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www.us- tech.com


Tech-Op-ed May, 2017


SOUNDING OFF By Walter Salm


Editor Emeritus


Content Providers, Take Note


I really didn’t notice until I did a little reminiscing on the Internet. What brought me up short was seeing on YouTube a 1948 kinescope recording of Ar- turo Toscanini conducting Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in a large, very acousti- cally dead NBC studio. The kinescope recording, the only video technology for that era, was poor quality, very low resolution, and of course black and white. The audio was somewhat better, but not much. As a teenager and as a young adult, I absolutely worshipped this incredible conductor, and had the good for- tune to see him in a live performance just once in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1953. I was in the army and in uniform and my buddy and I managed to score two free tickets at the box office only minutes before the concert started. We climbed many, many stairs to the very top of the nosebleed gallery; I could almost touch the ceiling, and somehow managed to avoid vertigo when I looked down. Assembled on the stage was the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the Robert Shaw Chorale, and the Columbus Boy Choir for a performance of the Prologue to Boito’s opera Mefistofele. It was glorious, and Carnegie Hall’s marvelous acoustics meant that we could hear every note, every nuance, even sitting at the very top of the nosebleed gallery. I could tolerate viewing this antiquated technology for only so long, so I


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finally switched to something much more up to date — a new video of pianist Yuja Wang and conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Orquestra Sinfonica Si- mon Bolivar de Venezuela performing Messiaen’s Turangalila. The technolo- gy was the latest and the greatest — extra sharp digital video, excellent and tasteful editing, and finally high-quality surround sound. What a difference 69 years makes! The technology that makes this all possible is pretty much taken for granted today, even by me, in spite of the fact that I had grown up with very poor recordings that sounded like they were recorded on sandpaper, buying a record album that was really an album — six or eight 12-inch 78 rpm records in a many-paged album that had a hard cover. It was the 78-rpm record that gave birth to the record changer, and we had a doozie, a floor mod- el 1938 vintage Silvertone console from Sears, Roebuck & Co. in a dark wood veneer. It contained an AM radio, a record changer with a pair of strange- looking record supports with fingers that would slide above the next record in the pile, allowing it to drop on the spinning turntable. There was a 10-inch loudspeaker that produced a lot of bass, but was lousy with the treble. High fidelity had yet to be invented, at least not in small-town Upstate New York. Then came 1948, I was still in high school, and the most marvelous thing


happened: the invention of the 33-1/3 LP microgroove record from Columbia Records, soon to be followed by RCA’s 45 rpm record. The 45s quickly became popular for pop music singles, while the LP was used to record classical mu- sic, Broadway shows, talking books, etc. Soon record players and changers ap- peared with all three speeds and a turnover pickup cartridge. Professionals and purists preferred a heavily weighted single-disk


turntable and a magnetic transducer in a featherweight arm, and this is what I found when I went to work in our college radio station in 1951. This is also where I first discovered the “transcription disk” — a monstrous 16-inch diam- eter disk that had been around since 1930. It used the old 3-mil-wide groove (same as the 78s) but rotated at 33-1/3 rpm. The radio station library had a whole bunch of pre-recorded programs, mostly with U.S. government-spon- sored content, providing 30 minutes of playing time, 15 minutes on each side. These days I can copy 100 or more CDs onto a micro SD chip that’s small-


er than the nail on my little finger for 120 hours of high-fidelity stereo music in my car’s in-dash infotainment system. Ultra-miniature hi-res color TV cameras perform in impossibly difficult situations, providing a recorded sound track as well. I have a rearview backup camera on my car the size of a shirt button mounted on the top of my license plate! My pocket-size Nikon records not only hi-res still photos, but also hi-def video with stereo sound, all on an SD chip the size of a postage stamp. What is most amazing to me is not that all this has hap- pened, but the incredible speed with which our technology has blossomed. And yet all of it pales in comparison to that live Toscanini performance I heard in Carnegie Hall when I was just 20. That’s a sweet memory that will stay with me forever. Virtual reality content providers, please take note. r


uestion: Have I gotten too smug in my total acceptance of today’s tech- nology? I have been royally spoiled over the years, before the technolo- gy became a factor, but much of the spoiling came on so gradually that


PUBLISHER’S NOTE


By Jacob Fattal Publisher


Big Data: The New Frontier


age,” the percentage of global data stored digitally has grown from half to around 95 percent, mainly residing in PC hard disks. But raw data does not necessarily equal useful information, and informa-


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tion does not always become knowledge. To turn data into information, for ex- ample, from sensors tracking events or product movement in a factory, re- quires combining various data into patterns and structures that represent much more. For instance, when grouped together, income and expenditure records tell a complete story about a company’s financial habits — useful in- formation. Information, when combined with experience, becomes knowledge.


Spurred on by ever more powerful computer processing, data management is rapidly transforming into knowledgemanagement. This has had profound im- pact on businesses worldwide. Through the Internet, individuals have con- stant access to information and can share it anywhere in the world instanta- neously. Of the 7 billion people on the planet, 2 billion of them have access to the Internet, and that number continues to grow. Our challenge is to sort through this flood of information and find the


right ways to apply it. With so much information being generated daily, our position is to sift through and to share what will become the most effective knowledge. To us at U.S. Tech, this means providing the electronics industry with a curated perspective, highlighting the brightest technologies, and avoid- ing data overload. For many others, this could mean using information trends to optimize supply chain, product introduction strategies, finances, and qual- ity control. Over a decade into the information age and we are only scratching its


surface. This change, however, has caused the rise of a new and developing in- dustry segment —data storage and analytics. In our own industry, we now see firms that handle data from a range of sources, aggregating them and turning them into actionable information for customers. This presents a variety of IP concerns and security risks, along with the potential for massive improve- ments to productivity and efficiency. We are likely to see companies with a firm grip on information management do much better than those without. As firms compete fiercely to defend their territories in the marketplace, the burgeoning field of big data makes for fertile ground. r


ig data is expanding on a scale that is difficult to reckon with. Accord- ing to IBM, every single day 2.5 exabytes (2.5 x 1018) of data are gener- ated. Since the early 2000s, considered “the beginning of the digital


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