Discovery News: Etherized

New Digs

clark boyd — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:08:14 -0500

Just a quick note for everyone. The blog has a new address. From now on, all tech-a-licious updates can be found at the new home of the Etherized blog on Discovery. That would be here. Be sure to check out the totally awesome redesign of the whole Discovery News site. Awesome sauce, as the kids say these days.

The Internet: Lordy, Lordy Look Who's Forty...

clark boyd — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:33:00 -0400

It's not often that I get to celebrate a technology that is, fundamentally, the heart and soul of the day job over at PRI's The World. We're talking existential here, folks. The Internet turned 40 last week. That's UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock, with the Interface Message Processor. Forty years ago, Kleinrock and his team sent the first message between two computers. One of the computers was at UCLA, and the other was up at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). That message was supposed to be "L-O-G-I-N." Prophetically, maybe poetically, only the "L" and "O" got through before the Net experienced its first system crash. Anyone know how to say "Fail Whale" in 1969-speak? Anyway -- to celebrate, UCLA threw a symposium-ish bash. You can read more about that here. Our intrepid left coast correspondent, Cyrus Farivar, happened to be down in Los Angeles for the festivities. He sent us interviews with Kleinrock and Charles Kline (who typed that fateful "L-O" message). We start, however, with an audio homage to "Internet," complete with an appropriate soundtrack from Marvin Gaye: I know many of you will be asking for some of the source material for the opening audio montage. So, below, please find two incredibly enlightening videos. This stuff is gold, people, pure gold.

Wide Angle: Scientific Data Collection Goes Mobile

clark boyd — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:37:29 -0400

Nearly seven years of covering developments in global technology have taught me two things. First, I remain woefully, albeit sometimes blissfully, ignorant of all the great things that people are doing with technology across the globe. (That's OK, though, as I continue to find great stories to share.)And second, which kind of follows that: tech alone will not save the world, and its ridiculous to think that it will. You need people. Not just "idea" people who are trying to come up with the Next Big Thing that all of us will be willing to part with hundreds of dollars to buy. Instead, I'm talking about people who find novel ways to take some tools that are already available, and make the most of them. People like David Aanensen, a Bioinfomatician in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College in London. He and his team have created an app for the Google Android operating system called EpiCollect. The idea is elegantly simple: many scientists are out in the field gathering information on different infectious disease organisms worldwide. Much of that data ends up in databases at Imperial College. Geography is often of significance in comparing disease organisms across the planet. So, why not devise an open source smartphone app that allows the user in the field to enter relevent information directly into the phone, where it is automatically geo-tagged by the phone's on-board GPS? Then, when there is a strong mobile data signal, the information on phone will synch directly back to the main database back in the lab. Indeed, why not?

Listen in as David Aanensen describes what finally got them to start working on EpiCollect in earnest:

Download or listen to the David Aanensen podcast

Finns Get the Right to Universal Broadband Access

clark boyd — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:28:38 -0400

You may have read, right here at Discovery, that Finland's just passed a landmark law that gives all of its citizens (yes, even the ones who live in the middle of snow-covered forests miles from nowhere, or are sitting in saunas) the right to universal broadband (1MB) Internet access. As if that's not enough of a challenge to the country's telco providers, they're thinking of bumping that up to 10MB in the future. Obviously, someone thinks the Internet-driven knowledge economy is here to stay, at least in northern Europe. As part of my coverage for this week's Tech Podcast for PRI (the day job, as I call it), I had Cyrus Farivar call up (Skype up, actually) Suvi Linden, Finland's Minister of Communications. Here's what she had to say about the new law, and about the reasoning behind it:

By the way, I hear through the grapevine that Finland's neighbor Estonia (or E-stonia, as it likes to bill itself) is a wee bit jealous that the Finns beat them to it!

Wide Angle: Geo-engineering and the Water Cycle

clark boyd — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0400

When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the resulting effect on global climate was staggering. The eruption sent so many millions tons of debris and aerosols into the stratosphere that it, quite literally, blocked the sun. Despite the fact that greenhouse gas emissions continued their steady rise in the year that followed the eruption, the stratospheric debris from Pinatubo caused global temperatures to drop during that time by almost a degree. Scientists hoping to find geo-engineering solutions to cooling the earth took note. Would there be a way to mimic the Pinatubo eruption, without the destruction and sulfur dioxide, and block or reflect enough of the sunlight to stop the heating of the earth? Lots of ideas have been floated, ranging from satellites that deploy giant parasol-like fans, to simply painting roofs a more reflective white. You can read a couple of posts from our friends at Treehugger to find out more: here and here. Here's the thing, though. You can't dramatically tinker with a complex system and not expect the unexpected. In the year after the Pinatubo eruption, scientists noted interesting, and potentially devastating, effects on the water cycle in certain parts of the world. And that's led some scientists to ask just exactly what effects large-scale bio-engineering might have on the earth's water cycle. Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology on the Stanford University campus, is running some modeling tests to try the answer those questions about geo-engineering and the water cycle. I caught up with him for this week's podcast, and he started by giving a bit more background on what happened to the Ganges River in India after the Pinatubo eruption:

(Photo by USGS)