Babbage
Science and technology
Obesity and health
Fat years
Jan 4th 2013, 18:36 by C.H. | NEW YORK
BEING fat is bad for you. That, at least, is the received wisdom. In reality the picture is more complex, because the prevailing measure of fatness, weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared, known as the body-mass index (BMI), is imperfect and because bad for you is a vague term. According to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), being a bit too pudgy may in fact reduce the risk of dying in a given period.
Researchers, led by Katherine Flegal of Americas Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, examined nearly 100 studies of more than 2.9m people and 270,000 deaths.Internet gaming
Artificial intelligence
Jan 3rd 2013, 14:11 by G.F. | SEATTLE
WORD games reward people with a vast vocabulary and the ability to sort a jumble of letters into the most unusual concatenations. Cheating is hard because consulting a dictionary or an anagram-solving website would be rather conspicuous to the other players. Online, such obvious skullduggery would go undetected. Or would it?
Take the recently launched Letterpress. The game, to which Babbage has become addicted, requires players to create words from letters displayed on a five-by-five grid. The grid is generated for each match according to rules that ensure a sufficient supply of vowels and consonants.
Babbage: January 2nd 2013
In furious flux
Jan 2nd 2013, 17:13 by Economist.com
OUR correspondents look at the on-going feud between Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the rise of 3D printing and driverless cars, and whether NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is about to leave the solar system
Babbage awards
Wackier than thou
Jan 2nd 2013, 12:24 by J.P.
SCIENCE had its share of Earth-shattering news in 2012. The Higgs boson—or at least something beguilingly like the elusive, mass-giving particle—was nabbed after decades of trying, a hatchback-sized rover landed on Mars without crashing and immediately began beaming high-definition images, and the 99% of the human genome that is not protein-coding became a good deal less mysterious.
Tablet computers
Difference Engine: Smaller still is smarter
Jan 1st 2013, 20:25 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
WHO really needs a tablet computer? Fashionable as they are, such devices are neither fish nor fowl. Even when fitted with a fast cellular connection, tablets still make terrible telephones. And lacking a proper keyboard, a serious amount of storage and professional-grade applications, they cannot compete with even the lightest of laptops when it comes to getting work done.
Fortunately, for Apple and other tablet makers, the public thinks otherwise.Continue reading "Difference Engine: Smaller still is smarter" »
Internet culture
#mutatis #mutandis
Dec 30th 2012, 18:17 by G.F. | SEATTLE
YOUR correspondent speaks his mind on Twitter, often at too great a length and too colourfully. Those with a sensitive disposition are advised to give his message stream a wide berth. Yet it was a surprise to receive a request recently from a follower to begin annotating tweets to allow said follower to filter "controversial" topics more easily.
Twitter supports a user-created convention known as hashtags in which a # (called a pound sign in America and a hash mark in the Commonwealth) is followed by a short bit of text. Such hashtags may be employed as a binding agent for tweets about a particular topic or theme, often sardonically (as author Susan Orlean described described a while back).
Hearing aids
Music to the ear
Dec 29th 2012, 9:28 by G.F. | SEATTLE
THE human voice, like any sound produced by thrumming a stretched string, has a fundamental frequency. For voice, the centre of that frequency lies mostly below 300Hz depending on the speaker's sex and the sounds in question. Information is conveyed through simultaneous higher-frequency overtones and additional components that can stretch up to 20,000Hz (20kHz). Modern hearing aids are able to distinguish only a small part of that range, typically between 300Hz and 5-6kHz, reducing noise and amplifying those frequencies customised to a wearer's aural lacunae.
But differentiating elements of many common parts of speech occur in higher frequencies.
Babbage: December 26th 2012
A mission to Mars
Dec 26th 2012, 6:39 by economist.com
OUR correspondents discuss their pick of the most important scientific breakthroughs from the past year
Audio recordings
Scratch that
Dec 24th 2012, 14:54 by G.F. | SEATTLE
A COUPLE of months ago your correspondent visited the Library of Congress's Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation near Washington, DC. The facility, converted from a former Federal Reserve strategic currency cache, has millions upon millions of items stowed in underground, temperature-controlled vaults, including wax recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company in the early 1900s; lacquer ones, including a trove of NBC Radio shows recorded directly from the engineering booth from the 1930s to 1970s; metal master and "mother" (pressing) discs; as well as innumerable commercially produced shellac and vinyl records.
In-flight internet
Coach potatoes
Dec 23rd 2012, 11:38 by G.F. | SEATTLE
HUMAN beings are bags of brine. This presents a problem for wireless communications, because the range of most commonly used radio frequencies lose signal strength when passing through salt water, as well as through masses of fat, muscle and bone. In large public spaces, like an open area at an airport terminal, human bodies are spread out and have little effect compared to the building materials that enclose the space, like metal and sheet rock. Even in a house, brick and chicken wire are much worse than people in reducing the range of a network.
Dropbox
A nebulous future
Dec 22nd 2012, 11:31 by A.R. | OXFORD
BEFORE Apple launched iCloud in 2011, Steve Jobs allegedly offered to buy Dropbox, a file-sharing service founded in 2007, for $800m. When Dropbox declined, Apple's late boss disparaged it as a feature, not a company. Soon after, Dropbox raised $250m, putting its value at over $4 billion. Earlier in December Dropbox concluded a promotional campaign that, in just a few weeks, added 2m new users, bringing the total to over 100m, roughly double the number when Jobs made his comment. Consumers, it seems, can't get enough of the feature.
Dropbox dominates online file-sharing. It boast three times as many users as its closest direct rival, YouSendIt.
Photo-sharing
A Flickr of life
Dec 21st 2012, 17:17 by G.F. | SEATTLE
BABBAGE'S inbox was swamped one recent morning with hundreds of e-mail notifications. Various friends and acquaintances wanted to add him as a contact on Flickr, a photo-sharing service which once set the world ablaze but which had been all but extinguished for years. The reason for the sudden flurry, Babbage soon discovered, was that Flickr had just updated its iPhone app to let users match their Flickr contacts against Twitter followers, Facebook friends, Google pals and Yahoo! e-mail addressbooks and share photos across the different social networks with a single tap.
Crowdsourcing ideas
Solutions in search of a problem
Dec 20th 2012, 10:12 by A.R. | OXFORD
WHAT if you could use a lensless, portable microscope to detect microbes in the air? This did not occur to the designers of the apparatus, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to develop but was lying unused in a storeroom at Oxford University. But it did occur to James Dash, a 15-year-old pupil at John Hampden Grammar School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. His winning proposal was one of 51 entries in a competition run by Marblar, a website for crowdsourcing ideas.
CyMap, researchers’ name for the device, is one of countless clever gizmos and techniques mothballed as solutions in search of a problem.
Babbage: December 19th 2012
Beware of those screengrabs
Dec 19th 2012, 23:59 by Economist.com
MARBLAR offers prizes for recycling unused ideas, SnapChat delivers self-destructing pictures over mobile phones and Hointer re-thinks the clothing showroom
Online commerce
A vintage year
Dec 19th 2012, 22:58 by G.F. | SEATTLE
A BILLION dollars is a lot of hay for knicknacks. But craftsmen and vintage collectors on Etsy, a dedicated online marketplace, are on course to sell wares worth that much in 2012. That is nearly double the tally for 2011 and three times as much as in 2010. Etsy's gross merchandise sales exceeded $800m by the end of November, its first $100m month. December, with its Christmas shopping, is likely to be better yet. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing, of which there were 17m in November, and takes a 3.5% cut of the sales price.
To be fair, Etsy sells plenty of useful things besides bric-a-brac.
Reports on the intersections between science, technology, culture and policy, in a blog named after Charles Babbage, a Victorian mathematician and engineer
Advertisement
Economist video
Comments and tweets on popular topics
- Analects | China
- Americas view | The Americas
- Babbage | Science and technology
- Banyan | Asia
- Baobab | Africa
- Blighty | Britain
- Buttonwood's notebook | Financial markets
- Cassandra | The World in 2013
- Charlemagne | European politics
- Democracy in America | American politics
- Eastern approaches | Ex-communist Europe
- Feast and famine | Demography and development
- Free exchange | Economics
- Game theory | Sports
- Graphic detail | Charts, maps and infographics
- Gulliver | Business travel
- Johnson | Language
- Lexington's notebook | American politics
- Newsbook | News analysis
- Prospero | Books, arts and culture
- Pomegranate | The Middle East
- Schumpeter | Business and management
Advertisement
Latest blog posts - All times are GMT
Advertisement
