Saturday, April 12, 2008

"Alicia Keys: Gangsta Rap Created to Convince Black People to Kill Each Other"

NEW YORK (AP) — There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist.

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. 'Gangsta rap' didn't exist."

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: The bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing."

Keys' AK-47 jewelry came as a surprise to her mother, who is quoted as telling Blender: "She wears what? That doesn't sound like Alicia." Keys' publicist, Theola Borden, said Keys was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

The multiplatinum songstress behind the hits "Fallin"' and "No One" most recently had success with her latest CD, "As I Am," which sold millions.

Friday, April 11, 2008

"Memory Breakthrough Could Mean 500,000 Songs on an iPod"

from the times

Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may someday be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology.

Scientists at IBM say they have demonstrated a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs — or 3,500 movies — and cost far less to produce.

In a paper published in the April 11 issue of Science magazine, a team at the company's research center in San Jose, Calif., said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time," and last for decades.

So-called "racetrack" memory uses the "spin" of an electron to store data and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.

Like flash memory — the most advanced type of memory for small devices such as mobile phones — it has no moving parts, meaning that the problems associated with mechanical reliability are dramatically reduced.

Unlike flash, however, it can "write data" — or store information — extremely quickly, and does not have the "wear out" mechanism that means flash memory drives can only be used a few tens of thousand times before they wear out.

"The promise of racetrack memory — for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket — could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet," Stuart Parkin, the IBM researcher who led the research, said.

At present the most capacious iPod, the 160 GB iPod Classic, can store 40,000 songs. Still, that's 32 times the amount of storage the first iPod had when it debuted in late 2001, six and a half years ago.

Parkin said racetrack memory could lead to the development of "three-dimensional micro-electronics," breaking with the tradition of scientists trying to fit an ever-greater number on transistors on an ultra-thin piece of silicon shaped like a wafer.

"The combination of extraordinarily interesting physics and spintronic materials engineering, one atomic layer at a time, continues to be highly challenging and very rewarding," he said.

For nearly 50 years, scientists have explored the possibility of storing information inside the walls that exist between magnetic domains, but to date manipulating such walls has been too expensive and complicated to achieve significant results.

In his paper, Parkin describes a milestone in which he and his team were able to store data in columns of magnetic material arranged on the surface of a silicon wafer. The information moves around the columns at high speed, giving the technology its "racetrack" name.

IBM said the technology was still "exploratory" at this stage, but that it expected devices which used it to be on the market within 10 years.

Monday, April 7, 2008

"The Grid Could Soon Make the Internet Obsolete"

from The Times

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, "the grid" will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could "revolutionize" society. "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine," he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their "red button" day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realized the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the Internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: "We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries."

That network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern's high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

"It will lead to what's known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere," he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded "frozen screen" experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature's most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.

The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analyzing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid's huge capacity busy for years to come.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.

It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyze 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

"Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science," Doyle said.

"Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.

"The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge."