A New Start

photo

Quote

"I am easily satisfied with the very best."

  --  Winston Churchill

Nissan EPORO Robot Car

http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/NEWS/2009/_STORY/091001-01-e.html

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October 1, 2009

Nissan EPORO Robot Car "Goes to School" on
Collision-free Driving by Mimicking Fish Behavior
- Advanced Robotic Concept Debuts at CEATEC JAPAN 2009 -

YOKOHAMA (Oct. 1, 2009) - In 2008, it was the flight of the bumblebee that inspired Nissan's Biomimetic Car Robot Drive "BR23C" concept. In 2009, fish-inspired technology takes center stage in Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.'s new Nissan "EPORO*1" robot car concept, which is designed to travel in a group of like-vehicles, mimicking the behavioral patterns of a school of fish in avoiding obstacles without colliding with each other.

Nissan will demonstrate this breakthrough technology with a group of six EPOROs when they make their world debut at the CEATEC JAPAN 2009, October 6 - 10 at the Makuhari Messe.

EPORO robot car

CEATEC JAPAN is an annual exhibition showcasing cutting-edge electronic and information technologies. Nissan is the only auto manufacturer that has been a participant in this exhibition since 2006. In addition to displaying the futuristic EPORO, Nissan Senior Vice President Minoru Shinohara will deliver a keynote speech, titled "The Future of the Automobile with Electric Vehicles and Car Robotics Evolution," and participate in a panel discussion on "EV leads to a society of 'All Electrification' and 'All Mobilization.'" Nissan will also exhibit the new Skyline Crossover's*2 current collision prevention technologies and provide test drives of an eco-drive diagnosis system utilizing an iPhone®*3 application.

EPORO Robot Car So what do a bumblebee and a school of fish have in common? Both demonstrate extraordinary "anti-collision" abilities, navigating instinctively and intelligently through challenging terrain by detecting and avoiding obstacles - just as future Nissan safety vehicles may have the capability to do. But where bees - and the BR23C robot car - are likely to travel alone, the schooling behavior of fish, or a group of vehicles, presents a far greater challenge in terms of collision avoidance. In developing EPORO, three rules of fish behavior were applied to its driving control.

School of fish swimming

Generically, fish recognize the surroundings based on lateral-line sense and sense of sight and form schools based on three behavior rules. A laser range finder*4 is used for lateral-line sense, while UWB*5 communications technology is utilized for the sense of sight.

Fish Behavior Rules AREA 1: Collision Avoidance Change traveling direction without colliding with other fish. AREA 2: Traveling Side-by-Side Travel side-by-side with other fish while keeping a certain distance between each fish (to match the speed). AREA 3: Approaching Gain closer proximity to other fish that are at a distance from them.

"We, in a motorized world, have a lot to learn from the behavior of a school of fish in terms of each fish's degree of freedom and safety within a school and high migration efficiency of a school itself. In EPORO, we recreated the behavior of a school of fish making full use of cutting-edge electronic technologies," said Toshiyuki Andou, Manager of Nissan's Mobility Laboratory and principal engineer of the robot car project. "By sharing the surrounding information received within the group via communication, the group of EPOROs can travel safely, changing its shape as needed."

This is the world's first development of a robot car that can travel in a group by sharing the position and information of others within a group via communication technologies.

While Nissan's ongoing research aims at creating collision-free vehicles based on its safety concept "Safety Shield*6," new technologies used in EPORO also aim to improve migration efficiency of a group of vehicles and contribute to an environmentally friendly and traffic jam-free driving environment.

[Keynote Speech]
Minoru Shinohara, Senior Vice President in charge of Research & Development, will make a presentation on "The Future of the Automobile with Electric Vehicles and Car Robotics Evolution," talking about an impact of EV on society and a safer automotive society in the future with collision-free vehicles.

Time and Date: 11:00 - 12:00, Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Venue: Convention Hall B, International Conference Hall

[Panel Discussion]
The trend toward the prevention of global warming and reduced dependence on oil are expected to create new industrial fields. Combined with new technologies, they will help contribute to a sustainable society. In this session, titled "EV Leads to a Society of 'All Electrification' and 'All Mobilization,'" executives from leading companies of related industries and local government officials will discuss business opportunities and challenges for this new energy revolution.

Time and Date: 14:00-16:00, Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Venue: Convention Hall B, International Conference Hall

* For details, please refer to the official web site.

[Other Presentations and Exhibits]
□Exhibition of Advanced Technologies for Collision-free Vehicles
Nissan will exhibit current cutting-edge autonomous safety technologies including Distance Control Assist System, Lane Departure Prevention and Around View Monitor with Parking Guide as well as cooperative technologies like Intelligent Transport Systems. Nissan's latest model Skyline Crossover, which was released in Japan in July 2009, will also be displayed.

□Test Drive Event for Eco Drive Check with iPhone®
In September 2009, Nissan and Yokohama City began a cooperative project called "E1 Grand-Prix," in which drivers compete in a fuel efficiency challenge. Aiming to encourage more people to participate in the project, Nissan will conduct a trial test ride event with an eco-drive diagnosis system. Utilizing an iPhone®*3 application on the roads around Makuhari Messe, participants will drive on a two-to-three-kilometer public road course and check how close they can come to the benchmark fuel-efficiency target.

* CEATEC JAPAN: Cutting-edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition.
Official website: http://www.ceatec.com

1. *1: EPORO: Abbreviation of EPisode O (Zero) Robot (Episode aiming to be CO2-free and accident-free).
2. *2: Skyline Crossover: Infiniti EX outside Japan.
3. *3: iPhone® is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.
4. *4: Laser range finder: Ranging sensor which measures the distance to an obstacle with reflection of laser light.
5. *5: UWB: Ultra Wide Band: Short-distance radio communications technology that measures the position of the target and the distance to it through calculation of the time lag from transmission to reflection of the pulse signal.
6. *6: Safety Shield: Nissan's advanced and active safety concept based on the idea the vehicle that always helps protect the people from normal driving situation to after the collision. It focuses on supporting drivers not to let them face the risk.

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Quotes

The Bridge Builder

An old man going a lone highway,
came at the evening cold and gray,
to a chasm vast and deep and wide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
but he turned when safe on the other side
and built a bridge to span the tide.

"Old man", said a fellow pilgrim near,
"You are wasting your strength with
building here; your journey will end
with the ending day. You never again
will pass this way. You’ve crossed the
chasm, deep and wide, why build a
bridge at evening tide?"

The builder lifted his old gray head;
"Good friend in the path I have come",
he said, "there followed after me today
a youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me,
to that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim.
Good friend I am building this bridge for him!"

-- Will Allen Dromgoole (1860-1934), Writer

NIGHT MAIL by W H Auden

NIGHT MAIL
by W H Auden

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Thro' sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver's eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman's restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro' southern uplands with northern mails. Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro' the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

FT: Identifying the right balance

Identifying the right balance

By Rhymer Rigby

Published: August 31 2009 23:07 | Last updated: August 31 2009 23:07

Property developer Heron International held a ceremony this summer to bury a time capsule in its Heron Tower development at Bishopsgate in the City of London. Its contents included an ethically sourced tortoiseshell.

“In feng shui, the tortoiseshell represents a strong back, protection and security,” explained Gerald Ronson, Heron’s chief executive. “For this reason, a tortoiseshell is commonly placed into the foundations of a building that incorporates feng shui principles. It is believed to help keep it safe and is considered an auspicious symbol.”

Another corporate exponent of feng shui is HSBC. Its headquarters on Hong Kong’s waterfront, designed by Sir Norman Foster, is considered to have very good feng shui for reasons ranging from its harbour view to the lions at the building’s entrance. A similar pair of lions can be found at the bank’s offices in London’s Canary Wharf.

Far from being a passing fad, feng shui continues to be taken seriously by companies in the west as closer business links are forged with Asia. “Although feng shui is often not a high priority for UK tenants, it can be a very important consideration for those from other cultures,” says Lisa Ronson, Heron’s marketing director.

“Ensuring that a building complies with feng shui will not generally put anyone off taking space in a building, but can be a big attraction for some.”

“Whether it’s feng shui or lucky numbers, it’s about maximising your opportunities,” adds Jeremy Gordon, chief executive of China Business Services, a consultancy. “These beliefs still have a lot of currency.”

Simon Brown, a feng shui consultant and the author of Practical Feng Shui for Business, says that a lot of feng shui is simply good workspace design. “For instance, in a sales area, you might want a dynamic atmosphere so you would use bright colours, whereas in an accounts space you would be looking for a more muted ambience that encourages concentration.”

Mr Gordon agrees: “Whether you believe in it or not, feng shui generally has a good, practical effect on the workplace and the layout of the building.”

There are three simple things any business can do to improve its feng shui, according to Mr Brown: bring in plants; position desks so that people face into the room; and get rid of clutter. Things that engender poor feng shui include grey carpets, off-white walls and strip lighting.

Mr Brown says that his feng shui clients have included British Airways, Body Shop, Interbrand and Specsavers.

A consultation can include anything from advice on rearranging a small existing office to input on the design of a new building.

Some companies go even further. Last year, Dawn Gibbins, chief executive of Barefoot Living, a flooring business, commissioned a feng shui survey of Congleton, the Cheshire town in which her business was based.

“When I first suggested it to the local business community, I think a lot of them thought I was mad,” she says, “but most people are pretty supportive now.”

Ms Gibbins recalls how, when she was seeking a Malaysian partner for her previous flooring company, she was taken to see three consultants to check that she had the right feng shui number sequence. “Luckily,” she says, “my feng shui was fine.”

Mr Gordon says that he once worked in a Hong Kong office where the wonderful view was permanently obscured by blinds on orders of his boss – because of the bad feng shui from a nearby building.

At Heron, Mr Ronson advises that good feng shui is part of “making sure nothing has been left to chance”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Economist: Women, testosterone and finance/ Sexual selection in humans

Women, testosterone and finance

Risky business

Aug 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Hormones, not sexism, explain why fewer women than men work in banks

Getty Images

THAT the risk-taking end of the financial industry is dominated by men is unarguable. But does it discriminate against women merely because they are women? Well, it might. But a piece of research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University, near Chicago, suggests an alternative—that it is not a person’s sex, per se, that is the basis for discrimination, but the level of his or her testosterone. Besides being a sex hormone, testosterone also governs appetite for risk. Control for an individual’s testosterone levels and, at least in America, the perceived sexism vanishes.

Dr Sapienza and her colleagues worked with aspiring bankers (MBA students from the University of Chicago). They measured the amount of testosterone in their subjects’ saliva. They also estimated the students’ exposure to the hormone before they were born by measuring the ratios of their index fingers to their ring fingers (a long ring finger indicates high testosterone exposure) and by measuring how accurately they could determine human emotions by observing only people’s eyes, which also correlates with prenatal exposure to testosterone.

The students were then presented with 15 risky choices. In each they had to decide between a 50:50 chance of getting $200 or a gradually increasing sure payout, which ranged from $50 up to $120. (Some of this money was actually paid over at the end of the experiment, to make the consequences real.) The point at which a participant decided to switch from the gamble to the sure thing was reckoned a reasonable approximation of his appetite for risk.

As the researchers suspected, women and men with the same levels of testosterone generally switched at the same time, demonstrating similar risk preferences. In other words, women who had more testosterone were more risk-loving than women with less, while the data for men at the lower end of the spectrum displayed a similar relationship. Curiously, the relationship between testosterone and risk taking was not as strong for men with moderate to high levels of the stuff, though previous studies have shown this relationship can be significant as well.

In all cases the correlation was strongest when the salivary measure of testosterone was used, suggesting that it is the here and now, rather than the developmental effects of testosterone on the brain, that is making the difference.

The researchers then followed the subjects’ progress after they graduated, to see what sort of careers they entered. As expected, men were more likely than women to choose a risky job in finance. Again, though, the difference was accounted for entirely by their levels of salivary testosterone. The researchers also studied the subjects’ personal investment portfolios after they had graduated, once in June 2008 (pre-crash) and again in January 2009 (post-crash). In a paper that has yet to be published, they demonstrate that the riskiness of these portfolios, too, was strongly correlated with subjects’ responses in the lottery game. The past year has, presumably, been kind to those with low testosterone levels.

Sexual selection in humans

Mr Muscle

Aug 27th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The price and privilege of beefcake

AFP Novosti

The way to hook the ladies?

WHY are men’s muscles so much bigger than women’s? Partly, of course, because men do the fighting and hunting. But also, perhaps, because women like men who can do these things well, and are thus attracted to muscular men. Both phenomena—competing with members of the same sex and showing off to members of the opposite—are subject to a form of evolution known as sexual selection. It is sexual selection that created the deer’s antlers and the peacock’s tail, and William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, think it explains men’s muscles as well.

The main characteristic of sexually selected features is that they are expensive to maintain. Since, whether competing or attracting, only the best will do, resources get piled into them, almost regardless of the consequences. In a study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Dr Lassek and Dr Gaulin show that this crucial characteristic is true for men’s muscles.

Their data came from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which followed 12,000 American men and women over the course of six years. They found that men require 50% more calories than women do, even after adjusting for activity levels, and that their muscle mass is the strongest predictor of their intake of calories—stronger than their occupation or their body-mass index (a measure of obesity). And there is another cost to being muscly: men’s immune systems are less effective than those of women (which was known before), and become worse the more muscular the men are (which was not).

The benefits, however, were there, as well. The more muscular a man, the more sexual partners he reported, both in the past year and over his lifetime, and the earlier his first sexual experience was likely to have been. This may, in part, be a result of the ability of muscular men to intimidate 97lb weaklings. But in a society where extreme forms of such intimidation are curbed by law, female choice seems as likely an explanation—especially as previous studies have confirmed scientifically the everyday observation that women do indeed prefer men with big biceps and triangular torsos.

Because muscles come at such cost, Dr Gaulin thinks an evolutionary fight is going on between natural selection, which conserves metabolic expenditure and promotes longevity, and sexual selection, which willingly trades both for extra mating opportunities. This may explain why men have such a range of muscularity. In the past, the strong man would have had better mating opportunities in the short term, but the skinny guy who outlived him could have had just as much reproductive success over the course of his longer life.

The irony for the skinny guy is that the laws which protect him from aggression also make it less likely that the hulk will fight himself into an early grave. Modern medicine, meanwhile, means the hulk’s weakened immune system is less likely to expose him to lethal infection. Time, then, to get the weights out, and start pumping iron.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Entrepreneurship: The ice cream king of Poland

Entrepreneurship: The ice cream king of Poland

By Jan Cienski

Published: July 21 2009 23:23 | Last updated: July 21 2009 23:23

The biggest clouds hanging over Zbigniew Grycan’s fast-growing ice cream business are not the shadows cast by the world economic crisis, but by Poland’s grey and rainy summer.

The economic crisis has not halted his plans to have 80 ice cream cafés across the country by the end of the year, up from just over 70 currently. The business has been hurt by the recent fall in the value of the zloty, but the overall effects of the crisis have been generally positive by lowering the price of milk and other locally sourced raw materials, which had rocketed last year.

“I have the largest chain of ice cream parlours in the country, and I’m continuing to invest,” says Mr Grycan, a heavyset 68-year-old, sheltering from the sun under an umbrella outside his café on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and sipping tea.

Mr Grycan, who became Poland’s ice cream king only to sell his kingdom to a private equity firm, and then start a new ice cream business, has bet on his compatriots’ sweet tooth in the past and has usually won.

Cream, egg yolks and sugar are in a sense in his blood – he is the third generation in a sweet-making family, which makes him a rarity in Poland. War, migration, border changes and 45 years of communism destroyed most Polish family-owned businesses and wiped out any inherited entrepreneurial traditions.

His parents operated an ice- cream shop in the western city of Wroclaw (at one point the city’s only ice cream parlour), which was taken over by the government for only a brief period at the height of Stalinist terror in the early 1950s. As a young man, Mr Grycan trained at one of the few decent hotels in the Polish capital, and in 1962 opened his own shop in western Poland. In 1979, he bought Zielona Budka (Green Cabin), a single ice cream shop in Warsaw.

“I’ve been an employer for 47 years,” he says proudly. His company currently has 750 employees.

Poles start to get a taste for cool desserts

Poland’s grey skies and cool weather have not turned the locals into ice cream fanatics.

The average Pole eats about 3.5 litres of ice cream a year, while Swedes eat about 13l and Americans shovel down about 23l annually (a statistic whose effects can be seen when comparing waistlines in America and Poland).

However, the Polish market is steadily growing – a decade ago Poles ate less than 2l each. Euromonitor, a research company, estimates that sales this year will be about 1.2bn zlotys ($400m, €280m, £240m).

The largest share of the market, with 35 per cent, belongs to Unilever, with its Algida brand, followed by 21 per cent for Koral, the largest local ice cream maker. In third place is Switzerland’s Nestlé, which has 8 per cent market share, according to MEMRB, a retail tracking company.

His first businesses were small – limited by the communist distaste for entrepreneurs and by the difficulty in getting raw materials such as sugar, which was often only available on ration cards.

That changed in 1989 when communism collapsed, and those few people with business experience and access to capital could rapidly expand their companies. By the mid-1990s, he had a factory in suburban Warsaw and his ice- cream was available across the country. Zielona Budka remains one of the best-known Polish brands of ice cream.

“I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life and I wasn’t afraid to risk my money,” he says.

But even a family background in commerce did not prepare Mr Grycan for dealing with the challenges of running a modern business in an increasingly complex regulatory environment.

His first problem came from Poland’s notoriously unpredictable tax authorities, who in 1997 alleged he had not paid VAT, and confiscated money from his accounts. Mr Grycan eventually won in court, but development of his business had been delayed.

A year later, he took Zielona Budka public and by 2001, Enterprise Investors, one of central Europe’s largest private-equity funds, had become a majority shareholder. Mr Grycan remained on the management team, but increasingly chafed at being part of a company he did not control.

The biggest friction came over the fund’s focus on the bottom line, a business model that earned profits through volume sales – but which he felt undercut the chain’s tradition of selling high-quality ice cream at low margins.

“I didn’t really agree with the way they were running things. The financial director would try to cut costs as much as possible,” he says. “I’ve always been concerned about having a good product.” Mr Grycan left the business after signing a three-year do-not-compete clause. Zielona Budka is now owned by Britain’s R&R ice cream company.

Instead of retiring quietly, Mr Grycan jumped back into the family business. His wife had retained an ice cream shop in Warsaw, so once the non-compete term was up in 2004, he set up Grycan – Lody od Pokole (Grycan – generations of ice cream).

“People warned me not to start this business because there was a lot of competition,” he says. “They said I was crazy to get back into the same business, but we did manage to find a space for ourselves in the market.”

The company does not reveal revenue and profit figures, although Mr Grycan says his company has just under 10 per cent of the Polish ice cream market worth about 1.2bn zlotys ($400m, €280m, £240m) annually. The business makes about half its income through sales at the Grycan parlours, and half through selling bulk ice cream in supermarkets. So far the company undertakes no advertising, relying instead on having a good presence in the new shopping malls that have sprung up in the country’s largest cities, and on Mr Grycan’s personal reputation as Poland’s ice cream magnate.

This time round, Mr Grycan is determined to retain much closer control with his eponymous company than when he owned Zielona Budka. Although he is conscious of costs, he devotes just as much effort to coming up with new flavours such as spice cake, poppy seed and melon, and keeping an eye on quality. “I have the final say in the company,” he says. “All the fruits we use are real. If the ice cream is mango, then we peel mangos in the factory.”

Asked if he might list the new company, Mr Grycan rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

He has abandoned most franchising, after finding that franchisees did not maintain the standards he wanted. Now his only franchisees are his 24-year-old twin daughters, Magdalena and Malgorzata. He charges them market rates, and hopes the experience of running their own operations will prepare them for taking over the whole business eventually. “I want them to know everything from the ground up. You can only learn by doing,” he says. Malgorzata, who is studying at the country’s leading business school, is his “right hand” in running the business with his wife.

Unlike many other successful Polish companies, he has no immediate plans for foreign expansion. Many other companies, particularly those involved in consumer goods such as food and clothing, undertook rapid foreign growth during the boom years and have had to retreat to their home markets.

Although the downturn has not stopped consumers slurping ice cream, it has affected the bottom line. Most rents in Polish malls are denominated in euros, as are costs for ingredients such as chocolate, coffee and exotic fruits, but earnings come in sharply depreciated zlotys.

“It has been very negative for me because I’m not an exporter,” says Mr Grycan.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Book touring in Beijing

Book touring in Beijing

By Simon Winchester

Published: June 20 2009 02:12 | Last updated: June 20 2009 02:12

Reading Room of the National Library of China in Beijing

It was when the elderly Chinese lady clambered up on to the stage as I was doing a reading and began a curious, undulating dance to music playing out of her cellphone, that I first started to think: book touring in China is very different from elsewhere and, in many ways, totally weird.

It all began with the sale of my most recent book to a Chinese publisher. I had written about the eccentric Cambridge biochemist Joseph Needham, whose adulterous love affair with a Chinese student in 1937 led to him writing what turned out be the longest English book on China ever written – 25 volumes and more than 4m words. In Britain, Needham is almost entirely forgotten beyond the confines of academia. But in China he is widely known and universally revered.

Before Needham, China was disdainfully regarded as quite peripheral. But since Needham, who catalogued China’s vast and bewildering array of achievements that proved without doubt how central the country was to the world, the view steadily changed to today’s mixture of awe, admiration and respect.

In addition to his having unintentionally engineered the sea-change, Needham was for all of his long life (he died in 1995, aged 94) a committed Marxist. So small wonder, perhaps, that when a Shanghai publishing company decided his story might sell in China, they were given immediate government permission to publish it. Last spring, they wrote to me: “Would I like to come over on tour?”

When I said yes, there came a blizzard of grateful and charmingly imperfect e-mails: “We are honoured and feel pleasure that you save one week for visiting China.” “We really appreciated the deep passion you deliver in the book.” And when I arranged to arrive in April: “We look forward to see you in China then, a month which we describe as paradise on earth in Chinese.”

These nice people in China seemed bent on making a fuss. They had booked me on the Air China non-stop service from Kennedy to Beijing – in business class. When I landed at Norman Foster’s staggering Beijing Terminal Three, there was Daisy, small, shy, bespectacled and unimaginably obliging, with a Mercedes, a driver, cold towels and bottles of iced jasmine tea.

It was a far cry from when I first landed in what was then Peking in 1979, a city of dust, strange silence and countless blue-uniformed workers grimly riding on a black cloud of bicycles. Here I was speeding in air-conditioned comfort down freeways, with BMWs and Buicks and Volvos on all sides, until I arrived at the very old Friendship Hotel.

This legendary place is a collection of a dozen old Chinese buildings where China has put up visiting dignitaries for the past half century. Back in the old days of Mao and Deng Xiaoping I remember it as grim, all smoke and spittoons: today it is languid luxury, aside from the importunate “masseuses” ringing to know when they might offer in-room services.

It was in the ballroom of Beijing’s St Regis hotel that, two days later, the book was officially launched. Comparisons pale. In Britain you might be thrown a lunch in the Mirabelle or a cocktail party at the Travellers Club; in America the kick-off will most likely be a speech at the big Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 84th Street, followed by dinner at the publisher’s penthouse. But in Beijing it was much more serious: a formal banquet for 300 people – no fewer than 50 of them being vice-ministers in the Chinese government.

A flurry of young women (all of whom spoke English) had come up from the publishing house in Shanghai, together with their bosses (all of whom did not). They came with gifts for me: a bright yellow silk tie with the Chinese character for “book” woven into the pattern; a series of jade chops with my Chinese name, “Wen Si-miao”; a calligraphy set with brushes and an ink-stone.

The following day they were keen to show me the sights – not so much the tourist sights that they knew I had been to before but the literary and cultural hotspots of their capital. There is a new National Library, for example – it was completed last autumn, a gleaming confection of steel and glass and pale oak, which manages to be both bustling and hushed at the same time. It is open to anyone 365 days a year from dawn until late at night, and has at its centre what looks like a vast opencast mine, hundreds of feet deep, with scholars and readers at rows of desks on every level, hemmed in by walls of volumes. I am an abiding fan of the new British Library, and have nostalgic longings for the old reading-room in Bloomsbury; but this new pit of learning, in the heart of Beijing, has now to be counted alongside the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.

It was here they had staged the first of the seminars – a series of unexpected, full-dress grillings by academics. I was introduced to an unsmiling young woman who was to be my interpreter – and then a pair of doors was flung open.

I was in a crammed lecture theatre, the audience standing and turning to applaud. They led me down, lamb-to-slaughter-like, to join three eminent Needham scholars at a table on the stage. I sat behind my name-card, the unsmiling lady took a seat behind me – and for the next two hours I was subjected to an interrogation on the human history of Chinese science. It was respectful, polite – and very intense.

And, on occasion, bizarre. For it was here that the dancer appeared. We were having a discussion about the human body – Needham wrote much about early Chinese anatomical charts – and I was reading a passage about the relative flexibility of Asian musculature, when the old woman climbed up, switched on her mobile phone and turned it to speaker-mode, cranked up some frightful tinny local opera and began to dance – to display the uniquely flexible nature of her body.

There were signings – held in one of the immense Xinhua bookstores found in city centres across the country. The store we visited near the old French Concession in Shanghai was eight storeys high. Each floor was beehive-busy, and the table where I was due to sit was full before I got there. Everyone had a book open at the title page, everyone had practised a little speech in English, each nervously and smilingly blurted it out: “Li Yue-se [the Chinese name for Needham] was a great hero – thank you for writing about him.”

And there was the interview, on CCTV-9 – held in China’s central broadcasting HQ, a building beside the Beijing military museum that had more security than Fort Knox. The young woman who interrogated me for 30 minutes for her programme, Dialogue, had evidently read every line of my book, and asked questions in perfect English with a formidable intelligence.

But perhaps the most memorable moment of the tour came on the evening in Shanghai, when I quoted a signboard I had seen in western China. It was outside the national space launch centre and it proclaimed: “Without Haste, Without Fear. We Will Conquer the World.”

There was a brief silence as the interpreter translated. Then she smiled broadly, and first the three professors beside me, and then the entire audience, stood up and began cheering. After a few seconds I realised it wasn’t me that they were cheering. It was China, and the future they all want for her, which all believe she is now on the verge of attaining and which a line from my book had happily confirmed.

‘Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China’ by Simon Winchester is published by Penguin

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

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