August 2011
Increasing pressure on scientists to publish in top journals may have contributed to a huge rise in retractions over the past decade, two academic editors have suggested.
Data from Thomson Reuters indicate that there was a 15-fold jump in the number of retraction notices between 2001 and 2010, from just 22 in 2001 to 339 in 2010. In the first six months of 2011 there were 210 retraction notices, suggesting that the numbers are continuing to climb.
» via Inside Higher Ed
The UK’s Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has launched a competition inviting developers, doctors and patients to submit ideas for health apps that could help patients make informed decisions about their care.
This seems to be a good initiative. I wonder if anyone have thought about how to deal with the responsibility issues…
A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM’s Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte “drive”—that’s 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.
With Steve Jobs no longer at the helm of Apple, it’s up to new CEO Tim Cook to lead the company and its employees to greater heights. Cook, whose career at Apple has spanned more than 13 years, sent a message to the company to assure the troops that “Apple is not going to change” and that Jobs will continue to be involved as chairman of the company. Cook has been running the day-to-day operations of Apple since Jobs took a medical leave of absence in January; yesterday’s announcement just makes it official.
If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.
In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Their weapon of choice - the algorithm.
Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers - calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook’s friend finding and imaging tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net.
It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.
At last month’s TEDGlobal conference, algorithm expert Kevin Slavin delivered one of the tech show’s most “sit up and take notice” speeches where he warned that the “maths that computers use to decide stuff” was infiltrating every aspect of our lives.
Among the examples he cited were a robo-cleaner that maps out the best way to do housework, and the online trading algorithms that are increasingly controlling Wall Street.
“We are writing these things that we can no longer read,” warned Mr Slavin.
“We’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world we’ve made.”
Adding solar cells to liquid-crystal displays could help recover a significant amount of energy that’s ordinarily wasted in powering them. Two research groups have created light filters that double as photovoltaic cells, a trick that could boost the battery life of phones and laptops. Over 90 percent of the displays sold this year will use liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology. LCDs are, however, tremendously inefficient, converting only about 5 percent of the light produced by a backlight into a viewable image. The LCD in a notebook computer consumes one-third of its power
