Hot on the heels of recent NSA revelations, the European Space Agency announced today[1] that they’ve put a satellite, Proba-V, in orbit that can track airplane flights from outer space. Unlike the NSA snooping, however, the plane tracking is voluntary, (for the moment), and welcomed.

Proba-V

Proba-V was launched recently and rocketed into orbit inside the same vehicle that carried the Estonian satellite ESTCUBE-1[2]. Proba’s main mission is to track vegetation growth on the planet.  The satellite’s designers provided room for a few extra experiments however. One of the extra experiments was designed to determine if ADS-B[3] signals can be detected from outer space. ADS-B is a radio based vehicle tracking system that is similar to a system developed by the United States Navy and used by ham radio operators known as APRS. Once Proba-V reached a stable orbit, the onboard ADS-B receiver started up, and soon thereafter signals from earthbound planes were detected.

Much like APRS, ADS-B transmitters aboard airplanes broadcast data packets that contain the plane’s location and other pertinent information. The APRS system, relies on automatic radio repeaters to route the data packets into a system of computer servers run by volunteers. Once in the system, the data can be utilized to track the transmitting vehicles. For an example of APRS in action, go to http://goo.gl/16cha, and/or watch the video below of the flight of OH3GMZ-9 path over Helsinki recorded earlier this morning.

Far from being volunteer based, ADS-B is being adopted as an enhancement to the existing air traffic control system and should prove to be more efficient and precise.  In the United States, the majority of planes are required to carry an ADS-B transmitter by the year 2020.

ADS-B adds an inbound channel that APRS doesn’t have. ‘ADS-B in’ users can receive the packets of other nearby aircraft, as well as direct communications.  With the new results from Proba-V, it looks like ADS-B will also be capable of providing space monitored search and rescue data for downed planes that are out of the range of traditional terrestrial radio receiver antennas.

References:
1. Proba-V aircraft tracking announcement
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/Proba-V_tracking_aircraft_in_flight_from_orbit

2. ESTCube-1
http://copaseticflow.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-little-news-two-approximations-and.html

3. ADS-B on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast#Relationship_to_surveillance_radar

We’re all getting ready for DAC here at the Carter household. I’m really looking forward to getting to spend a few days in my old stomping grounds, Austin! If you’re not from the area, here are a few things you should check out while you’re there. Keep in mind that these are extracurricular extracurricular activities and prioritize them accordingly with the big vendor bashes which are always a lot of fun.

Trudy’s and the Mexican Martini
There are at least three locations of Trudy’s Mexican Restaurant in Austin.  The food is good, but what you should really try is the Mexican Martini!  It’s so famous that it’s been written up in the New York Times.  Essentially, it’s an extra large margarita served in a cocktail shaker with a martini glass.  It’s so big in fact that the limit at each Trudy’s location is two.  But wait, there are three Trudy’s locations, and that brings us to the Trudy’s Triple!  One of the local challenges is to drink your limit of Mexican Martinis at all three locations in a single night.  You should only try this with a taxi cab, of course, and perhaps a few friends to make sure you get back to your hotel as opposed to having your alcohol soaked organs prematurely harvested.

Poodle Dog Lounge
For a little local color what I call the North side of town, but Austin natives call central Austin, check out the Poodle Dog Lounge.  The last time I was there, it was a beer only joint, (Texas has some truly bizarre liquor laws.  If you don’t believe me go to Dallas sometime).  Not to worry though because the aforementioned Trudy’s is just up the street.  There are plenty of pool tables available at the Poodle Dog and quite often a local band.

Barton Springs Pool
This is a beautiful spring fed pool in the center of downtown Austin.  The water is always chili and clear.  It’s great for  a dip after enduring the sometimes grueling Austin heat.  In the 1970′s, the women of Austin protested for the right to go topless.  They won and were granted a small hill overlooking Barton Springs Pool to do with their shirts as they pleased. Before long everyone began to realize the silliness of occupying a hillside with the pool right there, and over the years they’ve migrated down the hill towards the pool.

Bob Schneider
Bob is Austin’s resident musician extraordinaire.  He burst upon the national scene during the 1990s when he released “Deep Blue Sea” and was dating Sandra Bullock, and has since developed a huge cult following in the Austin area. He plays at several venues downtown and hist style changes depending on the venue.  At Antone’s your almost guaranteed to find the Bob my crowd reveres and loves for riotous, high-energy, hedonistic, misogynistic lyrics accompanied by musical styles ranging from rap to rockabilly, (really whatever style of music Bob happens to be interested in at the time.)  At Saxon’s Pub, where Bob will be playing on June 3rd during DAC, you’ll find a slightly more restrained, and refined version of his music that tends more towards ballads and songs which aren’t always about sweet love are certainly slower in tempo and tamer in content.  If you can hang around until June 14th, (perhaps a few too many Mexican Martinis?), the show at Antone’s should be phenomenal.

Toy Joy
As you’re having fun, don’t forget to go home with presents!  Toy Joy is an awesomely fun, kitschy, low priced toy store located in central Austin.  They have a wide selections of toys including Little Golden Books, gyroscopes, bathtub boats made completely of recycled milk bottles, bouncy balls, and 20 sided die.  Best of all, they’ll gift wrap each toy for free if you so desire!

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DAC is in Austin this year, and I’ll be headed over from College Station to check out the latest and greatest in functional verification technology. I haven’t attended DAC since 2007 and I can’t wait to see how things have evolved.  I’ve kept track of the various technologies as a consultant, but it’s always fun to hear from the various vendors and find out how they’d like their products to be seen.  While I’m looking forward to running into a lot of the same folks that were there in 2007, it’ll also be exciting to see who’s new on the scene.  I’m curious to discover what became of the various contending object oriented verification methodologies. I’d also like to know how assertion based verification has advanced and what the usage and product development proportions are for formal vs. dynamic. SoCs have continued to grow and become more specialized. How have verification software and hardware technologies evolved to handle this complexity?

What verification technology would you like an update on?  Do you have a favorite company or methodology I could find out more about while I’m there?  Do you have any questions regarding how a technology should best be used?  What kind of tool capabilities are you interested in?  What are your toughest verification issues and how do you think they could best be solved?  What technologies do you think should exist that don’t yet?  Who do you think would be the most capable of providing them?  What technologies did you think held the greatest promise yet didn’t pan out?

Let me know what kind of DAC coverage you’d like to see and I’ll do my best to make the rounds and find answers.

In a paper on arXiv[1], a team of researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory revealed that they had been successfully using a quantum encrypted network for the last two and a half years.

It’s pretty cool stuff, although not as cool as it might sound.  What follows are a few details of the technology including what it will and won’t do.

1.  It’s not fully networked technology
The system works on a client/hub architecture.  While all clients have quantum enabled transmitters only the hub has a quantum enabled receiver.  While the quantum transmitters can be made rather small and scaled for manufacturing, not so much for the receivers which require moderate cooling.  The transmitter is pretty classy looking and is shown in picture 1 below.

2.  It’s not fully quantum encrypted
At least one other reader and myself were confused by the MIT review[3] of the article that used the term ‘one time pad’.  I suspect we’d had just enough crypto exposure to confuse ourselves, but in case you’re in the same boat, here goes.  If ‘one time pad’ means, to you, a pad of random numbers that’s xor’ed with the transmitted message and somehow also transmitted securely to the destination of the message where it will be used once to decode the message and then discarded providing Shannon perfect encryption, then no, that’s not what the LANL paper details.  Basically the scheme uses quantum encryption to encode the keys that are to be used for the bulk message that will be transmitted via standard non-quantum algorithms.  Quantum encryption is used only for the key exchange portion of the message in the same manner that RSA is used in current TLS/SSL technologies.

3.  Your bulk message is still vulnerable to a brute force attack on the non-quantum algorithm
See number two.  Whatever sort of brute force attack an interloper could use on standard algorithms without knowledge of your key can still be used.  This is slightly more assiduous than it seems.  It depends on a number of things like message redundancy.  I can’t find the reference, so I won’t quote the algorithm used, but an engineer in the ’80s showed that a rather secure algortihm could be broken quite easily if it was used to encode auido recorded voice signals.

4.  Your key is completely secure and can’t even be monitored for a brute force attack!
What it does encrypt, the system encrypts very, very nicely.  One of the key advantages of quantum encryption is that the bit stream can’t even be monitored.  If you measure it, you destroy it.

5.  I may have worked for one of the researcher’s dads.
Said in the tone of New York taxi drivers who are commonly portrayed as always saying ‘Seen it.’, no matter how absurd the situation.  (If you’ve seen Curious George, you’ll understand.)  I actually may have worked for Kevin McCabe’s dad when I was an intern in the electronics shop at Los Alamos.  Kinda inconsequential, yet kinda cool to me  Checking on it.

6.  Finally, the system is still vulnerable to the most obvious attack of all[2]

References:

1.  ArXiv paper
http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0305

2.  xkcd on crypto
http://xkcd.com/538/ 

3.  MIT Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514581/government-lab-reveals-quantum-internet-operated-continuously-for-over-two-years/

I’ve got Tesla on the brain this week, so I’d like to review some of the events in his life and their outcome with you. Don’t worry, I’m getting to a point.

Tesla is rumored to have attached a mechanical vibrator to a support structure of his building, tuned it for resonance, and caused the entire building to shake. He got the gadget turned off before the police arrived. Did he get arrested? No.

Later at his laboratory near Colorado Springs he built a giant Tesla coil that electrified the ground for miles around. People wouldn’t ride their horses near his lab because of electric discharges between the ground and their horseshoes. Was Tesla arrested for this? No.

At the same laboratory, one night his experiments pulled too much power from the town’s overtaxed generator. The generator caught on fire and was destroyed. Was Tesla arrested? No. He did, however, have to replace the generating system.

Tesla claimed until his dying day that he was in possession of a death ray. As far as his contemporaries knew, he both the knowledge and the means to construct such a device. Was his home stormed by police? No. At least not until after he died of natural causes.

Now, fast forward a few hundred years or so. Last week, a high school student, Kiera Wilmot, in Bartow, Florida mixed a few household chemicals in an eight ounce plastic water bottle and screwed on the lid. She was standing in a mostly empty hallway at her school at 7:00 in the morning. A bit later, the lid popped off the bottle making a loud noise, and some smoke poured out of the bottle. No one was nearby, no one was hurt, and no property was damaged.

Guess what happened next? The young lady in question was taken to the principal’s office where he ascertained she had acted with no ill intent.  He then proceeded to send her to the school’s resource officer. The resource officer expelled her from school, and then called the police. The young woman was charged with weapons felonies and will be tried as an adult. Make a science mistake, go to jail!

There was a complete abdication of responsibility by every single adult involved in this incident. Watch the news interview below where the principal of the school blithely says that it’s just unfortunate such a good student made such a bad decision.

http://www.9news.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=2324791963001

He could have prevented the whole mess. He’s presumably in charge of the school. The school’s resource officer could have acted differently. The police could have accepted responsibility for their actions and refused to arrest her. The individual at the prosecutor’s office who made the decision to try the case as a felony and in an adult court also had the option to not act or to act in a far different and less severe manner.

We have a young woman who acted out of scientific curiosity and has paid dearly for her actions so far. I’m reminded of the culture of the dark ages where science and magic were indistinguishable, and anything out of the ordinary was treated as heresy. The punishment for such heresy was swift and disproportionate forcing rational thinkers underground. Is that really the society we want to live in? Have we let our fears and desire for security push us so far that we’ll jail a kid that made a harmless mistake with a few chemicals? Has our sense of personal responsibility to our fellow human beings become nothing but meaningless platitudes that start with phrases like “My job requires me to…”, or “The rules state that I must…”? Have we become so entrenched in our efforts to prevent kids from bullying kids that we no longer care about adults bullying kids? I for one hope not. I hope this catastrophic failure can serve as a rallying point for Americans to turn things around and begin to accept responsibility for their actions and for defending their personal freedoms again. I hope this serves as a lever to begin to push out unreasoning, unthinking authoritarian structures that have obviously gone far beyond ‘beginning’ to permeate our public institutions.

This just in on Reuters[1].  The IEEE believes that tech companies in the United States might be using H1-B visas to hold engineering salaries low.  Quoting from the Reuters artcle:

The 200,000-member U.S. chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers rejects the claim of a broad shortage of tech workers and opposes more H-1Bs.

“What these companies are doing is to replace Americans with lower-cost foreign workers,” says Russ Harrison, senior legislative representative at the IEEE.

Apparently the IEEE has finally seen what many of us have been commenting on since 2007 and earlier.  There may not have been a real engineering shortage since oh… 2003 or so.  Evidence of the farce, I mean faux, shortage has been leaking out around the edges  ever more persistently for the last few years.  Take the following video clip where President Obama is let in on the secret.

The episode that keyed me into what was going on happened in 2006.  I walked out of a large semi company customer of mine one night to find one of their engineers smoking a cigarette and looking wistfully across the parking lot at another office building in the company compound.  We’ll call the engineer Ted.

“Hey Ted, you doing OK?”
“Yeah, I’m all right, but the guys in building six sure aren’t.  Every last one of them lost their job today.”

I figured a design project had been cut, the semi industry is notorious for that.  A few months later though, I found out that building six was still full of engineers.  A few inquiries brought the whole story to light.  About six months prior to the layoff, each engineer in building six had been provided with an Indian engineer to train.  Almost six months to the day later, the American engineers were led, like lambs to the slaughter, to the HR office and told they could go home after signing the documents regarding the details of their severance package.  Shortage indeed!

Write your congressmen if you got ‘em.  According to Reuters another visa expansion bill is on the table.  You might just think of sending your representative this quote from the Reuters article:

But wages in the tech industry are rising more slowly than those in the economy as a whole. For example, pay for applications software developers, a specialty in high demand, have risen just 8.9 percent in the five years through mid-2012, compared with a 12.5 percent increase for all occupations in the U.S. economy.

“It is extraordinarily unlikely for a severe shortage to happen in a way that doesn’t result in very large wage increases,” said Kirk Doran, an economist at the University of Notre Dame who studies immigration and labor.

“We know what a labor shortage looks like: there should be both much lower unemployment than other professions and much higher wage growth. If either of these are not present, then I don’t buy the shortage hypothesis.”

A closing thought, if there’s not a shortage, but Congress has been told that there is, who perjured themselves before a congressional hearing?  The answer can be found on any number of CSPAN video feeds by the way.  I wonder if Congress will have the temerity to go after semiconductor and software industry executrices with the same fervor that they pursued baseball players on steroids.

References:
1. Reuters story about the IEEE and immigration
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/10/us-usa-immigration-tech-idUSBRE9390CM20130410

Heaviside and Dirac giants of Electrical Engineering and Quantum Mechanics

Over at Copasetic Flow, I wondered briefly last week whether electrical engineering notation and quantum mechanics notation had shared a common background and if so, which was the progenitor[1].  A few days ago I came across a helpful article by J. D. Jackson, If you’re on the physics side of things, yes, that Jackson, (careful, language in the  subtitles).

Dr. Jackson points out[5] that what most of us call the Dirac delta function was introduced in its modern form 35 years before Dirac’s definition[2] by Oliver Heaviside, first in The Electrician, and then in his Electromagnetic Theory volume I[4].  So, as early as 1895, (before quantum mechanics was invented), the two fields were already intertwined.

If you’ve never read Heaviside’s book, you should, (go ahead, it’s free on Google Books).  He introduces a sizable amount of the notation that we use in EE.  First, there’s the Heaviside step function.  Then, there’s the entire field of operational calculus.

If you vaguely remember a linear systems course in EE  where derivatives suddenly went from being denoted as d/dt to being denoted as multiplication by p, that’s operational calculus and Heaviside invented it.  I remember being awestruck that I could now do differential calculus simply by multiplying by p, (taking the derivative), or dividing by p, (taking the integral).  Consequntly, this is one of the notations that seems to be similar between EE and quantum mechanics.  Reading Heaviside, it seems to have its origin in physics.  p in physics was and is the symbol for momentum which is the time derivative, (d/dt) of position.  Heaviside doesn’t elucidate the point, but on page 232 he starts using the p notation, (“for convenience”), and apparently never goes back.  Later on he’ll realize that Fourier analysis is also kind of fun and start using omega, or frequency, as a derivative and one over omega as an integral.  Both of these really nice notations have never been adopted by the physics texts.  Interestingly though, quantum mechanics will pick up the whole Fourier habit and denote p, (momentum), as the Fourier conjugate of position space.

I only really have one gripe with Heaviside, great hero of engineering though he may be.  He killed the quaternions Man!  I mean dead, for decades.  The text I’ve referenced here is where he did it.  He replaced them with the easier to work with, (he thought), vectors.  They started turning back up in the 1960′s, 70′s, and 80′s when people began to realize that they were very nice for doing efficient rotations, (think computer graphics and games).  It also became apparent that they could be used to provide geometric explanations of quantum mechanics, (more on that later).  On the fringe side of things, they’re of course the reason the Russians got to the moon before us and also how they got ahead in teleportation technology, but I digress.

So, in summary, quantum mechanics and EE do seem to be intertwined, the p notation in operational calculus, and the ‘Dirac’ delta point towards a common heritage, but there’s no smoking gun yet as far as locating a common link between the two in a single person.

References:

1.  Copasetic Flow about the history of EE and QM
http://copaseticflow.blogspot.com/2013/03/separataed-at-birth-quantum-mechanics.html

2.  Dirac’s Introduction of what will be called the Dirac Delta Function
http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/180/980/1.full.pdf+html

3.  Heaviside’s introduction of the same function, (the derivative of what will be called the Heaviside step function), 35 years earlier
http://books.google.com/books?id=8GBNAAAAYAAJ&dq=editions%3A21BCEIltjgcC&pg=PA600#v=onepage&q&f=true

4.  Heaviside’s Electromagnetic Theory
http://books.google.com/books?id=9ukEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=oliver+heaviside&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lhlTUcn_CJTryAH6ioGQCQ&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAg

5.  Jackson on Dirac and Heaviside
http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v76/i8/p704_s1?ver=pdfcov

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It should come as no surprise to readers of this column that I’m a big fan of fringe physics history and literature.  When done well,, it can serve to inform and inspire.  Take for example, the Philadelphia Experiment by William Moore.  Mr. Moore never claims that the story he tells about the purported experiments that allegedly made a naval destroyer disappear during World War II are true.  What he does do is construct a chain of credible research and then let the reader come to their own conclusions.  In doing this, he exposes the reader to narratives about electromagnetism, high voltage engineering, special and general relativity, and Einstein’s attempts to create a unified field theory.  As a kid, this book more than anything else inspired my interest in physics and engineering.  Then, there’s the whole Tesla mythos.  Much of the legend surrounding Tesla is patently scientifically unprovable.  Take for example the Tunguska event[1].  Supposedly Tesla used a large antenna near Shoreham, NY to transmit energy over the north pole and blew a large hole in the Siberian countryside.  While this story almost certainly isn’t true, it serves to inspire interest in the man who actually did invent our power distribution system, induction motors, and radio controlled vehicles.  As an aside, if you like stories along the line of the Philadelphia Experiment, and t the Tunguska event, you should check out Jeff Smith’s RASL[2].

In addition to my fringe physics reading, I also read quite a few science blogs, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately towards what I’ll call fringe-bashing.  The trend may have been inspired by the fervor of the climate change activists, or maybe by the anit-creationists, both of whom have valid reasons for censuring psuedo-scientific theories.  I don’t know it’s origin, but I define fringe-bashing is the practice of singling out an article for being un-scientific in it’s viewpoint or implications and then calling the intelligence of the author into question, taunting, and generally writing in a denigrating manner rather than simply and objectively stating the facts of the scientific matter in a polite and helpful manner.  

To me fringe-bashing comes across as nothing more than high-handed meanness, and then of course, there’s always the matter of stones and glass houses.  Recently, while reading the weekly summary of interesting scientific articles at Cocktail Party Physics[3], a blog published by Scientific American, I came across a link to a post[4] on the proper use of the term ‘dimension’.  Since I’m currently working on exercises involving Lorentz contractions and time dilation,(basically four-dimensional space-time), I happily clicked on through.  What I arrived at was a blistering diatribe written by PhD computer scientist, Mark Chu-Carroll, about a ‘crackpots’ improper use of the word dimension.  Apparently, the ‘crackpot’ had the audacity to write the following, (among other things)

Energy can travel at the speed of light, and as Special Relativity tells us, from the perspective of light speed it takes no time to travel any distance. In this way, energy is not bound by time and space the way matter is. Therefore, it is in a way five-dimensional, or beyond time.

So, this is a rather philosophical use of the term five-dimensional.  I’ll give you that.  The author of the blog, however, went on a five paragraph rant starting with

Bzzt, no.
Energy does not travel. Light travels, and light can transmit energy, but light isn’t energy. Or, from another perspective, light is energy: but so is everything else. Matter and energy are the same thing.
From the perspective of light speed time most certainly does pass, and it does take plenty of time to travel a distance.

and after illustrating the theory of time dilation for awhile ends with,

It’s not that there’s some magic thing about light that makes it move while time stops for it. Light is massless, so it can move at the speed of light. Time dilation doesn’t apply because it has no mass.

Which is all very nice, except for one thing.  Here’s what Brian Greene author of “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality” and famed PBS popular scientist has to say about how light experiences time.

A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all  Light realizes the dream of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry; it doesn’t age.

Hunh…  so… anyway. Maybe we do need to correct ‘bad’ science when we find it.  Maybe someone does need to protect the internet at large from the dread of crackpottery, but in this case I’m reminded of a quote from one of my favorite scientists, Dr. J. B. Tatum[5],

Phillips opened his article by writing about “deep ignorance and antiscientific attitudes” concerning collecting. I am one of those who-in spite of 20 years of active scientific research (although not in ornithology)-hold to those very views that Phillips criticizes, and I do not feel that he does great credit to his own arguments or to ornithology as a whole by the use of such intemperate language.

In science as in most aspects of life,intemperate language is simply neither necessary or classy.

References:

1.  The Tunguska Event
http://copaseticflow.blogspot.com/2013/02/tesla-meteors-and-maps.html

2.  RASL
http://www.boneville.com/store-rasl/

3.  Cocktail Party Phyiscs
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2013/03/01/physics-week-in-review-march-2-2013/

4.  New Dimensions of Crackpottery
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2013/02/26/new-dimensions-of-crackpottery/

5.  On Killing Birds
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4512071

After writing a post about the hodograph of Sir W. R. Hamilton and how it relates along with a few other rather obscure mathematical theorems to angular momentum and planetary orbits, my wife, a PhD physicist, remarked, “Yes, but what about the hodoscope?”.  A little bit of digging revealed that unbeknownst to me she had actually built a hodoscope.

A hodoscope is a subatomic particle detector that displays the path a particle travels along through a region of space.  It does this by utilizing an array of single particle detectors that each on it’s own can only detect the presence of a particle in its active region.  By tracking the binary events produced by each detector, (logical high for the presence of a particle and logical low for its absence), the hodoscope can reconstruct the track of the particle display it on an array of pixels on your computer screen for example, or on an array of light bulbs, as in the original hodograph discussed below.

The first hodoscope, was designed and built by Dr. Thomas H. Johnson and Dr. E. C. Stevenson of the Bartol Research Foundation of the Franklin Instititue.  In time for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. The Review of Scientific Instruments described it as:

… a hodoscope, designed by Dr. Johnson of the Bartol Institute, will show the paths of individual cosmic rays by means of flashing neon lamps. The astonishing thing about these rays is that they have come to us through our atmosphere, which is equivalent to over two feet of lead, whereas similar radium rays will penetrate only about two inches of lead.

A diagram of the array of detector tubes used in the hodoscope is shown below. All diagrams are taken from the Franklin Institute report on the device.

M1 and M2 are detectors that are used to determine when a single particle has penetrated the entire device as a cosmic ray would, but a lower energy background particle from the laboratory would not.  If M1 and M2 both fire at nearly the same time, then the tubes in the array are allowed to fire and light their constituent bulbs in the devices display.

Why should all of this be interesting to electrical engineers?  Check out the circuit that detects coincident events between M1 and M2 and uses those events to enable the array of tubes to display the cosmic ray’s track.

It’s an early example of a vacuum tube logic circuit!  Notice that they could incorporate a number of gates, (called grids in vacuum tube parlance), denoted by the squiggly lines in each tube.  The operation of the circuit is described in one final excerpt from the Franklin Institute’s report:

In closing, I leave you with a picture of the hodoscope from Electrical Engineering magazine circa 1933 and it’s eerily similar modern counterpart, (in form, but not in function), the Fringe light box.

References:

1.  Franklin Institute Report http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016003233913459

2.  IEEE Electrical Engineering Article
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6430683&contentType=Journals+%26+Magazines&sortType%3Dasc_p_Sequence%26filter%3DAND%28p_IS_Number%3A6430679%29

3.  Review of Scientific Instruments on the 1933 World’s Fair
http://rsi.aip.org/resource/1/rsinak/v4/i6/p329_s1

4.  hodagraph post
http://copaseticflow.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-hodograph-and-mamikons-theorem.html

5.  Built a hodoscope
http://chipdesignmag.com/carter/2012/05/30/of-giant-chips-particle-physics-and-old-tech-made-new/

If you were pinning the hopes of your next startup on last year’s announcement of twisted light communications  you might want to scale back you venture capital search drastically, or if you’re far enough along, hurry up and cash the check. Last year, a team of scientists claimed that they had made the first transmission modulating the orbital angular momentum of light.  They claimed that by modulating different whole integer values of lights spin, they could provide much broader communications bandwidth  than what was currently available.  Their scientific report appeared in Nature, and subsequently on the BBC new service as well as other media outlets.

Since then, it has been shown, (see the references), that the newly proposed mode of propagation, at least in free space, can’t bee sustained and does not offer bandwidth improvements over existing communication methods such as multiple in multiple out, (MIMO).  One study even showed that some of the claims made for the method contradict the second law of thermodynamics.

While large media splashes were made about the initial reports of OAM technology demonstrations, I can’t find a single mention of the contradicting studies in any of the major media outlets.  This brings up the question of responsibility in scientific journalism.  How far should the popular scientific press be expected to go to make the public aware of counter views to, or disputes of science and technology they’ve reported on?  I know there are a number of new scientific developments every day, and it would probably be impossible to track the progress of each development.  However, in one case this would seem to be an invalid excuse.  The comment stream at the end of the Scientific American report actually contains a link to one of the contradicting studies.

For big splash articles like those linked to below in Scientific American, the BBC, and Nature, should the public expect their news sources to update them on developments instead of leaving them ignorant by omission?

References:

Encoding many channels on the same frequency through radio vorticity: first experimental test

http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/3/033001/article

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/14/3/033001

BBC Report on Twisted Light

BBC:  ‘Twisted’ waves could boost capacity of wi-fi and TV

Nature:Terabit free-space data transmission employing orbital angular momentum multiplexing
doi:10.1038/nphoton.2012.138

Scientific American: Twisted Radio Waves Could Expand Bandwidth for Mobile Phones

Is orbital angular momentum (OAM) based radiocommunication an unexploited area?

Comment on ‘Encoding many channels on the same frequency through radio vorticity: first experimental test’

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/14/11/118001