Article for 10th & 13th of January.

Scientific American Previews the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

By Larry Greenemeier | January 6, 2012 |  

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Attending the annualInternational Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is like walking along a loud, crowded boardwalk on a hot summer day. There may not be much sun or sand, but amongst the thousands of tech peddlers who flock there each January, you’ll find no shortage of hype, hoopla and expensive gimmicks. What keeps visitors coming back, however, is the chance to hear about new trends and see new technologies before they’re available to the general public—a glimpse at the gadgets that are most likely to be the hottest gifts by year’s end.

It doesn’t always work that way, of course. 3-D televisions haven’t lived up to the billing they received a few years ago, nor have 4G networks. Still, CES puts all of these technologies out in front of well more than 100,000 attendees every year, giving them the opportunity to see and judge for themselves.

This time around, to cite just a few trends: The venerable PC will try for a comeback against upstart tablet technology; automobile makers will demonstrate even more ways to transform their vehicles into gadgets on wheels; and content providers will talk up ways to further wed social media and television.

Ultrabooks and tablets
CES 2012 features a showdown between makers of tablet computers and so-called “ultrabooks,” an Intel trademark used to describe a class of thin, lightweight portable computers that have evolved to save PCs from extinction. The concept of ultrabooks isn’t much different than that of the “Netbooks” that Dell, HP and others were hocking at CES a few years ago. Ultrabooks have actually been around since Apple launched its MacBook Air in January 2008. They have bigger displays, longer battery life and more advanced microprocessors than Netbooks, which is why they cost about twice as much.

For many PC vendors, ultrabooks are a way to liven up the PC market and keep tablet vendors like Apple at bay, for now anyway. Tablet PCs accounted for one quarter of all PCs sold in 2011 and are slowly eating into the market for notebook PCs, according to research firm NPD DisplaySearch. Earlier this week, the research firm reported that by 2017 notebook PC shipments should reach 432 million units, with tablet PC shipments expected to reach 383.3 million units. “Demand for ultrabooks will be driven by consumer interest in sleek design and convenience like instant-on and long battery life,” according to the NPD report. Tablet PCs, meanwhile, will be driven by increasingly powerful multi-core processors, mature operating systems, growing application libraries and higher resolution panels.

Connected cars
It’s hard to think of an automobile as an appliance, but carmakers have spent the past several years filling up their latest models with gadgets that connect drivers and passengers to mp3 players, mobile phones and the Web. Ford CEO Alan Mulally will be part of the CES keynote lineup for the third year in a row, this time as part of the January 11 “Innovation Power Panel” with executives from Xerox and Verizon. One of the more interesting directions Ford has taken is its proposed in-car health monitoring system, which would link drivers and passengers to glucose monitoring devices, diabetes management services, asthma management tools and Web-based allergen alerts while on the road. Ford first introduced this idea in May.

Social TV
TV networks have taken a special interest in younger audiences that are more likely to watch real-time programs with a laptop, iPad or smart phone in hand, ready to more actively participate in the social-network buzz around a show. Yahoo‘s purchase of IntoNow last year gave the former kind of search an entry into the social TV movement with software designed to listen to what you’re watching on TV, identify the program and send this information out to friends via social networks.

The utility of this aside, look for more of these kinds of announcements this year at CES. During a November 16 social-media event in New York City, Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s manager of strategic media partnerships, indicated his company would make a TV-related announcement at CES, although neither he nor the company would provide details.

So long Microsoft
Bill Gates said goodbye to CES in 2008. It’s worth noting that the company he co-founded is pulling up stakes as well. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will give his final CES keynote on January 9, and the company says it will not have a major presence at the show beginning next year. Much of this has to do with the fact that neither Microsoft nor any of the other major tech companies actually debut products at CES anymore. Most of what they present at CES has already been introduced the previous year at trade shows that specialize in different types of technology—mobility, video games and such. Before hitting the CES stage in January 2010, for instance, Microsoft had already unveiled its Bing search engine at the May 2009 All Things Digital conference and Kinect for Xbox 360 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) one month later.

This time around Ballmer will surely talk about Windows 8, which the company hopes will be the premier operating system for the emerging ultrabook PC category. There’s already a lot of information about Windows 8 available on the Web of course, including listings of new features and a version of the OS for software developers to tinker with.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/01/06/scientific-american-previews-the-2012-consumer-electronics-show-ces/

Article for the 10th & 13th of January.

Is It Time to Overhaul the Calendar?

A reformed calendar, with a pattern of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month, would be more business friendly

By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience  | December 29, 2011 | 89

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Egyptian calendar of Kom Ombo temple, in Egypt.Image: Flickr/guillenperez

Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before.

Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas, for example, would forever come on a Sunday.

"The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient."

New versus old

The trouble with designing a nice, regular calendar is that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long, leaving extra snippets of time that don't fit nicely into a cycle of 24-hour days. If this time isn't somehow accounted for, the calendar "drifts" relative to the seasons, and the next thing you know, Christmas Day is coming after the spring thaw.

The Gregorian calendar deals with this by adding an extra day (Leap Day) to February about every four years, correcting for the seasonal drift.  

"It's really incredible that in the Middle Ages, they were able to invent a new calendar that was so accurate," Henry told LiveScience. What bothers him about the Gregorian calendar, though, is the frustrating tendency for days of the week to jump around. Because 365 is not a multiple of seven, 7-day weeks don't fit evenly into the Gregorian calendar. That means that each year, dates shift over one day of the week (two during leap years).

"Everybody has to redo their calendars," Henry said. "For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It's completely unnecessary."

Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (named after Henry and Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins economist who also advocates calendar overhaul), every date falls on the same day of the week — forever.

The calendar follows a pattern of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month. That means the old rhyme, "30 days hath September, April, June and November," would need to be revised to "30 days hath September, June, March and December."

To account for extra time, Hanke and Henry drop leap years and instead create a "leap week" at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week, dubbed "Xtr", would adjust for seasonal drift while keeping the 7-day cycle on track.

"The new calendar can be fairly often off as much as three days on the seasons, but looking out, could you tell?" Henry said. "Of course you couldn't tell."

The economics of time

For Henry, the new calendar is worth it because of how much time and effort goes into revising the calendar each year. He first got into the idea of calendar reform while having to yet again update lecture dates and syllabi for his students. He quickly discovered that there were calendar-reform advocates with suggestions on how to do away with that problem, he said.

"My heart sank, and I thought, 'Oh my god, I don't want to get involved in calendar reform. It's the stupidest waste of time. It's hopeless,'" Henry said.

But he put the Hanke-Henry calendar online anyway, weathered a storm of publicity, and watched nothing come of it. This time, he said, he's hoping that the influence of Hanke, the economist, will spur real interest in change.

To Hanke, the need for a new calendar goes beyond the annoyance of out-of-date syllabi. Calculations for interest payments, for example, are complicated by the irregularity of months. Different financial entities deal with these irregularities differently, meaning that the amount of interest accrued depends not just on time, but on who did the calendar-related math. The Hanke-Henry calendar would do away with these irregularities, streamlining the process, Hanke and Henry wrote in the January 2012 issue of Globe Asia magazine.

The new calendar would also be more business-friendly, the researchers wrote. Meetings and holiday time off would be easier to schedule. Other businessmen's attempts at calendar reform, including one by Eastman Kodak founder George Eastman, failed because they didn't always maintain Sundays as weekends,disrupting the Sabbath for Christians. The Hanke-Henry calendar doesn't have that problem.

"The natural date for the introduction of these changes is 1 January 2012, because it is a Sunday in both the current Pope Gregory calendar and the simple, new calendar," the researchers wrote.

While that would not be enough time to update computers to the new calendar, he said, the target for complete technical adoption could be January 1, 2017, when the Gregorian year again begins on a Sunday.

When's my birthday?

But no matter how simple Hanke and Henry's suggestion is, it faces high psychological barriers.

"My favorite reason it shouldn't be done is, 'But my birthday will always be on a Wednesday!'" Henry said. "Of course the answer to that is you can celebrate your birthday whenever you want."

Another problem: "To my extreme annoyance, my calendar contains four Friday the 13ths each year," Henry said. "Isn't that awful?"

Nonetheless, Henry has some hope for a simpler calendar. After all, he said, smokinghas gone from completely acceptable to often banned in public, in just a few short decades. The federal government once managed to institute a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour. And despite centuries of habit, no one says "Peking" anymore when they mean "Beijing."

"Real change is possible," Henry said.