Technology Quarterly

LarsWestergren writes "There is an unusually interesting Technology Quarterly available for free from The Economist where they discuss some of the more interesting new areas in the area of science and technology. Of most interest to Slashdot might be Open source's local heroes, or perhaps playing Pac-Man on thought-controlled computers. Among the other articles this month: Predicting microweather, transparent magnetic memories, smart robotic transplants, how to bake the perfect chip, and Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals."

Comments

Though Controlled Computers

[sirReal.83.]

ha! no need to type one-handed anymore! ;)

sorry.

Measuring data

[Isopropyl]

AROUND five exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of information was created in 2002, up from around two exabytes in 1999, according to the latest "How Much Information?" survey produced by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California in Berkeley.

How does one go about measuring this? It seems wildly inaccurate; either they're using a complex algorithm to model data creation, or they're taking a shot in the dark.

Because of the difficulty of estimating such figures, however, all of their numbers have wide margins of error.

I'll say! Give or take, say, five exabytes or so...

Similiar.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals"

Hmmm...all his later work seems so similiar.

"Computers that can read your mind"

[theneb]

mate....eat....mate...eat.

AI Robots aren't bad enough

[burgburgburg]

AI Robots that time travel and try to kill John Conner aren't bad enough. Self-replicating nanobots overrunning the planet aren't bad enough. Computers that can lip read and know that you're going to shut them down so they send one of the pods to kill your fellow astronaut and then won't open the pod bay door aren't bad enough.

Let's build computers that can read our minds.

Okay, I'm getting my family and we're going up to the hills. I mean it this time. Who's with me?

The Economist

[Infonaut]

The Economist is one of the few news weeklies you can obtain in the US that doesn't assume that you have the mental capacity of a sea urchin.

In a recent subscriber survey they sent to me, I told them, "Whatever you do, don't follow Time, Newseek, et. al. and dumb yourself down to post-literate status. For the love of God please, please, please, don't ever put one of those ludicrous 'conventional wisdom' boxes in your publication."

Re:The Economist

[JAYOYAYOYAYO]

indeed. their www site has an article, 'A Nation Apart',, discussing the idea of American exceptionalism. one of the most fascinating articles ive read recently.

what about the learning curve?

[whovian]

Did you know that your brain was preparing for that movement a full half-second before it actually took place? Even more spookily, your mind knew which hand it was going to lift before you made the conscious decision to lift it.

This sounds rather interesting, but it seems it would apply to people who have already learned a task. Therefore, the neural connections would already be "connected" and trained.

But what about teaching somebody a new task using an EEG hat or such? You'd then use this device to find out how the brain learns. I mean, originally....the first bootstrap, so to speak.

I don't think it would be entriely useless to apply to learning new experiences either. Although your brain would draw on that which was previously learned, it would still be trying to absorb a wealth of new information.

Thought-controlled Pacman

[attonitus]

This seems like more fun:

Human Pacman

Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals!

[Mark_in_Brazil]

Benoit Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals! Yes, he did coin the term, but his work built on the work of two men who have at least as much claim to the title of "father of fractals" as he does, and did their work before he did. As the article states, his work in the 1970s was based on the earlier work of Gaston Julia, a French-Algerian mathematician who described the fractal sets that now bear his name without the benefit of computers and won the Grand Prix de l'Academie des Sciences for his paper on the subject, entitled "Memoir sur l'iteration des fonctions rationnelles." Julia wrote that paper at age 25. Interesting side note on Julia: he lost his nose as a soldier in World War I and did mathematical research during an extended hospital stay due to that injury. He was eventually forced to wear a leather cover over the place where his nose had been, held in place with straps tied behind his head. Pictures of him are a bit strange because of that.
Mandelbrodt came along in the 1970s, rediscovered the works of Julia, which had been all but forgotten, and used computers to do things like determine which Julia sets are connected and measure the Hausdorff Dimension of some fractal sets. He also coined the term "fractal." Contrary to what the article says, Mandelbrodt did not invent the concept of non-integral dimensions... given that the measure used is called the Hausdorff Dimension, does anyone want to guess who invented it? The answer is here.
Hausdorff, being a Jew, suffered and ultimately died during World War II. His work was deemed "Jewish" and "un-German" by the Nazis, and he lost his professor post at the University of Leipzig. In 1942, he, his wife, and his sister-in-law committed suicide when they couldn't escape being sent to a concentration camp.
Mandelbrodt did make significant contributions, especially to the visualization of fractals and the study of fractals and their properties on computers, but to call him the "father" is to ignore the contributions of the giants on whose shoulders he was standing (to borrow a famous phrase). Mandelbrodt is a good self-promoter, which should be obvious to anyone who RTFA. In the article, the familiarity of his work is compared to that of Newton and Einstein. While it never says his work is as important as the work of those two greats, it doesn't take a big mental leap to get to that idea. When Mandelbrodt discovered the set that now bears his name, he was smart enough not to give it that name himself. Instead he called it the "M set," leaving it to somebody else to add "andebrodt" to the name. Both of these things remind me of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which there are brief biographical blurbs of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, in that order. I'd have loved to see Mandelbrodt and Hawking write a book together. It would be the battle royale for the title of biggest self-promoter in the sciences. I'm not saying they didn't make significant contributions (nor that Hawking's contributions aren't all the more amazing due to his debilitating disease), but this kind of self-promotion shouldn't be necessary. I wouldn't put Hawking or Mandelbrodt on my list of the top ten scientists and mathematicians of the 20th Century, but they would definitely make the list of the top ten best known.
A friend once told me a really nerdy joke that just came back to mind. He asked me if I knew which letter was most used in the English language. I told him I did-- it's "E." My friend said "that's correct, except in the work of Mandelbrodt, where the two most used are "I" and "M" (getting use from "me," "my," and "M," the name he gave the now-famous set).
I'm sad to report that I laughed as much at that one as I did at "assume a spherical cow." Damn, I'm nerdy.
I found the use of the phrase "under our noses" in the article a bit offensive, a slap in the face to Julia. Oops. Now I've done it too. :-b

--Mark