»computing«

The Economist (1.3.2007) investigates in a grant piece the changing role of research and development (R&D) in today's IT industry. What was formerly R&D is now (in the IT sector) blurred together and much more market driven, say R&D changed to 'rD', with a big emphasis on the D. The article gives a great view of U.S. corporate R&D management, as for the Economist journalists talked to many key figures at Google, IBM, HP, Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo.

The Economist: "The Google method means researchers are part of development, says Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt. The company employs very small teams to work on a small number of ideas, some of which may turn into big hits. Failure is an essential part of the process. 'The way you say this is: Please fail very quickly—so that you can try again,' says Mr Schmidt."

Also the conclusion by John Seely Brown, a former director of Xerox PARC is remarkable: "When I started out running PARC, I thought 99 percent of the work was creating the innovation, and then throwing it over the transom for dumb marketers to figure out how to market it. Now I realise that there is at least as much creativity in finding ways to take the idea to market as coming up with the idea in the first place. I would have spent my time differently had I figured this out early on," quotes the Economist.

In his article on refurbished computer models Barry Rehfeld writes in the NY Times (31.12.2006) that it's worth a thought for the sake of environment and resources' protection. "The push is coming from new technology and government initiatives. The most important political change came in July, when the European Union issued its Restrictions on Hazardous Substances. The RoHS directive essentially will require all manufacturers and retailers selling their products in the European Union to greatly reduce the presence of six hazards.
There is nothing like those standards in the United States, but the directive is nonetheless having an impact here. Wal-Mart Stores, for example, said last spring that it would sell the first laptop compliant with the European standards in the United States: a $700 Toshiba model. Other computer makers are quickly following suit," writes Rehfeld. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set up a website for corporate purchasers, but also for private use, to rate electronics equipment http://www.epeat.net/

The story shows quite nicely how European legislation has got an impact on global trade - although IT manufacturers are located in other regions of the world, the U.S. and Asia.

Manfred Dworschak reports in Der Spiegel (18.12.2006) about the forthcoming game "Spore". It allows users to play and supervise evolutionary processes. Its creator is Will Wright who also invented "Sims". The game (according to Wikipedia) plays evolution over five phases, from the pool phase, creating higher forms of life, communities, cities, and in the end space exploration. It's a game to design new worlds, not play combat, hence a single player game. But players may download from a central server the creations from other players. Spore has been already featured by Stephan Johnson in the NY Times (8.10.2006).

The ultra-mega-super computing centers of Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, both Germany, both some 105 kilometers apart, are now interconnected by an ultra-mega-super capacity cabeling that manages 40 Gigabit (40,000,000,000 bits) per second. For the general reader that's amazing but equally incomprehensible. Or, the equivalent 1,300,000 textpages, as explained in a press release by the IT company Alcatel, makes it even worse and drags me to my bookshelf: With the average book of some 300 pages we get to 4333 books what might compare slighly to a small town library. That's really great.

addition: obviously, these people have problems with ultra-mega-super (u-m-s) numbers, as anybody else. The German Alcatel website compares the u-m-s 40 Gigabit per second with 40,000 people with parallel access to broadband Internet, the English website expands it to "15 million people connected to broadband Internet at the same time across the Pacific Ocean."

SETI@home, the popular screen saver that uses your computer's idle time for searching aliens, revitalizes its mission: It switches off for a short break to join forces with other distributed computer projects. At present, computer users could donate their unused computer time only to one project, for instance, SETI, disease research or climate simulation. The new approach puts all these project on one single platform, reports Declan Butler in Nature online (15.12.2005). On top of this new software platform, called BOINC, you may support several projects at once and donate, for instance, 70% to drug research, 20% to check the skies for aliens, and 10% for saving world's climate. More than 300,000 people around the world are already running the BOINC software.
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/051212-10.html

Scientists are impressed by the features of Google Earth to visualize data. Unlike standard geographical information systems (GIS) the web tool is easy to implement and convenient to use. Google Earth maps satellite images onto a virtual globe. Users may zoom in and out to their need and fun. Manfred Dworschak reports in Der Spiegel (31.7.2006) about options for scientists to present their research data in a new way, for instance by combining maps with population densities, disease outbreaks (on a continent's scale) or floods (on a regional or local scale), to name a few ideas.

A new simulation by supercomputers of the Max Planck Institute of meteorology shows the effects of global warming in Germany until the end of this century. On a grid with mesh width' as small as 10km by 10 km the researchers calculated climate change on a not-yet seen regional resolution, reports Gerald Traufetter in Der Spiegel (24.4.2006). The model predicts for some regions a temperature rise of up to 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. Average rain falls are the same, but the winters get more heavy rain, the summers are drier and hotter. For the region around Freiburg in Southwest Germany -- already the warmest place in Germany -- the temperature will rise by 3 degrees. East Germany will see a Mediterranean climate, snowfall in the Alps is declining. Who benefits: Well, the people along the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The climate prediction model shall give evidence for various groups to react on the occurring climate change.

A research paper by American and Dutch computer scientists shows that the newly introduced RFID technology is vulnerable to computer viruses, reports John Markoff for the NY Times (15.3.2006). RFID, short for radio frequency identification tags, are tiny electronic circuits that may be attached to goods, consumer products, generally everything for identification purposes. They are supposed to replace bar codes. The chip is irradiated remotely with microwaves by a scanner. The microwave provides energy for the workings of the chip and code. The chip now replies with processed or stored data, for instance, best-before date information of food. Because anything may be labelled with these tags and thus recorded and tracked RFID technology is compared with an 'Internet of goods.' The security issues are presented at http://www.rfidvirus.org (if the page is offline, check out Google's cache.)

Saul Hansell and John Markoff write about hardware and computer centers used by Google (NY Times, 3.7.2006). It's nothing off the shelf, but tailor-made for Google's needs -- we would have already thought that. However, Google is according to an analyst the fourth biggest maker of servers, behind Dell, HP and IBM. Even more, Google invested in "technologies it designed to reduce its ravenous need for electricity. These computers in turn use software developed with advanced tools that Google also designed itself. There are signs that Google is even preparing to create its own custom microchips," write the authors.