12 Books that changed the world by Melvyn Bragg

Introduction

Begins Sunday 28th Jan at 5.45pm on ITV1 When people think of things that have changed the world, they tend to think of events – natural disasters, assassinations, wars and scientific breakthroughs. What tends to get overlooked is the powerful, transforming ideas that are communicated in the apparently unassuming pages of books. 12 Books That Changed The World is presented, written and edited by Melvyn Bragg. In this series we look at 12 of the most exciting and powerful books ever written in the English language, all penned by British authors, without which the world would be a very different place. The result is a fascinating celebration of the power of the printed word. The 12 books Every week, Melvyn Bragg reveals the names of three of the most significant books of all time. Episode One Principia Mathematica, Sir Isaac Newton (1687) Married Love, Marie Stopes (1918) The First Rule Book of the Football Association (1863) Episode Two The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) Speech to the House of Commons, William Wilberforce (12th May 1789) Episode Three The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776) The King James Bible (1611) Magna Carta (1215) Episode Four Experimental Research in Electricity, Michael Faraday (1855) Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine (1769) William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)

Introduction to Windows Vista

Personal Computer World review.

Analyst dismisses Second Life as a 'pyramid scheme'

An article claiming that the economic system in Second Life is a "pyramid selling scheme" has created a furore of debate about the way business is conducted in the virtual community.

The article was written by financial analyst Randolph Harrison and published in the Capitalism 2.0 blog.

Harrison claims in the article that the economic system in Second Life has become a " Ponzi scheme" that promises monetary gains for everyone, but ultimately benefits only a select few.

The analyst said that cons and cheats in monetary deals are rampant, that virtual banks routinely spring up and disappear over night, and that Second Life 'residents' are quick to take each others' money and run.

Harrison claimed that the markets in the game, in which people exchange virtual 'Linden Dollars' for real-life money, is "virtually rigged" to yield the least amount of money to players looking to cash in their virtual currency.

"Second Life is not a dramatic taste of our future in which markets are virtual, currency is free from government control, taxes are non-existent, and normal people can become real millionaires simply by clicking their mouse a few times," he said.

"Second Life is a classic pyramid scheme. Or, more of an Amway-like pyramid: partially legitimate, partially Ponzi."

Harrison acknowledged that the system works fine for recreational users who visit the online world strictly for entertainment.

But the claim that Second Life is an emerging economy ripe for the picking by everyday people turned entrepreneurs is, by and large, a scam, according to the analyst.

Supporters and residents of Second Life were quick to criticise Harrison's article. Blogger Tateru Nino suggested that the assertion was like comparing "Buicks to boysenberries".

"There are truths in there certainly, but very deceptively phrased ones, and chunks of the material are apparently no longer current or accurate," said Nino.

Nino claimed that Harrison's observations on the exchange market were not based on Second Life creator Linden Lab's own Lindex exchange system, but on smaller private exchange markets operated by users.

The rates in Harrison's exchange study were inflated because such a large amount of money was being traded, artificially creating a low rate, according to Nino.

"By his own figures, Harrison tried to cash out more than three per cent of the then total currency in motion at once, and was distressed when supply and demand worked the way supply and demand does," he wrote.

John Zdanowski, chief financial officer at Linden Lab, told vnunet.com that the Lindex exchange system is not wholly dependent on supply and demand.

"While the exchange is based on a floating rate, Linden Lab maintains some indirect means with which to maintain price stability, including control over the stipend that is offered to users and the pricing of various Linden Dollar 'sinks'," he said.

Linden Dollar 'sinks' are the price of uploading images, for example, or posting classified ads.

Wagner James Au has worked as an 'embedded' journalist in Second Life since 2003, and currently runs the New World Notes blog which chronicles the virtual community.

Au told vnunet.com that users looking to "get rich quick" in Second Life will, like their real-world counterparts, often fall victim to con artists and scams.

"If you are looking for a quick buck you are probably going to lose your money," said Au. "The people who are successful, in my observations, are the ones who establish themselves, build a trust network and build their businesses. "

The revelation of a grand scheme being run by wealthy users to con new residents out of their money is an extremely rare occurrence, according to Au.

"What will happen is you have someone who started out and something will happen; they will run out of time in their real life or they will get annoyed with the people they are working with and leave," he said.

Among those who invest substantial amounts of time and money, however, a merchant's reputation can make or break a Second Life business.

"What [Harrison] is missing is the day-to-day in-world social activity," said Au, noting that residents have even gone so far as to establish a Second Life chamber of commerce.

"There is this tight social network of content creators who are watching after each other," he said.

Au explained that most users will spend several months in the Second Life community before attempting to establish a business.

At that point, he said, players have grown much more savvy to the way the market works, and the amount of time and currency invested in the virtual business makes users less likely to try and cash out all their Linden Dollars at once and experiencing the sort of inflation noted by Harrison.

"For the serious content developers, it is in their interest not to take out a lot of money at once," Au said. "What the most successful people do is take out their money slowly."

reposted from: vnunet.com
my highlights / edits

Basics: Logic, aka "It's illogical to call Mr. Spock logical"

This is another great basics topic, and it's also one of my pet peeves. In general, I'm a big science fiction fan, and I grew up in a house where every saturday at 6pm, we all gathered in front of the TV to watch Star Trek. But one thing which Star Trek contributed to our vocabulary, for which I will never forgive Gene Rodenberry, is "Logic". As in, Mr. Spock saying "But that would not be logical.".

The reason that this bugs me so much is because it's taught a huge number of people that "logical" means the same thing as "reasonable". Almost every time I hear anyone say that something is logical, they don't mean that it's logical - in fact, they mean something almost exactly opposite - that it seems correct based on intuition and common sense.

If you're being strict about the definition, then saying that something is logical by itself is an almost meaningless statement. Because what it means for some statement to be "logical" is really that that statement is inferable from a set of axioms in some formal reasoning system. If you don't know what formal system, and you don't know what axioms, then the statement that something is logical is absolutely meaningless. And even if you do know what system and what axioms you're talking about, the things that people often call "logical" are not things that are actually inferable from the axioms.

Logic, in the sense that we generally talk about it, isn't really one thing. Logic is a name for the general family of formal proof systems with inference rules. There are many logics, and a statement that is a valid inference (is logical) in one system may not be valid in another. To give you a very simple example, most people are familiar with the fact that in logic, if you have a statement "A", then either the statement "A or not A" must be true. In the most common simple logic, called propositional logic, that's a tautology - that is, a statement which is always true by definition. But in another common and useful logic - intuitionistic logic - "A or not A" is not necessarily true. You cannot infer anything about whether it's true or false without proving whether A is true or false.

More....

So when someone says, a la Mr. Spock, that something is logical, the correct thing to do is to whack them in the head with a logic textbook for saying something nonsensical.

reposted from: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/01/basics_logic_aka_its_illogical_1.php
my highlights / edits

How Intel shrank processors to 45nm without taking a leak

Pictured left is a die shot of one of Intel's new 45nm Penryn processors, which the company claims represent the biggest breakthough since the sixties. Its development forced Intel to address one of the biggest problems of miniaturisation: leakage current.

A standard transistor of the type used in processors consists of source and drain electrodes sitting in a silicon substrate with a tiny gap between them. Above this gap is a thin layer of insulator, or dielectric; and sitting on that is the gate electrode (click image at right for pop-up diagram). Toggling the voltage at the gate toggles the charge distribution across the gap, and thus its ability to pass current.

This solid-state switch is never quite perfect because there are tiny current flows even in the off state. Most important is the "leakage" across the insulating layer under the gate. This layer is made of silicon dioxide (SiO2) in current designs and when it becomes only a few atoms thick, as it does as processor transistors get smaller, leakage becomes prohibitively high.

So why not have thicker insulation? The problem is that the thinner the layer, the higher is the capacitance of the structure - the amount of charge it can hold. The higher the capacitance, the better the current flow in the on state, and the faster the switching. In other words if you thicken the insulation to reduce leakage, you slow the transistor down.

What Intel has done is to replace the SiO2 with a 'high K dielectric', based on the element Hafnium, which allows a thicker (and thus less leaky) layer of insulation without reducing the capacitance.

Intel has also replaced the usual silicon gate with what it vaguely refers to as a mix of metals. Kaizad Mistry, product manager for Intel's 45nm logic technology development, said Intel was keeping this secret as the precise proportions of these and hafnium are critical.

The overall effect is to boost current flow in the on state, providing fast switching, and cutting leakage in the off state.

Intel claims that relative to 65nm technology the Penryn chips will pack twice as many transistors in a given area, with a 30 percent reduction in switching power, 20 percent faster switching, and a tenfold reduction in leakage across the gate dielectric. It also claims a fivefold reduction in current leaking between the source and drain.

reposted from: http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2007/01/how_intel_shran.html

my highlights / edits

Doggy treadmill gets your pup in shape

For those of you out there whipping your offspring into shape by utilizing the Step2Play middleman, and burning your own fair share of calories on the GameRunner, it's about time Rover joined the fray, eh? The Dog Walker treadmill helps prevent doggy obesity and apparently relieves the dog's stress, all while helping it to exert all that pent-up energy from being cramped up in the house all day. Aside from sporting a smaller, dog-friendly design, casters to enable easy transport, and two side shields to prevent minor tumbling disasters, the machine also sports a safety leash which prevents the pup from sliding off the rear (or giving up on the goal) and a devilish remote control to vary the speed from 0 to 5-kilometers per hour (3.1 mph). So if you're tired of Fido's stomach dragging the ground while crawling around in misery, you can pick up its very own treadmill (to go along with that recently-purchased pedometer) for ¥15,800 ($131).

reposted from: Engadget
my highlights / edits

Intel shows off next generation transistors

Computers the world over are about to get a makeover. Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, announced on Saturday that its next generation transistors will have metal - not silicon - gate electrodes. They will also have insulating walls made of a "high-K" hafnium (wikipedia) compound, which is transparent to electric fields, instead of silicon dioxide.

reposted from: NewScientist.com news service
my highlights / edits

The changes mean that the 45-nanometre transistors on Intel's next suite of computer processors will not only be faster and smaller than today's 65-nanometre ones, they will also be more power efficient. That combination has been difficult to achieve in the past.

"The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate transistors in the late 1960s," says Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

The new transistors will make their way into Intel's next generation products, currently codenamed "Penryn", which include the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Xeon processors. These will run Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux.

Leaky materials

Intel first announced that it would start using the new materials at the end of 2003 (see Intel claims plug for leaky chips). But on Saturday it announced that manufacturing will begin later in 2007, with the first products available in 2008.

"It's no longer a research project, it's real," says Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with VLSI Research in California, US. "This is a really big breakthrough."

A transistor consists of an electrode that switches the current on and off within a "channel" using an electric field. In the past, to make the transistor switch faster, and thereby up its performance, chip makers shortened the electrode and thinned the insulating wall that separates it from the channel.

This is far from ideal, as thinning the wall causes current to leak from the channel into the electrode, wasting heat and electricity. Furthermore, it means more current leakage than the transistor could handle.

Switching speed

Now, in an effort to continue shrinking and speeding up its transistors, Intel has come up with an insulator that transmits a fast-switching electric field even at a relatively large size. The exact composition of this "high-k" material is a secret, but Intel says that it contains hafnium. It is claimed to increase transistor switching speed by 20% and leak five times less current.

In 2003, Intel also had to tweak its process to start making 90 nanometre transistors. Its secret then was to use "strained silicon" in its transistors (see Secret of strained silicon chips revealed). This increased the speed at which current flowed, although Hutcheson says that advance was "a walk in the park" compared with achieving today's leap to high-k insulators.

The change in insulator has also led to a change in the gate electrode material. When high-k materials are deposited next to an electrode made of polysilicon, defects normally arise at the boundary. But this effect disappears when a metal gate is used instead.

Using the new 45 nanometre transistors, dual-core processors will contain 400 million transistors, while quad-core will contain 800 million.

Intel chips push through nano-barrier

New materials have had to be developed to shrink the transistors. TINY TRANSISTORS on this Intel silicon wafer contain the element hafnium, which will necessitate new manufacturing tricks.

The next milestone in the relentless pursuit of smaller, higher performance microchips has been unveiled.

Chip-maker Intel has announced that it will start manufacturing processors using transistors just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide (wikipedia).

Shrinking the basic building blocks of microchips will make them faster and more efficient.

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6299147.stm
my highlights / edits

Computer giant IBM has also signalled its intention to start production of chips using the tiny components.

"Big Blue", which developed the transistor technology with partners Toshiba, Sony and AMD, intends to incorporate them into its chips in 2008.

Intel said it would start commercial fabrication of processors at three factories later this year.

Critical leaks

The development means the fundamental "law" that underpins the development of all microchips, known as Moore's Law, remains intact.

The proposition, articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, states that the number of transistors on a chip could double every 24 months.

After more than 10 years of effort, we now have a way forward Tze-chiang Chen, IBM

The new Intel processors, codenamed Penryn, will pack more than four hundred million transistors into a chip half the size of a postage stamp.

Like current processors, they will come in dual-core and quad-core versions, meaning they will have two or four separate processors on each chip. The company has not said how fast the new devices will run.

The production of 45nm technology has been the goal of chip manufacturers ever since they conquered 65nm transistors.

A transistor is a basic electronic switch. Every chip needs a certain number of them, and the more there are and the faster they can switch, the more calculations chips can do.

For more than 45 years, chip manufacturers have managed to keep up with Moore's Law, shrinking transistor size and packing more and more of them on to chips.

However, past the 65nm barrier the silicon used to manufacture critical elements of the switches known as gate dielectrics no longer performs as it does at larger scales.

As a result, currents passing through the transistors leak and reduce the effectiveness of the chip.

To prevent this, researchers have had to develop new materials to contain the current at such small scales. The class of silicon substitutes are known as high-k metals.

Same 'tools'

Their development and integration into working components was described by Gordon Moore as "the biggest change in transistor technology" since the late 1960s.

The first working chips to incorporate 45nm devices were demonstrated last year by Intel, but they have never been incorporated into commercial products.

Dr Tze-chiang Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, said: "Until now, the chip industry was facing a major roadblock in terms of how far we could push current technology.

"After more than 10 years of effort, we now have a way forward."

The exact recipes for the different high-k metals used by Intel and IBM have not been disclosed, but importantly both firms have said that they could be incorporated into current production technology with minimal effort.

Braces 'may not boost happiness'

Braces may not be beneficial for minor teeth problems

Having braces to correct crooked teeth as a child does not improve mental well-being or quality of life in adulthood, a UK study suggests.

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6295727.stm
my highlights / edits

A 20-year study found that orthodontic treatment had little positive impact on future psychological health.

The researchers said more funding was needed for children with severe teeth problems instead of focusing on those with minor irregularities.

The study is published in the British Journal of Health Psychology.

The researchers said there was a widespread belief in the dental profession that orthodontics improved self-esteem and psychological well-being but evidence was lacking.

Before your child starts treatment there should be a careful discussion about whether there's any benefit. It shouldn't just be an automatic thing Professor Bill Shaw

Around 1,000 Welsh schoolchildren were followed from 1981, when they were 10 or 11 years old to 2001, when they were in their 30s.

Those who had received treatment such as braces had better tooth alignment and were happier with their teeth, but this had not had an impact on their self-esteem or emotional health compared with those who hadn't had any work done, the study concluded.

Lack of treatment in children who would have qualified did not lead to psychological difficulties in later life, the study reported.

Previous research published by the same team found that not having orthodontic work done as a child did not have an adverse effect on future dental health.

Strict criteria

Thousands of children have orthodontic work done each year.

Study leader Professor Bill Shaw, professor of orthodontics at the University of Manchester dental schoo,l said the dental profession had been getting more strict about which children should have treatment.

"The findings confirm early work that has influenced British orthodontics in recent years."

He said hospital orthodontists had been working to a 10-point scale for the past decade to decide whether children needed braces to correct their teeth for dental health or cosmetic reasons.

However, it has only recently become mandatory for dentists and orthodontists working in the community to stick to the same scale for NHS work.

It has been estimated that around 15% fewer children will now have braces on the NHS.

"Before your child starts treatment there should be a careful discussion about whether there's any benefit. It shouldn't just be an automatic thing," he said.

He said more funding was needed because in some areas of the country children with severe teeth problems did not have access to orthodontists.

"It's about making sure it's available and done well and not squandering money the NHS doesn't have on treatments that are marginal."

Iain Hathorn, chair of the British Orthodontic Society, said that the results of the study had contributed to the dental profession's understanding of orthodontics on the well-being of patients.

But he added: "What must be taken into account, however, is that we live in a very different era; attitudes to beauty have changed and orthodontic techniques and materials have improved; so has patients' willingness to wear retainers to maintain the benefits of treatment.

"If the survey was under way today, the picture would perhaps be very different."

"There are patients around the UK clamouring for treatment who would find it very hard to believe that orthodontics did not impart a psychological health gain," Mr Hathorn said.