Archive for the 'News' Category

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What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future

Published on March 31, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Michiko Kakutani | The New York Times | Original Article

Book of the Times – “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,” by Jon Gertner.

In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was invented.

Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable systems.

The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial processes like quality control. More…

Spring Break Gets Tamer as World Watches Online

Published on March 26, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Lizette Alvarez | The New York Times | Original Article

KEY WEST, Fla. — Ah, Spring Break, with its copious debauchery, its spontaneous bouts of breast-baring, Jager bombing and après-binge vomit.

In this era of “Jersey Shore” antics and “Girls Gone Wild,” where bikini tops vanish like unattended wallets, it would seem natural to assume that this generation of college student has outdone the spring break hordes of decades past on the carousal meter.

But today’s spring breakers — at least some of them — say they have been tamed, in part, not by parents or colleges or the fed-up cities they invade, but by the hand-held gizmos they hold dearest and the fear of being betrayed by an unsavory, unsanctioned photo or video popping up on Facebook or YouTube.  More…

Image: Maggie Steber for The New York Times

Google’s Moves Raise Questions About ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto

Published on March 20, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Mike Swift | Mercury News | Original Article

With its “Don’t Be Evil” motto, Google has always held itself to a higher moral standard.

Now Google observers, including many longtime admirers of the search giant, say the Mountain View company is behaving more like something it vowed never to become: a conventional company where the bottom line drives decisions.

The signs of that transformation in recent months include an illegal ad deal, a string of privacy violations, an altered privacy policy that a key regulator called “brutal” for consumers and a change in search results that appear to favor Google’s own social network, Google+, over competitors.

Google has about 12 times the revenue, 11 times the employees and arguably far more power over the Internet than it had when it proclaimed its idealism and went public in 2004. But as the Internet evolves to a more social and mobile Web where a search engine can no longer tie everything together, Google is threatened as never before. The company is locked in an intense competition with rivals such as Facebook and Apple, and it faces a patent-lawyer gutter fight with as Microsoft and Oracle over the intellectual property behind its crucial Android mobile operating system.

Image via Mercury News

Why It’s OK to Let Apps Make You a Better Person

Published on March 15, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Evan Selinger | The Atlantic | Original Article

Digital Willpower

Evan Selinger, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology explores the implications of an ever-growing library of digital applications (“apps”) that contribute to, or diminish the need for, our willpower. Apps that track GPS locations to ensure users go to the gym or provide financial incentives to continue working out are just one example of how Apps impact our lives and our decision-making skills.

Individuals (and, as we’ll see, philosophers) are growing increasingly realistic about how limited their decision-making skills and resolve are. Moreover, we’re not ashamed to discuss these limits publicly. Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we’re doing, whom we’re doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities.

Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become “design space.” We’re now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today’s apps are more harbinger than endpoint.

Consider, for example, GymPact, an iPhone app that combines GPS tracking and financial rewards/penalties to motivate people to go the gym, is getting lots of attention. Fail to work out as regularly as you promised yourself, GymPact — which has users register their geographical location via a “check-in” button — can be configured so that funds transfer to participants with better resolve.

Image: Shaun Foster via The Atlantic

 

Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud

Published on March 9, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Jason Pontin |  Technology Review | Original Article

Credit: Winni Wintermeyer

Tell me the requisite founder’s tale.

The breaking point for me was a bus ride. I went down to Boston’s South Station to ride the Chinatown bus to New York. I was thrilled to open my laptop and have four hours where I could finally get some work done. But I had that sinking feeling that something was wrong, and I started feeling in my back pocket for my thumb drive, and of course I could just see it sitting on my desk at home. So I sulked for about 10 or 15 minutes and then opened up the [text] editor and wrote some code that I thought would solve the problem. And I met up with Arash through a mutual friend at MIT, and he decided to drop out with a semester left, and we went to California and got to work.

[...]

Will Dropbox one day become more than a network for file sharing?

Absolutely. The explosion of mobile devices means that the world needs an elegant solution for the new problems people have. It needs a fabric that ties together all of their devices, services, and apps. Even though today people may think of Dropbox as a magic folder on their desktop, what we’re really excited about is the opportunity to make all this other stuff you use better. We envision little Dropbox icons everywhere, analogous to the Facebook icons you see everywhere. When you take a picture, it should save your photo to your dropbox; and when you make a to-do list on your iPhone, it should save the list to your dropbox. Any app or device should be able to plug into Dropbox and have access to all your stuff, because that’s where it resides. More…

Foxconn and Apple Respond to ABC Report

Published on March 5, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Stan Schroeder, Mashable.com

Bill Weir at Foxconn Nightline

Although it didn’t unearth any atrocities in the factories of Foxconn – the Chinese company that manufactures goods for several electronic giants, including Apple – ABC’s recent report did raise a lot of questionsabout the conditions there.

The report suggested that many workers complain they’re underpaid, while others work very long hours. Now, Foxconn, Apple and the Fair Labor Association have responded to the report, shedding new light on some important details about the working conditions at Foxconn.

Responding to one worker’s claim that she etches logos into 6,000 iPads during one shift, Apple claims this is not possible. “In manufacturing parlance this is called deburring. Her line processes 3,000 units per shift, with two shifts per day for a total of 6,000. A single operator at Ms. Zhou’s station would deburr 3,000 iPads in a shift,” Apple told ABC, adding that Zhou Xiao Ying probably misunderstood the question. More…

Image via Mashable.com

The Internet is a Major Driver of the Growth of Cognitive Inequality

Published on March 1, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Kevin Drum, MotherJones.com

Apropos of yesterday’s post about using Google to convert joules to electron volts, a friend of mine emailed this morning to say that Wolfram Alpha would be an even better choice. It’s one of his favorite time wasters, he said.

Well. I remember using Alpha back when it first came out, and then giving up because it didn’t seem to live up to its hype. But I haven’t used it in quite a while, so I headed over to try it out. But what to ask? Hmmm. How about asking it to check the price of a gallon of milk?1 So I did. Answer: $20 million gal, whatever that means, which converts to $4.62 billion cubic inches, whatever that means. If you ask for the price of a quart of milk, it tells you the milk production budget for the Quart region of Italy. Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!

But does Google do any better? Sort of. I typed in the same question, and one hit was from an elementary school class project telling me that a gallon of milk costs $2.99 in Bakersfield, along with conversions of that amount into pounds, lira, and punts. Which suggests this data might be a wee bit out of date. More…

Image via motherjones.com

Breakthrough: Organic Computer Could Change Everything [VIDEO]

Published on February 26, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Alissa Skelton, Mashable.com

Scientists have created a biological computer capable of extracting hidden images on a DNA chip.

There’s nothing new about a computer reading images encrypted on DNA chips, but this is the first computer made only of biomolecules. The scientists behind the research in California and Israel say they don’t expect biological computers to compete with electronic computers.

The biological computer isn’t pretty and doesn’t look like a normal computer since it was created in a test tube by mixing chemicals in a solution that appears clear, said Ehud Keinan, the professor who led the research.

Scientists don’t know what impact their findings will have on technological advancement, but biomolecular computing devices could redefine what a computer is. A computer is defined “as a machine made of four components — hardware, software, input and output,” Keinan said in a statement. More…

The New New Thing

Published on February 22, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Zoë Corbyn, Times Higher Education

Credit: Pieter Franken/Andy Ryan

Joichi Ito does not have the kind of background that would normally catch the eye of an appointment committee searching for someone to head a prestigious university research lab. To start with, he is not an academic – he is an internet entrepreneur, a venture capitalist and a former disc jockey. And, if that were not enough against him, he dropped out of university. Twice.

But not every lab is like the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which turned 25 last year, is world famous for its “renegade” research environment and creative and wacky projects that combine design with cutting-edge technology. It is responsible for, among other things, the electronic ink technology that e-readers use to simulate printed paper; for Guitar Hero, the hit video game in which players simulate playing the guitar in rock songs; for Lego Mindstorms robotics building kits and for the XO-1 laptop, a budget computer designed to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world as part of the One Laptop per Child project.

Nicholas Negroponte set up the Media Lab to explore human-machine interaction and the life-enhancing possibilities of new technology. He led it from its start until he stepped down as director in 2000. Ito, who took over in September, is the third person to head the lab since the departure of its founder; he took the reins from Frank Moss, professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT. More…

Unicode 6.1 released complete with emoji characters and a pile of poo

Published on February 18, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Ray Walters, Geek.com

The Unicode Consortium recently announced the release of the Unicode 6.1 standard, updating the set with 732 new characters. Included in the update is support for the popular “emoji” icons widely used by consumers in China on mobile devices. One of the most interesting interesting characters added to the set is U+1F4A9, or to be more specific, “pile of poo.”

We crap you not (see what we did there?), the Consortium thought enough people wanted to communicate their displeasure on a topic of conversation by depicting a steaming pile of waste that it included the icon in the official standard. Along with pile of poo, “love hotel” was also added… you can use your imaginations as to why.

For those of you who are more interested in the less amusing additions to the set, you won’t be disappointed. Also included are seven new script extensions as well as support for identifying emoticons, text-style symbols as well as the aforementioned emoji icons. Line breaks have been updated as well to better serve text written in Japanese and Hebrew. In addition language support for Thai and Chinese has been updated.