ICT SPECIALS FROM THE ECONOMIST

I have been wanting to mention some things that have been published recently in the Economist magazine, that would be of interest to the readers of the Blog. (The links work if you are a subscriber):

The new geography of the IT industry
First there was the fad for crediting Silicon Valley for everything good. Then people noticed that there were centers of excellence in many other places where great ICT work was being done. This three page article updates those views, suggesting that emphasis is moving to implementation and away from innovation. Thus geographic attention in the ICT sector is moving to places where efficient production and distribution of good quality ICT goods and services is taking place. Jul 17th 2003

Technology Quarterly
Included in this section of the June 21, 2003 issue are: “Coming soon to a laptop near you” (about better, cheaper display technology); “Storing e-text for centuries” (about the danger of losing all that good stuff in digital form, and what can be done about it); “The smoother, the faster” (speeding up information transmission over the Internet); “Getting cars to talk back” (ICT improves diagnostics for your car); “Building a better bug-trap” (Can software facilitate the production of more bug free software?); “Spare parts for the brain” (plugging in chip protheses); “Spread betting” (How CDMA became the world standard for mobile telephony); “Grokking the infoviz” (visualization software); “The sentient office is coming”.

I like the idea that Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful movie star of the 1940’s and 50’s, held a key patent for spread spectrum technology. It was apparently her contribution to the World War II war effort. As words are attached to different notes in a song, messages can be attached to different frequencies in radio transmission. See what you learn reading the Economist!

Freeing the airwaves
The May 29, 2003 issue had this essay on the controversy over regulation of spectrum that is used for computer communication in technologies like Wi-Fi.

That issue also had a brief note on a research result published in Nature that suggests that experienced video game players have improved visual perception as compared with non-players! Go Nintendo!