The Hindu Business Line : Why ‘paperless office’ is ‘virtual’

Do you feel at sea? “The best way of dealing with this is to wear one of those JVC headsets with built-in EQ FX. Tune into REM on FM PDQ,” suggests Steve Morris in The Handbook of Management Fads ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

TLAs or three-letter-acronyms are endemic among managers and their gurus, he cautions. “It’s an unconscious fad, more like a nervous tic.” To identify TLA in action, all you have to do is “to eavesdrop on manager’s conversations. Listen out for sentences that have no intelligible nouns at all.”

Another fad discussed in the book is ‘paperless office’, a ‘squib’ born out of computerisation. “The idea excited the virtual community’s imagination by proposing that paper would become a thing of the past, finally rendered unnecessary by the virtual office – a cyberspace version of the one with handles.”

In the virtual office there are no filing cabinets! Because, “vast volumes of information would be stored on hard disk, safely hibernating inside microchip circuitry. Computers could file information much more precisely and quickly than human beings, who usually had to heave open a filing cabinet full of dog-eared folders. Words and other information would only need to be teleported to ‘our’ world when we actually chose to print it out.”

If that sounds alluring, listen to Morris’ caution before you go paperless: Microchips, “for all their hyper-this and virtual-that,” have a tendency to crash. “Hair was torn out in clumps as managers lost incalculable amounts of information and labour hours, then turned to their insurers for unlikely sums of money.”

Apparently paradoxically, computers haven’t reduced the use of paper; rather, its usage has grown. The paper habit dies hard, explains the author. More hard-copy documents are churned out than before; for, it is now possible “to digitally process huge amounts of text, then tell your mouse to tell your Pentium chip to tell your printer to run off nine or ten, or why not eleven-hundred? – copies of a document.”

That’s exactly what PC users did, narrates Morris. “Which explains why the paperless office remains in every sense a virtual office, and an actual fad.”

Entertainingly instructive.

For ‘the future tense’

The paper habit dies hard, explains the author.

Imagine this. At the flick of a switch, “a wall becomes a window becomes a hologram generator. Any chair becomes a hypercomputer, any rooftop a power or waste treatment plant.” Thus reads the year 2100 scenario that Wil McCarthy opens with in Hacking Matter ( www.oxfordbookstore.com).

In the twenty-second century, any competent designer will simply define the required shape and properties – “including ‘unnatural’ traits such as superreflectance, refraction matching (invisibility), and electromagnetically reinforced atomic bonds – and then distribute the configuration file to any interested users.”

How would that be possible? Using ‘quantum well,’ says the author. “While silicon was invaluable in the development of twentieth-century digital electronics, its ‘killer app’ eventually proved to be as a storage medium for electrons,” he explains. In this ‘quantum well’, you’d come across ‘quantum wire’, where the electron has a second dimension; and the ‘quantum dot’, with three dimensions. “The unique trait of a quantum dot, as opposed to any other electronic component, is that the electrons trapped in it will arrange themselves as though they were part of an atom, even though there’s no atomic nucleus for them to surround.”

These ‘designer atoms’, as McCarthy describes them, “can be fashioned into cubes or tetrahedrons or any other shape, and filled with vastly more electrons than any real nucleus could support, to produce ‘atoms’ with properties that simply don’t occur in nature.”

He takes you on a tour of ‘the programmable city’ where ‘quantum’ applications would abound. For instance, programmable matter “would provide us with room-temperature superconductors capable of carrying enormous currents in very tiny volumes,” foresees the author. In the ‘hypothetical house’, made mostly of quantum wells, “walls could serve as both wiring and energy storage – scalable on the fly, to meet the household’s changing needs as the hours and days and seasons unfold. In times of high consumption, virtual plaster would give way to fat conduits of pseudocopper, and to capacitors of pseudocarbon and glass.”

That way, we should be able to harvest the enormous energy that the sun showers upon the earth. “The power of full equatorial sunlight, at noontime on a horizontal target, is around 1,100 watts (1.1 kilowatts) per square metre… The sun deposits an average of 1.5 to 3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square metre every day in temperate climates.”

Considering that households in the developed world consume on average about 80 kWh, they would need for their energy needs only 53 square metres (less than 22 by 22 ft) of roof made of 100 per cent efficient photoelectric materials, instead of “442 square metres for a standard commercial (amorphous silicon) solar voltaic system today.” Larger homes can generate more electricity and run a surplus to sell back to the power grid.

Not the remote ‘future tense’, because only weeks ago scientists at Rice’s Centre for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) unveiled “a new chemical method for making four-legged cadmium selenide quantum dots, which previous research has shown to be particularly effective at converting sunlight into electrical energy…”

A book to prepare you for the smart city!

Tailpiece

“When I get unwanted calls…”

“You start barking?”

“No, I begin speaking like an answering machine!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in