科技 science and technology

A second wireless revolution is starting

2012-02-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

White-space puts Wi-Fi on steroids

A second wireless revolution is starting, thanks to television’s switch to digital

Nov 17th 2011 | Los Angeles | from The World In 2012 print edition

Who needs TV?

Think of how Wi-Fi has made computing so much more convenient. It has untethered users from pesky cable connections to the internet, allowing them to wander around the home or office with laptop or tablet in hand, surfing the web, making free phone calls, sending files wirelessly to printers, video to television sets, and many more things. But what if Wi-Fi radio beams travelled not just a few hundred feet but stretched for several miles—and were unimpeded by trees, terrain and walls so that they could penetrate all the nooks and crannies within buildings? That is the promise of “white-space” wireless.

“White-space” is technical slang for television channels that were left vacant in one city so as not to interfere with TV stations broadcasting on adjacent channels in a neighbouring city. In the early days of television, America’s broadcasting authorities reserved 50 or so channels for TV stations. But because of worries about interference, no metropolitan area has ever come close to using all 50 channels at its disposal. In rural areas, vacant channels (ie, white-space) have frequently amounted to 70% or more of the total bandwidth available for television broadcasting.

With the recent switch from analogue to digital television, much of this protective white-space is no longer needed. Unlike analogue broadcasting, digital signals do not “bleed” into one another—and can therefore be packed closer together. All told, the television networks now require little more than half the frequency spectrum they sprawled across previously.

The attraction of white-space is that the frequencies used for television broadcasting (54MHz to 806MHz) were chosen in the first place for the distance they could travel and their ability to penetrate obstacles. They were also good at transmitting information quickly. Where Wi-Fi can shuttle data at 160-300 megabits per second, white-space can do so at 400-800 megabits per second.

In America the best frequencies for doing all this—the 700MHz band covering channels 52 to 69 on the old television dial—were auctioned off in 2008 to mobile-phone companies. Between them, Verizon, AT&T and others paid close to $20 billion for this “beachfront property” of the wireless spectrum. The white-space freed below 700MHz is to be made available for unlicensed use by the public.

Do you want to play in my bandwidth?

White-space should help to solve the bandwidth problem that has begun to plague wireless networks in general—as more consumers download films, television episodes and other video offerings wirelessly from the internet, instead of receiving such fare from their traditional cable, satellite or over-the-air TV broadcasters.

A decade ago the biggest bandwidth hogs were computer users downloading music tracks from Napster and other peer-to-peer websites. Nowadays media seekers are more likely to be downloading whole television episodes from Amazon, iTunes or Hulu (which typically gobble up 14 times the bandwidth of music tracks) or streaming films from Netflix (110 times). Blame the current bandwidth crunch on the growing popularity of the iPhone and Android smartphones as well as media tablets like the iPad.

What if Wi-Fi radio beams stretched for several miles?

Apart from easing bandwidth problems, white-space could lead to a wireless revolution even bigger than the wave of innovation unleashed over a decade ago when Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless technologies embraced the unlicensed 2.4GHz band previously reserved for microwave ovens and garage-door openers. Some insiders even talk about white-space offering a “third pipe” that will rival cable and telephone broadband for access to the internet. Others see it as a cheaper alternative to today’s mobile-phone system.

Microsoft has been using just two experimental white-space antennae, instead of thousands of Wi-Fi access points, to blanket its 500-acre (200-hectare) campus in Redmond, Washington. With white-space hotspots capable of covering such wide areas, supermarkets, shopping malls, even local municipalities could use it to offer free (advertising-supported) internet services to their customers and local residents, to search the web and make free telephone calls using Skype, Google+, or something similar on their smartphones and other devices.

Pipe-dreams? Far from it. Technical hurdles remain, but the first “enterprise-level” pieces of white-space equipment are about to go into service, with commercial trials of various applications expected throughout 2012. How soon before individuals can buy $100 white-space routers for the home? The consensus view is 2015 at the very latest.

Nick Valéry: Difference Engine columnist, The Economist

英文科技論文大出版商Elsevier受攻擊

2012-02-08T17:36:00.000-08:00

Scientific publishing

The price of information

Academics are starting to boycott a big publisher of journals

Feb 4th 2012 | from the print edition

SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.

It did. More than 2,700 researchers from around the world have so far signed an online pledge set up by Tyler Neylon, a fellow-mathematician who was inspired by Dr Gowers’s post, promising not to submit their work to Elsevier’s journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them. That number seems, to borrow a mathematical term, to be growing exponentially. If it really takes off, established academic publishers might find they have a revolution on their hands.

Dr Gowers’s immediate gripes are threefold. First, that Elsevier charges too much for its products. Second, that its practice of “bundling” journals forces libraries which wish to subscribe to a particular publication to buy it as part of a set that includes several others they may not want. And third, that it supports legislation such as the Research Works Act, a bill now before America’s Congress that would forbid the government requiring that free access be given to taxpayer-funded research.

Elsevier insists it is being misrepresented. The firm is certainly in rude financial health. In 2010 it made a £724m ($1.16 billion) profit on revenues of £2 billion, a margin of 36%. But it charges average industry prices for its products, according to Nick Fowler, its director of global academic relations, and its price rises have been lower than those imposed by other publishers over the past few years. Elsevier’s enviable margins, Dr Fowler says, are simply a consequence of the firm’s efficient operation.

Dr Neylon’s petition, though, is symptomatic of a wider conflict between academics and their publishers—a conflict that is being thrown into sharp relief by the rise of online publishing. Academics, who live in a culture which values the free and easy movement of information (and who edit and referee papers for nothing) have long been uncomfortable bedfellows with commercial publishing companies, which want to maximise profits by charging for access to that information, and who control many (although not all) of the most prestigious scientific journals.

This situation has been simmering for years. In 2006, for example, the entire editorial board of Topology, a mathematics journal published by Elsevier, resigned, citing similar worries about high prices choking off access. And the board of K-theory, a maths journal owned by Springer, a German publishing firm, quit in 2007.

To many, it is surprising things have taken so long to boil over. Academics were the internet’s earliest adopters, with all the possibilities for cutting publishers out of the loop which that offers. And there have indeed been attempts to create alternatives to commercial publishing. Cornell University’s arXiv website (pronounced “archive”, the X standing in for the Greek letter “chi”) was set up in 1991. Researchers can upload maths and physics papers that have not (yet) been published in journals. Thousands are added every day. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in 2000. It publishes seven free journals which cover biology and medicine.

But despite the enthusiasm for such operations, there are reasons for the continued dominance of traditional publishers. ArXiv’s papers, though subject to merciless post-publication commentary, are not formally peer-reviewed before they are posted. Their quality is thus rather uneven. PLoS relies partly on donations, but also charges publication fees of up to $2,900 per paper. These must be paid by the authors, a significant expense for cash-strapped university departments. And there is also a lingering prejudice against electronic-only publishing. Web-based alternatives often seem less respectable than their dead-tree counterparts.

That matters, because university departments (and individual researchers within them) are rated both by the number of papers they publish and the reputation of the journals those papers appear in. Youngsters, who might be expected to embrace new ways of doing things, must therefore publish in existing, reputable journals if they want recognition and promotion. And the definition of “reputable” changes slowly, since journals with the best reputation get the pick of new papers.

Commercial publishers have begun to experiment with open-access ideas, such as charging authors for publication rather than readers for reading. But if the boycott continues to grow, things could become more urgent. After all, publishers need academics more than academics need publishers. And incumbents often look invulnerable until they suddenly fall. Beware, then, the Academic spring.

政務委員/ 國科會主委

2012-02-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

此次國科會主委為某朱先生經濟學者

今年の 1 月 14 日、台湾では総統選挙と立法院選挙 (日本の国会議員選挙にあたる) が行われ、与党・国民党が引き続きこれからの 4 年間の政権を担うことになったが、今度の新しい内閣には、科学技術担当の政務委員 (無任所大臣に相当) に Google 台湾から張善政氏を迎えており、「台湾クラウドバレー」計画を推進していくとのことだ (台湾ビジネス情報の記事より) 。
台湾クラウドバレーは企業や行政組織など 25 以上の団体が共同で推進するもので、台湾のクラウドコンピューティング産業が国際市場に進出するための足掛かりとすることを目的としているようだ。また中国との提携をも視野に入れている模様。中国では北京や広東など 10 箇所以上でクラウドコンピューティング目的のデータセンターが設置されているのだが、ご存じの通り Google と中国の関係はここ数年であまり良好なものではないこともあり、台湾政府の一員として Google が含まれている事に懸念が感じられる、としている。

Today's Wearable Computers/Devices to Keep Track of Calories,

2012-01-25T14:12:00.001-08:00

Today's Wearable Computers Help You Sleep, Not Tweet

By NICK BILTON

It might be another decade before social network updates flash to us through wearable screens and contact lenses. Yet wearable computing is already here to help people track some aspects of health, like sleep patterns, and view the results through a smartphone.

Devices to Keep Track of Calories, Lost or Gained

By ROY FURCHGOTT

Monitors designed to gauge physical activity and subsequent calories burned might become a silver bullet for weight loss and for sticking to New Year's resolutions.

向日葵狀太陽能電廠

2012-01-25T01:46:00.000-08:00

Solar energy

Flower power

In matters of clever design, nature has often got there first

Jan 21st 2012 | from the print edition

A virtuous spiral

SOLAR-POWER stations take up a lot of room. They need either vast arrays of photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, or of mirrors, which direct it towards a boiler, in order to raise steam and drive a generator. The space these arrays occupy could often be used for other purposes.

Two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have now devised a better and more compact way of laying out arrays of mirrors. Slightly to their chagrin, however, and somehow appropriately, they found when they had done the calculations that sunflowers had got there first.

Alexander Mitsos and Corey Noone started with the observation that existing concentrated solar-power plants, as those which drive boilers are known, usually have their mirrors arranged in a way that resembles the seating in a cinema. The mirrors are placed in concentric semicircles facing a tower, on top of which the boiler and the turbine sit. That arrangement, however, sometimes results in the mirrors shading each other as the sun’s position in the sky changes, even though the mirrors are usually attached to robotic arms that track the sun as it moves.

According to their report in Solar Energy, Dr Mitsos and Mr Noone found that they could do better. They divided each of the mirrors in a real power plant, PS10, in southern Spain into about 100 pieces. (Or, rather, they divided a computer representation of each mirror.) They then plugged each of those pieces into a computer model that calculated all of the energy losses by noting points where mirrors were not optimally oriented to the sun and places where they hindered one another by blocking incoming or reflected rays. It then rejigged them into a better arrangement.

Fermat’s conjecture

Previous efforts have been directed mainly at stopping the mirrors shading each other, which tends to mean spreading them out. Dr Mitsos and Mr Noone also wanted to save space. In trying to do so they stumbled on an unusual arrangement that had the desired effect. When they showed this layout to a third researcher, Manuel Torrilhon of Aachen University in Germany, he recognised the spiral patterns within it, and this prompted the trio to test a design specifically modelled on nature.

That design was a pattern known as a Fermat spiral, in which each element is set at a constant angle of 137° to the previous one. It is most familiar as the arrangement of the florets that make up a sunflower head. When the three researchers programmed their model to arrange PS10’s mirrors in front of the tower in a segment from such a spiral, they both improved the efficiency of the collection process and saved space. The improvement in efficiency was, admittedly, quite small (about half a percent), but the space saving was significant—almost 16%.

If solar power is to make up much of the world’s electricity output in future, as supporters of alternative energy hope it will, a lot of land will be needed for the power stations. Reducing that requirement by a sixth, as this discovery promises, would be a big gain. It would also show that if you look hard enough, there really is nothing new under the sun.

Massive Solar Flare Sends Radiation Storm to Earth

2012-01-24T18:46:00.000-08:00

Massive Solar Flare Sends Radiation Storm to Earth

The effects, which include the southern creep of the Northern Lights, will last through Tuesday night.

By Abby Ohlheiser | Posted Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012, at 10:36 AM ET

In this handout from the NOAA/National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center, shows the coronal mass ejection (CME) erupting from the sun late January 23, 2012. The flare is reportedly the largest since 2005.

Photo by NOAA/National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center via Getty Images

We're right in the middle of the biggest solar radiation storm on earth since 2005, thanks to a massive solar flare that left the sun on Sunday.

Although solar flares can cause disruption of satellite computer systems and long-distance power lines, and cause aircraft to avoid polar flights due to disruption of radio activity and increased levels of radiation, the biggest noticeable effect from the storm for most of us is likely to be northern lights reaching much farther south than usual, possibly as far south as New York.

As the Christian Science Monitor explains, Sunday's solar flare sent what's called a coronal-mass ejection (CME) flying towards earth at 4 million miles an hour, which is fast even for this sort of event. The CMEs are giant clouds of energized particles - protons, electrons, and heavy atomic nuclei formed by the nuclear fusion reactions that keep the sun shining.*

The storm hit Tuesday morning, and the effects are expected to last through the night. According to spaceweather.com, this storm is strong enough to interfere with radio communications along the poles, and to possibly cause some satellite computers to reboot. The storms caused by solar flares are measured on a scale of one to five. This storm is a three.

Curious about just how big this flare is? NASA has an animated map. Those dots represent planets.

As the Los Angeles Times explains, this flare is something of an opening act for more anticipated solar activity in the very near future: The sun is approaching a period of peak activity in 2013.

(綜合報道)(星島日報報道)美國太空氣候預測中心發出預報稱，受到來自太陽的高能粒子影響，地球磁場會在周二開始出現「磁暴」。屆時，部分航班、電網及衞星通訊可能受到影響。

該中心在周一的預報中表示，太陽的高能帶電粒子流於周日以每秒二千公里的速度衝向地球，其速度約為普通太陽粒子的五倍，預計到達地球的時間為美國東部時間周二早上九時（香港時間周二晚上十時）。預報稱，這次磁暴的總體強度為中等或較強，將持續到美國時間周三。

太空氣候預測中心官員翁薩格（Terry Onsager）表示，到達地球的高能粒子可能會干擾到部分高頻無綫通訊系統，北美、歐洲和亞洲之間的部分航班可能需要更改飛行路綫，發電廠也可能受影響。

翁薩格說：「當這些粒子襲擊地球，就像把一個大鐵錘丟進地球磁場，那些能量會讓地球磁場產生變動。」

太陽的高能帶電粒子流到達地球引起的全球性強烈地磁場擾動，稱為「磁暴」。電子流的速度愈快，磁暴的強度也就愈大。

太空氣候預測中心物理學家比賽克則指出，這次磁暴為二○○五年以來最大，在一到五級制中列為三級，仍為「強烈」的級別。比賽克又稱，極地區域可能受磁風暴影響最深，鑽油、極地探索和太空衞星也可能因此中斷，但預期不會造成太大影響。

IBM cuts bit size to 12 atoms

2012-01-19T06:52:00.000-08:00

IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

2 ((米略式))（特定の）見解, 解釈

put a political spin on ...
…に政治的な解釈を加える.

The technology could also someday be applied to tape media.

While the science behind what IBM researchers accomplished is complex, the results are quite simple: They put a spin on the old adage that "opposites attract."

Instead today's method for magnetic storage where iron atoms are lined up with the same magnetic polarization, requiring greater distance between them, IBM created atoms with opposite magnetization, pulling them more tightly together.

"Moore's Law is basically the drive of the industry to shrink components down little by little and then solve the engineering challenges that go along with that but keeping the basic concepts the same. The basic concepts of magnetic data storage or even transistors haven't really changed over the past 20 years," Heinrich said. "The ultimate end of Moore's Law is a single atom. That's where we come in."

The researchers started with one iron atom and used the tip of scanning tunneling microscope to switch magnetic information in successive atoms. They worked their way up until eventually they succeeded in storing one bit of magnetic information reliably in 12 atoms. The tip of the scanning tunneling microscope was then used to switch the magnetic information in the bits from a zero to a one and back again, allowing researchers to store information.

Scanning tunneling microscope image of twelve iron atoms that were assembled into an atomically precise antiferromagnet (source: IBM Research)

IBM used iron atoms on copper nitrate to perform its experiments, but other materials could theoretically require even fewer atoms to store a bit of data.

The experiment was performed at low temperature: about 1 degree Kelvin, which corresponds to about -272 °C (-458 °F). The byte starts switching randomly about once a minute due to thermal energy (heat) at about 5 degrees Kelvin.

"We use low temperatures because it enables us to start from one atom and assemble bigger and bigger structures while keeping an eye on their magnetic properties. The more atoms we use to make each bit, the more stable the bits become. We anticipate that in order to make bits of this type that are stable at room temperature would require about 150 atoms per bit (rather than 12 atoms at low temperatures)," an IBM spokesman said.

The researchers then combined 96 atoms to make one byte of data, such as a letter or number. IBM then put many of the bytes together to create information. The first word they spelled using the new technique: THINK, which required five bytes of information or 480 magnetized atoms.

"The atomic scale magnetic data storage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single conventional bit," Heinrich said.

Heinrich is quick to point out that the breakthrough is more theoretical than practical at this point; storage manufacturers aren't going to build a storage devices that use a scanning tunneling microscope to switch bits back and forth to store data.

But the research proves storage mediums can be vastly denser than they are today.

"If you look at magnetic data storage element in a solid state device, like a spintronics device [also known as magnetoelectronics] or in a hard disk drive, you have about one million atoms in each bit," Heinrich said. "So you have a lot of leeway from where we currently are."

Miniaturized information storage in atomic-scale antiferromagnets. The binary representation of the letter 'S' (01010011) was stored in the Neel states of eight iron atom arrays (source: IBM Research)

Heinrich predicted that devices using IBM's new method of data storage would take five to 10 years to develop, but the research is critical in that it proves previous theoretical limits to data storage do not exist.

"Using iron atoms on a copper nitrite surface is probably far from being a real technology. You don't want to build this with the tool we're using, which is a research tool," he said. "You want to build this cheaply for a mass environment, and that's a huge engineering challenge."

Antiferromagnets is not the only data storage project that IBM is working on. Last year, the company produced its first Racetrack Memory circuit, which could also lead to silicon chips with the capacity of today's hard drives, but the durability and performance of flash drives. Henrich, however, said Racetrack technology falls somewhere between today's storage mediums and IBM's most recent antiferromagnets discovery.

T-H-I-N-K ... This figure shows the a magnetic byte imaged 5 times in different magnetic states. A white signal on the right edge corresponds to logic 0 (and is labeled as such) and a blue signal to logic 1. Between two successive images the magnetic states of the bits were switched to encode the binary representation of the ASCII characters "THINK" (source: IBM Research)

"In the technology world, hopefully this will gather some momentum to allow them to use antiferromagnetic structures as active elements and then solve the all the technological problems around that," Heinrich added.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

微中子確實比光速快?/ Chips the Size of Blood Cells

2012-01-18T16:40:00.000-08:00

[科學人]微中子並沒有超光速撰文╱卡司塔維奇（Davide Castelvecchi）翻譯／宋宜真如果你漏掉這則新聞，那我來告訴你。2011年9月，有個物理團隊發表了一份報告，表示微中子這種次原子粒子有可能違反愛因斯坦狹義相對論所設定的光速極限。參與「微中子振盪感光追蹤儀」（Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus, OPERA）實驗的研究人員表示，他們從瑞士日內瓦附近的歐洲核子研究組織（CERN）朝義大利拉奎拉地底的格蘭沙索國家實驗室發射微中子束，根據他們的計算，微中子抵達目的地的時間，比光速還快了60奈秒。其他專家對此發出強烈警告，要求確認實驗數據是否精確，尤其先前實驗所獲得的結果是微中子的確遵守光速極限。9月29日，美國波士頓大學的科恩（Andrew Cohen）與格拉肖（Sheldon Glashow）在網路上發表了一篇簡要的論文，計算出微中子只要超過光速，便會放射出速度較慢的粒子，接著便喪失能量，並在後頭留下一道較慢粒子的軌跡，這些粒子則會由地殼吸收。這道軌跡就像是超音速噴射機呼嘯而過之後，在身後留下的音爆。不過，在義大利格蘭沙索國家實驗室所偵測到的微中子能量，卻跟剛從CERN發出的微中子差不多，科恩和格拉肖因而對於所測得的速度真實性感到懷疑。科恩解釋道：「當所有粒子具有同樣的最高速度，一個粒子就不可能因為放射出另一個粒子而喪失能量。但倘若這些粒子所擁有的最高速度並不相同，那麼這種情況就有可能發生。」這類效應其實並不陌生，當電子以較高速（光速）行進，而光本身則因為通過水或空氣之類的介質而慢下來時，也會出現類似情況。此時電子在該介質中的速度，會比光子在相同介質中所能達到的最高速度還快，電子這時會發射出光子而喪失能量。不同速度極限的粒子之間傳遞能量的現象，稱為之切侖科夫輻射，正是這種效應讓核能電廠的反應爐發射出偏藍的光。				■圖片來源：http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html
				就微中子的例子而言，根據科恩和格拉肖的計算，微中子的尾波應該主要是由電子與正子這樣的物質和反物質對所組成。更重要的是，由於電子–正子對的產生率，一個超光速微中子從CERN飛行到格蘭沙索時，會損失大部份能量。何況，這些粒子的起始速度可能也不是超光速。美國亞利桑那州立大學的理論物理學家克勞斯（Lawrence M. Krauss）說：「這篇論文解答了一切，是一篇非常出色的論文。」所以，最後還是愛因斯坦對囉？既然愛因斯坦的相對論可以取代牛頓物理學，而物理學家自然也會竭盡所能想找愛因斯坦理論的碴。的確，科恩也說：「我們從未停止檢驗自己想法，即便是那些已經根基穩固的理論。」

ICARUS Team Rebuts CERN's Faster-Than-Light Findings

New round of experiments renew fight over major Einstein theory.

READ FULL STORY

《中英對照讀新聞》ARM CTO Predicts Chips the Size of Blood Cells 安謀技術長預測晶片大小將有如血球細胞

◎陳成良

In less than a decade, that smartphone you’re holding could have 32 times the memory, 20 times the bandwidth and a microprocessor core no bigger than a red blood cell, the CTO of chip design company ARM said on Thursday.

再過不到10年，你手拿的智慧手機可能有32倍記憶容量、20倍頻寬，以及1個不會比紅血球細胞大的微處理器核心，晶片設計公司安謀的技術長週四說。

ARM has already helped develop a prototype, implantable device for monitoring eye-pressure in glaucoma patients that measures just 1 cubic millimeter, CTO Mike Muller said at ARM’s TechCon conference in Silicon Valley Thursday. The device includes a microprocessor sandwiched between sensors at the top and a battery at the bottom.

安謀已協助開發出一個偵測青光眼病患眼壓的植入性裝置原型，大小只有1立方毫米，技術長麥克．穆勒週四在矽谷舉辦安謀TechCon大會上說。該裝置包含了一顆微處理器，夾在上端感應器與底部一個電池之間。

Strip away those extra components, rearrange the transistors into a cube and apply the type of advanced manufacturing process expected in 2020, and you’d end up with a device that occupies about the same volume as a blood cell, Muller said.

拿掉這些多餘元件，把電晶體重整成一個立方體，再應用預期2020年出現的那種先進製程，結果就能打造出一個所占容積跟一個血球約同樣大小的裝置，穆勒說。

ARM designs the processor cores used in most of today’s smartphones and tablets, and smaller cores are generally more energy efficient, he said. That helps to extend battery life.

安謀設計的處理器核心為今日大多數智慧手機、平板電腦所使用，較小的核心通常較節能，他說。那有助於延長電池使用時間。

That’s a good thing, because battery technology is advancing much more slowly, and Muller expects only a two-fold improvement in battery performance by the end of the decade.

那是件好事，因為電池科技進展速度緩慢許多，穆勒預測到了本十年末，電池效能只會有兩倍的改善。

新聞辭典

CTO：為Chief Technology Officer 的縮寫，技術長，又常稱為首席技術官、科技長。

be sandwiched between something and something：被夾在兩個東西中間。例句：The tiny kingdom was sandwiched between Austria and Czechoslovakia.（這個小王國夾處在奧地利與捷克斯洛伐克之間。）

end up：片語，結束、告終。例句：Wasteful people usually end up in debt.（浪費的人最後往往負債。）

二度實驗微中子確實比光速快

〔編譯魏國金／綜合十八日外電報導〕歐洲核子研究組織（ＣＥＲＮ）九月間宣布，實驗發現微中子移動速度比光速每秒約快六公里，由於這項消息引發科學界強烈質疑，為了釋疑，該組織十月間進行二度實驗，結果微中子速度仍快於光速。

推翻愛因斯坦？專家視為誤差

二度試驗的結果於十八日上午刊登在科學期刊網站「ArXiv」，同時送交「高能物理」期刊，以進行同儕審查。

第一次的實驗是從瑞士ＣＥＲＮ實驗室發射微中子至七百三十二公里外的義大利格蘭沙索實驗室。果然一公布立刻引發科學界譁然，因為該結果違背愛因斯坦的特別相對論。

ＣＥＲＮ的研究團隊十月宣布進行第二次試驗以回應排山倒海而來的質疑。這一次研究團隊改變質子束的結構，因為批評人士認為該因素恐影響結果。這項改變有助於團隊在發射出質子束及其抵達目的地時，辨識出特定粒子。

義大利核子物理研究院十八日聲明指出：「目前為止，最新的測試可使先前結果獲得證實。」但美國專家仍然無法信服，指出實驗可能在計時上發生誤差。美國知名的費米實驗室指出，二度試驗仍對微中子的移動是否精確計時的問題未有解答，而毫釐之誤將使整個結果有千里之失。

Impossible to pre-screen content: Google, Facebook

2012-01-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

Impossible to pre-screen content: Google, Facebook

Published: Tuesday, Jan 17, 2012, 9:15 IST
By DNA Correspondent | Place: New Delhi | Agency: DNA

Expressing their inability in filtering the content posted on their websites, Google and Facebook told the Delhi high court that there was no way in which they can stop an individual from posting anything on their profile online. They asserted that the social networking sites do respect a person’s freedom of speech and expression.

Putting forth the argument on behalf of Google, senior advocate Neeraj Kishan Kaul said, “It’s easy for people to say you can use filters. If we were to block the word sex, for instance, all data on ration cards, passports etc will get blocked in one go, as the word sex figures in all this data, so what wrong we are doing if this word is being used by any individual? It is difficult to analyse as to in what sense the word is being used.”

Both companies are among 21 whose executives have been summoned to appear in person in a trial court on March 13 for allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable content.

Google said it is working as a search engine, its filtration will lead to surfers to sites they’re looking for.

“The offending material belongs to the website, controlled by the owner of the website. Google has nothing to do with it,” Kaul said.

“There are serious issues regarding freedom of speech. We have this freedom in our country unlike a totalitarian regime like China. We are proud we have this freedom,” added Kaul.

The legal trouble for companies including Orkut, Yahoo and YouTube is based on a petition filed by Vinay Rai who has objected to obscene depictions that he found online of Hindu deities, the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus Christ.

A Delhi court has on Friday suggested the executives of these 21 companies be tried for criminal conspiracy, even when the government has sanctioned their prosecution. The companies appealed against this in the high court, which warned last week that like China, India can choose to ban these websites.

Google also said the Indian subsidiary cannot be held responsible for an act by its parent company.

However, Justice Suresh Kait was not impressed with this argument. “Are you not a beneficiary of Google Inc’s business? If some illegal activity is being carried out by a tenant and the landlord is a beneficiary, then how can the landlord not know what’s happening?”

On this, counsel for the petitioner Hariharan told the court that websites such as Google and Facebook are liable for the content, posted on their platform by users, as they benefit from the content.
“Every click on a Google- owned website gets it revenue on the content. Google India is wrong in stating that it is just an ad-collection subsidiary of Google Inc. The memorandum of association of Google India shows it is in the business of production of software, Internet products, computer-aided design, analysis, selling Internet search, engineering platforms and solutions. Thus it is not only in the business of advertising, as it states,” Hariharan added.

The arguments remain inconclusive and the court posted the matter for further hearing on January 19.

霍金70歲英特爾幫他另覓溝通工具

2012-01-08T19:46:00.001-08:00

霍金70歲英特爾幫他另覓溝通工具

劍橋大學舉行慶生會

〔編譯張沛元／綜合報導〕英國知名物理學家霍金（見圖，美聯社）八日歡度七十歲大壽，但因罹患漸凍人症而癱瘓多年、利用電腦溝通的霍金近來健康情況惡化，使得他越來越難利用電腦溝通，甚至有「失聲」之虞。電腦晶片大廠英特爾（Intel）的一支團隊目前正與大師合作，共同研究另覓包括腦波掃描等其他溝通方式。

霍金取得博士學位的母校與任教地點英國劍橋大學，八日在理論宇宙學中心為他舉行慶生會，與會者包括不少來自世界各地的著名科學家和學者。霍金二十一歲時被診斷出患有肌肉萎縮性側索硬化症（俗稱漸凍人症），醫生告訴他最多活不過三年，但他卻創造奇蹟，與病魔抗爭近五十年。霍金被譽為是繼愛因斯坦之後，最偉大的科學家。

患病的霍金在一九七○年已無法自己行走，得靠輪椅代步，後來更惡化到全身上下只剩幾根手指可以活動；一九八五年，霍金接受氣切手術喪失說話能力，改用手指按說話器發言。

霍金目前以臉頰肌肉抽動控制電腦：眼鏡上的光學感應器能偵測臉頰肌肉抽動，讓霍金挑選電腦螢幕上的字彙與字母。近日他的助理透露，由於肌肉退化，抽動臉部肌肉對霍金來說已非易事，霍金不久後可能「失聲」。

為了幫霍金尋找新的溝通方式，英特爾的一支團隊正與他密切合作、尋求解決之道，構想之一是利用腦波掃描，透過頭罩或其他裝置偵測腦中的電子活動；另一種方法則是眼球追蹤；第三種對策是臉部辨識，例如霍金只要扮鬼臉，就能將滑鼠游標移往特定方向。這支由英特爾科技長雷特納領軍的團隊，將在霍金過完生日相關慶祝活動後開始工作。

感謝有您邁向2012

2011-12-29T17:32:00.001-08:00

感謝有您 邁向2012

hc的”剪貼簿”在2011年約有25萬人次造訪

戴明圈: A Taiwanese Deming Circle

"交情千千" 電子連絡簿(日報)

胡適的世界 The World of Hu Shih

管理學新生

 Books Birdviews 書海

 People 人物

 品質世界 quality world

教育人

 英文人行道 et cetera, et cetera .

漢語人行道：演變風貌

 譯藝

 英國風

 日本心得帖

 亞洲

 SHE健康一生

Science and Censorship: A Duel Lasting Centuries

2011-12-27T21:37:00.000-08:00

紐約時報

Science and Censorship: A Duel Lasting Centuries

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

When a federal panel asked two journals last week to withhold details on bird flu experiments, it was only the latest example of an ages-old conflict often rooted in issues of war and advanced weaponry.

媽媽不出門能知寶貝的萬事“mompreneurs”

2011-12-25T03:17:00.000-08:00

Prototype

If These Moms Can’t Find It, They Invent It

By NICOLE LAPORTE

The rise of “mompreneurs” 媽媽興業家 has been helped by the rise of Internet and social media, which allow child-raising women to exchange ideas without having to leave the house.

Ogata Korin's "Red and White Plum Blossoms," a folding screen w

2011-12-20T03:37:00.000-08:00

National treasure's silver waves recreated via computer

BY KAZUMASA NISHIOKA STAFF WRITER

2011/12/20

Silver-colored waves were reproduced through computer graphics after an analysis of crystals on the painting. (Provided by Izumi Nakai, professor of analytical chemistry at the Tokyo University of Science)

Ogata Korin's "Red and White Plum Blossoms," a folding screen with a painting from the 18th century (MOA Museum of Art)

After fading over time, the dazzling silvery waves of a dark river originally depicted in a national treasure screen painting from the 18th century have been reproduced via computer by a team of researchers, giving testament to the brilliance of the original masterpiece.

偽造家人的來電顯示

2011-12-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

這科技值得一記

---

偽造家人的來電顯示→ 最新詐騙手法

請留意勿上當

新聞來源：華視

詐騙集團詐騙又有新手法。以往詐騙集團的來電通常都不會顯示號碼，但現在詐騙集團利用一種新科技，可以偽造被害者家屬的來電號碼，讓被害者家屬信以為真，由於，目前還沒有科技可以破解這種技術，警方提醒，接到可疑電話，切記一定要保持冷靜，才不會被騙倒。電話響了，來電顯示是兒子打過來的，沒想到一接起來竟然是歹徒謊稱綁架勒贖的電話。台北市一名婦人就是接到了這種詐騙勒贖電話，被詐騙集團騙走了五十八萬元，原因就是來電顯示的號碼不是別人，而是她的兒子。

以往詐騙集團的來電顯示，絕大部分不是保密電話，就是沒有顯示號碼，民眾通常都可以輕易的辨識，但現在歹徒透過這一台叫做 ID RUN的機器，就可以輕易的偽造出被害者家屬的電話。不幸的是，業者表示，目前為止還沒有技術可以破解這項新科技，因此警方呼籲民眾接到可疑電話，一定要謹慎再謹慎。又或者在第一時間，向警方求助，透過電信警察追查發話地點，才可以避免掉入歹徒的陷阱。

The Higgs boson,

2011-12-14T16:53:00.000-08:00

The Higgs boson

Fantasy turned reality

Those searching for the Higgs boson may at last have cornered their quarry

Dec 14th 2011 | from the print edition

WELL, they’ve found it. Possibly. Maybe. Pinning down physicists about whether they have actually discovered the Higgs boson is almost as hard as tracking down the elusive subatomic beast itself. Leon Lederman, a leading researcher in the field, once dubbed it the “goddamn” particle, because it has proved so hard to isolate. That name was changed by a sniffy editor to the “God” particle, and a legend was born. Headline writers loved it. Physicists loved the publicity. CERN, the world’s biggest particle-physics laboratory, and the centre of the hunt for the Higgs, used that publicity to help keep the money flowing.

And this week it may all have paid off. On December 13th two of the researchers at CERN’s headquarters in Geneva announced to a breathless world something that looks encouragingly Higgsy.

The Higgs boson, for those who have not been paying attention to the minutiae of particle physics over the past few years, is a theoretical construct dreamed up in 1964 by a British researcher, Peter Higgs (pictured above), and five other, less famous individuals. It is the last unobserved piece of the Standard Model, the most convincing explanation available for the way the universe works in all of its aspects except gravity (which is dealt with by the general theory of relativity).

The Standard Model (see table) includes familiar particles such as electrons and photons, and esoteric ones like the W and Z bosons, which carry something called the weak nuclear force. Most bosons are messenger particles that cement the others, known as fermions, together. They do so via electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. The purpose of the Higgs boson, however, is different. It is to inculcate mass into those particles which weigh something. Without it, or something like it, some of the Standard Model’s particles that actually do have mass (particularly the W and Z bosons) would be predicted to be massless. Without it, in other words, the Standard Model would not work.

The announcement, by Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli—the heads, respectively, of two experiments at CERN known as ATLAS and CMS—was that both of their machines have seen phenomena which look like traces of the Higgs. They are traces, rather than actual bosons, because no Higgs will ever be seen directly. The best that can be hoped for are patterns of breakdown particles from Higgses that are, themselves, the results of head-on collisions between protons travelling in opposite directions around CERN’s giant accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Heavy objects like Higgs bosons can break down in several different ways, but each of these ways is predictable. Both ATLAS and CMS have seen a number of these predicted patterns often enough to pique interest, but not (yet) often enough to constitute proof that they came from Higgses, rather than being random fluctuations in the background of non-Higgs decays.

The crucial point, and the reason for the excitement, is that both ATLAS and CMS (which are located in different parts of the ring-shaped accelerator tunnel of the LHC) have come up with the same results. Both indicate that, if what they have seen really are Higgses, then the boson has a mass of about 125 giga-electron-volts (GeV), in the esoteric units which are used to measure how heavy subatomic particles are. That coincidence bolsters the suggestion that this is the real thing, rather than a few chance fluctuations.

Physicists Report Progress in Search for "God Particle"

Scientists say they've found "intriguing hints" about the Higgs boson, thought to be one of the universe's key building blocks.

By Greg Howard | Posted Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011, at 1:44 PM ET

Scientists at the CERN gave update Tuesday on their search for the Higgs boson, a elusive subatomic particle that is believed to be a basic building block of the universe.

Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images.

Physicists haven't found the so-called "God particle" (known to the less sensational among us as the Higgs boson) just yet, but two teams have found "intriguing hints" pointing to the existence of the elusive particle that is thought to be a basic building block of the universe.

So what’s the big deal? And what’s with the haughty name?

The Washington Post explains: "[T]his particle—spotted—would all but complete the fundamental theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model. Confirmation of the Higgs would solve the mystery of why matter has the property that physicists call mass—the resistance to being shoved around."

British physicist Peter Higgs and others theorized the particle’s existence over 40 years ago. Scientists haven’t had the tools or expertise to conclude whether or not it exists until now, and a pair of separate teams have sparked excitement among experts and laymen with early results—the latest of which were unveiled Tuesday—that show small but significant progress toward finally answering the question once and for all.

"The excitement is higher than anything I've seen in high-energy physics in the past 20 years," Joe Lykken, a physicist at the Energy Department’s Fermilab in Illinois, told the Post.

Two separate teams are using the European Organization for Nuclear Research's Large Hadron Collider—a 17-mile circular tunnel underneath the Swiss-French border that is so powerful that it can create conditions that mirror those that followed the theoretical Big Bang—to crash proton beams into each other at incredibly high speeds in hopes of finding the Higgs boson.

The Associated Press explains that scientists believe that only under these conditions can it be created, and only a fraction of the time. Both teams have concluded with some confidence the likely mass of the particle. They hope to reach an ultimate conclusion about whether or not the particle exists by next year.

"But be careful—it's intriguing hints," said Rolf Heuer, director of CERN. "We have not found it yet; we have not excluded it yet."

If scientists prove the Higgs boson exists, and at the mass they predict, it will support other physics theories related to the Big Bang Theory and the general makeup of the universe, says BBC. Those theories, in turn, would predict the existence of other particles that shape our universe.

presidential address was broadcast on radio

2011-12-06T00:54:00.001-08:00

《爐邊談話》(趙越等譯，台北：福隆，2010) 。其實從此書可以知道，小羅斯福總統相當善於講故事，譬如他說的一些戰爭時空軍英雄的艱難任務等，相當有戲劇性。其實，總統利用收音機與人民拉近感情的做法，始於1930年代初*。在美國1929年股市大崩盤的時候，有人就說，胡佛總統在廣播中如此親切，讓大家誤以為是太平盛世呢。 (進一步可參`考John Kenneth Galbraith《1929大崩盤》( The Great Crash 1929) 台北:經濟新潮，2009。)

*On Dec. 6, 1923, a presidential address was broadcast on radio for the first time as President Calvin Coolidge spoke to a joint session of Congress.

Smartphones could have better energy efficiency

2011-11-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

Energy | 29.11.2011

Smartphones could have better energy efficiency, Finnish researchers say

The researchers hope mobile phone users in the developing world will benefit most

Aalto University researchers claim they've quadrupled the energy efficiency of smartphones. This could improve mobile Internet access in developing countries.

A Finnish research team says it's slashed smart phone energy use by more than 70 percent - a finding that may help people in developing countries get better Internet access.

Smartphones - mobile phones that can run applications and use the Web easily - are on the rise worldwide. Recent industry analysis from Gartner shows that 115 million smartphones were sold worldwide in the third quarter of 2011 alone.

The key behind these new energy savings is a network proxy, which better organizes the flow of data between a mobile phone and the network, explained Jukka Manner, the lead scientist for the study at Aalto University, outside of Helsinki.

The team hopes to use a combination of new software on the phone and network proxy hardware to use the phone's cellular radio in a much more energy-efficient manner.

The team presented initial findings at the Africomm Conference in Tanzania last week. Manner told Deutsche Welle that the research has been peer-reviewed, and that in-depth findings would be published early next year.

Internet for developing countries

The researchers looked at use cases in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, hoping to develop solutions for times when access to electricity was difficult.

Aalto University researchers want to add another layer to existing mobile infrastructure"In Finland, it's annoying when you're to not be able to charge your phone. But in many places around the world, it's not just annoying, but impossible," Manner said.

Only about 11 percent of Africa's population has Internet access. Yet more than half of the people on the continent have mobile phones.

And according to the Finnish team's research, 90 percent Africans live in areas with mobile phone coverage.

Manner emphasized that though the team looked at cases in Africa, "the technology is not tied to any network or country," and can theoretically be implemented anywhere.

Proxy solution

A proxy is a device that gathers data requests from the phone, then sends them on to the network. Communication goes the other way as well, with the proxy receiving "answers" from the Internet to pass along to the mobile phone.

115 million smartphones were sold worldwide in the third quarter of 2011The we content proxy involves a "client application that talks to a dedicated server," Manner said, which organizes the flow of data.

Manner said the Web browser Opera works in a similar fashion.

The device can increase efficiency by, for example, sending bursts of data packets at one time rather than continuously. This results in more "sleep" time for the cell phone, saving battery use.

"It seems a fairly complex and sophisticated piece of technology they've developed," said Steve Furber, a professor at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. Furber is also one of the designers behind the energy efficient ARM microprocessor, which is in use in many smartphones, including the iPhone.

Combined efficiency

The Aalto University researchers say they managed to cut power use from smart phones by up to 74 percent.

Although the proxy accounted for the bulk of saved energy, the researchers also utilized websites optimized for mobile phones, Web compression and better data caching to increase efficiency.

Manner noted that they didn't lower the data quality or use any sort of compression.

"We can probably go over 80 percent savings," Manner said.

Author: Sonya Angelica Diehn
Editor: Cyrus Farivar

搜索資料庫分析法

2011-11-21T23:45:00.000-08:00

我相信各大公司如 Google 等都在開發類似的搜索資料庫分析法

IBM knows a thing or two about shoes. Retailers, take note.
Reuters Blogs (blog)
While some will argue that it takes style and expertise to predict what customers will want to wear even before they know it, IBM begs to differ. It comes down to science, specifically IBM's analytics software. Take shoes for example, in particular the ...

醫療專家系統

2011-11-21T23:41:00.001-08:00

台灣這則新聞讓人想起 H. A. Simon 人工科學書中的醫療專家系統在70年年代末已經建立

作家吳淡如最近在廣播節目，請醫師答覆call in電話，為了不讓醫師背上「隔空問診」的違法問題，請工作人員代接電話，轉述回答。吳淡如上午接受台視獨家訪問表示，節目中特別提醒民眾一定要去看醫師，還說衛生署如果真要查，應該先查地下電台。藝人吳淡如主持廣播節目，請來醫師回答Call in，只是這樣的節目現在卻疑似被盯上，就因為涉嫌醫師親自隔空問診的內容。斬釘截鐵地說，就是過敏性鼻炎，到底是衛教宣傳，還是問診，醫師說他們心中也有一把尺，怎麼可能傻到跟著遊走法律邊緣。衛生署表示，其實call in宣傳衛教問題都可以，只是一旦有診斷，就會違反醫事法。節目企圖透過工讀生轉述規避罰則，但衛生署表示，根本就無效，重點在於醫師尺度拿捏，只能建議，不能斷定，否則依舊是違反醫事法。

Internet TV Service

2011-11-16T19:36:00.000-08:00

Google to Unveil Online Music Store

Sony, Universal and EMI are expected to have deals in place to let Google sell their music in time for an announcement Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles.

November 16, 2011 -- 3:00 p.m. EST

TECHNOLOGY
Sony Weighs Internet TV Service

Sony is considering launching an Internet-based alternative to cable-TV service, the latest threat to cable and satellite operators that now dominate pay television.

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy

2011-11-04T00:21:00.001-07:00

John McCarthy (1927-2011)

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy, machine whisperers, died on October 8th and 24th respectively, aged 70 and 84

Nov 5th 2011 | from the print edition

NOW that digital devices are fashion items, it is easy to forget what really accounts for their near-magical properties. Without the operating systems which tell their different physical bits what to do, and without the languages in which these commands are couched, the latest iSomething would be a pretty but empty receptacle. The gizmos of the digital age owe a part of their numeric souls to Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy.

As was normal in the unformed days of computer science in the 1950s and 1960s, both men came to the discipline through maths. They were rather good with numbers. As a teenager Mr McCarthy taught himself calculus from textbooks found at the California Institute of Technology in balmy Pasadena, where his family had moved to from Boston because of his delicate health. Mr Ritchie was not quite as precocious. He breezed through school in New Jersey, of course, and went on to Harvard to study physics. After receiving a bachelor’s degree, however, he decided, with typical modesty, that he was “not smart enough to be a physicist”.

When Mr McCarthy and Mr Ritchie first developed an urge to talk to machines, people still regarded the word “digital” as part of the jargon of anatomy. If they no longer do, that is because of the new vernaculars invented to cajole automatons into doing man’s bidding. In 1958 Mr McCarthy came up with the list-processing language, or LISP. It is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in use today—one whose grammar and vocabulary were more perspicuous and versatile than the machine code early programmers had to use. A little over a decade later Mr Ritchie created C.

C fundamentally changed the way computer programs were written. For the first time it enabled the same programs to work, without too much tweaking, on different machines; before, they had to be tailored to particular models. Much of modern software is written using one of C’s more evolved dialects. These include objective C (which Apple favours), C# (espoused by rival Microsoft) and Java (the choice for a host of internet applications). Mr Ritchie and his life-long collaborator, Ken Thompson, then used C to write UNIX, an operating system whose powerful simplicity endeared it to the operators of the minicomputers which were starting to proliferate in universities and companies in the 1970s. Nowadays its iterations undergird the entire internet and breathe life into most mobile devices, whether based on Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS.

Mr McCarthy has had less direct impact. That is partly because he believed, wrongly, that minicomputers were a passing fad. In the early 1950s, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he pioneered “time-sharing”, by which multiple users could work on a single mainframe simultaneously. Mr Ritchie, who moonlighted as a mainframe operator at MIT while a graduate student at nearby Harvard, also dabbled in time-sharing. Yet unlike his younger colleague, whose UNIX spurred the development of mini- and later microcomputers, Mr McCarthy always argued that the future lay in simple terminals hooked up remotely to a powerful mainframe which would both store and process data: a notion vindicated only recently, as cloud computing has spread.

Needed: 1.8 Einsteins

As for LISP, Mr McCarthy created it with an altogether different goal in mind—one that was, in a way, even more ambitious than Mr Ritchie’s. Whereas Mr Ritchie was happy giving machines orders, Mr McCarthy wanted them—perhaps because he had never suffered human fools gladly—to talk back. Intelligently. LISP was designed to spark this conversation, and with it “artificial intelligence”, a term Mr McCarthy coined hoping it would attract money for the first conference on the subject at Dartmouth in 1956.

In 1962 Mr McCarthy left MIT for Stanford, where he created the new Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He set himself the goal of building a thinking machine in ten years. He would later admit this was hubristic. Not that technology wasn’t up to it. The problem lay elsewhere: in the fact that “we understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.” An intelligent computer, he quipped, would require “1.8 Einsteins and one-tenth of the resources of the Manhattan Project” to construct.

Neither was forthcoming, though the Department of Defence did take an interest in Mr McCarthy’s work at Stanford from the start. Mr Ritchie, too, was briefly on the Pentagon’s payroll, at Sandia National Laboratory. He did not stay long, though. “It was nearly 1968,” he later recalled, “and somehow making A-bombs for the government didn’t seem in tune with the times.” So in 1967 he moved to AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where his father had worked for many years, and where both C and UNIX were born. He never left.

For his part, Mr McCarthy continued to tinker away at a truly thinking machine at Stanford. He never quite saw his dream realised. Mr Ritchie had more luck. “It’s not the actual programming that’s interesting,” he once remarked. “It’s what you can accomplish with the end results.” Amen to that, Mr McCarthy would have said.

醫護夥伴機器人（Partner Robot）

2011-11-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

Toyota醫護夥伴機器人亮相

豐田汽車發表新型「夥伴機器人」之一的「平衡練習助手」結合電玩元素，讓使用者更具樂趣。（彭博）

〔編譯林翠儀／綜合報導〕日本汽車大廠豐田汽車（Toyota），1日發表4款新型照護及醫療用「夥伴機器人」（Partner Robot），包括可協助癱瘓者自行上廁所、協助下肢麻痺者上下樓梯的照護機器人，以及可供練習步行的機器輔助腿、利用電玩遊戲練習平衡感的助理機器人等，預定2013年在日本上市。

結合電玩滑板機器人教平衡感

豐田早在1970年代便開始研發產業用機器人，2000年後更嘗試結合汽車領域的控制技術，以及長年累積的產業機器人技術，投入服務型機器人的研發。2007年，豐田發表「夥伴機器人」事業遠景，看準日本高齡化社會在老人及醫療照護市場上的需求。

1日發表的4款「夥伴機器人」，包括針對下肢麻痺者設計的「自立步行助手」，只要裝上這種機器輔助腿，膝蓋將可配合步行或上下階梯自然彎曲，而且還能保持平穩性。

「步行練習助手」則是利用機器輔助腿技術開發的練習裝置，可協助不良於行者在初期階段練習走路。

「平衡練習助手」則是利用類似滑板車的裝置，讓使用者練習平衡控制，較特別的是這項裝置加入電玩效果，讓使用者以身體律動控制遊戲畫面，就像玩「體感電玩」一樣，不會覺得枯燥無聊。

機械臂將癱者從床移到廁所

「移乘照護助手」則有如一部大型輪椅，利用可舉起重物的機械臂，將癱瘓者從床鋪抬起並移動到馬桶座上方，以減輕照護者的負擔。

在這些「夥伴機器人」的開發過程中，從愛知縣起家的豐田汽車，除旗下的豐田醫院外，還特別選定與同縣的藤田保健衛生大學合作，不但標榜在地精神，也透過工業與醫療結合，強調實用性與舒適性。

‘A Toad-Eat-Toad World,’ and Other Tales of Animal Cannibals

2011-10-31T22:04:00.000-07:00

Basics

‘A Toad-Eat-Toad World,’ and Other Tales of Animal Cannibals

Clockwise from top left: B.G. Thomson/Photo Researchers; Photo Researchers, via Getty Images; Ian Waldie, via Getty Images; and Steffen Schmidt.

Midsize cane toads lure younger cane toads, which the bigger toads then swallow whole. A mother caecilian, top right, stays by her young and literally feeds them herself. Tamarin monkeys don't eat their offspring, except when they do. The female redback spider makes a meal of her mates.

By NATALIE ANGIER

Published: October 31, 2011

When Richard Shine, a biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, first heard the mystery of the missing eggs, he feared it was another case of what might be called invasive toadkill. He and his colleagues were studying the cane toad, Rhinella marina, a big, warty, sludge-colored Latin American amphibian that was brought to the continent years ago in an ill-fated effort at beetle control.

The researchers already knew that many large Australian carnivores like freshwater crocodiles and marsupial quolls had died after naïvely feasting on the highly toxic adult toads. Now it seemed that smaller predators were going after the toad’s equally poisonous eggs, and Dr. Shine worried that they too would be doomed.

Follow-up field studies soon revealed the identity of the caviar thieves. To the researchers’ astonishment, Dr. Shine said, it was cane toads themselves — or rather their tadpoles, which would swim over to each fresh batch of Rhinella eggs and “desperately consume” every slick black spherelet they could find.

Significantly, the tadpoles weren’t simply hungry for a generic omelette. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, Dr. Shine and his co-workers showed that when given a choice between cane toad eggs and the similar-looking egg masses of other frog species, Rhinella tadpoles overwhelmingly picked the cannibal option. Oh, little cane toads lacking legs, how greedily you snack on pre-toads packed in eggs!

Life after metamorphosis brought scant relief from fraternal threats. The scientists also demonstrated that midsize cane toads wriggle digits on their hind feet to lure younger cane toads, which the bigger toads then swallow whole. “A cane toad’s biggest enemy is another cane toad,” Dr. Shine said. “It’s a toad-eat-toad world out there.”

Rhinella’s brutal appetite is among a string of recent revelations of what might be called extreme or uncanny cannibalism, when one animal’s determination to feed on its fellows takes such a florid or subversive turn that scientists are left, as Mark Wilkinson of the Natural History Museum in London put it, “gobsmacked” by the sight.

There are males that demand to be cannibalized by their lovers and males that seek to avoid that fate by stopping midcourtship and hammily feigning rigor mortis. There are mother monkeys that act like hipster zombies, greeting unwanted offspring with a ghoulish demand for brains; and there are infant caecilians — limbless, soil-dwelling amphibians — that grow fat by repeatedly skinning their mother alive.

In the past, animal cannibalism was considered accidental or pathological: Walk in on a mother rabbit giving birth, and the shock will prod her to eat her bunnies. Now scientists realize that cannibalism can sometimes make good evolutionary sense, and for each new example they seek to trace the selective forces behind it.

Why do cane toad tadpoles cannibalize eggs? Researchers propose three motives. The practice speeds up maturation; it eliminates future rivals who, given a mother toad’s reproductive cycle, are almost certainly unrelated to you; and it means exploiting an abundant resource that others find toxic but to which you are immune.

“We’re talking about a tropical animal that was relocated to one of the driest places on earth,” Dr. Shine said. “Cannibalism is one of those clever tricks that makes it such a superb colonizer and a survival machine.”

Maydianne Andrade, a biologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario, has studied the redback spider, a type of black widow in which males willingly fling themselves onto the fangs of their much bigger mates. Dr. Andrade has found that the self-sacrificial act is simply the grand finale of an elaborate Ringling Brothers courtship performance that can last hours.

The suitor leaps around the web to vibrate its silken strands just so. He vaults up and over the female, back to front, side to side, again and again. He somersaults tantalizingly close to her mouth and then flips himself clear.

Is she ready to mate? She allows the male to mount her and fill one of her paired sperm storage organs, but then, hold on buster, it’s time for more jitterbugging, more lordly leaping. The male dances around her jaws again, she lets him fill sperm receptacle No. 2, his genitals break off to help seal the deal, and that’s it. He somersaults toward her fangs for real, she makes a quick meal of him, and he dies in arachnirvana, his gametes well positioned to sire thousands of next-generation redbacks.

But woe to any suitor that lacks a daredevil stripe. The female will cut short his wan routine, cannibalize him prematurely and then instantly mate with a rival, as if out of spite.

Dr. Andrade said the male redback’s suicidal efforts made sense. Males are the size of rice grains and blown about by the wind, females are spottily distributed and hard to find, and a vast majority of males never encounter a single female. For the lucky few who do, there’s no time to waste: This is their one shot at legacy, and they throw their hearts and parts in her hands.

“It’s what we call a terminal investment,” Dr. Andrade said.

For males with better dating prospects than the redback, the idea of connubial cannibalism may not seem so sexy, and the males do what they can to keep peckish females at bay. Among some species of widow spiders, males are preferentially drawn to females that smell as if they’ve just finished dinner, and hence are less likely to view approaching mate as a meal.

Studying Pisaura mirabilis, a slender, half-inch-long brown garden spider found in Denmark, Trine Bilde of Aarhus University and her colleagues have discovered that the males sometimes resort to a particularly melodramatic anticannibalism gambit. A male woos a female with a nuptial gift, a fresh-caught insect neatly bundled in silk and held aloft in his fangs. The female latches onto the gift with her fangs, and if she starts eating it calmly, the male slowly positions himself around her and starts transferring sperm.

If, however, the female grabs the parcel a little too hungrily, the male counters the predatory threat by playing spider possum. “He’s still holding onto the gift, but he stretches himself out into a deathlike pose, completely motionless, with his legs lagging behind,” Dr. Bilde said.

The female starts running around with the gift, the limp male dangling from it. Only when she finally grows tranquil enough to treat her present with care will the male dare to rouse himself back to life and lovemaking.

“This sort of death-feigning behavior has never been observed before in a sexual context,” Dr. Bilde said. “It’s very spectacular to see.”

Another skin-tingling spectacle is the kind of living cannibalism recently identified in two species of caecilians. These limbless tropical amphibians may live in soil and look like worms, but the mothers act like saints. For some three months after her young have hatched, the mother stays by their side, and repeatedly, literally feeds them herself.

Over a three-day period, the outer layer of the female’s skin gradually swells with lipids and turns pale and glisteny. When moment and maternal epidermis are ripe, a half-dozen famished young caecilians surround her, and using rows of temporary, specialized teeth that look like slotted spoons or grappling hooks, they peel her, potato-style, from top to tail. They tug and yank. They fight over hanks.

“Within 10 minutes of fairly frenzied activity, they have peeled all the mother’s skin off,” said Dr. Wilkinson of the Natural History Museum, who with his colleagues reported on skin-feeding behavior in the journals Nature and Biology Letters. Mother Caecilia doesn’t seem to mind. Like a lactating Madonna, “she remains placid the whole time,” Dr. Wilkinson said.

Not all mothers are martyrs, of course, and even the good ones may have their monstrous moments. Tamarin monkeys are normally famed for extravagant devotion to their offspring, but in a recent issue of the journal Primates, Laurence Culot, now of São Paulo State University in Brazil, and her colleagues described witnessing a rare case of maternal cannibalism among wild mustached tamarins of Peru.

A mother tamarin holding her infant son was foraging for fruit with her adult daughter. One moment the charming tableau looked fine, baby monkey clinging adorably to mother’s fur. The next, the researchers watched as the mother bit through the baby’s skull and ate out its brain. And once the mother had polished off the entire head, her adult daughter partook of some shoulder.

“I was really, really surprised — it was a totally unexpected thing to see among wild tamarins,” Dr. Culot said. “I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I forgot my camera!’ ”

The researchers propose that, in a way, the grisly act was an expression of maternal love. The adult daughter turned out to be pregnant at the time. Tamarin infants are so demanding that rearing them is a group affair, and if the mother’s infant survived, the daughter’s wouldn’t have a chance. Through a shared act of cannibalism, mother and daughter made their pact.

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

2011-10-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

Grading the Digital School

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The Waldorf School in Los Altos, Calif., eschews technology. Here, Bryn Perry reads on a desktop. More Photos »

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: October 22, 2011

LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

Grading the Digital School

Blackboards, Not Laptops

Articles in this series are looking at the intersection of education, technology and business as schools embrace digital learning.

Previous Articles in the Series »

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Old-School in Silicon Valley

Bits Blog: Technology, Schools and a Big Black Bug (October 22, 2011)
Times Topics: Education and Schools | Computers and the Internet

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Cathy Waheed helps Shira Zeev, a fifth grader. Waldorf parents are happy to delay their children's engagement with technology. More Photos »

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But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.

“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader, “doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning. (Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of gadgets.)

Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction. Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.”

While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.

Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.

In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.

Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.

“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”

Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.

Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a standardized math and reading curriculum.

When asked for evidence of the schools’ effectiveness, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America points to research by an affiliated group showing that 94 percent of students graduating from Waldorf high schools in the United States between 1994 and 2004 attended college, with many heading to prestigious institutions like Oberlin, Berkeley and Vassar.

Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional methods from other factors. For example, parents of students at the Los Altos school say it attracts great teachers who go through extensive training in the Waldorf approach, creating a strong sense of mission that can be lacking in other schools.

Absent clear evidence, the debate comes down to subjectivity, parental choice and a difference of opinion over a single world: engagement. Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them.

Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, which represents school boards nationwide, said computers were essential. “If schools have access to the tools and can afford them, but are not using the tools, they are cheating our children,” Ms. Flynn said.

Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning.”

“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

And Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.

“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.

And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

There are also plenty of high-tech parents at a Waldorf school in San Francisco and just north of it at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, which doesn’t have Waldorf accreditation but is inspired by its principles.

California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.

The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home.

The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have they gone completely cold turkey. Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates say they occasionally watch movies. One girl, whose father works as an Apple engineer, says he sometimes asks her to test games he is debugging. One boy plays with flight-simulator programs on weekends.

The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices. Aurad Kamkar, 11, said he recently went to visit cousins and found himself sitting around with five of them playing with their gadgets, not paying attention to him or each other. He started waving his arms at them: “I said: ‘Hello guys, I’m here.’ ”

Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could monitor his progress over the years.

“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”

Innovation works in mysterious ways

2011-10-25T01:13:00.000-07:00

喬布斯大吃創新蛋糕
Innovation works in mysterious ways
作者：英國《金融時報》專欄作家蒂姆•哈福德

Was it salesmanship or engineering? Creativity or ruthlessness? Or was Steve Jobs simply gifted with vision and impeccable taste? Whatever the true source of his success, there was more than a touch of genius about Jobs. Even his side project, Pixar, was an astounding achievement. His first love, Apple, he built from nothing and then dragged back from the brink to make it the most valuable company in the world. No wonder so many of us felt sad at the news of his passing: surely he had more to offer.

是推銷藝術還是工程實力？是天才創意抑或冷酷無情？又或者僅僅因為史蒂夫•喬布斯(Steve Jobs)天生就具有遠見卓識和無可挑剔的品味？無論喬布斯取得成功的真正原因是什麼，他的天才能力可不止一點。甚至他的“副業”皮克斯(Pixar)都取得了令人矚目的成就。蘋果(Apple)是喬布斯的初戀，他白手起家創立了這家公司，後來又從懸崖邊上把它拉了回來並打造成為全球最有價值的公司。也難怪我們許多人對喬布斯的去世感到難過——他要活著，準能給我們帶來更多驚喜。

I spend my life in front of a computer, and that life is better because of what Steve Jobs created. But here's the strange thing: I've never owned an Apple product for longer than the two weeks it took to give up and send it back. (Apple's customer returns department is impeccable, by the way.) My Macbook Air? Glorious hardware, but fussy software and a counterintuitive interface. My iPad? Beautiful – but also heavy, not too fond of wireless, and refused even to turn on until I did some most impertinent things to my Windows laptop.

我每天的生活都是在電腦前度過的，是喬布斯的諸多創造讓我的生活更美好。但奇怪之處在於：我擁有蘋果產品的時間從沒有超過兩週，兩週時間已足以讓我放棄，並把它退還給蘋果公司了。（順便說一下，蘋果公司的顧客退貨部也是讓人無可挑剔！）我的Macbook Air？硬件炫極了，可軟件有些花里胡哨，界面也不夠直觀。我的iPad？華麗得很，可它太重了，不太喜歡無線網絡，而且直到我在Windows筆記本電腦上進行了一些極其荒謬的操作之後，它才可以開機。

Apple never made a penny from me. Why, then, do I say that Steve Jobs improved my life? It's because I am surrounded by technology that looks good and works well because others followed where Apple led. Without Apple's refinement and popularisation of the WIMP environment (window, icon, menu and pointer), how long would we have waited for a graphic interface from Microsoft – and how awful might it have been? It's hard to imagine Bill Gates would have shown much interest in fonts without Apple's beautiful typography. Beyond desktop computers, there's a similar story to tell: I own an Android phone that owes more than a passing debt to the iPhone; I'm still waiting to own a Windows machine to rival the Mac Air; and every tablet in the world bows to the iPad.

蘋果從來沒有從我身上賺到過一分錢。那麼，為什麼我要說史蒂夫•喬布斯改善了我的生活呢？理由是，我被各種外觀出色效率出眾的技術所圍繞，正是因為其它公司都在追隨蘋果的腳步。若不是蘋果對WIMP（窗口、圖標、菜單和光標）環境的改進和推廣，我們不知要多久才能等到微軟(Microsoft)的圖形界面——那會是多麼可怕的一種情形啊！很難想像，要不是因為蘋果的漂亮字體，比爾•蓋茨(Bill Gates)會對字體產生多大的興趣。除了台式機以外，我還有類似的經歷告訴大家：我有一部Android手機，它欠iPhone的可不止一星半點；我還在期待可以擁有一台能與Mac Air相媲美的Windows筆記本；還有，世界上的每一台平板電腦都應該向iPad致以敬意。

To an economist the lesson is obvious: innovative profits are imperfectly appropriable. In more user-friendly language: when an entrepreneur bakes a cake, he only gets to keep a thin slice for himself. This is worrying if it discourages innovation, and in some industries innovators may be discouraged by the prospect that they must take big risks and sink big costs while society sits back and hopes to reap the benefits. Yet in the computer industry, plenty of entrepreneurs seem happy to take risks for the prospect of a thin slice of the social benefits.

對於經濟學家而言，其中的教訓是顯而易見的：創新收益的分配不盡合理。換成更通俗的話講，一位企業家烤熟了蛋糕之後，自己只能保住薄薄的一塊。不由讓人擔憂這是否會阻礙創新；在某些行業，創新者想到自己必須承擔巨大的風險並投入巨大的成本，而全社會坐享其成，希望憑空分得收益，可能會感覺灰心喪氣。但在計算機行業，似乎還有數不清的企業家樂於為了那微小的一份社會收益而冒險。

A discussion paper published in 2004 by the economist William Nordhaus attempts to establish exactly how thin that slice is. Nordhaus reckons that innovators capture a “minuscule” 2.2 per cent of the total social benefit of their innovations. The other 97.8 per cent goes to consumers , partly because competitors soon catch on, and partly because no company, even a monopolist, can charge each consumer a price reflecting her individual willingness to pay.

經濟學家威廉•諾德豪斯(William Nordhaus)於2004年發表的一篇論文，試圖準確地計算出這一薄片到底有多薄。諾德豪斯認為，創新者在其發明所產生的社會總收益中僅能收穫“微不足道的”2.2%。其它97.8%則造福了消費者，部分原因是競爭對手們很快就趕了上來，還有部分原因是沒有一家公司、哪怕是壟斷企業，向每位消費者收取的價格能夠與其個人願意付出的數額相符。

Professor Nordhaus's estimate can be regarded as, at best, an educated guess, partly because Nordhaus is only able to focus on innovations which lead to lower production costs and thus lower prices. If that's the metric, developments such as the world wide web or penicillin barely register. Still, I think it's safe to say that both Tim Berners-Lee (the web) and Alexander Fleming (penicillin) reaped far less than 2.2 per cent of the total value to society of their insights.

諾德豪斯教授的估算充其量可以被看作一種推測，部分原因是他只能夠集中研究那些促進生產成本下降、進而降低價格的發明創造。如果那就是衡量標準，萬維網(World Wide Web)和盤尼西林(penicillin)等發明勉強說來也算符合。不過，我覺得可以有把握地說，萬維網創造者蒂姆•伯納斯-李(Tim Berners-Lee)和盤尼西林的發現者亞歷山大•弗萊明(Alexander Fleming)從他們的創意想法給社會帶來的總價值中收穫的份額遠遠低於2.2%。

Was Jobs an exception? Chris Dillow of the Investor's Chronicle, who called my attention to the Nordhaus paper, reckons that Jobs's gift for branding and design helped Apple retain an unusually large slice of the innovator's cake. Perhaps that's true. Apple's shareholders have certainly enjoyed a profitable few years. But the greater benefit has flowed to customers – and not only the customers of Apple.

喬布斯是一個例外嗎？使我注意到諾德豪斯論文的是《投資者年鑑》(Investors' Chronicle)的克里斯•迪洛(Chris Dillow)。他認為，喬布斯在品牌塑造和設計方面的天分幫助蘋果公司從創新者的蛋糕上分得了出奇大的一片。或許他說的對。蘋果的股東們近幾年無疑賺得盆滿缽盈。但更多的收益還是流向了顧客——而且不僅僅是蘋果的顧客。

Tim Harford's latest book is 'Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure' (Little, Brown)

蒂姆•哈福德的新書名為《適者生存：為何失敗是成功之母》(Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure)，由利特爾-布朗公司(Little, Brown)出版。

譯者/邢嵬

Japan’s Standardized Baseballs Are Popular With Pitchers

2011-10-23T18:52:00.001-07:00

Japan’s Standardized Baseballs Are Popular With Pitchers

Mizuno

The new ball used for all top-league games in Japan, made by Mizuno, has features that make it popular among pitchers.

By BRAD LEFTON

Published: October 22, 2011

TOKYO — Unlike Major League Baseball, for whom Rawlings has been the official supplier of baseballs since 1977, Japan’s top league has long used multiple manufacturers.

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami (October 23, 2011)

This season, however, for the first time in the 75-year history of Nippon Professional Baseball, every team is using the same supplier.

In any given season, as many as nine manufacturers had supplied baseballs to Japan’s 12 teams. Many clubs, in fact, contracted with multiple suppliers and freely switched the balls they used in their home games depending on the series, the month or some other variable that had to be revealed in advance to the commissioner’s office.

Citing rising costs and declining domestic production, Commissioner Ryozo Kato began the tedious and touchy process of unifying Japan’s ball last year. Mizuno emerged as the lone supplier.

But old customs are hard to break, and in tradition-bound Japan, the move to a unified ball comes with a twist: it is required only for official games played between major league teams. Individual clubs can continue choosing their own baseballs for minor league games, spring training games and practices. According to the commissioner’s office, at least two teams that contracted with multiple baseball makers last year, the Hanshin Tigers and the Yakult Swallows, continue to use those balls in unsanctioned events.

In Japanese baseball, power has traditionally rested with the teams. Franchises have operated independently on a variety of issues, including deciding which ball manufacturers to contract with, much as players in the United States and Japan decide which manufacturers’ bats, gloves and spikes they use.

In Japan, a culture evolved in which sporting goods makers, especially smaller regional ones, became dependent on their relationships with local clubs to supply thousands of balls each year.

“In order to build relationships that stand the test of time, you have to be willing to endure lots of hardships on your customers’ behalf,” Katsuhisa Matsuzaki, a spokesman for N.P.B, said in Japanese, describing the traditional arrangement. “For a team to then turn around and say to a supplier that persevered, ‘Sorry, we don’t you need anymore,’ is not the Japanese way.”

So instead of trying to undo longstanding relationships, Japan’s commissioner’s office established standards over the years to attain a degree of uniformity among the game balls being produced by multiple manufacturers.

That began as far back as 1950, when the Central and Pacific Leagues came under one governing umbrella. Over the years, standards pertaining to the balls were gradually tightened. This happened, for example, in 1981, after a game was delayed by 20 minutes as one team accused another of using a suspicious ball with extra zip. But until this year, teams could use any ball that adhered to the standards.

The new Mizuno ball for this season has been called the noncarrying ball, a reference to the effect of the lower-elasticity rubber that encases the cork center. Not surprisingly, pitchers like the new ball for that and other subtle changes they can use to their advantage.

“It breaks better, moves more advantageously for the pitcher,” Hisashi Iwakuma of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, speaking in Japanese, said of the new ball. “Whether you throw a fork or a curve or a slider, the break is bigger. Even your fastball doesn’t have to be perfectly straight; you can make it miss the sweet spot of the bat.”

Iwakuma said pitchers could manipulate the slightly lower height of the red stitches and their slightly wider spread.

Japan’s regular season was extended until this week because of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March and unusually heavy rain. But the ball is believed to be responsible for an abundance of curiosities.

Through Friday’s games, seven pitchers among the 12 clubs had earned run averages below 2.00 while throwing more than 170 innings. By comparison, despite his dominant performance of 24 wins in 29 decisions, Detroit’s Justin Verlander, the major league leader in E.R.A. among starters at 2.40, would not crack Japan’s top 10.

Among those Japanese pitchers is Yu Darvish, 25, who many believe will be made available to American teams this winter by the Nippon Ham Fighters. But Darvish’s 1.44 E.R.A. was only second best in the Pacific League. As a testament to his acumen, though, he had a 1.78 E.R.A. last season.

In another oddity, Darvish’s team tied a Japanese record with five consecutive shutout victories during a stretch in May. That was part of nine shutouts in 11 games by the Fighters’ staff, three of them complete-game shutouts by Darvish.

Robust pitching has turned the batting races into rather pedestrian competitions. Worry abounds that the race in at least one league could produce the lowest average for a batting champion in Japanese history. The Hiroshima Carp’s Katsuya Morinaga holds that distinction, capturing the Central League’s 1962 title with a .307 average. This season’s race has come down to the Yomiuri Giants’ Hisayoshi Chono (.315) and Hanshin’s Matt Murton (.312), with three others teetering around .300. Last year, 14 players in the league hit .300 or better, with .358 taking the title. In the Pacific League, five players were hitting over .300, with the leader at .339.

Most noticeable of all, home runs were down. With three players totaling 40 or more homers last year, the overall title was claimed with 49. This season, only the Seibu Lions’ Takeya Nakamura and the Yakult Swallows’ Wladimir Balentien will finish with more than 30.

Although Japan’s new ball is not meant to replicate the American major league ball, a conscious effort was made to make it much more similar than before. That is a crucial point in Japan, where performance in international competitions like the quadrennial World Baseball Classic, which uses the American ball, weighs on the national conscience. Kato, the commissioner, said as much at a news conference when he unveiled the new ball before the season.

“Certainly, an impetus for the uniform ball was seeing with my own eyes the difficulties Japanese pitchers had with the different ball at the W.B.C.,” he said of the 2009 tournament, which Japan won. “By unifying our approach to the domestic game, we can lessen such discomforts that arise for our players on the international stage.”

That could pave the way for Mizuno to bid on the contract to supply the American major leagues. The leagues’ contract with Rawlings, which replaced Spalding after a century as the sole ball supplier, expires in 2013.

At the preseason news conference, Kato was seemingly focused on something larger than his own league when he proclaimed Japan’s new ball to be “of a higher quality than the one used in the American major leagues.”

www.economist.com/science-technology

2011-10-12T06:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.economist.com/science-technology

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Difference Engine: To catch a thief

2011-10-12T06:02:00.001-07:00

數字錯誤最平常: 天下雜誌例: 60萬台啦!

天下雜誌

電腦被偷不用怕？追蹤軟體幫你找回

美國聯邦調查局表示，美國一年約有60台筆電失竊，其中只有3%找了回來；每年失竊的手機則高達2600萬支。確實有人找回了失竊的手機或筆電，例如有人在筆電裡裝了名為Prey的開源碼追蹤軟體，最後靠軟體所提供的資訊和朋友的協助成功找回了筆電。詳全文

60萬台啦!

Retrieving stolen digital devices

Difference Engine: To catch a thief

Clearly, such headline cases are merely the well-publicised tip of an iceberg of pricey portables that disappear. In America, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reckons some 600,000 laptops are stolen annually, with only 3% ever being recovered. A further 26m mobile phones go missing each year. Airports, hotels and parked cars are where most laptops vanish. Mobile phones tend to get lost in taxis, and be swiped in bars, restaurants and other public places where their owners are easily distracted. The Federal Trade Commission urges people to treat such gadgets “like cash” and keep them securely about their person or hidden out-of-sight.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/09/retrieving-stolen-digital-devices

NikkeiBP : 史蒂夫·喬布斯病逝

2011-10-10T20:06:00.000-07:00

NikkeiBP

史蒂夫·喬布斯病逝

美國蘋果公司於當地時間2011年10月5日宣布史蒂夫·喬布斯於當日逝世。喬布斯於同年8月24日辭去蘋果CEO一職，改為出任董事會的Chairman職務（技術在線的相關報道）。

蘋果公司董事會於當日發表了悼念喬布斯的聲明（參看本站報道）

美國蘋果公司的共同創始人史蒂夫·喬布斯於2011年10月5日逝世，享年56歲。喬布斯因健康不佳的原因與2011年1月開始休養，並辭去了最高經營責任者（CEO）一職。（參看本站報道）

喬布斯與1976年創建蘋果公司。之後在1985年由於公司內部的對立，被強制退出公司。1996年由於蘋果公司業績不佳，喬布斯被再次請回蘋果公司，2000年開始出任CEO。

喬布斯在任期間，為人們推出了“iPod”、“iPad”等革新性產品，使得蘋果公司的股價成為了世界第一，其中喬布斯的功績不可磨滅；另外，喬布斯那讓人著迷的演說能力也給人留下了深刻的印象。技術在線的報道中，提及“喬布斯”的有193篇，遠遠超過“孫正義”（120篇）、“片山干雄”（100篇）、“豐田章男”（98篇）、“大坪文雄”（53篇），可見喬布斯的影響力之大。

技術在線！特組本專輯奉獻給讀者，共同回顧史蒂夫·喬布斯的功績。

很多人都認為雲服務只是大型的硬盤。其實雲服務還有更多豐富的功能

在2011年6月6日召開的“Worldwide Developers Conference 2011（WWDC）”主題演講中，介紹雲服務

我們每年都表示改進iPod，今年付出了很大的努力

2010年9月1日召開的發布會上介紹新型“iPad”

我們調查了之前的Apple TV用戶的意見後得知，用戶只希望觀看電影及電視節目，並不希望管理內容保存裝置

2010年9月1日召開的發布會上介紹“Apple TV”的新機型

雖然受到天線問題影響的iPhone 4用戶只是一部分，但是我們尊重所有的用戶，因此希望所有用戶都能滿意

在2010年7月16日召開的有關“iPhone 4”天線問題的媒體說明會上宣布將向所有iPhone 4用戶免費提供護套

對於我們而言，iPhone 4是推出首款iPhone之後邁出的最重要一步

在2010年6月7日召開的“Worldwide Developers Conference 2010（WWDC）”主題演講中正式發布“iPhone 4”

作為介於手機和筆記本電腦之間的‘第三屏幕’，許多人會提到上網本。但與其他產品相比，上網本在功能方面沒有出色之處。我們對這一問題的回答是iPad

在2010年1月27日召開的媒體發布會發布平板電腦“iPad”

我們免費提供攝像機

在2009年9月9日召開的媒體發布會上介紹發布平板電腦“iPod nano”

The reports of my death is greatly exaggerated（有關我死亡的報告太誇張了）”。

在2008年9月9日召開的記者發布會上發布新型“iPod”

阻礙iPhone普及的原因獲得了解決

在2008年6月9日召開的“Worldwide Developers Conference 2008（WWDC）上正式發布”iPhone 3G”

今後開發者可向iPhone用戶提供自已制作的軟件

在2008年3月6日召開的記者發布會上，發布用於iPhone的SDK（software development kit）

這是全球最薄的筆記本電腦。最薄部分僅0.16英寸（約4mm），最厚部分也只有0.76英寸（約19.3mm）。而且沒有犧牲配置

在2008年1月15日召開的“Macworld Conference and Expo”的主題演講中，發布“MacBook Air”

至今我們（通過iTunes Store）銷售的電影已經超過700萬部。這一數字比其它公司（的在線電影發送服務）的總和還要高，但我們並沒有滿足。我們認為還有比通過iTunes發送電影更好的方法

在2008年1月15日召開的“Macworld Conference and Expo”的主題演講中，發布在線電影租借服務“iTunes Movie Rentals”

Safari的份額已經提高到約5％。今後我們將力爭提高到15％左右

在2007年6月11日召開的“Worldwide Developers Conference（WWDC）2007”宣布加大Safari的業務力度

這一天的到來我們等了2年半

在2007年1月9日召開的“Macworld Conference and Expo”的主題演講中，發布“iPhone”

我們一般不在上市前公開產品

在2006年9月12日面向傳媒舉辦的活動中發布數字媒體適配器“iTV”

雖然研發費用高達50億美元，也不過是模仿我們和Google。歸根結底，金錢並不代表一切。（回答如何看待美國微軟延期上市“Windows Vista”一事）

在2006年8月7日召開的“Worldwide Developers Conference（WWDC）2006”上介紹新一代OS“Leopard”

向英特爾微處理器的過渡已經完成

在2006年8月7日召開的“Worldwide Developers Conference（WWDC）2006”上發布台式機“Mac Pro”

今後iPod將開始在家庭中使用。因此立體聲音質系統將必不可少

在2006年2月28日召開的記者發布會上發布新型音頻系統“

iPod Hi-Fi”、新

The energy efficiency of computing is doubling every 18 months

2011-10-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

Computing power

A deeper law than Moore's?

Oct 10th 2011, 13:28 by The Economist online

The energy efficiency of computing is doubling every 18 months

IN 1965 Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, first observed that integrated circuits, better known as silicon chips, seemed to conform to a predictable law: since their invention in 1958, the density of components in each chip had doubled each year, and this trend was, he suggested, likely to continue for at least a decade. In 1975 Dr Moore modified his prediction, observing that component density was doubling every two years. In practical terms, the result is that personal-computer performance doubles every 18 months, and has done so for decades, a prediction commonly known as Moore’s law. As computers have become mobile devices, however, their users are increasingly concerned about battery life as well as raw performance. So they will welcome a new analysis, by Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University and his colleagues, which seems to have uncovered a deeper law relating to the energy-efficiency of computers, dating back to the era of vacuum tubes. The researchers found that the electrical efficiency of computing has doubled every 1.6 years since the mid-1940s. “That means that for a fixed amount of computational power, the need for battery capacity will fall by half every 1.6 years,” observes Dr Koomey. This trend, he says, “bodes well for the continued explosive growth in mobile computing, sensors and controls.” Some researchers are already building devices that run on “ambient” energy harvested from light, heat, vibration or TV transmitters. As the energy-efficiency of computing continues to improve, this approach will become more widespread. Dr Koomey’s team published their results in IEEE Annals, an industry research journal. Inevitably, industry observers are already calling this new finding “Koomey’s law”.

英國的科學--幾個重要的硏究機關

2011-10-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

英國的科學--幾個重要的硏究機關

這是一本好書
雖然各組織只講至1940年而已英國的科學--幾個重要的硏究機關:
皇家學院 48頁/ 格林威基皇家天文台 45頁/ 英國的農業研究--樂桑斯特實驗戰30頁

馬丁(Thomas Martin), 準兹(Harold Spencer Jones),拉塞爾(John E. Russell)撰
李曉舫譯
臺一版臺北市|c臺灣商務|d民65 1976 [6],126面|d18公分

"Sir Harold Spencer Jones, 1890-1960". Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 55: 117. Bibl code:1961JRASC..55..117S. Página visitada em 2008-02-24.

Nobel prizes in chemistry

2011-10-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

Getting squishier

Oct 5th 2011, 16:22 by The Economist online

The changing chemical affinities of the Nobel Committee

ALFRED NOBEL, himself a chemist, founded his prizes in the late 19th century, when scientific excitement centred on chemistry. Boffins were busily filling in the blanks in the periodic table and probing unknown atomic phenomena (like radioactivity and bonding). Little wonder, then, that at the start of the 20th century most of the Nobel prizes in the discipline went to these and other discoveries under the broad label of physical chemistry. Soon, however, chemists reached a point where further advances became the province of chemical physics, rather than physical chemistry. As our chart shows, topics like the nature of organic compounds and of biological substances and processes grew more prominent. (Where the winning work straddled two categories, we ascribed half a prize to each.) The trend towards squishiness moved into reverse in the last two decades of the 20th century, however, in part because of developments in physics which yielded precision devices like the scanning-tunnelling microscope that permitted chemists to study the structure of chemical compounds close up. The 21st century, meanwhile, has again been dominated by mushier matters. Until this year's prize, that is. On October 5th it was awarded to Daniel Shechtman for the discovery of a new type of atomic lattice called quasicrystals—a discovery that, it must be remembered, was first reported in 1984 in Physical Review Letters, the world's leading physics journal.

"Quasicrystals"

2011-10-05T18:11:00.001-07:00

Israeli Chemist Wins Nobel Prize for Discovery of "Quasicrystals"

The discovery faced skepticism and mockery before it won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough.

By Will Oremus and Josh Voorhees | Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011, at 9:48 AM ET

(Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman gives a press conference in the Technion Institute of Technology in the northern port city of Haifa on October 05, 2011.)

Photo by Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.

UPDATE: And the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry is: Dan Shechtman of Israel.

Shechtam's win was for his 1982 discovery of a new chemical structure known as "quasicrystals" that the scientific community had previously thought was impossible.

The find "faced skepticism and mockery, even prompting his expulsion from his U.S. research team, before it won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough," the Associated Press reports.

The Nobel Foundation with more:

"On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Daniel Shechtman's electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically over and over again. For scientists, this repetition was required in order to obtain a crystal.

"Shechtman's image, however, showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Such a pattern was considered just as impossible as creating a football using only six-cornered polygons, when a sphere needs both five- and six-cornered polygons. His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter."

UPDATE Tuesday, Oct. 4: The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three U.S.-born scientists on Tuesday for showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating -- and not ever-slowing, as most scientists had assumed for decades.

The Associated Press explains: "Their discovery created a new portrait of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed."

The award is being shared with one half being awarded to Saul Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess.

"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the Nobel citation read. "However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice."

UPDATE Monday, Oct. 3: Following an emergency meeting Monday, the Nobel Prize committee has decided to go ahead with plans to award its annual prize in medicine to a New York-based scientist even though he died on Friday.

The Nobel statutes typically don't allow posthumous awards. Via the AP, the foundation said: "The Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel laureate was alive."

POST Monday, Oct 3..: A Canadian-born biologist at Rockefeller University in New York was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday—three days after he died of cancer.

The prize committee was unaware that Ralph Steinman, a 68-year-old Canadian-born researcher, had passed away when it announced the honor, the Associated Press reports.* The rules don’t allow for the prize to be awarded posthumously, so the organization will have to decide whether to rescind it. Officials said they believe this is the first time a recipient has died without the committee’s knowledge prior to the announcement.

“It’s incredibly sad news,” Nobel committee member Goran Hansson said. “We can only regret that he didn’t have the chance to receive the news he had won the Nobel Prize. Our thoughts are now with his family.”

Steinman was to have shared the $1.5 million award with American Bruce Beutler, 53, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and French scientist Jules Hoffman, 70, who led a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, until 2009. Each of the three made important discoveries related to the activation of the body’s immune system. The knowledge could be used to develop new treatments for infectious diseases, cancer, and a range of other ailments.

Steinman had been using a cutting-edge therapy based on his own research to prolong his life, Reuters reports. He had battled pancreatic cancer for four years.

The other Nobel Prize announcements are expected later this week, with the Peace Prize coming Friday. The schedule is available on the Nobel website.

*Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the Nobel Prize winner in question. His name is Ralph Steinman.

可歌可泣兩例

2011-09-27T23:32:00.000-07:00

科技業的故事多

可歌

與孩子一同成長的平板電腦
100美元一台的LeapPad Explorer平板電腦不僅僅是一款適合兒童的益智玩具和學習工具，還能和孩子們一同成長。

可泣

廣達電腦RIM平板電腦生產線將裁員
據一名消息人士週三透露﹐由於訂單下滑﹐廣達電腦將對負責為RIM製造PlayBook平板電腦的生產線進行裁員。以收入計﹐廣達電腦是台灣最大的筆記本電腦代工生產商。

Nicolaus Copernicus

2011-09-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

Copernicus’s cosmos

Oh heavens, no

How one man took on the church

Sep 24th 2011 | from the print edition

See the revolution of the times

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos. By Dava Sobel. Walker & Company; 272 pages; $25. Bloomsbury; £14.99 . Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE common rule in biography is that the more important the subject, the heavier the tome—with both pages and piety. Dava Sobel flouts this convention. Famous for her delightfully quirky books on the history of science, starting with the 1995 bestseller, “Longitude”, she delivers here a refreshingly fast-paced and breezy account of the life of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish cleric who knocked the Earth from its perch at the centre of the solar system and put the sun in its place.

Ever since Claudius Ptolemy published the “Almagest” in the second century AD, almost all astronomers had believed that the Earth lay at the centre of the universe. The sun, the planets and the stars supposedly revolved around it once a day. It was a faith reinforced by common sense, a reverence for the wisdom of antiquity, and its resonance with Christian mythology. Geocentrism fit with several passages in the Bible, and with the church’s view of the world more generally, which held that the Earth, as the abode of God’s greatest creation, sat at the centre of everything. Ptolemy’s model was complex, with planetary orbits modified by smaller orbits (called epicycles), but it fit with observations, and could even be used to predict what the night sky would look like at an arbitrary date in the future.

It is not known when the idea of a sun-centred cosmology came to Copernicus. He was not the first to dream it up: Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek astronomer, proposed something similar around 250BC, although no details of his system survive. Copernicus’s first speculations on the subject appear in a 40-page booklet printed before 1514, which he circulated to some friends and colleagues. Although he continued to refine the theory, he was reluctant to publish, either because he feared ridicule for such an outlandish suggestion, or because he worried about a reaction from the church. Indeed the church would imprison Galileo Galilei, an Italian astronomer, for advocating the sun-centred model of the universe a century later.

But Copernicus did eventually publish his celestial theory at the end of his life. One person seems to have been instrumental in persuading him to go ahead, a scholar called Rheticus, or Georg Joachim von Lauchen, a young mathematician who arrived on Copernicus’s doorstep in 1539 and spent two years as his pupil.

In her introduction, Ms Sobel writes that she has long been fascinated by this meeting. She uses the book to imagine what took place between the two men, presenting it in the form of a play. The scarcity of surviving evidence gives Ms Sobel some poetic latitude. Readers are treated to a demonstration of an arcane machine, subplots involving pederasty and concubinage, and a conspiracy to hide Rheticus’s presence (he was a Lutheran) from the Catholic bishop of Varmia. Rheticus ultimately overcomes his own doubts about Copernicus’s theory and manages to persuade his host to commit his ideas to paper.

“A More Perfect Heaven” does a good job of giving the flavour of life in Reformation-era Europe, at least among its intellectual elite. But there is strangely little discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of Copernicus’s system of the world, and of the meticulous observations that eventually convinced him that Ptolemy was wrong. It was a giant leap suddenly to argue that the Earth orbits the sun, rather than the other way around, particularly without telescopes. Imagine trying to deduce this with the naked eye, a sextant and little else. Then imagine the difficulties of defending it against the obvious criticisms in an era before mathematically rigorous physics: why are we not flung from the Earth if it spins round so fast? Why are there not hurricane-force winds? That Ms Sobel overlooks these questions is a shame, since it rather undervalues an immense intellectual achievement and leaves a noticeable hole in an otherwise excellent book.

A Faster-Than-Light Neutrino?

2011-09-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

傳言:Was Einstein Wrong? A Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Could Be Saying Yes

Physicists have a stock phrase they trot out whenever someone claims to have made an astounding new discovery about the universe. "Important," they say, "if true."

It's a tactful way of saying "Don't bet on it," and they've been saying it a lot over the past day or so. The reason: a team of European scientists has reportedly clocked a flock of subatomic particles called neutrinos moving at just a shade over the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, that can't be, since light, which cruises along at about 186,000 miles per second (299,000 km/sec.), is the only thing that can go that fast.

If the Europeans are right, Einstein was not just wrong but almost clueless. The implications could be huge. Particles that move faster than light are essentially moving backwards in time, which could make the phrase cause and effect obsolete.

"Think of it as being shot before the trigger is pulled," wrote University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank on his NPR blog. Or, as Czech physicist Lubos Motl put it on his blog, "You could kill your grandfather before he had his first sex with your grandmother, thus rendering your own existence needed for the homicide inconsistent with the result of the homicide."

The evidence for this complete upending of modern physics and cosmic decorum comes from an experiment involving two top-notch physics installations. The first is CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics, near Geneva, where a particle accelerator created the swarm of neutrinos in the first place. These bits of matter are bizarre no matter how you look at them: they're so elusive that one of them could pass through a chunk of lead a trillion miles thick without a bump.

It's no surprise, then, that the swarm created at CERN could fly out of the accelerator, zip right through the Alps and appear in the Gran Sasso Observatory, located in a tunnel deep beneath Italy's Apennine Mountains. Most of the neutrinos kept on going, but just a few, by pure chance, were intercepted by one of the observatory's neutrino detectors. And when the two labs synchronized their watches, it appeared that the particles had made the 450-mi. (724 km) journey 0.0025% faster than a beam of light would have (if light could travel through mountains, that is).

That splinter of a second isn't much, but it's enough to overturn a century of firmly established physics, rewrite the textbooks and throw the faculties at major universities around the world into a collective tizzy. In short, it's really important.

If true.

No one is tearing up the Einsteinian rule book just yet. As physicists well know, astonishing results like this often turn out to be wrong, especially when they haven't been double-checked. Sometimes that means the group announcing the big news has done shoddy work, like the Utah chemists who announced to great fanfare back in 1989 that they'd achieved controlled nuclear fusion on a tabletop — the cold-fusion kerfuffle — trumping the physicists who'd been struggling for years to do the same thing with billion-dollar machines. Sometimes it just means the researchers have overinterpreted what they're seeing, as when NASA scientists said they'd found evidence of life in a rock from Mars.

And sometimes, the researchers have gone about things the right way, carefully checking their equipment and their calculations to make sure they aren't being fooled by some mundane, potentially embarrassing glitch. The Grand Sasso scientists have done just that kind of due diligence here, and you know what? They still can't find any evidence that they've missed anything.

But that doesn't mean they haven't. It's always possible that their instruments are misbehaving in too subtle a way for anyone to detect at this point. Given the stakes if the equipment is right — if neutrinos really can move faster than light — nobody's buying the shocking result until another set of researchers, using another set of instruments, gets the same answer. Indeed, that's exactly what Antonio Ereditato, of the University of Bern, leader of the Gran Sasso end of the experiment, is hoping for. He told the BBC: "My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing. Then I would be relieved." This very willingness to be double-checked — and proved wrong — gives the scientists greater credibility, even if the jury is still out on their findings.

A second opinion may be coming soon. A group at the Fermilab accelerator complex, near Chicago, says it's preparing to do just the follow-up round of studies Ereditato welcomes. As it happens, Fermilab physicists made their own faster-than-light neutrinos claim back in 2007. It too would have been important if true, but on closer analysis, the evidence went away. The Fermilab scientists immediately accepted the verdict that time, just as the Europeans undoubtedly will if this new "discovery" goes up in smoke, as physicists everywhere are betting it will.

Or maybe it won't: the history of science may be littered with claims that were ultimately proved false, but some outrageous ideas turn out to be true in the end. Take dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that outweighs the visible stars and galaxies by a factor of 10 to 1. When it was first proposed in the 1930s, nobody believed it. When it reappeared in the 1960s, everyone laughed. Now it's firmly accepted as a fundamental part of the universe.

That kind of thing just might happen again. "Based on past experience, these results are probably wrong," writes Adam Frank at NPR.org, "but it sure would be a wild ride if they prove correct."

Best of Gadgetwise

2011-09-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

紐約時報的一點點

Best of Gadgetwise

Sony Binoculars That Take Video in 3-D

By ROY FURCHGOTT

Sony is introducing binoculars that also record 3-D video.

Line2 HD Adds Phone Features To The iPad

By ROY FURCHGOTT

Line2 HD puts phone calls, texts and voice mail and email on a single screen, and offers a stack of other features as well.

Bose's New SoundLink Wireless Speaker

By SAM GROBART

Bose's new SoundLink is a wireless speaker that connects through Bluetooth to your smartphone.

新型の家庭用燃料電池/ Why Is the U.S. Losing the Green Race?

2011-09-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

比燃料电池车领先一步，

家用燃料电池系统于2009年投入了实用。2011年10月，有望实现小型、低成本化的“新一代电池” 固体氧化物型燃料电池（SOFC）即将问世。

Opinion

Room For Debate

Why Is the U.S. Losing the Green Race?

Americans pride themselves on being global leaders in innovation. So why is the nation lagging behind China and Germany on renewable energy?

新型の家庭用燃料電池発売へ　効率向上、価格２７０万円

science, 科學到" サイエンス"

2011-09-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

science

[名][U][C]

1 科学, 学問（の一分野）, …学

an exact science ［exact sciences］
精密科学

the applied sciences
応用科学

cultural science
人文科学

historical ［moral, linguistic］ science
歴史［道徳, 言語］学

the science of ethics
倫理学.

2 [U]自然科学；（学科としての）理科

a man of science
科学者.

3 [U]（科学的）知識；（一般的に）体系的知識；[C]特殊な学問の分野

occult sciences
（中世の）幽玄術；秘学.

4 [U]（競技などの科学的知識に基づいた）技術, わざ, 術.

have ... down to a science

…についての知識［技能］が完ぺきである.

［中フランス語←ラテン語scientia（scīre知る＋-ENCE＝知ること）. △CONSCIENCE］

現在朝日新聞等則採用音譯

サイエンス

車体は炭素繊維製

2011-09-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

車体は炭素繊維製、３億円かけた電気自動車　東レ試作

車体の大半に炭素繊維を使った電気自動車のコンセプトカー＝東レ提供

　東レは９日、炭素繊維を車体に使った電気自動車（ＥＶ）の試作車を発表した。Ｆ１カーの元設計者を起用し、３億円の製作費をかけた。鉄より軽くて強いとされる炭素繊維を自動車業界で普及させるためのシンボルにする。

　炭素繊維を骨格や座席、外板などに使い、車体の重さを従来のＥＶに比べ３分の２程度に抑えた。２人乗りのオープンカーで、最高速度が時速１４７キロ、充電１回で１８５キロ走る。Ｆ１カーのデザイナーだった英国人ゴードン・マレー氏に設計や製作を頼んだ。

　東レは２０１５年以降、炭素繊維の自動車業界への本格供給をめざす。価格の高さが難点とされるが、鉄なら複数にわたる部品を、炭素繊維は一体で成型できるため、車全体の製造費は抑えられるとみる。記者会見で田中千秋副社長は「高級車でなく普通車への供給をめざす」と語った。

Gut instinct

2011-09-08T18:02:00.003-07:00

Bacteria and behaviour

Gut instinct

Tantalising evidence that intestinal bacteria can influence mood

Sep 3rd 2011 | from the print edition

A GOOD way to make yourself unpopular at dinner parties is to point out that a typical person is, from a microbiologist’s perspective, a walking, talking Petri dish. An extraordinary profusion of microscopic critters inhabit every crack and crevice of the typical human, so many that they probably outnumber the cells of the body upon and within which they dwell.

Happily, these microbes are mostly harmless. Some of them, particularly those that live in the gut, are positively beneficial, helping with digestion and keeping the intestines in good working order. That is no surprise—bacteria as much as people have an interest in keeping their homes in sound condition. What is surprising is the small but growing body of evidence which suggests that bacteria dwelling in the gut can affect the brain, too, and thereby influence an individual’s mood and behaviour. The most recent paper on the topic, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports (like much of the research in this field) on results in mice.

The researchers, led by Javier Bravo of University College, Cork, split their rodent subjects into two groups. One lot were fed a special broth containing Lactobacillus rhamnosus, a gut-dwelling bacterium often found in yogurt and other dairy products. The others were fed an ordinary diet, not fortified with microbes.

The team then subjected the mice to a battery of tests that are used routinely to measure the emotional states of rodents. Most (though not all) of these tests showed significant differences between the two groups of animals.

One test featured a maze that had both enclosed and open tunnels. The researchers found that the bacterially boosted mice ventured out into the open twice as often as the control mice, which they interpreted to mean that these rodents were more confident and less anxious than those not fed Lactobacillus.

In another test the animals were made to swim in a container from which they could not escape. Bacteria-fed mice attempted to swim for longer than the others before they gave up and had to be rescued. Such persistence is usually interpreted by students of rodent behaviour as evidence of a more positive mood.

Direct measurements of the animals’ brains supported the behavioural results. Levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone, were markedly lower in the bacteria-fed mice than they were in the control group when both groups were exposed to stressful situations. The number of receptors for gamma-aminobutyric acid, a natural chemical messenger that helps dampen the activity of certain nerve cells, varied in statistically significant ways between the brains of the two groups, with more in some parts of the treated animals’ brains and fewer in others. Most intriguing of all, when Dr Bravo cut the animals’ vagus nerves—which transmit signals between the gut and the brain—the differences between the groups vanished.

The idea that gut-dwelling microbes can affect an animal’s state of mind may strike some people as outlandish, and there are certainly loose ends still to be tied up. Beyond their evidence that the vagus nerve is crucial to the relationship, for example, Dr Bravo and his colleagues do not yet know the precise mechanisms at work. There is also an obvious follow-up question: whether a similar thing is going on in people. A few previous studies have hinted at the possibility. For example, bacterial treatments may help with the mental symptoms of illnesses such as irritable-bowel syndrome.

All this is forcing a reassessment of people’s relationship with the bacteria that live on and in them, which have long been regarded mainly as a potential source of infections. An editorial in this week’s Nature raises the possibility that the widespread prescription of antibiotics—which kill useful bacteria as effectively as hostile ones—might be one factor behind rising rates of asthma, diabetes and irritable-bowel syndrome. If Dr Bravo’s results apply to people, too, then mood disorders may end up being added to this list.

Gut instinct

2011-09-08T18:02:00.001-07:00

Bacteria and behaviour

Gut instinct

Tantalising evidence that intestinal bacteria can influence mood

Sep 3rd 2011 | from the print edition

Japan eyes global product performance standards

2011-09-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

Japan eyes global product performance standards

BY TETSUO KOGURE STAFF WRITER

2011/09/06

The government is set to draw up proposals for international standards evaluating product performance in a bid to help Japanese businesses fare better against price-competitive goods from China and other rivals.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is expected to craft its proposals over the next couple of years for submission to international standardization organizations.

The proposals will cover 29 industries where Japan is strong, such as light-emitting diode bulbs, antibacterial textiles and household fuel cells.

Japan has fallen behind the United States and EU countries in the quest for international standardization.

Japan-initiated standards were mainly for products that have smaller markets.

Japanese manufacturers have been put at a disadvantage in the world market because Chinese companies grabbed market share by quickly releasing products similar to theirs, but at much lower prices.

There have been growing calls inside Japan to create a framework that highlights differences in the quality of Japanese and Chinese products.

"Increasingly, it has become important for Japan to get involved in making rules assessing product performance," a ministry official said.

As for LED bulbs, an industry in which Japanese makers have begun mass production, the government is expected to propose to the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization in fiscal 2012 a method to measure the brightness of a bulb per unit of electric power.

Japan is expected to work with the United States and France to put this plan in motion.

Japanese manufactures use a number of formulas to gauge the energy-saving qualities of their products.

This makes it harder to objectively assess the performance of LED bulbs, which are said to last four to seven times longer than fluorescent lights.

The global market for lighting is estimated at 10 trillion yen ($129.87 billion) a year.

Chinese companies are also rolling out LED bulbs.

The Japanese government fears that, without international performance standards, Chinese makers may market less expensive products, billing them as environmentally friendly based on their own performance tests.

With respect to household fuel cells, used to make electricity and hot water out of gas, the government will propose to the International Electrotechnical Commission, also in Geneva, next fiscal year a method to assess the safety and energy saving feature of the products.

The move is aimed at preparing for the entry of Chinese producers in the future.

Right now, only Japanese companies manufacture household fuel cell on a commercial basis.

The government will also propose to the ISO by the end of the current fiscal year a measure to gauge the performance of sweat absorbing, antibacterial and static protection features of high-function textile.

Other products the government is trying to protect include those involving solar cells or regenerative medical techniques as well as welfare equipment.

International standards at the ISO and IEC are adopted by a majority vote by its member countries.

Technology Review 麻省理工《科技创业》

2011-09-01T01:15:00.000-07:00

今天才知道MIT的 Technology Review 有漢文網《科技创业》

Technology Review: The Authority on the Future of Technology

- [ 翻譯這個網頁 ]

www.technologyreview.com/ - 頁庫存檔

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麻省理工《科技创业》中文网--来自全球历史最悠久的权威科技商业杂志

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當地產的食材已全球化

2011-08-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

Findings

Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: August 29, 2011

Charles C. Mann has faced up to the locavore’s dilemma. At his home in the Berkshires, he likes to eat food that has traveled directly from his own garden: heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, lettuce and other foods for his table. He and his family belong to a farm-share program in which they advance money each year to a farmer a few miles away in return for the farm’s crops. He loves local food, but he knows too much about it to be a truly devout locavore.

Enlarge This Image

Viktor Koen

Mr. Mann realizes that none of the foods in his garden or at the local farm originated within 1,000 miles of his home. They grow today in the Berkshires only because of farmers and plant breeders and traders throughout the world. While today’s locavores worry about the sustainability of the globalized modern system of agriculture, Mr. Mann sees today’s food system as nothing new.

The foods we consider local are results of a globalization process that has been in full swing for more than five centuries, ever since Columbus landed in the New World. Suddenly all the continents were linked, mixing plants and animals that had evolved separately since the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea.

What resulted, Mr. Mann argues in his fascinating new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created,” was a new epoch in human life, the Homogenocene. This age of homogeneity was brought on by the creation of a world-spanning economic system as crops, worms, parasites and people traveled among Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia — the Columbian Exchange, as it was dubbed by the geographer Alfred W. Crosby.

“The Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann writes, “is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.”

The consequences were devastating for many ecosystems and people conquered by Europeans. Before the exchange, Beijing was the world’s largest city, and nearly all the other large ones were in warm regions outside Europe. Columbus was seeking a new route to Asia because of the technologically advanced economies that were thriving there.

After the Columbian Exchange, the cities of Europe became the planet’s boom towns, and it wasn’t just because of the Europeans’ culture and guns. Europeans prevailed by changing ecosystems, often in inadvertent ways that have only recently been measured by scientists.

The earthworms that traveled with the English settlers to Jamestown played havoc with the forests and the crops of the Indians. The island of Hispaniola was overrun by fire ants after the Spanish arrived. Throughout the Americas, the settlers introduced organisms that spread horrific epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, smallpox and other diseases.

Meanwhile, people in Europe were reaping nutritional benefits from the Columbian Exchange. Europeans’ diets improved radically from the introduction of potatoes and what Mr. Mann calls the first green revolution: the widespread use of fertilizer, made possible by the importing of guano from Peru.

As always, there were trade-offs. In China, the introduction of maize and sweet potatoes to the highlands provided vital sustenance — and erosion that flooded rice paddies. A ship carrying guano fertilizer to Europe was probably also the source of the organism that blighted the potato crops in Europe and led to the great famine in Ireland in the 1840s.

Mr. Mann has come to sympathize with both sides in the debate over globalization. The opponents of globalization correctly realize that trade produces unpredictable and destructive consequences for the environment and for society, he says, but globalization also leads to more and better food, better health, longer life and other benefits that affluent Western locavores take for granted.

“There are these huge catastrophes that constantly threaten the gains, but I think they only threaten the gains,” he said in an interview. “The lesson of history is that the costs are high — and higher than the advocates of free trade often admit — but the gains are higher still.”

That lesson, though, has always run counter to the intuition of people all over the world. Like today’s locavores, monarchs in Spain and China during the 16th century were deeply suspicious of becoming dependent on foreign food (although the rulers kept failing in their attempts to restrain trade). The monarchs also resented parting with their own crops, a feeling that persists today.

“People in Brazil still talk bitterly about the Brits stealing their rubber seeds and planting them in Asia,” Mr. Mann said. “Brazilians will denounce this horrible ‘bio-piracy’ while they’re standing in front of fields of bananas and coffee — plants that originated in Africa.” Two other leading crops in Brazil, soybeans and sugar, he noted, are from Asia.

Of course, the 19th-century rubber barons of Brazil had good personal reasons to resent losing their monopoly. But those seeds transplanted to Asian plantations increased the world’s supply of a product essential for the belts and gaskets in machines.

“There’s no way the Industrial Revolution could have so occurred so quickly and so widely if the world had depended solely on Brazilians tapping rubber trees,” Mr. Mann said. Indeed, the Asian plantations proved crucial when Brazilian trees were struck by blight.

“On the whole, there are lots more winners than losers from the Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann said. “I don’t want to tell Italians they can’t have tomatoes, or people in Sichuan they can’t have peppers. People have a way of taking things and making them their own. I know nothing in my garden is native, but I still have this idiotic feeling that it’s my home.”

How does he reconcile this feeling with this book? What’s a locavore to do? Mr. Mann doesn’t presume to dictate anyone’s food preferences, but he does offer one piece of advice for locavores: go easy on the preaching.

“I’m willing to pay more to get fresh vegetables grown by nice people farming nearby,” he said. “It’s incredible to eat lettuce an hour after it was picked.

“But if your concern is to produce the maximum amount of food possible for the lowest cost, which is a serious concern around the world for people who aren’t middle-class foodies like me, this seems like a crazy luxury. It doesn’t make sense for my aesthetic preference to be elevated to a moral imperative.”

Google Knew About Illegal Ads For YEARS Before Trying To Stop Them (GOOG)

2011-08-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

Google Knew About Illegal Ads For YEARS Before Trying To Stop Them (GOOG)
San Francisco Chronicle
But in fact, Google knew what was going on for years and did nothing to stop it. Google even offered customer support to the illegal advertisers, and it didn't close various loopholes that allowed the ads to sneak in front of US viewers until it became ...

Apple, Apple

2011-08-27T07:08:00.000-07:00

wsj 這幾篇都是探討這家公司的科技辦為社會的影響

August 26, 2011 -- 3:00 p.m. EDT

TECHNOLOGY
Successor Faces Tough Job at Apple

Steve Jobs has arguably disrupted more industries than any other CEO of his generation. The big question is whether Apple can transform the landscape while making an impact on pop culture.

• Jobs Through the Years on Stage at D

• Vote: What does news mean for Apple?

Steve Jobs Steps Down

TECHNOLOGY
Living by the Book of Apple

Devotees of Apple and Mac—many of whom express an almost religious fervor— are contemplating a world without their charismatic leader.

• Video: Tech Diary: Mac as Religion?

TECHNOLOGY
Controversy on Jobs's Innovations

Apple's originality, and handling of intellectual property, have frequently been controversial topics.

ASIA TECHNOLOGY
Asian Tech Firms Brace for New Landscape

The departure of Apple's creative maestro could spell opportunity for tech competitors in Asia, but it also raises longer term concerns for some of the U.S. company's biggest suppliers.

TECHNOLOGY
Apple Still a Buy, Say Analysts

Investors may be undervaluing Apple even as its shares near all-time highs. Apple shares eased 0.7% on Thursday, as investors paused to consider how the company might change after founder Steve Jobs's resignation as CEO.

Berlin workshop recreates ancient masterpieces

2011-08-25T09:14:00.001-07:00

Museums | 22.08.2011

Berlin workshop recreates ancient masterpieces

Nefertiti reborn

Copying ancient sculptures is a traditional art in itself, which also relies on chemistry and technology. A 200-year-old workshop in Berlin specializes in reproducing the mysterious glance of Nefertiti and co.

A pale sphinx is sitting on a pillar near the entrance to the atelier. Nearby, on the lawn in front of the brick building, a grim and mighty weather god from Tell Halaf in Syria is peering out of the window on the second floor of the plaster workshop.

Works of art from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, from the Middle Ages are collected here, as well as pieces from Africa, Asia, America, and local Berlin sculptors. That's why Miguel Helfrich, the head of the workshop, likes to call it a universal museum.

Its large inventory - about 7,000 replicas - stands close together, in meticulously catalogued rows, over several floors. Some are in glass cabinets, others in deep industrial shelves, and a few are packed onto the staircases.

Each replica reveals the condition that the original piece of art was in when the mould was made, explained workshop manager Bertold Just. Some works damaged after they were duplicated - in World War II or by environmental influences - so the replica serves as a historical record.

The workshop's repertoire spans millennia

Art with tradition

Since the Berlin workshop has a 200-year tradition, some of the replicas themselves are quite old. German poet Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and the scholarly brothers Alexander (1769-1859) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) were customers of the workshop, buying replicas of historic works to decorate their homes.

Even today, the imitations are still created by hand. Valuable alabaster plaster stone is poured into moulds which are traditionally made of silicone or other solid material. As soon as the cast is dry and the casting seams have been removed, the detailed work begins.

Miguel Helfrich says the painters establish a kind of relationship to each object and know exactly where the original was made and how long it had been buried. Their task is to imitate the wounds of time with paint, as well as a wide variety of natural materials, from bronze to rose granite to ivory.

Museums all over the world appreciate buy reproductions from the Berlin workshop, particularly of valuable objects that can't be loaned out or are difficult to transport. Architects also call on the workshop when they want to embellish rooms for prominent clients, as do more and more private customers with a special interest in historical art.

For them, the workshop offers limited editions of two pieces: a bust of Isabella of Aragorn, which exists in its complete form only as a replica, and the legendary Nefertiti.

Every detail matters

Time on a brush

For the reproduction of the Nefertiti bust, a new 3D scanner was developed, explained Bertold Just - a method that has so far mainly been used in the auto industry. This scanning process is so exact that "you can really see the thickness of the color, the brightness, the stroke of [Egyptian court sculptor] Thutmose's brush."

Sculpture painter Anette Schulz spends about seven days on each piece, matching blemishes and imitating historical color tones. Achieving Nefertiti's vitality is a particular challenge, said the restorator.

"She appears so true-to-life, and not just painted," exclaimed Schulz. This, of course, has a lot to do with the 3,500 years that have left their traces on Nefertiti's countenance. The signs of her age are applied to the replica as carefully as her eye-liner and eyebrows.

And her famous gaze has to be just right, said Schulz.

So far, she has completed 10 of the 100 Nefertiti replicas planned for the limited edition series. They're nearly identical to the ancient Egyptian herself - except that they are made of plaster, and only cost 2,900 euros ($4,200). That includes a pair of white gloves, so the piece doesn't get dirty when taking it out of the box.

Author: Silke Bartlick / ef

Editor: Kate Bowen

Apple’s Steve Jobs Reshaped Industries

2011-08-25T09:00:00.001-07:00

Apple’s Steve Jobs Reshaped Industries

By DAVID POGUE 9:37 AM ET

It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever see another 15 years of blockbuster, culture-changing hits like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad — from Apple or anyone else.

Steve Jobs

Cardboard robots win children's hearts

2011-08-23T06:48:00.001-07:00

Cardboard robots win children's hearts

BY AKIHIRO TANAKA STAFF WRITER

2011/08/23

Masahiko Senda says free-thinking is the key to craft work. (The Asahi Shimbun)

KYOTANGO, Kyoto Prefecture--Many of us remember making one or two toy models in our childhood, but Masahiko Senda has made model making his life's work.

The 59-year-old computer support shop operator has built more than 10,000 toy planes, dolls and other models since catching the bug as a junior high school student.

Now, a line of whimsically designed robots made out of cardboard is attracting wide attention and giving Senda the chance to share his passion.

"You can use hard cardboard paper to design (models) in any way you want, and it is cheap," Senda enthuses. "I will go anywhere to teach if I can promote the joy of craftwork."

He says, "When I conceive an interesting idea, I can't help but make it straight away."

Last December, he held a popular exhibition of his robots at the Osaka Tin Toy Institute in Osaka's Nishinari Ward and he is now being bombarded with requests to teach elementary school students how to make the models.

One of Senda's latest creations, a 30-centimeter-tall robot that opens to reveal two human-shaped figures running inside its body that totters around on two sets of three hexagonal wheels, is a far cry from the radio-controlled planes that first brought him attention from the model-making world about 10 years ago.

A model jet made from lightweight, flexible resin brought a flood of orders in the early 2000s, and Senda turned the warehouse at his house into a studio. He spent about 10 million yen ($129,750) to buy a resin-cutting machine and sold more than 1,000 models before orders started to dry up when a foreign company started offering a similar but cheaper version.

Senda, with an empty workshop and an expensive machine on his hands, spent three months working out a way to make a life-sized cardboard model of an old motorcycle using the machine. From that experience were born the cardboard robots and a new way to connect with aspiring young model-makers.

林語堂明快打字機 1920-1947?

2011-08-23T00:37:00.000-07:00

這是中國20世紀最重要的一人"熱情":

以發明家言，林語堂早年即已立志發明中文打字機。當時，科學嚴謹的漢字檢索系統仍未建立起來；又由於漢字本身是符號文字而非字母文字，長期以來人們對製成中文打字機的可能性多持懷疑態度。為解決這一難題，林語堂在數十年間鍥而不捨地研究探索，自斥資金，購置設備，堅持不懈地一再嘗試，以致一度傾盡家財、負債累累，而最終成功發明了「明快中文打字機」，幷於1946年在美國申請專利。六年半以後，到了1952年，他才取得該項發明的專利權。此打字機以「明快」命名，乃取其明易快捷之意，寄託了他希望人人都能順利操作使用的心願。除開「明快中文打字機」，他另有若干項小發明亦獲得了專利——例如，其中一件是可以擠出牙膏的牙刷。

[edit] Passions

Ming Kwai Typewriter

Dr. Lin was very active in the popularization of classical Chinese literature in the West, as well as the general Chinese attitude towards life. He worked to formulate Gwoyeu Romatzyh a new method of romanizing the Chinese language, and created an indexing system for Chinese characters.

He was interested in mechanics. Since Chinese is a character-based rather than an alphabet-based language, with many thousands of separate characters, it has always been difficult to employ modern printing technologies. For many years it was doubted that a Chinese typewriter could be invented. Lin, however, worked on this problem for decades and eventually came up with a workable typewriter—brought to market in the middle of the war with Japan.

He also invented and patented several lesser inventions such as a toothbrush with toothpaste dispensing.

輿情活躍的微博

2011-08-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

新聞報導 | 2011.08.19
央視狂批百度為哪般?

從本週一起，中央電視台在多檔節目中，連續曝光中國搜索引擎百度存在的問題，如收錢推廣虛假廣告等，百度股價疑受此影響持續暴跌。一向被認為"聽話"的百度，此番被官媒揭批，原因何在？

8月15日，中央電視台《經濟與法》節目中播出：百度如何面對法律，集中關注百度在推廣鏈接存在的諸多問題，有用戶指百度搜索引擎搜出虛假信息後上當受騙。其後連續四天，在央視的多檔其他節目中，如《環球財經連線》、《經濟信息聯播》、《今日觀察》接連曝光百度存在的一系列問題。 2008年，百度亦曾被央視曝光百度競價排名的負面信息。百度自此和央視結成密切的商業合作夥伴，央視一年一度的春節晚會，百度首席執行官李彥宏都會出現在現場，有媒體指百度每年在央視投放巨額廣告費用。 #b#

2010年3月，谷歌搜索因為拒絕接受中國當局對其內容進行審查，退出中國大陸市場，曾掀起關於搜索公司"政治自我審查"和"過濾敏感信息"的討論，百度也被推上峰口浪尖，成為與穀歌堅守企業商業道德相對應的典型，一度為人詬病。但不爭的事實是，百度牢牢佔據中國搜索市場的大璧江山，也成為在美國上市的互聯網公司。

就在央視推出多個關於百度問題的節目之後，百度一直未予公開回應。德國之聲也曾聯繫百度在北京百度大廈的工作人員，但截止發稿，一直未有回應和解釋。

百度在中國市場一家獨大招眾怒？

德國之聲就此事首先採訪了中國著名網站"凱迪"的董事長蕭增健，他認為對央視此次的舉動，應該從市場的角度進行分析，媒體市場化後，意識形態的色彩會逐漸淡化，從市場競爭這一層面來看，央視和人民網也推出自己的推索業務，百度在中國搜索市場上一家獨大並不正常，尤其是谷歌淡出中國大陸市場後，百度在競價排名方面有恃無恐，央視從某種程度上也順應了互聯網上的民意。蕭增健對這種批評持肯定態度。

人民網是在2010年6月推出了搜索引擎，但用者廖廖。而以前其他中國門戶網站推出的輔助搜索業務也都難成氣候。

但他也認為央視最近對百度的批評和人民網的動態應該有一定的關係，凱迪網今天的頭條轉發《人民日報》社論：用公開透明推動改革大業。蕭增健分析說拋開市場角度，央視與《人民日報》的信息都有一種跡象，中央高層似乎想通了一些事情，依靠互聯網可以推動政治的改革向前走。中國社會矛盾激化的背景下，中共高層需要傾聽互聯網上的民意，找到良性的解決之路。

清除市場障礙給黨產企業讓路？

德國之聲也與目前就職陽光衛視的中國新媒體人北風取得了聯繫，他首先認為央視此舉疑為人民網搜索清除市場障礙："人民搜索最近可能要發力，毫無疑問需要把百度打下去，沒有什麼比用行政手段調動中央媒體直接對百度進行抹黑更好的辦法，當然我不認為在技術上人民網的搜索能和百度處在同一重量級，這樣做的意義不大。"

北風認為當時谷歌在中國市場時，百度以其接受"過濾敏感詞""審查"的行為贏得官方信任，但是谷歌趕出中國市場後，百度也成為官方搜索的對手："必竟百度還是一家美國上市公司，如果黨產企業像人民網、新華網要進軍搜索業，百度毫無疑問成為他們最重要的對手。"

央視打壓百度，官方意在微博？

北風也分析另一種可能性就是，看似打壓百度，實際上當局的目標還是在輿情活躍的微博："從表面上來講，百度是最容易被抓到毛病的，他們的競價排名確實有很大的問題，並且很為業界詬病，如果央視從這一點來批，百度幾乎無還手能力。但事實上我們看到央視前段時間批駁過微博一輪，但民間反彈太大，央視突然就戛然而止。我想肯定不會就這麼結束。"

北風覺得央視這次打壓百度，可能的路徑是把公眾輿論調動起來，然後成立一些所謂的民間組織發起新一輪的互聯網整治行動，再藉機用公眾舉報虛假信息、受騙信息等，把矛頭再轉向微博進行整治。

作者: 吳雨

責編: 敏芬

Repressing the Internet, Western-Style

2011-08-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

2011年 08月 17日 14:24

Repressing the Internet, Western-Style

Evgeny Morozov

Did the youthful rioters who roamed the streets of London, Manchester and other British cities expect to see their photos scrutinized by angry Internet users, keen to identify the miscreants? In the immediate aftermath of the riots, many cyber-vigilantes turned to Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites to study pictures of the violence. Some computer-savvy members even volunteered to automate the process by using software to compare rioters' faces with faces pictured elsewhere on the Internet.

The rioting youths were not exactly Luddites either. They used BlackBerrys to send their messages, avoiding more visible platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It's telling that they looted many stores selling fancy electronics. The path is short, it would seem, from 'digital natives' to 'digital restives.'

Technology has empowered all sides in this skirmish: the rioters, the vigilantes, the government and even the ordinary citizens eager to help. But it has empowered all of them to different degrees. As the British police, armed with the latest facial-recognition technology, go through the footage captured by their numerous closed-circuit TV cameras and study chat transcripts and geolocation data, they are likely to identify many of the culprits.

Authoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely. Chinese state media, for one, blamed the riots on a lack of Chinese-style controls over social media. Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies. They hope for at least partial vindication of their own repressive policies.

Some British politicians quickly called on the BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to suspend its messaging service to avoid an escalation of the riots. On Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government should consider blocking access to social media for people who plot violence or disorder.

After the recent massacre in Norway, many European politicians voiced their concern that anonymous anti-immigrant comments on the Web were inciting extremism. They are now debating ways to limit online anonymity.

Does the Internet really need an overhaul of norms, laws and technologies that gives more control to governments? When the Egyptian secret police can purchase Western technology that allows them to eavesdrop on the Skype calls of dissidents, it seems unlikely that American and European intelligence agencies have no means of listening the calls of, say, a loner in Norway.

We tolerate such drastic proposals only because acts of terror briefly deprive us of the ability to think straight. We are also distracted by the universal tendency to imagine technology as a liberating force; it keeps us from noticing that governments already have more power than is healthy.

The domestic challenges posed by the Internet demand a measured, cautious response in the West. Leaders in Beijing, Tehran and elsewhere are awaiting our wrong-headed moves, which would allow them to claim an international license for dealing with their own protests. The yare also looking for tools and strategies that might improve their own digital surveillance.

After violent riots in 2009, Chinese officials had no qualms about cutting off the Xinjiang region's Internet access for 10 months. Still, they would surely welcome a formal excuse for such drastic measures if the West should decide to take similar measures in dealing with disorder. Likewise, any plan in the U.S. or Europe to engage in online behavioral profiling─trying to identify future terrorists based on their tweets, gaming habits or social networking activity─is likely to boost the already booming data-mining industry. It would not take long for such tools to find their way to repressive states.

But something even more important is at stake here. To the rest of the world, the efforts of Western nations, and especially the U.S., to promote democracy abroad have often smacked of hypocrisy. How could the West lecture others while struggling to cope with its own internal social contradictions? Other countries could live with this hypocrisy as long as the West held firm in promoting its ideals abroad. But this double game is harder to maintain in the Internet era.

In their concern to stop not just mob violence but commercial crimes like piracy and file-sharing, Western politicians have proposed new tools for examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of those who use social media in the Middle East.

Should America and Europe abandon any pretense of even wanting to promote democracy abroad? Or should they try to figure out how to increase the resilience of their political institutions in the face of the Internet? As much as our leaders might congratulate themselves for embracing the revolutionary potential of these new technologies, they have shown little evidence of being able to think about them in a nuanced and principled way.

(-Mr. Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the author of 'The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.')

2011年 08月 17日 14:24

觀點﹕西方互聯網自由遭遇挑戰

Evgeny Morozov

那

些遊盪在倫敦、曼徹斯特和其他英國城市的青年暴徒是否預料到自己的照片會遭到憤怒網民的仔細審查？暴亂後不久﹐許多義憤填膺的網民來到Facebook和 Flickr等社交網站研究暴力事件的照片﹐急切地想確認這些惡棍的身份。有些精通電腦的網民甚至自告奮勇將這一過程自動化﹐用軟件對照來自網上不同地方的暴徒照片。

那些青年暴徒也不完全是反對科技進步的勒德主義者（Luddites）。他們用黑莓（BlackBerry）發消息﹐避免使用Facebook和Twitter這樣比較顯眼的平台。據說他們搶劫了許多銷售時尚電子產品的商店。從“數字原生代”到“數字暴民”似乎沒有多長的距離。

科技為倫敦騷亂中的各個群體都賦予了力量﹐包括暴徒、民間自警組織、政府﹐甚至是熱情的普通市民﹐但他們被賦予的力量有大有小。通過瀏覽大量閉路電視攝像頭拍攝的錄像並研究暴徒談話記錄及地理位置數據﹐擁有最新人臉識別技術的英國警察可能會認出許多肇事者的身份。

威權政府正在密切關注這些局勢的發展。中國就是其中之一。中國國有媒體稱發生暴亂是由於對社交媒體缺乏中國式的控制。這類政府急切想看到西方政府在與不斷演進的科技角力時會確立怎樣的先例。他們希望能夠為自己的壓制政策找到一些辯護理由。

部分英國政界人士迅速呼籲黑莓製造商Research in Motion取消其消息服務以防暴亂升級。上週四﹐英國首相卡梅倫（David Cameron）說﹐政府應考慮阻止密謀發起暴力或騷亂活動的人使用社交媒體。

最近挪威發生大屠殺後﹐許多歐洲政客表示﹐擔心網上匿名的反移民言論是在煽動極端主義。他們目前正在討論限制網上匿名的方法。

是否真的需要對互聯網相關規范、法律和科技進行改革以擴大政府的控制權？當埃及秘密警察都可以購買西方技術從而得以竊聽異見人士的Skype通話時﹐美國和歐洲情報機構無法監聽挪威一個“獨行俠”的通話﹐這似乎不大可能。

我們所以能夠容忍如此偏激的建議﹐僅僅是因為恐怖行徑暫時剝奪了我們理性思考的能力。而將科技想象成一種解放性力量的普遍傾向也令我們心煩意亂﹔它讓我們無視一個現象﹐即政府擁有的權力已經大到了不適宜的水平。

互聯網構成的國內挑戰要求西方國家的反應既有分寸又要慎重。中國、伊朗和其它國家的領導人正等著我們犯下執迷不悟的錯誤。這些錯誤會讓上述國家得以宣稱﹐他們對待本國抗議活動的做法是在遵循國際慣例。這些國家也正在尋找可能改善他們數字監控技術的工具和策略。

2009 年的暴力騷亂過後﹐中國官員毫不猶豫地切斷了新疆地區的互聯網通訊﹐時間長達10個月。儘管如此﹐如果西方國家在處理混亂局面時決定採取類似措施﹐中國官員無疑仍會為他們上述激進行動獲得了一個冠冕堂皇的借口而歡喜。同樣﹐美國或歐洲從事“網絡行為側寫”（online behavioral profiling）的任何計劃﹐都有可能推動已經蓬勃發展的數據挖掘行業。要不了多久此類工具就會為壓迫政權所利用。所謂“網絡行為側寫”是指試圖根據微博、遊戲習慣或社交網絡活動等信息找出未來的恐怖分子。

但一些更為重要的事情正處於危急關頭。對世界其他國家來說﹐以美國為首的西方國家在國外促進民主的舉措往往讓人覺得虛偽。西方國家在奮力應對其自身的社會矛盾之際﹐他們又如何能向其它國家說教呢？只要西方國家堅持在海外推廣其理念﹐ 其它國家或許還是可以忍受這種虛偽的。但在互聯網時代﹐這種表裡不一的做法難以為繼。

西方政界人士既希望制止暴徒的暴力行為﹐還想遏止盜版和非法文件共享等商業犯罪行為﹐他們建議採用新工具檢測網絡流量﹐並改變互聯網的基本架構以簡化監控。但他們忽視的是﹐這些舉措也能夠影響到中國和伊朗等國異見人士的命運。同樣﹐歐洲政界人士處理網絡匿名問題的方式方法也將影響到Facebook等社交網站的政策﹐而這又將影響中東地區使用社交媒體的那些人的政治行為。

美國和歐洲抑或應該放棄任何在海外推動民主的說辭？或是應該努力揣摩在面對互聯網時應如何提高其政治機構的應變能力？我們的領導人在為這些新技術的革命性潛能慶幸不已的時候﹐他們卻不能既細緻入微又秉持原則地思考這些新技術所帶來的影響。

（編者注：本文作者Evgeny Morozov是斯坦福大學的訪問學者﹐也是《網絡的錯覺：互聯網自由的陰暗面》(The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom)一書的作者。）

美國超級電腦實驗室將採用中國華為元件

2011-08-17T16:36:00.000-07:00

使用中製元件美憂引狼入室

〔編譯陳成良／綜合報導〕華盛頓時報十六日披露，一座從事機密軍事研究的美國超級電腦實驗室，最近決定採用咸認與中國軍方關係密切的全球第二大通訊設備製造商「華為技術」（Huawei）製造的元件，使得美國國會對潛在的電子間諜活動更感憂心。

美國超級電腦實驗室將採用中國華為元件

報導中指出，國會的疑慮源於美國「MPAK」科技與田納西大學國家運算工程中心（NCCE）今夏協議。田納西大學的超級電腦能模擬美國下一代軍機和太空船的試飛狀況，也能為美國海軍模擬潛艦作戰。

MPAK專精資料儲存架構，與ＦＢＩ及多個美國政府機關都簽有敏感合約。據簽訂合約規定，儲存系統需使用華為生產裝置，並採用美資安公司賽門鐵克（Symantec）軟體。華為在○八年與賽門鐵克成立合資企業，華為持有五十一％股權。

四名共和黨參議員及眾議院常設情報特別委員會一名委員，上週致函國防部及能源部，促請檢討這項合約潛在的國家安全風險。信中強調，華為與中國政府、軍方關係密切，侵犯智產權行徑斑斑可考，加上顧慮到它可能充當外國政府的間諜，華為科技不是先進美國研究中心的適當合作對象。

這項要求凸顯情報界與高科技業者間的分歧，即在海外設計或生產的電腦伺服器、微晶片及軟體，會對外國情報機構提供何種秘密取得敏感資訊系統的機會。華為是中國官方重點培植企業，前年躍居全球第二大通訊設備製造商，由於華為與解放軍關係密切，美國、印度紛紛拒絕採用，以免危及國家安全；英國也對該公司的電信設備可能損害該國飛彈防禦系統發出警告。

our lives in LED bulbs

2011-08-15T01:41:00.000-07:00

Award-winning mural measures our lives in LED bulbs

BY LOUIS TEMPLADO STAFF WRITER

2011/08/14

Toshiba's award-winning outdoor advertisement "With 10 Years of Life" at the Yurakucho Mullion Building until August 19. (Louis Templado)The display depicts the creation of a family. (Louis Templado)

How many times do you flip a light switch in a day? How about in a month, a year, or a decade? That's one of the questions posed by an award-winning mural in a dimly lit concourse in Tokyo's normally bright Ginza district.

Installed in the middle of June on the ground floor of the Yurakucho Mullion Building, "With 10 Years of Life" (or "10 Year Calendar" in the original Japanese) advertises energy-saving LED light bulbs by Toshiba. It took the gold medal for outdoor advertising at the 58th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival the same month.

Measuring about 20 meters wide, the mural is made up of 3,653 photos, depicting a decade that begins with the installation of a living room LED and ends with its replacement. The protagonist is not the bulb but a family, shown in silhouette, which forms and grows under its glow. The action begins on April 1, 2010, when a bachelor installs the bulb. A week later, he meets his future wife. Then comes a proposal, a dog and, eventually, three children.

Whether a bulb change will attract a mate is a matter of speculation. The advertisement did gain the attention of the competition judges, who chose it from nearly 4,500 entries in the outdoor advertising division, which includes billboards and posters. The installation continues until August 19. For more information, see (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/lighting/jp/ad/index_j.htm#top.)

住宅、オフィス、店舗、街路、そしてコンサートホールや旅館、動物園などコミュニティ全体に「ＬＥＤのあかり」が広がりはじめていることを訴求するとともに、東芝の多種多様なＬＥＤ商品の紹介を行なっています。

シリーズ広告「東芝のLEDエコ計画、進行中」：PDF形式 1.8MB

日本で初めて白熱電球を実用化した東芝が、今度はＬＥＤベースライトを誕生させ、オフィスなどビジネスの未来を明るく照らしていくことを、登場感を持って訴求しています。ラインの工員が、製造したばかりのベースライトを手に持ち、まさに手渡そうとしている表現としています。

シリーズ広告「LEDベースライト広告」：PDF形式 1.1MB

東芝のＬＥＤ電球は、約１０年（注１）の長寿命。
その凄さを、分かりやすく実感していただくために、
世の中の様々な"光るもの"とＬＥＤ電球の寿命を比べました。
子供から大人まで、誰もが思わず目をキラキラと輝かせながら
楽しめるちょっと変わった図鑑です。

（注１）1日10時間使用した場合。定格寿命約40000時間。定格寿命であり、製品の寿命を保証するものではありません。

シリーズ広告「光の寿命図鑑」：PDF形式4.5MB

ＬＥＤ電球に交換してから、
次の交換までの１０年間をカレンダーにして描きました。
結婚、出産、家族とのだんらん、
時には旅行で家をあける日も。
そんな幸せな日々を照らし続ける東芝のＬＥＤ電球。
ずっと見ていても飽きない、見るたびに発見がある、
そんなポスターです。

シリーズ広告「１０年カレンダー」：PDF形式 4.7MB

製造ラインに向かって一礼する作業員の後ろ姿をセピア色で描写、迫力ある印象と情緒的イメージを演出、読者に驚きと感動を伝えます。広告左下には消灯した白熱電球、右下には明るく点灯したＬＥＤ電球を配置することで、白熱電球からＬＥＤ電球への構造転換を表現します。キャッチコピーでは、作業員が一礼している理由がすぐに理解されるよう、製造ラインに対する強い感謝の気持ちをシンプルに表現。また、藤岡市助から始まる１２０年の歴史、決断の背景にある東芝の環境への思いを述べ、今後のＬＥＤへの取り組みを簡潔に伝えます。

シリーズ広告「LEDは東芝」：PDF形式 741kB

ＬＥＤ電球の特長である40000時間の長寿命と電気代80%オフと、
東芝ＬＥＤ電球の特長である信頼性をあかりの歴史と
省エネ大賞受賞(受賞：東芝ライテック株式会社)により、
天海祐希さんのビジュアルとともに親しみやすく、わかりやすく
訴求しています。

シリーズ広告「LEDは東芝」：PDF形式1028KB

クリスマスイブにあわせたホワイトクリスマスを
イメージしたビジュアルです。
「10年後のクリスマスも、このあかりの下で
サンタを待っています。」というコピーで
LED電球の寿命を訴求しています。

シリーズ広告「LEDは東芝」クリスマス広告：PDF形式 827kB

LED電球が普及して家庭に本格的に入ってきた
今年を「LED元年」と位置づけ、LED照明への
取り組みと８．７WのLED電球を中心とした
新商品を訴求しています。

※別ウィンドウで開きます。

シリーズ広告「LEDは東芝」：PDF形式 1.3MB

新商品の発表に合わせ、商品写真を大きく
全面に押し出しています。キャッチフレーズは
「あかりを変える。未来が変わる。」として、
照明の歴史を築いてきた東芝の使命感を
伝えています。

LED電球（4.1W、6.9W）（東芝ライテック株式会社）

※別ウィンドウで開きます。

シリーズ広告「LEDは東芝」：PDF形式431KB

一般白熱電球からの置き換えが可能な一般
電球形のLED電球の製品化にあわせて、
省エネ性、寿命とも現行の電球形蛍光ランプ
を凌ぐ未来の“あかり”であることを訴求して
います。

LED電球（4.3W）（東芝ライテック株式会社）

※別ウィンドウで開きます。

シリーズ広告「電球への思いと地球への思い」：PDF形式 100ｋB

Passionate minds: the inner world of scientists

2011-08-10T07:47:00.000-07:00

Passionate minds: the inner world of scientists

此書可讀八成很好

Passionate minds: the inner world of scientists - Google 圖書結果

books.google.com/books?isbn=0198549040...Lewis Wolpert, Alison Richards - 1997 - Biography & Autobiography - 240 頁
scientist Lewis Wolpert and BBC radio producer Alison Richards investigate the ... insights into the minds of some of the greatest men and women of science, ...

中國譯本激情澎湃:科學家的內心世界上海世紀 2007

Scientist on mission to prove grass can be greener

2011-08-05T01:55:00.001-07:00

Scientist on mission to prove grass can be greener

BY MISUZU SATO STAFF WRITER

2011/08/05

An experiment on cutting grass deeply as opposed to removing from the roots is conducted in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture. (Kengo Hiyoshi)

KORIYAMA, Fukushima Prefecture--Mention grass to scientist Mitsuo Kondo and he gets excited.

On Aug. 4, the professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture conducted an experiment to decontaminate irradiated grass in Fukushima Prefecture.

Kondo used Ose Park in Koriyama, about 60 kilometers east of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, for the experiment.

Kondo's method involves mowing grass so deeply that the roots are barely spared.

His effort is part of the prefectural government's campaign to mitigate the impact of radiation on people's lives.

First, radiation levels were measured in the 160-meter-square area picked for the experiment. Then the grass was mowed deeper than usual.

Kondo said the "deep-mowing" method should lower radiation levels to one-third of the level before cutting.

He said he will continue to try to come up with better ideas to preserve sites with grass while at the same time decontaminating those areas.

The IBM Personal Computer Turns 30/Selectric Typewriter Turns 50

2011-08-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

The IBM Personal Computer Turns 30

Thirty years ago this month, IBM released its first PC -- the IBM Personal Computer Model 5150. It was a $1,265 beige box without a monitor, serial or parallel ports or even a hard disk. The IBM PC arrived years after revolutionary microcomputers like the Apple II (1977), the Commodore Pet (1977) or the Atari 800 (1979) hit hobbyists and small business.

But the IBM PC changed everything.

Created by a 12-engineer team in Boca Raton, FL – and developed under the radar of a then-crippling IBM bureaucracy -- IBM’s original PC Model 5150 was a top-secret rush project code-named “Project Chess.” IBM conceived it, IBM PC original team member Dave Bradley told me, in response to growing business use of the Apple II and other systems.

See BYTE's first review, by Phil Lemmons, of the original PC in the BYTE Oct. 1981 issue right here.

Now, IBM never envisioned its explosive success, nor the resulting aftershock of PC-compatible hardware and software that followed. The heavy marketing featuring a Charlie Chaplin campaign certainly helped as IBM entered the AT era. But it was the PC's open architecture and use of third-party hardware and software enabled an industry of PC hardware and software makers to grow up around it.

The original PC was the first truly open system. It sported a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 processor, up to 256K RAM and an open 8-bit ISA-slot architecture for expansion. Reverse engineering from BIOS makers spawned an entire industry of PC-compatible systems, which quickly dominated the market and even outstripped IBM’s marketshare by the late 1980s. IBM eventually sold off its PC division to Lenovo.

It’s fascinating to trace how and why the IBM PC and the industry it created exploded with such ferocity. According to Bradley, a key element was that the Project Chess team was agile, small and able to do what no other IBMers could: Forget IBM signoff policies and use third-party components and software as it needed. Those included Intel’s 8088 CPU – and a version of Seattle Computer Products’ Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS), which Microsoft licensed, eventually purchased and relicensed to the IBM team as PC-DOS.

IBM allowed software developers to write applications for PC-DOS and, before long, a rash of business applications from word-processors to spreadsheets was available to PC users. A business standard was born.

Here's a user disassembling it, so you can see what's inside.

Love them or hate them, the Wintel combo still dominates today. Even Apple’s Macs include Intel-made CPUs and they support and run Microsoft Windows (albeit in virtual machines).

Bradley told me the project was “a dream come true” for an IBM engineer constrained by the corporation. The PC development project was prescient in terms of the consumerization of IT. Like with the consumerization of IT, PCs in business were really an outgrowth of a consumer hobbyist movement in the 1970s. Also similar to the consumerization of IT where employees are making IT decisions, sometimes without regards for policy or existing systems, the Project Chess team at IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca was able to move rapidly and without legacy constraints.

Bradley, by the way, is the guy responsible for the three-fingered salute: the [CTRL][ALT][DEL] key combo, which he developed so engineers could easily reboot the PC. “I may have invented it, but I think Bill (Gates) made it famous,” he joked to Bill Gates at a computer event. Note Gates’ expression in the video. It’s priceless.

Today, BYTE covers consumer tech in business and watches closely as the Apple iPad and other non-Wintel devices revolutionize tech use. But today, as we approach the official IBM PC’s 30th Anniversary on August 12, we do so with a nod to the groundbreaking work of Estridge, Bradley and the rest of the Project Chess team that brought us the first open PC. Without it, widespread consumer use of personal technology in business just would not be possible.

Gina Smith is editor-in-chief of BYTE. Follow her on Twitter at @ginasmith888 or on Google+ as Gina+ Email her at Gina@BYTE.com.

IBM's Selectric Typewriter Turns 50 on July 31

Posted 07/27/2011 at 7:38am | by Paul Lilly

IBM is getting a head start in celebrating the 50th anniversary of its Selectric typewriter, which was born on July 31, 1961. The Selectric typewriter was one of the most common typewriters around during its 25-year tenure, and included 2,800 parts, many of which IBM says were designed from scratch. That in and of itself is a noteworthy achievement for IBM, which spent seven years solving the Selectric's manufacturing and design challenges before putting it up for sale. But the real story here is the impact IBM's Selectric had on modern day computing.

Rightfully described by IBM as a game changer, the Selectric allowed for much faster typing thanks to its unique "golf ball" head that moved across the page, making it the first typewriter to eliminate carriage return. It also took up less desk space, and in 1964, magnetic tape was added for storing character, making the Selectric the first word-processor device. IBM points out that modified Selectric typewriters could be plugged into IBM's System/360 computer.

"The Selectric typewriter, from its design to its functionality, was an innovation leader for its time and revolutionized the way people recorded information," said Linda Sanford, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Transformation, IBM, who was a development engineer on the Selectric. "Nearly two decades before computers were introduced, the Selectric laid the foundation for word-processing applications that boosted efficiency and productivity, and it inspired many user-friendly features in computers that we take for granted today."

The Selectric's 50th anniversary coincides with IBM's Centennial year and will appear on a U.S. postage stamp honoring it as an icon of design, IBM says.

Digital analysis is invading the world of the connoisseur

2011-07-31T19:13:00.000-07:00

Art criticism and computers

Painting by numbers

Digital analysis is invading the world of the connoisseur

Jul 30th 2011 | from the print edition

JUDGING artistic styles, and the similarities between them, might be thought one bastion of human skill that machines could never storm. Not so, if Lior Shamir at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan is correct. A paper he has just published in Leonardo suggests that computers may have just as good an eye for style as humans do—and, in some cases, may see connections between artists that human critics have missed.

Dr Shamir, a computer scientist, presented 57 images by each of nine painters—Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh—to a computer, to see what it made of them. The computer broke the images into a number of so-called numerical descriptors. These descriptors quantified textures and colours, the statistical distribution of edges across a canvas, the distributions of particular types of shape, the intensity of the colour of individual points on a painting, and also the nature of any fractal-like patterns within it (fractals are features that reproduce similar shapes at different scales; the edges of snowflakes, for example).

All told, the computer identified 4,027 different numerical descriptors. Once their values had been established for each of the 513 artworks that had been fed into it, it was ready to do the analysis.

Dr Shamir’s aim was to look for quantifiable ways of distinguishing between the work of different artists. If such things could be established, it might make the task of deciding who painted what a little easier. Such decisions matter because, even excluding deliberate forgeries, there are many paintings in existence that cannot conclusively be attributed to a master rather than his pupils, or that may be honestly made copies whose provenance is now lost.

To look for such distinguishing features, Dr Shamir programmed the computer to use a statistical method that scores the strength of the distance between the values of two or more descriptors for each pair of artists. As a result, he was able to rank each of the 4,027 descriptors by how useful it was at discriminating between artists.

Surprisingly, the values of 19 of the 20 most informative descriptors showed dramatically higher similarities between Van Gogh (left below) and Pollock (right) than between Van Gogh and painters such as Monet and Renoir, who conventional art criticism would think more closely related to Van Gogh’s oeuvre than Pollock’s is. (Dalí and Ernst, by contrast, were farther apart then expected.)

What is interesting, according to Dr Shamir, is that no single feature makes Pollock’s artistic style similar to Van Gogh’s. Instead, the connection is based on a broad set of image-content descriptors which reflect many aspects of the two artists’ styles, including a shared preference for low-level textures and shapes, and similarities in the ways they employed lines and edges.

What was intended, then, as a way of improving the ability to distinguish between different hands has also thrown up a new way of looking for stylistic similarities. Whether Pollock was actually influenced by Van Gogh, or merely happened upon a similar way of doing things through a similar artistic sensibility, is not clear. But it gives art historians a new line of investigation to pursue.

Minitel

2011-07-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

France Télécom to Bid Adieu to Minitel

France Télécom will shut down Minitel, France's precursor to the Internet, next year, saying the text-only service's architecture has become obsolete.

Minitel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- [ 翻譯這個網頁 ]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel - 頁庫存檔

The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web ...

Mechanical advantage

2011-07-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

豐田汽車公司北海道設第二所技術學校

Mechanical advantage

Two new types of transistor may lead to simpler, more efficient computers(4)

洗手間工廠

2011-07-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

A Human-Waste Gold Mine: Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Die Welt.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft who has morphed into the world's best-known philanthropist, wants to reinvent the toilet.

This next big idea for the good of mankind will now also be getting help from German taxpayers after Development Minister Dirk Niebel earmarked $10 million for a joint project with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the next five years, this project aims to provide 800,000 people in Kenya with access to sanitation facilities and ensure clean drinking water for 200,000.

The goal is to find "innovative solutions" for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources. (See pictures of the global reach of the Gates Foundation.)

The matter is urgent: the lack of sanitary installations and hygienic waste removal furthers the spread of disease. UNICEF estimates that 1.1 billion people worldwide don't have access to any kind of toilet or ways of eliminating waste. That, in turn, fouls drinking water and can cause diarrhea, which spreads quickly.

According to UNICEF, at least 1.2 million children under the age of 5 die of diarrhea every year; the main cause is contact with human feces. At the end of June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — together with UNICEF — approved a five-year sustainable sanitation plan under which the number of people who have no access to toilets would be halved by 2015. (See the top 10 famous toilets.)

Ban emphasized that sanitary installations not only play a decisive role in reducing world poverty, but they are crucial for sustainable development and for making it possible to achieve Millennium Development Goals.

Dutch engineer Frank Rijsberman agrees. He heads the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene department at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and he is presently working on two projects. With one project, the foundation supports the construction of pit latrines in rural areas and slums without sanitation facilities. With the other, it supports research projects, giving grants to scientists who come up with new ideas for using human excrement. He says there have been experiments to turn excrement into a kind of microwave that can be used as a source of energy.

He says there are biological bacteria that could turn waste into compost; he talks about the possibility of toilets actually turning urine into drinking water. Human waste could be a real gold mine, Rijsberman jokes. In view of the world's limited water resources, both the Gates Foundation and German Development Policy support various projects for dry toilets that do not use water to flush and that separate excrement from urine in order to dry it.

Another method put forward by the Gates Foundation in South Africa is using the urine of 400,000 people to make nitrogenous fertilizer in powder form. A similar albeit high-tech variation is currently being tested by the Society for International Cooperation in Eschborn, Germany. Germany and the Gates Foundation's projects are complementary, says the German Ministry for Development. The importance of this research is not always easy to explain, says Rijsberman, because anything having to do with human waste provokes a "yuck factor." (See pictures of Bill Gates in his younger years.)

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of those concerned are far from convinced that it's a good idea to use toilets in the first place. "We have a lot of work ahead us," says Rijsberman, who knows he can count on his boss's full support.

And the billionaire himself seizes every opportunity to lobby for the end of the traditional Western toilet. In April, Gates met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff in Berlin. In a press conference he told journalists that they didn't talk politics, but discussed the idea of the "ultimate toilet."

Natural Experiments of History

2011-07-13T01:25:00.000-07:00

奇怪許久前有錄過此書英文版沒想到找不到

《歷史的自然實驗》（Natural Experiments of History）是一本包羅萬象的小書，收錄了許多文章，倡議採用控制下的實驗方法，用以研究人類歷史、政治、文化、經濟與環境等諸多領域的混亂現況。本書展現了跨學門合作的多產益處，但也揭露了學界不同文化之間的隔閡。

原載於【知識通訊評論91期】2010.05.01

書名：《歷史的自然實驗》（Natural Experiments of History）

編輯：傑德戴蒙 (Jared Diamond) 、羅賓森 (James A. Robinson)

出版社： Belknap ， 2010 年 288 頁

定價： 29.95 美元

《歷史的自然實驗》是一本包羅萬象的小書，收錄了許多文章，倡議採用控制下的實驗方法，用以研究人類歷史、政治、文化、經濟與環境等諸多領域的混亂現況。本書展現了跨學門合作的多產益處，但也揭露了學界不同文化之間的隔閡。

擔任本書編輯的地理學家戴蒙與政治經濟學家羅賓森，確保文章長度一致，論證嚴謹。許多作者會以其區域比較研究的明晰解釋，探討重要的爭議話題，高談闊論卻少有結論。

自然實驗的觀念很簡單：找兩個以上有某些顯著共通點，但其他方面卻不相同的例子，然後系統化探究其異同之處。有些批評家把戴蒙斥為地理決定論者，但是戴蒙的文章利用島嶼研究，所做出的兩種相反論點，可能會讓批評者大吃一驚。他比較了海地與多明尼加這兩個共據一島的國家，認為他們不同的殖民歷史與規則，凌駕於環境因素之上，決定了兩邊如何發展的命運。今天的多明尼加共和國，有個運作良好的民主體制，國民平均所得比鄰國多出六倍，國土還有百分之二十八的完整森林，而海地只有百分之一。把成敗之分歸於「文化、經濟與政治差異」，大體而言當然沒錯，不過敗壞之因總是藏在歷史的罅縫之間。

: 戴蒙以九個環境變數及四種農業栽培法為研究變項，分析六十九個太平洋島嶼，發現復活節島會去林化，因為該島是太平洋上環境最為脆弱的島嶼之一。

戴蒙的第二個案例研究比較量化，他以九個環境變數（其中包括土壤地質年齡、去林化程度、降雨量、溫度、塵埃風積現象等等），以及四種農業栽培法（水耕、旱耕根莖類作物，種植麵包樹以及堅果），分析六十九個太平洋島嶼。他認為復活節島會去林化，是因為居民「運氣不好，生活在太平洋上環境最為脆弱的島嶼之一」。這可能會讓那些讀到戴蒙認為復活節島居民「未能在文化上適應其受限環境，造成其社會崩解」的人，感到困惑不已。所以這到底是他們自己的錯，還是因為運氣不好，抑或兩者都有？戴蒙似乎是想要兩者都說得通。

在另一篇由經濟學家努恩 (Nathan Nunn) 所撰寫，頗具煽動性的文章〈受過去桎梏〉中，歷史同樣凌駕於地理因素之上。他檢視非洲不同地區的奴隸交易歷史，與現代的國民平均所得與國內生產毛額之間的關係，經過統計分析後顯示，過去有愈多奴隸被帶走的非洲國家，時至今日就愈貧窮。努恩估計，若沒有奴隸交易，非洲今日的國民平均所得，會比二○○○年年平均所得的一千八百三十四美元，高出百分之四十五到百分之一百八十。這對鎖定奴隸交易賠償目標來說，是很有說服力的論述。

大膽揭露歷史模式的手法，對《歷史的自然實驗》一書而言，既是強項也是弱點，話說從頭的細節，自然必須留待後話。像是歷史學家貝利奇 (James Belich) 的文章，就是從他的著作《盈滿大地》（Replenishing the Earth）濃縮而成的，原著是一本關於央格魯移民社會，鉅細靡遺的歷史書。在這篇精簡版的文章中，貝利奇比較十九世紀與二十世紀早期，美國西部、加拿大西部、阿根廷、澳洲、紐西蘭、西伯利亞與南非等地，風馬牛不相及的移民社會，所經歷過非常相似的爆炸性人口成長與經濟起伏循環模式。他認為這些社會都經歷了一種三階段的節奏：起先是聚落本身產生經濟成長，接著是這些經濟體自己內部無以為繼所產生的衰退，然後是「輸出救火」階段，移民者殖民地開始把商品賣到逐漸聯繫在一起的全球經濟體。

貝利奇想要確認這些社會有一些共通的「起始條件」，藉此解釋這個跨世界的現象，其探求的手法可謂大膽。他找出重要的歷史、經濟、科技與文化模式：拿破崙戰爭與美國獨立戰爭所帶來的衝突，在一八一五年劃下句點所帶來的「和平加分」，快帆船帶來逐漸成長的國際貿易大量轉運，以及在方興未艾的印刷文化推波助瀾之下，世人對移民潮的觀感由負轉正的顯著轉變。不過貝利奇自己也承認，讀者若細察各地詳情，就會發現證據參雜不齊。

《歷史的自然實驗》作者戴蒙（Jared Diamond）等人，會對讀者的挑戰嚴陣以待。

《歷史的自然實驗》裡的所有文章，都會引發辯論。戴蒙等作者將會嚴陣以待：他們的任務是將科學方法帶入歷史學中，以剔除因果，建立能用來預測的理論。社會科學家也被這種研究方法所吸引。不過會有許多歷史學家爭論說，這些實驗並不怎麼自然，而且因為歷史無法重現，這甚至算不上實驗。大多數的歷史學家最終還是回到偶然性的解釋：事情就是會發生，細節則會造就差異。然而比較、模式、理論與預測的力量，仍然不會這麼容易就被輕忽。

A Little Placebo Effect For the Common Cold

2011-07-13T01:14:00.000-07:00

A Little Placebo Effect For the Common Cold

By JENNIFER CORBETT DOOREN

In the fight against the common cold, a patient's feelings about a treatment could be a helpful weapon.

A study of more than 700 patients found cold sufferers who get a pill, regardless of what it contains, have less severe symptoms and recover a bit sooner than patients who don't take pills.

The placebo effect was most pronounced among people who believed in echinacea's healing properties.

The findings by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison will be published in the July/August edition of the Annals of Family Medicine. The study was primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The 719 participants, ages 12 to 80, with new colds were divided into four groups. One group didn't receive anything. Another group received echinacea and were told they were receiving the herb. Two other groups received pills but didn't know the contents: The pills either contained echinacea or were a placebo.

At the time the study was designed, some studies suggested echinacea had a benefit in treating colds. More recent studies, including previous findings from the Wisconsin cold study, suggest echinacea has little to no impact.

Those receiving pills were instructed to take two pills four times a day for the first 24 hours and then continue with one pill four times a day for four days. During the study, virus samples were obtained from a person's nose. People were required to complete a survey twice a day to assess the severity of their illness. Participants were also asked about their beliefs in echinacea as a potential cold treatment.

Overall, researchers didn't find major differences between the four groups, but the length and severity of colds was slightly worse among patients who didn't receive pills. Colds lasted about six to seven days in all groups.

There was little difference between those who didn't know they were receiving echinacea and those who knew they were taking echinacea, which suggests the herb didn't have a major impact.

However, a subgroup who rated echinacea's effectiveness highly on a form at the start of the study—and were given a placebo during the study—had the shortest duration colds. Their illnesses were 2½ days shorter than those who weren't taking pills.

The study also found 62% of patients who didn't receive pills reported headaches compared with less than 50% of patients in the other three treatment groups.

Researchers concluded that there can be a placebo effect with the common cold, particularly in people who believe in a therapy, but the effect is "limited" and "not large."

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White-space puts Wi-Fi on steroids

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The price of information

Academics are starting to boycott a big publisher of journals

政務委員/ 國科會主委

Today's Wearable Computers/Devices to Keep Track of Calories,

By NICK BILTON

By ROY FURCHGOTT

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In matters of clever design, nature has often got there first

Massive Solar Flare Sends Radiation Storm to Earth

IBM cuts bit size to 12 atoms

IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

微中子確實比光速快?/ Chips the Size of Blood Cells

ICARUS Team Rebuts CERN's Faster-Than-Light Findings

New round of experiments renew fight over major Einstein theory.

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霍金70歲 英特爾幫他另覓溝通工具

感謝有您 邁向2012

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偽造家人的來電顯示

The Higgs boson,

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Fantasy turned reality

Those searching for the Higgs boson may at last have cornered their quarry

presidential address was broadcast on radio

Smartphones could have better energy efficiency

Energy | 29.11.2011

Smartphones could have better energy efficiency, Finnish researchers say

Aalto University researchers claim they've quadrupled the energy efficiency of smartphones. This could improve mobile Internet access in developing countries.

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醫療專家系統

Internet TV Service

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy, machine whisperers, died on October 8th and 24th respectively, aged 70 and 84

醫護夥伴機器人（Partner Robot）

‘A Toad-Eat-Toad World,’ and Other Tales of Animal Cannibals

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By NATALIE ANGIER

Published: October 31, 2011

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

Grading the Digital School

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: October 22, 2011

Grading the Digital School

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Innovation works in mysterious ways

Japan’s Standardized Baseballs Are Popular With Pitchers

Japan’s Standardized Baseballs Are Popular With Pitchers

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感謝有您邁向2012

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