The typhoon that hit the Philippines last week killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more, according to the BBC. The damage to infrastructure and the dislocation of all those people make it difficult for relief agencies to know where to route aid. Yet this typhoon, called Yolanda in the Philippines and Haiyan elsewhere, hit just as the technology to update maps and sift through social media is maturing. Filipinos and their faraway friends may be in the best position yet to respond to a typhoon, thanks to better digital coordination among volunteers.
Read the rest of this post at IEEE Spectrum’s Tech Talk blog post [html] [pdf]
Debates about how best to avoid Nairobi traffic can take nearly as long as a drive across town. The city has three dozen traffic cameras downtown, but that’s not enough information for a city of over three million people. Traffic costs the city US $600 000 a day, by one estimate. IBM’s Nairobi lab, in beta since a year ago, tackled traffic early on and today launched a mobile application to help drivers avoid traffic. Continue reading IBM Nairobi Lab’s First Offering is a Traffic-Dodging Mobile App→
If neuroscientist Henry Markram had a dollar for every neuron he wants to map, he still wouldn’t have enough money.
As it happens, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) researcher has a billion euros, or $1.38 billion, from the European Union to spend over the next ten years, but the normal means of determining a neuron’s activity can cost $1 million and take a year. By the time he got through the 3000-odd pathways shown in the photograph of a pinhead-sized slice of brain behind him in a conference room last month, he’d be flat broke, decades older, and he’d still have to map countless more pinheads’ worth of neurons to understand the brain. Continue reading Human Brain Project Needs Artificial Brains to Understand Real Ones→
Computer scientist Peter Kazansky at the University of Southampton, in England, has some words for the ages. He and a group of collaborators wrote them in quartz crystal using new optical techniques that could preserve the text for millennia. The message, which consisted of the abstract of the paper announcing the work, is stored as two types of alterations in the way quartz glass refracts light. The combination of the two allows for data-storage densities as high as 360 terabytes per disc, or more than 7000 times today’s 50-gigabyte double-layer Blu-ray capacity.
There’s always a catch, though. Reading the message requires an electron microscope, and the process may never provide faster access to stored data than existing technology can. This and similar over-the-horizon memory research may someday improve big-data storage, but such systems aren’t an easy fit with today’s data-storage needs, experts say. Improved density and durability are both helpful, but readability and the capacity to rewrite data in a different format might be more important.
Read the rest of this news story in this month’s issue of IEEE Spectrum: [html] [pdf] and see my related blog post.
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
