All of the Nobel prizes have now been announced: Nobelprize.org
Of course I am a bit biased since I am a physicist and this blog is also about cool technologies. Have a look at this year physics Nobel prize. The contribution to the manipulation of the quantum states might help make quantum computing a reality 😉
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
– Apple Inc, Think Different “
I’ve said it a couple of times, I like computers and electronic gadgets, in particular those gadgets that do what they are supposed to do without getting in the way. You can just use them and they work (for a useful amount of time)!
I got my first computer in early 1983 (a small Radio Shack unit) followed a few months later by a C64. It was a great computer and learned a lot of programming from it. But when I saw a Mac and had the chance to work with one in school in 1985, I knew what a computer would looked like moving forward. This gaming changing business happened again a few times for Apple. Before the iPhone, most “smart” phones where really not that smart and the top of the line was the Blackberry (an e-mail on the go device). Even early version of Android was geared toward competing with the BlackBerry…2007 marked a pivotal year for smartphone, and nobody ever looked back (expect for those trying to revisit history after the fact). The same is true for tablet computing. Tablets have been there for a long time before the iPad but it was not even considered a factor in term of selling volume. Just a few years after the iPad, the tablet is now a bigger market than the “traditional” PC.
The most interesting things about all of the above is that when launched, all were declared DOA by most “market experts” : computers with GUI were toy computers just good for playing (and I am not even talking about the mouse…), iPhone was Apple biggest mistake since no one in its right mind would buy a phone that has no physical keyboard and buttons. The iPad was just a big iPod Touch, no way of doing real work on them. The truth is that all of the above broke or shifted a paradigm, a way of doing things that was so entrenched that they were seen as set in stone.
The same is true for many aspects of life, including scientific research. Once in a while, you get comments that your research program or project (or even paper) cannot be successful because that would mean the usual way of doing things, of thinking would have to change. Oh boy, that would be so impractical…
This leads me to the quotation used in the opening of this blog post and Steve Jobs.
Steve jobs passed away over one year ago (on October 5th 2011). Yet I find it fascinating how much it still written, especially online, about him even today. Some praise him as one of the genius of our time. Others, like to tell that he or Apple, in fact, didn’t do anything all. It does not really matter; the point is, as stated in the quote: “you can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.”. Clearly, he was someone who still can’t be ignored 😉
Steve Jobs delivered a great speech at Stanford University, which is worth listing to:
I came upon this interesting video through a LinkedIn contact. It seems that with internet, social media and now having access to all of it in your pocket (smartphone) have lead to the decrease of the attention span from 20 minutes to 9 seconds (that a two order of magnitude decrease – a 133 to be more precise!).
You Only Get 9 Seconds » Sally Hogshead, Keynote Speaker – YouTube
Next time you sit in a meeting or are in a classroom, you might want to do a little experiment and see how often people divert their attention to their phones.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
– Neil Armstrong
I was still a new born baby at the time but this event shaped much of my youth. R.I.P. Neil Armstrong.
Link to New York TIme article: Neil Armstrong, First Man on Moon, Dies at 82 – NYTimes.com.
Space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launch in the early 70’s with what would be nowadays called rudimentary technology. Yet they had extremely long, in fact 15 times longer than the expected minimum of 2 years(!), and productive life. These were truly amazing and well-design engineering pieces.
Yet even as the probes are out of touch with us, new science is being done as reported by Ars Technica.
This got to be the most twisted line of thought in all of this smartphone patent war I have seen up to now in order to get to use some else inventions for free:
Who gets to define what is “great” or when something is too “popular”? This is not like a 100m race with precise time measurements. History teaches us that once you set one of these “soft” standard, the standard tends to be lowered with time until it becomes meaningless.
OK, enough of Google and Apple. Every one, researchers and graduate students alike have the potential to come by a worthwhile invention. Protecting it is supposed to provide incentive to the inventors to benefit from their work and the time spawn is usually limited (contrary to the copyright which can now, in certain countries, last for decades even for works that heavily borrow from the public domain – another debate).
Invention protection through patents can be a good approach in certain situations e.g. you’ve developed something new, useful, that can be actually implemented or made, has a market large enough to potentially make money, … I also strongly believe that graduate students should get expose to intellectual property themes early during their graduate studies.
What do you think?
Ruminating... 