終於解開迷底了……
出得嚟
買得幾個月就又可以phase out
真係好好數口呢……呢啲咪叫做marketing囉！
White iPhone camera problems confirmed, Steve Wozniak loves Android
Apple had announced at its launch that the iPhone 4 would come in black and white models, then kept delaying the release of the white iPhone 4, a rare misfire in its recent history of smooth product rollouts.
By Devindra Hardawar, Venture Beat / January 31, 2011
Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak confirmed today that early white iPhone 4 parts caused issues with its camera, which led to multiple delays and its near-mythical status among gadget hounds. He also praised Google’s Android smartphone operating system.
Both observations are interesting in that they show rare cracks in Apple’s seamless public façade. The gadget company had announced at its launch that the iPhone 4 would come in black and white models, then kept delaying the release of the white iPhone 4, a rare misfire in its recent history of smooth product rollouts. And Wozniak, who regularly notes that he’s still on the Apple payroll, has issued praise for Android before.
In a conversation with Joshua Topolsky, editor of the AOL-owned tech blog Engadget, on the site’s eponymous online-video show today, Wozniak said that he ordered the white iPhone parts from a teenager online who somehow received them from Foxconn, who manufacturers the iPhone. When he tried to take a picture with the device’s flash, he said the photo looked as if it was taken through cellophane, confirming earlier rumors that the white case caused light leakage when the flash was used.
Additionally, Wozniak said that his white iPhone 4 parts caused issues with its proximity sensor (although I think he’s actually referring to its ambient light sensor, which could see similar light leakage issues to the camera). He then confirmed that Apple has resolved the problems with the white iPhone 4, and that we’ll be seeing them soon. We recently reported that the fabled device has started appearing on AT&T and Best Buy computers.
Woz also spent quite a bit of time praising Android, something that put him in hot water months ago when he called Android the winner in the current smartphone race (he later said he was misquoted). He said that Android contained many great features that the iPhone is lacking. In particular, Wozniak emphasized how much he loved Android’s ability to accept voice commands, as well as the Swype software keyboard available on Android, Symbian and other platforms. He definitely preferred both of those methods to hunting and pecking letters on a touch screen — which is the only method of text input on the iPhone so far.
Wozniak also revealed that he’ll be picking up two Verizon iPhones — in black and white — to accompany his current trio of AT&T iPhones.
2011年1月30日星期日
The Future of Search: Who Will Win The Spam Wars?
The Future of Search: Who Will Win The Spam Wars?
Vivek Wadhwa
Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year’s Day post on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last two months, there has been an avalanche of articles echoing my post (and a few before it from notable people like Jeff Atwood), including New York Magazine, Business Insider, GigaOm, TechCrunch, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal.
I had a feeling that this would get Google’s attention. And I had the same concern as when I challenged the Russian government, once, in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Skolkovo (a new tech park). I feared that Google would either blacklist me or do its equivalent of putting me in a Gulag—deliver even more spam when I search websites.
But I was delighted to get an e-mail from Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s SEO team. His message was exemplary for those wanting to learn how to handle a PR crisis. Here is part of what he wrote:
I read your post on TechCrunch yesterday and was quite disappointed by the fact that Google search failed your students at their task. My team and I treat every such failure as an inspiration to improve Google. Would it at all be possible for me to get a few queries from your students for which our algorithm failed? We will debug every aspect of our system for those queries.
He went on to invite me to visit Google to show me how they run the search system and listen to any other criticism I had to offer.
I took Amit up on this and spent hours with him; with Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s webspam team; and with their lead developers. They were incredibly open and honest. They acknowledged the deficiencies of Google search, shared ideas on how they plan to fix them, and asked for feedback.
I raised concerns that “content farms” are turning the web into a massive garbage dump, that many sites are simply replicating the content of others like TechCrunch, and that Google has no incentive to stop this because it gains advertising revenue from the spammers.
The Google developers assured me that there is a very high Chinese Wall between them and the business side of the company; that they have been instructed by Google’s executives to do only what is in the interest of users—to keep improving quality of search results and the user experience. They said they understood the issues and had many solutions to the technical problems. I questioned whether the spam problems could even be solved algorithmically; whether the only solution was a curated web-search model like that of Blekko and DuckDuckGo. They convinced me that they could, and would, win the battle.
Matt said he would post a blog, which he did, on Jan 21. In it, he explained that Google had already made improvements to make it harder for “spammy on-page content to rank highly”; had radically improved its ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010; and was about to implement a change that would directly address the issue of sites copying others’ content. Most importantly, he acknowledged that something had to be done about the “content farms,” and said that Google would.
Not surprisingly, Matt’s blog led to another avalanche of media coverage. As it turns out, the biggest content farm of them all, Demand Media, was set for an IPO this week (on Jan 26). Savvy bloggers and journalists began to question whether it could sustain its profits without Google’s support. The Wall Street Journal asked Did Google Just Make Demand Media Less in Demand?, and GigaOm wondered Did Google Just Declare War on Demand Media?
Nonetheless, Demand Media had a spectacular IPO. Its investors reaped huge bounties, with the company achieving a market cap of $1.7 billion—valuing it higher than the New York Times. So the public markets rewarded junk over quality. And they called Google’s bluff.
Where does that put us? Do we have to watch the web become one big toxic waste dump—as the spammers rake in billions of dollars? Or will Google indeed save the day?
There is an event on Tuesday, Feb 1, called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, to discuss these questions. It will be live-streamed on TechCrunch (watch for a post by Jon Orlin on that day) and is being organized by BigThink, a public online forum for intellectuals (people like Gary Kasparov, Jimmy Carter, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Nouriel Roubini, and Paul Krugman). BigThink has thousands of videos on its site, which 1.5 million people watch every month.
I am emceeing the BigThink event and moderating a panel with three big players: Matt Cutts from Google; Harry Shum, Microsoft Corporate Vice President who heads Bing development, and Rich Skrenta, founder and CEO of Blekko.
Here are some questions that I plan to ask the panelists. Please share your comments below and suggest additional questions. I can’t promise I’ll cover all the topics you raise, but I will bring up as many as I can.
1. How will they save the web? Is it possible for search engines to separate the wheat from the chaff—tell the difference between content produced by regular people and large-scale junk produced by the spammers?
2. How are the engines really different? Most people can’t tell the difference between Google and Bing. Where is the magic?
3. What lies ahead? What is the future of search?
I have no doubt that this will be a very lively and informative event. There are also other great presentations such as:
- Jaron Lanier, named by Time Magazine in 2010 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, speaking about the need for a new sustainable revenue model for search.
- Esther Dyson, in an address entitled “The Future of Search is a Verb,” speaking about how we want search to help us do something—a set of many verbs.
- Demos from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Architect of BING maps at Microsoft; and Luc Barthelet, Executive Director of Wolfram|Alpha.
- Demos from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Architect of BING maps at Microsoft; and Luc Barthelet, Executive Director of Wolfram|Alpha. I hope you’ll tune in.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School , Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
Vivek Wadhwa
Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year’s Day post on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last two months, there has been an avalanche of articles echoing my post (and a few before it from notable people like Jeff Atwood), including New York Magazine, Business Insider, GigaOm, TechCrunch, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal.
I had a feeling that this would get Google’s attention. And I had the same concern as when I challenged the Russian government, once, in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Skolkovo (a new tech park). I feared that Google would either blacklist me or do its equivalent of putting me in a Gulag—deliver even more spam when I search websites.
But I was delighted to get an e-mail from Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s SEO team. His message was exemplary for those wanting to learn how to handle a PR crisis. Here is part of what he wrote:
I read your post on TechCrunch yesterday and was quite disappointed by the fact that Google search failed your students at their task. My team and I treat every such failure as an inspiration to improve Google. Would it at all be possible for me to get a few queries from your students for which our algorithm failed? We will debug every aspect of our system for those queries.
He went on to invite me to visit Google to show me how they run the search system and listen to any other criticism I had to offer.
I took Amit up on this and spent hours with him; with Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s webspam team; and with their lead developers. They were incredibly open and honest. They acknowledged the deficiencies of Google search, shared ideas on how they plan to fix them, and asked for feedback.
I raised concerns that “content farms” are turning the web into a massive garbage dump, that many sites are simply replicating the content of others like TechCrunch, and that Google has no incentive to stop this because it gains advertising revenue from the spammers.
The Google developers assured me that there is a very high Chinese Wall between them and the business side of the company; that they have been instructed by Google’s executives to do only what is in the interest of users—to keep improving quality of search results and the user experience. They said they understood the issues and had many solutions to the technical problems. I questioned whether the spam problems could even be solved algorithmically; whether the only solution was a curated web-search model like that of Blekko and DuckDuckGo. They convinced me that they could, and would, win the battle.
Matt said he would post a blog, which he did, on Jan 21. In it, he explained that Google had already made improvements to make it harder for “spammy on-page content to rank highly”; had radically improved its ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010; and was about to implement a change that would directly address the issue of sites copying others’ content. Most importantly, he acknowledged that something had to be done about the “content farms,” and said that Google would.
Not surprisingly, Matt’s blog led to another avalanche of media coverage. As it turns out, the biggest content farm of them all, Demand Media, was set for an IPO this week (on Jan 26). Savvy bloggers and journalists began to question whether it could sustain its profits without Google’s support. The Wall Street Journal asked Did Google Just Make Demand Media Less in Demand?, and GigaOm wondered Did Google Just Declare War on Demand Media?
Nonetheless, Demand Media had a spectacular IPO. Its investors reaped huge bounties, with the company achieving a market cap of $1.7 billion—valuing it higher than the New York Times. So the public markets rewarded junk over quality. And they called Google’s bluff.
Where does that put us? Do we have to watch the web become one big toxic waste dump—as the spammers rake in billions of dollars? Or will Google indeed save the day?
There is an event on Tuesday, Feb 1, called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, to discuss these questions. It will be live-streamed on TechCrunch (watch for a post by Jon Orlin on that day) and is being organized by BigThink, a public online forum for intellectuals (people like Gary Kasparov, Jimmy Carter, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Nouriel Roubini, and Paul Krugman). BigThink has thousands of videos on its site, which 1.5 million people watch every month.
I am emceeing the BigThink event and moderating a panel with three big players: Matt Cutts from Google; Harry Shum, Microsoft Corporate Vice President who heads Bing development, and Rich Skrenta, founder and CEO of Blekko.
Here are some questions that I plan to ask the panelists. Please share your comments below and suggest additional questions. I can’t promise I’ll cover all the topics you raise, but I will bring up as many as I can.
1. How will they save the web? Is it possible for search engines to separate the wheat from the chaff—tell the difference between content produced by regular people and large-scale junk produced by the spammers?
2. How are the engines really different? Most people can’t tell the difference between Google and Bing. Where is the magic?
3. What lies ahead? What is the future of search?
I have no doubt that this will be a very lively and informative event. There are also other great presentations such as:
- Jaron Lanier, named by Time Magazine in 2010 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, speaking about the need for a new sustainable revenue model for search.
- Esther Dyson, in an address entitled “The Future of Search is a Verb,” speaking about how we want search to help us do something—a set of many verbs.
- Demos from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Architect of BING maps at Microsoft; and Luc Barthelet, Executive Director of Wolfram|Alpha.
- Demos from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Architect of BING maps at Microsoft; and Luc Barthelet, Executive Director of Wolfram|Alpha. I hope you’ll tune in.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School , Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google
Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google
Vivek Wadhwa
Jan 1, 2011
This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information. But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.
But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.
We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).
Blekko was founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, Tom Annau, Mike Markson, and a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers. Previously, Skrenta had built Topix and what has become Netscape’s Open Directory Project. For Blekko, his team has created a new distributed computing platform to crawl the web and create search indices. Blekko is backed by notable angels, including Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Clavier, and Mike Maples. It has received a total of $24 million in venture funding, including $14M from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA capital.
In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does. One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites. So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.
The feature that I’ve found most useful is the ability to order search results. If you are doing searches by date, as my students were, Blekko allows you to add the slashtag “/date” to the end of your query and retrieve information in a chronological fashion. Google does provide an option to search within a date range, but these are the dates when website was indexed rather than created; which means the results are practically useless. Blekko makes an effort to index the page by the date on which it was actually created (by analyzing other information embedded in its HTML). So if I want to search for articles that mention my name, I can do a regular search; sort the results chronologically; limit them to tech blog sites or to any blog sites for a particular year; and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics. Try doing any of this in Google or Bing
The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.) This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just appliance reviews that are the problem. Almost any popular search term will take you into seedy neighborhoods.
Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.
The bottom line is that we’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. I hope that Blekko and a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s—clean up the spam and clutter.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
Vivek Wadhwa
Jan 1, 2011
This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information. But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.
But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.
We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).
Blekko was founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, Tom Annau, Mike Markson, and a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers. Previously, Skrenta had built Topix and what has become Netscape’s Open Directory Project. For Blekko, his team has created a new distributed computing platform to crawl the web and create search indices. Blekko is backed by notable angels, including Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Clavier, and Mike Maples. It has received a total of $24 million in venture funding, including $14M from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA capital.
In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does. One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites. So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.
The feature that I’ve found most useful is the ability to order search results. If you are doing searches by date, as my students were, Blekko allows you to add the slashtag “/date” to the end of your query and retrieve information in a chronological fashion. Google does provide an option to search within a date range, but these are the dates when website was indexed rather than created; which means the results are practically useless. Blekko makes an effort to index the page by the date on which it was actually created (by analyzing other information embedded in its HTML). So if I want to search for articles that mention my name, I can do a regular search; sort the results chronologically; limit them to tech blog sites or to any blog sites for a particular year; and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics. Try doing any of this in Google or Bing
The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.) This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just appliance reviews that are the problem. Almost any popular search term will take you into seedy neighborhoods.
Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.
The bottom line is that we’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. I hope that Blekko and a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s—clean up the spam and clutter.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
Astronomers find what may be the oldest galaxy ever seen
Astronomers find what may be the oldest galaxy ever seenIt's known as UDFj-39546284, and it could help scientists understand the early period after the Big Bang.
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
January 29, 2011
Astronomers said this week that they found a distant galaxy that could be the oldest object ever observed in the universe.
The discovery could help them better understand the early days after the Big Bang — more than 13 billion years ago when the first stars were born.
But some scientists were more intrigued by the vast emptiness that apparently surrounds the ancient galaxy.
"The most interesting thing is the galaxies they didn't detect," said Mark Dickinson, an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, who wasn't involved in the discovery.
The galaxy, known as UDFj-39546284, was spotted in a patch of sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Based on their understanding of how the universe evolved, the scientists who scoured that region had expected to find about five galaxies that were roughly the same age. But they saw only the one.
"That told us very dramatic things are happening with galaxy generation" at that time, said UC Santa Cruz professor Garth Illingworth, a member of the research team that published its findings Thursday in the journal Nature.
"We're getting close to the era of galaxy birth."
The galaxy in question is quite small, with a mass less than 1% that of our Milky Way. It is also gassy and composed of "fuzzy bright blue blobs of tens of millions of stars," Illingworth said.
If the team's estimates of its age are correct, the galaxy's redshift — a measure of how fast the galaxy and the Earth are moving away from each other because of the expansion of the universe — is around 10. That means it existed a mere 480 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than 4% of its current age.
The earliest galaxies previously identified have redshifts of around 8.5. They emitted their light about 100 million to 150 million years later than UDFj-39546284.
To find the galaxy, Illingworth, lead author Rychard Bouwens of Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues collected images of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 2009 and again in 2010. They scrutinized the data looking for objects that were extremely faint and very red.
After numerous tests, Illingworth said, they were left with just one "tantalizing" object.
Experts caution that they can't be certain UDFj-39546284 is as old as the team suspects until the light it emits can be analyzed more precisely with a spectrograph.
"There's no proof that it's at this great distance other than its color," said Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis, who was not involved in the research.
Pinning down the ages of extremely old objects in space is tricky because the light they emit is so dim.
Last year, the Bouwens team released a draft paper describing three candidate galaxies with redshifts of about 10. The paper was not published because new data in 2010 showed that the objects were "spurious".
Illingworth said the Nature paper is based on stronger data. He estimated that the chance that UDFj-39546284 would turn out to be something other than a galaxy is about 10%.
The ancient galaxy — along with its apparent lack of neighbors — will help astronomers understand what happened to the vast clouds of hydrogen gas that shrouded the early universe. Many believe light from early galaxies and stars ionized the hydrogen and made the universe more transparent. But the Bouwens paper suggests that there may not have been enough of those galaxies and stars around to do so, said Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
"They've done the best job of quantifying what we can see — and it turns out to be not very much," he said. "It seems to be nowhere near enough to be responsible for ionization."
Ellis was more skeptical. "It's a stretch to base a discussion on only one object," the Caltech astronomer said. "If you met one person, could you estimate the population of a town?"
No one will know until more data appear, the experts said, and that could take time.
Illingworth said questions like these make the case for completion of the James Webb Space Telescope, a planned successor to the Hubble telescope that may be powerful enough to deliver the data the astronomers need, but which has become bogged down in budget troubles.
"This is as far as we'll go with Hubble," Illingworth said. "It's pushing the limits of what we can do."
eryn.brown@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
January 29, 2011
Astronomers said this week that they found a distant galaxy that could be the oldest object ever observed in the universe.
The discovery could help them better understand the early days after the Big Bang — more than 13 billion years ago when the first stars were born.
But some scientists were more intrigued by the vast emptiness that apparently surrounds the ancient galaxy.
"The most interesting thing is the galaxies they didn't detect," said Mark Dickinson, an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, who wasn't involved in the discovery.
The galaxy, known as UDFj-39546284, was spotted in a patch of sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Based on their understanding of how the universe evolved, the scientists who scoured that region had expected to find about five galaxies that were roughly the same age. But they saw only the one.
"That told us very dramatic things are happening with galaxy generation" at that time, said UC Santa Cruz professor Garth Illingworth, a member of the research team that published its findings Thursday in the journal Nature.
"We're getting close to the era of galaxy birth."
The galaxy in question is quite small, with a mass less than 1% that of our Milky Way. It is also gassy and composed of "fuzzy bright blue blobs of tens of millions of stars," Illingworth said.
If the team's estimates of its age are correct, the galaxy's redshift — a measure of how fast the galaxy and the Earth are moving away from each other because of the expansion of the universe — is around 10. That means it existed a mere 480 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than 4% of its current age.
The earliest galaxies previously identified have redshifts of around 8.5. They emitted their light about 100 million to 150 million years later than UDFj-39546284.
To find the galaxy, Illingworth, lead author Rychard Bouwens of Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues collected images of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 2009 and again in 2010. They scrutinized the data looking for objects that were extremely faint and very red.
After numerous tests, Illingworth said, they were left with just one "tantalizing" object.
Experts caution that they can't be certain UDFj-39546284 is as old as the team suspects until the light it emits can be analyzed more precisely with a spectrograph.
"There's no proof that it's at this great distance other than its color," said Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis, who was not involved in the research.
Pinning down the ages of extremely old objects in space is tricky because the light they emit is so dim.
Last year, the Bouwens team released a draft paper describing three candidate galaxies with redshifts of about 10. The paper was not published because new data in 2010 showed that the objects were "spurious".
Illingworth said the Nature paper is based on stronger data. He estimated that the chance that UDFj-39546284 would turn out to be something other than a galaxy is about 10%.
The ancient galaxy — along with its apparent lack of neighbors — will help astronomers understand what happened to the vast clouds of hydrogen gas that shrouded the early universe. Many believe light from early galaxies and stars ionized the hydrogen and made the universe more transparent. But the Bouwens paper suggests that there may not have been enough of those galaxies and stars around to do so, said Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
"They've done the best job of quantifying what we can see — and it turns out to be not very much," he said. "It seems to be nowhere near enough to be responsible for ionization."
Ellis was more skeptical. "It's a stretch to base a discussion on only one object," the Caltech astronomer said. "If you met one person, could you estimate the population of a town?"
No one will know until more data appear, the experts said, and that could take time.
Illingworth said questions like these make the case for completion of the James Webb Space Telescope, a planned successor to the Hubble telescope that may be powerful enough to deliver the data the astronomers need, but which has become bogged down in budget troubles.
"This is as far as we'll go with Hubble," Illingworth said. "It's pushing the limits of what we can do."
eryn.brown@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
How Apple and Google will kill the password
How Apple and Google will kill the password Prediction: Your phone is about to become a universal biometric ID and debit card
By Mike Elgan
January 29, 2011 07:55 AM
Computerworld - Imagine sitting down at a public PC, surfing the Web, visiting Facebook, checking your online bank account and buying something on Amazon.com -- all without entering passwords or credit card information.
It gets better. You get up and leave without even logging out. Some shady criminal type sits down at the same PC and finds his attempts at cracking your password foiled at every turn. Your accounts can't be accessed because your phone is no longer on the desk.
It gets better still. Hop in your car and press the "Start" button -- no key necessary. The car knows it's you after you wave your phone over the dashboard, and it adjusts the driver's seat and steering wheel just for you.
On your way to work, you swing by Starbucks to grab a Trenta Iced Cafe Mocha with whip. To pay, you wave your phone over a terminal on the counter, grab your drink and head for work.
Arriving at the office, you sail past security with doors unlocking automatically as you approach them. When you walk into your office, the lights and PC come on auto-magically.
But what's this? While you were out, IT replaced your old-and-busted PC with the latest and greatest. The PC is a blank slate, and it's unaware of your data or settings. No worries. Just drop your phone on the desk, and the system instantly implements your settings and begins downloading your work documents from the cloud.
While all this is happening, a co-worker walks in talking smack about the game yesterday -- and the ill-advised bet you lost. You owe him $10, so you both pull out your phones. You launch an app, type in the number 10, and tap the phones together to transfer the money.
All this has taken place without a single password or credit card.
The magic happens when you can combine a biometric ID system (which uses some kind of scan from a smartphone to verify that you're actually in possession of the device) with a secure short-distance wireless communication technology that other devices (cash registers, PCs etc.) can read.
What's wrong with passwords?
Why do we need a new ID system? Because most users don't create secure passwords, and they can't always remember the ones they create.
On any public system -- like, say, Facebook -- if a hacker tries the 20 most common passwords on enough accounts, he'll eventually break in. Any two-bit suburban script-kiddie can download free software to crack the majority of passwords on a public system within hours.
Many people use a single password for all accounts. Once a hacker gains access to the password, he can wreak havoc, steal your identity, destroy your credit, ruin your relationships and expose your secrets.
Password protection -- or lack thereof -- is the IT industry's dirty little secret. Passwords are a broken and obsolete model, yet everyone relies on them and pretends they do what they're supposed to do.
The obvious password replacement is biometric identification -- the use of a system capable of recognizing unique physical attributes, such as fingerprints, iris patterns or voices.
Far too many people don't trust biometrics because it feels like Big Brother technology. But I believe that if the biometric system resides on the user's cell phone, and is under the user's control, such technology would be far more acceptable to the public.
How Apple will kill passwords
Apple doesn't discuss future product plans, but it appears likely that the company is aggressively pursuing the development of technologies that replace IDs, passwords and credit cards.
Two years ago, Apple was in the news for patenting a range of biometric ID tools for the iPhone, such as a voice recognition system, a retinal scanner that uses the phone's camera or, most likely, a system that uses the screen to scan fingerprints.
Last year, Apple hired an expert in Near Field Communication, or NFC, to head up the company's Mobile Commerce department. NFC is technology that enables the transfer of data over distances of just a few inches -- a model that's far more secure and reliable than, say, Bluetooth. Other inside sources have been quoted as saying that Apple plans to build NFC into the iPhone 5.
Apple has also recently advertised three job openings related to payment platforms and short-range wireless data transfers.
And Apple has been granted NFC-related patents.
Apple is in a unique position to add biometric ID and the short-range communication technology that would make it effective.
Because Apple makes both handheld devices and PCs, it could easily build support into both. And because Apple already maintains one of the largest e-commerce systems in the world -- the various iTunes stores -- it already has most of the infrastructure for payments in place -- and the credit card numbers of millions of customers.
Most important, however, Apple has proved to be the best company in the industry at taking research concepts that have been going nowhere for years and mainstreaming them overnight. It did that with multitouch user interfaces, cell phone videoconferencing and touch tablets. And it could do it with biometrically secured NFC ID and commerce systems.
In other words, all Apple needs to do in order to turn the iPhone into a universal debit card is to add a tiny, inexpensive chip to the device. And all Apple needs to do in order to make the iPhone a universal secure ID is to add a fingerprint scanner to the phone and put another chip in its various desktop systems.
Of course, it could be a while before you can use an iPhone as a universal debit card. It could take Apple some time to establish the partnerships and programs necessary to get every gas station and grocery store to support iTunes. But the password-killing ID card functionality could exist on Apple systems as early as this year, or most likely next year.
How Google will kill passwords
Google, meanwhile, does discuss (some) future plans. CEO Eric Schmidt announced late last year that Android Gingerbread 2.3 and later versions will support NFC at the software level. It's up to Google's hardware partners to build that functionality into Android devices.
Google is already using cell phones to improve security. The company has a universal password log-in that grants admission to most of its many online services, from Gmail to Google Latitude. Google encourages users to associate that single sign-on password with their cell phone number. If someone hacks your Google password, you can get a new password sent to your phone.
The Android platform has also been at the forefront of workable biometric solutions for cell phones. In fact, you can already download Android apps that do face recognition and iris scanning.
What doesn't exist yet is a Google-approved or Google-designed system that ties it all together -- NFC, payment and biometric ID. But with Apple apparently taking the lead when it comes to using a cell phone as a debit card and a universal ID, you can be sure Google will step up and do whatever is necessary to compete.
I believe that it will soon be possible to live without passwords or credit cards. If Apple builds in these capabilities, you can be sure Google will. And if Apple and Google do it, so will all of their competitors.
It won't be easy -- we can look forward to messy standards and privacy battles. But once they ship cell phones that can replace both passwords and credit cards, I think life will be more convenient -- and more secure.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Contact and learn more about Mike at Elgan.com, or subscribe to his free e-mail newsletter, Mike's List.
By Mike Elgan
January 29, 2011 07:55 AM
Computerworld - Imagine sitting down at a public PC, surfing the Web, visiting Facebook, checking your online bank account and buying something on Amazon.com -- all without entering passwords or credit card information.
It gets better. You get up and leave without even logging out. Some shady criminal type sits down at the same PC and finds his attempts at cracking your password foiled at every turn. Your accounts can't be accessed because your phone is no longer on the desk.
It gets better still. Hop in your car and press the "Start" button -- no key necessary. The car knows it's you after you wave your phone over the dashboard, and it adjusts the driver's seat and steering wheel just for you.
On your way to work, you swing by Starbucks to grab a Trenta Iced Cafe Mocha with whip. To pay, you wave your phone over a terminal on the counter, grab your drink and head for work.
Arriving at the office, you sail past security with doors unlocking automatically as you approach them. When you walk into your office, the lights and PC come on auto-magically.
But what's this? While you were out, IT replaced your old-and-busted PC with the latest and greatest. The PC is a blank slate, and it's unaware of your data or settings. No worries. Just drop your phone on the desk, and the system instantly implements your settings and begins downloading your work documents from the cloud.
While all this is happening, a co-worker walks in talking smack about the game yesterday -- and the ill-advised bet you lost. You owe him $10, so you both pull out your phones. You launch an app, type in the number 10, and tap the phones together to transfer the money.
All this has taken place without a single password or credit card.
The magic happens when you can combine a biometric ID system (which uses some kind of scan from a smartphone to verify that you're actually in possession of the device) with a secure short-distance wireless communication technology that other devices (cash registers, PCs etc.) can read.
What's wrong with passwords?
Why do we need a new ID system? Because most users don't create secure passwords, and they can't always remember the ones they create.
On any public system -- like, say, Facebook -- if a hacker tries the 20 most common passwords on enough accounts, he'll eventually break in. Any two-bit suburban script-kiddie can download free software to crack the majority of passwords on a public system within hours.
Many people use a single password for all accounts. Once a hacker gains access to the password, he can wreak havoc, steal your identity, destroy your credit, ruin your relationships and expose your secrets.
Password protection -- or lack thereof -- is the IT industry's dirty little secret. Passwords are a broken and obsolete model, yet everyone relies on them and pretends they do what they're supposed to do.
The obvious password replacement is biometric identification -- the use of a system capable of recognizing unique physical attributes, such as fingerprints, iris patterns or voices.
Far too many people don't trust biometrics because it feels like Big Brother technology. But I believe that if the biometric system resides on the user's cell phone, and is under the user's control, such technology would be far more acceptable to the public.
How Apple will kill passwords
Apple doesn't discuss future product plans, but it appears likely that the company is aggressively pursuing the development of technologies that replace IDs, passwords and credit cards.
Two years ago, Apple was in the news for patenting a range of biometric ID tools for the iPhone, such as a voice recognition system, a retinal scanner that uses the phone's camera or, most likely, a system that uses the screen to scan fingerprints.
Last year, Apple hired an expert in Near Field Communication, or NFC, to head up the company's Mobile Commerce department. NFC is technology that enables the transfer of data over distances of just a few inches -- a model that's far more secure and reliable than, say, Bluetooth. Other inside sources have been quoted as saying that Apple plans to build NFC into the iPhone 5.
Apple has also recently advertised three job openings related to payment platforms and short-range wireless data transfers.
And Apple has been granted NFC-related patents.
Apple is in a unique position to add biometric ID and the short-range communication technology that would make it effective.
Because Apple makes both handheld devices and PCs, it could easily build support into both. And because Apple already maintains one of the largest e-commerce systems in the world -- the various iTunes stores -- it already has most of the infrastructure for payments in place -- and the credit card numbers of millions of customers.
Most important, however, Apple has proved to be the best company in the industry at taking research concepts that have been going nowhere for years and mainstreaming them overnight. It did that with multitouch user interfaces, cell phone videoconferencing and touch tablets. And it could do it with biometrically secured NFC ID and commerce systems.
In other words, all Apple needs to do in order to turn the iPhone into a universal debit card is to add a tiny, inexpensive chip to the device. And all Apple needs to do in order to make the iPhone a universal secure ID is to add a fingerprint scanner to the phone and put another chip in its various desktop systems.
Of course, it could be a while before you can use an iPhone as a universal debit card. It could take Apple some time to establish the partnerships and programs necessary to get every gas station and grocery store to support iTunes. But the password-killing ID card functionality could exist on Apple systems as early as this year, or most likely next year.
How Google will kill passwords
Google, meanwhile, does discuss (some) future plans. CEO Eric Schmidt announced late last year that Android Gingerbread 2.3 and later versions will support NFC at the software level. It's up to Google's hardware partners to build that functionality into Android devices.
Google is already using cell phones to improve security. The company has a universal password log-in that grants admission to most of its many online services, from Gmail to Google Latitude. Google encourages users to associate that single sign-on password with their cell phone number. If someone hacks your Google password, you can get a new password sent to your phone.
The Android platform has also been at the forefront of workable biometric solutions for cell phones. In fact, you can already download Android apps that do face recognition and iris scanning.
What doesn't exist yet is a Google-approved or Google-designed system that ties it all together -- NFC, payment and biometric ID. But with Apple apparently taking the lead when it comes to using a cell phone as a debit card and a universal ID, you can be sure Google will step up and do whatever is necessary to compete.
I believe that it will soon be possible to live without passwords or credit cards. If Apple builds in these capabilities, you can be sure Google will. And if Apple and Google do it, so will all of their competitors.
It won't be easy -- we can look forward to messy standards and privacy battles. But once they ship cell phones that can replace both passwords and credit cards, I think life will be more convenient -- and more secure.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Contact and learn more about Mike at Elgan.com, or subscribe to his free e-mail newsletter, Mike's List.
2011年1月28日星期五
The risks of speedy turnarounds
The risks of speedy turnarounds
Getting a plane off the gate quickly and on-time is a point of pride for airlines. But how fast is too fast?
AP/Airbus
Dipping back into my story from the Thai islands ... about that Air Asia flight:
Air Asia is a young, low-cost carrier (LCC) headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In less than 20 years the company has grown to become one of the biggest and most successful airlines in the region -- an equatorial Southwest of sorts.
Air Asia is unusual in that it's something of a multinational, with hubs in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. These divisions are operated semi-autonomously (not unlike those of LAN, the highly regarded Latin American airline with bases on Chile, Peru, Argentina and Ecuador). It is also one of the few LCCs to venture into the long-haul, intercontinental realm, with a network now stretching to Europe and Iran. The track record for long-haul LCCs isn't good -- one thinks of People Express, Tower Air and Laker, all three of which failed. That was a long time ago, though, and the Asian market of 2011 is a lot different from the transatlantic market of the 1980s. Smart money says Air Asia will continue to grow and succeed.
People certainly seem to like Air Asia -- it won Skytrax World's Best LCC award for 2009 -- but my own experience, a round-trip between Bangkok and the tourist ghetto of Phuket, wasn't without its kinks.
Both flights were late, for starters, including a 60-minute delay on the outbound leg. No reasons or apologies were provided. And I was less than impressed with the Air Asia website, which at steps along the way attempts to trick the customer into purchasing add-ons he or she probably doesn't want: priority seating, insurance, etc. And when we tried to make an online reservation in Bangkok, the site would not accept any of our credit cards issued by U.S. banks, ultimately requiring a phone call to book the old-fashioned way. To encourage online booking, Air Asia adds a "dot-com" to its name pretty much everywhere -- in print, on the Web and in bright red paint on the flanks of its aircraft. It ought to have a friendlier interface.
As for the onboard experience, well, it was what it was: a no-frills, get-what-you-pay-for ride. The plane, an Airbus A320, was spotlessly clean, but there is something downmarket, even ugly, about the carrier's red and black interiors -- not to mention the advertisements splashed over the tray tables and overhead bins. Seat pitch is minimal, and there's a charge even for water or soft drinks. It's hard to complain when our tickets ran less than a hundred bucks each way, but 50 Thai baht for a can of Coke Zero seems a little unnecessary.
Flying out of Phuket we were delayed about 15 minutes due to our plane's tardy arrival. But it could have been worse save for a remarkably fast turnaround time. The inbound Airbus was relieved of its passengers and luggage, refueled and reboarded (with almost every seat taken), and ready to push in what couldn't have been more than 20 minutes!
Rapid turnarounds are a point of pride at Air Asia, just as they are at Southwest and other LCCs, where super-high aircraft utilization rates are part of the game, but something about a 20-minute turn makes me uneasy. The logistics of a turn are perhaps more involved than people realize. From the minute a plane docks to the point where the brakes are released for push-back, a long series of tasks has to be accomplished.
For the ground staff, those tasks include the following:
- arriving passengers need to disembark with all of their carry-ons
- departing passengers and their carry-ons need to be boarded
- incoming luggage, mail and freight need to be offloaded
- outgoing luggage, mail and freight need to loaded
- the cabin needs to be cleaned and, if necessary, re-catered
- the aircraft needs to be fueled in accordance with outbound flight plan
The cockpit crew, meanwhile, has its own list of chores:
- complete the parking and shutdown checklists
- perform an exterior walk-around inspection
- receive and review updated weather for origin and destination
- load the outbound flight plan into the flight management system (FMS )
- receive and review the flight's air traffic control clearance (sometimes this happens after push, during taxi)
- review the departure profile and set up various instruments correspondingly -- review the expected taxi route
- receive weight-and-balance report and load the necessary data into the FMS
- perform the pre-flight and before start checklists (covering dozens of items, typically)
- take a whiz
That's a lot of moving parts. There is paperwork to deal with as well, plus communicating and coordinating with company handlers, cabin crew and ATC, as needed. Actual tasks, and the order in which they're performed, will vary, but it's never anything less than what you see above. Usually it's more. And the list above presumes there is no crew change. For pilots, a crew swap means having to stow our bags, then set up and organize our gear (charts, maps, headset and so on). This alone can take several minutes.
For perspective, I begin my preparations for a long-haul flight a good 90 minutes prior to departure. Sure, an hour-long domestic hop is different, but it's not that different, and the basic responsibilities are the same. Trying to get everything done in 20 minutes is pushing it under conditions. I am not accusing Air Asia, or anybody else, of being reckless, but as anybody knows it's easy to make mistakes when you're in a hurry. One of the basic tenets of air safety is to keep things slow, methodical and unrushed.
Airlines tend to hyperventilate when it comes to getting a plane off the gate as quickly as possible. I've never understood this. Scheduled flight times are usually padded, for one, and on-time performance is measured by arrival time not departure time.
Not that it didn't feel good getting the hell out of Phuket.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.
"Quantum Water" Discovered in Carbon Nanotubes
"Quantum Water" Discovered in Carbon Nanotubes
A new quantum state of water found in carbon nanotubes at room temperature could have important implications for life
Many astrobiologists think that water is a key ingredient for life. And not just because life on Earth can't manage without it.
Water has a weird set of properties that other chemicals simply do not share. One famous example is that water expands when it freezes, ensuring that ice floats rather than sinks. That's important because if it didn't, lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom upwards, making it hard for complex life to survive and evolve.
These and other properties are the result of water molecules' ability to form hydrogen bonds with each other and this gives these molecules some very special properties.
Today, George Reiter at the University of Houston and a few buddies put forward evidence that water is stranger than anybody thought. In fact, they go as far as to say that when confined on the nanometre scale, it forms into an entirely new type of quantum water.
The background to this is that the electrons in donor and acceptor molecules in hydrogen bonds are indistinguishable, meaning they can travel from one molecule to the next. When the molecules are confined in some way, they can spread some distance, when in a solid for example.
But water molecules can be confined in other ways too. And when that happens, the electronic structure of liquid water becomes a connected network.
That raises an important question: how does the behaviour of molecules in this electronic network differ from the behaviour of molecules in bulk water interacting in an ordinary way?
Reiter and co say they have measured the properties of confined in the tiny space inside carbon nanotubes at room temperature and found some important differences. They've done this by filling nanotubes with water and bombarding them with an intense beam of neutrons at the Rutherford Appleton Lab in the UK. The way the neutrons scatter reveals the momentum of the protons inside the nanotubes.
It turns out that the protons in this nano-confined water at room temperature behave in an entirely different way to those in bulk water. Protons are known to be sensitive to the electronic fields around them. So when these fields form into unusual electronic networks, it's no surprise the protons behave differently.
"The departures of the momentum distribution of the protons from that of bulk water are so large, that we believe that the nano-confifined water can be properly described as being in a qualitatively different quantum ground state from that of bulk water," they say.
They even suggest that there could be some kind of quantum coherence that spreads out through the electronic network. If that's the case, it should be possible to measure how this decoheres in future experiments.
That's a big deal. Reiter and co chose carbon nanotubes because they are an analogue of the conditions water faces when passing through living systems, through ion channels in cell membranes, for example. Biologists have long known that flow through these channels is orders of magnitude greater than conventional fluid dynamics predicts. Perhaps this new state of quantum water is the reason why.
Reiter and co also say that this quantum water can only exist when it is surrounded by neutral molecules such as the carbon in nanotubes and not in the presence of many commonly studied materials, such as proton exchange membranes like Nafion. This is made of molecules that conduct protons in an entirely different way and so prevents the formation of quantum water.
The implication, of course, is that the proton exchange membranes used in everything from chemical production to fuel cells could be dramatically improved by using a neutral carbon-based material.
In fact, this phenomenon may be a crucial factor in the very mechanism of life itself. Exciting stuff!
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1101.4994: Evidence Of A New Quantum State Of Nano-Confifined Water
2011年1月27日星期四
China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people
嘩嘩嘩……
十年後嘅「巨」城市人口竟然達一億？係真唔係真？
咁不如合併埋香港啦
2047年不遠矣……
City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.
The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
"The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas," said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.
However, he said no name had been chosen for the area. "It will not be like Greater London or Greater Tokyo because there is no one city at the heart of this megalopolis," he said. "We cannot just name it after one of the existing cities."
"It will help spread industry and jobs more evenly across the region and public services will also be distributed more fairly," he added.
十年後嘅「巨」城市人口竟然達一億？係真唔係真？
咁不如合併埋香港啦
2047年不遠矣……
China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people
China is planning to create the world's biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.
12:21PM GMT 24 Jan 2011
City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.
The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
"The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas," said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.
However, he said no name had been chosen for the area. "It will not be like Greater London or Greater Tokyo because there is no one city at the heart of this megalopolis," he said. "We cannot just name it after one of the existing cities."
"It will help spread industry and jobs more evenly across the region and public services will also be distributed more fairly," he added.
Mr Ma said that residents would be able to use universal rail cards and buy annual tickets to allow them to commute around the mega-city.
Twenty-nine rail lines, totalling 3,100 miles, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centres. According to planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 per cent and hospitals and schools will be improved.
"Residents will be able to choose where to get their services and will use the internet to find out which hospital, for example, is less busy," said Mr Ma.
Pollution, a key problem in the Pearl River Delta because of its industrialisation, will also be addressed with a united policy, and the price of petrol and electricity could also be unified.
The southern conglomeration is intended to wrestle back a competitive advantage from the growing urban areas around Beijing and Shanghai.
By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and "small" city clusters of 10 million to 25 million.
In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China's most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million.
The process of merging the Bohai region has already begun with the connection of Beijing to Tianjing by a high speed railway that completes the 75 mile journey in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities.
As the process gathers pace, total investment in urban infrastructure over the next five years is expected to hit £685 billion, according to an estimate by the British Chamber of Commerce, with an additional £300 billion spend on high speed rail and £70 billion on urban transport.
Twenty-nine rail lines, totalling 3,100 miles, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centres. According to planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 per cent and hospitals and schools will be improved.
"Residents will be able to choose where to get their services and will use the internet to find out which hospital, for example, is less busy," said Mr Ma.
Pollution, a key problem in the Pearl River Delta because of its industrialisation, will also be addressed with a united policy, and the price of petrol and electricity could also be unified.
The southern conglomeration is intended to wrestle back a competitive advantage from the growing urban areas around Beijing and Shanghai.
By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and "small" city clusters of 10 million to 25 million.
In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China's most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million.
The process of merging the Bohai region has already begun with the connection of Beijing to Tianjing by a high speed railway that completes the 75 mile journey in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities.
As the process gathers pace, total investment in urban infrastructure over the next five years is expected to hit £685 billion, according to an estimate by the British Chamber of Commerce, with an additional £300 billion spend on high speed rail and £70 billion on urban transport.
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