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December 01 2010
The Revolution Should Not Be Digitized–Put It on Microfilm Instead
By The siren song of digitization is one we are hardly even trying to resist. E-books are outselling hardcovers on Amazon, the Beatles sold over 2 million songs on iTunes in a week, and you can read 350-year-old scientific papers online. But why should we fight it? Digital media is cheap, it’s easy, and it’s clutter free.
But like all of the siren’s attempted seductions, digitization is an attractive tune with a twist. The convenience that digital storage offers now will more than likely be made up for in future headaches. So a pair of researchers recommend that we bring some analog back into our lives.
Steffen Schielke and Andreas Rauber are neither picky audiophiles nor hoodie-clad hipsters, they’re computer scientists, and they are worried about the long-term storage of all this data we’re collecting.
Magnetic tape, floppy disks, CDs and DVDs have all more-or-less come and gone in the last 80 years. While trying to find the equipment and expertise to actually use the different formats can be a burden, there are also issues with software, say Schielke and Rauber, the authors of a new study on the future of data archiving published in the International Journal of Electronic Governance. You may have even experienced this before. As Brien Posey recalls on the TechRepublic blog:
Fifteen years ago, I stored my archives on Zip disks. They were a good choice at the time because they were relatively inexpensive and you could fit a whopping 100 MB of data on a single disk.
Today, though, Zip disks are pretty much extinct. I still have my old Zip drive, but it connects to a PC via a parallel port. Like the Zip drives themselves, parallel ports are also extinct, so I can’t read the data from the Zip disks.
The problem really kicks in for people who are trying to maintain records for decades or longer, like governments or librarians. Every time a storage medium goes obsolete, the whole archive needs to be flipped over to a new format, taking time, money, and opening up room for errors.
Schielke and Rauber’s solution is to switch everything over to a format called microfilm, a 200-year-old technology which stores information as tiny images and can be read with nothing more than a good magnifying glass. Microfilm can last for over 500 years if it is stored properly, and using a barcode system allows error-free storage densities of around 14 kilobytes per image, say Schielke and Rauber. The information is easily re-digitized, saving us from the strained eyes and late nights previous generations experienced hunkered over microfilm at the library.
It’s more than a little ironic that one of the proposed solutions for our data storage woes might be solved by a technology that led us to embrace digitization with open arms (Hipster Kitty would be proud). But with the Library of Congress now archiving tweets and websites, I can’t help but worry about the historians of the future, lest they be crushed to death under a pile of microfilm in the Justin D. Bieber Wing of the National Twitter Archive.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Man Boots Memories From Brain Straight to Computer
80beats: “Story of Stuff” Crusade Takes on E-Waste and Planned Obsolescence
80beats: Self-Organizing Nanotech Could Store 250 DVDs on One Coin-Size Surface
DISCOVER: In the Race Between Optical and Magnetic Storage, We Win
DISCOVER: Think Tech One Hundred Movies on Just One Disk
Image: I Can Has Cheezburger?
October 28 2010
Take the “Ultimate Intelligence Test” to Find out if You’re Ultimately Smart
There are many different kinds of intelligent. Are you book smart? Street smart? Good at school and test-taking smart? Good at schmoozing your way out of deadlines and into jobs smart? Better at writing or math?
One new intelligence test, put online today by New Scientist and the Discovery Channel, claims to be the best test of overall smarts. The test was designed by neuropsychologist Adrian Owen to test 12 different “pillars” of wisdom, and to work every part of your mind.
From Owen’s article about the test for New Scientist:
Like many researchers before us, we began by looking for the smallest number of tests that could cover the broadest range of cognitive skills that are believed to contribute to intelligence, from memory to planning.
But we went one step further. Thanks to recent work with brain scanners, we could make sure that the tests involved as much of the brain as possible – from the outer layers, responsible for higher thought, to deeper-lying structures such as the hippocampus, which is involved in memory.
As an intrepid blogger, I went ahead and took the test. Some of the exercises resembled classic games like “Memory” (to test paired associates learning, you’re asked to remember what items are hidden where) and “Simon” (to test working memory, you have to remember sequences). Others are more similar to cognitive psychology tests like the Stroop test (which tests focused attention), and there are also some puzzle-solving tests (to test your ability to plan for the future).
The 12 tests are designed to test 12 different aspects of working memory, reasoning, focus, and planning. I did the worst on the “verbal working memory” test, which was reading a string of numbers and typing it in from memory. This actually makes sense, because I’ve always known myself to be a physical learner, and highlight or write down everything I hear that I need to remember. I wonder if there is a correlation there?
You can only take the test once, so make sure to do some mental push-ups first before diving in. Then come back here and tell us what you thought! Also, visit www.cambridgebrainsciences.com to play additional games, to train your brain, and to test your 12 pillars.
Related content:
DISCOVER: Teen Genius: 5 Promising Scientists Under 20
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Genius
The Intersection: ‘Are Men Smarter Than Women?‘ The Verdict
Gene Expression: More exercise = more I.Q.?
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Single memory training task improves overall problem-solving intelligence
Image: Flickr/B Rosen
June 07 2010
World Science Festival: Telling Scary Stories of Strangelets
Serious scientists may disdain anecdotal evidence, but we have evidence that some of them are pretty good with an anecdote.
Last Thursday, the World Science Festival brought a collection of science geeks to The Moth, where the brave souls took the stage not to explain their work, but to tell stories of their lives in science. The evening’s biggest scientific celebrity was theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of a 2004 Nobel Prize in physics. His story began with a phone call.
The editors of Scientific American were hoping he would write a rebuttal to a letter they’d just received. “The letter was from a man who I later learned was a banana farmer in Hawaii,” Wilczek recalled. “He was worried about black holes. He was worried about a particle accelerator that was being built on Long Island that could produce black holes, and he was worried that the black holes would swallow up Long Island and then the world.”
Wilczek happily wrote a response to defend the honor of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab. He noted that even if RHIC did create black holes, they’d be smaller than atomic nuclei and therefore would have such feeble gravity that “they wouldn’t be good at swallowing up anything.” He also explained that the type of particle collisions that would take place at RHIC occur naturally on Earth when cosmic rays bombard our planet–and we’re still here.
But Wilczek felt that his response was boring, and decided to spice it up a bit by mentioning “strangelets,” hypothetical particles that he said could be produced by the RHIC, and which could pose more of a threat to life, the universe, and everything. Imagine strangelets as the ice-nine from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, Wilczek said; crystals of that fictional substance turned all liquid water they came into contact with into solid ice-nine, creating a chain reaction. Strangelets could have a similar warping effect on “all nuclear matter,” said Wilczek, “which would not be good.” However, Wilczek finished his response by explaining why the doomsday strangelet scenario was “not plausible,” and happily went off on vacation.
He thought no more of it until his brother-in-law arrived at Wilczek’s isolated vacation home bearing tales of a worldwide media panic over RHIC. One article from The Sunday Times of London ran under the banner headline, “Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth,” and prominently asked in a caption whether the RHIC would be “The Final Experiment?”
At least the story had a happy ending. Wilczek spent the next two weeks trekking to a payphone near his vacation home to explain to journalists why RHIC wouldn’t kill us all. The particle collider was completed and turned on, and its findings helped Wilczek win that Nobel. And most importantly, the nuclear matter that makes up my body is feeling no stranger than usual.
Related Content:
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Listening to Illusions of Sound
Discoblog: World Science Festival: The 4 Ways to Find E.T.
DISCOVER: The Glue That Holds the World Together
80beats: Physics Experiment Won’t Destroy Earth
Image: Wikipedia
May 27 2010
Punked! Slate’s Doctored Photos Mess With Readers’ Memories
“How will we remember the 2000s? What were the high and low points? Who were the heroes and villains?” William Saletan asked in a Slate article last week.
Do you remember when Senator Joe Lieberman voted to convict President Clinton at his impeachment trial, when President George W. Bush chilled at his Texas ranch with Roger Clemens while Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, and when Hillary Clinton used Jeremiah Wright in a 2008 TV attack ad against Barack Obama?
You shouldn’t remember any of these things, because they didn’t happen. But Slate made pictures to use as evidence that these events did actually occur as an exercise in “altering political memories.” Slate mixed doctored photos of these fake events with other photos of real ones, and asked the readers which they remembered. The readers had no idea they were part on an experiment in memory hacking.
More people remembered the real ones, Slate reports:
In the first three days the experiment was posted, 5,279 subjects participated. All of the true incidents outscored the false ones. Our subjects were more likely to remember seeing Powell’s Iraq presentation (75 percent), Katherine Harris presiding over the Florida recount (67 percent), or Tom DeLay leading the congressional effort to save Schiavo (50 percent) than any of the five fake scenes.
But people remembered the fakes too. A fake screenshot of the Hillary Clinton ad, for example, fooled 36 percent of readers into thinking it had actually happened. “At that time I was backing Hillary for President. I didn’t like it that she used this rather sleazy ad, but her campaign did remove it,” one respondent said.
The stunt paid homage to memory research; a series of articles on Elizabeth Loftus‘ human memory research at the University of California at Irvine will follow. Slate meant to show the power of images in producing false memories. Besides quoting George Orwell, they also mentioned a 2002 experiment that, with a little Photoshop magic, fooled 10 out of 20 college students into believing they had gone up in hot-air balloons as children.
Related content:
80beats: Lasers Write False, Fearful Memories into the Brains of Flies
80beats: Neuroscientist Says Torture Produces False Memories and Bad Intel
DISCOVER: Are Recovered Memories Real?
DISCOVER: How Much of Your Memory Is True?
Image: flickr / Nrbelex
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