TechCrunch graded each member of the House of Representatives on tech issues. TechCrunch studied how closely their voting records align with what they call consensus interests of the technology industry. TechCrunch explains that after finding patterns in technology lobbying through public records, they determined where there was industry consensus on particular bills by surveying the most prominent technology lobbies, which collectively represent most of the industry. There was consensus on 3 issues: immigration, crowdfunding, and an open Internet (SOPA).
None of Michigan’s Rep’s earned an A from the site. TechCrunch ranked some well-known Michigan politicians way down.
John Conyers, MI-14 (D) who has in Washington for 47 years now, earned a D for his sponsorship of SOPA, (Which I noted earlier). You tweet Conyers here and tell him to do better by tech.
John Dingell MI-15 (D) who has been a politician in DC for 58 years earned a grade of C. You can tweet Dingell here. OMG yes, he has a Twitter account, probably run by some staffer.
Hansen Clarke MI-13 and Gary Peters MI-9 received grades of B.
You check out all TechCrunch’s ratings here. Hows does your Representative rate for tech leadership?
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Gizmodo brings us the ultimate photobomb. Two kids playing basketball were photobombed by NASA’sspace shuttle Endeavour. Endeavor peeks out from a corner in the background on its last trip, across Los Angeles, en route to its permanent retirement home, at the California Science Center.
Robert Colburn, the research coordinator at the IEEE History Center, recalled the first time a computer, UNIVAC was used to predict a United States Presidential election in 1952. The IEEE historian says the story has been told and retold for decades.
CBS Television News used a UNIVAC computer to predict the 1952 U.S. Presidential election returns and — when the computer accurately predicted the Eisenhower landslide at around 8:30 in the election night broadcast — however, they doubted the prediction, and only hours later did CBS reveal that the prediction had been correct. It has become a classic cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing human preconception to interfere with logic and the evaluation of facts.
There is more to the story according to Mr. Colburn. The exact timeline of when UNIVAC’s made its initial prediction is not certain, but that UNIVAC’s correct prediction of a landslide victory was ostensibly ignored until later in the broadcast because of journalistic prudence and lack of confidence in the accuracy of the results.
The article cites Dr. Ira Chinoy, whose doctoral thesis examines the use of computers in broadcast journalism, estimates that the celebrated initial prediction of the Eisenhower landslide was made closer to 9:15. At 8:30, only slightly more than one million votes had been tallied; it took until at least 9:15 pm for three million votes to be transmitted from CBS to the Remington Rand factory in Philadelphia. CBS was receiving vote tallies from the wire services and teletyping them to Remington Rand’s factory in Philadelphia. Additional time to input the data and run the programs was required.
The 8:30 CBS segment merely gave the television audience a visual tour and introduction to UNIVAC; the second UNIVAC segment of the evening at 9:30 asked for a prediction, but the machine was not yet ready. By that point in the television coverage, the human commentators were already commenting on the surprising Eisenhower strength in the early returns. On the basis of pre-election polls, the race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed to be close (Eisenhower held a slight edge), so the use of a state-of-the-art computer to predict what was expected to be a very close election had generated a lot of popular interest the blog speculates.
At some point relatively early in the evening, UNIVAC predicted an Eisenhower landslide victory. However, the UNIVAC programmers decided that the prediction was too risky to release because it contradicted what the pollsters had been saying about the election about a tight race.
At 10:30, which was the third on-air UNIVAC segment, the computer predicted twenty-eight states for Eisenhower and twenty for Stevenson recalls the historian. This was a softer prediction and was in line with what the CBS commentators had already been telling their television audience. It was the first correct prediction of an overwhelming Eisenhower win that the UNIVAC programmers decided not to release because it contradicted the poll numbers.
The 11:30 UNIVAC on-air prediction caused more drama. It reversed its earlier prediction, calling 24 states each for Eisenhower and Stevenson, and a slim 270 to 261 Electoral College vote margin for Eisenhower. But by 11:45, the prediction was corrected and UNIVAC predicted 100 to 1 odds of an Eisenhower victory.
UNIVAC made its predictions based on the difference between vote tallies and the expected vote in cities and counties, based on a statistical model extrapolated from past elections. By applying this deviation in places that had already voted to those which had not yet voted, an estimate of the present election could be obtained based on past tallies in those places. One of the ironies of the election of 1952 was that the returns from Massachusetts, one of the crucial early reporting states, were incorrectly reported to UNIVAC. That UNIVAC was nonetheless able to make accurate predictions.
The UNIVAC used by CBS was the fifth UNIVAC machine made. In the autumn of 1952, UNIVAC-5 was still in the Philadelphia factory of Remington Rand waiting for its future installation at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Ironically, the author reports that because UNIVAC itself was too large to be moved conveniently, a dummy control console was set up in the CBS studio in Grand Central Terminal, New York City for visual effect, its lights blinking evocatively thanks to delay switches ordinarily used for making Christmas tree lights flash on and off.
There was some irony that a machine that debuted in the public spotlight of national TV would go on to do classified weapons work. UNIVAC contained mercury delay lines, which allowed it to store 1,000 words (45 bits each) as electric pulses in tubes of mercury. Up to one million characters could be stored and accessed on magnetic tape. It was these tapes, replacing punched cards, which made the UNIVAC revolutionary, and which gave it a tremendous speed advantage because it could access its own data instead of needing to wait for cards to be loaded. It could perform four hundred and sixty-five multiplications per second and had a clock speed of 2.25MHz.
A brief Youtube video of the CBS prediction can be seen here.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
The mix tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way according to New Scientist. From the updates posted by Facebook’s (FB) 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organization worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need to store massive amounts of data is greater than ever. Hard drives have been the workhorse of large storage operations for decades. However, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives is set to the replace the HDD. The new tape drives pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy in the size of a 1980’s mix tape, according to the article.
Researchers at Fuji Film (4901) and IBM (IBM) have already built prototypes that can store 35 terabytes of data. The cartridge which measures 10 centimeters by 10 cm by 2 cm, can store about 35 million books’ worth of information. This is achieved using magnetic tape coated with nanoparticles of barium ferrite. The coating stabilizes magnetic storage media by keeping moisture and oxidation (rust) from damaging the surface of storage tape.
But the real début for this technology, the author speculates will be with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope when it is completed in 2024. SKA will consist of thousands of antennas across the southern hemisphere. Once it’s up and running, the SKA is expected to pump out 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of compressed data per day. If the SKA data archive was built using today’s 3-terabyte HDD’s, the telescope would fill an unmanageable 120,000 drives a year.
100 terabytes on a cartridgeThat annual archive growth would swamp an experiment that is expected to last decades, says IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou, who is part of a team working to build tapes for the SKA. The IBMer says that by the time the telescope comes online, they expect to be able to store 100 terabytes. They plan to store that much data by shrinking the width of the recording tracks and using more accurate systems for positioning the read-write heads used to access them.
Using tapes should cut down drastically on energy use, too. A 2010 study by Clipper Group found that data centers with disc drive arrays use over 200 times more power than would a tape library of similar size. Disc drives in large arrays tend to stay powered-up, so their platters spin continuously, in case data is required, says Jon Hiles of Spectra Logic, a digital archiving firm in Boulder, CO. But tape drives only use power when they are being read or recorded on, he says.
The downside of tapesThe downside of tapes is that they are slower to access than hard discs. Tapes have to be fetched by a robotic mechanism, inserted in a reader and spooled to the right point. But the Linear Tape File System, expedites this process to make it comparable to disc drives, Eleftheriou told the blog. As storage needs skyrocket, hard drives won’t be able to keep up and keep power down, Eleftheriou says. Density improvements in hard drives are facing physical limits that mean they can only add more power-munching platters. “It’s time to take advantage of the low power and low-cost of tape,” he says.
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It is unlikely even the largest firm will need the kind of capacity SKA’s IT staff will have to deal with every day. But it is likely that every organization that stores big data on-site will be looking for low-cost, high-capacity alternatives to disk. However I would not want to trust 35 TB (or more) of data to a cassette which can be easily destroyed. Do you think the 80’s mix tape cassettes are the future of big data storage?
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
