2026-08-04 02:00:02
Most hospitals and health care providers use electronic health records instead of paper charts to note patient vaccinations, diagnoses, and procedures. AthenaOne, Epic, and Oracle Health are some of the systems employed around the world. Many patients can access their electronic medical records from home.
The platforms exist thanks to pioneering efforts such as the Medical Information System (MIS-I). The first hospital-wide computer system, it was developed in the 1960s by Lockheed Martin (then known as Lockheed Missiles and Space Co.) in partnership with El Camino Hospital, in Mountain View, Calif. Doctors and nurses used MIS-I (pronounced miss-ONE) to admit patients, order lab work and imaging, schedule follow-up appointments, and issue hospital bills, according to a 1973 article published by Datamation.
Although many people now know how to type on a keyboard, in the 1960s, most did not. Therefore, MIS-I included a light pen, which worked like a stylus for today’s touchscreens.
MIS-I was recognized as an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony on 14 May at El Camino Hospital. The IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section sponsored the Milestone.
“The medical information system was more than a technological breakthrough; it was proof of what can happen when clinicians, engineers, administrators, and community leaders unite around a common goal: improving care for patients,” Dan Woods said at the event. He is chief executive of El Camino Health, the nonprofit organization that maintains the hospital.
“This pioneering work helped establish the foundation for the modern medical informatics industry,” Woods said. “The legacy of Lockheed’s innovation continues to benefit patients and health care providers around the world, making this achievement truly worthy of lasting recognition.”
Prior to Lockheed’s effort, health records remained paper-based. They often were stored in dedicated rooms within the hospital. Files were kept in heavy-duty manila folders organized on mechanized open-shelf filing systems, revolving rotary files, or locked steel filing cabinets, according to EO Johnson Business Technologies. The process of retrieving a patient’s medical history was cumbersome and could hamper decision-making in a life-or-death situation. Paper records were prone to human error, according to an EHR in Practice article. In addition, upkeep could be costly due to administrative expenses such as transcribing doctors’ notes, storing patient charts, adding medical codes, and managing insurance claims.
Companies and universities including General Electric, IBM, and Harvard began exploring how to use computers to improve clinical care. They developed several systems for hospital laboratories to track test orders and results, as explained in the Milestone webpage.
In 1964 Lockheed was looking to diversify its portfolio, Melville Hodge, who helped lead the MIS development, said at the dedication ceremony. The company decided to apply its expertise to health care, and later that year this focus-area became part of a new information systems division. Hodge, who at the time oversaw multiple R&D efforts, became the driving force behind the MIS program.
MIS-I displayed patient information on a 14-inch television purchased from a department store. Below that monitor was a keyboard and a light pen.Ian Thomson/Computer History Museum
In 1966 Lockheed secured a contract with the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., to assess its computer system needs and those of its two associated hospitals, Hodge wrote in a paper detailing MIS history.
He and a small team of engineers worked with Mayo Clinic physicians for two years to build the prototype of what would become MIS-I.
The system displayed patient information on a 14-inch television purchased from a department store. Below that monitor was a keyboard, and to its right was a printer. Doctors and nurses would swipe their ID badge to access the system, then use the keyboard to put information into the patient’s file or send a request to a pharmacy or laboratory. They also could print documents.
But one problem kept cropping up: Most doctors didn’t know how to type. The computer mouse was still in its infancy, and Hodge suspected it would not solve the problem, according to a video shown at the dedication ceremony. Instead, he “borrowed technology from a then-secret satellite program,” he said.
That technology was the light pen, which was used with MIT’s Whirlwind Computer in the 1950s.
“The insight that physicians could not and would not learn to type, combined with the innovative solution of light pen interaction, transformed an impossible dream into practical reality,” the Milestone proposers wrote.
To display text, the system used matrix programming, a 2D data structure consisting of rows and columns. Using the light pen, a doctor or nurse would select text from a list of general categories on the monitor. The options included the patient’s personal and medical information, family medical history, current illness, and physical exam findings, according to a 1968 article in the medical journal JAMA. The computer would display the requested information or list the next steps to complete tasks such as sending a prescription to a pharmacy. The keyboard remained part of the setup because it could allow users to input new information and update patient records.
To further develop the system, they submitted a proposal to the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now split into the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education) to secure additional funding, but it was rejected.
Herschel Brown, Lockheed’s executive vice president, and Kenneth Larkin, its director of information systems, decided to fund its commercial development, Hodge wrote.
When the company’s contract with the Mayo Clinic ended, the Lockheed team returned to Sunnyvale, California to refine, test, and deploy the system at El Camino Hospital.
“I admire Ed Hawkins, who was its first administrator, for having the courage to take on this kind of project while running a hospital that was only four years old at the time,” Hodge said at the dedication ceremony.
Starting in 1968, early prototypes were installed in the hospital’s M.D. lounges and nursing station at El Camino Hospital. The organizations worked to configure the system so it met the hospital’s needs.
By 1969, a number of monitors had been installed, including in admissions, pharmacy, and radiology. The information from all the connected machines was stored in a data center housed in a separate location outside the hospital.
In 1971 Lockheed encountered difficulties with its C-5A and L-1011 aircraft programs, according to Hodge. The company was forced to curtail discretionary new business programs including MIS-I. The program was sold to Technicon of Tarrytown, N.Y., a leader in clinical laboratory automation.
The medical information system business operated independently as a subsidiary unit, and the transition marked the beginning of MIS-I’s commercial expansion.
That same year, MIS-I went live for hospital-wide use. Physicians’ orders were communicated to other departments, test results and radiology reports were retrieved, and nursing care planning and documentation were available, according to the Journal of Nursing Scholarship. MIS-I supported most information handling for nurses, physicians, and other medical personnel in the hospital.
But the change was not welcomed by all, according to the video about the technology. Nurses tended to praise the system, but many doctors had a hard time transitioning from paper to computers. They complained they were “spending more time fighting a machine” than interacting with their patients, according to the video. Some even retired to avoid learning the system. But nurses fought to keep it, emphasizing to doctors how much it improved patient care.
In 1974 El Camino Hospital held a vote of medical staff to determine whether to keep the system or return to paper-based records. About 60 percent of doctors and more than 90 percent of nurses voted in favor of keeping it, according to the Milestone webpage.
“The medical information system was more than a technological breakthrough; it was proof of what can happen when clinicians, engineers, administrators, and community leaders unite around a common goal: improving care for patients.” —Dan Woods, El Camino Health CEO
In 1975 nonprofit Battelle of Columbus, Ohio, evaluated how well the system was working for El Camino Hospital. It found that MIS-I reduced the time nursing staff spent on clerical tasks, improved communications among departments, and facilitated better planning of patient care. The survey also showed that more readily available, complete, and accurate information was being used to administer care and monitor patient progress, according to the filings.
By 1993, the technology was installed in more than 200 hospitals in the United States, Canada, and Europe, according to the Milestone entry.
El Camino Hospital used MIS-I for 34 years, until its decommissioning in 2005. It was initially replaced by Eclipsys Sunrise XA and then ultimately by Epic.
The dedication ceremony brought together IEEE leaders, hospital staff, and government representatives. Hodge and his family also attended. IEEE President-Elect Jill Gostin made a presentation about IEEE, and Brian Berg of the IEEE History Committee discussed the organization’s Milestone program.
Hodge participated in a Q&A session with Deb Muro, chief information officer of El Camino Health. He told a story about the early days of MIS-I that he said he will never forget. During a hospital board meeting at which physicians were complaining about the system, an announcement was made over the hospital’s public address system that MIS-I wasn’t working.
“I had to ignore it to survive,” Hodge said, laughing. “As physicians got more used to it, and with a phenomenal poking from the nurses, doctors who wouldn’t use it were forced to.”
A bronze plaque recognizing the MIS-I as an IEEE Milestone has been installed in the lobby of the hospital in Mountain View. The plaque reads:
From 1965 to 1974, the first hospital-wide computerized medical information system was created by Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. in partnership with El Camino Hospital. Innovative light-pen terminals enabled physicians and staff across all departments to efficiently and accurately access patient data and enter work orders. By providing immediate feedback and seamless communication, it reduced costs and errors, improved safety and outcomes, and led the way to modern medical and clinical informatics.
Reviewed by the IEEE History Committee and approved by the IEEE Board of Directors, IEEE Milestones recognize outstanding technical developments around the world that are at least 25 years old. The Milestone program is administered by the IEEE History and Heritage group.
To learn more about historical figures in engineering, IEEE Milestones, and IEEE History Center programs and events, check out The Institute’s IEEE Tech History collection. IEEE Spectrum also covers aspects of tech history.
2026-08-03 19:38:22
This article is brought to you by COMSOL.
In pursuit of improved range, greater reliability, and faster charging, electric vehicles are driving the demand for high-voltage electronics. Other applications driving this demand include wind farms, data centers, and server farms, to name a few. As the interest for high-voltage electronics increases, the risks associated with their sudden failure must be considered.
Much of what causes high-voltage equipment to malfunction can be linked to the conditions of the climate in which it operates. Specifically, condensation on electronic surfaces caused by humidity can lead to corrosion, which can result in stray leak current and dendrite shorting during Electrochemical Migration (ECM).
Predicting, mitigating, and helping proactively design to account for corrosion is the focus of the Centre for Electronic Corrosion (CELCORR) research group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The group’s researchers are working with industry partners to develop models and simulation apps that will help in building robust electronics designs. Their goal is to develop knowledge that can be used for manufacturing electronics to withstand humid operating conditions.
Automotive electrification and renewable energy systems rely on electronics at all stages of the energy chain. When these electronics, such as the example PCB in Figure 1, are exposed to the effects of moisture, they can become potential failure points.
“Anywhere you are producing, converting, transporting, and using energy, you need these high-power electronic systems that get affected by the humidity,” explained Dr. Rajan Ambat, DTU professor and manager of CELCORR. Ambient moisture can seep into the devices and machines that require these electronics and cause unexpected functional issues through corrosion. When these electronics are involved in particularly high-voltage applications (such as wind farms, data centers, electric vehicles, and server farms), failure due to humidity exposure can even lead to fire.
“There might be a situation where somebody installs a solar panel near the seashore or in an area with high humidity, and within a short period of time, a conducive condition forms inside the electronics that results in a failure,” Ambat said. “This is why we need to understand exactly how the conducive condition of condensation is created, when the condition is created, and how the system is failing.”
Figure 1. The electrolyte potential and current density distributions on a PCB surface (with pinholes).CELCORR/DTU
Identifying corrosion as the underlying cause of some electronic failures is still a challenge. “Fifty percent of failures in electronics are currently branded with an unidentified root cause,” Ambat explained. “When engineers open up the system, they do not realize that the failure was due to corrosion, because moisture disappears without leaving any sign of corrosion unless there is ECM dendrite formation.”
This lack of awareness was a strong motivator for CELCORR, which turned to multiphysics simulation as a supplementary tool to help its partner organizations to better predict humidity-related issues at the design stage.
CELCORR believes the best way to identify and avoid electronic failures is to build more effective designs that better prevent corrosion from developing or can withstand a higher humidity load. Its research team applies its expertise in modeling to generate simulation apps that will help partner industries to evaluate safe designs for humidity robustness.
“We are at the intersection of materials science and the electronics industry. We work as a bridge between materials and electronics disciplines, using both kinds of language,” Dr. Anish Rao Lakkaraju, a postdoctoral researcher at CELCORR, explained.
To understand potential design issues, Ambat emphasized the importance of virtually breaking down systems to identify where problems may arise. “We need simulation software to analyze potential uses of designs and whether new designs are good or bad,” Ambat said.
Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are using simulation apps to predict corrosion and design electronics proactively to mitigate or withstand its effects.
Using the COMSOL Multiphysics software for investigation, the CELCORR research team together with other research partners (Aalborg University) built an example model with a simple PCB geometry that matched both its test circuit boards as well as the design of a device used by one of its partner companies. The team then added a water film layer on top to act as the relative humidity. From there, the team could introduce variation. “We change the layout, geometry, distance between electrodes, thickness of the water film, and conductivity of the water film depending on the conditions,” Ambat said.
Ambat and his team generate data on the effect of these variations and can identify which has the greatest impact on the device’s performance and whether any alterations can improve the device’s anticorrosion robustness. “We assume there is condensation forming on the electronic surfaces (Figure 2) and compute the electrochemical leak current for different design elements,” Ambat said. “The value of the computed electrochemical current between the parts will give us an indication of whether the PCB will be affected or not.”
Figure 2. A 10-µm water film condensation effect on an example PCB.CELCORR/DTU
Altering the design elements and solving the model equations again and again allows the team to better understand what makes a design effective. “Now, we are at the current form of the model, and we are quite happy with where the physics are at this point,” Lakkaraju said. This modeling, however, was just the first part of CELCORR’s overarching goal of illuminating the destructive potential of corrosion in electronics and the best ways to avoid it.
To open up and ease access to these models, CELCORR used the Application Builder in COMSOL Multiphysics to create simulation applications for the members of the industrial consortium. Built with a simple 3D circuit board geometry with two oppositely biased electrodes and a water layer to replicate corrosion-causing moisture, the apps provide a pared-back, straightforward interface where users can vary model inputs. “We focused on fundamental aspects,” Lakkaraju said. “We boiled down our partners’ overarching concerns to create two apps with very simple geometries and the simplistic stuff that can be varied over multiple parameters.”
The simple simulation apps shown in Figures 3 and 4 are designed to show companies how the distance between the electrodes and the thickness of the moisture layer affect the leak current through the water film depending on different parameters. By analyzing multiple design elements and parameters, users can determine the relative benefits of certain design elements on the humidity robustness. “The apps we have built have really helped because they give the electronics engineers a plug-and-play sort of approach,” Lakkaraju explained.
Figure 3. The UI of CELCORR’s standalone app showing the inputs that users can alter.CELCORR/DTU
“By using this app [Figure 3], companies have unlimited freedom to work with these sorts of variables,” Lakkaraju added. “This would be quite difficult to recreate in real life with physical design and testing, and the companies we work with are quite happy with the level of accuracy the app can provide.”
Figure 4. The UI of one of the simulation apps showing a streamline plot with inputs such as the cathode voltage and blockage length.CELCORR/DTU
Alongside its collaboration with the industry consortium, CELCORR is also working toward improving the world’s general understanding of corrosion’s impact on electronics. To do this, Ambat and his team are undertaking multiple projects, including actively adding greater complexity to their models. In a tertiary current distribution model they are building, the team is drilling down into each of the basic inputs used in a secondary current distribution model, zooming in to examine the effects of the set of even more detailed inputs each basic input comprises.
“The next point is to study what each of these detailed inputs does,” Lakkaraju said. In particular, the team is examining mass transport properties and the chemical reactions’ rate constants.
In addition to these ongoing studies, CELCORR is expanding the scope of its research to investigate corrosion in high-power, high-voltage systems. Thanks to a 2024 grant from the Grundfos Foundation, CELCORR was able to establish the Centre for Climate Robust Electronics Design (CRED). The center’s lab facilities and expertise are being developed to address the humidity-robustness requirements of today’s high-voltage and high-power electronic equipment. “Using CELCORR’s uniquely deep understanding of materials and corrosion, we are equipped to find the root cause and provide knowledge for environmentally robust designs,” said Ambat.
For all of its investigation, CELCORR continues to rely on the agility of the COMSOL Multiphysics software. As Lakkaraju explained, “It is really quite nice how a model can be adapted to a variety of combinations of materials, geometries, and parameters and how the software allows you to keep building on from there.”
2026-08-02 21:00:01
A German engineer wanted a cheaper cigarette. The popular crooner Bing Crosby wanted a vacation. Satisfying both desires inadvertently led to the invention of the laugh track. Along the way there were Nazis, spoils of war, and more than one accidental encounter. Tying together this quirky history is the Magnetophon.
The Magnetophon was a high-fidelity reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder. The hit of the Berlin Radio Show when it debuted in 1935, it was developed by the German electronics manufacturer AEG. The magnetic tape was produced by I.G. Farben (now known as BASF).
German inventor Fritz Pfleumer came up with the idea of recording sound on magnetized paper tape coated with metal.ullstein bild/Getty Images
The tale of that tape runs through German inventor Fritz Pfleumer. In the early 1920s, Pfleumer was working on industrial paper products in Dresden. At the time, fancy cigarettes had gold leaf to decorate the tip. Cheaper manufacturers achieved a similar effect using colored paper, but the dye could stain smokers’ lips, and no one wanted that. Pfleumer devised a less expensive process using powdered bronze to simulate the gold band.
Pfleumer didn’t work in the recording industry, but he was familiar with the technology of electromechanical recording, which was done on metal wire—a 1898 invention of the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen. Pfleumer thought he could do something similar with paper by replacing his powdered bronze with a magnetized material. He patented his “sounding paper” in 1928 and also invented an audio tape recorder to go with it. The sound quality wasn’t great, and the paper tore easily, but it was the start of a promising idea. Two points in its favor: The paper could be sliced, allowing edits, and it could be erased and re-recorded over.
Pfleumer knew he needed to partner with a larger company to commercialize his idea, and so he signed a contract with AEG in 1932. Hermann Bücher, chairman of the AEG board of directors, took a personal interest in the project, helping shepherd it to completion. Although AEG originally planned on developing both a recorder and the tape, it didn’t take long for Bücher to reach out to his friend Wilhelm Gaus, managing director at I.G. Farben. AEG developed the hardware, while I.G. Farben worked on the tape.
The two teams dubbed their product the Magnetophon, or magnetic phonograph, and planned on launching it at the 1934 Berlin Radio Show to compete directly with machines that recorded on steel tape or wire. But the product wasn’t quite ready. Two days before the show, they canceled the debut.
A year later, the bugs had been worked out. The Magnetophon’s introduction at the 1935 show was a resounding success. AEG fielded inquiries for many variations on the recorder, including one that combined the recorder with a telephone, a player for prerecorded music, and a special version to add artificial reverberation for recording open-air concerts. Over the next three years, AEG developed several iterations, resulting in the Magnetophon K4 in 1938, its first commercially successful tape recorder.
The K4 eliminated the hiss and distortion that magnetic recordings previously suffered from by incorporating AC bias, which added a high-frequency signal, typically around 40 to 150 kilohertz, to the recording. Inaudible to the human ear, the signal reduced distortion, especially when recording quieter passages. The fidelity of the Magnetophon was such that radio listeners couldn’t distinguish between live broadcasts and prerecorded performances.
This is where the Nazis come in. Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, understood the power of radio. The Magnetophon became a powerful tool for both political messaging and military strategy. Because the device could record and play back sound at the same quality as a live radio broadcast, it allowed Hitler’s recorded speeches to be aired from one radio station while the dictator was in another part of the country. This made it more difficult for the Allies to pinpoint his location.
Meanwhile, World War II disrupted the exchange of technical information and prevented Americans from learning about the Magnetophon until after the war. At least, that’s the shorthand version of this history I kept running across during my preliminary research for this column.
During World War II, U.S. Army Signal Corps engineer Jack Mullin [top] came across the Magnetophon. After the war, he got approval [bottom] to ship two of the disassembled machines and reels of magnetic tape back to the U.S.Top: Pavek Museum; Bottom: Richard L. Hess/The Mullin Family Collection/Archive of Recorded Sound/Stanford University
But then I read Friedrich K. Engel’s account in the book Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years, which provides a wealth of detail about the Magnetophon. Among other things, Engel notes that the AEG affiliate in Schenectady, N.Y., received a Magnetophon in November 1937, well before the United States entered the war, and AEG engineers demonstrated it for their colleagues at nearby General Electric. The GE engineers dismissed the technology out of hand, though, and so Americans had to wait until after the war for the Magnetophon to be reintroduced.
We have electrical engineer John T. “Jack” Mullin to thank for that reintroduction. Mullin served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, stationed in the United Kingdom and Paris during the war, and he liked listening to the radio. He realized that “live” orchestral broadcasts coming from Germany in the middle of the night, when no musicians would have actually been in the studio, lacked the telltale hiss and crackle of prerecorded music. Clearly, German engineers had recording technology far superior to the Americans’.
Sent to Germany at the war’s end, Mullin eventually came across that technology at a radio station, and in 1945 when he returned home to California, he shipped two disassembled Magnetophons, a case of tape, schematic drawings, and the determination to change the U.S. recording industry.
Enter Bing Crosby. In the 1940s, Crosby was perhaps the most popular performer on the radio. But he was tired of performing two weekly shows three hours apart (one for each coast). He wanted to prerecord his performances and take a break. He sent in his lawyers to talk to executives at NBC, which aired his program. The audio recording technology at the time used vinyl or shellac transcription discs, but radio listeners could hear the pops and hisses and knew it wasn’t live. NBC refused Crosby’s request, and so Crosby took a year off from radio and then signed with the upstart network ABC, which was willing to let him record his shows for later airing.
Radio producer Murdo MacKenzie [right] arranged for Jack Mullin [left] to demonstrate the Magnetophon to Bing Crosby in 1946.Pavek Museum
Serendipitously, Mullin had begun demoing the Magnetophon in California. In October 1946, Crosby’s technical producer, Murdo MacKenzie, heard about the demonstrations and arranged one for Crosby at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood. Crosby was delighted and promptly invested US $50,000 (about $800,000 today) in Ampex, the company working with Mullin to engineer an American version of the Magnetophon. Mullin became Crosby’s chief engineer. 3M developed the magnetic tape.
In 1947, Crosby became the first major radio star in the United States to prerecord performances. Much of the success was due to the recording equipment, but Mullin was also an excellent editor. Crosby and his team would record multiple takes, and Mullin would deftly splice together the best to create a seamless performance.
After seeing a demo of the Magnetophon, Bing Crosby invested $50,000 in Ampex, which developed a U.S. version of the tape recorder. Cinematic/Alamy
One day a guest told a joke that was uproariously funny, but a little too spicy for radio. Even though the joke couldn’t be aired, the audience’s laughter was worth keeping. Soon, the producers created a whole catalog of different laugh tracks. If a joke didn’t land, it didn’t matter. The editor could just add a laugh in postproduction, from polite titters to hearty guffaws.
According to Crosby’s daughter Mary, Bing didn’t have a problem with this type of editing. The live audience was immaterial as long as the jokes were funny. But according to Mullin’s daughter, Eve Mullin Collier, the manipulation didn’t sit well with her father. He disliked the inauthenticity of the moment, of editing joy.
The history of technology is filled with such episodes of unintended consequences. Mullin admired the Magnetophon precisely because it could faithfully record a performance, an event, a moment in time. He worked tirelessly to refine the machine for the benefit of radio audiences everywhere. And so I understand why its appropriation for capturing canned reactions and manipulating reality must have rankled. He championed the technology, but ultimately it moved beyond his control.
Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2026 print issue as “Birth of the Laugh Track.”
Luis Felipe Eguiarte Souza, curator at the Pavek Museum of Electronic Communication, in St. Louis Park, Minn., first told me about the Magnetophon and its link to the laugh track. The machine pictured at top is on display at the Pavek, and is one of the two that Jack Mullin brought back from Germany and then rebuilt.
For significantly more technical detail on the development of the Magnetophon, magnetic tape, and its reinvention in America, check out Chapter 5, “The Introduction of the Magnetophon,” by Friedrich K. Engel, and Chapter 6, “Building on the Magnetophon,” by Beverley R. Gooch, in Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years (IEEE Press, 1998).
Radiolab interviewed Mary Crosby and Eve Mullin Collier as part of the show “Mixtape: Jack and Bing,” which includes many archival recordings as it tells the story of the development of the laugh track.
There is a 2006 documentary on Jack Mullin titled Sound Man: WWII to MP3, but I was unable to view it.
2026-08-01 20:00:01
When I started at Spectrum 25 years ago, a senior editor suggested that I find a “rabbi,” by which he meant someone who could mentor me in how EEs approach problems and evaluate potential solutions.
I didn’t find one right away. Then in 2005 we decided to do a special report, focusing on the challenges of enterprise software development. I suggested we invite IEEE Life Senior Member Robert N. Charette, a self-described risk ecologist, prolific book author, and leading authority on risk management and software engineering, to explore in our pages the myriad reasons software projects fail. His seminal article “Why Software Fails” is still read in university engineering classes today.
IEEE Life Senior Member Robert N. Charette is one of IEEE Spectrum’s most prolific authors.Robert N. Charette
It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I had found my rabbi, one who shared my love of writing. We settled into a rhythm that would last more than 20 years, talking on Friday mornings about a range of topics including the growing ubiquity of software in our lives.
So when I became Spectrum’s website editor in 2007, he was the first contributor I tapped to start a regular blog (remember those?). The Risk Factor was born and over the course of more than 10 years and 1,750 posts, Bob chronicled hundreds of software debacles, culminating in “Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures,” which won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Infographics in 2016. Ironically, yet predictably, those infographics were created in a software package that is no longer supported and thus are lost to the bits of time.
“I like the expression on the fish just before it’s going to be swallowed by the heron.”Robert N. Charette
Bob, however, was not a one-trick pony. In between his full-time job running his two management consultancies and raising a future biochemist and a future civil engineer, his daughters Maura and Megan, he also wrote many deeply reported and insightful articles. These include last year’s “The Doctor Will See Your Electronic Health Record Now,” the eye-opening 12-part series and e-book The EV Transition Explained, and my personal favorite “Automated to Death,” about the deadly consequences of the automation paradox as manifested by the cyberphysical systems that pilot planes, trains, and automobiles.
“The young bald eagle I photographed in September 2024 had bands that I could read which identified it as a female born in May 2024, near Lexington Park, St. Mary’s County, Maryland, about 65 miles away from where I live.”Robert N. Charette
His main goal all along has been to make software visible, as he told me one Friday in July. “Software is all around us, but we don’t recognize it at all,” he said. “I really wanted my stories to help people better understand complex software systems. You can’t see software, you can’t touch it, you can’t taste it. You may feel the consequences of software failure, but you never see the reason itself.”
When he told me that he was hanging up his hat as a contributing editor to focus on nature photography and to write a handful of fictional trilogies, including one entitled “The STEM Murders” featuring an engineer-turned-detective and his rabbi, I asked him which of his Spectrum articles had the biggest impact.
“The hummingbird I caught with the yellow of a road curb behind it.”Robert N. Charette
He singled out the 2013 feature “The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.” “Spectrum gave me a platform to question the assumption that we needed more STEM graduates. Until then, people didn’t really realize how much of the STEM crisis was a mythology that was perpetuated by employers and the academic community and was foisted on the IEEE community,” he said.
Charette made a career of questioning assumptions. The best way to mitigate risk, he told me as our Friday chat drew to a close, is to be careful making assumptions in the first place. “My main risk maxim is assumptions made are risks accepted.”
2026-07-31 02:00:03
Given a rising number of publishing misconduct allegations, IEEE in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Team as a centralized department to assist in handling claims. The group also works to increase the organization’s visibility in the broader publishing ethics area and helps IEEE volunteers write new policies.
Here are some highlights of the team’s activities last year.
IEEE conducted a pilot program in 2024 to integrate tools from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) Integrity Hub into the peer-review workflow of IEEE Access. The multidisciplinary, fully gold-open-access journal publishes research results across all IEEE fields of interest.
STM created the hub so scholarly publishers could access a suite of integrated, commercial, third-party research integrity tools as well as those developed by STM Solutions. The tools help the publishing group avoid printing problematic content upon manuscript receipt, rather than reacting postpublication.
The new features include the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm, which helps identify potentially fraudulent manuscripts at submission. Another is an integration with the PubPeer database, which allows users to check whether references in a manuscript have received previous PubPeer comments or have been retracted—both of which can indicate quality or integrity issues. The duplicate submissions detector can determine whether the same manuscript has been submitted to multiple journals by different publishers, often a sign of academic “paper mill” activity.
Following the success of the pilot, IEEE began working last year to expand the services to all its periodicals. It is anticipated that all IEEE periodicals will be included in the Integrity Hub screening by the end of this year.
The team participated in industry-wide initiatives with STM. It also renewed membership in groups including the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the team continued its work sponsoring and presenting at conferences.
At a panel presentation during the Council of Science Editors annual meeting last year, Amanda Sulicz, manager of IEEE Research Integrity, participated in the Research Integrity Investigation panel session. She also presented at the Standardization of Publishing Integrity Norms and Corrective Actions poster session during the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s annual meeting, held 28 to 30 May 2025.
Luigi Longobardi, the IEEE Publishing Ethics and Conduct director, gave a presentation at the Communication and Collaboration With Institutions session during STM Innovation and Integrity Days, which took place 9 and 10 December.
IEEE was a sponsor of the National Conference on Research Integrity, held 20 to 22 May 2025, and the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, held 3 to 5 September.
The team is responsible for tracking ethics-related complaints for all IEEE publications, including articles published in periodicals and conference proceedings. When complaints regarding an article’s integrity are received, either via email at [email protected] or the anonymous ethics reporting line, the team works with IEEE volunteers to open a case, investigate the complaint, and resolve the matter.
Last year 591 cases were opened, a 56 percent increase over 2024. Of the 591 reports, 317 were closed and 274 are still under investigation. Of the complaints, 88 percent were research-related, including issues with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and falsification of—or unauthorized use of—data. The other 12 percent involved alleged misconduct by editors, reviewers, and conference organizers.
The complexity of the reported cases has expanded. An increasing number of the complaints deal with more than one article or complicated situations such as editorial misconduct or peer-review manipulation.
For the second consecutive year, the team participated in the joint IEEE Publication Services and Products Board/IEEE Conferences Committee’s ad hoc committee on conference publication quality. The committee is tasked with analyzing and reviewing problematic conference papers and enhancing quality screening of articles prior to publication to detect integrity issues such as plagiarism and tortured phrases. The committee also updates educational modules on organizing and managing conferences.
As part of the review process, the committee focused on conference articles that contained tortured phrases, which are nonstandard English expressions that are imprecise or erroneous and give the impression of technical jargon.
Many of the articles reviewed by the ad hoc committee were identified by the Problematic Paper Screener, a free online tool that uses application programming interfaces to screen papers published online for potentially problematic content, such as tortured phrases, machine-generated content (SCIgen or Mathgen, for example), or references to retracted content.
The ad hoc committee was responsible for reviewing and recommending the retraction of more than 1,700 problematic conference articles last year.
From the cases the team reviewed, IEEE learned valuable information to help update its publishing policies and best practices.
Here are examples of two anonymized cases reported to the team last year.
Updated Policies
Occasionally, a misconduct case is so complicated that it requires an update to the PSPB Operations Manual.
In this particular case, Coauthor 1 reported to the Publishing Ethics Team that the work was reused in an IEEE publication without proper credit. The new work also listed two coauthors not part of the original document. Coauthor 1 also reported the case to their university’s research integrity officer (RIO) for additional investigation.
Initially, adjudicating the case proved challenging because under the PSPB policies at the time, the issue would have been classified as a multiple publication, which typically results only in a warning for the authors of the new work.
With the assistance of the RIO, it was determined that the methodological and theoretical portions of the paper were previously derived in the university’s lab; therefore, the contributions of the two new authors were not substantial enough to warrant authorship.
After deliberations by the IEEE Publishing Conduct Committee and eventually the IEEE Document Working Group, which is responsible for updates to the Operations Manual, IEEE PSPB Policy 8.2.4 was updated to clarify policies regarding the adjudication process for reuse of material and the proper crediting of coauthors when material has been reused.
Faked Reviewers
Using the screening tools and data available to IEEE periodical editors, an editor in chief was alerted to suspicious reviewer activity. Specifically, two of the reviewers assigned to an article submitted the exact same review text. The editor contacted the handling editor to inform them of the irregularities and also contacted the two reviewers, asking them to verify that they were, in fact, the ones who submitted the reviewer report. Out of an abundance of caution, a new editor was assigned to the article, and new reviewers were selected while the investigation continued.
The investigation concluded that the original handling editor created and submitted both reviews in question. Following the recommendations provided to the PSPB vice president by the periodical’s Society and Publishing Conduct Committee, the handling editor was banned from publishing with IEEE and serving in an editorial capacity.
2026-07-30 22:00:03
If you’re wondering what dark matter is, you’re not alone. Astronomers don’t know. But they’ve determined that this invisible material must be far more abundant than the stars and nebulas that they can see. They’ve surmised as much from observing the gravitational effects of all this perplexing dark stuff, launching a decades-long campaign to understand its nature.
I recently learned that it is possible to sense the presence of dark matter using a small radio telescope such as the Discovery Dish covered in these pages last year. The trick is to know what observations to collect and how to analyze them. I’ll sketch that out below, but first let me describe the homemade radio telescope I put together for this project.
It’s a pyramidal-horn antenna, not unlike the horn antenna first used in 1951 to detect the 1,420.4-megahertz radio emissions from interstellar clouds of neutral hydrogen in space. These emissions hold the key to confirming the presence of dark matter because such clouds can be found all over the galaxy, and their motions reflect what’s happening in different parts of the Milky Way.
I used an online calculator to help me design my antenna, adopting dimensions I knew I could achieve using a US $25 10-by-2-foot roll of roof flashing and an emptied one-gallon paint-thinner can. (Next time, I’ll just buy an empty F-style can.)
The horn antenna is made from tape, an empty paint-thinner can, and a roll of metal roof flashing [bottom row]. Signals are picked up with a low-noise amplifier [top middle] and passed to a software-defined radio receiver [top left].James Provost
Construction of the antenna itself was similar to that of the slightly smaller horn antenna I described in these pages in 2019. I made my new antenna bigger, though, because I needed better angular resolution, allowing me to scan smaller regions of the sky.
To pick up the emissions from interstellar hydrogen, I used Nooelec’s $45 SAWBird+ H1, a device that combines two low-noise amplifiers with a standing-acoustic-wave filter centered on 1,420 MHz, in combination with a RTL-SDR V4 dongle. So it’s not too hard to put together the hardware needed to measure signals from hydrogen clouds. But how do you pull the signature of dark matter out of those signals?
The answer is that you use such measurements to gauge the speed at which clouds located at different distances from the center of the Milky Way are moving in their orbits.
You just have to show that the speed at which material orbits the center of the galaxy doesn’t fall off with distance.
You might think that these clouds circle around the galactic center in the same way that planets orbit the sun or satellites orbit the Earth, with objects close in orbiting faster than those farther out. Mercury, for example, zips around the sun at 47.4 kilometers per second, whereas Neptune lumbers along at a leisurely 5.4 km/s.
The Milky Way contains a central bulge of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole. So at first blush, the mass of the galaxy appears to be concentrated near its center. If that were the case, stars and clouds of other material would orbit more slowly as their distance from the center increases. If, however, there were enormous amounts of invisible matter present throughout the galaxy, you wouldn’t expect orbital velocities to diminish in this way.
So to detect dark matter, you just have to show that the speed at which material orbits the center of the galaxy doesn’t fall off with distance. And radio observations are the easiest way to do that, because you can gauge speeds by measuring how much the signal from hydrogen clouds is shifted by the Doppler effect.
By pointing your radio telescope at different parts of the sky, you pick up emissions from clouds located at various distances from the galactic center. The frequency offset of these emissions from 1,420 MHz reflects the speed of approach or recession of those clouds relative to Earth.
You need measurements from the plane of the galaxy, at galactic longitudes between 0 and 90 degrees (a galactic longitude of 0 degrees points directly toward the center of the galaxy and 180 degrees directly away from it). Applying some high school trigonometry lets you convert these figures into orbital speeds around the galactic center, a technique known as the tangent-point method.
In any group of clouds, the one with the highest velocity as seen from Earth will be the one lying closest to a tangent point along its orbit around the galaxy. This allows its distance from the galactic center to be determined through trigonometry [top]. The bottom graph shows the astronomical community’s measurements for velocities around the galactic center [in black], with the author’s results plotted in filled and open red circles.James Provost
Experiments aiming my horn antenna at an Inmarsat geostationary satellite revealed that the angular resolution of my little radio telescope is about 20 degrees. So with the help of the planetarium program Stellarium, I pointed my antenna in the plane of the galaxy at galactic longitudes of about 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, and 90 degrees, spacing things out in an effort to make each set of measurements largely independent.
I used the SDR# software with a plug-in called IF Average to read the raw measurements coming in from the antenna. This plug-in stacks up data received over a few minutes, allowing a weak signal to build up and produce a clean radio spectrum that shows the 1,420-MHz line. In reality, it looks more like a bump, or even a set of bumps due to Doppler shifted emissions from multiple clouds, located at different distances from the galactic center. Fortunately, you only have to care about the cloud that’s receding the fastest—the one with the largest redshift, in astronomer-speak.
I used Microsoft Excel to analyze the shapes of radio spectra I gathered, modeling them as the sums of individual bell-shaped contributions from different clouds. That allowed me to estimate the largest redshift for each galactic longitude I probed. Then, again using Excel, I applied formulas that transformed those six redshift values into six pairs of orbital velocities and distances from the galactic center.
The plot of my results matched reasonably well with a recent paper, “The Inner Rotation Curve of the Milky Way,” in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan. Two innermost points did show anomalously low orbital velocities. Another shot at curve fitting in Excel brought these results closer to expectations, but they were still somewhat off.
In any case, the orbital velocities I estimated did not diminish with distance from the galactic center—quite the opposite. Something out there is putting its stamp on how the Milky Way turns. And that basic observation is what allows me to say that, with the help of some roof flashing and a paint-thinner can, I’ve been able to detect dark matter from my backyard.