Category Archives: Technology

Snap search

Posted on by

From Technology Review…

Searching for information on your cell phone by typing keywords can be cumbersome. But now researchers at Microsoft have developed a software prototype called Lincoln that they hope will make Web searches easier. According to Larry Zitnick, a Microsoft researcher who works on the project, phones equipped with the software could, for example, access online movie reviews by snapping pictures of movie posters or DVD covers and get product information from pictures of advertisements in magazines or on buses.

“The main thing we want to do is connect real-world objects with the Web using pictures,” says Zitnick. “[Lincoln] is a way of finding information on the Web using images instead of keywords.”

The software works by matching pictures taken on phones with pretagged pictures in a database. It provides the best results when the pictures are of two-dimensional objects, such as magazine ads or DVD covers, Zitnick says. (See the accompanying chart to find out how compatible certain pictures are with Lincoln.) Currently, the database contains pictures of DVD covers that link to movie reviews uploaded by Microsoft researchers. However, anyone can contribute his or her pictures and links to the database, and Zitnick hopes that people will fill it with pictures and links to anything from information about graffiti art to scavenger-hunt clues. Right now, Lincoln can only be downloaded for free using Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and it can only run on smart phones equipped with Windows Mobile 5.0 and PocketPCs.

Why you should be allowed to use mobile phones in hospital

Posted on by

One of the most irritating things about hospitals is the regulation about switching off mobile phones. I’ve often wondered whether there was any real evidence to support the injunction. Now, the New York Times reports that a study published in the latest edition of the Mayo Clinic Journal says that it was all baloney.

Another article in the same journal describes an experiment testing cellphones at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., over a four-month period in 2006. The researchers used various phones and wireless handheld devices in 75 patient rooms and the intensive care unit, where patients were nearby or connected to a total of 192 medical machines of 23 types.

In 300 tests of ringing, making calls, talking on the phone and receiving data, there was not a single instance of interference with the medical apparatus. For many of the tests, the cellphones were working at lower received signal strengths — that is, showing fewer bars on the screen — which means they were operating at the highest power output levels. The authors conclude with a recommendation to relax existing cellphone rules.

But Mr. Shein said changing hospital cellphone regulations on the basis of these findings might be premature. “I think it’s dangerous for someone to go around doing ad hoc testing and conclude that it’s not going to be an issue for others,” he said. “There was no result, but there may have been if the circumstances had been slightly different.”

Dr. David L. Hayes, the senior author and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, disagreed. “Cellphone technology is the same throughout the country,” he said, “and hospital equipment is similar. I don’t think that testing in another part of the U.S. is going to have different results.

“I’m advocating based on this testing that we should change the rules,” Dr. Hayes continued, “and in fact many people ignore the rules anyway. In a way, the policy is already antiquated and violated de facto.”

During the 18 months that Sue was in an out of hospital, the injunction against mobiles proved a nightmare for me as I tried to be with her while keeping in touch with our children and those who were looking after them while I was away from home. I often had the dark suspicion that the real reason for the ban was to safeguard the business model of the firm which provided bedside fixed-line telephones at an extortionate cost.

The code writers

Posted on by

Once upon a time, the Ndiyo office was tidy. Sigh. On the other hand, Michael (left) and Quentin (right) have written an incredible amount of code in the last month. And it (mostly) works. It’s a good demonstration of the rule that the most efficient programming teams are small.

The mathematics of opinion formation

Posted on by

Here’s something to drive innumerate spin-doctors wild: a mathematical theory of opinion formation by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Abstract reads:

We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in thelong time limit. This coexistence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks.

So now you know. The paper has lots of nice equations of the kind that make some people’s eyeballs revolve. But, at heart, it reaches reassuringly obvious conclusions. For example,

Our theory further predicts that a relatively small number of individuals with high social ranks can have a larger effect on opinion formation than individuals with low rank. By high rank we mean people with a large number of social connections. This explains naturally a fragility phenomenon frequently noted within societies, whereby an opinion that seems to be held by a rather large group of people can become nearly extinct in a very short time, a mechanism that is at the heart of fads.

These predictions, which apply to general classes of social networks, including power-law and exponential networks, were verified by computer experiments and extended to the case when some individuals hold fixed opinions throughout the dynamical process. Furthermore, we dealt with the case of information asymmetries, which are characterized by the fact that some individuals are often influenced by other people’s opinions while being unable to reciprocate and change their counterpart’s views.

Gadget wars (contd.)

Posted on by

Bah! Quentin has a new toy.

It’s the Sony PRS – the Portable Reader System – which is a bit like a giant read-only PalmPilot that uses the new e-Paper type display. It’s designed to be a replacement for a paperback – a way of viewing eBooks, and unlike some earlier devices, it’s not limited to DRM-encoded books downloaded from the manufacturer. You can put text files, RTF files, PDF files on it as well, and they look gorgeous.

However, there was a big question-mark over my purchase, which was that there is no official Mac or Linux support for this device. You can use a card reader to plug an SD card into your Mac, copy the files onto it and then plug it into the PRS, but that’s hardly convenient, especially in comparison to the (optional) USB docking station. Sadly, the PRS doesn’t just appear as a USB storage device. You can run the Sony software just fine under Windows using Parallels, but that’s yucky too…

Needless to say, he’s hacked it. He’s found a way to take an arbitrary document on his Mac and make it available as a pdf on the Sony device. See the full post for the grisly details.

Later… And to add insult to injury, he’s put Memex on it!

Server power

Posted on by

A new study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (pdf available here) finds that:

Aggregate electricity use for servers doubled over the period 2000 to 2005 both in the U.S. and worldwide Almost all of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expensive servers, with only a small part of that growth being attributable to growth in the power use per unit.

Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.

Nicholas Carr comments:

The estimate that servers account for 1.2 percent of overall power consumption in the U.S. is, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, considerably lower than some previous estimates, which put data center power consumption as high as 13 percent of total U.S. consumption. It should be noted that the study, underwritten by AMD, looks only at power consumption attributable to servers, which represents about 60% to 80% of total data center power consumption. Electricity consumed by storage and networking gear is excluded. The study also excludes custom-built servers, such as the ones used by Google. The number of servers Google runs is unknown but is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

It all goes to explain why Sergey Brin & Co are getting so exercised about power consumption.

Posted in Web

Escaping from Adobe’s clutches

Posted on by

Here’s something useful:

PDFescape is a new way to open PDF files. It allows you to open your PDF files right here on the web without downloading or installing any software.

With PDFescape, you can fill in PDF forms, add text and graphics, add links, and even add new form fields to a PDF file. Best of all, it’s Free!

Have just one PDF form to fill out, but don’t want to buy $299 Adobe Acrobat? PDFescape is for you!

Have a PDF form you want customers to fill out and email back to you? PDFescape is for you!

Another useful web service. Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link. Of course, users of Mac OS X don’t really need it, because the operating system does pdf out of the box. But we’re only — what is it? — 5% of the personal computer world!

Posted in Web