may the force be with you

"Yahoo! News has an AP story about Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems coming together to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems or RAD lab is scheduled to open Thursday and will dole out $1.5 million annually over five years, with each company contributing equally. From the article : 'Conceivably, the lab's services could help launch another revolutionary company like online auctioneer eBay Inc. or even Google, which has emerged as one of the world's most valuable companies just seven years after its inception in a Silicon Valley garage.'"

source:http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/15/1426223.shtml?tid=95&tid=146&tid=109&tid=217&tid=102

1up.com is running a lengthy piece talking to Microsoft VP J. Allard and Sony Computers of America President Kaz Hirai about what exactly the 'next generation' of consoles are about. The article is informative and varied, with talk about Xbox Live, the launch of the Xbox and PSX, and what past efforts from Sony and Microsoft will mean as the newest front in the console war heats up. From the article: "OPM: What are the benefits of being first to market, much like the Dreamcast was? What are the pitfalls? JA: Good question. I'd say one of the pitfalls from a competitive point of view is that you don't know what the other guys are doing, and to be frank, the guys over at Sony have been very good at not telling anyone what they're doing. It's tough to tell where they're going with the PS3. The other tough thing is that you're under the microscope [when you're first]. [Sony] shows two movies and a product that you can't touch behind a piece of glass, and that's what you get to write about on them."

source:http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/12/15/079255.shtml?tid=211&tid=212&tid=109&tid=233

An AdWords Experiment Shows Why at Google, the House Always Wins

Google is in the news everywhere lately. They are filching executives from Microsoft, and Microsoft is conveniently forgetting how Redmond did the same and worse to Borland. Google is scanning the world's books, and the world's authors aren't all pleased about that. But this column is about something both far more prosaic and important -- the very nature of Google AdWords, the search giant's paid placement advertising program that is, by far, its greatest source of revenue. But as you are about to read, AdWords is probably much more complex than we are led to believe by Google.

AdWords was Google's response to the paid search placement program from Overture Systems, now part of Yahoo. Overture allowed web sites to pay for higher placement in searches that used certain words. Someone could pay a lot of money for the word "Cringely," for example, and have their totally non-Cringely web site appear above this one in Overture's search results. This really wasn't as bad as is seems as long as advertisers paid for words that really described their sites and most words weren't purchased.

Google's AdWords took the process a couple steps further. First, it segregated paid and unpaid search results by placing the paid results in a separate location where those results were identified as advertisements. But Google also embraced fully the concept of an ad and allowed the payers to make their own two-line pitch. Overall, the AdWord system was more honest and up-front with users about what was happening. And honesty has worked well for Google, with AdWords becoming a goldmine for the company.

But AdWords isn't as simple as it seems at first. With Google, things rarely are. As usual for Google, there be algorithms at work here, and the nature of those algorithms is alluded to, but never fully explained. What Google does admit is there are forces that can drive an advertiser's listing up or down, making them appear on the first page of results or push them down to second and subsequent pages. Both effects, it is strongly implied, are in the control of the advertiser. Advertisers can move higher in AdWord ranking by paying more money for the key words they have chosen. But they can also move higher -- or lower -- based on the quality and desirability of the ad, itself.

This second effect deserves its own paragraph. As a Google advertiser you can decide to pay some amount -- say $0.20 -- to have your ad appear whenever someone's Google search includes the word "Cringely." To be honest, I just checked, and while there are 1,030,000 Google results for "Cringely," there are no ads at all on the results page, indicating -- as many have long suspected -- that I have no commercial value whatsoever. But for searches that involve very common words like "mountain bike," or "libido enhancement," for example, there are multiple pages of ads, and what puts your ad on the front page is not just how much money you are paying, but also how frequently Google searchers actually click on your ad.

This makes a lot of sense because Google wants to feature ads that its users find interesting enough to click on, both because it indicates they are more intrigued than annoyed by the ad and because Google makes money from the clicks-through. So without having to actually read the ads individually, Google has found a revenue-generating way of measuring their usefulness to readers by monitoring click-throughs.

The upshot of all this is that clever ads and offering legitimate good deals can improve your ad positioning ,which will inevitably improve your sales in a virtuous cycle that fits well with Google's corporate model of not doing evil. The users', advertisers', and Google's results are all optimized in this way, which discourages bad or poorly-targeted ads. If your ad is so clueless or useless that hardly anyone clicks, Google will eventually reject the ad altogether.

That's what we know about the AdWords algorithm without being actually able to SEE the algorithm, which is of course a trade secret. But does the algorithm do anything else?

One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium.

But one can never make enough money, it seems, so this reader decided to do some research to see if he could improve his results by modifying this and that. He decided that the best way to conduct this research was not by altering variables on his existing, very profitable web site, but by creating a separate site purely to be used for these tests.

Clearly, this is a behavior that the big brains of Google did not expect.

It was no big deal to create a separate experimental site. Web hosting companies offer e-commerce sites for only a few dollars per month. A Google AdWords account costs only $5.00 to set up. The actual content of the new web site could simply be copied over from the pre-existing site and changed at will as dictated by the experiment.

Most people would alter variables on the main site and see what happens, but this guy didn't want to mess with the success he was already achieving, so he came up with this parallel experimental design.

The first thing he wanted to study was the impact of paying more or less for AdWords. He knew that paying more would result in higher placement -- especially given that both the ads and the AdWords would be identical between the two sites. What he didn't know, however, was whether a slight increase in cost-per-word would more than pay for itself in increased sales, or whether a slight decrease would go effectively unnoticed, thereby increasing his profit margins.

His old site with the same ads had been running successfully for a year paying at the relatively low rate of $0.10 per word (the AdWords minimum is $0.05 per word) and generating about 15,000 clicks-through per day. But for the new site, he started out paying $1.00 per word for exactly the same words. Based on everything he had read about AdWords (remember nobody actually SPEAKS to Google about these things -- the service is totally automated from Google's end), he expected his ad to move higher in the rankings and, hopefully, to make more sales as a result. And that's exactly what happened, though not to the extent that he would have liked.

Buying AdWords at $1.00 versus $0.10, his ads DID move higher on the page and his revenue was increased, though not by enough to justify going all the way to $1.00 with its associated higher cost basis.

All the while, of course, the essentially identical original web site was churning along, still entirely dependent on AdWords, still carrying identical ads for identical products as the test site, and still generating an average of 15,000 click-throughs per day.

Now it was time to drop the per-word price a bit on the test site to see whether he could increase his profit margins after paying too much at $1.00. So he set the new per-word price at $0.40 -- still four times as much as he was paying per word through his main site.

And his clicks-through dropped from 15,000+ to 1,200 per day.

Huh?

Same products, same ads, same service, but by paying four times MORE than his main site his results dropped by an order of magnitude.

A bit more experimenting showed a similar effect and he was never again able to match the success of his original site as it continually operated in precisely the same market with precisely the same services over the exact same period of time.

I have no idea what the heck is happening here, but my friendly reader, who makes his living from this stuff, has a theory. He believes the Google AdWords algorithm tries to do many things and one of those is to encourage advertisers to pay more for words. By modifying something that in turn modifies the results, Google is effectively encouraging advertisers to change their behavior.

So increasing the amount per word DID increase sales, though not enough to justify the additional cost. Google's revenue per word, of course, went up by 10X. But dropping the price by more than half was greeted by a huge decrease in clicks-through that could only have resulted from some unknown resultant change in GOOGLE's behavior, given that all other variables were constant.

If that's indeed what's happening, it isn't illegal and to some might not even be unethical (I guess) but it feels just a little bit EVIL.

Ironically the only way this could be observed was though the use of parallel, otherwise identical web sites and AdWords accounts.

"It's like Vegas," said my friend. "They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs."

source:http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050922.html

"The Nixie Watch displays the time on nixie tubes, a cold-cathode tube filled with neon, a little mercury and argon at a small fraction of atmospheric pressure. Nixies were used in many early electronic desktop calculators, including the first: the vacuum tube-based Sumlock-Comptometer Anita Mk VII in 1961. This two-digit wristwatch is designed for everyday use, being water-resistant and rugged, not to mention looking really retro-future cool. The watch requires no button pushing to operate - it shows the hours, minutes and seconds in sequence at the flick of the wrist. For the hardcore code tweaker, a programming adapter allows the GPL'd PIC firmware running the watch to be hacked up at will. The Nixie Watch is being sold in very limited edition, with each piece individually numbered and engraved."

source:http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/12/15/019206.shtml?tid=126&tid=14

A mission to determine whether spider-like robots could construct complex structures in space is set to launch in January 2006. The spider bots could build large structures by crawling over a "web" released from a larger spacecraft.

The engineers behind the project hope the robots will eventually be used to construct colossal solar panels for satellites that will transmit solar energy back to Earth. The satellites could reflect and concentrate the Sun's rays to a receiving station on Earth or perhaps beam energy down in the form of microwaves.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency will launch a satellite called Furoshiki on 18 January 2006, which will conduct three experiments to test the idea. The satellite will be deployed from a rocket on a sub-orbital trajectory. This means scientists will have only 10 minutes of microgravity in which to perform their tests before the craft starts its descent back to Earth and eventually burns up in the atmosphere.

The first experiment will see three small satellites detach from the mother ship and stretch out to form two corners of a triangular net with their mother craft forming the other. Onboard cameras will be used to verify that the net, which measures 40 metres on each side, remains as steady as possible and that the daughter satellites do not get tangled in the web.

Web crawlers

Next, two smaller robots, called RobySpace Junior 1 and 2, will crawl out of the mother satellite and manoeuvre themselves along strands of the web. Such spider robots could one day be used to fit pieces of a large solar array or reflector on top of the netting.

The prototype robots, built by engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Vienna University of Technology, will test how well they can crawl along the net in the absence of gravity. Each robot has a set of wheels that can grip both sides of a netting line to prevent it from floating off into space.

"I hope that we can demonstrate for the first time that it is possible to move along a very thin, free-floating net in a controlled fashion," says Leopold Summerer from ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team.

While the robots are being deployed, a ground station will command the mother and daughter satellites to synchronise their microwave antennae and beam a signal back to a receiving station on Earth.

First step

The mission will last only a short period of time but will cost much less than an in-orbit experiment. "We wanted to try a satellite experiment which provides us with a very long experiment time," says Nobuyuki Kaya, an engineer at Kobe University, Japan, who is working on the satellite’s microwave experiment. "But we have no budget. We thought, well, this is just a first step."

A satellite capable of beaming one billion watts of solar-generated electricity back to Earth would probably need a solar panel with an area of one square kilometre. But spider robots could also be used to build massive communication antennas or a shield to protect satellites from orbiting space junk.

"A few hours ago, the European parliament accepted a proposal '...on the retention of data processed in connection with the provision of public electronic communication services...'. Summarized: any data (internet connections, traffic, email, file sharing, SMS, phone calls) of 450 million people of Europe has to be collected by telcos, to be used by governments in their fight against 'crime and terrorism' ... oh, and child porn, of course. In Germany, over-the-sea reports are limited and usually do not include the latest developments in law and order, but since Slashdot has readers all over the world, I would like to ask: how is the status of YOUR country in terms of anti-terrorism-laws, observations and such? Any recommendations where one can still live free and unobserved in a non-nanny state?"

source:http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/0032202&tid=158&tid=215&tid=4

"This Article tells of an Orwellian chip that, once installed in your computer (and not by your choice), will allow any website you visit to "read" your identity. The article goes on to describe how many benefits there are for using this to facilitate online business and even suggests some negative points. It ends with "Ultimately the TPM itself isn't inherently evil or good. It will depend entirely on how it's used, and in that sphere, market and political forces will be more important than technology." ... ugh. Well we all know what that means."

source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/0028256&tid=95&tid=17

Helicon reactor in operation

13 December 2005

ESA has confirmed the principle of a new space thruster that may ultimately give much more thrust than today’s electric propulsion techniques. The concept is an ingenious one, inspired by the northern and southern aurorae, the glows in the sky that signal increased solar activity.

“Essentially the concept exploits a natural phenomenon we see taking place in space,” says Dr Roger Walker of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team. "When the solar wind, a ‘plasma’ of electrified gas released by the Sun, hits the magnetic field of the Earth, it creates a boundary consisting of two plasma layers. Each layer has differing electrical properties and this can accelerate some particles of the solar wind across the boundary, causing them to collide with the Earth’s atmosphere and create the aurora."

In essence, a plasma double layer is the electrostatic equivalent of a waterfall. Just as water molecules pick up energy as they fall between the two different heights, so electrically charged particles pick up energy as they travel through the layers of different electrical properties.

Researchers Christine Charles and Rod Boswell at the Australian National University in Canberra, first created plasma double layers in their laboratory in 2003 and realised their accelerating properties could enable new spacecraft thrusters. This led the group to develop a prototype called the Helicon Double Layer Thruster.

	Laboratory setup of the helicon reactor at LPTP

The new ESA study, performed as part of ESA’s Ariadna academic research programme in association with Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, confirms the Australian findings by showing that under carefully controlled conditions, the double layer could be formed and remains stable, allowing the constant acceleration of charged particles in a beam. The study also confirmed that stable double layers could be created with different propellant gas mixtures.

“The collaboration has been absolutely excellent,” says Dr Pascal Chabert, of Laboratoire de Physique et Technologie des Plasmas, Ecole Polytechnique. “It has been a real kick-off for me and has given me lots of new ideas for plasma propulsion concepts to investigate with the Advanced Concepts Team. The new direction for our laboratory had led to a patent on a promising new electric propulsion device called an Electronegative Plasma Thruster.”

To create the double layer, Chabert and colleagues created a hollow tube around which was wound a radio antenna. Argon gas was continuously pumped into the tube and the antenna transmitted helicoidal radio waves of 13 megahertz. This ionised the argon creating a plasma. A diverging magnetic field at the end of the tube then forced the plasma leaving the pipe to expand. This allowed two different plasmas to be formed, upstream within the tube and downstream, and so the double layer was created at their boundary. This accelerated further argon plasma from the tube into a supersonic beam, creating thrust.

Image of the helicon reactor diffusion chamber during operation

Calculations suggest that a helicon double layer thruster would take up a little more space than the main electric thruster on ESA’s SMART-1 mission, yet it could potentially deliver many times more thrust at higher powers of up to 100 kW whilst giving a similar fuel efficiency.

In the next steps, ESA will now construct a detailed computer simulation of the plasma in and around the thruster and use the laboratory results to verify its accuracy, so that the in-space performance can be fully assessed and larger high power experimental thrusters can be investigated in the future.


Note to editors:

Plasma can be thought of as the fourth state of matter. Just as solids, liquids and gases have different properties, so too does plasma. It is a gas in which the atoms have been stripped of some of their electrons, meaning that it responds to the influence of electric and magnetic fields. It is estimated the 99% of the matter in the Universe is plasma. On Earth, however, naturally occurring plasma is rare, apart from within the layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere.

Related links
•	ACT (http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/index.htm)
•	Laboratoire de Physique et Technoloogie des Plasmas, Ecole Polytechnique (http://www.lptp.polytechnique.fr)
•	Plasma Research Laboratory of Australian National University (http://prl.anu.edu.au/)

source:http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM6HSVLWFE_index_2.html

"Security expert Bruce Schneier is reporting on a continuing effort to penetrate US government and industry computer systems that most likely stems from the Chinese military." From the Terranet article: "The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity."

source:http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/14/1634247&tid=172&tid=219