Joseph Calamia

You Are Not A Gadget

by

A review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.

If you bought a Windows computer in the late 1990s, perhaps you remember the system’s preloaded music. Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto Number Three,” Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies”—Windows Media Player included them all, along with two songs created by Microsoft called “Passport” and “Canyon,” the apparent digital love children of elevator music and 1980s advertising jingles. Though any listener could recognize the classics’ melodies, each note sounded somehow mechanical, and certainly simplified.

In his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier uses the birth of these songs as one example in his intriguing investigation into culture’s current relationship with technology. The songs use a programming strategy called MIDI to make music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which simplifies music’s complexity into discrete steps in pitch. Dave Smith, a synthesizer designer, devised MIDI in the 1980s, but we still find MIDI songs everywhere from digital alarm clocks to cell phone ringtones. Certainly, they are no longer the best available strategy, but, Lanier argues, they have become a “locked-in” design, an assumed and arbitrary rule in computer programming.

Lanier looks ahead a thousand years at a hypothetical descendant in a spaceship: “She will probably be annoyed by some awful, beepy MIDI-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.” Full Review »

You Are Not A Gadget

by

A review of You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier
209 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf.

If you bought a Windows computer in the late 1990s, perhaps you remember the system’s preloaded music. Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto Number Three,” Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies”—Windows Media Player included them all, along with two songs created by Microsoft called “Passport” and “Canyon,” the apparent digital love children of elevator music and 1980s advertising jingles. Though any listener could recognize the classics’ melodies, each note sounded somehow mechanical, and certainly simplified.

In his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier uses the birth of these songs as one example in his intriguing investigation into culture’s current relationship with technology. The songs use a programming strategy called MIDI to make music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which simplifies music’s complexity into discrete steps in pitch. Dave Smith, a synthesizer designer, devised MIDI in the 1980s, but we still find MIDI songs everywhere from digital alarm clocks to cell phone ringtones. Certainly, they are no longer the best available strategy, but, Lanier argues, they have become a “locked-in” design, an assumed and arbitrary rule in computer programming. Full Review »

Streetcars and Corpuscles

by

In 1705, light was a particle. In 1805, light was a wave. In 1905, light was a particle.

“I no longer doubt the reality of light quanta,” Albert Einstein wrote in a July 1918 letter to friend Michele Besso, “although I still stand quite alone in this conviction.” Given light’s historic identity crisis, it is not hard to imagine why. In 1922, both Neils Bohr and Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics: Bohr for his work explaining radiation and the structure of atoms, and Einstein (a belated 1921 award) for what is called the photoelectric effect, demonstrating that light must be a particle.

Despite Einstein’s work, Bohr was not convinced: “I shall not . . . discuss the familiar difficulties to which the hypothesis of ‘light quanta’ leads,” he said. Louisa Gilder uses both of these quotes in her book The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn. Later she describes a debate between Bohr and Einstein in 1920 as they rode a Copenhagen streetcar. The discussion grew so heated, Bohr recalled in a 1961 interview, that the men kept missing their stop: “We took the streetcar from the station and talked so animatedly about things that we went much too far past our destination . . . We went back and forth . . . what people thought of us, that is something else.”

More than 200 years earlier, Isaac Newton had also pondered light’s structure. In his 1704 volume Opticks, he mused on an eclectic set of natural philosophy questions. Without the Principia’s mathematical rigor, he speculated on everything from the role of God in matter to particle light. Newton described light “corpuscles” that moved like eels; they could bend, but remained solid and whole.

Full Article »

Big Results From Small Detector

by

“Picture this in the jaws of a magnet,” says Wit Busza, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Look in here. This is where the particles went in.”

He pointed to the inside of a tiny tube covered in a tinier silicon grid, a crucial piece of the Phobos particle detector.

One of four detectors that made up Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), Phobos recorded the properties of a special substance known as quark-gluon plasma from 2000 to 2005. Physicists are only now sorting through the last of the small detector’s wealth of data.

Though particle physicists study the universe’s smallest inhabitants, their laboratories are often the realms of big machines, multiple-story detectors in seemingly endless underground tunnels. Phobos’ three main pieces, though, each can fit on a desk. Like model ships in bottles, they now sit in separate glass boxes on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 24.

In 1989, Busza had imagined a much larger experiment. “It was called the Modular Array of RHIC Spectra, or MARS,” he says. “It got rejected. It was too expensive.” Back at the drawing board, he designed a smaller, cheaper detector: “A colleague of mine said that, since MARS was rejected, I should name this one after a moon of Mars.” In 1999, Brookhaven finished construction. Phobos was born.

Full Article »

Arecibo

by

Aimed at asteroids that could threaten Earth, a venerable telescope fears only retirement.

A September interim report from the National Academy of Sciences praises Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, built in 1963, for its “unique role” and “unmatched precision and accuracy” in determining the make-up and path of objects that might hit the planet—members of a larger group of space rocks known to astronomers as NEOs or near-Earth objects.

Despite the Academy’s report, the National Science Foundation, which funds Arecibo almost entirely, has no room in its 230 million dollar budget to continue complete funding of the unique tool. Over three years, the Foundation has reduced funding for the telescope, from over 10 million dollars, before a 2006 Senior Review report, to currently 8 million dollars. Recommendations from the 2006 report suggest further funding cuts and, without outside funding, closure of the telescope in 2011.

“We looked at all of our existing facilities,” says Dana Lehr, Program Director for the Foundation’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, regarding the 2006 Senior Review, “in the hopes of carving out some free space, meaning money, for new facilities.”

Lehr stresses that cutting funds for current facilities was unavoidable as the Foundation attempts to support five established national observatories while answering the astronomical community’s call for new telescopes, such as those that will appear in the National Research Council’s 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey.

Full Article »

Dear Professor Van de Graaff

by

A metallic sphere in air with a 100-centimeter radius has a total charge of 250,000 electrostatic units. Deduce an expression for the sphere’s capacitance. Compute the potential gradient just outside the surface. What is the minimum radius a sphere can have to retain this charge?

Five minutes after noon on Wednesday, October 20, 1937, an MIT student in course 8.03, “Electricity,” had exactly fifty minutes to answer this and three other questions. Missing this one would have been embarrassing. 8.03’s professor was Robert J. Van de Graaff.

The Van de Graaff generator, the hair-raising electric charge experiment still popular in high school physics classrooms, had serious applications in the 1930s. Though today’s physics class prop may generate 350 thousand volts, Van de Graaff’s 40-foot tall version, an “atom smasher” built for MIT in a vacant dirigible hanger in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, generated 7 million.

“A tool of unequalled power for penetrating and investigating the atomic nucleus,” as Van de Graaff and coauthors described it in a project progress report, the generator found use in everything from military research to cancer treatments. Full Article »

Abbrevs is totes the lang of the fuche

by

Whatevs, def, and ridic—abbreviations filling text-messages and Facebook walls—may be less related to new technologies than old ties between language and social identity, say researchers.

The link between technology’s limitations and lopping off word parts seems reasonable: if you write abbreviations like those above—instead of whatever, definitely, and ridiculous—you can send your IM faster and fit more words in each text-message.

“It’s not complete bunkum,” says Susan Herring of Indiana University. “When you send text-messages on mobile phones, you have a 160-character limit, so there is a very clear technological constraint.”

But Herring also ties these shortcuts to social expression. In a recent study, she looked at differences among text-messages sent by men and women to an interactive Italian television program. Users send messages to this particular program to get a date. A romantic might send one saying “TVB,” the abbreviation for Ti voglio bene or I love you.

Full Article »

Sartorial Robotics

by

When roboticists make the clothes, the clothes might improve the man. New vibrating robotic suits could teach wearers to perform complex movements faster and more accurately.

If you have ever struggled to learn a sport, you know that new motor skills don’t come easy. Your coach may shout commands or demonstrate her technique, but both oral and visual instructions require an awkward translation—a mapping of movements from the teacher’s body to your own. When all else fails, the coach might stand behind you, pushing and pulling your limbs through the proper motions. Research shows that this student-teacher puppetry is the most effective teaching method, but also the most difficult since no single instructor can steer all of your joints simultaneously.

Enter the robotic suit. Conforming to your body, it is a suit that can provide instantaneous feedback to every joint and help a variety of users—to tango or to recover from a stroke. “We have massage and we have sex—and basically that’s what people are used to for touch,” says Jeff Lieberman, the roboticist who envisioned this suit as a member of MIT’s Personal Robots Group. For Lieberman, the vibrotactile suit is an untapped learning tool. “It’s low-hanging fruit. It’s just waiting to be used,” he says.

Lieberman tested a suit sleeve with eight tactors—or vibration points. Wearers watched a video of a teacher’s arm performing a certain motion and then mimicked that motion. The sleeve created the equivalent of an invisible, vibration “force field.” Bending the arm too far down, for example, started a vibration on the sleeve’s bottom—too far up, started one on the sleeve’s top. At the end of test, those performing the motions with no mistakes felt no vibrations. “Here you are learning by definition,” Lieberman said. “When you are doing it right, the machine is off.” Full Article »

Dear Professor Van de Graaff

by

A metallic sphere in air with a 100-centimeter radius has a total charge of 250,000 electrostatic units. Deduce an expression for the sphere’s capacitance. Compute the potential gradient just outside the surface. What is the minimum radius a sphere can have to retain this charge?

Five minutes after noon on Wednesday, October 20, 1937, an MIT student in course 8.03, “Electricity,” had exactly fifty minutes to answer this and three other questions. Missing this one would have been embarrassing. 8.03’s professor was Robert J. Van de Graaff.

The Van de Graaff generator, the hair-raising electric charge experiment still popular in high school physics classrooms, had serious applications in the 1930s. Though today’s physics class prop may generate 350 thousand volts, Van de Graaff’s 40-foot tall version, an “atom smasher” built for MIT in a vacant dirigible hanger in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, generated 7 million.

“A tool of unequalled power for penetrating and investigating the atomic nucleus,” as Van de Graaff and coauthors described it in a project progress report, the generator found use in everything from military research to cancer treatments.

During its first test on November 28, 1933, the atom smasher could barely contain the charge that flooded its metal spheres. The device discharged in violent arcs of lightning, striking any metal surface nearby, including the trusses of the hangar’s 60-foot roof. “The most powerful man-made thunderbolt of its kind produced so far, was hurled here today from a man-made Olympus,” The New York Times reported. Full Article »

Could Difference in a Protein Mean Higher Rates of Cancer for African Americans?

by

One protein could hinder treatment for over 60,000 African American cancer patients each year.

The death rate for African Americans for all cancers is consistently higher than other cancer patients—18 percent higher for women and 35 percent for men. Although many factors contribute to this disparity, recent results from a lab directed by Joann Sweasy at Yale University indicate that researchers should look closely at a protein called DNA polymerase beta. Full Article »

Page 1 of 2Next