Nokia’s 14 Years of Mobile-Phone Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon

Recommendable! A chronicle of fast moving technological change!

What about Motorola?

"In 2005, Nokia sold its billionth mobile phone, a budget-friendly device that went to a customer in Nigeria. By then, the company, based in Espoo, Finland, was making one of every three cellphones globally.

But just nine years later, the mobile-device maker offloaded its entire handset division to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar, compared to what it had been worth at its peak. ...

On 9 January 2007, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs made a characteristically bold claim. “Today, Apple is reinventing the phone,” he said, soon pulling one of the first iPhones out of his pocket. ...

multitouch [screen] technology ..

And yet it took Nokia years to develop a phone that used multitouch. “Remember, Nokia is based in Finland,” he says. “It’s very cold in Finland. They wear gloves for six months of the year, including the executives. They didn’t think a device like that would work.” ...

That similar product ended up being the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, known as the Tube, released in 2008. “The idea was to focus on streaming videos and television,” Partanen says. “So we made a phone with a similar form factor to the iPhone [that was] optimized for streaming content.” But the 5800 was “delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed,” he says. “It didn’t materialize in the way it was planned. It was released as a watered-down version.” ...

The 1200 kept the 1100’s dust-proofing, flashlight, and long-lasting battery, and added features aimed squarely at the developing world. ...

In September 2008, the first Android phone went on sale—the HTC Dream, which was also sold as the T-Mobile G1. ...

Released in 2009, the Nokia 5230 attempted to be a low-priced, touchscreen (though not multitouch) competitor to both the iPhone and Android. It sold an impressive 150 million units, doing especially well in developing countries.

But the 5230 didn’t have Wi-Fi—one of the biggest complaints at the time. In the developing world, Wi-Fi connections were still rare, so the lack of Wi-Fi made some sense. ..."

How Nokia’s Feature Phones Lost to the Smartphone Era - IEEE Spectrum "How the iPhone and then Android killed the feature phone"

Google will establish a first automated research lab in the UK in partnership with the UK government

Good news! Imagine the possibilities when hundreds if not thousands of automated labs do research! 

Exponential technological, scientific and medical progress awaits!

"... Establishing Google DeepMind’s first automated science laboratory in the UK

To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials. ..."

Our partnership with the UK government - Google DeepMind

Credits: Last week in AI

Are We Losing the Ability to Write by Hand?

Certainly, like we are not using stone tablets anymore! What a rhetorical question!

 

I feel, I lost my ability to hand write several years ago! 😊 It has become almost painful to write with the hand.

Signature Moves: Are We Losing the Ability to Write by Hand? | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

OpenAI: DALL E 3 announced

DALL-E 1 came out only in January of 2021 and DALL E 2 in March 2022. Here is Wikipedia on DALL-E.

"DALL·E 3 is now in research preview, and will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in October, via the API and in Labs later this fall. ...
Modern text-to-image systems have a tendency to ignore words or descriptions, forcing users to learn prompt engineering. DALL·E 3 represents a leap forward in our ability to generate images that exactly adhere to the text you provide. ...
DALL·E 3 is built natively on ChatGPT, which lets you use ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner and refiner of your prompts. Just ask ChatGPT what you want to see in anything from a simple sentence to a detailed paragraph. ..."

DALL·E 3 DALL·E 3 understands significantly more nuance and detail than our previous systems, allowing you to easily translate your ideas into exceptionally accurate images.

Secondary Genome Analysis In Under 1 Hour!

Posted: 9/17/2018

Today (9/17/2018) I read this news release from Nvidia: What’s in Your Genome? Startup Speeds DNA Analysis with GPUs

Quotes (emphasis added):

1. “Now, the bottleneck for genomic insights is the computational analysis that follows sequencing. It’s the process of detecting key markers and outliers, called variants, in the genetic data.”
2. “Parabricks, a startup based in Ann Arbor, Mich., and NVIDIA Inception member, is shrinking the time this analysis takes from a couple days to under an hour. “It’s the first application for secondary analysis of genomic data on a GPU, and it fully matches the state-of-the-art analytical pipeline,” …”
3. “... Running on a single NVIDIA DGX-1 server, Parabricks’ software can process more than 12,000 whole genomes per year ...”

Very impressive!

Next Green Revolution Is Imminent

Posted: 8/18/2018

Just read Wheat’s complex genome finally deciphered, offering hope for better harvests and nonallergenic varieties.

The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (founded in 2005; a massive collaboration of academic and industry researchers from 20 countries) finally finished sequencing the rather complex wheat genome of 107,000 genes on 21 chromosomes.

One can only imagine what benefits will come next!

Living At Artificial Intelligence Speed

Posted: 7/1/2018  Updated: 8/6/2018

Update Of 8/6/2018

If you want to get an idea how fast AI is moving here is a blog post for you published on the BLAIR (Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research) website: When Recurrent Models Don't Need to be Recurrent. Essentially, this post describes that celebrated AI approaches (e.g. recurrent neural networks) that were considered top of the line until just a few years if not a few a month ago are seriously questioned and about to be substituted with new AI approaches (Google’s Wavenet, Google’s Transformer).

Absolutely breathtaking!

Original Post

The Immediate Past Is Prologue

Some of the readers may remember such popular expressions as living at Internet speed.

However, since about 2005/2006 we are living at AI speeds. The speed at which AI is proliferating and evolving is absolutely incredible.

Just follow a talk like this one by Yann LeCun (here, Chief AI Scientist at Facebook) and you get an idea how fast and far AI has come within a span of a few years.

A Revolution For Everyone

Most amazing is the the general attitude to make AI open source and open publish and learnable by everyone who cares on the Internet. There probably never was a technological revolution before in history, where the leaders of the revolution want to make sure that everyone interested in this revolution can instantly participate, grow with it, and learn and practice all about it at any time.

No Hype

You better believe the hype! If you don’t it is at your own peril. AI will be so transformative like few other technologies ever before in human history.

Ready For DNA Base Editors

Posted: 10/28/2017

Trigger

Just read these articles (1 & 2) about a new adenine base editor. Many of us, who are now familiar with the CRISPR Cas 9, will appreciate these latest advances in genetics.

Enormous Implications

“Being able to make this type of conversion [to flip base pairs] is particularly important because approximately half of the 32,000 disease-associated point mutations already identified by researchers are a change from a G•C base pair to a A•T base pair.

…

Liu said that particular change is unusually common in part because about 300 times a day in every human cell, a spontaneous chemical reaction converts a cytosine (C) base into uracil (U), which behaves like thymine (T). While there are natural cellular repair mechanisms to fix that spontaneous change, the machinery is not perfect and occasionally fails to make the repair. The result can be the mutation of the G•C base pair to an A•U or A•T base pair, which can lead to certain genetic diseases. …

A major addition to genome-editing technologies, the adenine base editor joins other base-editing systems recently developed in Liu’s lab, such as BE3 and its improved variant, BE4. Using these base editors, researchers can now correct all the so-called “transition” mutations — C to T, T to C, A to G, or G to A — that together account for almost two-thirds of all disease-causing point mutations, including many that cause serious illnesses that currently have no treatment.” (emphasis added)

The Return Of Civilian Supersonic Flight By Early 2020s

Posted: 7/9/2017

Never quite understood, why there were only two civilian supersonic airplanes flown commercially since the invention of jet engines (i.e. the soviet Tupolev TU-144 and the western Concorde). Let’s be sarcastic for a moment and blame the aggressive, intolerant environmentalists for that.

There were recently several news reports about plans to build two different new civilian supersonic airplanes. Apparently, big players like Airbus, Lockheed, Virgin Atlantic, NASA and small startups like Boom are in the game. Read e.g. here, here, here

The supersonic boom may not be such a problem anymore with latest technological improvements.

Looking forward to buy my first ticket for a flight around the world in less than 10 hours! :-)

Regeneration Of Damaged Heart Tissue

Posted: 6/19/2017

Just read:

Israeli scientists successfully regenerate damaged hearts

Weizmann Institute study finds molecule prevalent in embryonic cardiac tissue promotes rapid healing in adult mice, as well as in human cells

Here is the news release by the Weizmann Institute of Science: Young at Heart: Restoring Cardiac Function with a Matrix Molecule Administering “young matrix” molecules to damaged mouse hearts led to muscle repair

This article is significantly more detailed!

This could be huge!

Some salient quotes from first article (emphasis added):

1. “While heart regeneration in mammals has been observed during the prenatal stage, it is virtually impossible for the blood-pumping organ to heal after birth.”
2. “Researchers studied a protein called Agrin, common in fetal hearts, which rapidly disappears after birth. They now believe Agrin, which resides in the space between prenatal heart cells, controls the process of cardiomyocyte regeneration.”
3. “When tested in lab cultures, Agrin was seen to promote cardiomyocyte growth in the tissue of adult hearts — both mice and human.
4. And when injected into the damaged hearts of live mice, Agrin appeared to heal them and restore them to regular working order within weeks, greatly reducing scar tissue and replacing it with new healthy muscle cells.”

On Mandatory Child Immunization

Posted: 6/11/2017

Trigger

Recently read: Null Toleranz für die Impfgegner Das Verhalten der Impfgegner ist irrational und ideologisch. Freilich muss auch irrationales Handeln erlaubt sein, doch ihr Verhalten bedroht das Leben anderer. Da hilft nur noch Zwang. (Partial translation: Zero tolerance for immunization opponents … only government coercion can help)

It appears there are more efforts in some western countries by governments to enforce more strict childhood immunization programs, e.g. in the U.S. and Germany.

Voluntary Or Government Compulsion?

Presumably, most parents would voluntarily agree to have their children properly immunised for the love of their children. Only immunized children are protected, most parents probably understand this very well.

Presumably, only a minority of parents believe in exaggerated or false claims of vaccines being dangerous for their children. Here better education by private and government institutions would certainly help.

I would argue that there is no compelling reason for government mandated compulsion of child or any other group immunization unless a severe crisis presents itself. General Government compulsion is based on or exploits exaggerated fears.

Government forced immunization is totally outdated in the 21st century!

Herd Immunization

Apparently, not 100% of the population need to be immunized to prevent an outbreak of a contagious disease (see e.g. here, here). For e.g. measles it is reported that a 95% coverage of immunization would be sufficient.

However, a less than 100% immunization rate increases the risk that vulnerable members of the population (e.g. children, who for medical reasons cannot be immunized or older adults etc.) get infected. However, what is the probability?

Immunization Schedules For Adults

This could be indeed a neglected subject of public health. How many adults realize that they need to be vaccinated again?

More private and public education on this subject would not hurt!

Victim Of Their Own Success

Beautiful argument! It goes like this “Vaccines prevent serious infections so effectively that many parents mistakenly believe the diseases are no longer a threat in the United States” (source).

This would call for more and better education of parents by private and public institutions about the real risk that long, largely controlled child diseases could come back to haunt if childhood immunizations keep dropping.

This would also call for private and government efforts to spread more childhood immunizations around the world. Or to achieve complete eradication!

More Research To Defeat These Pathogens Once And For All!

Like with antibiotic resistance it is high time to devote more private and public funding to diagnose and defeat these pathogens as early and thoroughly as possible with least side effects. Finally, in the early 21st century, humans have the technological means to do it. Just do it! (pardon me Nike)

Where are Bill & Melinda Gates or other billionaires to step forward!

Big Disclaimer

I am not a doctor nor have I ever had any significant training in medicine! I am a lay person on medical topics.

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (35)

Posted: 5/24/2017

1. 'Smart genes' account for 20% of intelligence: study (Hope, we will be smarter soon!)
2. Fullerene nanoflask captures reactivity of atomic nitrogen (This is highly promising!)
3. Machine learning dramatically streamlines search for more efficient chemical reactions
4. Team cures diabetes [type 1] in mice without side effects (“... The pancreas has many other cell types besides beta cells, and our approach is to alter these cells so that they start to secrete insulin, but only in response to glucose [sugar]”... The therapy is accomplished by a technique called gene transfer. A virus is used as a vector, or carrier, to introduce selected genes into the pancreas. These genes become incorporated and cause digestive enzymes and other cell types to make insulin. Gene transfer using a viral vector has been approved nearly 50 times by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to treat various diseases … It is proven in treating rare childhood diseases, and Good Manufacturing Processes ensure safety.)
5. Researchers achieve direct counterfactual quantum communication
6. Seeing through fog using noisy light
7. Scientist invents way to trigger artificial photosynthesis to clean air
8. Enzyme saves us from insect dust and worm skin
9. Surprising Brain Change Appears to Drive Alcohol Dependence
10. Buried lasers will sense Earth's spin and quakes doing the twist (“.... In doing so, ROMY [the tetrahedron, Rotational Motions in Seismology] will measure minuscule changes in Earth's spin rate and spin axis. The speed and pace of those measurements promise to add an increment of precision to GPS navigation, and ROMY may even be able to detect a subtle effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity: the drag of the rotating planet on nearby spacetime, … ROMY also will be sensitive to the weak rotations that accompany earthquakes, long-ignored motions that contain clues to the interior structure of Earth … With its 12-meter arms, ROMY is more sensitive than previous ring lasers, capable of sensing Earth's spin to better than one part per billion. And instead of one square ring, it has four triangular ones. Three of them are required to pin down rotations in any direction, and the fourth adds redundancy. Construction began in March 2016 and finished 6 months later. Last month, engineers achieved first light in all four rings at the same time—a sign that the geometry of the tetrahedron is precise enough to keep all the lasers resonating properly.”)
11. Giant space magnet may have trapped antihelium, raising idea of lingering pools of antimatter in the cosmos (If confirmed, this could be huge! “The AMS [Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. In 2011, NASA launched the 8.5-metric-ton magnet on the penultimate space shuttle flight and attached it to the International Space Station (ISS)] … has seen a handful of candidate particles of antihelium-3, made of two antiprotons and an antineutron. In labs on Earth, physicists have made antihelium for a few fleeting instants, but no one has ever detected it in space.”)
12. Immune cells unexpectedly help the heart keep its beat (“The researchers then discovered that macrophages were common in AV [atrioventricular] nodes from mouse and human hearts ... When the researchers grew macrophages and heart muscle cells together in culture dishes, they found that the two types of cells were connected physically and synchronized electrically. Because of these interactions, macrophages made it easier for their muscular neighbors to fire … When the team began examining mice that lacked macrophages, a technician noticed that the electrical rhythms of the animals’ hearts were abnormal. … the rodents appeared to have an AV block, in which the AV node doesn’t forward the atrial signal to the ventricles. ...”)
13. Naked mole-rats turn into plants when oxygen is low (Naked mole rats are absolutely amazing animals! They live up to 30 years (about 10 times longer than other, comparable rodents); rarely have cancer; do not feel many types of pain. “But naked mole-rats have a backup: their brain cells start burning fructose, which produces energy anaerobically through a metabolic pathway that is only used by plants ... In the new study, the researchers exposed naked mole-rats to low oxygen conditions in the laboratory and found that they released large amounts of fructose into the bloodstream. The fructose, the scientists found, was transported into brain cells by molecular fructose pumps that in all other mammals are found only on cells of the intestine. … The naked mole-rat has simply rearranged some basic building-blocks of metabolism to make it super-tolerant to low oxygen conditions," … At oxygen levels low enough to kill a human within minutes, naked mole-rats can survive for at least five hours … They go into a state of suspended animation, reducing their movement and dramatically slowing their pulse and breathing rate to conserve energy. And they begin using fructose until oxygen is available again.
14. The naked mole-rat is the only known mammal to use suspended animation to survive oxygen deprivation. … an adaptation for living in their oxygen-poor burrows. Unlike other subterranean mammals, naked mole-rats live in hyper-crowded conditions, packed in with hundreds of colony mates. With so many animals living together in unventilated tunnels, oxygen supplies are quickly depleted.”)
15. First evidence for higher state of consciousness found
16. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicists-negative-mass.html
17. Atomic Spins Evade Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle New measurements revise the limits of quantum fuzziness
18. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-teeth-evidence-ice-age.html
19. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicists-hidden-aspects-electrodynamics.html
20. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-star-wars-superlaser-longer-sci-fi.html (This could be huge! But no details are provided!)
21. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-vacuum-channel-transistor-combines-semiconductors.html
22. http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20170403/lander.html
23. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-brain-tranquility.html
24. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/millions-atoms-entangled-record-breaking-quantum-tests
25. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-reshape-basic-plasma-physics.html (Advances in nuclear fusion!
26. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-physicists-reveal-experimental-verification-key.html (More advances in nuclear fusion)