry and that is the muscle memory that we are going to use going forward." (Translations on a postcard please to...)

Bill Porter, chief administrative officer and formerly CFO, added: "Part of our strategy is to have a holistic solution, front and back. And part of Mentor's philosophy is to have very distinct points of technology throughout their product line. Our ability to integrate that will have benefit to our customers. We will be able to get on that very quickly....I think it has got some long-term benefits for our customers."

It's a fair point that Cadence has made acquisitions work for it: the company has a patchy history of turning internal R&D into top-notch tools. It has claimed, recently, that it is much better at it. However, the Mentor deal has demonstrated that Cadence believes Calibre is far superior to its own offering, Assura, which is a dramatic about-turn from a company that has busily been trying to push into the design-for-manufacturing (DFM) space. It is because of this that Cadence is now in the position that it cannot retreat from the takeover bid: it's signalled its weakness in certain key areas.

Is the deal worth it? For Cadence, the risks are huge and could turn out to be a 1+1=1 deal. Calibre will bring in the dough from day one but Cadence will have the issue of how it merges Assura with Mentor's tools. Mentor's PCB operation is a steady earner and the nature of that business means that Cadence would not have to spend much time merging tools. You just keep all of them that have a decent user base. Verification is far from clean-cut. It's hard to see the ModelSim team settling in well at Cadence. It took a while for them to settle in at Mentor and some of the other business units work because they have relative autonomy. That, historically, is not the way things have worked at Cadence.

I still need to do a full analysis of where the overlaps lie. But, trust me, the diagram is going to look messy. And, I believe that both Cadence and Synopsys are over-playing the concept of the one-stop-shop. The big chipmakers do want to buy a single design flow but there is a caveat: that flow has to have all the best tools in it. And none of the players can offer that. They won't be able to offer it even if Cadence succeeds in its purchase of Mentor. What they really want is some third-party to make the pain go away by taking the best tools around and glueing them together. This is not the same story that Fister is selling to Wall Street.

Mentor is also faced with a dilemma: a takeover might be bad for Cadence; it might be bad for EDA; but is it bad for shareholders? Let's face it, it's real money on the table. Last year, $16 was not a great offer. But, right now, it looks somewhat more attractive. Shareholders feeling a little rattled from the rollercoaster returns of the sector over the last ten years might feel like running, not walking, for the exit. Or, if they are feeling lucky, might want to take the cash and stick it in Synopsys, unless Aart de Geus has a rush of blood to the head and decides to bid for Magma Design Automation, while Cadence struggles to digest Mentor. A lot will depend on how Mentor's institutional shareholders fall on this deal.

Posted by Chris at 10:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Turn the voltage down, you're stressing me out

Intel came close to giving the idea of having a fixed clock-speed rating on its upcoming Nehalem the heave-ho, according to Intel fellow Rajesh Kumar, speaking to journalists ahead of the VLSI Circuits Symposium in Hawaii this week. The people who were going to be putting the processor into PCs didn't care for the idea, it seems.

The company has radically altered the way that Nehalem is clocked compared with its predecessors in order to improve both memory bandwidth and power consumption. It means that the core, memory buses and I/O run almost independently.

The bigger change is internal, where it seems that the concept of a fixed clock running at several gigahertz has been discarded in favour of letting the logic run at its own speed. This is something that people such as former ARM architect Professor Steve Furber have been advocating for years. The concept of a system clock is entirely artificial and exists largely to make life easy for chip designers and simplify the job of testing chips as they come off the production line. Chips such as the Amulet don't run off any kind of clock: the logic inside finds its own speed.

"The idea is not new," said Kumar. "But the implementation is new."

With a conventional clocked design, the architects work out how much logic each part of the pipeline can perform within a cycle. They then add on some slack to cope with the vagaries of manufacturing. For decades, this has worked pretty well although knocking some bits of the pipeline into line can have engineers tearing their hair out. "Negative slack" is not a term they like to hear.

Now, everybody cares about power consumption and the synchronous techniques of the past don't look so attractive. One problem is that having to add the guard bands increases power consumption because some part of the system are struggling to keep up. Others produce a result and sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the end of the clock cycle. The first circuit needs as much voltage as you can feed it — the higher the voltage, the faster transistors will switch. The second one you could afford to feed with a lower voltage, so that it slows down to the point where it comes up with result just ahead of the next clock cycle.

Where it gets worse is that, in modern processes, every transistor works slightly differently to its neighbours. Some are faster than expected; others are slower. To make sure everything can keep up, you have to increase the guard bands. And that pushes the overall power consumption up.

Kumar claimed it's now different with the Nehalem: "We have introduced a chip that adapts every cycle to the dynamic power. We can get higher frequency and lower voltage."

According to one of Intel's slides, the "duty cycle adapts to transistor variation and lifetime stress". Yes, not only do transistors come out of the fab with something of a spread in terms of performance, they change as they get used. Some will fare much worse than others in usage, slowing down over time. Higher voltages do not do sub-micron transistors a lot of good. So, being able to adapt to that change in speed is important.

However, the idea of a sort-of-3GHz processor did not appeal to Intel's customers. "We debated this quite a bit while doing the implementation," said Kumar. A less clock-centric approach was "the obvious way" to go, he added. But, "We realised quickly that people did not want that. They hated the idea of asynchronicity and indeterminism. So a tremendous amount of innovation has gone into avoiding that. We spent a lot of time working on that. Internally, the chip is adapting but, from the outside, it is deterministic."

In effect, there is an averaging process that goes on to ensure that people do not wind up with processors that run at subtly different speeds long term. "Every few seconds, it is averaging so that, from the outside, it is running at a fixed frequency. All the time. There is no indeterminism."

It's important for Intel to hide a variable clock cycle. But the idea of a stretchy clock cycle is something we may see from other quarters. ARM's director of R&D Krisztián Flautner studied at the University of Michigan where the Razor concept was developed.

Razor works on the assumption that circuits run at maximum speed for a given supply voltage and that, if they cannot meet timing, the calculation will seem to fail. But the correct result will become available at some point once the circuit has stabilised. The trick is knowing when this happens — so you add some logic to watch for this. The additional Razor logic cancels the false result and fetch the correct result from a shadow register. In effect, the circuit runs speculatively but can be corrected after the fact.

“The concept here is that we treat part of the cycle time as the error region; the place where we might screw up,” said Flautner last year.

The team has developed a self-correcting flip-flop and a memory cell, where a second sense amplifier detects the error. One of the issues is that the circuit is no longer deterministic — the problem that Intel wanted to avoid — as errors need to be fixed after the fact.

However, with this kind of approach, chips could be 40 per cent more energy efficient than they are today, according to Flautner. But runtime approaches such as Razor incur their own energy and area overhead. He said the area overhead was relatively unimportant: the question is whether the power drawn by the additional Razor logic outweighs the potential saving from being able to run circuits much closer to their timing margin by reducing their supply voltages.

Does the circuit needs to be deterministic? Flautner said this issue was confronted by software engineers when caches were introduced on embedded processors.

Posted by Chris at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 15, 2008

The bluffer's guide to understanding

It took me ages to get round to reading Nick Carr's Atlantic piece on the stupefying effects of Internet usage. I was too busy looking at lolcats, surfing the news and skimming through RSS feeds. And I liked it. That's probably where the problem lies.

In The Big Switch and other recent writing, Carr worries about the relentless push toward the Singularity - a time when humans and computers become inseparable because the machines will keep us alive and help us think. The Atlantic piece signs off: "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence".

I think Carr worries too much about the ability of computer science to deliver on Larry Page's 2004 promise in a Newsweek interview that he cites: "Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off."

The idea of the machine that learns for us was echoed recently by a UK educationalist who thought we would be learning in our sleep courtesy of hypno-programs. It's a popular theme in sci-fi but really only makes sense if you confuse information with knowledge.

A lot of people seem confused about it, especially those in the 'knowledge management' field. You can no more manage knowledge with computer databases than you can manage lions by putting up signs saying "please don't eat the antelopes". You can, however, corral information, which is what the average knowledge management system really does. And, as it turns out, many of them function as glorified search engines. Some places have even replaced the traditional knowledge-management system with a search engine that is not Google's but one that works pretty much the same way.

To turn information into knowledge you have to apply understanding. There are no shortcuts. However, the brain does make it easier on us by providing subtle rewards for learning stuff, both good and bad. The amygdala is a tiny part of the brain that takes part in a lot of neural processing. It's easy to overplay the role of the amygdala but recent research suggests that the amygdala is there to help us understand, and making us feel good about it. However, the amygdala tends to favour learning in an social or emotional context.

And this is probably where the problem with Google and the Internet lies. Our minds are inherently distractable. This is a good thing. It probably helped stop us getting eaten by lions. Sorry antelopes. And I'm willing to bet that the process is helped if we learn something by being distracted, even if it is just a lolcats punchline. You can then double up on the mental reward by getting social points from emailing it or blogging it.

If the brain rewards us for the kinds of learning distractions that the Internet provides, then it is not hard to see why putting a lot of effort into reading a longer tract would seem harder. Fear may also play a role in this, another response mediated by the amygdala. It's interesting that productivity schemes such as Getting Things Done tend to revolve around writing things down in diaries and to-do lists to effectively clear them from your head, so you stop worrying about them until it's time to get on with them.

I reckon some of the effects are temporary. Take away the external stimuli and reading a book is easy. People seem to happily digest books on flights – probably more so on medium-distance journeys where there is no multichannel TV and games system.

However, I also believe that there is a second influence that comes into play: the ability to fake it. This is potentially the permanent legacy of the searchable Internet and one that is far harder to deal with. This is where hooking your head up to Page's ultimate addon is both a boon and a dangerous idea.

One thing that the search engine excels at is DIY tech support. Got a problem with the computer? Google the error message and see what comes up. Nine times out of ten the answer is staring from the first page of results.

Where it becomes insidious is where you start to believe that manuals or text books are for suckers and that the answer is only one search term away. It dawned on me as I was looking to solve a Unix-related problem that you can waste an awful lot of time trawling round the Intarwebs looking for a solution when I could have simply learned a bit more about how the system actually works and then just use the logs to nail the issue.

I guess I could learn about the workings of the system by piecing together the errors, but it's often a whole lot quicker just to put some donkey-work into learning. This kind of knowledge fakery is the thing that really worries educationalists. The systems we have to test knowledge tend to assume that students have gone through the understanding phase. But the types of exams and tests that worked pre-Internet are breaking down because it is hard to distinguish between someone who has genuine understanding and who has just managed to fake it by picking up on the key points and buzzwords around a topic.

Posted by Chris at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 12, 2008

You wait ages for a GPU programming environment to come along and then...

A couple of months ago, nVidia's Jen-Hsun Huang decided to stick his head out of the window and shout he wasn't going to take it anymore. Or at least, gather a bunch of analysts together at the graphics chipmaker's HQ and tell them he wasn't going to take it anymore. The trigger was Intel's developer forum in China where Intel's Pat Gelsinger declared the death of today's graphics processor (GPU). Curiously, Gelsinger claimed that just ahead of talking about Larrabee: Intel's latest foray into the GPU business (it's a different kind of GPU, you understand).

The argument from the Intel side was that traditional processors would take over many of the rendering functions in 3D graphics, largely because there are going to be so many of them. Huang had the opposite argument: GPUs already have lots of processors on them, why not use them for offloading software from the host processor?

And so the stage is set for a new kind of architecture war in which you have different kinds of microprocessor fighting over the same ground.

At the analysts meeting, nVidia lined up a bunch of demoes from people operating in supercomputer-land who have tried plugging together thousands of Xeons and Athlons and decided they have had enough of it. They want something new. IBM's Cell looked promising for a while but a number of supercomputer users have decided that it does not deliver quite what they want, despite the headline performance claims over Roadrunner.

Their main options are GPUs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), chips that let you define whatever hardware circuitry you like. FPGAs are not that great on the kind of floating-point code that host processors can handle but they tear through things like genetics and chemical-matching programs.

The problem is finding a programming environment that will handle all of the above. The supercomputer users want to be able to work will a combination of x86, GPU and FPGA-based processors. There isn't anything out there that will work across more than one type of accelerator. Got an nVidia card? Use CUDA. But that's no good if you happen to have an ATI GPU. For that, your only option is the long-in-the-tooth Brook environment. Intel is lining up its own architecture under the banner of QuickAssist. Its current implementation is oriented towards FPGAs but the scope is likely to widen as Larrabee gets closer to shipping.

There is an open effort under the OpenFPGA banner. But, again, it is, as its name suggests, focused on FPGAs. A number of the specialist vendors in the supercomputer world like the idea of OpenFPGA because it has potential as an independent standard. However, the amount of money behind the other players suggests that we are likely to be looking at a vendor-derived standard emerging.

But the GPU programming environments will, with the exception of the FPGAs handled by QuickAssist - as Intel hasn't made FPGA since the mid-1990s - be oriented to vendors's own hardware.

Then there are the unplayed hands of Apple and Microsoft. Apple provided hints of what it is doing in this area on Monday in talking briefly about the Snow Leopard release of Mac OS X:

Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard.

This, potentially, is a smart move on Apple's part. The company would benefit not just from having one language to work with all the GPUs it could buy in from AMD, Intel or nVidia but gets a chance to wrong-foot Microsoft. The software giant has projects to look into acceleration using GPUs and FPGAs - a lot of the work is being carried out by people such as Satnam Singh at Cambridge - but has very little in the way of product plans. Apple gets the chance to define the programming model of the future, giving it a lot more architectural control than it has now, and come out looking like the good guy by providing a software layer that works with a much wider range of hardware than anything that the chipmakers plan to offer.

At this stage of the game, unless Microsoft is genuinely ready to go public with an API, the only realistic counter-proposal would be for nVidia to port CUDA to other architectures. True, AMD could propose the same thing but it is coming from further behind. It's hard to see anyone accepting an Intel-proposed API unless they really have no other choice.

There is plenty that can go wrong with OpenCL. Programming GPUs to run code is one thing. Getting the code to run as fast as you'd expect 128 processors to do it is another matter, according to supercomputer users, some of whom turned up at the MRSC conference in Belfast a couple of months ago to talk about their experiences. But, unless Microsoft can come out with a real API and library first, Apple is in a good position simply by virtue of being in control of a desktop computing environment rather than having to sell chips into existing platforms.

Posted by Chris at 9:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sabotage from a faulty time machine

There was something oddly convenient about the passage extracted from a 1944 manual on sabotage supposedly written in 1994 by the US OSS about disrupting corporate activity. You read through the list of things a saboteur should do, as quoted by people such as David Weinberger, and think: "Yeah, I've been in those meetings."

Take, for example, point one on page 28:

Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

It was at that point that my internal hoaxmeter started edging into the red.

Download the document. Take a look at it. Doesn't it look just a little too clean for a publication that was printed more than 60 years ago and, presumably, scanned only days or weeks ago? The front page has been disfigured by stamps to make it look a little distressed but there's barely a dog ear – in fact there are no dog ears - on the subsequent pages.

Maybe it's the little things that give it away. There is the lack of hyphenation in 'cooperate', the use of phrases such as "inside dope" and the reference to fluorescent lighting. Yes, dope was slang for information a century ago. But in a document supposedly for distribution to agents whose first language probably wasn't English? Fluorescent lighting? It existed but hardly anybody had seen it in the 1940s.

And then maybe it's the reference to "the United Nations war effort": an organisation that was not formed until after the Second World War.

When you consider the provenance of the 'manual' - it's an exhibit being used by a couple of Web 2.0 evangelists from the OSS's successor the CIA - it shows that spooks have a sense of humour too. The OSS and CIA did have sabotage leaflets (they probably still do). Just not, in all likelihood, this one.

Update: Darn it. A commenter at David Weinberger's blog points out that the term United Nations was used before 1945. The commenter points to the Declaration of United Nations in 1941 as the point at which the name started to be used. I wasn't totally convinced but then spotted some speeches given by Roosevelt where he used the terms United Nations liberally. So, maybe that bit was culled from a real OSS document. But the whole thing still screams fake to me.

Posted by Chris at 7:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2008

Blowin' in the wind

I've never really understood the point of leaf blowers. Even less so as I look out of the window today - in the middle of June - at a guy wandering up and down with a leaf blower in a street that does not have any trees in it.

Posted by Chris at 8:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 4, 2008

The currency of news

It wasn't until I read about the research commissioned by the Associated Press into news consumption (via Martin Stabe's blog) that I realised that hardly anybody has done ethnographic studies of how people deal with news. Other than this study, I can't find anything through Google Scholar that deals with the audience – most of the ethnographic research concentrated on the journalists not on who they are producing the work for.

Media companies make a fair amount of use of focus groups and surveys but those sessions can be very misleading, not least because internal marketing departments structure them to probe behaviour that affect commercial decisions rather than the editorial concerns. The other big problem is that people don't tell the truth about how they read newspapers or magazines. You spend a lot of time watching the sessions or reading the reports trying to infer what the subjects are really thinking. Ethnographic research goes further by trying to compare what people say versus what they do.

It is still flawed. People behave differently with a stranger watching what they are doing - it's a kind of social Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And it's always entertaining to see researchers at conference ripping apart each other over the quality of their ethnography - no-one else's is as good as yours, it seems.

Yet, it seems bizarre that countless academics doing media studies don't seem to study people dealing with media. They prefer, it seems, to concentrate on those producing the stuff. Which is bizarre when you consider that most of the people on the production may not seem to care what the consumers think but have a vested interest in understanding it.

'Newsosaur' Alan Mutter considers the research to be contradictory, partly because Jon Stewart comes off well in some of the individual studies. The report said:

"American respondents in the study noted that the news comedian Jon Stewart could take even the most serious news, spin it and make it palatable."

Neil Postman is not so much spinning in his grave as bouncing around saying: "I told you so."

Mutter worked out from the report:

"...forward-looking news executives would be advised to ensure that future stories report all the latest developments, contain all the facts, provide context, include in-depth explanation, forecast future events and, above all else, are upbeat and funny."

Mutter is a bit unfair on the report. But you have to separate the 71-page document into useful bits and those that are surplus to requirements. The spin at the end on how AP has responded to the findings also tend to cast suspicion on which bits of the research made it into the report.

One glaring example of the dual-purpose nature of the report is the way that one theme pursued in the segments on the research itself suddenly disappear. If you read through the capsules on the study participants and the discussion, one phrase keeps popping up: "social currency". Given that much blogging revolves around the news, this is hardly a surprise. However, the report authors concentrate on the issue of news fatigue and the claimed need for in-depth background among participants.

This is where, I think, the findings are contradictory. I'd love to believe that what readers want is in-depth background on stories. Some of them do. But to concentrate on that as a strategy for a media company is probably going to be commercial suicide unless you have a great new way of getting money for it. People tend to say they believe they want the in-depth stuff but it's tough to get the money for it.

People looking for background on a subject are far less likely to be distracted by ads and other links than when they are grazing for news. Given that many online news sites make their money from ads, it should hardly be a surprise that they will favour producing pages that generate high click-through rates, particularly if the ones that produce poor results are also expensive to produce.

Somewhat unconsciously, news organisations have already embraced the philosophy of news as social currency. I don't mean this in the sense they have spawned blogs but that they are focusing more attention on the stories that get linked to or emailed. Unfortunately for news production it means they are going to spend a lot more time on blokes marrying goats and mice setting fire to houses than substantive stories about the state of the world, except in the developing world where readers seem to prefer news to be important rather than a source of entertainment. At least for the moment.

Posted by Chris at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dear Tom Tom, this is not a road

In Sicily for a holiday in the second half of May, my girlfriend and I decided to go to Pantalica. It sounds as though it ought to be a South American heavy metal act but is an enormous, sprawling necropolis that dates back to the Bronze Age. From about 1300 BC, the inhabitants buried their dead in caves cut into the sides of the gorge cut by the Anapo river. They cut thousands of square holes in the cliffs and dragged the bodies of their relatives up to them, ultimately to be uncovered and shipped off to museums by archaeologists.

You can get to Pantalica from two directions: Ferla to the west and Sortino to the northeast. The roads almost meet, but not quite. However, the Tom Tom satnav shows one stretch of road joining Ferla and Sortino by way of Pantalica. Before we got there, I assumed that there was a road there but it was no more than a dirt track for the section that ran down into the gorge and up the other side, as local maps show a break between the two sections of tarmac. This was on the basis that in all the stories of satnavs going wrong, most of the time the road actually existed. It just wasn't all that useful to regular motor vehicles.

Not so this time. The path down into the gorge pretty much dates back to the Bronze Age. You have steep steps cut into the stone that have been there so long they have, in some cases, been eroded into rock pools. No-one's going be off-roading down in the gorge unless they've given their 4x4 mechanical legs.

For a while, I thought Tom Tom's fake road might follow the path. But, having had the chance to compare it against the satellite images in Google Maps, it seems the connecting bit of road is total fantasy. If it existed, it would be quite a bridge. But there is nothing there other than a deep, tree-filled gorge.

The bright patch in the lower half of the zoomed image is the Ferla-side car park. The road from Sortino runs out of tarmac as it comes in from the right. It turns into a dirt track that kinks up. Then, in real life, it stops: the way down is a narrow path that is almost invisible on the satellite image. You can see the path that snakes up and to the left from the Ferla side. This crosses the river, eventually, towards the top where the gorge bends round. Shown as an overlay on the top image, after a bit of Photoshop work, Tom Tom's road just seems to be a spline that joins the Sortino half from the end of the kink directly to the bit where it dissolves into a sand-covered car park.

From the looks of it, I'd guess a little bit of over-enthusiastic error correction has been going here. I can't help feeling that someone looked at the map data they bought in, saw a break in the road and thought: "That can't be right." So they 'fixed' it.

Posted by Chris at 5:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack