Geek Gestalt

At Celebration V, the massive 'Star Wars' fan fest in Orlando this weekend, a large group of droid builders gathered for a photo--with dozens of their charges.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

ORLANDO, Fla.--When you're lucky, you're lucky. And on Saturday, I was lucky.

At about 9:20 a.m. Saturday, walking into the Orange County Convention Center here, where the massive Celebration V "Star Wars" fan fest is being held, I stumbled onto a scent that could only be described as geek heaven: a group picture of dozens of droid builders and their motley collection of R2-D2s and other creations based on George Lucas' sci-fi saga.

I wasn't the only one, of course. There were many people gathered around watching the scene unfold, including an official photographer taking the group's picture. And let's be honest: what's cooler than a picture of several dozen droids packed tightly together?

I'll tell you what: the scene afterward, when the photos are done being taken and when all these dozens of droids have to head out to do whatever it is they do at a "Star Wars" convention. And to me, there's no question at all that that was the best part: watching them smoothy disperse (see video below), one and two droids at a time. Except for Max. After you watch the video, you too, will wonder: Where's Max?

Since June 23, Geek Gestalt has been on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I've been looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. You can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

As part of Road Trip 2010, CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman visited the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, Fallingwater.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

MILL RUN, Pa.--After seeing a few Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces, you might expect to be a little jaded when it's time for the next one.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have spent time inside the Marin County Civic Center--a stunning Wright creation that was the set for the movie "Gattaca." I've visited Wright's Scottsdale, Ariz., architecture school, Taliesin West and have seen a few other of his buildings along the way.

But nothing prepared me for my Road Trip 2010 visit to the incredible Fallingwater, Wright's 1937 piece de resistance, a relatively small vacation house in the woods here, just more than 60 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, the home of the Kaufmann family, for whom he designed and built Fallingwater.

For decades, the property here was a country club. Then, Edgar Kaufmann Sr. began renting this woodsy getaway as a retreat for employees of his Pittsburgh department store. Later, Kaufmann purchased the land. But it was only after the Kaufmanns had hired Wright for a Pittsburgh project that the famous architect was commissioned to built a house here. In part, that was because the Kaufmanns' son, Edgar Jr., had studied at Taliesin West and knew that Wright would be a good fit for Bear Run, as the property is known.

Click here for a full photo gallery from Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece Fallingwater.

The majesty of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (photos)

Wright designed Fallingwater in 1935 and completed it in 1937, adding a guest house in 1938. Lilliane Kaufmann died in 1953, and her husband passed away in 1955. Not interested in living a country life, Edgar Jr., who wanted to live in New York City, decided that the great house was too special to put in the hands of private interests, and in 1963, he turned it over to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which still operates it today. It opened to the public as a museum in 1964.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of people a year have made the journey here to see what some have called America's most important, or best, private home. Having not seen them all, of course, I can't comment on that honorific. But I can say unequivocally that Fallingwater is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen, and it's a testament to Wright's imagination that the house blends in effortlessly into a woodsy scene otherwise untouched by humans and full of little else but trees, plants, animals, and the sweet sound of the stream flowing through the property and under the house itself.

Reconstruction
As is well known, Wright was a huge fan of cantilevering elements of his buildings, such as terraces and stabilizing them by anchoring them to a single load-bearing wall. And that's precisely what he did with Fallingwater. The house is probably most famous for its terraces, which appear to float out over the water.

An artist's rendering of Fallingwater. The building attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, a very impressive number for a small house built in 1937.

(Credit: Western Pennsylvania Conservancy)

But as the story goes, Edgar Kaufmann Sr. didn't necessarily believe that the terraces were structurally sound. As a result, he hired a Pittsburgh engineering firm to come and investigate--without Wright's assent. The firm felt that large steel beams were needed to stabilize the house and installed them.

Wright was not happy about that turn of events, but he went along with it. Years later, the terraces began to sag, and the unanswered question is whether Wright's inherent design was flawed, or whether the steel beams put too much weight onto the terraces and caused them to begin to list.

Either way, work was done in 1997 to support the lower terrace, and in 2002, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy completed a much more serious repair project that resulted in Fallingwater now being structurally sound and safe for the time being.

Wright built Fallingwater with a dependence on cantilevered terraces that were anchored to a single, load-bearing wall.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Of course, Wright's buildings--even his own--are well known to have all kinds of design errors. In some cases, such as with other parts of Fallingwater, that meant little inconveniences like leaks that couldn't be fixed.

As was related to me on my tour of Fallingwater, Kaufmann was upset that there was a leak in his study, to which Wright responded that Kaufmann should move his chair and replace it with a bucket.

In other parts of the house, such as at the end of one of its long, narrow, dark hallways, leaks could only be handled by putting in a drain.

Yet, despite these small blemishes, Fallingwater is seen the world over as an architectural gem. Its magnificent use of natural surroundings, clean lines, a commitment to an aesthetic dominated by vertical and horizontal lines, and a preference for bringing the outside nature inside, all make the house--like others Wright built--a treat to visit.

Perhaps the best example of Wright's use of organic design at Fallingwater is a choice he made--over Kaufmann's objection--to built a hatch into the house's Grand Room that, when opened, uncovered the stream below. The idea was to let the cool air from the stream rise into the house when it was hot and to bring in the calming sounds of the flowing water.

Wright was a fan of organic design, such as this hatch, which when opened, let in cool air and natural sounds from the stream below the house.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

But Wright also used design philosophies like folding ceilings that drew the inhabitant's eyes to the outside, more windows meant to allow the sounds of nature to come in, and abundant windows that let in sunlight for warmth in the cold seasons.

Throughout the house, Wright's own furniture adds to the decor. Indeed, in total, there are 169 pieces of Wright-designed furniture in the house, one of the world's largest such collections. As well, there are more Wright touches, like a Japanese wood print he had made as a present for Kaufmann.

Fallingwater can easily be seen as larger than life, yet the house--and its adjacent guest quarters--is actually fairly small, at least by the standards of the vacation homes of the very rich.

In total, the main house is just 2,885 square feet, while the guest house is only 500 square feet. Yet, because it is on several levels and leans out over the wonderful stream below, Fallingwater feels like much, much more than it is.

If you find yourself in western Pennsylvania in the future, I heartily recommend taking the time to wind through the backwoods there and head toward what may be Wright's most famous creation. But make a reservation. There are many others with the same idea. Even after all these years.

For the rest of this week, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. You can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

The National Cryptologic Museum, run by the National Security Agency, is a treasure trove of artifacts of the modern--and not so modern--history of code making and code breaking devices.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

FORT MEADE, Md.--For anyone with even the vaguest sense of the history of World War II, the term "Enigma" should hold some special meaning.

That, of course, was the name of the encryption device the Germans used to such great success during the first years of the war, allowing them to pass messages without worry of their being decrypted by the Allies.

But when the Allies finally solved the mystery of the Enigma, it turned the course of the war. The Germans were no longer able to stay ahead of the Allies and were no longer able to communicate in secret with anywhere near the efficacy that they had before.

Click here for a full photo gallery from the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum.

The crypto machines of the NSA museum (photos)

For any fans of the history of the Enigma, or of cryptology in general, there's one place that is a can't miss: the National Cryptologic Museum, run by the U.S. National Security Agency here. I had originally hoped that, as part of Road Trip 2010, I would be able to visit the NSA and talk to folks there about the latest in cryptologic techniques--but that was not to be. Fortunately, the museum allowed me--and many others--a chance to see where things in that field have been, and, using our imaginations, to see where things might be going next.

The museum features sections on the encryption devices and technologies used during the Civil War, the Cold War, World War II, and in the post-Cold War era. From a set of the various Enigmas used by the different branches of the German military services, to 19th century ciphers to cipher wheels and reels used by the Confederate government, it's hard to imagine a more complete collection anywhere. And who better to host it than the NSA?

There's also unexpected exhibits, such as one on the coded signals that hobos would use to alert each other to the best places to panhandle or squat or to avoid at all costs, to the secret messages encrypted in quilts made by slaves trying to help each other escape to freedom, to some of the supercomputers used by the NSA, the museum takes visitors on a rich journey through the history of codes and code breaking.

The dilemma I face while there was how much time to spend. I had figured it would take about an hour to tour the place, especially after I saw it from the outside. It's housed in a small, nondescript building not far from the NSA's world-famous headquarters. But once inside the museum, I realized that an hour wouldn't be nearly enough time to soak in the full breadth of what was on display.

Still, I tried to do the best I could, and with the photos I took--and am presenting in my associated photo gallery on the museum--I hope that I've conveyed enough of a sense of the place to make any visitor to Washington--or resident, for that matter--take the drive up Maryland Highway 295 and check it out for yourself. Just make sure that you turn left at the two large, all-glass buildings. The NSA would probably prefer that.

For the next week, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American Northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

Part of the semiconductor foundry at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, this machine is used to grow gallium nitride.

(Credit: Raytheon)

WALTHAM, Mass.--For Mark Russell, the vice president of engineering, technology, and mission assurance at defense giant Raytheon, engineering is not just his profession--it's also the lifeblood of the company.

It seems pretty obvious that engineering would be important at a company that makes just about every imaginable kind of defense system. But this important? At Raytheon, more than 40,000 of the total 75,000 employees are engineers, and the company is hiring thousands more each year.

To Russell, who grew up in the company (he's been there 27 years) it's a no-brainer that all six of Raytheon's major business units--integrated defense systems; missile systems; intelligence and information systems; network-centric systems; space and airborne systems; and Raytheon technical services--are driven by engineering and technology. And part of that is entirely practical: by having engineering driving the development side of the show, Russell can ensure that when the company builds new products, it builds in "hooks" ensuring both backward and forward compatibility.

And ultimately, he said, that is all about giving the company's customers--which range from the U.S. Navy and other elements of the U.S. Defense Department to an array of foreign governments--solutions to the problems they've presented.

I got a chance to talk to Russell, the top engineering and technology guy at Raytheon, during a stop at the company's corporate headquarters as part of Road Trip 2010. It was the beginning of what would end up being two days spent with various elements of the company--including BBN Technologies, the Cambridge, Mass., R&D shop that is sometimes credited with inventing the technology behind the Internet.

I met for a while with Russell--who called in by phone from Washington, D.C.--and Raytheon Chief Technology Officer Bill Kiczuk in the latter's office, and the two gave me a primer on the company's philosophy of building engineering into just about everything it does.

They talked a bit about the challenges of designing a missile system with the express goal of shooting down a failing satellite, and they set the table for one of my later meetings, during which I learned about Raytheon's groundbreaking work on a new semiconductor compound known as gallium nitride that it says is 10 times as powerful as current-generation materials and which will allow the military to build radars that are much more powerful than anything possible today.

Yet, despite the fact that Raytheon is known for its work on major projects like radar systems, missiles, naval destroyers, and the like, Russell pointed out that across the company, there are more than 8,000 programs and that none of them makes up more than a few percentage points of its overall revenue. Further, programs that are in the $10 million to $20 million range make up half of what Raytheon does.

How Raytheon innovates
To CTO Kiczuk, the answer to the question of how Raytheon innovates is simple: Across the board, everyone is free to pursue innovative ideas, and the company looks everywhere for new projects, both inside its own walls and outside at universities, start-ups, and other small companies. If Raytheon sees something it likes, it will try to license it, or buy its developer, and then it figures out how to mass produce the product.

Raytheon's killer laser 4, UAVs (photos)

View the full gallery

Inside the company, Raytheon has an annual innovation challenge in which it poses five hard problems that have come from customers and asks its employees to come up with possible solutions. Each year, it receives a few hundred white papers proposing answers, and selects five to fund for one year. If those projects bear fruit, then they are picked up by one of Raytheon's business units. "We keep it going long enough to see if it has life," Russell said.

Yet even though Raytheon is divided into the six units, there are no hard walls between them. Rather, the company encourages members of different businesses to weigh in on problems being addressed by others. That way, someone in one unit may discover that someone in another already has or is working on a solution to the same or a similar problem. If so, the two can collaborate going forward. In order to facilitate the discussions that would result in those kinds of discoveries, Raytheon holds regular internal symposiums, and hosts electronic idea sharing and discussion forums.

Similarly, it also has a program called Internal R&D, or IRAD, which searches for places where multiple business can collaborate on similar work to avoid redundancy, Kiczuk said.

And one of the key ideas at Raytheon is using existing technologies and applying them to non-traditional businesses. An example, said Kiczuk, is the question of whether radio frequency technology could be used to help with frost on citrus crops, much as microwaves were discovered to melt chocolate. The goal, ultimately, is to find the most and the best ways to apply technologies towards problem-solving technologies for the company's customers, he said.

Mission: Innovation
After my discussions with Russell and Kiczuk it was time to move on to Raytheon's Integrated Defense Systems headquarters in nearby Tewksbury, Mass. There, I met with a phalanx of professionals from the IDS team, led by Lee Silvestre, the vice president of mission innovation.

Silvestre's mandate is to help shape the face of Raytheon--meaning that she is tasked with coming up with new ways to think about the company's identity and how it can make a difference to its customers. Her department explores and vets ideas from throughout the company in a search for solutions to problems that go beyond core defense industries. And that also means looking for new, nontraditional ways that the company can grow, lest it fall behind the curve.

For example, Silvestre said, in a bid to figure out new ways to track the avian flu, IDS recently began discussions with the Centers for Disease Control. "They said, 'Why should we talk to you? You're about killing people,'" Silvestre recalled, referring to the fact that to the CDC, one of the world's largest defense contractors wouldn't necessarily be the most obvious partner (See related clarification at the end of this post). But while Raytheon may well be best known as the maker of a wide range of weapons systems, it also has extensive expertise in technologies that can be used for things such as tracking the spread of disease, and so the discussions moved forward.

Gallium nitride
One place that IDS is innovating is in the base compound used in high-performance semiconductors.

For a long time, silicon has been used for that base, but Raytheon wanted to find a better solution for phased-array radars, since it's the job of the semiconductor to boost the signal from a military-strength radar system from hundreds of megahertz to tens or hundreds of gigahertz, a frequency multiplication process.

At IDS, Raytheon already has a long history of producing semiconductors and even has its own foundry. And not long ago, the company began investigating whether a new compound, gallium nitride, might offer an order-of-magnitude improvement over silicon. Underlying that decision were some of the properties of gallium nitride: it has a high bind gap, meaning it is good at withstanding electricity; it pulls a lot of heat out; and it is as sensitive as possible on the receiving side, while being as powerful as possible on the transmitting side.

According to IDS' Joe Smolko, Raytheon sees gallium nitride offering five to 10 times the power density advantages--in size and cost--over what is available today. That means it could produce higher power and smaller chips with a smaller dollar per watt of power cost.

Smolko said that gallium nitride's sweet spot is that it is far more efficient than current phased-array semiconductor compounds like gallium arsenide, particularly when it comes to heat generation.

And that means that Raytheon sees a huge opportunity to migrate the Navy and other users of phased-array radars away from legacy technology like gallium arsenide to gallium nitride.

Going back to Raytheon's companywide mandate to make its equipment forward- and backward-compatible, Smolko argued that new gallium nitride-based semiconductors will be able to be integrated into legacy radar systems, like those on the F-18 fighter jet. And Raytheon sees that the new compound's time has come--Smolko said gallium nitride is ready now for system insertion. And as such, it is now producing large amounts of the material in its semiconductor foundry in Tewskbury.

The underlying goal is simple: find the latest technologies that can help improve the systems Raytheon makes. And if there's a way to make generational leaps, improvements that are of an order of magnitude or better, then push toward that.

"Our end customer is that kid in Iraq," one of my hosts said, "whose life may depend on what we build, so we want it to be 100 percent."

Update at 3:38 p.m. PDT: This story has been modified to clarify a comment by Lee Silvestre about Raytheon's discussions with the Center for Disease Control. The statement was an aside, and as originally written, didn't accurately represent the sentiment she was trying to convey.

For the next week, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

IBM Research has created a project known as 'Lab on a chip' that is intended to give doctors a quick and cost-efficient way to test blood samples for disease markers. The work is part of the research organization's massive efforts to be world leader in pushing the boundaries of technology and science.

(Credit: Mathias Hofstetter/Arnold. Inhal/IBM)

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.--When you think about diverse issues like river management during drought, urban traffic prediction, cocoa crop maximization, and how to win at Jeopardy, IBM might not be the first company that comes to mind.

But as unlikely as it might seem, Big Blue has its hands in all four of those areas and many, many more, all part of its IBM Research division, a sprawling organization that seeks to keep the company at the bleeding edge of the world's most pressing technology problems and to help it and its partners develop products aimed at solving them.

As part of my Road Trip 2010 project, I took the opportunity to visit IBM Research headquarters at the Thomas Watson Research Center here, and throughout the course of nine straight hours of meetings with some of the company's top minds, I got a deep look at how a $97 billion company begins the process of thinking years into the future in a bid to figure out where technology is going and to be among the first to get there.

According to Katherine Frase, IBM Research's vice president of industry solutions and emerging business, the organization's mission boils down to differentiating IBM from its competition, looking for forthcoming market trends, and staying connected with the outside technology community. Essentially, that means that job No. 1 for everyone involved is to put a finger--ahead of time--on the coming business trends and scientific and technology trends and then help figure out how to build products around them.

Today, IBM Research comprises eight labs around the world, with a ninth opening soon in Brazil, and its work breaks down into three chronological buckets: 20 percent of the work is geared toward innovations that will come to fruition within a couple of years; 65 percent is aimed for between two and 10 years; and the remaining 15 percent takes a "maybe we'll get there" someday approach.

The Porsche Panamera 4S that CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman is road-testing as part of Road Trip 2010, seen in front of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, home to IBM Research, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Much of what the organization does, Frase said, is about trying to figure out how the company's customers are going to react to new trends, and as such, it puts a lot of energy into behavioral sciences, studying the latest developments in pricing, and marketing.

But Frase insisted that IBM Research isn't just doing theoretical work: its scientists have their fingers on the pulse of the rest of the company and its clients and customers. "Research can't be an island," Frase said. "We work with clients to move from what can I do to what should I do?"

One of its major initiatives--a joint effort between IBM Sales and IBM Research--is a program called First of a Kind, or FOAK. This is about identifying potential clients and giving them early access to research that demonstrates the potential of problem solutions that have yet to be applied to real-world problems. By working with the clients, the fruits of this research can be productized, Frase explained.

But IBM also offers its customers and clients--and potential partners--one of its most intangible advantages, Frase said: the endless possibilities that come from having world-class researchers from wildly diverse disciplines working in close proximity.

An example of that power came, Frase explained, from the hallway conversations between an IBM Research "chip guy" and a "computational biology guy" who began talking about ideas of how they could work together.

"We're very much steered by what we see as the pain points of clients," Frase said, explaining that a new project with pharmaceutical giant Roche came from the discussions between the two researchers into whether it was possible to apply the company's expertise in microelectronics toward inexpensive gene sequencing.

The two researchers pondered the question and came up with a procedure (see video below) in which they drilled a tiny hole into a microprocessor in order to allow a strand of DNA to go through and impact its nanocircuitry. By designing the circuitry of a chip to read peptide pairs, she explained, it is now theoretically possible to have a physical device that can get the cost of sequencing genes down to under $1,000. Roche saw the papers that the two researchers wrote on their work and came to IBM, and a partnership was born. Now, Roche will likely license the technology and bring it to market.

Solutions Lab
At IBM Research's Industry Solutions Lab in nearby Hawthorne, N.Y., content manager Ray Hitney explained a little more about the company's FOAK program. Currently, he said, there are 20 such efforts under way, one of which is being worked on at a similar lab in Zurich.

Known as "Lab on a Chip," the project is aimed at creating a very inexpensive and quick way for medical facilities to test blood samples. Today, Hitney explained, such tests can take days and requires sending the samples to off-site labs. But this work is aimed at giving hospitals a way to test the samples on site and using inexpensive machinery they already have.

Leveraging work that marries IBM's legacy understanding of micro and nanofabrication techniques for making chips with biology, this system measures proteins in blood cells, looks for cancer markers, can detect heart attack risks, and more, all in real time.

By illuminating the chip (see video below), the system looks at the molecules in a blood sample and then uses complex image processing technology to measure the signal strength of the reflection of the light from the sample and then correlates the results, providing a determination of whether there are certain disease markers present.

The idea, said Luke Gervais, a researcher in Zurich working on the project, is to get the cost of the chips to less than a few dollars to make them cost-effective for health care institutions--all with no electronics and no mechanical parts. The goal: a system that is fully autonomous and allows the institutions to get test results quickly and without help from anyone.

Real-time traffic prediction
Another project being worked at the Hawthorne lab is one headed up by Laura Wynter, who runs the IBM Research's transportation efforts.

Wynter explained to me that she is working on technology that could help municipalities offer residents cutting edge traffic and public transportation system predictions that are far better than anything available today.

Again, the idea is to combine IBM's expertise in information management with existing problems. As a result, there is already a pilot project in Beijing that is working on long-duration predictions aimed at offering the public alerts as to what the traffic patterns are likely to be more than 50 minutes into the future.

IBM Research is working on systems that could give cities a way to model predictive behavior of traffic patterns and, ideally, provide nearly an hour of lead time on road conditions.

(Credit: IBM)

That and similar efforts use a combination of statistical flows and descriptive traffic modeling to model where traffic will go based on known historical data and limited real-time observations. In a Singapore public transportation pilot project, the researchers have found their predictions are more than 85 percent accurate.

Ultimately, the idea is that cities can give drivers the best and most up-to-date traffic information, allowing them to make decisions about how to get from point A to point B based not just on what's happening now, but on what is likely to happen in the next few minutes.

Next-generation computing
At IBM, it's no surprise that there is a heavy emphasis on solving some of the biggest problems in next-generation computing. One of my stops during my tour of IBM Research was to talk with Bijan Davari, the vice president of next-generation systems and an IBM fellow.

As we've all seen over the last 20 years, processing power has increased a thousand fold and the upper limits of Moore's Law have forced those searching for further increases to go parallel rather than continue to look for serial improvements.

But there are never-ending applications for more and more processing power, and so it falls to researchers like Davari to find ways to keep pushing the limits. He said that these days, there is an explosion in the amount of real-time unstructured sensor-driven data that must be harnessed and that the requirements for analyzing that data requires continuing to raise the bar when it comes to processing.

And in industry, that's no less true. Davari said that booms in workload optimized systems in the banking, health care, insurance, and manufacturing fields have forced companies like IBM to push the boundaries of computing power.

An advantage IBM offers its customers, Davari said, is that it has a unique and complete view of the entire computing stack--middleware, operating system, hypervision, cooling, system packaging, and chips, and puts a tremendous amount of money--about $6 billion a year--into research and development. The goal, then, is to design applications that meet customers' specific use case needs. Indeed, that's the business model, he said: build a system that incorporates the elements of the stack that best suit a customers' requirements.

Ultimately, that means finding the most cost-efficient method of delivering low-latency, high-bandwidth technologies for customers, be they health care providers in Africa, or banking institutions in the West.

Smarter Planet
Throughout my visit to IBM Research, nearly everyone I spoke with brought up Smarter Planet, IBM's corporate innovation program that aims to gather data from a wide variety of sources and use analysis of that data to solve new problems for customers and clients alike.

To meet the increasingly complex requirements that Davari talked about, and to have new initiatives meet the goals of Smarter Planet, IBM will have to push the boundaries of physics. That's where folks like IBM Research director of physical sciences Supratik Guha come in.

Guha explained that his mandate is to master physics, material sciences, and technology and in doing so, to find new ways past what have to date been the limits of technology.

The computers of the future, Guha said, are going to lean increasingly on optical communications--mainly because the power consumption of the latest systems is already beginning to surpass what more traditional computing architectures can handle.

Computation and information transfer have three parts, Guha explained: logic, memory and communications, and in the future, we're going to see optical communications making their way onto chips. That's already happening, he said, on the very highest-end computing systems, as it is a chief way to handle the power consumption problems.

We are already seeing optical communication links between racks and chips. The next step will be to integrate optical planes right on the chip, a crucial step in moving high-end computing from the petaflop--1,000 trillion floating point operations per second--range where we are today to the exaflop--1,000 petaflops--range. That advance is expected by the end of the decade.

And this is where nanotechnology becomes necessary. Already, there is development of nanostructures and the growing and placement of them on chips. Now, the next generation of chips will require nanoscale accuracy in order to meet the processing requirements of the next-generation of high-performance computing applications. At IBM Research, Guha said, teams are working to perfect the construction of such systems--at atomic level precision.

Unsustainable growth
Today, according to Hendrik Hamann, the research manager for the IBM Research Physical Sciences Photonics and Thermal Physics program, U.S. data centers are responsible for 2 percent of national power consumption. But that number is growing 15 percent a year, meaning it is doubling every five years. And that's unsustainable, Hamann said.

What that means is that in order to grow high-performance computing systems to meet the requirements of future applications, it is crucial to find ways to reduce energy in the data center. And that means using physical analytics, energy optimization and more efficient cooling, he said.

For IBM, that meant an opportunity to apply data analytics to data centers in a means to find smart answers to the problem of power consumption.

By deploying a "vast" system of sensors in data centers, Hamann and his team have found a way to visualize how the machines in those centers are used--and not used. And that has been important in finding efficiencies that help make decisions about how to employ those machines.

Essentially, Hamann's research showed that there are constantly air conditioning units being used to cool machines that aren't being used. By figuring out how the workflow in a data center ebbs and flows, it is possible to find significant savings in those centers--as much as 10 percent to 15 percent with no investment.

Of course, that by itself isn't going to get us to exaflop computing. But to Hamann and others at IBM Research, every bit helps, especially as IBM works with its customers and clients and pushes its Smarter Planet program: Improvements are welcome at every level, from data analysis to nanoscale manufacturing.

Watson
You might wonder how a game show fits into IBM Research's larger goals. But then again, remember that IBM and chess have long been spoken in the same sentences.

One program currently under way at IBM Research is known as Watson. The idea is to build a new Deep Blue--the IBM chess computer that in 1997 beat world champion Garry Kasparov--except for "Jeopardy" instead of chess.

It might seem like a simple problem to design a computer that can win at "Jeopardy," but think about how much of that show centers on semantic subtleties. And then remember how good some of the best players are.

Now, IBM Research is tailoring Watson to be able to beat the best of those players. And here, at the Yorktown Heights campus, the institution has built a faux-"Jeopardy" studio and sucking in huge amounts of content from the show and trying to program a new computer to learn how to beat the best.

It turns out that this is a huge natural language and open advancement question/answer (OAQA) computing problem, and IBM isn't there yet. But this fall, it plans to conduct a full-scale test involving some of the best "Jeopardy" players and it is hoping that Watson can win.

IBM Research is a huge organization, and even my one-day visit overwhelmed me with world-class information and ideas, much of which I've spelled out here, but some which I didn't have space for.

What's most interesting to me, though, is that the company is so devoted to R&D, even when the fruits of the research may be years off, or may never bear out at all.

To some, IBM may seem like a company rooted in the past. But after a day in Yorktown Heights, I have little doubt that this is an organization that will continue to be at the forefront of much of the technology that changes the world in the years and decades to come.

For the next week, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

At the MIT Media Lab, innovation and solving age-old problems is a daily exercise. One interesting project in the works is a folding car that is enabled in large part by the fact that its powertrain would be distributed between its four wheels instead placed in the heart of the vehicle. And while the car is still largely a concept, the researchers developing it have already built prototypes of a vehicle with that type of powertrain system. CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman got a chance to see that prototype on a Road Trip 2010 visit to the lab.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--If I learned one thing Thursday, it's that I want a folding car.

You might laugh at that notion, but I'm here to tell you it's not fantasy: the folding car is coming, and if it succeeds, it could change the way urban environments look forever.

That's my take after a visit to the MIT Media Lab here, the 25-year-old hotbed of research and innovation that has produced the underlying technology behind things like Guitar Hero, Lego Mindstorms, E Ink, One Laptop per Child, and much, much more.

Click here for a photo gallery on MIT Media Lab.

Hot ideas brew at MIT Media Lab (photos)

This is an unusual academic institution. Though much of its funding comes from its 60 corporate sponsors, those companies are not able to specifically support--or direct--any particular research projects. Instead, the program's students and faculty--23 faculty members run 23 different research groups, with each group comprised of six graduate students--pursue their work, and the corporate sponsors benefit by, among other ways, getting royalty-free licenses to the work products.

I got a chance to visit the lab on Thursday as part of Road Trip 2010, and unfortunately, I only had a few hours to investigate the cutting-edge projects under way there. But even that much time afforded me no shortage of opportunities to see some very exciting technologies and research concepts.

And surely, the CityCar--the folding vehicle--was one of them. Expected to weigh in at less than a 1,000 pounds, it can fit into the tiniest of parking spaces, and could get the equivalent of at least 150 miles per gallon, mainly because it is a battery-electric car.

Instead of being built with a traditional engine and power train, the CityCar would have four in-wheel electric motors, and each wheel has its own suspension, drive motor, and steering. And that means that the car can rotate on its own axis--they call that an O-turn--can park sideways and do straight-ahead lane changes, according to the lab.

And because it doesn't have a central engine, the CityCar can be folded, making it even smaller and allowing it to fit in even smaller parking spaces. Three of the vehicles are thought to be able to fit in a standard parking space.

Clearly, this is not a family car. It holds just two passengers, but then again, it is not intended for heavy-duty driving. It is meant for the most common trips. And it is thought it could be charged at municipal charging stations, and perhaps eventually through solar charging.

This is a concept image of what the folding car--the City Car--could look like in a typical urban environment.

(Credit: William Lark/MIT Media Lab)

"Lithium-ion batteries are housed in the floor of the CityCar, which provides a large amount of space, keeps the center of mass low, and facilitates cooling," the CityCar's site says.

Bokode
My next step was to the Camera Culture group, where faculty adviser Ramesh Raskar talked to me about two very interesting projects.

The first was called Bokode, and Raskar positioned it as a way to solve a problem by adapting society to the fact that there are already 1 billion digital cameras in people's hands, rather than asking people to give up those devices in order to try to work with a whole new technology.

The problem is how to do mobile advertising, or message or information delivery. Today, we are all used to bar codes and are increasingly becoming used to things like QR codes or similar systems, all of which can deliver a small piece of information by being scanned, increasingly by smartphones running simple applications.

But Raskar argued that that is too limiting. Why not make it so that much more data can be transferred through that same smartphone scanning process?

The answer is the Bokode, he said, which can be scanned just the same as any of the other coding systems. But instead of carrying just a small bit of information, it can convey as much as 10,000 bytes, enough to pass on an entire bus schedule or restaurant menu or the like.

I asked him who would implement this, and he said it could be useful for businesses that are expecting the arrival of a Google Street View truck, and anyone interested in putting a Bokode on the side of their shop or business. Ultimately, as noted above, the idea is simply to make it possible to upgrade information delivery without requiring anyone to jettison a device they already have. This, Raskar noted, is an elegant solution that adapts the technology to us, rather than the reverse.

NETRA
Next, Raskar showed me a system that could have much more meaningful social implications: NETRA, or Near-eye tool for refractive assessment.

It sounds complicated, but it's actually quite simple. Meant to provide large numbers of people around the world--including in the developing world--with quick and easy eye tests, NETRA is little more than a smartphone application that takes advantage of the better than ever resolution of devices like the iPhone 4. Users would clip a special eyepiece to their devices, and run the application--which would give them a quick eye test. According to Raskar, this could be as good or better than what is possible in a typical eye doctor's office and can be done in just seconds and for next to no money. Even the eyepiece could cost just a couple of dollars, he said.

This could be a major breakthrough, Raskar said, because there are 2 billion people on Earth who have refractic error of some kind, and half of billion of them--even some in rural areas of the U.S.--have no access to eye care. With NETRA, he theorizes, that could change, and quickly.

NETRA, or Near-eye tool for refractive assessment, is a system designed to allow for near instantaneous (and highly accurate) self-evaluation of eyesight using a smartphone and a simple snap on device.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

For those who have access to smartphones and the Internet, the idea is that they could run the application--which tasks them with looking through the special eyepiece and lining up two lines; if their eyes are good, the lines will already be aligned--and the, using the report of their vision, order glasses online. In cases of the developing world, it might be more a situation where someone goes from village to village doing tests for people, leaves to get their new glasses, and then returns. But that's still a big step up for many, since they have nothing even that good now, Raskar said.

Helping autistic children
A little later, I met Elliott Hedman and Rob Morris, who spent the next hour talking with me about two different elements of a project aimed at helping occupational therapists work with autistic children.

The concept here is that in many cases, therapists can guess at the moods of the kids they're working with but can never really be sure how something affects them. And that matters, because if a kid is too excited or overwrought, the therapist might not be able to get any constructive work done. Similarly, if the kid is too subdued, the work would be just as hard.

By combining ideas from artificial intelligence, biosensors and assistive technologies, the two have found ways that they think could lead to better understanding of the emotional moods of these children, and in the process, help therapists do their job better.

For one, this involves fitting kids with electrodermal sensors, essentially wristbands, and other sensors that can measure excitement at very discrete levels, and keep a running, real-time measurement. The idea here is that by tracking the moods and correlating them with behavior, therapists can get a better sense of how the therapy they're trying actually affects the children. At the same time, it can also help professionals see the kinds of things that can bring overexcited kids down, or that can get them to feel more engaged if they've been too subdued.

Essentially, it's about taking out the guesswork, said Hedman.

Morris then showed me a system designed to measure people's moods by capturing their expressions on camera and mapping their facial expressions and body language to a database of moods. Sitting in front of a large monitor, I watched my face get mapped, and saw the system interpret my expressions.

Together, these two systems seem primed to really help offer better understanding of people's emotions, especially among those who have a hard time expressing those moods directly.

Human Dynamics
My last stop was with Coco Krumme and Riley Crane, two members of the Media Lab's Human Dynamics group.

They explained several projects aimed at examining the "digital breadcrumbs" left by most people as they navigate the world. At its heart, this work is about "reality mining," and using devices like smart phones to measure just about everything people doing.

They talked about one project in which groups of people were given special badges capable of measuring people's interactions. The badges were able to track meetings between anyone in the group, as well as their tones of voices and other emotional states, essentially providing a map of the social dynamics of the entire group.

One of the goals of that work, they said, is to measure performance in groups and see how certain social interactions work--is it better when everyone is participating in conversations, or better when a few people are dominating the discussions and the social mixing.

Crane, it turns out, was part of the team that won the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge in 2009, a project that offered a $40,000 reward to the first group that could located nine red balloons hidden around the United States. His team won by creating a clever distributed, crowd-sourced, network that built connections throughout the country and offered partial rewards to anyone who referred someone who helped locate a balloon.

For her part, Krumme has been working on a project aimed at determining how people behave economically, at least as it relates to our spending patterns--and what those patterns say about us.

She defines the project on the Media Lab site by asking, "How predictable are people? We are using credit card transaction data to look at how patterns of human behavior change over time and space, and with which macroeconomic features these changes correlate. How does spending/merchant composition evolve as a region gets bigger/richer/more economically diverse? Do network features help to predict economic ones?"

Ultimately, she said, as a society, we're pretty boring. Whether we're rich or poor, we end up making the same decisions again and again. But at an individual level, we're very unpredictable, and Krumme is hoping to help create financial management models that can help people get through the difficulties of debt and overspending.

Fire hose
One thing I've had people say to me again and again throughout Road Trip 2010 is that they understand that they've unloaded a "fire hose" of information on me in a short period of time. Ironically, no one said that to me at MIT Media Lab on Thursday, but there's no doubt that that's what happened. Yet, I would gladly go back again and stand in front of the hose for as much as they have time to aim my way.

For the next two weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American Northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

At iRobot headquarters in Bedford, Mass., a Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV) robot tries to climb a wooden platform. Though best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaners, iRobot is also a major developer of military robotics. And now, it is looking seriously at the next generation of military devices.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

BEDFORD, Mass.--I have seen the future of military robotics, and it is autonomy.

I've come here to visit the headquarters of iRobot, the company probably best known for its famous Roomba vacuum cleaners. But while it has sold more than 5 million of those cute household devices, it has also developed a reputation as one of the world's leaders in designing battlefield-ready robots capable of things like detecting and extracting explosive devices, search-and-rescue, and much more.

Click here for a full photo gallery on iRoomba, its past and its history.

From living rooms to battlefields at iRobot (photos)

And though iRobot could probably rest on its laurels, and keep making profits for the foreseeable future with the Roomba and military-grade robots like the PackBot or the SUGV--the small unmanned ground vehicle--it is at the same time looking to set the pace for the robots that will man--so to speak--the battlefields of the future.

Naturally, iRobot is also looking for ways to advance its home consumer line of robots, and in that realm, it believes its path to down-the-road profits will depend heavily on health care and care giving. But I'll get to that later.

The techie admiral
I've come to iRobot as part of my Road Trip 2010 journey through the American Northeast, in search of a clear picture of what one of the few successful, large-scale robotics companies thinks the future looks like. Of course, I've also come to see a bit of the company's history, and during my visit, I got a really nice look at both.

One of my stops during the visit was with a gentleman who definitely isn't from Massachusetts--Joseph Dyer, iRobot's president of government and industrial robots division. Dyer, a genial Southerner with a discernible if not thick accent, is currently in his "second career" after years spent in the Navy, where he retired as a vice admiral. But thanks to his focus in the military on tech and how it can help the military achieve its goals, he became known as the "techie admiral," I'm told.

Dyer doesn't mince words about why he came to iRobot: "I wanted to find the 2000s equivalent of Apple in the '80s," he tells me as we sit down for an information-packed 15-minute talk.

With the PackBot, the SUGV and other devices that have been in the field for years, iRobot has already made a difference to a lot of people, and Dyer said that is established all the time with the arrival of postcards from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who, based on those devices' ability to sniff out threats like improvised explosive devices (IEDs), frequently write things along the lines of "You saved lives today."

"If you're looking for gratification for coming to work," Dyer says, "it doesn't get any better."

Admittedly biased, Dyer said that he sees robotics as the next big American field of innovation after a century of success in areas like agriculture, automobiles, information technology, and more.

But how can iRobot and other companies in the industry take a field in which these small devices are already capable of helping to find and destroy explosives, do search-and-rescue missions and much more? To Dyer, the answer is in solving one of the key bottlenecks that to date has limited the full range of what's possible with robotics in the battlefield.

Until now, he explained, there has always been a one-to-one relationship between the robots and the soldiers who operate them in the field. But that ratio is about to change dramatically, Dyer predicted. "The one word answer to why," he said, "is autonomy."

He likened today's robots to the state of fighter planes 35 years ago, when limitations in electronics and other technologies meant that a pilot had to devote 80 percent of his or her time to attending to the plane's airframe, engine, and navigation, leaving just 20 percent to their mission. But over time, thanks to significant advances in fighter technology, those numbers are almost entirely reversed, Dyer said.

Similarly, with today's telepresence robots, about 80 percent of the operator's time is spent focusing on the technology, while just about 20 percent is available to focus on the mission. But thanks to things like Moore's Law, he predicted, it will take far less than 35 years to reverse that ratio, meaning that within a few years, the technology will exist to make it possible for a human operator in the field to focus almost entirely on the task at hand and not have to worry much about the practicalities of getting their robot to do what they want.

Indeed, Dyer said that he expects the first major shift in this area to take place later this year, with the delivery of the first truly autonomous robots to soldiers in the field.

To be sure, these robots won't be that much more advanced than what is out there today, but Dyer said they will feature autonomous communication technologies known as "retro-traverse" that will allow them, for the first time, to navigate out of trouble if they lose communications connection with their human operators.

Today, he said, if a robot loses communications, soldiers are required to take the time and the personal risk to go find it, something that is entirely counter-productive considering that the robot is meant to obviate soldiers putting themselves in harm's way.

But the new generation of robots should be smart enough, Dyer explained, to figure out that if they lose communications, they should back-track far enough to where they can once again pick up the signal.

At the same time, the new robots will also feature cruise control, which will mean that they can automatically maintain course and speed. That may not sound like much, but to a soldier who currently has to take care of those elements manually, it could be a major shift forward.

2015
Looking further down the line, Dyer said that by 2015 or so, soldiers should be getting their hands for the first time on so-called "robot wingmen."

The idea here, he explained, is for a robot to be able to autonomously take on task assignments for things like getting through closed doors. The robot won't have full artificial intelligence, but based on a programmed mission profile, it should be designed to attack a task and generally figure out how to complete it. Even better, if it encounters problems, it won't simply stop working, it will be smart enough to ask for help.

That might mean that if a robot is assigned to get through a door "peacefully," but finds that the door is locked, it can inquire--by voice, or even by text message--how it should proceed.

And, human operators may also be able to give instructions to robots simply by making hand gestures--something that could free up a lot of attention that is currently spent manually handling controllers.

Finally, Dyer said, the more autonomous robots are deployed in the field, the more that will free up already-taxed communications networks since it requires a great deal of bandwidth to maintain connectivity between soldiers and their robots.

"6-1 money"
According to Chris Jones, iRobot's head of research, a significant percentage of the forward-looking work that the company does, especially on the military side, is funded by what is known as "6-1 money." This funding comes from DARPA--the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--and is essentially defined as very early stage, or "basic" research. In other words, work done to figure out what's possible, not necessarily what to do with it.

With that in mind, iRobot's research division focuses on four main areas: Autonomy--which Dyer obviously sees as a big part of the company's future; Human-Robot Interaction, which will, in part, utilize autonomy to help users more efficiently control their robots; Collaboration--which could mean single users can simultaneously control multiple robots; and New platforms.

As an example of the last one, Jones demonstrated a new project based on "6-1 money:" the so-called "Chemical Robot." This is a project with no specific known application, and looks nothing like any robot you've seen before. In fact, it looks more like a blob of soft plastic.

A Chemical Robot, a very-early stage basic research robot project that is designed to squeeze through very tight spaces, potentially as part of a search-and-rescue mission.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

But what it is is a collection of soft material that can, on demand, be expanded or retracted, all with the idea that it can be rolled somewhere and then squeezed under or through very small spaces. It may be the size of a softball in its full form, but could theoretically get through a hole the size of a quarter, Jones predicted.

While there are no specific tasks in this device's future, it's thought that search-and-rescue is a major possible application.

Generally, there are no known timeframes for the productization of technologies like this, Jones added, but said that the point is first to prove they are viable, and then what to do with them.

Similarly, as iRobot works on new-style versions of the PackBot that are smaller and, thanks to better sensors and technology, more autonomous, the answer to when they are deployed in the field may have more to do with military culture than technology.

Care giving
My last stop of the day was with iRobot founder and CEO Angle. For some time, we talked about his company's history, and how he came to develop the Roomba and its successor, the floor-cleaning Scooba.

But Angle also had a forward-looking message. To him, iRobot's commercial future is centered on health care and care-giving. He explained that over time, as humans live longer, the number of people available to take care of the elderly--family members and friends, mainly--is shrinking due to major cultural and demographic shifts.

And since most elderly people want to stay away from nursing homes, that means there's a huge opportunity for a company like iRobot--and its competitors--to develop robots that can fill the resulting gap.

And that means that if iRobot or other companies can come up with home-based robots that can do things like proactively remind elderly people to take their medications, or to get out of bed, go to the bathroom, or any of many other possible tasks, it could make a huge difference in people's lives.

That might not be intuitive to the average robotics fan, but it's crucial to the industry, Angle said.

"The industry as a whole has always had a weakness in that robots are so cool that people have always been excited" by their futuristic possibilities, Angle said. "What the industry needs is people solving real problems."

For the next few weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American Northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

Open-source hardware companies like Adafruit, Arduino, Chumby, and others have come together to set standards for their nascent industry.

NEW YORK--There are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field.

Until now, that is.

Unlike open-source software, because there have been no formal definitions, many people may not even be aware of the growing industry. But already some of those practicing its general principles have become household names among the geek set: Arduino, the programmable single-board microcontroller and software suite; Chumby, a popular Wi-Fi device; MakerBot, a low-priced 3D printer; and Adafruit, a maker of do-it-yourself hardware kits for things like MP3 players and more.

Late Tuesday, a group of signatories including Wired magazine editor and DIY Drones' Chris Anderson, Phil Torrone of Make magazine, David Mellis of MIT Media Lab and Arduino, Limor Fried of Adafruit, and Ayah Bdeir of New York's Eyebeam publicly issued a formal definition of open-source hardware.

The basic elements of the standards are as follows: documentation; necessary software; derived works; free redistribution; attribution; no discrimination against persons or groups; no discrimination against fields of endeavor; distribution of license; license must not be specific to a product; license must not restrict other hardware or software; and license must be technology-neutral.

That is a definition that might be considered familiar to many who have read much about free-software licensing.

The decision to issue the new standards stemmed from a meeting in March organized by Bdeir and attended by many of the endorsers and participants, as well as a lawyer from Creative Commons.

For years, Torrone has been a friend of mine, and a frequent source of great stories, including the infamous Roomba Frogger, from South by Southwest 2006. And because I was in New York on Road Trip 2010, I got a chance to see the Adafruit labs, where he and a small team of employees work for Fried, who is a longtime hacker hardware maker and culture-jammer, as well as a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and a former Eyebeam fellow.

No clear definition
Prior to the March meeting, there had been many opinions about exactly what open-source hardware is, said Torrone, who argued that most of them were from people who don't actually practice it, at least not according to the newly defined standards.

Yet despite its purely altruistic name, open-source hardware hardly means that the companies in the field aren't making money. Indeed, as noted above, there are already at least 13 companies making more than $1 million a year (see video below) in revenue, and that number seems poised to grow, and grow quickly, particularly if the new standards inspire more to believe that getting into the business is a safe entrepreneurial risk.

And that's despite the fact that one of the more elemental tenets of the field is that those selling products give away their designs, and allow others to make and sell products based on those designs, or even give them away for free.

Open source hardware $1m and beyond - foo camp east 2010 from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

So, Torrone continued, someone could take an Adafruit design and make and sell their own version of the product, and Fried wouldn't get a dime.

But that's not how the industry is going, he continued. Mainly, that's because the companies that are creating the designs--like Adafruit--are also putting a lot of energy into customer service, and to many buyers, that's worth the extra price they often pay.

At the same time, by putting product designs out into the community for free, open-source hardware companies are allowing others to improve upon their work. "Someone could say, hey, you could use a different component here, or save money here," Torrone explained.

Accelerated patent system
In some ways, Torrone argued, the new open-source hardware standards are tantamount to "an accelerated patent system that's instant." By that, he means that while someone may copy another's design, they also have to give full and fair attribution.

And that's important, both because designers should get credit for their work, and because, to many hardware geeks, half the fun of making stuff is showing others.

"There's almost a skateboarding culture, to make an analogy," said Torrone. "People love to show tricks they can do. If you're doing really cool electronics, you want to share the really interesting parts of what you're doing."

The full language of the new standard is as follows:

•  Documentation
The hardware must be released with documentation including design files, and must allow modification and distribution of the design files. Where documentation is not furnished with the physical product, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining this documentation for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The documentation must include design files in the preferred form for which a hardware developer would modify the design. Deliberately obfuscated design files are not allowed. Intermediate forms analogous to compiled computer code -- such as printer-ready copper artwork from a CAD program -- are not allowed as substitutes.

•  Necessary Software
If the hardware requires software, embedded or otherwise, to operate properly and fulfill its essential functions, then the documentation requirement must also include at least one of the following: The necessary software, released under an OSI-approved open source license, or other sufficient documentation such that it could reasonably be considered straightforward to write open source software that allows the device to operate properly and fulfill its essential functions.

•  Derived Works
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original hardware. The license must allow for the manufacture, sale, distribution, and use of products created from the design files or derivatives of the design files.

•  Free redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the project documentation as a component of an aggregate distribution containing designs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. The license shall not require any royalty or fee related to the sale of derived works.

•  Attribution
The license may require derived works to provide attribution to the original designer when distributing design files, manufactured products, and/or derivatives thereof. The license may also require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original design.

•  No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

•  No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the hardware in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the hardware from being used in a business, or from being used in nuclear research.

•  Distribution of License
The rights attached to the hardware must apply to all to whom the product or documentation is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

•  License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
The rights attached to the hardware must not depend on the hardware being part of a particular larger product. If the hardware is extracted from that product and used or distributed within the terms of the hardware license, all parties to whom the hardware is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original distribution.

•  License Must Not Restrict Other Hardware or Software
The license must not place restrictions on other hardware or software that may be distributed or used with the licensed hardware. For example, the license must not insist that all other hardware sold at the same time be open source, nor that only open source software be used in conjunction with the hardware.

•  License Must Be Technology-Neutral
No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

For the next few weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.

At the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, a huge bin full of blank dollar coins waits to be fed into a press that will turn them into actual money.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

PHILADELPHIA--Staring at the bin in front of me, stacked high with thousands of dollar coins, it's hard not to make like Scrooge McDuck and jump in headfirst.

Except, of course, that security would grab me and I'd have to deal with having a felony on my record for the rest of my life. Also, there's this small detail: These aren't actually dollars. Yet.

I'm at the U.S. Mint here, the largest mint in the world, and a place big enough--at around 600,000 square feet--that all the rest of the American mints could fit inside. I've come here on Road Trip 2010, and my visit is the bookend to a two-part look at how American money is made. Last week, I got a great behind-the-scenes peek at the production of the next-generation $100 bills, and now I'm here to see how our coins are made.

Making coin at the U.S. Mint (photos)

From a technology standpoint, it's a good thing I'm here now, rather than, say, 10 years ago. That's because about five years ago, the Mint transitioned from a purely manual production process of engraving in clay to one in which much of the work is done using off-the-shelf software tools like Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop, plus a few others. Of course, from the perspective of a numismatic enthusiast--or as one of my hosts here put it, a "mint nerd"--it probably would have been better to be here when everything was still done by hand.

Still, as John Mercanti, the Mint's chief engraver, told me, even though much of the work is now done using software tools, there are still designers on staff who prefer to do it the old-school way.

Thousandths of an inch
The good thing about transitioning to tools like Illustrator and Photoshop is that it allows the designers to fix things whenever they want. In the past, a mistake meant starting over and doing an entire drawing again.

Now, errors are easily fixed, and the digital tools let the designers do all kinds of neat tricks that were never possible before: look at 3D models of a future coin, alter their perspective, change angles, maneuver a coin any way they want, and more.

That's critical, Mercanti said, because when crafting a new coin, or any of the commemorative medals made at the the Mint, the "tolerances" the designers are working with are measured in the thousandths of an inch. Indeed, he said that being even one-thousandth of an inch off is tantamount to a Mt. Everest-size mistake, and can mean that the metal in the coin may not flow properly, or that the coin's too hard to manufacture.

Because the Mint is producing up to 750 coins a minute, any error is magnified. And the digital tools help make sure everything is spot on.

In the past, the Mint relied on panagraph machines known as Janviers that were first made in the 19th century and had no tolerance for mistakes. If one was made, it might be necessary that many more reductions of a design be done before arriving at a usable coin die. Today, though, the Mint uses CNCs (computer numerically controlled machines), systems that are automated, precise, and can cut more quickly than anything used in the past. That allows the Mint to focus on making sure the coins are made just the way they're supposed to be.

Congress controls much that the Mint does--such as new coin designs--and last year, Congress directed the Mint to move to the CNC system. That means that the last Janvier went out of service just a year ago, though the process of transitioning had been going on since about 2005. "We actually went from the 19th century to the 21st century in five years," Mercanti said.

Yet despite the romance of the old ways, he added that he has no nostalgia related to the change, which has "enabled us...to catapult so far forward."

Many new coins
Each year, the Mint has to produce a number of new coins and commemorative medals. For example, everyone knows about the 50-states quarters program, which just concluded last year. Now the Mint has embarked on a similar program in which it is producing America the Beautiful quarters--56 new coins over 11 years that celebrate the country's national treasures. The 2010 issues honor Arkansas' Hot Springs National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest.

But there are also plenty of non-legal-tender issues: medals for the Army, 3-ounce silver or gold $5 pieces, clad 50 cent commemoratives, and many others. These are mandated by Congress, which has the power to legislate two new designs per year.

And while there are Mints in cities like San Francisco and West Point, N.Y., the actual circulating coins are made only in Philadelphia and Denver. And the lion's share are made here: fully 454 million coins came out of the Philadelphia Mint in June.

These days, that level of production means investing in the latest tools, and in recent years, the Mint has invested millions in new presses, CNC machines, and software. In addition to Illustrator and Photoshop, the Mint also relies on software like Freeform and Z Brush for 3D sculpting. The former works in conjunction with a haptic arm (see the video below) that allows designers to get physical feedback when digitally "sculpting," much as they would if they were using engraving tools on clay.

Here's how a brand new coin ends up in your pocket. First, Congress issues a law directing the Mint to make it--such as the America the Beautiful quarters. Then, Mint designers come up with an initial design that's vetted through the institution's legal department, ensuring there are no copyright problems.

Next, the design goes through two advisory committees, the Washington, D.C.-based Commission of Fine Arts, and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. Once everyone there is onboard, the Secretary of the Treasury must sign off on the new design, and then it's on to sculpting, a process that can take from two weeks to months, depending on how many modifications must be made.

Production means master tooling, and five generations of reproductions from design to coin. First, designers create a model, then they produce a positive reduction hub--meaning one that's in the same orientation as the coin will be. Next up is a "reduction hub," which will be clean, ground to a specific form, and then put in a press with a soft seal and used to make a master die. Then, it's time for a "work hub," which is used to make the dies that will go in the presses and make the actual coins.

From that original master model, perhaps as many as 10 reduction hubs can be made, and from those, thousands of dies that will be used to make millions or even billions of coins. The hubs wear down over time, and the dies much, much faster, all because 400 to 500 tons of pressure are applied in the presses onto the steel dies.

The dies are made by scanning the plaster hubs, explained project manager Tony Petrella. He said he will use the scanner--just one such device is used in the production of all American coins--and take 30 or 40 pictures of each plaster hub, so that the software has as much data as possible before it's time to turn on the CNC and make the steel dies.

Once the data is handed off to the CNCs, those machines read the images created in the previous four generations and gradually cut the new steel dies.

This is not a fast process. It can take up to eight hours to cut a die for a penny, and up to 24 hours to make a 1-ounce silver coin. The cutting inside the CNC is done with a cutter that has a tip just six one-thousandths of an inch wide.

Finally, it's time for coin production.

On the production floor, there are countless coils of sheet metal, each coil corresponding to a specific denomination. The coils are fed into a machine, which punches out coin blanks that are then passed on to the annealing process--where they go through a furnace to soften the metal--and then are cleaned in a four-chemical wash. Then it's on to "upsetting," where a machine squeezes the blank, giving it an edge and making it better for striking by the press.

Finally, the blanks are sent to the stamping process, where one of 67 high-speed presses actually makes coins. In a typical day, the Mint here turns out 20 million coins, but it has a capacity as high as 50 million a day.

Two hundred thousand quarters
To make a quarter, a blank is hit with 61 tons of pressure. That happens a lot, as quarters pour out of the presses and eventually fill large bags that hold 200,000 of them, or $50,000 worth (see video below). Those bags are then closed up and shipped off to the Federal Reserve. The same process goes for dollars nickels, dimes, and pennies.

Walking around the floor of the stamping area, I come across the bin of dollar blanks. It's nearly full and must contain tens of thousands of them. Having overcome my Scrooge McDuck inclination, I put my hand inside and let a few slip between my fingers. It feels good, and makes a rich sound.

For the next few weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip and find the project on Facebook. And you can also test your knowledge of the U.S. and try to win a prize in the Road Trip Picture of the Day challenge.