Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia blogs and other forms of “user generated” medical information a healthy trend?
Millions are now logging on to contribute information about topics stretching from avian-flu pandemics to the extraction of wisdom teeth or the use of acupuncture to overcome infertility. You could call it user-generated health care, or Health 2.0.
Japanese scientists are researching technologies that they hope will replace the Internet at some point in the future.
TOKYO - Japan plans to start research on new networking technology that could one day replace the Internet amid its growing quality and security problems, according to the nation’s communications ministry.
U.S. and European researchers already have started similar efforts to rebuild the underlying architecture of the Internet.
Yoshihiro Onishi, assistant director at the Japanese communications ministry, said Japan must follow suit to stay competitive. Post-Internet network technology is expected to become imperative by 2020, he said.
While I don’t think the Internet will ever be replaced as a whole, I agree that there is plenty of room left for improvements, e.g. the creation of networking technology that consumes less energy, technology that prevents spamming and inter-planetary networking technologies.
Another topic I’m watching closely is data visualization. Here’s an excerpt from an article I found at SmashingMagazine.com:
Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.
Information Architects Japan, for example, created a mindmap to visualize the 200 most successful websites on the Internet (click on the image to enlarge):
Time Magazine uses visual hills to show the density of American population in its map and Forbes Magazine uses visual hills to show the density of millionaires in the USA.
There are lots of possible ways to visualize data, some of which are described in the article mentioned above - worth the read!
I’ve been a supporter of this theory for a long time. People usually tend to ignore the good they could do to larger number of people when they find themselves confronted with the bad luck of an individual, and in most cases they decide to help the individual. Paradox there, of course. Yet, that’s how people act and it is what they say is noble, too.
In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Clive Thompson makes a thought-provoking claim: Geeks like Bill Gates are better suited to understand the world’s problems than non-geeks.
I couldn’t agree more. While most people would help a single stranger who has been hit by a bad blow of fate, they’re just as good at ignoring the equally bad or worse situations of millions. People who can think in giant numbers, on the other hand, are more likely to see the misery of the masses in Africa, for example.
“The problem isn’t a moral failing: It’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but horrible at conceptualizing the suffering of large ones,” says Thompson. “The guy [Bill Gates] is practically a social cripple, and at times he has seemed to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking concretely about giant numbers. Their imagination can scale up and down the powers of 10 — mega, giga, tera, peta — because their jobs demand it. So maybe that’s why he is able to truly understand mass disease in Africa. We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad.“
Today I found this interesting blog post analyzing the eye movements and body movements of conversational partners. This is something I’ve read about before. If you are in a conversation with someone, it might be that you are doing the very same things at the same time, without thinking about it. That’s because conversational partners coordinate each other’s moves and actions.
It makes sense, then, if you’re both looking looking at the same picture while you talk, that you’ll look at the same parts of the picture at the same time. If you’re together in the same room, you can point to the areas you want to talk about, or substitute pointing for speech. But even if two partners are conversing remotely while looking at the same picture, their eye movements are still synchronized. In 2005, Daniel Richardson and Rick Dale had recorded college students speaking about pictures of the cast of The Simpsons and Friends, and recorded their eye movements. They then played back those speeches to different set of students looking at the same pictures.
Read more at http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/08/conversational_partners_coordi.php.
Physics are great, partly because I’ve never understood anything related to physics that is more complex than a car covering a specific distance per hour. However, today I stumbled across an article by Dariusz Miskowiec who shows “that the concept of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter consisting of uncorrelated quarks, and gluons, has a fundamental problem”, whereas he claims that he’ll base his explanation on “simple physics arguments”. Cool, I thought. He’s got my attention.
A quark-gluon plasma (QGP) forms when the density or temperature of hadrons (particles consisting of quarks) exceeds a certain level, for example by heating. A QGP is believed to be in the inside of neutron stars and to have been the biggest part of all matter that was around in the initial moment after the big bang. Dariusz Miskowiec doesn’t explain this in his paper, which is not necessary, by the way, because we all know it already, don’t we? Instead he wants you to make a gedanken experiment (the Germans, they have a word for everything) by imagining one cubic mm of QGP with a temperature “well above the critical temperature” that is stretched to dimensions of 10 fm x 10 fm x 1,000 light years. If you then connect both ends you have a GQP ring with a diameter of 1,000 light years. So far, so good.
If you now cut the ring at one point the hadronization would start at the two loose ends (the plasma would create hadrons). This would go on into both directions of the ring, until the ring would disappear. Now, this hasn’t been anything extremely interesting yet, but I know your next question: What will happen if you cut the ring at two different points (but at the same time)? The two ends would be seperated by a distance of light years, of course. The plasma would hadronize again, but only until the rest of the ring would have a non-neutral color charge! Honestly, I can’t tell you what this means, but it sounds like a hell lot of fun, because we started from a physically allowed state, always abided by physics laws, but we ended up with something that is forbidden.
Up to this point in the article I realized something: The explanation is in no way based on “simple” physics arguments… I don’t even understand the problem Mr. Miskowiec is talking about. After all, I decided that the world would be better off without me writing about the quark-gluon plasma paradox (although I love paradoxes, no kidding) and that a better way of getting you interested in the QGP paradox is a link, which follows below. Enjoy.
You’ve got some change left? Well, why not buy one (or all) of the following things:
9X Media allows you to combine up to 64 screens, which you can use to do 64 different things at the same time or you can use all of them as one giant video wall. Hey, it’s only about $800,000.
You will want to have this system in your house. The price is a cool $1 million, and that’s just for one of these.
SAFE “Bat Cave” Garage Security System
SAFE can build a high-security garage for your luxury cars. A SAFE garage has everything to offer Batman has in his Bat Cave: It’s a custom-designed vault, protected by highest-level bullet proof panels with the cars on turntables two feet off the ground. You can even have a waterfall and a moat to further protect your cars and keep trespassers out. Price: $2.5 million and up. Click here for a photo of an example garage. (Photo hosted by Forbes.com. Copyright by Panache Partners LLC.)
And there are lots of other goodies every serious millionaire or billionaire should own… Maybe I’ll feature them in a future article. : )
The Associated Press reports that China has plans for a new generation of carrier rockets. China wants to establish itself as one of the world’s leading nations in science and technology, therefore planning to build rockets with a payload capacity large enough to launch an entire space station. It is not clear though when the rockets will be ready to be launched into space.
Earlier this month China already launched a new communications satellite for better radio and TV signals in their country.
Now, this is funny. According to Engadget, Seok Gyeong-Jae has invented the roboter Tiro. Gyeong-Jae will marry soon and he wants Tiro to be the master of ceremonies at his wedding. The world is strange, and it gets stranger every day.
Science fiction writer Charlie Stross published an essay, titled “The High Frontier, Redux”, on space colonization on his blog. The essay is both interesting and entertaining. Excerpt:
Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that’s before you factor in the price of bringing them back …
(…)
We’re human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet’s surface area. (Earth is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or desert or mountain, we aren’t well-adapted to thriving there.) Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that’s not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there’s the travel time. Five and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars.
(…)
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
