Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Science writer Simon Singh and Tracey Brown from Sense About Science tell us about Libel Reform Week and the campaign to change Britain's libel laws and protect scientific freedom of expression. Simon is currently locked in a legal battle over a comment piece published in the Guardian . Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8 , is performing an audiovisual study as part of Cambridge Science Festival . We went along to the Institute of Astronomy to hear the telescopes he used as his musical instruments. Ian Sample speaks to Kees van Deemter about the importance of being vague. Kees is trying to program computers to be a little more ... erm ... fuzzy
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Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Google executive: ‘Desktops will be irrelevant in three years’
Google's prediction jumps on an obvious trend - but the implications betray the company's growing hubris It's likely that you don't know a lot about John Herlihy, the head of global advertising operations for Google. He's not a publicly-recognised figure in the same way as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or Sergey Brin, and - like many vice-presidents at big corporations - he doesn't get a great deal of time in the limelight. But he is certainly basking in it today, after a series of comments - reported by Silicon Republic - caused a stir around the web. "In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant," he told an audience at University College Dublin. "In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs." "Mobile makes the world's information universally accessible. Because there's information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that's why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models - ubiquity first, revenue later." Various camps reacted in a mixture of ways.
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Google executive: 'Desktops will be irrelevant in three years'
PC speakers also pick up radio
Jon Godfrey likes internet radio stations, but he can hear music coming faintly from his PC speakers whether he is connected to the internet or not I have had a Dell Dimension 8250 for several years, and I have connected to it a set of speakers through which I listen to the radio whilst online. I am receiving a faint but audible music channel, which I can hear whether I am connected to the net or not. Jon Godfrey This seems to be a common example (to judge by a Google search) of radio frequency interference or RFI, though it's not something I've heard on a PC. The speaker wires may be acting as an aerial and picking up a radio signal, which you then hear from the speakers. The loudspeakers may also be implicated: some models seem to have better shielding than others. You could try moving the speaker and mains cables, and folding up (rather than coiling up) any spare bits of wire, or changing to shorter, better-quality shielded speaker cables. If that doesn't work, try adding some ferrite rings to the speaker and mains cables. KSL Consulting has a web page, Solving Radio Interference (RFI) on Computer Speakers , which says: "Bunching the cables with cable ties to reduce their length will reduce the interference, as will winding each speaker cable around ferrite rings (winding at least 10 to 15 turns around the ferrite ring). The ferrite rings act as RFI filters, making the cables inefficient aerials. This reduces the level of the radio signal on the amplifier wiring. Ferrite rings can be purchased from Maplin.co.uk under stock code QT26D ." Maplin and similar stores also supply clip-on ferrites and shielded cables . Note that Cat5 Ethernet cables can also act as aerials and deliver a radio signal to the PC motherboard. Ferrite rings are a cheap solution, if they work. Upgrading the speakers is a more expensive option. America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published the useful Interference to Home Electronic Entertainment Equipment Handbook , which you can find online "preserved by KYES TV"
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PC speakers also pick up radio
CeBit 2010, the largest IT fair in the world
The CeBit in Hanover is the world's biggest high-tech fair. Some 4,157 companies from 68 countries are displaying their latest gadgets at the fair, which takes place from 2 March and runs through March 6
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CeBit 2010, the largest IT fair in the world
Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Ten years after the millennium bug scare, there's a new computer glitch hitting users of Sony's PlayStation games consoles Age: 10. Appearance: Surprisingly youthful. You do realise the millennium bug is old news? The clue's in the name. Yes, yes, but it's back! And this time it has come for our children! What are you on about? Remember how a decade ago the bug nearly destroyed civilisation? Planes were going to fall out of the sky, nuclear power stations were going to melt down, clock radios were going to wake us in the middle of the night . . . Unless we paid trillions of pounds to IT specialists . . . That's right. And all because other IT specialists had sold us computers that couldn't handle the switch from 1999 to 2000. That's the kind of organised blackmail even a banker could admire. Still, what has it got to do with 2010, especially now we're several months into it? Something very similar has hit Sony's PlayStation games consoles. On Monday, when February turned into March, millions of PS3 owners had their machines' calendars reset to 1 January 2000, and lost their high scores. Oh, the humanity! Have they been offered counselling?
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Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don’t use a computer at all"
The entrepreneur and innovator tells Simon Garfield about inspiration, determination and why he doesn't do email… Thirty years ago this month, Clive Sinclair launched a computer that he hoped would change the world. In the majority of cases it only changed the way people played primitive computer games, but it also turned a bespectacled, prematurely balding man into a hero for our times. In those dark days before Windows 7 and the iPad, the Sinclair ZX80 represented the pinnacle of affordable domestic computing. It was a flat box without a screen or proper keyboard, it had the memory of a hamster and at the back of it was something that looked like a radiator grille but was actually a strip of plastic designed to look like a radiator grille. It promised it could do "quite literally anything, from playing chess to running a power station", which was good value for something costing £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 assembled, about one fifth of the price of other home computers. Sir Clive, who was knighted for services to industry at the age of 43, will be 70 later this year. He lives in an apartment overlooking Trafalgar Square, and from his adjacent office he has a magnificent view of tourists and lions (recently he also had a view of people performing on Antony Gormley's fourth plinth, but that "got a bit boring really"). He was a household name before Sir Alan Sugar, and for a while was the unlikely future of modern electronics: a bright, hi-tech uncle rejuvenating British industry blighted by decay, unions and Thatcher. Sinclair helped transform Cambridge into the computing capital of the world, a homegrown version of Silicon Valley and Taipei, and for a couple of brilliant years he made the bestselling computers in the world
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Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don't use a computer at all"
Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Forgotten your password? That'll be the 58th one you've not remembered this year, then In days of yore, we're told, people had less leisure time because everything – everything – was a protracted pain in the fundament. Want to clean that smock? Then you'll have to walk six miles carrying a pail of water back from the village well. And that's before you've tackled the laundering process itself, which consists of three hours laboriously scrubbing your soiled garment against a washboard and wringing it through a mangle. By the time you've finished, it's bedtime.
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Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Lenovo ThinkPad X100e | Technophile
The ThinkPad X100e has both good and bad points, depending on whether you see it as an overpriced netbook or a cut-price ThinkPad business notebook The IBM ThinkPad became the industry's premier notebook brand after the launch of the 700T in 1992, and its distinctive black styling and red TrackPoint became a noticeable part of business travel. ThinkPads were never cheap, but they were very durable, had outstanding keyboards, and you could get support and spare parts almost anywhere. Prices came down after China's Lenovo took over IBM's PC division, but the brand has managed to retain most of its value. I've been carrying ThinkPads everywhere for more than a decade, so I was delighted to see the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e when it appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. It was almost love at first sight. After using one (Type 2876), I'm less impressed, and my views might have tipped too far the other way. The main problem with the X100e is trying to decide what it is.
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Lenovo ThinkPad X100e | Technophile
Will an algorithm pick you for your next coding job?
The former CTO of Dopplr has hacked together an algorithm to find the best (open source and public) coders in whatever location he's in. A taste of the future? Will your next job come from an algorithm? You'll have noticed that among other things you can get here at the Guardian are jobs. But the way that we find jobs is a bit outdated, isn't it? Plug in a CV, hope that someone picks it up; or alternatively, hunt through job ads trying to find something that fits your experience and skills. Wouldn't it be easier - at least in the programming field to begin with - if your job could find you? That's the possibility being held out by a recent post on Hackdiary , in which Matt Biddulph ("I'm based in Berlin. I'm a software designer and creative technologist. I work at Nokia. I was the CTO of Dopplr, a social network for frequent travellers acquired by Nokia in 2009") notes that his new job involves recruiting people for new projects in Berlin, which he's only recently moved to. The problem: how do you figure out who the people to recruit for your project are, when you're not familiar with the people in the area but need to get going? Well, one option is to analyse submissions to Github , the open source code repository used by dozens of companies and individual programmers. Biddulph explains: "When I'm hiring, one of the things I always want to see is evidence of personal projects. Over the last two years, GitHub has become an amazing treasure trove of code, with the best social infrastructure I've ever seen on a developer site. GitHub profiles let the user set their location, so I started with a few web searches for Berlin developers. This finds hundreds of interesting people, but how do I prioritise them?" Good question.
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Will an algorithm pick you for your next coding job?
Meedan puts machine translation into practice
A new website uses computers to translate everything between English and Arabic (and vice versa) to create a real cross-language site The Meedan wesite has been launched today, and we've covered the story in News translation website Meedan aims to improve Arabic-English relations . The site also has a YouTube video to explain how it works. An article published last year -- Will web users join forces to break the online language barrier? -- mentioned Meedan in another context, because it planned to use the Worldwide Lexicon (WWL) project's open source system. In the end, it didn't. Meedan's content and community manager George Weyman, based in London, told us: "it has some advantages, but right now we're using IBM's Machine Translation engine and the IBM Transbrowser " -- a browser-based tool for creating a translation layer on the web. IBM's sytem isn't open source, but Meedan's data -- its 'translation memory' of over 3m words -- is available to other translators. Weyman says: "the translations that are done with the Transbrowser are part of our agreement with IBM that makes sure all those translations are open source." This isn't true of some other web-based translation services, which are open access but not open source data services. The 'translation memory' is important because having a corpus of texts in two languages allows you to apply statistical techniques to improve a translation engine. One of the leading open source statistical machine translation systems is Moses , whch is funded partly by the European Commission. The project is being led by Philipp Koehn at the University of Edinburgh, and he's just written a book about the topic
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Meedan puts machine translation into practice