Recently Congress passed the Financial Reform Bill. President Obama and the Democrats congressman have praised it as a pallative to prevent a future financial collapse. President Obama has a few more IQ points than me, but I find that guarantee to be naive political spin.

Whether we pass new laws or not, financial crisis will occur again, though probably not in his lifetime. And the cause will probably be a scenario we didn’t legislate against, unless free markets and human emotions are completely removed by some advanced technology.

Furthermore, enacting thousands of pages of new laws to prevent excessive risk taking is premature when we are mired in a Great Recession now showing signs of retrenchment.  The Recovery Act enacted in January 2009 was either ill-conceived or too small, depending on whether you side with Hunter Lewis or Paul Krugman. That debate could go on forever, to the delight of the editorial pages of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.  The next debate in Congress will be the extension of Bush Tax Cuts – the monetary equivalent of stimulus spending though targeted at stimulating private spending that sustains a recovery. I think the key question is what tax cuts actually do that.

Quoting from an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, “The economy’s central problem is not lack of money to hire workers or make loans or rates that are too high. It is lack of hiring and lack of lending, despite cash cushions at many corporations and big banks and rates that are already very low.”

In other words, the solution does not require more of the same public spending we have seen over the last two years. The solution lies with increasing the risk motive . When companies hire workers and expand product lines they are betting on demand and betting takes money. Corporations are sitting on a mountain of money (Apple, Microsoft and Cisco have a combined ~$130B give or take). Private equity is sitting on a mountain of money. And banks are flush with 0.25% Federal loans. What is missing is motivation to spend, lend, and take risks.

My company, Wattminder Inc., has received stimulus awards from the DOE and NSF as part of the Recovery Act of 2009. This pays for an engineer or two, and a few graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, our research partner. It’s a good thing, it helps advance the state of the art of solar photovoltaic diagnostics. But those programs alone won’t put California back to work.

The stimulus required to put California (and America) back to work comes in the form of policy changes, like a “Feed In Tariffs” to encourage alternative energy power generation. Germany’s FIT helped them become the world leader in alternative energy production; And tax code changes that encourage repatriation of profits when US jobs are created; And banking incentives to expand lease & credit lines for small businesses. A a venture capitalist told me recently that one of his portfolio companies was using investor cash to buy manufacturing equipment to ramp production because the mezzanine credit facilities are available.

Instead of fretting over China’s ability to buy our goods and debt, we should be weening ourselves off of foreign oil – the major component of our trade deficit. Cap ‘n Trade is doomed legislation.  How about an import tax on oil instead? Start small but ratchet it up every year until alternatives become lucrative – for suppliers and consumers.

The most common mechanisms are credit card theft from lost wallets, rifled mailboxes and trusting your card to someone who copies down the information required to enter an online purchase.

After 9/11, President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and Congress empowered it with the authority and the budget to prevent “bad guys” from hatching or executing terrorist plots. For the most part the American people support this, although most of us know very little about DHS beyond airport security measures. No less than twelve security organizations are involved in data collection and data mining across a vast array of records and online activities.

The private sector, through companies like Google, organize and catalog the world’s information. Millions of websites use “cookies” to remember impersonal details that improve customer support. For instance, Amazon “remembers” what you purchased and what you search for, and they use it to make suggestions for your next purpose. For the most part this information is harmless unless you are a ‘bad guy”.

Through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, we volunteer much more information about our behaviors and our actions. When you play games on social sites (e.g. Farmville or the array of “if you were an xxx what kind of xxx would you be” games) you are creating entries in a database that describe you in order to better serve advertising to you. This may benefit you, but it benefits Facebook and Zygna, etc. much more.

Smart phones connected to social media sites allow us to advertise our location, our buying habits, our friends and our actions recorded in image, video and voice. We are gleefully creating nuggets of information for the government mining operation.

Orwellian totalitarianism (George Orwell’s 1984) is not a requirement for the manipulation of a society. We’re going down that path voluntarily because we get rewards as we go. Our shopping gets easier, our personal networks are more robust, our lives appear to be simpler despite a our addiction to gadgets and hyper-disruption.

But we are not out of the woods. All of this technology and all of this data enables mistaken and purposeful acts of identify theft. There are stories about two-year olds getting held up by the TSA because their names are on the “no fly list”. Duh, your name isn’t your identity, it’s just a set of letters assigned by your parents. If you Google your “letters”, you will likely get hits that really are about you or content you created. Your IP address (if you have cookies turned on) biases Google to rate you higher in the search result. But there will be hits for people with the same name that are not you. What if they are “bad guys” creating a trail of illegal activity that could trigger DHS to knock on your door, or put you on the “no fly list”.

What if they’re just “dumb guys” leaving a trail of sleeze or stupidity that is is mistakenly associated with you. Maybe a prospective employer or potential romantic “date” reads it and makes a snap judgement.  A fews years ago, I was turned down on a car loan because a county I never lived in had a lien for unpaid property taxes – on the “letters” that match my name. It was a bit of hassle to straighten out my credit  report, but at least I knew who to call.

But what do you do about reputation theft? Whether by accidental data match or malfesance, the damage can be substantial. Who do you call to correct it? How do you know when it happens? Data in the 21st century expands like entropy – how will we put the genie back in the bottle.

Cecil Green, in his private office in downtown Dallas. He founded TI the year I was born, and though retired from TI, he took time from his philanthropy to entertain new hires and pass on some of the TI’s history.

Carver Mead. He was an early investor and board member of Actel Corp in the late 1980’s . He used to drop by and chat up the staff. He is a 5th generation Californian, and a pioneer in GaAs, Design Automation, Neural Networks, Vision and Imaging. His former students founded dozens of companies in these areas.

Buddy Melges. The only sailor to win the Mallory Cup three times in a row in his teen’s, he was one of America’s greatest sailors. I purchased an M-2o sailboat boat from him in 1976. I picked it up at his factory in Zenda, WI. He lived in a gabled home on the lake with a backyard full of sailboats and ice-boats. In the sitting room were all of his trophies. His 1972 Olympic Gold medal in the Soling Class was lying on the coffee table like a coaster. World Championship plaques adorned the walls. He later raced the America’s Cup Yacht, “Heart of America”, but his heart was in small boats. Today, his sons run the boatworks and the Melges 24 is one of the hottest boats on the racing circuit. He signed a copy of his book Sailing Smart for me in the late 70’s. While the topic was sailing, the principles could be applied to any desired success in life. I loaned it to a co-worker – forgot about it – and then never got it back.

Ted Turner. After he won the 1977 America’s cup, he and Gary Jobson campaigned a six-meter boat around the country for charity. They brought the boat to the Fort Worth Boat Club where I purchased a signed copy of their book on match racing. I have not, and will not loan that book out. Many people think of Ted Turner as the force behind 24hour news with CNN, a billionaire from Timer Warner buyout, and an ex-husband of Jane Fonda. But he started out as a small boat sailor. For the last few years he has become a conservationist rivaling Teddy Roosevelt – buying vast sections of the American West (and South American rangeland) to preserve it from development.

PS Dr. Turner E. Hasty was a pioneer R&D manager at TI and a personal mentor. He left TI to help to found Semitech with Charles Spork and Robert Noyce. He wasn’t famous because he didn’t seek it, but he certainly deserved it.

But what if he’s right, i.e. the phenomenon called social media becomes boring.

Jason Calacanis started a “quit Facebook” campaign over their incompetent privacy polices but I think it fizzled. People don’t hang with lynch mobs after it gets late and the cops come. People don’t stick with much of anything these days. Haiti – you mean there’s still an earthquake disaster in Haiti – I thought the  BP oil spill took precedence?

500 million Facebook users won’t quit Facebook over privacy flaws, not right away.

Mike Cassidy wrote in the June 20 SJ Merc, “Instead of wasting time on Farmville, why don’t you visit a real farm (with your kids)”.

I have friends I might jump on an airplane to be with in a time of crisis or celebration, but when their newsfeed drones on about their Farmville critters, I delete them. I simply don’t care about their accomplishments in Farmville or Mafia Wars.  The next worst thing in your feed is Ads – everybody and everything has a fan page.  There’s probably a charity page for “Brain Damaged Welders” (please don’t sue me Bruce Jay Friedman).

And I’m sorta tired of getting emails from friends suggesting I might like a website selling Canadian Viagra. I know they didn’t send the email – Facebook’s privacy holes gave access to the spammers.

But a deeper phenomenon is at work. Gadgets are addictive. YouTube is serving up 2B videos/day. 5B text messages are sent every day (almost all of them by teens who don’t use Twitter or Facebook).  Text messages remind your fiends that you are “now here” because otherwise you are “no where”, which is worse than death for a teen.

Txting, Facebook and Twitter provide “virtual validation”. We all need positive strokes and we’re all to quick to suspend belief that our “pretend friends” on social media sites think we’re cool, smart, attractive, successful, whatever.

At some point, the fakery will wear off.  Social Media as we know it today, will be the mass bulimia craze of the early 21st century.  Never happen you say? Facebook is an unstoppable force you say? Take Twitter for instance.  Certainly one of the most hyped phenomenons on the planet, yet the real tangible benefits of following and being followed are vanishingly small. Twitter’s ultimate role (who every ends up controlling it) is a really simple global real-time syndicated (RSgrtS) news feed.  The follow/be followed paradigm will be ditched.

Or maybe not. Maybe the “cloud” will coalesce into “everyone’s best friend”. Someone who knows everything about your life, and knows how to provide the manipulation you seek.

Big Brother, lend me an ear?

In my sophomore year, my roommate purchased an HP35, one of the first scientific calculators. It used Reverse Polish Notation which was cool, and would probably politically incorrect today. .
My sliderule and CRC were instantly out dated. Costing over a $1000 in today’s money it was out of my budget, so he let me share it until TI introduced a cheaper, albeit clunkier clone.

The computational analysis for my PhD thesis was done on the school CDC Cyber 70. A screaming 25MHz 60b mainframe with 256KB of core memory. I entered Fortran 77 programs on the IBM029 key punch. Make a mistake, start another card – although but it did buffer characters to save re-typing. I carried my programs and sub-routines in a shoebox. When I started at Texas Instruments, shoeboxes of keypunch cards were a common sight.

When I was developing TI’s first semi-custom CMOS design, I stored my design files on a removable 50MB platter. I carried it from my office to the design center and it never left my sight at work. .

When I established an ASIC design center I was able to get my own TI personal computer, a virtual clone of the one IBM introduced in 1982, except with a 5MB hard drive instead of dual floppy ports. It used a 4MHz Intel 8086. I outfitted the center with Daisy Designstations based on the 80186 and Mentor/Apollo DN workstations which used Motorola 68K processors. . One of my clients designed ASICs for the first 68030 MAC, the IIfx. We are constantly using today’s computers to design tomorrows.

We uploaded design files to Dallas for mask generation using a dedicated 9600baud modem (the rest of the TI sales office shared a 9600baud modem and they were a bit jealous).

I went through a succession of personal computers at work, based on 286, 386, 486, 586 (Intel renamed to Pentium before introduction to further isolate AMD), Pentium II, Pentium III, M, Centrino and currently a 2GHz Dual Core. My first portable computer was a Compact III . I lugged it around the US and overseas visiting customers for Actel. There was enough empty space in the back to hide bombs, drug or small endangered animals, but no airport security ever ask me to open it.

At home, I was one of Pac Bell’s first residential ISDN customers with effectively 56K of bandwidth. I was one of the first DSL customer, suffering through 3rd party maintenance and support nightmares. When it worked is screamed at 1.5MBps. A few years ago, I pulled all the plugs on Pac/SW/AT&T. My “triple play” is 15Mbps cable modem, off-name VOIP and satellite TV.
If the cable goes down (which has been very rare) I get Google Free Wifi at ~2Mbps (benefit of living in GoogleTown).

In my professional career, I’ve seen ~5 orders of magnitude increase in bit/sec processing and ~7 orders of magnitude increase in bits/m3 storage density with substantial price declines. But I’ve also the price of gasoline increase from 50c to $3.50 while the average gas mileage of a US automobile only increased from 15mpg to 25mpg, an increase of 3X in cost/mile. The attributes of Moore’s Law have not made much of an impact on transportation or energy consumption yet.

What is a digital legacy?

A digital legacy is the total available online content for a topic, person or an organization. Your digital legacy is everything created about you or by you that can be retrieved and displayed on an Internet-connected device. Most likely this is a browser but that’s a colloquial term that may not apply in another generation. Barring nuclear war or a totalitarian takeover of the Internet, your digital legacy exists as long as bits are stored. And right now that looks like a long time. For instance, the Library of Congress is archiving all Twitter “tweets” for some yet unknown future application.

What does this all mean?

In the purest sense, information is related to entropy. To paraphrase Claude Shannon, information is proportional to the logarithm of event probability . The more unlikely an event, the more information it conveys. For example, a Twitter retweet contains zero information. A time-specific tweet is a delta function, i.e.. the value of the information evaporates when the event has passed. On the Internet last week is a long time ago.

• Intellectual Property. Patents last for twenty years from the filing date. Copyright in the United States lasts for seventy years after the author’s death. Everything you create online that is an original work (i.e. you didn’t steal it from someone else) is entitled to copyright protection and potentially passes monetary value to your estate and heirs.
• Sentimental Property. To paraphrase Isak Dinerson, “our lives are our stories”. Your words, deeds and images describe you, they are proof that you lived, that you made a difference to someone present or in the future.
• Narcissistic Property. The vast majority of online content created on the web today is a form of self worship. Most tweets contain either contain no information (per Claude Shannon) or they merely advertise something you wish to promote – a skill, service or product. Blogs are a conduit for telling the world you exist or to generate traffic that can be monetized. But the topical nature of most blogs and tweets reduces the monetization value as time passes. The most egregious example is game activity on Facebook. If you believe your grandchildren will care about your luck with Farmville then perhaps you are too self-absorbed. My grandchildren have never asked me how I did on Pong nor will they ever.
• Cultural Property. The Library of Congress is archiving all Twitter tweets. Most tweets contain little or no information, but when combined they potentially contain archaeological information about our culture, our world, our collective points of view. The collected videos, email, SMS, tweets, etc. form a digital midden heap for future civilizations to ponder, laugh at, or ignore.
• Stuff. In the physical world it might be tools, clothes, appliances, gadgets, keepsakes, collections, etc. In the digital world it might be e-books, reference documents, email, software purchased, open-source code downloads, and web app subscriptions. I subscribe to a myriad of free web apps but my membership may not be worth anything unless my businesses depend on it. It is common in a family death, for the people closest to the deceased to choose from the personal items that are not specified in a will. That which wanted ends up in estate sales, Ebay, Goodwill or the dump. The same may be true for a lot of items on the digital knickknack shelf. So don’t worry too much about stuff, worry about things that pass on value or meaning.

What matters and what should you do?

Some things are simple:

• Take time to save the stories of your life.
• Don’t trash your reputation online.
• If access to online sites matters to you, then take steps to safeguard your passwords.
• Make a will, designate a digital executor. And start creating and preserving your stories.

In the end a digital legacy is simply a longer lasting version of a physical legacy

.
It differs from a physical “3D” legacy in the immutability of the content. Real stuff deteriorates. Pictures fade. Magnetic media fades. Things burn or get buried in trash heaps, lava flows, etc. But bits can be reformatted to live on in new forms, like disc storage evolving to holographic storage. Stuff is still stuff, it just lasts longer.

I read a story in the Wall Street journal (April 7, 2010) about James Alan Bouton, the author of “Ball Four” a best selling book on baseball published in 1970. The author created a controversy with antedotes about the infamous exploits of famous players of the 60’s. Several players were upset along with the commissioner. It was believed that Mickey Mantel took the accusations personally but before his death in 1995, Mickey called the author and left a personal message. The author states in the article that he is “saving the tape for his grandchildren”. But tapes don’t “save”, they decay. And worse, the devices that “play” tapes are disappearing. Unless Mr. Bouton takes steps to digitize the tape, his grandchildren won’t hear Mickey’s personal message to their grandfather.

Voice recordings are subject to accidental erasure. On a trip to visit my mother, she complained that her phone recorder was full and she didn’t know how to clean it out. No problem, I just selected ‘clear’. Then she told me that there was a message on the phone from my deceased brother. Nothing special, but just the last message he had left on the phone prior to his death. Gone now because of a reckless button push.

My cell phone messages must be re-saved every 10 days or they are automatically erased. For years I re-saved a special message from my five year-old grandson – until I forgot – and now it is lost.

Online Legacy introduced a feature called VoiceSafe that combines a simple voicemail server with perpetual storage. Subscribers receive an access code that they – or their loved ones – can use to record personal messages and brief stories over a telephone. The call is toll free in the US. The recordings are archived in the subscriber’s personal account where he can manage and share content directly through secret links or in perpetuity through his PermaSite digital safe.

Not everyone has an iPhone. Not every parent or grandparent wants to interact with a computer or the Internet. Many seniors are simply scared of the Internet because they fear loss of privacy or identity theft. And they might be right – every few months Facebook introduces a new way to expose your personal information to increase the network effects that drive advertising revenues. Facebook is a sharing site and a saving site.

I just finished a book on death and personal family memoir by Nothing to Be Frightened Of .  “Nothing” is a double entendre that also means “total annihilation of your being”. The central theme is, religious beliefs not withstanding, that the living brain simply can’t grasp it’s own death. To quote William Saroyan, “Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”

One implication is the living are compelled to embrace being alive, i.e. move on with your life after someone dies. Like a New Orleans funeral, strike up the pomp and circumstance after the tomb is shut.

Another implication is that websites that honor the dead are simply not interesting except to a very few loved ones who can’t let go. When I cycle home I use a bike trail that passes by a local cemetery. A nearby grave was decorated in flowers and flower petals laced into the chain link fence surrounding the cemetery spelled out “We miss you Mom”. I frequently saw two young women kneeling next to the site. I only pass this way once or twice a week, so seeing them every time meant they were there every day. But no more. Life goes on.

Creating memoir engages your memory. We are our memories. Memories older than eleven years are known to reside (and hide) in some corner of the hippocampus until something draws them out. Drawing them out brings you closer to your own past and brings people that affected you back into your life – either as memories, or contributors to your ongoing life story.

What is video? Video is “moving pictures”. A series of pictures that change many times a second will fool the eye into believing the image is moving.  A movie in a theater uses 24 pictures per second. A television show is 30 pictures per second. The iPhone 3GS video camera “takes” s 30 pictures per second at 640 pixels x 480 pixels. A picture that is part of a video is called a FRAME. Each FRAME therefore contains 3 x 640 x 480 BYTEs. A 30 FPS (frame per second) movie will use 30 x 3 x 640 x 480 BYTEs each second or 60 x 30 x 3 x 640 x 480 BYTES/minute. That’s a lot of BYTEs, about 1600 million bytes per minute, or ~100 Billion Bytes/hour. And that is only for what you SEE not what you HEAR. The sound is stored separately and the explanation for how that is done is a future topic. Fortunately sound takes much less space so we can ignore it for now.

But my iPhone only has 16GB of memory – how can it store several hours of video? The computer chips in the iPhone shrink the movie while it is being recorded. And the result is huge – almost 100 times smaller than raw numbers would predict. How is this possible? This shrinking is called ENCODING. It follows several simple principles. For instance your full name takes 14 letters to spell. The teacher puts your full name on your report card, but when she records your grades each week, she uses your initials (2 letters). By not writing the other 12 letter every day for you (and all the other kids in your class) she saves a lot of pencils over the school year. Encoding uses several techniques to “abbreviate” the movie data. When the movie is played (DECODING), the abbreviations are replaced with the full names, just like on your report card. These techniques are called arithmetic compression because they use a lot of tricky math. But that isn’t all. If you take a picture of the sky, there will be a lot of blue pixels right? Let’s pretend you are a “pixel” in a picture and you’re wearing your school-blue sweatshirt. The kids (pixels) standing next to you are also wearing the same blue color that your are. What if we replace the RGB color with a short note that says “I’m the same color as the kid in front of me (or to my left or right, and so on). Assume this “note” takes fewer BYTES than your actual color data would. This technique of saving data is called “spacial compression” because information about the “space” ( the kids near you) is used to reduce data.

Now let’s think about time. If you take a movie of a fast car, the pixels in each frame will probably be different. But what if you take a picture of a person. The colors in his face don’t change from one second to the next. Take the previous example of kids standing around you and think about in a high-rise building. On each floor of the building there are kids standing in rows and columns. Each kid represents a pixel in a frame. Each floor in the building is a different frame. A 30 story building is one frame of iPhone video – displayed as the elevator shoots from the ground to the top floor at 30 frames per sec. Your “color” might the same as the “color” of the kid on the floor directly above or below you. A short note could say “use the color of the kid on the floor directly above me”. This would save space – in fact this will save a lot of space if you think about how fast the elevator travels. This is called “temporal” compression. Temporal is a fancy word for time.

But wait, there’s more. When all the kids from all the classes are on the school ground do you notice if one of them stayed home sick. Maybe you would notice if one of your friends was missing. But if hundreds of kids are on the field you might not notice a few that you don’t know are missing.  The same thing is true when you eye looks at an image that has millions of pixels. Some of them could be missing and you would never notice. The eye isn’t perfect when looking at lights and colors.  Some colors are more noticeable than others. For instance, if there are a lot of kids wearing blue (your school color) jackets everyday, then your eyes won’t notice if a few of them stayed home sick. If a few kids always wear green jackets, you would notice if one of them was absent. The engineers that invented video encoding programs use facts about how our eyes work to remove some the color elements. This is called “sub-sampling”. Together these technique reduce the amount of data required to store a move by a factor of one hundred or more, allowing your iPhone to store several hours of video, and to make a single movie small enough to email to YouTube for instance. When you play an encoded movie, a reverse process takes place, to put the video data back. This is called DECODING. When you play a movie all of the abbreviations are replaced with full names, all of the little notes about which the color a kid near you in space or time, are replaced with actual color values, and so on. This happens on a frame by frame basis. The frames are “shrunk” during encoding and “un-shrunk” just before they get sent to the display you are watching.

None of this was possible in a hand-held device when you were born. The computer chips weren’t fast enough. The storage chips weren’t big enough. And it would have cost a ton of money to make a high quality video camera that fits in your pocket. In ten more years, the quality will be higher and the device will be smaller and cheaper. When your kids are ten, they might take video movies of everything they see every second of every day. Their whole life might be recorded and wirelessly saved somewhere to watch in the future.