Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Since we’re well into the 21st century, we should have at least some of the things that the fabled Popular Mechanics article promised us for the 21st century way back in 1950, shouldn’t we?

We have some, it’s true although in many cases they didn’t turn out to be as popular as you would have expected. The talking cars for instance have been and gone and, after several abortive starts, we have workable video phones now. However, in many respects we’ve gone back to basics as all the predicted plastic furniture and furnishings have largely been rejected in favour of natural products. Both the hovercraft and supersonic flight have both been consigned to history for the moment and those flying cars never came to pass, or at least not yet.

What about the predictions of the novels? Well, perhaps the most famous of those is 1984. We didn’t get the surveillance that was predicted by 1984 but we sure do now and all we’re missing is the totalitarian regime. Going back further to Brave New World from 1932 and we’re getting there on the designer baby front although the mood enhancing drugs have some way to go before they’d be accepted on a widespread basis by society.

Many predictions involved the use of automation would mean that adults would work only a few hours each week. Although you might laugh at that it actually has happened in the sense that many of the routine jobs of the 1930s and before are now automated: who would expect a person to copy documents by hand these days when there are photocopiers around? The problem is, of course, that we’ve started doing different jobs and ones that, so far, generally can’t be automated.

Some of the predictions seem silly to us now such as that from Julius Sextus Frontinus in AD10 that everything had already been invented and he saw no scope for further developments. In many ways he was right because the Roman Empire didn’t invent anything of consequence after that and it was over 1000 years before developments started moving beyond Roman hi-tech.

Of course we’re just on the leading edge of the 21st century and there’s much more to come. One thing that seems likely to cause a considerable impact on life in the future is the seemingly relentless increase in life expectancy. To put the figures into some context consider that in 1911 there were only 100 people over 100 years old whereas there are over 9,000 over 100 today. In fact the increase in lifespan is so significant that the pensions industry has been told to drop any assumptions they may have made about there being an upper limit on lifespan which is nice news if you’re planning on living forever but don’t forget that you’ll not be able to stop working at 65 and put your feet up!

Everyone and their dog tends to look for aliens from outer space but the number of people looking for time travellers is very much smaller. There isn’t really a good reason for that on the whole. After all, absolute proof that time travel was possible would cause just as great a stir on earth as would absolute proof that aliens were out there.

It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors (on the assumption that at least the mark #1 time machine would be a fairly sizeable piece of equipment).

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

Although you might not think there was a whole lot of scope for advertising in a medium that only gives you 140 characters to play with, there are a growing number of ways to advertise through Twitter although whether or not they’re actually effective is an entirely different question.

The means for handling the advertising varies quite a bit as you’d expect for a fairly new type of media. For instance, since the tweets themselves are rather fleeting affairs on the tweet streams of the more prolific twitterers, Twittad takes the approach of using the background image to place the main advert and uses the tweet stream to announce that the twitter account is sponsored. The system works in a similar way to blog sponsorship platforms which is to say that you write up a little profile of your twitter account and advertisers can choose you based on that or alternatively you can choose some advertisers. Payout seems to be around the $2.50 a week level which is OK in that you don’t need to do much for that.

Another service that’s possibly more interesting to the advertisers than the twitterers is Twtad which works on the pay per click model. The problem with this one is that the payment is typically 5 cents or less which would be alright for a system that was entirely automated but this system isn’t. Since click-through is typically quite low this system isn’t really worthwhile unless you have LOT of followers (10,000 or more perhaps) and if you have then you should be able to pick up more money elsewhere.

A more comprehensive version of this is Be a Magpie which is an automated service offering pay per view, pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale. You can set it so that you have to pre-approve tweets but leaving it on automatic seems best and will put a Magpie tweet every 5 ot 10 (you set the interval) of your tweets. All else being equal this one seems by far the best bet for the twitterers in that once it’s set up it can be fully automated. It’s good from the advertisers point of view too in that it offers the four different payment methods.

The latest entrant seems to be Betweeted which I gather operates on the basis of the twitterer choosing advertisers to tweet about so is quite similar to the usual blog sponsorship services. So far it’s only for US bloggers and nobody else can even register to look at how it works.

So, you can advertise via Twitter, but the question is: should you? If you followed the original principles of Twitter ie that it’s a service for “friends, family members and co-workers to stay connected” then the answer is probably not. After all, you wouldn’t hand out advertising leaflets to these people, would you? However, the service has moved a long way from that and most people have followers who are complete strangers and lots of others are tweeting to promote themselves or their business, in which case the answer is: why not? Aside from advertising third parties, more and more companies are moving on to Twitter to promote their products and, of course, there’s always been the self-promotion of bloggers tweeting their posts (some cross-promote their tweets on their blog) so advertising is very much a feature of Twitter that seems here to stay.

Finally, there’s the question of effectiveness of Twitter advertising ie does it actually work? Well, I’ve been tweeting my own blog posts for a while now and it would appear that it’s quite an effective way of gathering new readers for the blog so presumably it would be equally effective for advertising tweets, or at least those that fit in with the general interest of the followers.

I know that computers are supposed to go down in price on a regular basis but the drops recently seem even more extreme than usual unless, of course, it’s just me keeping more of an eye on them than normal.

For instance, the Acer Aspire One that I bought in early December is now replaced by a model that comes with twice the RAM and 50% more storage space for exactly the same money. Now, that’s pretty typical of computers but the impact on the lower end of the market is a little more extreme.

The somewhat less cute version that Maplin originally put out for £160 at one stage came with all of 128MB RAM, 2GB space and a 7″ screen was obviously severely overpriced when the 512MB RAM, 8GB storage and 9″ display Acer dropped to £135 so the Maplin price has pretty much collapsed to £99 and may have a little further to fall yet. Actually, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to think that perhaps it’s time to consider getting one to leave in the living room to read the paper on or whatever.

And, of course, these price drops and performance improvements can only continue. Next year we can expect that the Acer will be down to close to that £99 price point with potentially the Maplin or something similar coming in around £50.

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.