Meeting notice: The 01.09.04 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. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Note: At the 8.21 meeting it was announced that the first meeting of September would be held on the 11th instead of the 4th, to accommodate a visit by Rod MacGregor, CEO of the startup NanoMuscle. (NanoMuscle uses alloys possessing shape memory to generate the contractions and expansions required for the application as opposed to the usual electroactive polymers.) Mr. MacGregor has had to reschedule to the 25th. As a result the first meeting of the month will be held on the first Tuesday (the 4th) as usual with the second meeting being moved from the third Tuesday to the fourth.* <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic for the meeting on the 4th: Privacy policy from the NT perspective. From an NT point of view the effort to maintain anything like the current status quo wrt privacy expectations, privileges, and practices faces two obstacles. One is that the development of NT will ensure that the power and invasiveness of monitoring technologies is going to grow and their costs fall without obvious limit. While it is possible in theory to imagine passing laws and regulations that will try to prevent citizens and authorities from making use of these technologies, enforcing those laws would require building a law enforcement bureaucracy that would be so large and powerful (and invasive) that it is hard to see the gain. The second problem is that NT will concentrate and enlarge the powers of mischief quite remarkably. No one receiving this needs any help in working out the possibilities, which form part of almost every serious discussion about the technology. It seems natural to try to solve the second problem with the first, by encouraging the development of what David Brin has called The Transparent Society. In essence, everyone would be under surveillance by everyone else all the time. Such an approach would not only be compatible with the trends mentioned above but also accommodate the steadily falling standard of tolerance for risks to personal safety, which would probably lead to widespread demand for a number of privacy-invading technologies (face recognition, publication of criminal histories) anyway. It would also end the tension between two essentially incompatible public goods -- on the one hand, the more information you or I have about the society, the better we can order our lives and play out our roles as citizens -- and privacy, which prevents us from obtaining that information. It would establish a clear definition for policy change -- struggling to make sure that the privacy of the rich and powerful is eroded at least as fast as that of everyone else's. But the path to a fully transparent society is certainly not without complexities. For instance, how much of a what CEO of a Fortune 500 company does should be public? A Fortune 5000 company? The guy who owns the pizzeria down the street? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Chris Phoenix writes: Fred Hapgood described Whitesides' critique in SciAm as "gentle, but smart and focussed". However admirable the writing style, such a description doesn't change the fact that the article is chock-full of technical errors. It's unrelated to nanotech, but the tone of the article is set by an early factual mistake: The flagellar motor does not use ATP, but instead uses a proton gradient. His critique of assemblers is based largely on Smalley's strawman of "fingers" or "pincers" that must manipulate the molecules. That, plus other claims such as that the strength of carbon bonds will make it impossible to release them from the placement tool, make me think that he is unaware of detailed work by Merkle and others on how to solve precisely these problems. Or perhaps he simply chooses not to mention it. He is also wrong about cancer cells not having chemical markers on their surface. Many of them do in fact have these markers. Many others differ in physical properties that would be possible for a nanomachine to detect. As to his description of nanoscale submarines, he got the scale wrong; he overplayed the importance of Brownian motion (white cells can "walk" along the surface of a blood vessel); and he described as almost insurmountable several problems that are simply matters for engineering, such as chemical sensing and power source. Whitesides' critique is too full of errors to be useful. Every single one of his objections is either flatly wrong, or has been addressed in far more detail than he cares to admit. There are enough known factual errors that the article can't even be used safely as a reference or starting point for further discussion. Chris -- Chris Phoenix cphoenix@best.com http://www.best.com/~cphoenix Interests: nanotechnology, dyslexia, caving, filk, SF, patent reform... Check out PriorArt.org! <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> *Anyone looking for something else to do on the 11th might consider the presentation by Kent Quirk, CTO of CogniToy, of his company's new, hideously addictive, breakout robot programming game. Discussion starts at 6 PM; Progam, at 6:30 PM. Wellesley High School. For more details see www.robotics-boston.org and/or www.cognitoy.com. Sponsored by the Boston chapter of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> 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.