WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
In this week’s offering you can find that windows 8.1 has finally overtaken XP, gasp at Amazon’s Kiva robots, ponder a possible brain cancer cure, look in awe at the Marshall Space Flight Center, be stunned at the idea of open access research from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, applaud Ursula Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards, marvel at a reconstruction of EDSAC, enjoy James Bond demolishing parts of London, and sigh at the sight of stars visible in cities. Alternatively you can browse through the URL for material on batteries, EXIF data, bullet proof graphene, Apple wiping rivals’ music, movie myths, and crypto protocols...
I’m not sure what the Christmas publication schedule for Winding Down is going to be. Normally I would be knocking off shortly, but with one thing and another, Winding Down has been a bit thin on the ground recently, so as long as I have news (i.e. the rest of the western world hasn’t dissolved into a gooey sludge as far as news is concerned), I will continue to produce up to the Sunday before Christmas.
More details in the next issue. And now for issue number 527...
Shorts:
I see that Windows 8.1 has finally managed to overtake Windows XP in terms of usage! That may sound good, but looking at the graphs it seems to me that this achievement has more to do with XP users switching to Windows 7, than a massive surge in Windows 8.1 usage!
For the record, at the start of December the figures were: Windows XP 10.69%, Windows 8.1 10.95%, Windows 7 50.3%... So! (Cue doom laden music) Will XP make a comeback, or does this spell the end for the venerable operating system? I suspect the bookies are backing the latter option, and as my father once told me, the only people who make money from betting are the bookies!
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/windows-81-overtakes-xp-and-breaks-10-perc-mark
As luck would have it, there were two article on Amazon’s latest generation of Kiva robots. The whole way they work is fascinating – sort of bringing the shelves to the workers, rather than having the workers go to the shelves.
The first article is pretty laudatory and uncritical. The second article is much more doom laden, suggesting that robots are going to take over the work of 47% of US workers in the next couple of decades.
My take? This is not the first time machines have displaced substantial numbers of workers. Yes there were problems, but new jobs – jobs which no one had even thought of previously – came into existence to replace the ones lost. Of course, just because something like that has happened several times before, it isn’t a given that it will happen again. However, I’m modestly hopeful that it will also happen this time.
I’d suggest it’s well worth taking a look at these two articles, since they stand at opposite poles of a debate that will only grow in urgency over the coming years.
http://www.cnet.com/news/meet-amazons-busiest-employee-the-kiva-robot/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2855635/techology-business/amazon-robots-working-conditions.html
Brain cancer is a nasty disease. The prognosis is bad (that’s doctor-speak for the chance of survival is very, very, slim). Now, however, researchers at the University of London have discovered that certain cannabinoids – the active chemicals in cannabis – in conjunction with irradiation have been able to halt, and in some cases reverse the situation in mice with brain cancer.
They are currently examining the possibility of trials in humans. Given the life expectancy of people with brain cancer, somehow I don’t think there will be any shortage of volunteers. However, if it does have a dramatic effect on human brain cancer, then I foresee a moral dilemma. Some of the patients will be given a placebo. How soon do you have enough evidence that you can start genuinely treating them? Conventional statistics demands that you finish the trial...
Incidentally, I’m left wondering how much earlier this possible treatment would have been discovered if it hadn’t been for the demonization of cannabis produced by the so-called ‘War on Drugs’?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-cannabis-effect-brain-cancer.html
Homework:
One of the lesser known parts of NASA is the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Not only is it the ground based communications center for the International Space Station, it’s also one of the centers of NASA cutting edge research.
Now the ‘gizmag’ people have produced a gallery of pictures that you can browse through to see what the center is doing. Hot stuff – take a look!
http://www.gizmag.com/marshall-space-flight-center-nasas-hidden-gem/34844/
In an interesting move, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have announced that as of next year, it will only fund research that is released for free immediately after publication. This is a brilliant move that is going to completely change the way research is publicized. The Fund is large enough and powerful enough to ensure that other funds will be forced to consider their publication requirements and more or less have to follow suit.
It’s also a little ironical, and I type this article with just a smidgen of schadenfreude, as the arch-villain of the open source software movement, Bill Gates, commits his fund to open access to research!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/27/gates_foundation_to_insist_on_open_access_science/
Three cheers for Ursula Le Guin, for her short and pithy speech at the National Book Awards. She laid it on the line for those publishers and writers who were listening that books are not just commodities – they are an art. As she said when she wrapped up her six paragraph speech:
“I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech
For Geeks:
If you are visiting the UK in the not too distant future, you must take a trip to Bletchley Park, scene of the UK ‘Enigma’ code crackers in the Second World War. It’s also the home of the UK’s National Museum of Computing, and they are just starting a reconstruction of one of the first computers.
It’s the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), a computer commissioned in 1949. At over six feet high, and taking up a floor area excess of 200 square feet, it was, as they say, a large beast. It was also a really fast piece of kit for those days – a 500kHz CPU (650 instructions a second) and two kB of RAM, using mercury delay lines.
Input and output was via a 5-track teleprinter paper tape via an electromechanical tape reader running at 6 2/3 characters per second. Output was delivered via a teleprinter also at 6 2/3 char/sec – not exactly a high speed interface!
Work on the replica is likely to be complete in a year, but if you’d like to show off to your geek friends, then the manual for the beast and a simulator are available on line. Point your browser at the URL and scroll down to the end of the article for details.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/28/edsac_rebooted/
London:
Something a little different about London this week – some James Bond movie video clips all set in London, allowing you a glimpse of some of the more interesting parts of London. Sadly it doesn’t include the brilliant little piece of the Queen parachuting in to open the Olympic games...
http://londonist.com/2014/12/the-best-james-bond-scenes-set-in-london.php
On a different note, the large majority of us in the UK (especially in London) rarely see the stars. No, we are not all troglodytes living underground, it’s just that there is so much light in the cities at night that you simply can’t see anything except the very brightest stars.
Now, thanks to some very cleaver photography, we can see what the sky above London would look like if you turned off all the lights for a night. Take a look, it’s fabulous!
http://www.itv.com/news/london/2014-12-03/londons-stunning-sky-at-night-free-of-light-pollution/
Scanner:
Feds dig up law from 1789 to demand Apple, Google decrypt smart phones and slabs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/feds_turn_to_1789_law_to_force_
smartphone_makers_to_decrypt_handsets/
It’s 2014. Why is my battery stuck in the ‘90s?
http://www.cnet.com/news/why-batteries-arent-getting-better/
What is EXIF data and how do you remove it from your photos?
http://www.howtogeek.com/203592/what-is-exif-data-and-how-to-remove-it/
Study shows graphene able to withstand a speeding bullet
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-graphene-bullet.html
Apple deliberately wiped rivals’ music from iPods – iTunes court claim
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/04/apple_ipod_itunes_antitrust_court_case/
The 10 most ridiculous movie myths that turned out to be true
http://www.howtogeek.com/203918/the-10-most-ridiculous-movie-myths-that-turned-out-to-be-true/
Crypto protocols held back by legacy, says ENISA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/24/crypto_protocols_held_back_by_legacy_says_enisa/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
7 December 2014
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
