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One expects Vice President Joe Biden to have loose lips. He has made a career of saying the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, for most of his political life in the US Senate. It has been interesting, therefore, that he has managed in recent months to keep himself away from press scrutiny. The last widely-published gaffe that I remember was the open microphone comment as Obama signed the health care bill in March 2010, “This is a big f***ing deal!” To me, his best ever out of context, lack-of-reality moment was in September 2008, commenting, during the last financial crisis, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here's what happened.’” That was quite some trick...because, of course, FDR was not president in 1929 and if there was any television it was very much experimental and known to only a few. But if Al Gore had actually completed his tr...

The US and other leading nations are looking to science and technology advancements to spur economic security and growth. Meanwhile, the political season has prompted fierce debates over the return on investment in research and the role of science in shaping public policy. Never before, it seems, has science held such contrasting, controversial and conflicting roles in the national conversation. Can America regain its competitive edge and continue to lead the world into a brighter future through greater spending in science, technology, engineering, and math? Billions of dollars invested in science and math education, drug development and bioengineering, new energy technologies and climate research have thus far not produced the answers the public expected to national issues and crises. And while those investments may have produced a few meaningful and practical benefits, they have done little in inspiring bold, new visions. Is the nation wasting money on ineffective and misplaced research, which sustains bl...

Donald Trump is probably best known these days not for his various bankruptcies and failed marriages, but for his strange hair and, of course, his hosting of NBC’s various iterations of The Apprentice. Created by Mark Burnett, the series allegedly winnows down a group of potential Trump employees to a single, lucky, candidate who takes a $250,000 job within the enterprise for one year. So far none of the winners has stayed with the organization beyond that year, and some of them have described their appointments as PR exercises. Viewer ratings on the show have not been good for NBC over the program's seven seasons, but the format has been copied in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Great Britain. In the UK the host is Alan Michael Sugar, known through the first few series as Sir Alan Sugar before being elevated to a peerage as Baron Sugar of Clapton by the very short-term Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Lord Sugar is a multimillionaire who made his fortune with hi-fi turntables using injection molded...

I was lucky enough to get into electronics at a time when the semiconductor was just moving from research to commercial fact for hobbyists. My first ever published technical article, for example, was for the design of a “Transistorised Q Multiplier” (for a receiver IF stage) that was published in Camm’s Comic (Practical Wireless, still published though with rather different content) when I was sixteen and which earned me the princely sum of six guineas. The circuit used a germanium ‘white spot’ transistor which was a pnp device selected for its RF performance – rather limited performance at that. When germaniums became more reliably made the same device was pretty close to an OC45, as opposed to the ‘red spot’ which was only good for audio – later close to an OC71 in specifications. The use of a 9 V battery for these projects in the early 1960s did not dilute the amount of work that I was involved in, both as a hobby and then as a professional, with valve...

If you remember the changeover to digital television terrestrial broadcasting in the US – and how could you possibly forget – it seemed to take forever. Maybe that was because it did. You would be forgiven for thinking that the US Government mandate for digital broadcasting was to enable viewers to have higher quality video and audio available to them. It wasn’t. It was instead a commercial desire to make existing TV channels available for auction for mobile wireless services. The timing, it ended up, was in poor economic times but somewhere down the road the US Treasury will benefit with a one-time revenue boost of a guaranteed $7.3 billion for what should be regarded as public property: the RF spectrum. The original Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 (the safety aspect being the public emphasis back-story of all the spectrum that was being freed for emergency services use) gave five years for the transition of all high-power transmitters to take place by 11:59 PM (local) on...