March 2009 Archives

Technophiles who happen to be wandering around northern California (actually, it's really central California, but Californians seem to consider anything north of, say, Bakersfield to be "northern California.") with time on their hands could do a lot worse than to drop in at the Embedded Systems Conference going on this week at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center -- surprisingly actually located in San Jose. It's a compendium of all the computer and computer-related technology at the forefront of what makes our society go.

Not many decades ago, the only computers available were giant clunky things of little value to anyone but scientists, insurance companies, and corporate accountants. The overwhelming majority of Americans had never seen a computer outside of the occasional Hollywood movie.

Not no more! Most of us now either spend much of our working days tapping at a desktop or laptop computer, or know somebody who does. Nearly everyone has access to and is comfortable using such machines. That, most people think, is what makes our society computer-bound.

The vast majority of computers we encounter today, however, don't look like computers at all. They're what are called "embedded systems." To find the nearest embedded system, all you have to do is pull your cellphone, Ipod, PDA, or whatever you like to call your mobile communications device, out of your pocket. It's nothing but a glorified wireless networking computer.

Want more? Go heat up a cup of coffee in a microwave oven. The few non-computer-controlled microwaves still in existence are pretty much dinosaurs. The same goes for your clothes washer. If your television isn't just a big computer terminal set up to display streaming video, its days are numbered. By this summer, it'll need a computer called a "set-top-box" to receive digital TV signals and convert them to the analog signals such ancient non-computerized TVs need.

As I've often said, just about every piece of equipment more complicated than a lead pencil is now computer controlled. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

All those computerized gadgets, from the thermostat on your wall to the radio in your car are embedded systems.Such microprocessor-based control systems are called "microcontrollers."

Indeed, virtually all of the cars on the road today are run by multiple interconnected embedded computers, each running one of the vehicles subsystems. New vehicles, for example, are all required to have tire-pressure monitoring systems consisting of a module in each tire with a sensor feeding pressure data to a tiny microcontroller, which then passes the information via a tiny radio to a receiver in the wheel well, which then feeds it to a microcontroller that runs your electronic dashboard. If the tire pressure starts to sag, all those separate microcontrollers send up an alarm that culminates in a light blinking on your dashboard to warn you about it.

By now you should be convinced that embedded computers are all around you, like little gnomes hiding in the woodwork watching and reacting to your every move. Put that way, it seems kinda creepy. In fact, though, embedded systems are more like little invisible servants waiting at your beck and call. They only show up when you want or need something that they can provide. If you don't think about it, you'll never even notice them.

The Embedded Systems Conference now going on in San Jose is the annual West Coast gathering for all the software and hardware engineers that make embedded systems possible. There are two such gatherings, of which ESC West is the largest. The smaller gathering (ESC East) happens in the Fall in Boston, Mass. At these gatherings, embedded-system developers share information about the latest bits and pieces available to go into their creations, and the latest ideas about how to put them together.

For example, Lantronix, Inc., which specializes in secure, remote device networking and data center management technologies, is announcing support for Linux on their wired embedded device server product, MatchPort AR. The company says its Linux software development kit (SDK) significantly simplifies and accelerates the process of developing Linux-based embedded platforms. Developers can integrate their applications using predefined configuration profiles and software assembly tools. Sample applications are provided within the SDK, allowing developers to jump-start their application development.

The company says its SDK helps users take advantage of the well-established Linux development community, allowing engineers to create new applications with greater flexibility and improving time to market. "The Linux development community is one of the fastest growing today," says Daryl Miller, vice president of engineering of Lantronix. "Working with our partner Nissin Systems, we were able to take this first leap in penetrating the Linux space, and will continue to establish Linux as the base platform for our product development moving forward."

Another company, Virtium Technology Inc., which is a provider of memory and solid state storage solutions for mission-critical applications, introduced a new family of DDR3 dual-function semiconductor memory modules combining a DRAM module and SATA compact Flash or SSD modules into a single space-saving form-factor. The company says its new module family is an innovative way to fit more memory and storage into space-constrained embedded systems. The modules are said to implement new DDR3 technology to offer higher data bandwidths up to 12.8 Gigabytes per second and at lower power consumption to reduce heat dissipation and improve reliability by minimizing or eliminating single bit ECC errors.

The company is making the memory modules available in commercial grade and industrial grade, and can provide ruggedized units for adverse environments. Virtium engineers are available to show ESC attendees techniques for saving space in embedded applications for industrial automation, motion control, mobile systems, military and defense systems, medical equipment, and other systems.

These are just two examples from the hundreds of technological developments that attendees are learning about at the Embedded Systems Conference. Most of the major providers of embedded components are represented, as well as a large cross section of Silicon Valley engineers combining these elements into the next generation of computer-controlled devices that will provide the infrastructure we will rely on for services from highway transportation to entertainment from now into the foreseeable future.

Improving patient care and reducing overall healthcare costs through smart technology systems is a key priority of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Allocated economic recovery funding includes $19 billion for grants and incentives that utilize health IT in order to save lives by reducing waste and decreasing medical errors.

One of the few trends in health care technology that promises to actually reduce costs while improving patient care is the move toward seamless networking of electronic patient records. The ultimate goal is to move all working records, from detailed test results to clinical history files for every individual, to electronic database form, and to make such records shareable between healthcare professionals on an as-needed basis. Likely, this will include wearable personal monitoring devices, such as for EKG and blood pressure, wirelessly linked into the database.

Development of this trend is proceeding as a number of parallel threads we expect to eventually converge. One of those threads is seamless sharing of medical records between institutions.

On Friday (3/20/09), a collaborative effort involving computer-system developer IBM, healthcare information technology developer MedVirginia, and the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) announced a first-of-a-kind electronic records exchange system to help speed the process of granting disability benefits for millions of Americans. Through the use of new software and services, the SSA claims to have shaved time needed to evaluate disability benefits from months to minutes.

The project, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Cooperative, represents the first health information exchange between a regional health information organization and a U.S. federal agency. The new system, which uses IBM's Health Information Provider (HSP) solution, is said to not only reduce processing times, but improve claims accuracy and reduce costs.

Spokespersons for the project explain that SSA uses individual medical records to determine almost 3 million disability claims each year. To make those decisions, the agency relies on doctors, hospitals, and other health professionals to provide medical information about patients. Through the migration from paper to electronic transmissions based on the patient's authorization, the agency is able to significantly reduce the time spent waiting for medical records and improve the service for those it serves. NHIN's goal is to enable secure access to such healthcare data and real time information sharing and exchange of healthcare data among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories and pharmacies, and other stakeholders, regardless of the location or application.

Providing such information-sharing infrastructure is, of course, key to achieving the ultimate goal of seamless integration of the healthcare IT system.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) surprised, if not everyone, at least a lot of people, Monday (3/16) by announcing the launch of a line of data servers based on what the company calls "Cisco Unified Computing System." What surprised many is the fact that the new system invades turf that Cisco has long left to Hewlett Packard (HP). In the past, so the thinking goes, the two companies cooperated in the enterprise data system market, with HP providing the computers that store and retrieve the data (the servers), and Cisco content to provide the networking infrastructure to interconnect them. Cisco's new blade-style server product, however, competes directly with HP's offerings in the enterprise data system market.

The product, called Data Center 3.0, is said to reduce total cost of ownership, accelerate business growth, and extend the lifecycle of current infrastructure.

Where have we heard that before?

Cisco, however, is doing things to make good on this promise. What media pundits might wake up to is the business strategy behind it. At least as important, however, is the fact that it is designed as a fully functional virtualized platform. This is something that I haven't heard any reports pick up on, so that is what I'll spend most of this blog describing.

Business Strategy
From a business strategy standpoint, Cisco has pulled together an "ecosystem" of partners making software and hardware components needed to make a complete solution. Partners include storage-disk maker EMC, enterprise software developers VMWare and Red Hat, and several others.

Such alliances are generally the best way for a single company to approach a technically complex market like enterprise data systems. It goes back to Marketing 101: stick to your knitting. That rule (which is often honored in the breach to many CEOs' eventual chagrin) can be paraphrased thus: "Do what you do best, and leave it to others to do the rest."

Each company has its core competence, which is what it does best, and hopefully better than its competitors. That's where it should concentrate its efforts to provide the greatest value added.

Every complex system, however, requires a range of core competencies beyond what virtually every company has at its disposal. The partnership model that Cisco seems to favor can, if done well, bring together the set of core competencies needed to make a technologically superior product. Products developed by any other strategy are doomed to be a combination of best solutions in some areas and less-than-optimal (read "amateurish") solutions in others.

Virtualization
But, that's not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is one of the core competencies Cisco has managed to incorporate into its new product through this team approach: virtualization.

Virtualization is a relatively recent software development that most people, including most engineers, haven't a clue about. It's actually a simple idea with profound implications.
Conventional computer architectures have a microprocessor-hardware base, with an operating system (OS), such as Windows or Linux, linking that hardware with the world of application software (think Word, Excel, Quicken). The user interacts through a human-machine interface (HMI) consisting of a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and other peripheral devices.


Figure 1: Conventional computer systems have an OS running directly on the microprocessor hardware.

Some such systems (such as that clanky old monster in my basement) allow the user to chose from a number (usually two) of available systems when turning on the computer. For example, the monster in the basement is set up to normally boot up with the Mandrake Linux OS, but has an option for booting up with Windows XP. Sometimes I want to use Linux, and sometimes Windows. With this machine, I can have either -- but not both at the same time.

Virtualization includes an extra layer, called a "hypervisor" inserted between the operating system and the OS. This runs directly on the hardware, representing itself to the hardware as a complete, monolithic OS.


Figure 2: Virtualized computer systems insert an extra software layer, called a hypervisor between the hardware and OS.

Technical market analysis applies mathematical analysis of patterns in 2-D data sets to stock market (actually, any financial market) buy, sell, and hold decisions. The two dimensions are, of course, market price and time. This entry looks at one reason such data sets should be viewed as chaotic systems.

You've all heard that the so-called Butterfly Effect is a characteristic of chaotic systems. It is the fact that small, seeming unrelated happenings can have major effects on results in a chaotic system. The classic version says that a butterfly flapping its wings in China (or some other remote location) can cause a hurricane to hit South Florida.

Since few of us have a real feel for how global weather patterns develop, we all tend to say: "Yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, blah. I've heard it before, and sure it might be real to weather patterns, but it's not real to me."

This story, however, illustrates in a way we all can relate to how the Butterfly Effect works in another chaotic system -- financial markets of all kinds. I offer it up to help unbelievers understand that these markets are truly chaotic. How chaos rules stock market price movements, and how to understand its effects, is mathematically complex, but the starting point is to accept that accurate financial market analysis is impossible without using chaos theory.

That's not to say technical market analysis based on chaos theory tells the whole story. The full development shows that fundamental stock analysis is necessary to understand the forces driving stock-price movements, which technical analysis only describes.

This story depicts characters and events that are fictitious. Any similarities.... You know the rest. That the story depicts how real people and events interrelate you can judge for yourself.

In 1992, Xin Hua was a wildlife photographer in China on assignment as part of a Peoples Republic grant to Professor Yau Khan of Beijing University to study insect flight dynamics for the purpose of improving the performance of high-speed aircraft. Prof. Yau wanted to obtain high-speed video of butterflies in free flight, rather than tethered in a wind tunnel.

Such free-flight photography is difficult because, unlike the situation in a wind tunnel where the insect is constrained to be stationary in the vision system's field of view, the insect is free to move in three dimensions, while the camera must follow it. For this reason, Prof. Yao hired Xin, reputed to be the best photographer in China for this type of assignment, rather than try to do it himself or assign it to a graduate student.

Xin spent weeks trying to obtain a few minutes of film that would meet Prof. Yau's specifications. The weeks turned into months as Xin filled dozens of CDs with hours of clips showing hundreds of different butterflies flitting across fields in rural China. Finally, he had an hour or so of video that could be used in Prof. Yau's study, along with days worth of video that was beautiful, but not quite what Yau needed.

Being one of China's hungry young entrepreneurs, Xin negotiated a contract with Beijing University and the People's Republic Central Committee that would allow him to market his excess butterfly video worldwide through stock photography service Corbis. Xin shared the royalties with Beijing University.  The Central Committee was pleased to have economic stimulus.

Akira Matsumori was an advertising executive at a firm in Tokyo, Japan. One of his firm's client's was the Japanese Tourism Bureau, and, in early 1994, he was assigned to create a wonderful new ad campaign to promote the Cherry Blossom festival to potential tourists throughout the world. Matsumori developed a campaign composed of a number of ads that all climaxed with a butterfly landing on a cherry blossom.

There was no way he was ever going to obtain actual footage of a butterfly flying in from the left to land on a cherry blossom located on the right side of the screen, with all of the action limited to the bottom third of the frame, so he hired the American film graphics company Industrial Light and Magic to create a lifelike sequence using CGI technology.

To ensure that the butterfly flight was realistic, ILM artists purchased stock video from Corbis showing slow-motion butterfly free flight. The video they studied was, of course, Xin Hua's, because it was practically the only slow-motion close-up video of butterflies in free flight existent.

From Xin's video, the ILM artists developed models of how a butterfly's wings would move if it were flying horizontally from the left and landing on a cherry blossom on the right. They then used thier models to render a butterfly animation to match Matsumori's art director's specifications. They gave the butterfly a dramatic wing coloration pattern based on stock photos of North American Monarch butterflies, with black borders and an arresting gold-color fill.

By the Fall of 1994, the Matsumori's ad campaign was ready to roll out worldwide to generate interest for the 1995 Cherry Blossom Festival in late Spring. By January of 1995, the ads were blanketing television channels all over North America, from Mexico to Canada.

Maria Delgado was a travel agent in Tijuana, Mexico. Her husband, Manuel, had a highly successful leather-goods store catering to tourists. Part of Manuel's sales strategy was to mark relatively high prices on his goods, so that he could give deep "discounts" during protracted negotiations with customers. This was lots of fun for the tourists, and gave them a sense of accomplishment by negotiating the deep discounts. Manuel's shop did very well.

Manuel brought in a large stock of handbags, boots, leather jackets, and pants to sell during the annual motorcycle run starting from downtown San Diego, California and ending in a big parade along Tijuana's main thoroughfare. It was to be a huge tourist marketing event, and Manuel's shop was busting at the seams!

The week before the motorcycle run, Maria saw Matsumori's Cherry Blossom Festival advertisement. Being in the travel business, she had arranged vacations for hundreds of tourists, but, being an aggressive Mexican entrepreneur like her husband, she had never taken a vacation herself. Matsumori's ad made the travel bug bite her hard!

She loved the exotic scenes of Japanese landscapes. She wanted to go shopping in the Ginza. She wanted to visit Buddhist temples. Especially, she absolutely fell head over heels in love with ILM's CGI animated butterfly. It was so lifelike and moved so beautifully.

Making an instant decision, she threw caution to the winds and negotiated a practically free flight for her, Manuel, and the children to go for a month-long tour of Japan during Cherry Blossom time. With her travel-business connections, she obtained cut-rate accommodations near all the great Japanese tourist attractions. It was going to be a huge surprise for Manuel when she told him at dinner that night.

Oh, it was a surprise alright. In fact, it was more of a shock. "We can't do that! My shop is full to bursting with stuff for the motorcycle run as well as the stuff for the rest of the Summer. I can't just walk away and leave it for a month."

"We can afford it," countered Maria, "We've been doing very well. We can afford to take a month off for the children to see Japan before they grow up. Besides, I can't cancel all these reservations. I had to put down deposits and everything."

"But, all our cash is tied up with this stock."

"You'll just have to sell it during the motorcycle run. Clear the store out , and we'll have cash to enjoy our trip."

During the mid-1990s, my wife, Bonnie, and I were living in western Arizona, and we attended the Tijuana Run every year with friends from the local motorcycle repair shop across the border in Needles, California. In 1995, I'd just sold a struggling magazine I'd started and been trying to keep afloat. For the first time in a couple of years, we had a little money in our pockets.

After the motorcycle run and the parade, we settled down for some serious shopping. Bonnie was still carrying around the beige handbag I'd bought her several years before. It certainly didn't go with her black leather motorcycling outfit, and was well past its prime, anyway. So, she was in the market for a replacement that would be more appropriate. She found it in Manuel's shop.

Now, I never really enjoyed the kind of aggressive negotiations Manuel specialized in. I don't much like confrontation, and don't much care whether a pocketbook costs $30 or $50 as long as I have the cash and think it's not a ripoff. Bonnie, however, likes negotiating a bargain. So, I always let her do the deals.

"You pick out anything you want, and get the price you want. I'll pay for it," is what I told her.

Because Manuel's travel-agent wife had fallen in love with an animated butterfly based on a real butterfly photographed by a Chinese wildlife photographer, the market price for that handbag in that shop at that time on that morning was $15 -- well below the $45 I'd have expected to pay for it in the States.

Notice that the handbag did have an intrinsic value based on the cost of the materials, labor, energy to make it and transport it to Manuel's shop, along with carrying costs Manuel incurred by keeping it in the store, and having a store to keep it in. That intrinsic value is the value a financial accountant would arrive at by fundamental analysis.

It is not, however, the market value. The market value is simply set by two parties negotiating one sale. It's based on a host of factors including, but not limited to, the two parties' ability to negotiate, their desire to make the sale, and the amount of coffee they'd drunk within one hour of starting the negotiations.The intrinsic value of the the item is only one factor among many.

In this case, the flapping of the Chinese butterfly's wings had a profound affect on the two parties relative willingness to make a deal, which had a major affect on the price arrived at.

The take home lesson is that hundreds of such seemingly unrelated events affect each and every sale of a financial instrument, whether the deal is struck between amateurs, professionals or 10 year olds swapping baseball cards. That fact makes stock markets -- indeed all markets -- chaotic systems.

A couple or three generations ago, healthcare was personal. At least, it was perceived as personal. You had your personal healthcare professional -- called "your family doctor" -- who made house calls, knew your medical history by heart, and had treated you and your family for generations. He (back then, doctors were invariably males) made an effort to be easily accessible.

As time went on the "personal" disappeared from healthcare. Perhaps it was the rapid development and deployment of novel medical technologies during the 20th Century increasing the cost of running a doctor's office, so doctors had to expand their practices just to keep even. Perhaps we became hypochondriacs, consulting physicians so often that they couldn't get out of the office. I don't really know why. History of healthcare business trends is not my area of expertise.

What I do know is that a new generation of clinical technology is poised to change the way doctors run their offices, and, perhaps, put "personal" back in healthcare. For example, Tuesday (3/10) two emergency medicine physicians, Peter Hudson, M.D., and Wayne Guerra, M.D. introduced a new iPhone app called iTriage to provide consumers with actionable healthcare information. iTriage helps consumers evaluate their symptoms, lists potential diagnoses, and provides locations for treatment.

Consumers can access iTriage's expansive library of medical symptoms, diseases, and procedures to immediately see initial diagnostic options and get recommendations on the appropriate level of service required. iTriage integrates these results with geolocation technology to provide users with specific information on the most relevant nearby treatment facilities.

Users can tap into a national directory of emergency departments, urgent care facilities, retail clinics, and pharmacies through the app's proprietary healthcare-focused search engine. In addition to location-specific data for mapping purposes, consumers can get detailed information on these facilities including enhanced descriptions of capabilities and areas of specialization, links to appropriate web sites, hours of operation and contact information. Quality reports from HealthGrades on hospitals and physicians can be downloaded and emailed directly to users' iPhones. Marketed thorugh the developers' company, Healthagen, iTriage is currently available in the Apple App Store for $0.99.

In a similar development, on Wednesday (3/11) crisis information management technology vendor ESi released WebEOC for Hospitals, a crisis information management system designed to manage and communicate health information and hospital resources in real time.

"WebEOC for Hospitals gives hospital administrators and emergency managers real-time situational awareness of available resources," says ESi Director of Health Services William Glisson.

In a third development, also announced Tuesday, CAE, a provider of simulation and modeling technologies and integrated training solutions for civil aviation industry and national defense forces around the world announced signing contracts and alliances with Canadian organizations Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences in Toronto, the Universite de Montreal, and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. Under the agreements, the entities will develop simulation-based healthcare training systems.

"The aviation simulation-based training model is becoming universally recognized as one of the effective ways to prepare healthcare professionals to care for patients and respond to critical situations while reducing the overall risk to patients," said Robert E. Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer of CAE. "CAE has already applied its technology and capabilities developed for the civil aviation and military markets to public safety and emergency response. Healthcare simulation is a natural extension of this know-how. By partnering with experts in the healthcare field, we will leverage our knowledge, experience and best practices in simulation-based aviation training to work with healthcare experts to deliver innovative education, technologies and service solutions in order to improve the safety and efficiency of the healthcare industry."

Whether these Healthcare de novo initiatives will help reduce healthcare costs while improving both service and clinical outcomes remains to be seen. Recent history is not encouraging. Healthcare costs over the past 50 years or so has increased more rapidly than just about any other measure of social activity. It certainly has increased faster than life expectancies!