September 15, 2008
Black holes and revelations
When musing over what stories to include in this week’s blog (bonus points to anyone who picks up on my clever musical reference there), there was one obvious contender for the headline act. But in the end I decided that Lance Armstrong didn’t need any further publicity and have plumped for a more obscure tale about Big Bangs, black holes and atoms.
Scientists gathered in Switzerland last week to kick off an experiment they hope will answer many questions about our universe. Using a $9bn laboratory known as the Large Hadron Collider, they are (almost) re-creating the beginning of the universe in the hope of discovering the Higgs boson; an elusive particle that scientists theorise gives mass to otherwise massless matter.
(Link)
You still with me? Andy McSmith of the Independent dumbs it down for us:
“…why, in the trillionth of a second after it all began with the Big Bang, stuff came into existence where there had been no stuff before.”
That’s the scientific part and it all sounds a lot of complicated fun. But the nature of the experiment has given rise to alarmist fears that scientists will bring on the end of the world by creating a black hole on earth that we’ll eventually all get sucked in to. Over the sound of Stephen Hawking rubbing his hands together the media have been having a field day.
But at the end of all this, regardless of the outcome, my chief query will be “why is the Big Bang considered a proper noun?”
Cliché’s and disappointments
Many have predicted the demise of Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the years. The 53 year old co-founded Apple Inc in 1976, oversaw the introduction of the first successful small computer with a graphical user interface in 1984 – the Macintosh – before losing his job after sales slumped the following year.
It was big news when Apple bought his company NeXT in 1996 and Jobs was reinstated as CEO in 1997 at the expense of Gil Amelio. Realising the power of a slender vowel he has turned the company around, successfully launching the iMac home computer, iPod range of portable music players and iPhone – which is a phone, obviously.
Predicting a professional demise is one thing. Financial newswire Bloomberg went one step further when they inadvertently published his actual demise.
(Link)
Jobs announced that he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004 and despite the tumour being removed the same year, rumours have persisted about his general health. Bloomberg’s mistaken posting of his obituary caused shockwaves before the error was rectified.
Jobs addressed the unfortunate incident while speaking at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event last week, channelling the spirit of Mark Twain with the wonderful cliché: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”
Meanwhile, the purpose of the event was for the corporation to make an exciting announcement. The actual take-away was disappointing: some price drops, an upgraded iPod Touch, upgraded iTunes software, new playlist and shuffle features for the Nano as well as a new slender design that is so thin it will give you a paper cut.
The new “shake to shuffle” feature is what it sounds like. To shuffle your music, you shake the player (how many screens will that crack?).
PC Magazine editor Lance Ulanoff said:
“Shake to shuffle was definitely the hit of the event.”
It’s a very original idea – or at least it was in June 2007 when the Sony Ericsson W910 introduced the same “flick of the wrist” control.
Six year old story sinks stock
It’s the type of scam you might expect from a high-tech action movie starring Matt Damon as the hot-shot conman and Harrison Ford as the ageing chief executive (as an aside - and not that I’m envious - but he really should meet someone his own age).
A story from 2002, stating that United Airlines were filing for bankruptcy, resurfaced in popular Internet news searches last week. It initially became the most viewed story on the South Florida Sun Sentinel's website even though it had not been republished by them. Like an electronic snowball (if you can imagine such a thing) the story spread, as the automated Google News spiders linked to it and a Floridian investment firm wrote a summary for Bloomberg. (Link)
This publicity brought the obvious investor response – a massive sell-off of United Airlines stock which saw the share price sink from $12 to $3.
Although the origin of the erroneous report is unknown, suspicions have been aroused amongst the security community. With all the predictability of a Harrison Ford political thriller, security consultants are forecasting that if fraudsters were behind this move, it’s a viable future path for stock scams.
Rather than use email-based spam to con people in to investing in worthless stock, fraudsters may look at reviving old stories with bad corporate news, publish them to the Internet and hope that the faux negative publicity brings about a drop in share price. What then for the criminals?
Danny McPherson from Arbor Networks explains:
“You could certainly buy stock and sell it short with such a ploy, or simply buy low and sell high... and with trading volumes we’ve seen here, a couple million dollars might easily fly under the radar.”
Old news being somehow relevant today through artificial means? There’s another Ford joke in there somewhere.
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