Alis grave nil
{ Thanks Glenn }
technology
I lost something on the way to wherever I am today
New research shows that Internet users often do not make the conscious decision to read news online, but they come across news when they are searching for other information or doing non-news related activities online, such as shopping or visiting social networking sites. (…)
“Many people don’t realize how their news reading behavior is shifting to more serendipitous discovery.”
‘All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.’ –Aristotle
It is not new to talk about the need to acquire “irreplaceable” skills. But what is not properly appreciated is the scope of the challenge this poses to people in all kinds of jobs, and the exact defining characteristic of what will make a skill “irreplaceable.”
The basic rule of economics after the Industrial Revolution is: if a task can be automated, it will be. Or to put it differently, if a worker can be replaced by a machine, he will be. Call it the principle of expendability. The only thing that has changed since the first power loom is the number and nature of the tasks that can be automated. The first thing the Industrial Revolution did was to automate physical tasks. But now we are beginning to automate mental tasks, and what we are just beginning to see is the scope of the mental work that can be automatized. It is much wider than you probably think.
An awful lot of work that is usually considered to require human intelligence really doesn’t. Instead, these tasks require complex memorization and pattern recognition, perceptual-level skills that can be reduced to mechanical, digitized processes and done by a machine. These include many tasks that currently fill the days of highly educated, well paid professionals.
Take doctors. A recent article by Farhad Manjoo, the technology columnist for Slate, describes how computers have begun to automate the screening of cervical cancer tests. A task that used to be done by two physicians, who could only process 90 images per day, can now be done with better results by one doctor and a machine, processing 170 images per day. (…)
One more example. I recently came across a story about a composer and music theorist who created a computer program that writes cantatas in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. (A cantata is a short piece with a well-defined structure, which makes the task a little easier.) The climax of the story is a concert in which an orchestra played a mixture of the computer’s compositions and actual Bach cantatas. An audience of music experts could not reliably determine which was which.
illustration { Julian Murphy }
And how does gravity work?
A team of Argentine scientists, led by Conrado Avendano of the Nascentis Center for Reproductive Medicine in Cordoba, found that placing drops of semen from healthy men under a laptop connected wirelessly to the Internet maims or even kills the sperm cells.
After four hours underneath the WiFi-connected computer, 25% of the sperm had stopped moving and nine percent showed DNA damage. By comparison, semen kept at the same temperature but away from the computer showed just a 14% drop in mobility and only 3% suffered DNA damage.
artwork { Katsushika Hokusai }
related { How the world’s engineers built Wi-Fi }
‘Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.’ –Cicero
Facebook is steamrolling forward. It now boasts 800 million active users. The company is reportedly preparting for an initial public offering. It’s laying plans to sell a Facebook phone, strengthening its presence on the mobile web. But Facebook’s plans may be hampered by a new backlash against the company’s efforts to get its users to share more of their lives online.
In September, Facebook announced at its annual f8 developers conference that it was upgrading its Open Graph technology. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Open Graph in 2010 to let web sites and apps share information about users with Facebook. The revamped Open Graph takes sharing to a new level, allowing apps to automatically share what articles users are reading or what music they’re listening to.
Zuckerberg said the new feature would allow “frictionless experiences” and “real-time serendipity.” At the time, only a few observers found them to be scary. “They are seeking out information to report about you,” wrote developer and blogger Dave Winer. But suddenly, a critical mass of critics are speaking up about the changes, how they affect users and publishers alike.
Well, I’m sorry, but this woman is telling you in the clearest possible terms that this relationship is over
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.
The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population.
painting { Wilhelm Gallhof, The Coral Chain, circa 1910 }
The demon’s logic is, of course, a perverted logic
What do people die from? And how many of those deaths are caused by mistakes, that we make in human decision-making.
About a hundred years ago this was about 10 percent. Think about how could you kill yourself a hundred years ago by mistake. Maybe you pushed a rock over yourself or got into some bad accident.
A few years ago this percentage was a little bit more than 45 percent. Why? Because over the years as we’ve designed new technologies, we’ve created new ways for us to kill ourselves. Think about diabetes, obesity, smoking, texting while driving. We are creating all of those technologies without really understanding what human nature is and often those technologies are incompatible with us.
Seven years ago, the Icarus project sent a mission to restart the sun
The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere or reflected back into space. 700 watts of power, on average, reaches Earth’s surface. Summed across the half of the Earth that the sun is shining on, that is 89 petawatts of power. By comparison, all of human civilization uses around 15 terrawatts of power, or one six-thousandth as much. In 14 and a half seconds, the sun provides as much energy to Earth as humanity uses in a day. (…)
It’s small wonder, then, that scientists and entrepreneurs alike are investing in solar energy technologies to capture some of the abundant power around us. Yet solar power is still a miniscule fraction of all power generation capacity on the planet. There is at most 30 gigawatts of solar generating capacity deployed today, or about 0.2 percent of all energy production. (…)
Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a “Moore’s law” in solar energy. (…)
The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. (…) 10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today.
{ Scientific American | Continue reading | via/more: Overcoming Bias }
photo { Eylül Aslan }
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This week Apple introduced a new feature for the iPhone in its Apple Store app. The feature, called EasyPay, allows people to take a picture of the bar code of a product with the phone’s camera and then buy the product on the spot, using their iTunes account.
For now, use of iTunes as a traveling wallet is modest; you can use it to buy the cheaper accessories in an Apple store. The phone’s location tracker has to be on, too, so Apple can verify that you are in one of its stores.
photo { Tina Modotti, Hands of the Puppeteer, Mexico, 1929 }
Let’s to it pell-mell. If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
First we need to differentiate between two kinds of innovation and think about their effects. The first kind of innovation is geared toward brute maximization of production. It is typically centralized and makes use of economies of scale. Examples might include an assembly line factory or a big, coal-fired power plant. Because these innovations tend to be centralized, they introduce points of control. The capital is typically fixed and therefore easy to tax and regulate. It’s well known in the development literature that it’s really hard for governments to control rural peasants who live off the grid. Once they move to the cities and plug into centralized services, it is easier to require them to send their children to school, for instance. Because these innovations introduce points of control, I will call them technologies of control.
On the other hand, not all innovations are about brute maximization of production. Some are about producing things that we already know how to produce in ways that have ancillary benefits. An important ancillary benefit is evading control. Examples of these innovations include 3D printers and solar power. The evasion of control that is possible with 3D printers is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s short story Printcrime. And portable solar power cells can make people harder to control by supplying electricity without the need to register an address, have a bank account, stay put, and so on. These are obvious examples, but control can be evaded through more subtle innovations as well.
photo { Arnold Odermatt }
Are cookbooks obsolete?
Aaron Lefkove was struggling to raise close to $200,000 to open a New England-style clam shack in a Gowanus, Brooklyn, storefront.
Bank loans were out of reach. “We didn’t have the kind of collateral they wanted,” said Mr. Lefkove, a 31-year-old punk rocker and publisher’s copywriter, nostalgic for family visits to Bigelow’s New England Fried Clams in Rockville Centre, N.Y.
“I liquidated my 401(k) and my I.R.A. as well,” Mr. Lefkove said. “I even sold my guitars.”
It wasn’t enough. He and a partner reached out to friends and family and used their own credit cards. Still not enough. “We picked up investors — some became partners, some would get a return, everyone was structured differently,” he said. “Even that was not enough.”
So to help get his restaurant, Littleneck, over the finish line, the next stop was Kickstarter.com — a Web site that solicits donations to finance art, technology and business projects. Promising little more than good karma, some discounts and a T-shirt, he raised $13,000 from 162 donors — $5,000 more than his goal. With the help of a few final investors, the 38-seat restaurant began serving fried clams and lobster rolls last month. (…)
John Fraser used Kickstarter to raise about $24,000 for his short-lived but well-reviewed pop-up restaurant, What Happens When. And the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm in Long Island City, Queens, raised more than $20,000 that way.
Later on, we can cruise if you wanna cruise
By comparing the brains of monkeys living in large groups to those living in smaller groups, scientists have found that the brain can change shape to accommodate social network size.
The finding, published in Science today, reveals that there are still opportunities for the brain to change, even during adulthood. It also suggests that a complex social environment puts pressure on improving brain plasticity - our brain’s ability to efficiently adapt to changes.
The researchers found that areas of the brain known to process social information such as facial expressions were larger in monkeys who lived in larger groups, and vice versa. There was also more activity between neurons in the monkeys who had larger social networks.
I don’t know karate, but I split the bricks
About five years ago, Apple design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook: a small dot of green light above the screen, shining through the computer’s aluminum casing to indicate when its camera was on. The problem? It’s physically impossible to shine light through metal.
Ive called in a team of manufacturing and materials experts to figure out how to make the impossible possible, according to a former employee familiar with the development who requested anonymity to avoid irking Apple. The team discovered it could use a customized laser to poke holes in the aluminum small enough to be nearly invisible to the human eye but big enough to let light through.
Applying that solution at massive volume was a different matter. Apple needed lasers, and lots of them. The team of experts found a U.S. company that made laser equipment for microchip manufacturing which, after some tweaking, could do the job. Each machine typically goes for about $250,000. Apple convinced the seller to sign an exclusivity agreement and has since bought hundreds of them to make holes for the green lights that now shine on the company’s MacBook Airs, Trackpads, and wireless keyboards.
Most of Apple’s customers have probably never given that green light a second thought, but its creation speaks to a massive competitive advantage for Apple: Operations. This is the world of manufacturing, procurement, and logistics in which the new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, excelled, earning him the trust of Steve Jobs.
When I go to sleep, I never count sheep, I count all the charms about Linda
Since September 7, .XXX domains are for sale. (That is, if you own a porn site or a trademark to protect – the rest of us have to wait till December 6 and hope nobody scoops our name first).
But the arrival of .XXX begs the question: How much of the internet is actually for porn? (…) In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.
photo { Roger Moore as James Bond, with Barbara Bach as Agent XXX, aka Major Anya Amasova }
Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment
It’s now been a couple of weeks since Siri debuted as part of Apple’s iPhone 4S. (…)
Siri is hard to copy. For anyone who doesn’t understand voice applications, it’s easy to think that Siri will be easy to copy. It won’t. There are 2 parts to making a successful voice app: the voice rec technology which has improved a lot but is basically a commodity and the app itself, which is a combination of art and artificial intelligence. It’s that 2nd part that’s so tough to replicate and that’s why Apple bought Siri last year. It’s true Google has experience in the voice rec space and doing some simple voice apps but they do not have the personality and AI of Siri and that will be very difficult to copy — especially for a company that doesn’t sit at the intersection of the humanities and technology.
related { Apple gets Siri-ous about TV }
The radiation is so high it’s not possible for humans to go inside. We need to use robots.
In Italy, all cargo containers carrying scrap metal get checked for radiation, by hand, before they’re allowed off the docks. At Voltri, this job falls to Montagna, a 49-year-old independent consultant certified as an expert in radiation detection by the Italian government. By the time he arrived that morning, longshoremen had gathered eleven 20-foot-long, 8-foot-wide containers from across the terminal, relying on manifests to determine which ones needed to be scanned. The boxes were lined up in two neat rows near the terminal’s entrance. (…)
He plugged in a heavy sensor wand and set the device on the ground 20 yards away from the containers. The Model 3 emits a high-pitched beep every time it detects a radioactive particle; Montagna turned it on, and the meter’s needle swung hard to the right, burying itself past the maximum reading of 500,000 counts per minute. Instead of its usual staccato chirps, the machine was whining continuously and frantically. (…)
Montagna realized that one of the containers in front of him held a lethal secret. But was that secret merely a slow-motion radioactive industrial accident—or a bomb, one that could decimate the Italian city’s entire 15-mile waterfront? Montagna ran back to his car to get a less sensitive detector. He didn’t give much thought to protection; at those radiation levels, he would have needed lead armor 5 inches thick to stand within a couple of feet of the source for very long.
Montagna took the new meter and walked up to the sealed boxes, circling each one in turn. Halfway down the second row, a crimson 20-footer with “TGHU 307703 0 22G1″ emblazoned in white on its side jerked the dials. As he passed a few feet from the box’s left side, Montagna was absorbing radiation equivalent to six chest x-rays per minute.
There are millions of containers just like TGHU 307703 0 22G1. The only thing that distinguished it from the steel boxes stacked in your local port or hitched to a truck one lane over during your morning commute—besides radiation a million times above normal background levels—was the painted-on identification number. (…)
Under the right conditions, just 20 milligrams of cesium-137—roughly the amount found in gadgets that hospitals use to calibrate their radiation therapy equipment—could contaminate 40 city blocks. (…)
The team then brought in one of the most sensitive portable detectors on the market, an $80,000 Ortec HPGe Detective DX-100T.
Research into developing controlled thermonuclear fusion for civil purposes began in earnest in the 1950s
Something unexpected has happened at Apple, once known as the tech industry’s high-price leader. Over the last several years it began beating rivals on price. (…) Apple’s new pricing strategy is a big change from the 1990s, when consumers regarded Apple as a producer of overpriced tech baubles, unable to compete effectively with its Macintosh family of computers against the far cheaper Windows PCs. (…)
The aggressive pricing, analysts say, reflects Apple’s ability to use its growing manufacturing scale to push down costs for the crucial parts that make up its devices. Apple has also shown a willingness to tap into its huge war chest — $82 billion in cash and marketable securities last quarter — to take big gambles by locking up supplies of parts for years, as it did in 2005 when it struck a five-year, $1.25 billion deal with manufacturers to secure flash memory chips for its iPods and other devices.
By buying up manufacturing capacity ahead of time, Apple forces its competitors to scramble for the parts that are still available, raising costs for their products, analysts say. Apple is the biggest buyer of flash memory chips in the world, according to the research firm iSuppli.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
{ Me & Her | Continue reading }
I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Steve Jobs’ biographer last night (video here), and I was aghast at something I learned: After Jobs learned of his pancreatic cancer, he delayed surgery by 9 months.
That decision was met with a massive push back from his friends and family. It was horrifyingly bad judgment. And, it likely cost him his life. He came to realize this towards the end of his life, according to his biographer.
No one sleeps in the hanging garden
Abu Dhabi — A dramatic fall in traffic accidents this week has been directly linked to the three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.
In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.
On average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, while in Abu Dhabi there is a fatal accident every two days.
