Science and technology
Babbage
Migrating to the cloud
Nov 23rd 2010, 18:47 by G.F. | SEATTLE
I COULDN'T understand why I was near tears. It was only a computer server I was shutting down, not pulling the plug on a life or saying goodbye to faithful pet. Nonetheless, my eyes were moist.
This Babbage has run his own server hardware since 1994, first hosting other companies' sites as an early web developer, and later my own operations. The first servers lived in my basement, connected by a dedicated 56 Kbps line to a much smaller internet. The current set of five are rack mounted in a co-location data centre, where I pay a monthly fee for space, electricity and bandwidth. They've hummed away there for years, chunking through millions of database queries each day, occasionally seeing one of their number replaced with a faster model. One of them is pictured there to the right.
Twitter and politicians
Nov 22nd 2010, 21:37 by B.G. | WASHINGTON
LAST week my colleague pointed out that Republicans make up 70 of the 100 most influential American politicians on Twitter. "Influential" twitterers, as measured by Hewlett Packard's Social Computing Lab, are more likely to have their tweets and links forwarded. This is not the only Twitter-based measure in which Democrats lag. From a piece I wrote about Twitter and politicians earlier this year,
As well as boosting the profile of individual politicians, Twitter may be better designed for campaigning and opposition than for governing. “We’ll change Washington” is easy to fit into 140 characters. Explaining the messy and inevitable compromises of power is a lot harder. In January of this year a study by Fleishman Hillard, a Washington PR firm, discovered that Republicans in the House twittered more than five times as often as Democrats. [Ena von Baer, spokeswoman for the Chilean government] says that the Chilean opposition uses Twitter to make up for its poor coverage in the mainstream media.
Galactic zoo
Nov 21st 2010, 15:45 by T.C.
IN AN age of compulsory PhDs, expensively equipped laboratories and a collaborative approach to research, astronomy is one of the few sciences still amenable to the interested amateur. For a few hundred dollars anybody can buy a decent telescope, set it up in his garden and hope to make a meaningful contribution, such as spotting a supernova or a new comet.Nowadays, indeed, not even the telescope is necessary. An online project called Galaxy Zoo lets amateurs do astronomy from the comfort of their own living rooms. Inspired by distributed-computing projects—which use idle time on internet-connected computers to achieve the sort of number-crunching power normally reserved for supercomputers—Galaxy Zoo employs human brainpower rather than silicon chips to make sense of the sky. The project’s 300,000 volunteers receive pictures of galaxies taken as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by an automated telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which they then assign to categories based on a few simple rules.
Maxwell's demon
Nov 20th 2010, 11:23 by G.C. and J.P.
SCIENTISTS are not, in their own imaginations anyway, much given to myths. There is one mythical beast, though, that has haunted physics for almost 150 years. In 1867 James Clerk Maxwell, a British researcher, wondered if you could extract useful energy from thin air, in apparent contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. He posited the existence of an all-seeing homunculus that might do so—a homunculus that was almost instantly dubbed “Maxwell’s demon”.The second law, one of the most famous in physics, states that order cannot come about spontaneously. Work must be done to create it, and that work (in the technical, physical sense of measurable amounts of energy moving things around) is converted into heat in the process. Since heat is, at bottom, the disorderly movement of molecules, the order created by the work done is more than counterbalanced by the molecular disorder of the newly liberated heat.
The Economist's digital editions
Some geeky details about our iPad and iPhone apps
Nov 20th 2010, 2:01 by T.S.
THE reaction to the launch of our iPad and iPhone apps seems to have been very positive, judging by the comments on Twitter and on the App Store. Thank you for all your kind words, tweets, reviews and five-star ratings. And we're glad you like the audio support as much as we hoped you would.
Yeah, we know, it took a while. But that was, in part, because we wanted to integrate the apps with our back-end systems to ensure that existing subscribers would not have to pay again to use the apps, as my colleague Oscar Grut explains. Also, we decided to build a piece of software to pipe the content of each week's issue into the iPad/iPhone apps and our other digital editions. (This system, called Merlin, now also powers our Kindle editions, for example.) Perhaps we could have launched sooner without this, but we believe it will accelerate our ability to launch on other platforms in future, such as Android. (Yes, we hear you on that one, too.)
Continue reading "Some geeky details about our iPad and iPhone apps " >>
Popularity does not equal influence on Twitter
Nov 19th 2010, 18:18 by L.S.
PEOPLE who are popular have a lot of influence. Or so Babbage thought. But things are not that simple, as research by the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard's research arm shows.
Bernardo Huberman, the lab's director, and his colleagues (Daniel Romerso, Wojciech Galuba and Sitaram Asur) analysed 22m messages on Twitter, the micro-blogging service, to find out, among other things, how popularity and influence correlate. Measuring popularity is straightforward: it rises with the number of those who have signed up to follow a person's or organisation's messages. In contrast, determining influence is more tricky. The researchers hypothesised that users of Twitter are the more influential the more they manage to overcome their followers' "passivity", meaning their tendency not to to pass on messages (only one in 318 messages containing an internet address is "retweeted" the researchers found).
Evolutionary machines
The Difference Engine: Darwin on the track
Nov 19th 2010, 15:09 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
WHILE watching the finale of the Formula One grand-prix season on television last weekend, your correspondent could not help thinking how Darwinian motor racing has become. Each year, the FIA, the international motor sport’s governing body, sets new design rules in a bid to slow the cars down, so as to increase the amount of overtaking during a race—and thereby make the event more interesting to spectators and television viewers alike. The aim, of course, is to keep the admission and television fees rolling in. Over the course of a season, Formula One racing attracts a bigger audience around the world than any other sport. Yet, each time the FIA mandates some draconian new rule change—whether the introduction of non-slick tyres, narrower aerodynamic wings or a smaller engine size—the leading teams have invariably trumped the restriction a few races into the season. And the cars fielded by the wealthier teams, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, are then going faster than ever. Once again, races become a tedious high-speed procession which, barring an accident or mechanical failure, all but guarantees that the pole-sitter (the fastest in qualifying) leads, lap after lap, to the chequered flag.
Continue reading "The Difference Engine: Darwin on the track" >>
Making a product
Nov 17th 2010, 15:45 by G.F. | SEATTLE
THE GLIF'S designers hoped to raise $10,000 to produce a few hundred iPhone 4 tripod adapters. Dan Provost and Thomas Gerhardt planned to do most of the fiddly final assembly, packaging, and mailing themselves. Instead, the project brought in $137,417 in crowdfunded contributions via Kickstarter over 30 days. The pair have been scrambling to keep up with success.This Babbage first spoke with the Glif's makers three days into their Kickstarter effort, at which point Mr Provost and Mr Gerhardt had seen over $70,000 pour in, largely in preset increments of $20, $50, and $250. The two were both a bit freaked out, as their original plans revolved around producing a modest number through low-volume injection molding. The final tally has them delivering over 5,200 to contributors of $20 or more.
The launch of our new digital editions
The Economist launches on iPhone and iPad this week
Nov 17th 2010, 14:32 by T.S.
AND now, the moment many readers have been waiting for: The Economist will launch its iPhone and iPad apps this week, on November 19th. We'll announce all the details then, but we want to reassure subscribers that full access to The Economist on both devices (and on iPod touch, of course) will be free for current print or online subscribers. If you have already activated your Economist online account (in other words, if you have associated your Economist.com credentials with your print subscription, or if you have a web-only subscription), you will be able to use the same log-in details to access The Economist via the apps, which will be free to download. So if you have not already activated your Economist online account you may wish to activate it now to ensure that you will have immediate access via the apps when they launch on Friday.
Fear in the brain
Nov 15th 2010, 13:45 by J.P.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT famously assured his countrymen that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Alas, fear itself is hard to get hold of, divide into manageable chunks and introduce as a terror-inducing agent in an experimental setting. So, in his quest to unravel humans' fear-related brain circuitry, Dean Mobbs, of the University of Cambridge, has had to rely on a less metaphysical frightener: a tarantula.Operating systems
The Difference Engine: Linux's Achilles heel
Nov 12th 2010, 10:16 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
TO LOSE one hard drive during a busy week may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. Both had been churning away, day in day out, for years—one in an elderly Windows workhorse, the other in an equally old Linux machine. Having two hard drives fail within days of one another seemed more than coincidence. Ambient temperatures were higher than usual that week, which may have hastened their demise. The fact remains, however, that hard drives tend to die either in infancy or in grand old age, usually as a result of something mechanical wearing out or breaking internally. One of the geriatric drives in question actually gave a few rasping gasps before giving up the ghost. The other passed away silently in the night. Coincidence or whatever, it appears their time had simply come.
A more interesting question, though, concerned not why they had failed, but how best to get the two computers up and running again. Above all, your correspondent was keen to see how the installation of the two respective operating systems would compare—and which was, when everything was taken into account, the better of the two. One machine would have Windows XP Pro with its SP3 service pack re-installed; the other would get the latest Linux Mint 9 distribution instead of the much earlier version of the free desktop operating system used before.Continue reading "The Difference Engine: Linux's Achilles heel" >>
News from CERN
Nov 11th 2010, 23:10 by J.P.
"THE largest microscope on Earth" is how Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory, described the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when this Babbage interviewed him in July. However, before Dr Heuer's device can be used to peer at previously unseen building blocks of reality, its lens needed to be focused.The LHC does not resemble a microscope in the everyday sense of the word. It occupies a circular tunnel 27 km (17 miles) around, straddling the Franco-Swiss border 100 metres beneath the fields outside Geneva. The loop is intersected by four cavernous experimental halls where beams of protons, circulating at a smidgen below the speed of light in a vacuum comparable to that of outer space, collide at temperatures just above absolute zero. The resulting shrapnel provides insights into the nature of reality.
Facebook in Vietnam
Nov 10th 2010, 22:40 by H.C. | HANOI
LATE last month Facebook began advertising for staff to help it expand in Vietnam. The Growth Manager will “lead the company’s interactions with policymakers and will be responsible for ensuring the site’s accessibility,” says the ad. As the company explained to AFP, “We often hire temporary contractors in different countries, including India, Russia and Brazil, to help Facebook and Facebook Platform grow in new regions, even if we don't have offices there.” Par for the course, one might think, for a venture with global ambitions. The thing is, Facebook has been blocked in Vietnam since late last year.Internet shaming
Nov 10th 2010, 17:01 by G.F. | SEATTLE
CROWDS have wisdom. But they turn ugly, too. Even when the cause seems just, mass action can suppress free expression or bypass due process. And on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but there's little to save you from being hunted down by the whole pack, either. The current case in point involves Cooks Source [sic], a small-circulation publication delivered to homes in Massachusetts. It runs short recipes and articles alongside local advertisements. It is being hunted.
In brief, Monica Gaudio, a freelance writer, blogged on Nov. 3rd that a 2005 article she wrote for the Gode Cookery site had been reproduced in Cooks Source. Ms Gaudio had not given permission, and the article looking at the evolution of English apple pie recipes had all its rights reserved. She wrote to the editor to get an explanation, and was initially unsatisfied with the response; she assumed it was printed in error. Ultimately, Ms Gaudio wrote, editor Judith Griggs responded, in part,
...the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it!...you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally....We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me!
Bloodhound land-speed record
Nov 10th 2010, 15:05 by P.M.
GOOD news that Cosworth, a British engineering company best known as the maker of high-performance motors, is supplying one of its Formula 1 engines to a team hoping to set a 1,000mph (1,609kph) land-speed record in Bloodhound SSC (for super-sonic car). It is heartening that even in these straitened times companies are prepared to support bold attempts to push human and technical abilities to new limits. More than 200 other firms will also be helping out.The Cosworth CA2010 engine would give any car a bit of poke. But alone it is not enough to get the Bloodhound SSC into the record books. Sitting in the centre of the vehicle, the Cosworth engine will run as an auxiliary power unit to operate various systems. This includes delivering hydraulic power to start an EJ200 jet engine from a Typhoon Eurofighter. This will quickly propel the car to more than 200mph, at which point the third engine will be ignited: a novel hybrid rocket, fitted below the jet.
Broadcast television
Home economics and the spectrum crunch
Nov 9th 2010, 17:00 by B.G. | WASHINGTON
IN JUNE of last year America's television broadcasters began sending out a digital signal. This meant that anyone who had relied on a broadcast over the air to watch the five or so big national networks would have to make sure that his television set had a digital tuner in order to continue to do so. At the time, I assumed that the future of what we used to call “television channels” was to become “video producers”. They would have to figure out some way to make money by providing on-demand and for free over the internet what they used to provide scheduled and for free over the airwaves. Most American homes are passed by some kind of wired broadband internet provider, so the transition, to me, seemed quaint. Cute, even.Continue reading "Home economics and the spectrum crunch" >>
Sensors multiply in the ocean too
Nov 5th 2010, 17:14 by L.S.
WANT your fish fresh off the boat? That may soon be a possibility in the Irish city of Galway. When they have hauled in their nets, fishermen will text a list of their catch to a website, so that restaurants and consumers can buy directly from them. By cutting out all the middlemen, the sellers could get a better margin and the buyers a lower price.
This is just one of many possible applications of “SmartBay”, a joint effort by the Marine Institute (Ireland’s national agency responsible for marine research), IBM and other technology firms. The idea is to wire up Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland and make the data collected available continuously on a common online platform, allowing them to be easily analysed and combined—and thus turning Galway Bay into a "smart system" (see our special report this week).
Tribology
The Difference Engine: All change, oil change
Nov 5th 2010, 7:26 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
WITH a trip planned up the back roads to the High Sierras and another 5,000 miles on the odometer since his last oil change, your correspondent spent a recent morning beneath his superannuated runabout, draining the sump and wondering what precisely to re-fill it with. It is no good looking at the workshop manual. The lubricants recommended by the manufacturer when the car was built back in the 1980s live on in name only. Their formulations have changed out of all recognition as a consequence of the motor industry’s quest for ever better fuel economy and lower exhaust emissions.Continue reading "The Difference Engine: All change, oil change" >>
Steal this book
Nov 4th 2010, 14:26 by G.F. | SEATTLE
AMAZON.COM says soon you will be allowed to lend out electronic books purchased from the Kindle Store. For a whole 14 days. Just once, ever, per title. If the publisher allows it. Not mentioned is the necessity to hop on one foot whilst reciting the Gettysburg Address in a falsetto. An oversight, I'm sure. Barnes & Noble's Nook has offered the same capability with identical limits since last year. Both lending schemes are bullet points in a marketing presentation, so Amazon is adding its feature to keep parity.Criticism of the World Bank's anti-carbon policy
Nov 4th 2010, 14:06 by G.C.
MAOISM is a bit old-fashioned, but it seems to live on in one organisation: the World Bank. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to give its full, windy title, keeps a whole department at its headquarters in Washington, DC, intended to indulge in the sort of self-criticism that, in an intellectual newly assigned to digging ditches in the countryside, would surely have pleased the old Chairman himself.Crowdsourced science
And now, the weather... from 1914
Nov 3rd 2010, 11:45 by T.S.
YOU'VE traversed the heavens, exploring distant galaxies. You've scoured the surface of the moon. Now check out the weather during the first world war. Go on, it's for the good of the planet!Huh? These are all Zooniverse projects that put volunteers to work online, classifying and sorting vast numbers of images so that scientists can use them in their research. The first project, Galaxy Zoo, was launched in 2007. Visitors to its website have categorised millions of images of galaxies, taken by robotic telescopes. This is the type of job that is easy for humans but difficult for computers. It was followed by Moon Zoo, which uses volunteer "citizen scientists" to map and classify craters, mounds and boulder fields on the moon, photographed by an orbiting space probe. (Each image is shown to several people to ensure an accurate classification.)
Hunter-gatherer communications
Nov 3rd 2010, 11:09 by J.P.
IT IS received wisdom that our species owes its evolutionary success in large part to a remarkable ability to communicate. So much so, in fact, that few have bothered to test this hypothesis in any systematic way. Now, a group of researchers led by Andrew King, of the Royal Veterinary College in Britain, has decided to start plugging this gaping research gap. Their first results have just been published in the journal Biology Letters.
Hunter-gatherers' practice of scouring surroundings for edible plants is responsible for only half of their moniker. And for good reason. With hunting likely to have been at best an intermittent diversion, effective foraging would have been crucial to tiding our ancestors over to the next woolly mammoth. So, Dr King and his colleagues conducted a study to see how, if at all, communication enhanced humans's foraging prowess.
HTML e-mail
Babbage prefers carrier pigeons
Nov 2nd 2010, 17:13 by G.F. | SEATTLE
THIS Babbage first encountered the power of internetworking in the mid-1980s with the BITNET (Because It's There/Because It's Time Network), an academic network that connected institutions and computer systems that didn't qualify for access on the research-minded Department of Defense's ARPAnet. Later, during a C language programming class, I was exposed to the glory of the nascent internet (the ARPAnet and the National Science Foundation NSFnet). I could suddenly communicate across the country with others as fast as I could type. The internet and BITNET were text-only then, of course, something that fails to convey the richness of information conveyed, much like black-and-white photographs make the past seem less vivid.Old media's woes
The Difference Engine: Beyond content
Oct 29th 2010, 10:33 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
THE old-media world of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television networks has a daunting task ahead of it. New-media upstarts like internet TV, social networking, mash-ups, web stores and online gaming—with their ability to stream content direct to smart phones, tablets, e-readers, laptops and game consoles—have begun to eat the green-eyeshade brigade’s breakfast, lunch and tea. At last week’s Digital Hollywood meeting in Santa Monica, California, the question on a lot of people's lips was how to fight back.Professional gaming
Sport for the wired generation
Oct 28th 2010, 19:26 by T.C.
BEING a nerd under the age of 35, I'm familiar with the Starcraft series of strategy games, developed by Blizzard Entertainment. I knew, vaguely, that the original game (released in 1998) was played competitively in South Korea, in front of crowds of tens of thousands and even bigger TV audiences. After the launch of the sequel, Starcraft 2, ealier in the year, a friend who follows the game closely suggested that a piece on professional gaming might be fun to write. There are other games that are played competitively, he argued, but if anything could really make competitive gaming take off outside its Korean stronghold, it will be Starcraft 2. The resulting piece is published in this week's paper.
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