Salesforce.com becomes sales channel, showcase for Google software applications

Monday, April 14, 2008

Salesforce.com becomes sales channel, showcase for Google software applications

By Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Salesforce.com Inc.'s online software service is becoming a showcase for Google Inc.'s e-mail and other widely used applications, deepening a relationship that has spurred speculation Google eventually will buy its smaller partner.

Besides selling Google's programs to its 41,000 business customers, Salesforce.com will integrate the suite of applications into its own service, which helps companies track and identify customers' needs.

The agreement to be announced Monday builds upon several years of collaboration between Salesforce.com and Google, which are trying to persuade more businesses to subscribe to software services over Internet connections instead of buying programs that must be installed on individual computers.

The online approach, sometimes called ''cloud computing,'' represents a potential threat to bigger software makers like Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG that make most of their money from selling individual licenses and then charging additional maintenance fees.

Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff has become cloud computing's chief evangelist since he left Oracle to found his San Francisco-based company nine years ago. He believes his preaching will resonate even more with Google applications in Saleforce.com's platform.

''This will make it easier for us to convince more businesses to stop buying Microsoft Office and switch to better services like this that are emerging in the cloud,'' Benioff said.

The additional applications will help make Salesforce.com's service more attractive, but ''the real winner here is Google,'' said Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann. ''This gives them a (business) sales channel'' at no additional cost.

Salesforce.com also intends to sell customer support for Google's applications later this year.

Reports that Salesforce.com wanted to plug Google's applications into its service surfaced nearly a year ago, triggering chatter about a possible acquisition.

The takeover talk then cooled after Salesforce.com disclosed that it had merely retooled its service to make it easier for its customers to distribute their ads through Google's Internet-leading search engine.

Benioff declined to comment about a possible sale to Google. Dave Girouard, who oversees Google's applications, also declined to comment about the company's interest in buying Salesforce.

Salesforce.com and Google have more in common than a passion for cloud computing.

Both companies have cultivated fun-loving cultures and set up philanthropic foundations funded by a portion of their profits.

And the stocks of both companies have soared more than fivefold since their initial public offerings in 2004.

With annual sales of $749 million, Salesforce.com currently has a market value of more than $7 billion.

That's well within the means of Google, which has a market value of $145 billion and $14 billion in cash. The Mountain View-based company's most expensive acquisition so far has been its recently completed $3.2 billion purchase of Internet ad service DoubleClick Inc.

Google's suite of applications includes word processing, spreadsheets, calendaring and instant messaging, as well as e-mail. All the programs are hosted over the Internet, which Google views as an advantage because users can access the applications from any computer with an online connection.

But the convenience hasn't won over most major companies, many of which worry about security issues and the ability to use the programs off-line. ''There is still a big trust issue, rightly or wrongly,'' Wettemann said.

Google offers free basic versions of its applications and charges an annual fee of $50 per worker for a deluxe package with more options.

More than 500,000 businesses and millions of people use the programs, according to Google. The company hasn't specified how many of the businesses pay fees for the premium applications.

The programs haven't been a big moneymaker so far. Last year, Google collected less than $200 million from software licensing while raking in $16.4 billion from advertising sales.

Water Is the Next Oil

Water Is the Next Oil

VC hopes to capitalize on an increasingly scarce resource.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

By Kevin Bullis

Oil, of course, dominates world economics and politics. But it's conceivable that some day, alternative fuels and other clean technologies, combined with the rising costs of extracting oil, could diminish petroleum's influence. But by that time, another scarce commodity--water--could come to dominate geopolitics, and venture capitalists are starting to take note.

The thinking goes like this. Biofuels are enormous consumers of water, says Jim Matheson, a general partner at Flagship Ventures, a venture capital firm in Cambridge, MA. And water is not always abundant where it's most needed. "So, increasingly you're going to see water as a scarce resource. I think it's going to drive not just economics but also a lot of geopolitical dynamics. So, we're trying to find technologies that can allow us to plug into this enormous value chain." He's interested, for example, in membranes and other water-treatment technologies that will allow biofuel-makers and others to reuse water. But he says there's a big challenge to making these new technologies successful. There has to be a way to scale them up to bring down costs. "The problem is that water is like the Internet. People love it and they use it all the time, but they don't want to pay for it," he says. "So the question is, how do you come up with a business model that actually works?"

One option, he says, is to develop technologies that can both clean up wastewater and extract energy from the waste, effectively adding value to the water. Matheson spoke as part of a panel on "green technology" investment at the Venture Summit East conference in Boston yesterday.

Tags: energy, petroleum, oil, geopolitics, membrane, water

Friday, April 11, 2008

IBM's Faster, Denser Memory

Researchers led by Stuart Parkin are developing a new type of memory chip that combines the benefits of magnetic hard drives and flash.

By Kate Greene

Researchers at IBM have demonstrated the feasibility of an entirely new class of data storage, called racetrack memory, which promises to combine the data storage of a magnetic hard disk with the ruggedness and speed of Flash memory, at relatively low cost. In addition, racetrack memory wouldn't degrade over time as Flash does. While still in the early days of research, these benefits could make racetrack memory an attractive replacement for both hard disks and Flash memory, leading to ever smaller computers and extremely inexpensive memory for iPods and other portable devices that now rely on Flash.

In this week's issue of Science, the team, led by Stuart Parkin, a physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, described a way to read and write multiple bits of data to magnetic nanowires, an important step toward making a prototype. Previous work by the group illustrated that the fundamental concept of racetrack memory was feasible, but the researchers hadn't yet demonstrated the manipulation of multiple bits. "It's a milestone in developing a prototype," says Parkin.

Racetrack memory consists of an array of billions of nanowires on silicon; each nanowire is able to hold hundreds of bits of data. Because the nanowires are so small, racetrack memory has the potential to be many times more dense than Flash. Unlike Flash memory, in which bits are stored as electrical charges in a transistor, racetrack memory stores data as a series of distinct magnetic fields along the wire. Flash memory degrades over time as charges leak and memory cells wear out, but racetrack memory, which uses magnetic fields, doesn't have this problem. And compared to the hard disks used in laptops and PCs, which store data on a bulky, spinning platter, racetrack memory has no moving parts and can be built in silicon, making it more robust.

Data is encoded onto racetrack memory by changing the magnetic properties along the wire, creating a series of magnetic barriers--called domain walls--and gaps between. Just as electrical charge represents a bit in a Flash memory cell, the gaps between two domain walls represent bits in racetrack memory. To read and write data from the nanowire, the domain walls move along the tracks, single file, past where stationary read and write heads are positioned.

That is, at least in theory, how it would work. But before the current research, no one had shown that multiple domain walls--essentially, data--could move along a nanowire without being destroyed. In order to move the domain wall down the nanowire, Parkin uses principles from spintronics, which takes advantage of the quantum mechanical property of electrons, called spin. He injects a small electrical current into the nanowire. As a result, the electrons in the current become "polarized," so that their spins are uniformly oriented, and when they contact a domain wall, they transfer the orientation of their spin to the atoms in the wall. This hand-off changes the magnetic moment of the atoms in the domain wall, shifting it forward on the racetrack, and likewise shifts all the domain walls on the racetrack forward, explains Parkin.

Keeping Track: Vertically oriented nanowires (top left, middle) illustrate how electric current is used to slide tiny magnetic patterns around the nanowire “racetrack” where a device can read and write data. A device reads data from the stored pattern (top right) by measuring the magnetoresistance of the patterns. Writing data (the two images below the read head) can be done by applying an electrical current to a second nanowire at a right angle to the data-storing wire. It is possible to fabricate the nanowires in a vertical array (middle right) and horizontally (bottom two images). Credit: IBM

"This is the first time that someone has demonstrated that you can move two or three of these domain walls without upsetting them or causing them to interfere," Parkin says. Parkin notes that it could take four years before he has a racetrack memory prototype, and three more years to commercialize it.

The appeal of racetrack memory, says Igor Zutic, professor of physics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is that it can "unify the best properties of inexpensive, high-density storage of magnetic hard drives with high-speed operation of random-access memory in a single device, while avoiding their main shortfalls, such as speed and cost, respectively."

The next step, Parkin says, is to implement a device to read the bits of data. He suspects that this will be fairly straightforward, because he could use pre-existing technology. In 2004, Parkin developed the small magnetic device that reads data from magnetic disk drives, and these devices, called magnetic tunnel junctions, would be sensitive enough to read the tiny magnetic fields produced by the domain walls in the nanowires.

Microsofts „Open XML“

Ein Dateiformat für die Computer der Zukunft

Von Carsten Knop

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Der Geschäftsführer von Microsoft Deutschland Berg: "Regierungen profitieren"

02. April 2008 Nach heftigem Streit mit Wettbewerbern und Kommunen wie der Stadt München ist das neue Dokumentenformat „Open XML“ des amerikanischen Softwarekonzerns Microsoft als Standard der internationalen Normungsorganisation ISO akzeptiert worden. „Dabei geht es um eine Antwort auf die Frage, wie Daten aus Dokumenten, die vor 20 Jahren von einem Computer gespeichert worden sind, auch in 40 Jahren noch lesbar sein werden. Das Open-XML-Format zeigt privaten Computernutzern, Unternehmen, aber auch öffentlichen Institutionen wie Archiven einen Weg, Daten zukunftssicher zu machen“, sagt Dorothee Belz, Direktorin Law and Corporate Affairs von Microsoft Deutschland.

Um die hiermit verbundenen technischen Schwierigkeiten zu lösen, braucht man standardisierte Dateiformate, die unabhängig von einem Programm eines Softwareherstellers funktionieren, den es möglicherweise an einem fernen Tag in der Zukunft nicht mehr gibt. Die meisten Bürodokumente der Welt sind mit einem Programm gespeichert worden, das vom weltmarktführenden Softwarehersteller Microsoft stammt, sei es mit Word, Excel oder Powerpoint.

Aber für diese Daten gab es bisher kein zukunftssicheres Standardformat. Der erste Standardisierungsversuch für das von Microsoft hierzu ausersehene „Office Open XML“-Format war im September 2007 gescheitert. Nach der jüngsten Abstimmungsrunde steht der Standardisierung durch das ISO nun aber nichts mehr im Weg.

Auch von Linux und Mac OS genutzt

Damit ist „Office Open XML“ nun wie „HTML“ (das Dateiformat des Internets) oder „PDF“ (als Standard für Dokumente, die von einem Betrachter nicht mehr verändert werden können) ein offener Standard für den Austausch von Dokumentenformaten. Die Anerkennung als ISO-Standard ist in den vergangenen Jahren zunehmend wichtiger geworden, vor allem weil Regierungen und Behörden im Rahmen ihrer Beschaffungsentscheidungen den Einsatz standardisierter Formate fordern.

Microsoft hatte das Format mit dem Dateikürzel „.xml“ mit dem Bürosoftware-Programmpaket Office 2007 eingeführt. Der Standard hat seither Verbreitung in der Softwareindustrie gefunden und wird von verschiedenen Technologieplattformen verwendet, einschließlich der Betriebssysteme Linux, Windows, Mac OS und Palm OS.

„Anwender und Regierungen profitieren“

Um die Anerkennung als ISO-Standard hatte es - wie in der wettbewerbsintensiven Technologiebranche üblich - in den vergangenen Monaten Streit gegeben. Ein Teil der Industrie um IBM, Google oder auch Sun Microsystems wehrte sich dagegen. Die Gruppe verweist darauf, dass das konkurrierende Format ODF („Open Document Format“) schon als ISO-Standard akzeptiert worden sei. Die Anerkennung von „Open XML“ sei daher unnötig und mache nur den Kunden das Leben schwerer, weil sich die beiden Formate nicht miteinander vereinbaren lassen.

„Open XML“-Dateiformate sind für die Übertragung bisheriger Dokumente des Microsoft-Programmpaktes „Office“ optimiert, was die Übertragung mehrerer Milliarden dieser Dokumente erleichtert. „Von dieser Entscheidung profitieren Technologieanwender und Regierungen, denn sie können das Dokumenten-Format wählen, das am besten ihren Ansprüchen genügt“, sagte Achim Berg, der Vorsitzende der Geschäftsführung von Microsoft Deutschland, im Anschluss an die Entscheidung. Durch die Anmerkungen von Fachleuten im Rahmen des Verfahrens habe der Standard auch noch deutlich verbessert werden können.

Text: F.A.Z.
Bildmaterial: dpa

Phishing with Ease

Phishing with Ease

Ninja hackers vs. the lazy mobs who want your credit-card number.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

By Erica Naone

Billy Rios and Nitesh Dhanjani spoke about phishing today at the computer-security conference Black Hat 2008, in Washington, DC. (Phishers, who set up websites that resemble legitimate sites in order to gain access to personal information that can be used for identity theft, are searching for good folk who'll hand over their passwords and credit-card numbers when asked.) Rios and Dhanjani trace phishers, starting from their dangled sites, back through compromised servers, to the forums where identities are bought and sold for as little as 50 cents each. "Are these phishers really the sophisticated, Einsteinian ninja hackers that the media makes them out to be?" asks Dhanjani.

It's a good question. I swore off my cell phone this morning after seeing David Hulton of Pico Computing and a man known only as "Steve" show how their sophisticated ninja hacking could be used to listen in on my phone conversations, read my texts, and possibly even gain control of my cell phone's core, the sim card, and use it to spy on me through my phone's microphones even when I'm not actively making a call. But I'll be honest with you: I'm going to go home and return to business as usual on my cell phone. I doubt that David and Steve will be around the corner from me. And although they say their process--which can decrypt the security on voice and SMS signals sent through the popular Global System for Mobile communications network--will be open source and also available as a commercial device, a would-be spy is still looking at $1,000 worth of equipment to get into the business of listening to me talk recipes with Mom.

On the other hand, phishing kits--which can be used to compromise a server, set up a fake site, and e-mail sensitive information wherever you want it to go--are easy to come by, according to Rios and Dhanjani. By slinging a little lingo, Rios says that he convinced a phisher to give him a set of 100 kits, which, had he chosen to use them, would have allowed him to set up fake versions of Amazon.com, Bank of America, and a slew of other sites. The kits are so easy to deploy, he says, that a would-be phisher doesn't even need to be able to read the code in which they're written. The fact is made even more evident by the barely hidden back doors scattered through the kits, ready to return information to the phisher who provided the kits, as well as the phisher who sets them up. Rios and Dhanjani, working on their own time, found a network of people all too willing to sell them identities, give them phishing kits, and sell them devices to collect credit-card information from ATMs.

"We could have kept following the trails for 10 years," Rios says to a group of us after the presentation. Solutions are hard to come by, the two researchers say, as long as personal information remains static (such as in the form of social-security numbers). To even begin to make a dent, they say, companies must raise the bar a little, so that would-be phishers need a little more in the way of technical skills in order to pull off their exploits. For example, Rios says, it might help if sites requiring authentication put a cookie on the browsers of legitimate users and only allow users to log in if they have the cookie.

In the meantime, Rios says that he's gotten paranoid about using ATMs: he even feels for the skimmers that can be installed over the pinpad or the card swipers to steal data. That's a paranoia that could stick with me. I find that I view hordes of lazy phishers who want my credit-card number as a more immediate threat than a ninja hacker, against whom my only real defense is to unplug.

Tags: security, Black Hat, cracking, GSM, phishing

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

A New Memory Company

Intel and STMicroelectronics have formed a joint venture that plans to commercialize phase-change memory by the end of the year.

In the era of iPods and smart phones, flash memory rules: it's small and rugged, and it keeps getting cheaper. But on the heels of flash comes faster, even more robust technology called phase-change memory, which is just starting to come out of the lab. Now Numonyx, a joint venture that combines the flash and phase-change memory efforts of Intel and STMicroelectronics, has officially launched its operations. In doing so, the company has taken a leading spot in the burgeoning phase-change memory industry. By the end of this year, Numonyx expects to commercialize phase-change memory, and by the middle of the next decade, the company hopes to make it increase its storage capacity to render it competitive with flash as a solid-state drive replacement.

Phase-change memory, which uses a glassy material, stores information via a change in its physical state, rather than using electrical charges, as in flash. A tiny electrode heats each memory cell; the cell's state depends on the manner in which it is heated, and it subsequently represents either a 1 or a 0.

At a press conference in San Francisco on Monday, Brian Harrison, CEO of Numonyx, said that phase-change memory has all the benefits of NOR and NAND flash technologies. (NOR is used in cell phones to execute code, and NAND has been used as a storage memory.) For instance, said Harrison, phase-change memory can have data read from it quickly like NOR flash, and data can be written to it as quickly as in NAND flash. In addition, phase-change memory doesn't wear out, losing bits of data over time, as flash memory does.

Next phase: This prototype phase-change memory chip has 128 megabits of capacity. Numonyx, a startup that combines memory technology from Intel and STMicroelectronics, will be manufacturing these chips later this year. Credit: Intel

In the near term, phase-change memory could replace the expensive and energy-consuming random access memory in cell phones, and in a few more years, it could potentially become a cost-effective alternative to flash. A customer who uses a phone with phase-change memory might notice extended battery life, said Harrison. "Intel and STMicroelectronics have been working [together] on phase-change memory for more than five years," he said. "We have a product today that we are sampling, and expect to bring it to market this year. I believe it will be one to two years before it becomes widely available."

Numonyx is made of the combined memory assets of Intel and STMicroelectronics, which include intellectual property, fabrication facilities, and employees. With the announcement, the company becomes the leading provider of NOR flash memory, and the third largest provider of nonvolatile memory (technology that retains data when the power supply is off), with a combined revenue of approximately $3 billion. It trails both Samsung and Toshiba in overall nonvolatile-memory market share.

Making memory: Phase-change memory devices are mass-produced on silicon wafers such as the one above.
Credit: Intel

In February, Intel and STMicroelectronics announced a new type of phase-change memory technology that doubles the storage capacity of each memory cell. Edward Dollar, chief technology officer of Numonyx, suspects that this improved phase-change memory, which has been transferred to Numonyx, could be ready to be mass-produced by the end of the decade. By doubling the capability of phase-change memory, he says, "it starts to become competitive" with the type of flash memory used in solid-state hard drives.

Samsung is also developing phase-change memory. But Numonyx is in a good position to lead the industry in phase-change memory, says Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, a market research firm. "In phase-change memory, there's really only a handful of companies who are dabbling in the technology," he says.

Numonyx is funded by $150 million from the Francisco Partners investment firm, and it makes use of more than 2,500 issued patents; another 1,000 patents are pending from its parent companies.

Inflation klettert auf Rekordhoch

Von Philip Plickert

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31. März 2008 Die Verbraucherpreise sind im Euro-Raum im März um 3,5 Prozent gegenüber dem Vorjahresmonat gestiegen. Das teilte das europäische Statistikamt Eurostat am Montag als Ergebnis einer ersten Schätzung mit. Im Februar hatte die Jahresteuerung 3,3 Prozent, im Januar 3,1 Prozent betragen. Die Europäische Kommission zeigte sich über den starken Preisanstieg beunruhigt. „Das ist keine gute Zahl. Das ist mehr, als wir erwartet haben“, sagte eine Sprecherin der Kommission in Brüssel. Die Inflationsrate von 3,5 Prozent ist die höchste seit Beginn der Währungsunion 1999. Nimmt man einen gewichteten Durchschnitt der Inflationsraten der teilnehmenden Länder, so war zuletzt Mitte 1992 ein so starker Anstieg der Verbraucherpreise zu messen. Besonders hoch war die Teuerung in den vergangenen Monaten in Slowenien mit mehr als 6 Prozent sowie in Griechenland, Spanien, Luxemburg, Zypern und Malta mit mehr als 4 Prozent.

Einzelheiten über die Ursachen des nun beschleunigten Preisauftriebs wird Eurostat erst in zwei Wochen veröffentlichen. Zum Teil ist er mit dem Anstieg des Ölpreises auf deutlich über 100 Dollar je Barrel (159 Liter) zu erklären. Der vom Hamburgischen Weltwirtschaftsinstitut berechnete Rohstoffpreisindex lag im Februar 15 Prozent über dem Vorjahreswert. Auch Nahrungsmittel haben sich in den vergangenen Monaten zum Teil erheblich verteuert. Ohne die höheren Energiekosten, die etwa ein Zehntel des statistischen Warenkorbes ausmachen, hätte die Inflation im Februar im Euro-Raum nur bei 2,5 Prozent statt bei 3,3 Prozent gelegen. Die Kommission warnte abermals vor überzogenen Lohnsteigerungen als Reaktion auf die höhere Inflationsrate. „Wir müssen Zweitrundeneffekte vermeiden“, sagte die Sprecherin. Eine inflationäre Spirale aus Löhnen und Preisen wäre nicht im Interesse der Verbraucher.

„Eine negative Überraschung“

Die verfügbaren Einkommen in Deutschland sind im vergangenen Jahr um rund 2 Prozent gestiegen. Die Verdienste der Arbeitnehmer nahmen jedoch durchschnittlich nur um 1,4 Prozent zu - weniger als die Inflation. Am Freitag hatte das deutsche Statistische Bundesamt die Teuerungsrate für März auf 3,1 Prozent geschätzt, nach 2,8 Prozent im Februar. Anders als Eurostat berücksichtigen die deutschen Statistiker in ihrem Warenkorb auch die Mieten für selbstgenutztes Wohneigentum, die einen dämpfenden Effekt auf die Preisentwicklung haben. Deutsche Bankvolkswirte hatten nicht mit einer so starken Beschleunigung der Inflation im Euro-Raum gerechnet. Die Zahlen seien „eine negative Überraschung“, sagte Christoph Weil von der Commerzbank. Die Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) gerate damit immer mehr in ein Dilemma, da neben der Teuerung auch die Konjunkturrisiken zunähmen. Nach den jüngsten Umfragen der Kommission hat sich die Wirtschaftsstimmung im Euro-Raum im März vor dem Hintergrund der Finanzkrise stärker als erwartet eingetrübt. Der Sammelindex zur Einschätzung der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung sank von 100,2 auf 99,6 Punkte.

Zum Thema

• Kommentar: Der Inflationsschock
• Mehr als drei Prozent Inflation im März
• Die Rückkehr der Stagflation

Ihrem Auftrag folgend, muss die EZB für Preisstabilität sorgen, die sie als eine mittelfristige Inflationsrate von knapp unter 2 Prozent definiert. Im vergangenen Jahr betrug die Teuerung durchschnittlich 2,15 Prozent. In diesem Jahr dürfte der Wert deutlich steigen. Die EZB-Ökonomen rechnen in ihrer neuesten Projektion vom März mit einer Spanne von 2,6 bis 3,2 Prozent. Im kommenden Jahr werde der Anstieg der Verbraucherpreise mit 2,1 Prozent wieder näher am Ziel der Preisstabilität liegen. Zugleich haben sich hochrangige Vertreter der EZB in den vergangenen Wochen immer wieder besorgt über bestehende Preisrisiken geäußert.

Text: F.A.Z.
Bildmaterial: ddp, F.A.Z.

Women’s attractiveness judged by software

March 31st, 2008
Women’s attractiveness judged by software

According to Haaretz, an Israeli team of computer scientists has developed a software that ranks facial attractiveness of women. Instead of identifying basic facial characteristics, this software has been designed to make aesthetic judgments — after training. The lead researcher said this program ‘constitutes a substantial advance in the development of artificial intelligence.’ It is interesting to note that the researchers focused on women only. Apparently, men’ faces are more difficult to grade. But read more…

But read more…

Rating women faces

The picture on the left shows how the system is initially calibrated: “Facial coordinates with hair and skin sample regions as represented by the facial feature extractor. Coordinates are used for calculating geometric features and asymmetry. Sample regions are used for extracting color values and smoothness.” (Credit: Amit Kagian, Tel Aviv University, Israel).

This software has been developed by Amit Kagian, a Tel Aviv University (TAU) student, for his master’s thesis in computer science. He has been supervised by Gideon Dror, an associate professor in computer science at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo and Eytan Ruppin, a TAU professor who manages the Complex Network Systems Lab.

This software has been developed by Amit Kagian, a Tel Aviv University (TAU) student, for his master’s thesis in computer science. He has been supervised by Gideon Dror, an associate professor in computer science at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo and Eytan Ruppin, a TAU professor who manages the Complex Network Systems Lab.

Here are some details about how the software was tested. “In the first stage, 30 human participants were asked to rate from 1-7 the beauty of several dozen pictures. Participants did not say why they ranked certain faces as more beautiful than others. The pictures were then processed and mathematically mapped. ‘We came up with 98 numbers that represent the geometric shape of the face, as well as characteristics like hair color, smoothness of skin and facial symmetry,’ Kagian explains. Participants’ rankings of the pictures were also input in the computer.”

But what was the second stage? “‘We input new pictures of faces into the computer and it graded them based on the information it had.’ Human subjects were then asked to rank the new pictures too. ‘The computer produced impressive results: the rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.’ According to Kagian, the key achievement is that the computer operated according to certain perceptions of beauty that were not input into it, but learned by processing the data it received.”

For more information, the researchers published their latest results in Vision Research, an Elsevier journal, under the name “A machine learning predictor of facial attractiveness revealing human-like psychophysical biases” (Volume 48, Issue 2, January 2008, Pages 235-243).

Here is a link to the abstract. “Recent psychological studies have strongly suggested that humans share common visual preferences for facial attractiveness. Here, we present a learning model that automatically extracts measurements of facial features from raw images and obtains human-level performance in predicting facial attractiveness ratings. The machine’s ratings are highly correlated with mean human ratings, markedly improving on recent machine learning studies of this task. Simulated psychophysical experiments with virtually manipulated images reveal preferences in the machine’s judgments that are remarkably similar to those of humans.” And here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 10 pages, 625 KB).

And here is a paragraph excerpted from the conclusions. “Our analysis has revealed that symmetry is strongly related to the attractiveness of averaged faces, but is definitely not the only factor in the equation since about half of the image-features relate to the ratings of averaged composites in a similar manner as the symmetry measure. This suggests that a general movement of features toward attractiveness, rather than a simple increase in symmetry, is responsible for the attractiveness of averaged faces.”

The same researchers presented their previous results at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference held in Vancouver, Canada, on December 4-9, 2006. Here is a link to
this presentation called “A Humanlike Predictor of Facial Attractiveness” (PDF format, 8 pages, 78 KB). Here is the first paragraph. “This work presents a method for estimating human facial attractiveness, based on supervised learning techniques. Numerous facial features that describe facial geometry, color and texture, combined with an average human attractiveness score for each facial image, are used to train various predictors. Facial attractiveness ratings produced by the final predictor are found to be highly correlated with human ratings, markedly improving previous machine learning achievements. Simulated psychophysical experiments with virtually manipulated images reveal preferences in the machine’s judgments which are remarkably similar to those of humans.”

As you can see, there some shared words between these two works. The figure above is featured in both papers.

Finally, why did the researchers limit themselves to women? Haaretz says men’s faces are more difficult to rank.

Sources: Ofri Ilani, Haaretz, Israel, March 21, 2008; and various websites

Apple has biggest impact on world consumers: survey

Apple has biggest impact on world consumers: survey
Mon Mar 31, 2008 7:18am EDT
By Rachel Sanderson

LONDON (Reuters) - The Apple brand has the biggest impact on the world's consumers, while Microsoft and the United States nation brand are those considered most in need of a remake, a survey showed on Monday.

The poll by online magazine brandchannel.com asked its readers to identify the brands with the greatest impact on their lives, and say how they affected readers' behaviour and their view of the world.

The nearly 2,000 professionals and students who voted named Apple overwhelming winner. The creator of the iPod and Mac computer triumphed in six categories including most inspiring brand and the one readers cannot live without.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker was also a winner, but it received the dubious honor of the brand most readers wanted to argue with, and the one they most wanted to revamp. Voted into second place in the category was brand USA.

"Apple has clearly captured the hearts and minds by leading across most categories. Others, such as the USA nation brand, which ranks highly as most in need of a rebrand, requires help according to our readers," said brandchannel editor Jim Thompson.

The poll does not take account of economic brand value, the murky science of assigning a financial value to brand, which regularly puts Coca-Cola Co's (KO.N) Coke in first place.

One of the more surprising results from the survey, was that few of the respondents -- who came from 107 countries -- thought that there was such a thing as a "green" brand.

The result comes despite millions of dollars spent by some of the world's biggest companies to rebrand themselves as "environmentally-friendly".
Discussing Apple, one anonymous reader said there was "never a dull moment" with the company "reinventing itself all along and providing, over and over again, a new perspective on what we thought was carved in stone".

At the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft had "gone from innovative and bold to stodgy and follower," said another unnamed reader.

After Apple, the most inspiring brands were Nike, Coca-Cola, Google and Starbucks, the survey showed.

The same brands, except with Virgin in place of Starbucks, were the brands most readers would "like to sit next to at a dinner party".

The rankings by brandchannel.com were based on answers from almost 2,000 readers from 107 countries. The survey was conducted online from February 24 to March 9.

(Editing by Richard Balmforth)

ISO to announce Microsoft Open XML result Wednesday

SO to announce Microsoft Open XML result Wednesday
Mon Mar 31, 2008 1:14pm EDT

powered by Sphere Sphere

GENEVA (Reuters) - The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) said it would reveal on Wednesday whether Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) had won the support needed to have its document format made into a global industry standard.

"Because ISO needs first to inform its worldwide membership of national standards bodies of these results, a press release on this subject will be issued on Wednesday, 2 April, 2008," ISO spokesman Roger Frost said in an e-mail message.

The results of the vote, which closed on Saturday night, had been on Monday.

Microsoft has pushed hard for international certification of Open Office XML (OOXML), the default file-saving format of Microsoft Office 2007, to improve its chances of winning government contracts and encourage developers to use the technology for new software applications and content.

The company did not get the two-thirds majority needed to clinch the standard in an original vote in September, but got another shot in a second ballot that closed on Saturday night.

Opponents of the Microsoft certification had argued that introducing a rival to the already ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF), developed by Sun Microsystems (JAVA.O: Quote, Profile, Research), defeated the purpose of having standards.

Search engine giant Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research), which uses the open ODF standard in its document and spreadsheet applications, also lent its weight to the anti-Microsoft camp, citing concerns about the dependence of OOXML on Microsoft proprietary formats.

The ODF technology allows users to save documents in a variety of formats, including Microsoft's. While OOXML originally did not allow saving text and spreadsheet documents as ODF files, Microsoft later made it possible to do so.

The ISO hosted a ballot resolution meeting last month to give delegations a chance to run through concerns raised in September and reconsider their positions. They had until midnight March 29 to change their votes.

(Reporting by Laura MacInnis and Georgina Prodhan, editing by Will Waterman)

Adobe startet kostenlose Online-Version von Photoshop

Computer | 28.03.2008

Adobe startet kostenlose Online-Version von Photoshop

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Angeblich kinderleicht: Bildbearbeitung mit dem neuen Photoshop-Express

Für die Bildbearbeitung ist das Programm ein Klassiker. Und bisher war er teuer. Doch jetzt gibt es eine erste Gratis-Version des Photoshop von Adobe im Internet.

Der US-Software-Konzern Adobe hat eine kostenlose Internet-Version seines Bildbearbeitungsprogramms Photoshop gestartet. Jedem Nutzer stünden auch zwei Gigabyte Speicherplatz zu, berichtete der kalifornische Softwarehersteller Donnerstag (28.3.2008). Mit dem Schritt will Adobe den Nutzerkreis seines Programms erweitern. Man wolle den Markennamen in der jungen Generation, die ihre Bilder im Internet lagert, verwaltet und bearbeitet, bekannter machen, teilte Adobe mit.

Mit allen Betriebssystemen kompatibel

Das Programm werde im Internet zur Nutzung zur Verfügung stehen. Damit sei es mit jedem Betriebssystem und Browser kompatibel, erklärte das Unternehmen. Zunächst soll es sich um eine sogenannte Beta-Version handeln, also eine noch nicht ganz ausgereifte Version. Die Anregungen und Kritikpunkte der Nutzer sollen in die Weiterentwicklung einbezogen werden. Für die Express-Version des Programms seien nur sehr geringe Kenntnisse der Bildbearbeitung am Computer nötig, betonte Adobe. Die Vollversion von Photoshop richtet sich auch an professionelle Nutzer kostet um die tausend Euro. Viele private Nutzer brauchen aber nur wenige Funktionen.

Harter Wettbewerb um Foto-Amateur-Software

Der Software-Spezialist verschärft damit den Wettbewerb um Fotoamateure, die ein einfaches Programm zur schnellen Bearbeitung ihrer digitalen Fotos zum Beispiel fürs Platzieren auf Websites wollen. Auf dem Markt sind zwar bereits zahlreiche derartige Angebote, auch Google und Microsoft bieten inzwischen internetbasierte Programme an. Adobe hat jedoch einen besonders guten Ruf als Hersteller der professionellen Photoshop-Software, die bei vielen Fotografen und Designern als Standard gilt. Adobe versucht mit Photoshop Express auch populären Webseiten wie shutterfly.com, bei denen Fotos kostenlos online verwaltet werden können, Konkurrenz zu machen.

Die stark abgespeckte Online-Version Photoshop Express ist das erste kostenlose Photoshop-Produkt. Für eine jährliche Gebühr soll es zusätzliche Funktionen wie mehr Speicherplatz oder einen Druck-Dienst geben. (tos)

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Bringing Light to Computers

IBM research could bring the speed of fiber-optic networks to the chips inside personal computers.

By Kate Greene

Researchers at IBM recently announced a nanoscale silicon switch that can direct trillions of bits of data per second within an optical network. The switch could make it possible to incorporate the speed and bandwidth of a telecommunications network into a personal computer, say the researchers. This is an increasingly important goal for engineers as they look for the best design for future multicore machines--computers with more than one processing center.

Directing traffic: IBM has developed silicon switches that can be used to control the flow of data in on-chip optical networks. Each of the eight switches above is made of five ring-shaped resonators. The image was taken with an optical microscope.
Credit: IBM

The advance gives researchers more control over where bits are directed in an optical network smaller than a fingernail. "We're talking about routing a terabit per second through a single switch," says William Green, an IBM researcher who worked on the project. Such performance is comparable to what's achieved by very large racks of mounted equipment for telecommunications fiber optics.

Today's top-of-the-line computers come with two or four general processing cores, but within the next decade, engineers expect to build computers with tens of cores. One of the main problems with making a many-core machine is that it's unclear how to let all the cores communicate efficiently with each other and with other components in the computer that lie off the chip, such as memory. Currently, all of this communication is conducted over metal wires that are etched into chips and circuit boards. But wires have an intrinsic resistance, which limits the speed of data. In addition, the flowing electrons can produce electrical interference and heat that can cause computation errors.

Optical devices and waveguides built into the same silicon used to make chips are promising alternatives to electronic components and metal wires. Within the past few years, there's been a flood of activity in this field, known as silicon photonics, from IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, MIT, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California, to name a few. Researchers have steadily been creating ever more efficient silicon-based devices, such as lasers, modulators that encode data onto light, detectors, and filters that clean up signals as they travel through a network. In fact, Sun Microsystems was recently awarded a $44 million contract from the U.S. Pentagon to investigate approaches for replacing metal wires with beams of light.

While there are many pieces that are necessary for intracomputer optical networks, IBM's switch announcement is an important step toward making such a system practical. "There have been a lot of advances in silicon photonics," says Keren Bergman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, but IBM's switch "is very important for being able to make optical networks on chips." Because the device routes a number of different wavelengths of light to various parts of a chip or the system, engineers don't need to build point-to-point waveguides to each destination in a system. "This enables you to generate and route photons to multiple destinations in a more efficient way," Bergman says.

IBM's switch, which is described in a recent paper in Nature Photonics, is made of connected, resonating rings etched into silicon. The rings are only 200 nanometers tall--much smaller than the dimensions of optical fibers that normally carry light. When the switch is turned on, electrons are sent to a specific ring. These electrons change the way that the ring resonates, which effectively blocks light from passing through. The light bounces off the resonator and is reflected in another direction.

The design is unique for a number of reasons, explains Green. First, the switch does not filter the light based on its wavelength, unlike switches used in telecommunications networks that need to route specific types of light to specific destinations. And the more wavelengths of light that are let through an on-chip network, the more bandwidth is available.

A second distinguishing characteristic, Green notes, is that IBM's switch is able to withstand a variation of about 30 °C, which is crucial to ensuring that the network is reliable. Within any given microprocessor, says Green, hot spots move around on the surface of the chip as a function of number crunching. If these optical interconnects are distributed all over the surface, he says, engineers need to make sure that the hot spots don't change the properties of the devices, so that data can make it to each end of the chip unaltered. The temperature resilience of the switch, Green says, is due, in part, to allowing multiple wavelengths of light through. As the switch changes temperature, it also changes properties, which causes some wavelengths of light to be blocked. But since the switch was designed to route a broad spectrum, it can still function in an environment with a variable temperature.

Green says that it could be five to ten years before this switch finds its way into a commercial machine. IBM has already made ultrasmall optical silicon modulators, but, he says, it will take years to integrate the modulator, the switch, and other components with chip electronics.

Indeed, the promise of silicon photonics produces a new challenge: how to redesign a computer to communicate with light instead of with electrons. "How do you design an interconnected network that really exploits the optics?" asks Bergman. "You can't follow the network design rules of electronics," she says. "There are many things that are going to evolve dramatically as we go forward."

American house prices

American house prices

Grim realty

Mar 26th 2008
From Economist.com

AFTER the gain for some, the pain continues for many American property owners. According to the newly published S&P/Case-Shiller index, house prices in ten metropolitan areas fell by 11.7% in January compared with the year before, the biggest fall since the index was created in 1987. The larger 20-city index tumbled by 10.7%. Sunbelt cities which earlier saw the most dramatic price rises are now enduring the hardest falls. Only Charlotte has yet to succumb to declining prices. The OFHEO's index of homes guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac fell by 3% from 2007, also showing an accelerating slide.

AP

orderpicking warehouse design helpindex

A

ABC storage strategy (short)
ABC storage strategy (long)
Additional time to change aisles
Administration time
Aisle length
Aisle number
References on AS/RS
Authorware

B

Batching
Batching examples
References on Batching
Browser

C

Change aisles
Clarke and Wright
Combined heuristic (short)
Combined heuristic (long)
Cross aisle

D

Depot location (short)
Depot location (long)
Distance between aisles
Download
References on Due Dates

E

Examples of orders

F

First come, first served

H

(Material) Handling equipment
Heuristic (routing)

I

Instructions (on how to use this site)

L

Largest Gap (short)
Largest Gap (long)
Layout of the warehouse
Layout of the storage zones (short)
Layout of the storage zones (long)
Lines per order
Location of depot (short)
Location of depot (long)
References on Layout

M

Material handling equipment

N

Narrow aisle pallet warehouse (short)
Narrow aisle pallet warehouse (long)
Number of aisles

O

Optimal routing algorithm (short)
Optimal routing algorithm (long)
Order examples
Orderpicking process

P

Percentage of picks
Plugin

R

Random storage strategy (short)
Random storage strategy (long)
Rear end
References
Route
Routing examples
Routing strategy
References on Routing

S

Savings algorithm
Seed algorithm
Shelf area warehouse (short)
Shelf area warehouse (long)
Simulate
References on Sorting
Speed in- or outside the aisles (short)
Speed in -or outside the aisles (long)
S-Shape (short)
S-Shape (long)
Storage strategy
References on Storage

T

Time to change aisles
(Administration) Time
Time to pick a line

W

Warehouses (types)
Warehouse layout
Wide aisle pallet warehouse (short)
Wide aisle pallet warehouse (long)
Width of aisle

Z

Zones

How Apple and Google Dominate

How Apple and Google Dominate

Posted by Umair Haque on March 12, 2008 11:14 AM

Last week, I promised to discuss another source of advantage in decay. We're going to zoom out instead, in response to a flurry of announcements from Apple, Google, and would-be competitors – to have a richer discussion in the weeks going forward.

It's funny how flatfooted - how almost inept - everyone else in media, marketing, consumer electronics, mobile, a long and dangerously growing list of industries, seems compared to Apple and Google.

What gives? Why is that everyone that Google and Apple decide to take to the cleaners, well, gets taken to the cleaners?

After all, Apple and Google are radically different companies. Who, it appears, have already divided the next-gen media pie very neatly between them. Google, software. Apple, hardware. Google, search. Apple, conduit. Google, algorithm. Apple, human. Google, geeky, self-effacing ad-quants. Apple, a reality distortion field wearing jeans and a turtleneck.

That's a product market level view - the view from the core. When we invert our traditional vision, and look at them from the edge, Google and Apple are strikingly similar: less like a power couple for whom opposites attract, and more like long-lost siblings.

Much of their DNA is - at least superficially - different. Jobs runs a totalitarian state with equal amounts of fear and love. Sergey and Larry tune - not manage - an organization poised forever on the edge of chaos and anarchy, while Eric Schmidt (who does sit on Apple's board) keeps the gears of the business grinding away.

But many of the most vital components of their DNA are strikingly similar, and that's where the lines between them begin to blur.

The ends they're working towards are similar: Goople aspires to - with laserlike intensity - change the world for the better. And where most of their competitors will sell out everything they believe in for a few bucks and a latte, Goople is deeply, radically purposive: they won't compromise much, if anything, to achieve the goal of changing the world for the better. (One can argue that Google's policy of following local content-filtering policies in China is a notable exception.) You'll never see an ad on Google's homepage, or a Mac that's not a joy to use, even if Bill Gates, Gordon Gekko, and Lucifer held a fire sale, and mortgaged the world to Goople.

And that DNA opens new paths to strategy and advantage. Goople finds value chains and industries in deep strategy decay - where innovation and choice are stale, and consumers are besieged by lameness - like marketing, consumer electronics, TV, and perhaps the most troubled of all, mobile and music. Then Goople utterly eviscerates them: it reconstructs radical new ones - where friction has been vaporized, where complexity and variety explode - and so everyone really is better off. When Steve Jobs makes the iPhone carrier-neutral, kiss the traditional mobile value chain goodbye.

On the flipside, where would-be competitors release a handful of predictable, often crippled products and services a few times a year - hi Nokia, bye Yahoo - Goople floods market space with radical new value propositions, overloading the very circuitry of the industry - still driven by fear of cannibalization - and so short-circuiting the traditional dynamics of competition.

Think the Macbook Air's a crippled, compromised pile of junk? If the early numbers are anything to go by, Apple listened hard enough to understand exactly those features road warriors really need and use, ditched the rest - letting it craft a radical new value proposition, just like that. Funny - that's exactly the story of Google Search, AdWords, and increasingly, Google ads across media; a story competitors just can't seem to get right.

Media isn't just "content" and "pipes". Media is the stuff that stitches together the fabric of production and consumption: it's how producers and consumers interact. So it's likely, that as newspapers, radio stations, and TV networks did yesterday, whoever holds sway over media tomorrow will enjoy supernormal profits for decades, and be able to shape and influence the course of the rest of the economy.

What will that influence look like?

The key components of DNA Google and Apple share let them overthrow yesterday's stale approaches to strategy and advantage, and pursue entirely new ones with a vengeance. Goople does exactly the opposite of what orthodox strategy counsels: it makes peace where there was war, conquers through love instead of hate, listens to instead of shouts at consumers, perhaps most critically, takes huge risks to make the world better instead of avoiding risk to make it worse.

Goople is rewriting the rules of a very stale game: industrial-era strategy itself, which is really the prime mover behind the gathering economic storm on the horizon – but that’s another post.

That was a dense post – so let's kick-start some discussion.

Do you see some of the differences between core and edge more clearly? Can you see some of the similarities between Apple and Google’s DNA? The way the global economy is going, which do you think makes more sense -- core strategy, or edge strategy? How do you think the rest of the media industry can respond to Goople?

Wrap Not, Waste Not

Wrap Not, Waste Not

A mathematical equation may help cut down on holiday waste.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

By Jennifer Chu

Credit: Nicolas Raymond

Each year, reams and reams of wrapping paper are wasted as gift givers tend to overestimate the amount of gift wrap required to festoon their packages. To cut down on all this holiday paper waste, a British mathematician at the University of Leicester has devised a formula for how to most efficiently wrap a present of any shape and size.

In a university press release, the equation's originator, postgraduate student Warwick Dumas, says,

"We have tested different methods of wrapping and our investigations showed that ... cutting the right size of paper will allow consumers to wrap presents in the least amount of time and achieve a classy result."

The formula, which can be applied to any box-shaped item, goes like this:

Area = 2(ab+ac+bc+c²)

"To explain in the most simplistic terms, the minimal area of paper needed to wrap a box-shaped gift is twice the sum of the height times the width, the width times the depth and the height times the depth, plus twice the square of the depth," says Dumas.

In multiple tests, Dumas found that wrapping cubic-shaped objects diagonally used up more paper than wrapping along the edges--except when the object has a square base. Then, the best method is to wrap diagonally, so that the flaps only just meet.

The same equation for box-shaped items may be used to wrap cylindrical gifts whose radius is greater than 87 percent of their height (for example, a squat tin of cookies). Taller cylinders (e.g., tubes of socks) may be best wrapped via a rolling method.

Dumas has teamed up with Bluewater, a major shopping center based in the United Kingdom, to help shoppers reduce their "gift-wrapping footprint." Bluewater plans to hold workshops throughout the holiday season to teach shoppers the ecofriendly wrapping equation.

Of course, minimizing the extra scratch paper you'll need in order to make your gift-wrapping calculations is another problem entirely.

Content, Context, Contrast

Content, Context, Contrast

Recently, I had an experience in New York City that reminded me of the three C's of design.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

I gave a talk at Parsons School for Design in New York City last week, and the school kindly put me up in an old hotel in Washington Square. After I got off the elevator, I was immediately confronted with the skinniest hallway I had ever seen. Entering my actual room, I was surprised at how spacious it was because the ultraslim hallway had signaled to me that I might need to be prepared to assume the Munchkin position in my room.

This experience reminded me of the three C's I try to teach my students as the three core principles of design:

• Content: There needs to be a message or meaning. Everything needs a reason to exist, otherwise it shouldn't.
  
  
• Context: Content doesn't live in a vacuum. A Chanel bag sitting on a shelf at Wal-Mart will only confuse.
  
  
• Contrast: An element is made stronger when a counterelement is offered. Salt tastes saltier after one has had some sugar.
  

In this case, the contrast between the hallway and my room gave me the benefit of feeling that the room was larger. Within the context of giving a lecture and staying the night in New York, the room was nothing spectacular but certainly sufficient. Finally, the question of whether or not this post has content is really up to you. Have a great rest of your day.

How to Think

How to Think

Managing brain resources in an age of complexity.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works. (I often need a 20-minute power nap after loading a lot into my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee. Knowing how my brain operates enables me to use it well.)

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day. The act of making the plan alone is worth it. And even if you revise it often, you're guaranteed to be learning something.

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things. Then, find the things that are not dependent on anything but have the most dependents, and finish them first.

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. That way, when you return to something you've done, you can make it routine. Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world. Much of creativity is learning how to see things properly. Most profound scientific discoveries are surprises. But if you don't document and digest every observation and learn to trust your eyes, then you will not know when you have seen a surprise.

10. Keep it simple. If it looks like something hard to engineer, it probably is. If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler, do it. It will work better, be more reliable, and have a bigger impact on the world. And learn, if only to know what has failed before. Remember the old saying, "Six months in the lab can save an afternoon in the library."

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out? I just use a word processor to schedule all my events, tasks, and commitments, with resolution fading away the farther I look into the future. (It would be nice, though, to have a software tool that would gently help you make the schedule higher-resolution as time passes...)

The second practical note: I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

^{Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "How to Think." Ed Boyden's Blog. Technology Review. 11/13/07. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/boyden/21925/).}

Tags: brain, tagging , contingencies, digital camera, documentation, how to, mistakes, simplicity, synthesis, think, time management, conversation, creativity, logarithmic, planning, thinking, time

How to Stay Young

The easy part is understanding a new technology; what's harder is to think creatively about it.

March/April 2008

By Jason Pontin

On November 20, 1917, at the Battle of Cambrai, a new technology was used successfully for the first time. In a plan conceived by a young British staff officer named J. F. C. Fuller, hundreds of tanks advanced on astonished German trenches. The gains of the British Army were soon lost, but within the year Fuller had planned the tank operations at the Battle of Amiens. There, British tanks broke through the German lines and were followed by Allied infantry, who held the ground thus taken. The Battle of Amiens ended the stalemate of trench warfare and led to the end of the First World War.

After the war, through command of an experimental mechanized brigade, in books, and in journalism (often in collaboration with the ­British military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart), Fuller urged the ­British Army to prepare for a different kind of war. Fuller believed that tanks should be used in concentrated formations for their shocking capacity to penetrate the enemy's defenses. But the ­British ­General Staff thought tanks should be used in support of ­infantry--despite the successes at Cambrai and Amiens, where they had led the advances.

Yet if Fuller and Liddell Hart were unappreciated at home, they found an audience abroad in one imaginative officer, Heinz ­Wilhelm Guderian, who translated their work into German and agitated for the adoption of their ideas by the Wehrmacht.

In his autobiography, Panzer Leader, Guderian wrote that in 1929, "I became convinced that tanks working on their own or in conjunction with infantry could never achieve decisive importance. ... What was needed were armored divisions which would include the supporting arms needed to allow the tanks to fight with full effect." He got his way: starting in May 1940, Guderian led a German armored corps in its blitzkrieg ("lightning war") through the Ardennes forest, a campaign that ended with the fall of France and the evacuation of the British Army at Dunkirk.

Guderian was 51 in 1940, but he had preserved a quality of mind that seems to atrophy in many of us as we grow older: the ­capacity to be unconfounded by new technologies. Guderian was not merely an enthusiast of the new technology of tanks. He did without resistance what Fuller had unsuccessfully entreated his own generals to do: think creatively about how they might be used.

In "A Technology Surges", David Talbot provides a modern analogue in his account of a new military intelligence network called TIGR (or Tactical Ground Reporting System). Developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, TIGR is a "map-centric application that junior officers can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning." It is part of a broader effort the military calls "network-­centric warfare," in which information is swiftly relayed to soldiers. TIGR is popular with junior officers because it allows them to exchange information in a way that recalls the "peer production" common to wikis, rather than relying on whatever information a battalion intelligence officer chooses to disseminate. Yet as John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and a leading proponent of network organization in the military, writes in "Network Warfare", "These technologies are wonders, but generally they have not been accompanied by shifts in military doctrine and organization. ... New organizational forms and practices must develop along with new tools."

For anyone who has invested a lifetime in understanding the uses and benefits of a technology that has become outmoded, it can be supremely hard to think creatively about a new tech­­nology. Our difficulty is that we have powerful emotional reasons to dismiss its capacity to disrupt our established ways.

Elsewhere in the magazine Jason Epstein provides a different example of this melancholy truth ("What's Wrong with the Kindle"). Epstein may be the greatest living publisher: at Random House, where he was editorial director for more than 40 years, he invented the modern paperback, and he cofounded the New York Review of Books and the Library of America. He is certain there will be no large market for electronic readers like Amazon's Kindle (see one cracked open on page 94). Epstein understands that the digital transmission of books is an established fact, but he believes that "the most rational form of digital transmission is not an electronic reader posing as a book but an actual library-quality paperback that has been printed, bound, and trimmed at low cost on demand, created from a digital file at point of sale by a machine like an ATM." In this, he is like the British generals who understood that the tank was an important new technology, but not that it would change warfare.

How can we stay young? How can we be unconfounded by 2008's "10 Emerging Technologies"? Certainly, we must not suspend our critical faculties: not all the scenarios suggested by such technologies are equally plausible, and something of the past always leaks into the future. But we should try to be as little attached to the past as teenagers, and to satisfy our creativity not in the disparagement of new technology but in the contemplation of how it might change our lives. Write and tell me what you think at jason.pontin@technologyreview.com.

Intel, Microsoft Push Parallel Computing

Intel, Microsoft Push Parallel Computing

The companies are providing millions of dollars to bolster practical parallel-computing research.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

By Kate Greene

Yesterday, in a teleconference, Intel and Microsoft announced that they will start to fund serious efforts to make parallel computing mainstream. The companies are injecting $20 million into computer-science research at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, dubbing them the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC).

For decades, parallel computing--the tricky job of dividing programming tasks among a number of processors--has been the province of academics who write programs for supercomputers. But with the advent of multicore chips--chips with more than one processing center--personal computers are on track to become supercomputers as well.

The main problem outlined at yesterday's teleconference is that there is still no consensus on the best way to easily program general-purpose chips, like the ones in consumer computers, which have a large number of cores. Historically, programmers have been able to wait for the next generation of chips to come out to make their programs run faster. Now that the next generation of chips includes multiple cores, it's not as obvious how to divvy up the tasks among the cores to achieve those same gains.

"Programmers have no choice: if they want fast programs, they're going to have to write parallel programs," says Dave Patterson, the director of the UPCRC and a computer-science professor at Berkeley.

Although no details were given on specific research projects, Tony Hey of Microsoft Research mentioned some areas of interest, which include developing parallel code libraries with chunks of code that are ready to use, testing different memory approaches, and exploring different types of parallel languages.

Below is a roundup of the most interesting quotes from the teleconference.

"The shift in hardware technology from a single core to multicore will have a profound effect in the way we do programming in the future. We're really in the midst of a revolution in the computing industry." --Tony Hey, Microsoft Research

"Parallelism is coming not just to high-end systems, but across a very broad slice of computer science, and we expect to permeate every corner of computer science going forward." --Andrew Chien, director of Intel Research

"The technology revolution that Andrew [Chien] outlined means that every computer will be a parallel computer. Every problem must be a parallel problem ... We want to democratize parallelism." --Marc Snir, codirector of the UPCRC and a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois

"My perspective here is, there's not that much that universities haven't invented [in parallel computing], but there was no strong pull from industry because parallelism wasn't pervasive; it was a small subset of the industry ... Now that the pipeline is unclogged, now that there's strong interest from Microsoft and Intel ... work that's been going on for many years will become much more fruitful." --Marc Snir

Tags: microsoft, Intel, multicore, parallel computing, supercomputing