Meeting notice: The 00.11.21 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: Smart valves and teleoperation. Perhaps the most underreported technological transition actually underway is the steady spread of smart values through the chemical and energy industries. A smart valve is a control device (it need not be a literal valve in the sense of a faucet) that comes with sensors, controllers, processors that can run diagnostic and monitoring programs, and network connectivity. Today about 1/3 of all control valves sold in the process industries are smart to some degree, and analysts expect that by the end of the decade more than 95% of all valves sold in that sector will be of this type. Within the context of the industry they represent a real revolution. For instance, few plants can do maintenance the way homeowners do, by waiting for something to fail in operation. Instead the entire facility must be shut down periodically and all the critical parts inspected and replaced if necessary. This is expensive (measured by lost production) and inefficient, since typically only a tiny fraction of the parts inspected really need replacement. The savings possible with valves that can monitor their own performance and predict when they will need to be replaced are significant. There are other gains: control devices that can communicate with all the other such devices in a plant can be organized to operate in precise synchrony, eliminating waste and making every production run identical to every other. And of course there are gains in being able to program an entire factory both remotely and (not 'or') automatically. While teleoperation and autonomy are sometimes thought to be antithetical, in fact they enable each other. Remote operation assumes a machine autonomous enough not to need a fulltime operator onsite and autonomous operation is unlikely to be trusted unless it supports supervision capable of dealing with the inevitable eventualities not contemplated by its programming. Further, remote operation defines a development vector for automation: increasing the number of machines that can be supervised by a single operator at the same time. Remote operation even has cultural implications, since it changes the nature of our relation to the machine. Everyone relates to a teleoperated machine in the same way: by sitting behind a desk, feet up, with a pizza slice in one hand, while banging on a keyboard with the other. It doesn't matter if you are running a vehicle, drilling a tunnel, washing windows, manufacturing textiles, or performing open heart surgery. All styles of work collapse into one. What will action movies look like when audiences assume that the normal relation to any machine is from a Barcalounger? What will directors do for car chases? Teleoperation changes our relation to the machine in another way. Generally our experience with machines is that they work; the very notion of operating 'mechanically' captures this implication. An operator runnning teleoperated machinery will never see them when they work, since his machines will only present themselves to his attention when something unexpected is about to happen. As machines get better at being autonomous, the population being controlled or supervised from any given point will grow; the larger the population, the more opportunities will appear for steadily weirder problems. The sense of "mechanical operation" as mindless repetition will turn into one in which machines are seen as quirky, bizarre, and unpredictable to the point of being positively bipolar. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.