Here comes the $35 tablet PC

But it won't be sold here. It's coming to India.

NEW DELHI — India introduced a cheap tablet computer Wednesday, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty.

The computer, called Aakash, or “sky” in i, is the latest in a series of “world’s cheapestt” innovations in India that include a $2,040 compact Nano car, a $15 water purifier and $2,000 open-heart surgery.

Developer Datawind is selling the tablets to the government for about $45 each, and subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers. In comparison, the cheapest Apple iPad tablet costs $499, while the recently announced Kindle Fire will sell for $199. ...

... the Aakash has a color screen and provides word processing, Web browsing and video conferencing. The Android 2.2-based device has two USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM. Despite hopes for a solar-powered version — important for India’s energy-starved hinterlands — no such option is currently available.

Looks good to me.

Why you should tick not off the Navy

The Navy's HDRM material makes this a double whammy.

News: Revolutionary Material Dramatically Increases Explosive Force of Weapons - Office of Naval Research

The Navy has developed a material with the strength of aluminum and the density of mild steel. That means that the Navy can use this material, called High-Density Reactive Material (HDRM), instead of steel to encase high explosive for cannon-launched projectiles or missiles.

So what, you say? Well, HDRM is itself explosive. That means that an HDRM-encased warhead of an anti-aircraft missile will not only shred an enemy aircraft with HDRM fragments, penetrating the airframe just as steel fragments would, the HDRM fragments will blow up once they've penetrated into the plane.

This capability begs the question:  - could you make an entire warhead out of HDRM? Say you want to penetrate the earth deeply to strike an Taliban cave in Afghanistan. Right now we have to use a specially-designed penetrating case to plummet through the earth to reach the cave, where the explosive within then explodes.

The problem is that the casing, to stay intact during the penetration, consumes a huge percentage of the bomb's or missile's weight. That means the explosive charge is relatively small. But what if you don't need to stuff the casing with TNT because the casing is TNT, that is, TNT equivalent?

HDRM won't displace high explosive fillings in large numbers because TNT or Composition B, two of the most common explosive fillers, are so cheap to make and are very powerful. I doubt HDRM is very cheap! But it seems that there would be special uses where the whole warhead could be HDRM that would be superior to conventional explosives.

Charge your cell phone by building a fire

How do you charge your cell phone, or any other USB-chargeable device, in the aftermath of a natural disaster when your electricity is knocked out? You could charge it off your car's power outlet if you have the right charging insert, but that burns precious fuel.

Well, here is a way:

TES NewEnergy, a company based in Japan, has created a new USB based charger that can charge your mobile phone without requiring electricity – all it needs is a heat source which could be as simple as a pan of boiling water or even a campfire.

The device, known as Pan Charger, converts heat into electric energy and that can charge any cellphone, MP3 player or other mobile device over a USB connection in 3-5 hours. The tech specs say that the USB connection also has a built-in radio and a lantern – things that you often need when there’s no power.

Pan Charger is already available for purchase in Japan according to an AFP report but, at $299 a unit, it is not a very affordable option. That could however change as the company does have plans to introduce the device in other developing countries.

Then there is this homegrown solution from Kenya, where cell phone are ubiquitous but only 10 percent of the rural population has electricity. Since most everyone there rides bicycles for routine transportation, here ya go:



Pretty ingenious, and I'd bet there would be a good market for this device here in the States.

Cellphones are god and we will bow

Not only do Apple's iPhones track your movements, so do Android phones.

Androids collect location data every few seconds and transmit to Google every hour or so. Google says the data are anonymous, but they are keyed to a unique phone identifier. So it doesn't sound truly anonymous to me.

There are already calls from Congressman for hearings, but, honestly, my concern isn’t so much with the data collection as it is with the possibility that the government itself may start accessing that data. Because, face it, corporations want personal data mostly so they can sell us stuff, governments want it so they can control and track us. I don’t mind the first, I do mind the second. So the primary concern with regard to Apple and Google should be whether they’re keeping the data they collect private, both from potential identity thieves, and from the state.

Exactly.

What is disturbing, though, is that this automatic data collection from dozens of millions of smartphones is taking us straight to a real-life "Minority Report."




The WSJ reports, 'Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views."

'Phones can know,' says an MIT researcher. 'People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior.'

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play....

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

Anyone acquainted with history knows with certainty that governments are not going to ignore these sources of information. They will first try to hack into foreign databases for intelligence purposes. After all, "Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone." Being able to assess the movements of millions of foreign nationals inside their own borders will yield incredible and accurate insights into what is happening or about to happen in that country militarily, economically, socially, politically. And the kicker is that enough data from one smartphone enables database miners to predict with accuracy of 90-percent-plus where the phone's user will go next and what s/he will do.

Researchers have already discovered that by analyzing the frequency of emotionally-laden words in Twitter messages, they can predict "changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6% accuracy."

It simply is not possible to believe that this information will remain only in the hands of private business. And remember that in many (maybe most) other countries, phone systems are run by the government to begin with.

I wrote in 2003,

When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

I frankly never imagined that the day would come so quickly. But it is upon us now.

Jeopardy's Watson computer: Just a high-speed moron

Here is the Youtube of IBM's computer, Watson, beating its human challengers like a mongrel dog on Jeopardy last night. Look carefully at the clues? Notice anything?



Almost none of the answers on the game board required any kind of abstract reasoning to answer. In fact, you could put a human with practically no knowledge of the subjects on the board in front of a computer connected to Google and that person could simply type in the nouns of the clues and get the same answers.

Example - the first question of the game:

And the Google:

Strip out Watson's blinding speed, and it is no smarter than human beings at all. Watson, for all its engineering impressiveness, simply did only what computers have always done: collate at blinding speed (and compute mathematical probabilities to choose an answer). It does not matter that Watson was not connected to the Internet since its mass-memory unit holds 16 Terabytes of data, processed by a 2,880 processor core. As my own computer professor said (many years ago!), "A computer is just a high-speed moron." There is nothing about Watson that I have read so far that obviates that observation.

I think its programmers must have realized this since they artificially crippled Watson by design. Note that Watson was programmed not to buzz in unless it computed an answer of at least 50 percent "confidence" of being right. This was an entirely artificial barrier. Why not 75 percent? Or 25 percent? Or any level at all? Watson is so blindingly fast that it could have buzzed in for every question before either champion (making their presence merely ceremonial, which it almost was anyway). Then Watson simply could have given its top answer, regardless of confidence level, and the computer still would have got 90% of the questions right.

In other words, if the game had allowed Watson to give uncrippled answers, it would have always answered first and would have won even more decisively. But then, with access to the same amounts of data resources through Google, I could beat the two champions if the game always allowed me to answer first. In fact, I'd win under the same confidence crippling as long as I could answer first - because clearly Watson will always be able to buzz in faster than a person.

So what does Watson really prove? From a technical, engineering and programming perspective, it's an amazing achievement with enormous potential for a wide range of applications ranging across broad multi-disciplinary subjects and problems. As for the Jeopardy game, there's less than meets the eye. Count it as a proof-of-concept exercise. What it did not do was reason abstractly. It just collated amazing amounts of information very rapidly. But we already knew that computers are faster than we are for specified tasks. That's why we build them to begin with.

Sorry, Prof. Reynolds, the Singularity has not arrived.

Update: Good discussion on this at The Speculist, including this nugget:

@stephentgo: Repercussions of IBM's Watson unknown, but any job that involves answering questions by phone will soon be at risk. http://bit.ly/hp91hW

Obama: Lets's Build the World's Slowest High-Speed Rail!

President Obama pledged in his State of the Union speech last month to seek funding for development of high-speed rail. This week we've learned some details: "U.S. plans to inject $53 billion into passenger rail"

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced an ambitious $53 billion U.S. program to build new high-speed rail networks and make existing ones faster over the next six years. ...

"This is about seizing the future," he said, making the announcement at Philadelphia's busy 30th Street station with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The United States should follow the example of Japan and China and build high-speed rail, Biden said. "If we do not, you tell me how America is going to be able to lead the world in the 21st century," he said.

Holy steam engine, Batman! America's actual position on the world stage depends on building a railroad! In my mind's eye:

President Obama, on the red phone: Kim Jong, I have three carrier groups off your shores and and an armored US Army corps arriving in South Korea. This is my ultimatum: give up your atomic weapons program, or else!

Kim: Do you have high speed rail in your capitalist, exploiting, oppressive country?

Obama (long pause): Um, uh, well, Republicans in Congress, uh, George W. Bush's fault, er, lobbyists, and um, uh, earmarks ... well, ahem, no, we don't.

Kim: Then you cannot lead the world in the 21st century and there is no reason for me to heed your empty ultimatum. The French, on the other hand, have Le Tren Grand Vitesse and therefore terrify me. But America, I simply dismiss.

Obama: But I have three carrier groups and an Army ... .

Kim: [Dial tone]

But back to the train-apple of Joe Biden's eye. In another article we learn:

According to the plan laid out Tuesday by Biden, the first step of the six-year plan would be to invest $8 billion to develop or improve three types of interconnected corridors:

Core express corridors would form the backbone of the national high-speed rail system, with electrified trains traveling on dedicated tracks at speeds of 125 to 250 m.p.h or higher.

Regional corridors would lay the foundation for future high-speed service, with trains traveling between 90 to 125 m.p.h.

Emerging corridors would provide travelers with access to the larger national high-speed network and travel at as much as 90 m.p.h.

This will make the American "high speed" rail system the slowest in the world. Consider this video produced by advocates of HS rail in California. Listen for the speeds attained by foreign trains.



Why does VP Biden think that having the slowest high speed rail will enable America to lead the world in the 21st century?