IEEE Spectrum August, 2014 - 10

SPectrAL LineS_

careers of the 20th century. He improved
on the traveling-wave tube, which had been
invented in Britain during World War II by
Rudolf Kompfner, who himself published
a feature article in Spectrum in 1967 titled
"Electron Devices in Science and Technology." With writer Arthur C. Clarke, Pierce
is credited with conceiving the communications satellite, and he later led the project
that built the first commercial one, Telstar 1.
What's more, Pierce published science fiction novels and, at the end of his career,
was a music professor at Stanford, where
he discovered a new kind of musical scale.
Pierce was also known for his wit: "Funding artificial intelligence is real stupidity,"
was one of many memorable quotes. An
article he wrote for Spectrum elaborated
on that very notion. "Many early computer
enthusiasts thought that computers should
resemble human beings and be good at
exactly the tasks that human beings are

good at," he wrote. He likened that approach to "designing an airplane that will
light on a tree. It is facing the future with
one's back squarely towards it." Nowadays,
with enthusiasm high for the technological singularity and its promise of machine
consciousness, I long for Pierce's authority,
clear-eyed realism, and pungent humor.
Luminaries continue to appear in the
pages of Spectrum. Best-selling author and
Harvard Business School professor Clayton
M. Christensen contributed to two memorable articles, one on the microprocessor
business and the other on how the Toyota
production method could be applied to
semiconductor manufacturing. In 2008,
not long after Hewlett-Packard researcher R.
Stanley Williams and his team succeeded in
building the long-hypothesized memristor,
Williams described that work in a feature
article for us. Nathan Myhrvold, a former
chief technical officer of Microsoft and a

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cofounder of the huge patent holding company Intellectual Ventures, has contributed
to two Spectrum features. The first, published in our June 2013 issue, described
efforts to build a food compositor, which
would assemble edible "elements" into delectable custom-made meals. His second article, published just last month, described
why even costly modern ovens perform
poorly and how they could be improved.
And then there was the article that got
away. In 2006, a publicist for Microsoft Corp.
sent us a manuscript and informed us that
the byline could list as authors Bill Gates
and one other Microsoft executive. However,
when we showed the executive an edited
version of the article, which was about a
robotics initiative, the company balked and
politely withdrew the draft. We next saw
the piece in the pages of Scientific American,
some months later. Predictably, it did not
seem to have been substantially edited.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum August, 2014