Rockstar vs. Google: How the patent trolling we hate taints the companies we love
I like to riff on Arthur C. Clarke by saying any company, sufficiently large, is indistinguishable from evil. I've used it before when Google failed to respect copyrights, trademarks, flip-flopped on net neutrality, disregarded privacy, and, through their Motorola subsidiary engaged in a horrendous violation of the very spirit of standards-essential patents. And I'm using it again now to describe the actions of the Rockstar consortium - the entity that purchased Nortel and Novell patents, bankrolled by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, and others. They've now sued Google over search-related patents, which is an attack against the heart of Google's business, and it smacks of patent trolling, which is a fairly revolting practice.
Motorola's actions don't excuse Rockstar's, nor vice versa. Nor is either, sadly, illegal. They are, simply, one front among many in a vast, international war. And, sadly, it's nothing new. It's a reminder of how venomously these companies take their current competition, and how much they value winning. At any cost.
It's also an important reminder that we, as consumers, should never be loyal to the companies we purchase from. They should be loyal to us. Every decision we make should be a decision anew, based on the conditions of the moment, and only on who is best serving our needs, and the needs of our society at the time.
Here's some further reading on Rockstar vs. Google. I recommend all of it:
iPad Air day is drawing towards its conclusion, and hopefully by now everyone who was planning to pick one up on launch day – wherever you might be in the world – has had chance to. But now, we want to hear from you and find out which model you picked up in the end? We've been talking about how to decide which is the best model for you since the iPad Air first launched, but for many today was the time to put the talking to an end.
The iPad Air launch for pretty much everyone has been much smoother and less stressful than last months iPhone 5s launch. Stock seems to have been plentiful pretty much everywhere, and with in-store pickups and availability stretching to a number of third-party retailers as well, perhaps more of you actually found yourselves grabbing one today instead of waiting a while? Planned, off the cuff, whichever it may have been, which iPad Air did you get today?
Myself, I picked up a 16GB wifi in black, going against all my own advice. There is a story behind it, which I talked about with Rene Ritchie and Derek Kessler on the special iPad Air launch day edition of the iMore Show – so check it out for the full skinny – and aside from having second thoughts now about which iPad is for me and potentially swapping up to a larger size, I'm pretty happy with the choice I made. The Space Gray color on the rear of the black iPad Air is really nice, and I don't have any regrets over not going for the white one.
So if you grabbed an iPad Air today, pick out your selection from the list up top and let us know why you went with it in the comments below!
iPad Air Apple's full-sized iPad gets slimmed down. Features include:
Carl Pelini's surprising departure from Florida Atlantic took another turn Friday, when school officials released sworn affidavits from two people — including a member of Pelini's staff — alleging that the football coach was seen using marijuana and cocaine.
FAU assistant coach Matt Edwards told officials that he witnessed Pelini smoking marijuana in Key West, Fla. on Oct. 19, the Saturday of an off week for the Owls. That was echoed by another person, Allison Stewart, who also said she got a text message from the now-former Owls coach one day later in which he was "admitting that he uses drugs on occasion."
Edwards remains on the staff, and is expected to be coaching Saturday when Florida Atlantic plays host to Tulane in Boca Raton, Fla. Brian Wright has replaced Pelini as head coach, on an interim basis.
The affidavits, both of which were notarized, state that they were provided at the request of Florida Atlantic athletic director Patrick Chun "to assist him with an investigation." They were released by FAU officials on Friday after a public-records request.
Pelini's contract specified that if he used "any narcotics, drugs, or other controlled substances" he could be subject to firing. Pelini resigned Wednesday after being confronted with the allegations, and since he wasn't fired the school may be able to recoup $500,000 because the coach terminated the contract himself.
Earlier this week, Chun said Pelini acknowledged use of "illegal drugs" before he resigned.
Pelini's resignation was effective immediately. The resignation of defensive coordinator Pete Rekstis, who Chun said also acknowledged drug use when confronted with the allegations, is not effective until Dec. 31. It's not clear what role Rekstis has with the university now, if any. He is no longer listed as a member of the Owls' coaching staff.
Edwards' affidavit also said he witnessed Rekstis using marijuana and cocaine in the past year.
"I wanted to provide as much advance notice as possible to avoid disruption at the University," Rekstis wrote in his resignation.
An email sent Friday to Brian Kopp, an attorney who sent FAU officials a statement from Pelini shortly before the head coach's resignation was announced, was not immediately returned.
Pelini had a base annual salary of $472,500, according to FAU's most recently released payroll data. Rekstis was making $145,000 and Edwards is making $90,272 annually.
Pelini was 5-15 in parts of two seasons at Florida Atlantic, including a 2-6 start this season.
Edwards is in his first season with FAU. He previously worked with Rekstis at Miami of Ohio, and Pelini raved about him when he brought him to Florida Atlantic, saying he was "blessed" to have him on staff and describing him as "a good person who genuinely cares about his players."
Contact: Caroline Perry cperry@seas.harvard.edu 617-496-1351 Harvard University
First-of-its-kind, brain-inspired device looks toward highly efficient and fast parallel computing networks
Cambridge, Mass. November 1, 2013 It doesn't take a Watson to realize that even the world's best supercomputers are staggeringly inefficient and energy-intensive machines.
Our brains have upwards of 86 billion neurons, connected by synapses that not only complete myriad logic circuits; they continuously adapt to stimuli, strengthening some connections while weakening others. We call that process learning, and it enables the kind of rapid, highly efficient computational processes that put Siri and Blue Gene to shame.
Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have now created a new type of transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse. The novel device simultaneously modulates the flow of information in a circuit and physically adapts to changing signals.
Exploiting unusual properties in modern materials, the synaptic transistor could mark the beginning of a new kind of artificial intelligence: one embedded not in smart algorithms but in the very architecture of a computer. The findings appear in Nature Communications.
"There's extraordinary interest in building energy-efficient electronics these days," says principal investigator Shriram Ramanathan, associate professor of materials science at Harvard SEAS. "Historically, people have been focused on speed, but with speed comes the penalty of power dissipation. With electronics becoming more and more powerful and ubiquitous, you could have a huge impact by cutting down the amount of energy they consume."
The human mind, for all its phenomenal computing power, runs on roughly 20 Watts of energy (less than a household light bulb), so it offers a natural model for engineers.
"The transistor we've demonstrated is really an analog to the synapse in our brains," says co-lead author Jian Shi, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS. "Each time a neuron initiates an action and another neuron reacts, the synapse between them increases the strength of its connection. And the faster the neurons spike each time, the stronger the synaptic connection. Essentially, it memorizes the action between the neurons."
In principle, a system integrating millions of tiny synaptic transistors and neuron terminals could take parallel computing into a new era of ultra-efficient high performance.
While calcium ions and receptors effect a change in a biological synapse, the artificial version achieves the same plasticity with oxygen ions. When a voltage is applied, these ions slip in and out of the crystal lattice of a very thin (80-nanometer) film of samarium nickelate, which acts as the synapse channel between two platinum "axon" and "dendrite" terminals. The varying concentration of ions in the nickelate raises or lowers its conductancethat is, its ability to carry information on an electrical currentand, just as in a natural synapse, the strength of the connection depends on the time delay in the electrical signal.
Structurally, the device consists of the nickelate semiconductor sandwiched between two platinum electrodes and adjacent to a small pocket of ionic liquid. An external circuit multiplexer converts the time delay into a magnitude of voltage which it applies to the ionic liquid, creating an electric field that either drives ions into the nickelate or removes them. The entire device, just a few hundred microns long, is embedded in a silicon chip.
The synaptic transistor offers several immediate advantages over traditional silicon transistors. For a start, it is not restricted to the binary system of ones and zeros.
"This system changes its conductance in an analog way, continuously, as the composition of the material changes," explains Shi. "It would be rather challenging to use CMOS, the traditional circuit technology, to imitate a synapse, because real biological synapses have a practically unlimited number of possible statesnot just 'on' or 'off.'"
The synaptic transistor offers another advantage: non-volatile memory, which means even when power is interrupted, the device remembers its state.
Additionally, the new transistor is inherently energy efficient. The nickelate belongs to an unusual class of materials, called correlated electron systems, that can undergo an insulator-metal transition. At a certain temperatureor, in this case, when exposed to an external fieldthe conductance of the material suddenly changes.
"We exploit the extreme sensitivity of this material," says Ramanathan. "A very small excitation allows you to get a large signal, so the input energy required to drive this switching is potentially very small. That could translate into a large boost for energy efficiency."
The nickelate system is also well positioned for seamless integration into existing silicon-based systems.
"In this paper, we demonstrate high-temperature operation, but the beauty of this type of a device is that the 'learning' behavior is more or less temperature insensitive, and that's a big advantage," says Ramanathan. "We can operate this anywhere from about room temperature up to at least 160 degrees Celsius."
For now, the limitations relate to the challenges of synthesizing a relatively unexplored material system, and to the size of the device, which affects its speed.
"In our proof-of-concept device, the time constant is really set by our experimental geometry," says Ramanathan. "In other words, to really make a super-fast device, all you'd have to do is confine the liquid and position the gate electrode closer to it."
In fact, Ramanathan and his research team are already planning, with microfluidics experts at SEAS, to investigate the possibilities and limits for this "ultimate fluidic transistor."
He also has a seed grant from the National Academy of Sciences to explore the integration of synaptic transistors into bioinspired circuits, with L. Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, and professor of physics.
"In the SEAS setting it's very exciting; we're able to collaborate easily with people from very diverse interests," Ramanathan says.
For the materials scientist, as much curiosity derives from exploring the capabilities of correlated oxides (like the nickelate used in this study) as from the possible applications.
"You have to build new instrumentation to be able to synthesize these new materials, but once you're able to do that, you really have a completely new material system whose properties are virtually unexplored," Ramanathan says. "It's very exciting to have such materials to work with, where very little is known about them and you have an opportunity to build knowledge from scratch."
"This kind of proof-of-concept demonstration carries that work into the 'applied' world," he adds, "where you can really translate these exotic electronic properties into compelling, state-of-the-art devices."
###
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Army Research Office's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The team also benefited from the facilities at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems, a member of the NSF-supported National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. Sieu D. Ha, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS, was the co-lead author; additional coauthors included graduate student You Zhou and Frank Schoofs, a former postdoctoral fellow.
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Synaptic transistor learns while it computes
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
1-Nov-2013
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Contact: Caroline Perry cperry@seas.harvard.edu 617-496-1351 Harvard University
First-of-its-kind, brain-inspired device looks toward highly efficient and fast parallel computing networks
Cambridge, Mass. November 1, 2013 It doesn't take a Watson to realize that even the world's best supercomputers are staggeringly inefficient and energy-intensive machines.
Our brains have upwards of 86 billion neurons, connected by synapses that not only complete myriad logic circuits; they continuously adapt to stimuli, strengthening some connections while weakening others. We call that process learning, and it enables the kind of rapid, highly efficient computational processes that put Siri and Blue Gene to shame.
Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have now created a new type of transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse. The novel device simultaneously modulates the flow of information in a circuit and physically adapts to changing signals.
Exploiting unusual properties in modern materials, the synaptic transistor could mark the beginning of a new kind of artificial intelligence: one embedded not in smart algorithms but in the very architecture of a computer. The findings appear in Nature Communications.
"There's extraordinary interest in building energy-efficient electronics these days," says principal investigator Shriram Ramanathan, associate professor of materials science at Harvard SEAS. "Historically, people have been focused on speed, but with speed comes the penalty of power dissipation. With electronics becoming more and more powerful and ubiquitous, you could have a huge impact by cutting down the amount of energy they consume."
The human mind, for all its phenomenal computing power, runs on roughly 20 Watts of energy (less than a household light bulb), so it offers a natural model for engineers.
"The transistor we've demonstrated is really an analog to the synapse in our brains," says co-lead author Jian Shi, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS. "Each time a neuron initiates an action and another neuron reacts, the synapse between them increases the strength of its connection. And the faster the neurons spike each time, the stronger the synaptic connection. Essentially, it memorizes the action between the neurons."
In principle, a system integrating millions of tiny synaptic transistors and neuron terminals could take parallel computing into a new era of ultra-efficient high performance.
While calcium ions and receptors effect a change in a biological synapse, the artificial version achieves the same plasticity with oxygen ions. When a voltage is applied, these ions slip in and out of the crystal lattice of a very thin (80-nanometer) film of samarium nickelate, which acts as the synapse channel between two platinum "axon" and "dendrite" terminals. The varying concentration of ions in the nickelate raises or lowers its conductancethat is, its ability to carry information on an electrical currentand, just as in a natural synapse, the strength of the connection depends on the time delay in the electrical signal.
Structurally, the device consists of the nickelate semiconductor sandwiched between two platinum electrodes and adjacent to a small pocket of ionic liquid. An external circuit multiplexer converts the time delay into a magnitude of voltage which it applies to the ionic liquid, creating an electric field that either drives ions into the nickelate or removes them. The entire device, just a few hundred microns long, is embedded in a silicon chip.
The synaptic transistor offers several immediate advantages over traditional silicon transistors. For a start, it is not restricted to the binary system of ones and zeros.
"This system changes its conductance in an analog way, continuously, as the composition of the material changes," explains Shi. "It would be rather challenging to use CMOS, the traditional circuit technology, to imitate a synapse, because real biological synapses have a practically unlimited number of possible statesnot just 'on' or 'off.'"
The synaptic transistor offers another advantage: non-volatile memory, which means even when power is interrupted, the device remembers its state.
Additionally, the new transistor is inherently energy efficient. The nickelate belongs to an unusual class of materials, called correlated electron systems, that can undergo an insulator-metal transition. At a certain temperatureor, in this case, when exposed to an external fieldthe conductance of the material suddenly changes.
"We exploit the extreme sensitivity of this material," says Ramanathan. "A very small excitation allows you to get a large signal, so the input energy required to drive this switching is potentially very small. That could translate into a large boost for energy efficiency."
The nickelate system is also well positioned for seamless integration into existing silicon-based systems.
"In this paper, we demonstrate high-temperature operation, but the beauty of this type of a device is that the 'learning' behavior is more or less temperature insensitive, and that's a big advantage," says Ramanathan. "We can operate this anywhere from about room temperature up to at least 160 degrees Celsius."
For now, the limitations relate to the challenges of synthesizing a relatively unexplored material system, and to the size of the device, which affects its speed.
"In our proof-of-concept device, the time constant is really set by our experimental geometry," says Ramanathan. "In other words, to really make a super-fast device, all you'd have to do is confine the liquid and position the gate electrode closer to it."
In fact, Ramanathan and his research team are already planning, with microfluidics experts at SEAS, to investigate the possibilities and limits for this "ultimate fluidic transistor."
He also has a seed grant from the National Academy of Sciences to explore the integration of synaptic transistors into bioinspired circuits, with L. Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, and professor of physics.
"In the SEAS setting it's very exciting; we're able to collaborate easily with people from very diverse interests," Ramanathan says.
For the materials scientist, as much curiosity derives from exploring the capabilities of correlated oxides (like the nickelate used in this study) as from the possible applications.
"You have to build new instrumentation to be able to synthesize these new materials, but once you're able to do that, you really have a completely new material system whose properties are virtually unexplored," Ramanathan says. "It's very exciting to have such materials to work with, where very little is known about them and you have an opportunity to build knowledge from scratch."
"This kind of proof-of-concept demonstration carries that work into the 'applied' world," he adds, "where you can really translate these exotic electronic properties into compelling, state-of-the-art devices."
###
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Army Research Office's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The team also benefited from the facilities at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems, a member of the NSF-supported National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. Sieu D. Ha, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS, was the co-lead author; additional coauthors included graduate student You Zhou and Frank Schoofs, a former postdoctoral fellow.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
UFC Hall of Fame inductee Tito Ortiz was supposed to headline the first ever Bellator pay per view on Nov. 2 opposite fellow former UFC champion Quinton Jackson until a broken neck took him out of the bout. The card was then turned into a free one on Spike and both Ortiz and Jackson's futures seemed up in the air.
However, Ortiz tweeted followers this week and appeared in good spirits.
"Ppl I will have 100% recovery & will be back n the gym in 6 weeks.I'm a fighter & I love competition. I was doing great n training but accident do happen. Just time to reshuffle the deck & deal another hand. #positiveminded"
Ortiz battled through serious injuries throughout his career before retiring in 2012. The former UFC champ came out of retirement to fight for Bellator.
It appears as if Ortiz' recent set back, serious as it may be, has not dampened his enthusiasm for a come back. As for Jackson, Bellator announced this week that he will face Joey Beltran, who recently lost in the UFC and was released by the organization.
October 31, 2013 Watch a special Halloween Tiny Desk Concert in which a gorilla-suit-clad Neko Case performs alongside Kelly Hogan, as well as Eric Bachmann of Crooked Fingers and Archers of Loaf.
Set List
"Night Still Comes"
"Calling Cards"
"Local Girl"
Credits
Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Becky Harlan, Abbey Oldham, Christopher Parks; photo by Meredith Rizzo/NPR
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