Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Hogan’s Noise: A Cosmologist Suggests a Novel Way to Uncover the Nature of Spacetime on the Smallest Scales

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on March 26, 2010
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From Ron Cowen, ScienceNews

feat_holography_opener

Oh, the noise!

Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

That’s the one thing he hated!

The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!

— Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

The Grinch detested the noise created by the tiny residents of Whoville. Cosmologist Craig Hogan, in contrast, has become enamored of a noise he claims is generated by something even tinier — a minuscule graininess in the otherwise smooth structure of spacetime.

Call it Hogan’s noise. Many physicists are skeptical, but if his hunch about the existence of this subatomic clatter proves correct, it could have a mind-boggling implication: that the entire universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.

What’s more, it would mean that the structure of spacetime on subatomic scales might soon be revealed. “What’s new is that we can make a prediction and design an experiment to measure something on the tiniest of scales in the universe, and that’s what hasn’t been done before,” says Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and a researcher at the University of Chicago.

To Read More…

Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch: Let’s Sue the Internet

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on March 24, 2010
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From Michael Wolff, Newser

Apple is suing HTC, the premier manufacturer of Android-based phones, including Google’s Nexus One. And Rupert Murdoch is suing Google—or so he says.
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It’s the suing phase, when the tough guys lose their cool.

We’ve been here before.

At the peak of its creative powers, Apple sued Microsoft, claiming that Windows was a Mac rip-off, which it was. The suit became Apple’s raison d’etre, tied up the company’s psychic energy and hopes and dreams for years, and sorely inhibited its creative powers. And then it lost.

It’s a Steve thing. Not just a temper tantrum. But an operatic one. It’s Steve Jobs’ signature: pride and paranoia. Behind it, too, is the motivation of all great competitors—they really don’t want to compete, they want the market for themselves. Now it’s Google, rather than Microsoft, copying him. It’s Google’s phone he’s out to get. He’s pissed off: Google controls the Internet and all he controls is his rotten phone.

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Report Shows Vital Role of Social Networks for the Disabled

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homer
on March 24, 2010
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reader_logoFrom Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times:

A former model who is now chronically ill and struggles just to shower says the people she has met online have become her family. A quadriplegic man uses the Web to share tips on which places have the best wheelchair access, and a woman with multiple sclerosis says her regular Friday night online chats are her lifeline.

For many people, social networks are a place for idle chatter about what they made for dinner or cute pictures of their pets. But for people living with chronic diseases or disabilities, they play a more vital role.

“It’s really literally saved my life, just to be able to connect with other people,” said Sean Fogerty, 50, who has multiple sclerosis, is recovering from brain cancer and spends an hour and a half each night talking with other patients online.

People fighting chronic illnesses are less likely than others to have Internet access, but when compared to people of the same demographic group, they are more likely to blog or participate in online discussions about health problems, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation.

For the article…

For the report…

An Interview with David Drummond of Google

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homer
on March 23, 2010
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jamesfallows1From James Fallows in The Atlantic:

Just now I spoke on the phone with David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and author of yesterday’s Official Google Blog post about the company’s new policies in China.

Highlights from the discussion below. I was typing this down in real time, so it may be 98 rather than 100 percent faithful to what he actually said. The entire discussion was on the record.

I began by asking what was non-obvious about the development — an aspect of the story known on the inside that had not been captured in the public reports:

It may not be quite obvious that this is not really a “shutdown” of either our operations in China or of our mainland China-focused web site. We have moved the physical location of it [to Hong Kong], and the virtual location. But the experience we are trying to offer to Chinese users is like the one on Google.cn, but done without the censorship on our part.

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Millennials, Media and Information

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homer
on March 20, 2010
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panel-twofrom an article at http://pewresearch.org/:

At a conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, Pew Research Center analysts and outside experts discussed research findings about the Millennial generation, the American teens and twenty-somethings now making the passage into adulthood. In this second of three sessions experts on media and technology examine how Millennials are seeking, sharing and creating information.

Moderator:
Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent, PBS Newshour

Opening Presentation:
Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism

Panelists:
danah boyd, Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research New England, and
Fellow, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Dylan Casey, Product Manager, Google
Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project

For the article…

Innovation for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality

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homer
on March 16, 2010
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innovation-photo From the International Center for Research on Women:

In a new, groundbreaking study, International Center for Research on Women examines how cutting-edge innovations can transform women’s lives. The ICRW report analyzes how a variety of innovations that used technology, changed social norms and strengthened economic vitality helped women.

Researchers identified seven core approaches – or levers – needed for any innovation to create meaningful change for women.

They include:

  • Creating strategic partnerships among governments, the private sector and civil society.
  • Including women in the design and implementation of innovative ideas.
  • Having committed support from governments as well as efforts at the grassroots level.

ICRW’s findings come at a critical moment.

Social, political and economic shifts globally are creating a perfect storm for innovations to benefit and potentially empower women. Take foot-pedaled water pumps. In sub-Saharan Africa, women in rural communities traditionally are responsible for collecting water to irrigate the crops that feed their families and that sell in markets. It can be a time- and labor-consuming effort.

For the web page…

For the research brief…

Now a No-Evil Zone

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homer
on March 15, 2010
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googleplexFrom Canadian entrepreneur and software developer Tim Bray in his blog Ongoing:

As of this morning I work for Google. The title is “Developer Advocate”. The focus is Android. Fun is expected.

How? · Google and I have been a plausible match for a long time. Web-centric, check. Search, check. Open-source, check. The list goes on.

…

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

For the complete post…

Yentabytes and Shiksabytes

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on March 7, 2010
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From David Friend at Vanity Fair

“One petabyte is equivalent to million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a million petabytes. A yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes.”
—The New York Times, March 2, 2010david_friend

Linguists who study changes in Internet-related terminology have discovered an increasing use of ever-more-bizarre and sometimes Yiddish-sounding phrases when it comes to characterizing large quantities of digital information. As a service to Web users, VF Daily offers this handy glossary of new terms:

Yentabyte: a thousand hectoring emails

Centayentabyte: a million yentabytes

Placentabyte: an overbearing mother snooping around her child’s Facebook account

Shiksabyte: the Sports Illustrated Bathing Suit Issue online photo archives

Pitabyte: a computer chip deliberately dipped in hummus

Wonchahavabyte: an online invitation to nosh (as in: “Eat! Later, we’ll blog!”)

Cleptobyte: a gigabyte of stolen data

Peptobyte: a gigabyte of pink-hued antacid

Ovabyte: an orthodotically challenged “Say Cheese” photo on a social networking site

Gagabyte: one too many streaming videos of Lady Gaga

Yodabyte: the online Star Wars database (see also: Wookiepedia)

Ferblondjibyte: a gigabyte of lost data (usually occurs after forgetting to back up one’s hard drive)

Fermishtabyte: a gigabyte of scrambled, meaningless data

Fercocktabyte: a million fermishtabytes (also known as an ongepotchkebyte)

Shlemielabyte: the noodnik who loses a fercocktabyte

Shlemazelbyte: the guy the noodnik blames for making him lose the fercocktabyte

Shmaggeggebyte: the tech-support guy who tries to help the noodnik find his lost fercocktabyte

Megillabyte: the entire Internet

Ballmer: Microsoft ‘Betting Our Company’ On The Cloud

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homer
on March 6, 2010
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cloud-sFrom Joseph Tartakoff at paidContent.org:

Microsoft … is still most closely associated with its desktop software (Windows, Office etc.), but on Thursday CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft was “betting our company” on the cloud. About 70 percent of Microsoft employees are working on cloud-related projects right now; that figure will reach 90 percent within a year, he said.

Ballmer’s remarks—made during an address at the University of Washington—may portend a change in mission for the software giant, which for years has talked about a future of software plus web-based services. Contrast that with the tagline Microsoft is now using for its cloud efforts: “We’re all in.”

Lots of excitement here for Ballmer’s talk—his first ever at the school, a surprising milestone considering the university’s close ties to its Redmond neighbor. The ground floor of the atrium is packed—and people are lined up on four levels of balconies. Before Ballmer started talking, I heard one girl urge her friend to skip class with her.

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Data, data everywhere: An Economist special report on managing information

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homer
on March 2, 2010
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201009srd001From The Economist print edition for 25 February 2010:

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

For the report…

The State of The Internet

Published
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on March 1, 2010
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