Chosen by an independent panel of five industry journalists, this year’s Apex Award finalists were named from a field of 88 entrants representing 18 countries and vying in 11 major digital signage categories.  Gold, Silver and Bronze Apex Awards will be presented in each category at a special awards banquet slated for the opening night of DSE 2012 on Wednesday, March 7th from 7-9 p.m. at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

bloomfield knoble, inc. has been named a finalist in “Interactive Self-Services” for it’s work for the 2011 Central Kansas Revival (CKR).  bloomfield knoble, along with it’s partners StreamZap and Harbor Industries, built self-service kiosks using iPads and LocPad software.  CKR used them as map locators for self service; digital signage to point people to various locations; digital signs announcing the event for that particular location (time and name of event – like meeting room signage) and as a self-service donation station (3G iPads were used so people could make credit card donations).  Volunteers also used LocPad iPads for internal communication, scheduling, emergencies, etc.

We are very proud of the nomination and excited to have been named a finalist for the Apex Award for our work for CKR in 2011.  At bloomfield knoble, we believe that LocPad, which empowers anyone to convert their tablet (running iOS or Android) into a digital sign or interactive self-service application, is a future-forward digital signage application in the prototype stage.  We believe that temporary events and festivals are areas under-served by the digital signage industry.  As such, we installed LocPad software on iPads, which were then placed into specially designed stands.  Together, these software / hardware / fixtures created a solution that could be used as both digital signage and interactive self-service.

Digital Signage Expo, held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV, USA, is the world’s largest and longest running conference and trade show exclusively dedicated to the digital signage, interactive technology and digital-out-of-home (DOOH) industries. Launched in 2004, DSE was the first event dedicated to the digital signage market and has been a significant contributor to the growth of this fast-paced industry. Professional end user attendance represents decision-makers from key industry categories such as retail, restaurant, healthcare, education, hospitality and transportation, as well as other key stakeholders, including advertising executives, brand marketers and systems integrators.

Over 180 exhibitors will feature technology and services including hardware, software, network, delivery and content from around the globe. DSE also offers the largest and most diversified digital signage and digital out-of-home educational program anywhere in the world, with more than 100 educators and the largest variety of educational opportunities, including a live installation tour and structured curriculum leading to professional re-certification in eight educational tracks. The program is comprised of 11 pre- and post-show educational events, 32 seminars, 40 targeted Industry Vertical Discussion Groups and over 40 free presentations staged in three on-floor theaters.

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We build strategies and everything that goes with them.

Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.

Man crush aside, I want to skip the normal praise I would heap upon him for his writing, drawing, artful commentary, being so handsome, etc. and praise him from a marketing perspective.  This weekend I realized that Stephan Pastis is a genius!

Mr. Pastis and Chronicle Books just launched an interactive app for the iPad that is really more like an interactive book.  If you’re a fan of Pearls, or any comic, you know that authors will often put out treasuries or collections of their strips.  This interactive book is like a treasury of Mr. Pastis’s favorite 250 strips.  What makes it even more fun is that he’s included video, audio commentary, animation and easter eggs (interactivity).  I love reading his stuff anyway and this opportunity to peel back the curtain made it even more entertaining.

But it’s not just because it’s Pearls.  I realized, after going through a second time, that this is how the future of books should be.

If you’ve read the biography of Steve Jobs, then you know that Steve Jobs himself thought the iPad could change the way people view ‘books’ and as an extension, learning.  In fact, Apple has scheduled an event in NYC to discuss education, which many people think will be to announce new interactive textbook opportunities.

I have downloaded hundreds of books to my iPad and have noticed that, as the popularity of the iPad continues, that books are becoming more interactive.  I have especially noticed this in children’s books.  My 7-year old has been reading books on the iPad for a couple of years.  The first books were just PDF versions of print books, but I have noticed that many books have begun to incorporate interactivity.  It started out small – click on the word to hear pronunciation, click on a character to hear that character talk, sound effects, etc.  The more interactivity in the book, the more interested my son was in the book.  I think it’s too soon to say if this is good or bad.  At a Parent – Teacher conference a few weeks ago, I was told that my son wasn’t doing very well in independent reading in class.  I was a bit surprised considering how well he reads at home.  When I asked him about it, he replied that books at school were boring.  At first I thought he meant the subject matter, but I realized that he actually means that ‘paper’ books are boring.

I was quick to recognize the benefits of the iPad as it relates to digital signage and other marketing applications, but never gave much thought to what the iPad could do for books.  I am such a bibliophile that I had the Rocket Book reader (that’s way back) and was an early adopter of the Sony eReader (hated it).  So when the iPad came out, I was only interested in the fact that I could store a lot of books and how easy it was to purchase and download new books on a device that also let me do other stuff.  I never thought much about what the books themselves could be / do.

Even when I noticed that my son preferred interactivity over regular print, I chalked that up to his age.  Even as books (and later magazines) began to incorporate interactivity, I found them to be ancillary to the words themselves, not an integral part of the content.  For example, Fortune magazine does a good job of offering additional material (such as videos), but I don’t need to click on them to understand the article.  When I do click on them, I find them to be extensions of the article – like bonus features on a DVD.  I have also been a part of designing interactive kiosks and other digital signage which required interactivity to deliver an end result (you are here . . . where do you want to go . . . here’s the path . . . download it to your mobile phone now, etc.), but the interactivity wasn’t part of the content.  I personally believed that too much interactivity – especially with books – was a bad thing.

Until now, which is why Stephan Pastis is a genius.

His app / ebook, whatever you want to call it, is the first time I felt that interactivity was an integral part of the story.  Yes, I could read the strips and get the humor, but the context in which he places them makes them that much more enjoyable.  I realized that I want all iBooks to be like this.

I want to be able to read, say Freakonomics, on the iPad just like I would a book, but I would love the opportunity to click and get more detail – see data – watch a video of how the formulas play out, etc.  I want interactivity not just because a developer knows how to put it in, but because it truly enhances my experience.  I think the closest would be director commentary on a DVD.  I think hearing the thoughts of a director / actor, whatever really can enhance the viewing experience, but those commentaries are usually given over the top of a movie.  It’s like having people talk next to you in the movie theater.  Well, as cool as that feature is, it required me to watch the movie and then watch it again with commentary.  I, personally, don’t really want to watch the same movie twice.

I have always grasped the need to have hardware offer interactivity to content – and generally how that should go, but I admit that I was a bit behind the curve on the content itself being interactive without being annoying.  I get what Steve Jobs was talking about.  I have to admit that I am a little sad about what this may mean for books (because I love holding them, the smell, the feel of the paper, etc.), but I think there will always be a place for both.  Like everything in our industry, I think we’ll find that some people will “get” what works best on an iPad and what doesn’t.  I suspect that we’ll see a rash of people slapping interactivity on books and we’ll probably see a bump in the sales of interactive books, because people who make them can and people who read them want the feature.  It’ll probably be the QR craze of 2011 all over again.

My final thought (in this way too long rambling commentary) is that what the future holds in interactivity in iBooks will be based on economics.  It seems that there are two economic approaches available.  One is to increase the price of the content.  For example, I could buy an iBook for $7.99 or an enhanced version for $9.99.  If I like the content and have seen previous value of interactivity, then I am probably willing to pay the extra $2 or so (give / take).  I doubt I’m willing to pay much more than that when, at the core, I really just want the content.  The other option is to offer new content as a stand alone (which is what this Pearls app) and charge a reasonable price ($3.99).  This can really work out better, because I’m willing to pay a higher price point ($3.99 vs $2.00) for the interactive content.  There will be some give and take to determine which route provides a better return, but it’s just math at that point.

When it’s all said and done, the truth is that I am a big fan of Pearls Before Swine and Stephan Pastis and I’m pretty much going to buy whatever he puts out . . . because he’s awesome . . . and a genius . . . and funny . . . and nice.

My real hope is that he reads this and invites me out for a beer sometime.  If that happens then you can expect to see a similar blog about Charlize Theron.

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We build strategies and everything that goes with them.

Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.

“Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”  Wall Street Journal.

But as we also stated at the time of launch, what Google+ has going for it… is Google. Besides Facebook, what website has a hold on us and integrates so completely (and almost invisibly) into our lives? We search with it, we email with it and we watch videos with it. And most people probably don’t stop too often to think about the fact that it’s all the same company. If Google+ is to succeed, it has to integrate with Google, and that integration will lift it up. It doesn’t have enough uniqueness otherwise to set it apart.

However, if every time you go to watch a YouTube video, you’re faced with a +1 button or a link back to which friends in your Circles have watched the same or similar videos, you’re going to be reminded about Google+. Just like when you drive by a restaurant repeatedly – even if it’s not the best restaurant. As long as the food is adequately prepared, you’re more likely to stop at that restaurant than the place you had the meal-of-your-life three months ago that’s 10 miles out of the way.

As of today, the Google+ restaurant has moved onto your main thoroughfare (well, it’s on many people’s main thoroughfare today, with the remainder of English-speaking Googlers getting it within the next couple of days).

That restaurant is the unfortunately-named and poorly-capitalized “Google Search, plus Your World.”

Now, every time you search on Google, not only will you get the millions of results that are webpages, articles, photos and videos from every conceivable corner of the Internet, most likely posted by people you’ve never met, but you will also get results from your Google+ social graph.

That means you’ll see, in your search results, pictures that you have posted to your Google+ account whose names relate to your search, related pictures posted by people in your Circles, posts you’ve made to your account that mention the search terms, posts made by people in your Circles, and suggestions as to other people whom you might want to follow.

This means everyone’s search results, from this point forward, will be different from those of anyone else and will be tailored to each individual’s previous experiences online.

What this also means is, Google+ users will suddenly experience what web designers and copywriters for websites have experienced for years – the need and desire to integrate SEO strategies into their profiles.

If you want your company website to appear higher in the organic results for any of the search engines, it is important to understand (as best anyone can) the algorithms used to determine placement. Most simply, from an on-screen content standpoint, that involves appropriate names for photos and keywords woven strategically into the copy. There’s also a whole bunch of backend meta-tag massaging, linking and other, more technical, activity that affects the search results, but because you can’t update the meta-tags on your Google+ profile, on-screen is what matters here.

From now on, when you post a status update, you might think to yourself, what search terms would I want people to search for and have my post appear in their search results? You’d probably think twice about some of your current photo captions; and you’ll want to update your photo file names so that each one is searchable by Google, not just a random series of letters and numbers like IMG_0008_1138.

Once this all sinks in, users won’t just be posting with the hope that those words may be seen if their followers happen upon their stream during the time period after it’s posted but before it gets pushed aside by the dozens of other posts that pop up. Users will know that others who are searching for those keywords will see their profile pop up as a source on that topic.

In case you’re wondering, search results will be clearly labeled, so those that come from the social graph will be obvious, compared to those from the more authoritative results from around the web.

Importantly, Google will also suggest other people you might want to follow based on your search. That means that other people will also find you based on the content you’re posting and decide whether or not to add you to one of their Circles. It’ll make you think twice about that long running joke thread about your favorite way to consume Captain Morgan’s and what happens after you do.

Besides causing us to filter our content – consciously or not – Google Search, plus Your World will be a powerful tool for those smart enough to harness it. If you want to promote yourself as an expert on bird watching in order to promote your new book on the subject, you can massage and tweak the content you post to Google+ to increase the chances that you’ll appear in the search results on that topic. It will definitely keep you top-of-mind among those who already have you in Circles; and it will also increase the likelihood that other Google+ users will discover your page and begin enjoying all the insights you have to offer on the Red Faced Warbler.

With Google+’s recent growth spurt over the holidays (most likely due to unprecedented advertising), coupled with this unique Google search integration, it is far too early to count Google+ down for the count. In fact, if you are a company or organization and you haven’t yet acquired your Google+ Brand Page, it’s definitely time to do so. It looks like Google+ will be around for quite some time.

At bloomfield knoble, we help our clients establish a valuable online presence that focuses on their overall strategy, branding and messaging. We integrate websites, social media and traditional media in the way that generates the best results. But we only initiate a specific strategy after doing our due diligence via market research and getting to know our clients’ needs inside and out. While we recommend staking out your Google+ real estate now, but unless its unique tools (anybody want to start a Hangout?) are a perfect fit for your business, it’s probably a prudent move to wait and see.

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We build strategies and everything that goes with them.  Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.

IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?  The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.

Instead, says Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority.

That is at odds with most people’s idea of being a pedestrian. More than any other way of getting around—such as being crushed into a train or stuck in a traffic jam—walking appears to offer freedom of choice. Reality is more complicated. Whether stepping aside to avoid a collision, following the person in front through a crowd or navigating busy streets, pedestrians are autonomous yet constrained by others. They are both highly mobile and very predictable. “These are particles with a will,” says Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, a technology-focused university.

Messrs Helbing and Moussaid are at the cutting edge of a youngish field: understanding and modelling how pedestrians behave. Its purpose is not mere curiosity. Understanding pedestrian flows makes crowd events safer: knowing about the propensity of different nationalities to step in different directions could, for instance, matter to organisers of an event such as a football World Cup, where fans from various countries mingle. The odds of collisions go up if they do not share a reflex to move to one side. In a packed crowd, that could slow down lots of people.

In 1995 Mr Helbing and Peter Molnar, both physicists, came up with a “social force” computer model that used insights from the way that particles in fluids and gases behave to describe pedestrian movement. The model assumed that people are attracted by some things, such as the destination they are heading for, and repelled by others, such as another pedestrian in their path. It proved its worth by predicting several self-organising effects among crowds that are visible in real life.

One is the propensity of dense crowds spontaneously to break into lanes that allow people to move more efficiently in opposing directions. Individuals do not have to negotiate their way through a series of encounters with oncoming people; they can just follow the person in front. That works better than trying to overtake. Research by Mr Moussaid suggests that the effect of one person trying to walk faster than the people around them in a dense crowd is to force an opposing lane of pedestrians to split in two, which has the effect of breaking up the lane next door, and so on. Everyone moves slower as a result.

Another self-organising behaviour comes when opposing flows of people meet at a single intersection: think of parents trying to shepherd their children into school as other parents, their sprogs already dropped off, try to leave. As people stream through in one direction, the pressure on their side of the intersection drops. That gives those waiting on the other side more opportunity to go through, until pressure on their side is relieved. The result is a series of alternating bursts of traffic through the gates.

This oscillation in flows is clever enough to have got Mr Helbing wondering about its application to cars. Traffic-light systems currently operate on fixed cycles, with lights staying green on the basis of past traffic patterns. If those patterns are not repeated, drivers are left to idle their engines for too long at red signals, raising emissions and tempers. Mr Helbing thinks it is better to have decentralised, local systems, which—like parents at the school gates—can respond to a build-up of traffic and keep the lights on green for longer if need be. City authorities agree: Mr Helbing’s ideas will soon be implemented in Dresden and Zurich.

Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. An experiment in 2009 tested the walking speeds of Germans and Indians by getting volunteers in each country to walk in single file around an elliptical, makeshift corridor of ropes and chairs. At low densities the speeds of each nationality are similar; but once the numbers increase, Indians walk faster than Germans. This won’t be news to anyone familiar with Munich and Mumbai, but Indians are just less bothered about bumping into other people.

Another problem with assuming people act like particles is that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually in groups. That matters, as anyone trying to get past shuffling tourists knows. It also leads to some lovely fine-scale choreography when small groups are squeezed. Observations of pavement crowds in Toulouse in France show that clusters of three and four people naturally organise themselves into concave “V” and “U” shapes, with middle members falling back slightly. If a group of three people cared about moving quickly, they would behave like geese and form a convex “V”, with the middle member slightly in front to forge a path. Instead, they adopt a formation that enables them to keep communicating with each other; talking trumps walking.

Mr Moussaid’s solution to such complexity has been to build a model based less on the analogy between humans and particles and more on cognitive science. Agents in this new model are allowed to “see” what’s in front of them; they then try to carve a free path through the masses to get to their destination. This approach produces the same effects of lane-formation in crowds as the physics-based models, but with some added advantages.

In particular, boffins think it could help make emergency evacuations safer. Simulating evacuations is a big part of what pedestrian modellers do—the King’s Cross underground fire in London in 1987 gave the field one of its starting shoves. One big danger in an emergency is that people will follow the crowd and all herd towards a single exit. That in turn means that the crowd may jam as too many people try to force their way through a single doorway.

The physics-based models do have an answer to this problem of “arching” (so called for the shape of the crowd that builds up around the exit). Their simulations suggest the flow of pedestrians through a narrow doorway can be smoothed by plonking an obstacle such as a pillar just in front of the exit. In theory, that should have the effect of splitting people into more efficient lanes. In practice, however, the idea of putting a barrier in front of an emergency exit is too counter-intuitive for planners to have tried.

The cognitive-science model offers a more palatable option, that of experimenting with the effects of changes in people’s visual fields. Mr Moussaid speculates that adaptable lighting systems, which use darkness to repel people and light to attract them, could be used to direct them in emergencies, for example.

Where the cognitive approach falls down is in the most packed environments. “At low densities, behaviour is cognitive and strategic,” says Mr Moussaid. “At high density, it’s about mass movement and physical pressures.” At a certain point crowds can shift from a controlled flow to a stop-and-go pattern, as people are forced to shorten their stride length and occasionally halt to avoid collisions. This kind of movement can develop into something much more frightening, known as crowd turbulence, when people can no longer keep a space between themselves and others. The physical forces that are imparted from one body to another when that happens are both chaotic and powerful: if someone falls over, others will be unable to avoid them.

Science meets religion

Working out precisely how and when these transitions happen is tough. Bringing a real-life situation under control once a stop-and-go pattern has started is equally hard. So the trick is to ensure that serious crowding is avoided in the first place. From big events such as the London Olympics to the design of new railway stations, engineering firms now routinely simulate the movement of people to try to spot areas where crowding is likely to occur.

A typical project involves using off-the-shelf software programs to identify potential bottlenecks in a particular environment, such as a stadium or a Tube station. These models specify the entry and exit points at a location and then use “routing algorithms” that send people to their destinations. Even a one-off event like the Olympics has plenty of data on pedestrian movement to draw on, from past games to other set-piece gatherings such as, say, city-centre carnivals, which enable some basic assumptions about how people will flow.

Once potential points of congestion are identified, more sophisticated models can then be used to go down to a finer level of detail. This second stage allows planners to change architectural designs for new locations and identify when to intervene in existing ones. “There should be many fewer crowd disasters given what we now know and can simulate,” says Mr Helbing.

The biggest test possible of these tools and techniques is the haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia that Muslims are expected to carry out at least once in their lives if they can. With as many as 3m pilgrims making the journey each year, the hajhas a long history of crowd stampedes and deaths. Indeed, video footage of a hajstampede is used by lots of modellers to validate their simulations of crowd turbulence.

The Saudi authorities have brought in consultants in recent years, focusing in particular on the layout of the Jamarat Bridge, where pilgrims perform a ritual in which they throw stones at three pillars. By making the crossing one-way, and changing the shape of the pillars so that people can stone them from a number of locations, they have improved the bridge’s safety.

But according to Paul Townsend of Crowd Dynamics, a consultancy that has worked on the pilgrimage, the risks remain significant. He thinks that the use of gates that could be opened and shut would help to manage the flow. Yet the haj presents some very specific difficulties beyond its sheer scale. Part of the problem is not having a clear idea of how many pilgrims will turn up, which makes planning difficult. Another issue is the nature of the crowd.

“Pilgrims on the haj have the attitude that, if I die there it is God’s will,” says Mr Townsend. “There is a willingness to get more and more dense in the space.” Scientists can model many aspects of pedestrian behaviour, but religious fervour is a step too far.

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We build strategies and everything that goes with them.  Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.

A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph.

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of “diddling the public”. Their demonstration had been hacked – and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy – “Hertzian waves” – could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. “I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages,” Marconi boasted to London’s St James Gazette in February 1903.

That things would not go smoothly for Marconi and Fleming at the Royal Institution that day in June was soon apparent. Minutes before Fleming was due to receive Marconi’s Morse messages from Cornwall, the hush was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise sputtering from the theatre’s brass projection lantern, used to display the lecturer’s slides. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a projector on the blink. But Arthur Blok, Fleming’s assistant, quickly recognised the tippity-tap of a human hand keying a message in Morse. Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector’s electric arc discharge lamp.

Mentally decoding the missive, Blok realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: “Rats”. A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily,” it trilled. Further rude epithets – apposite lines from Shakespeare – followed.

The stream of invective ceased moments before Marconi’s signals from Poldhu arrived. The demo continued, but the damage was done: if somebody could intrude on the wireless frequency in such a way, it was clearly nowhere near as secure as Marconi claimed. And it was likely that they could eavesdrop on supposedly private messages too.

Marconi would have been peeved, to say the least, but he did not respond directly to the insults in public. He had no truck with sceptics and naysayers: “I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system,” he said at the time. Fleming, however, fired off a fuming letter to The Times of London. He dubbed the hack “scientific hooliganism”, and “an outrage against the traditions of the Royal Institution”. He asked the newspaper’s readers to help him find the culprit.

He didn’t have to wait long. Four days later a gleeful letter confessing to the hack was printed by The Times. The writer justified his actions on the grounds of the security holes it revealed for the public good. Its author was Nevil Maskelyne, a mustachioed 39-year-old British music hall magician. Maskelyne came from an inventive family – his father came up with the coin-activated “spend-a-penny” locks in pay toilets. Maskelyne, however, was more interested in wireless technology, so taught himself the principles. He would use Morse code in “mind-reading” magic tricks to secretly communicate with a stooge. He worked out how to use a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder. And in 1900, Maskelyne sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. But, as author Sungook Hong relates in the book Wireless, his ambitions were frustrated by Marconi’s broad patents, leaving him embittered towards the Italian. Maskelyne would soon find a way to vent his spleen.

One of the big losers from Marconi’s technology looked likely to be the wired telegraphy industry. Telegraphy companies owned expensive land and sea cable networks, and operated flotillas of ships with expert crews to lay and service their submarine cables. Marconi presented a wireless threat to their wired hegemony, and they were in no mood to roll over.

The Eastern Telegraph Company ran the communications hub of the British Empire from the seaside hamlet of Porthcurno, west Cornwall, where its submarine cables led to Indonesia, India, Africa, South America and Australia. Following Marconi’s feat of transatlantic wireless messaging on 12 December 1901, ETC hired Maskelyne to undertake extended spying operations.

Maskelyne built a 50-metre radio mast (the remnants of which still exist) on the cliffs west of Porthcurno to see if he could eavesdrop on messages the Marconi Company was beaming to vessels as part of its highly successful ship-to-shore messaging business. Writing in the journal The Electrician on 7 November 1902, Maskelyne gleefully revealed the lack of security. “I received Marconi messages with a 25-foot collecting circuit [aerial] raised on a scaffold pole. When eventually the mast was erected the problem was not interception but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this easy. Marconi had patented a technology for tuning a wireless transmitter to broadcast on a precise wavelength. This tuning, Marconi claimed, meant confidential channels could be set up. Anyone who tunes in to a radio station will know that’s not true, but it wasn’t nearly so obvious back then. Maskelyne showed that by using an untuned broadband receiver he could listen in.

Having established interception was possible, Maskelyne wanted to draw more attention to the technology’s flaws, as well as showing interference could happen. So he staged his Royal Institution hack by setting up a simple transmitter and Morse key at his father’s nearby West End music hall.

The facetious messages he sent could easily have been jumbled with those Marconi himself sent from Cornwall, ruining both had they arrived simultaneously. Instead, they drew attention to a legitimate flaw in the technology – and the only damage done was to the egos of Marconi and Fleming.

Fleming continued to bluster for weeks in the newspapers about Maskelyne’s assault being an insult to science. Maskelyne countered that Fleming should focus on the facts. “I would remind Professor Fleming that abuse is no argument,” he replied.

In the present day, many hackers end up highlighting flawed technologies and security lapses just like Maskelyne. A little mischief has always had its virtues.

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We build strategies, and everything that goes with them.  Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.

It seems that everybody is doing end-of-the-year lists, so I thought I would do one too (courtesy of Physics World).  I am always the first to admit that much of the science-related stuff I blog about doesn’t have a direct correlation to marketing (although I try to make it seem so), but sometimes science just needs to be promoted for science sake.  So courtesy of Hamish Johnston, editor of physicsworld.com, here are their top 10 breakthroughs of 2011.

1st place: Shifting the morals of quantum measurement

Steinberg’s work stood out because it challenges the widely held notion that quantum mechanics forbids us any knowledge of the paths taken by individual photons as they travel through two closely spaced slits to create an interference pattern.

This interference is exactly what one would expect if we think of light as an electromagnetic wave. But quantum mechanics also allows us to think of the light as photons – although with the weird consequence that if we determine which slit individual photons travel through, then the interference pattern vanishes. By using weak measurements Steinberg and his team have been able to gain some information about the paths taken by the photons without destroying the pattern.

In the experiment, the double slit is replaced by a beamsplitter and a pair of optical fibres. A single photon strikes the beamsplitter and travels along either the right or the left fibre. After emerging from the closely spaced ends of the parallel fibres, it creates an interference pattern on a detector screen.

The weak measurement is performed by passing the emerging photons through a piece of calcite, which imparts a tiny rotation in the polarization of the photon. The amount of rotation depends on the direction of travel of the photon – in other words, its momentum. The photons are then “post-selected” according to where they strike the screen, which allows the researchers to determine the average direction of travel of photons that arrive there.

The experiment reveals, for example, that a photon detected on the right-hand side of the diffraction pattern is more likely to have emerged from the optical fibre on the right than from the optical fibre on the left. While this knowledge is not forbidden by quantum mechanics, Steinberg says that physicists have been taught that “asking where a photon is before it is detected is somehow immoral”.

“Little by little, people are asking forbidden questions,” says Steinberg, who adds that his team’s experiment will “push [physicists] to change how they think about things”.

2nd place: Measuring the wavefunction

Second place goes to another group that has asked a “forbidden question”. Led by Jeff Lundeen at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa – a former colleague of Steinberg – a team has used weak measurement to map out the wavefunction of an ensemble of identical photons without actually destroying any of them. Quantum tomography, in contrast, maps out the wavefunction at the expense of destroying the state. As well as boosting our understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, the technique could prove useful in cases where tomography cannot be used.

3rd place: Cloaking in space and time

Coming in at third place are two teams – one at Cornell University in the US led by Alexander Gaeta, and the other at Imperial College London headed by Martin McCall. In early 2011 McCall’s team published a theoretical analysis of how an event in space and time could be cloaked, which he later described in a special Physics World feature. A few months later, Gaeta and colleagues built a device that uses two “split time lenses” to do just that. As well as changing our ideas about what can and cannot be cloaked, space–time cloaking could also be used in the perfect bank heist – at least in theory.

4th place: Measuring the universe using black holes

Fourth spot on the list goes to Darach Watson and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the University of Queensland, Australia, who have worked out a way of using supermassive black holes – which power active galactic nuclei (AGNs) – as “standard candles” for making accurate measurements of cosmic distances. The work is important because AGNs can be found just about everywhere in the universe, and unlike the supernovae currently used as standard candles, the light from AGNs endures for long periods of time.

5th place: Turning darkness into light

Christopher Wilson and colleagues of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden together with physicists in Japan, Australia and the US have bagged fifth place because they are the first to see the dynamical Casimir effect in the lab. The effect arises when a mirror is moving so quickly through a vacuum that pairs of virtual photons – which are always appearing and then annihilating – are pulled apart to create real photons that can then be detected. As well as shedding new light on the Casimir effect, the team’s use of a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) as the mirror make this an extremely clever experiment.

6th place: Taking the temperature of the early universe

Just after the Big Bang, the universe was a complicated soup of free quarks and gluons that eventually condensed to form the protons and neutrons we see today. Sixth place in our top 10 goes to a team of physicists in the US, India and China that has made the best calculation yet of this condensation temperature: two trillion degrees Kelvin. As well as providing important insights into the early universe, the work also advances our understanding of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the properties of neutrons, protons and other hadrons.

7th place: Catching the flavour of a neutrino oscillation

Seventh place is awarded to the international team of physicists working on the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan. The researchers fired a beam of muon neutrinos 300 km underground to a detector, where they found that six neutrinos had changed, or “oscillated”, into electron neutrinos. While the measurement is not good enough to claim the discovery of the muon-to-electron neutrino oscillation, it is the best evidence yet that one “flavour” of neutrino can oscillate into another.

8th place: Living laser brought to life

Ninth place goes to Matteo Mariantoni and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara for being the first to implement a quantum version of the “Von Neumann” architecture found in PCs. Based on superconducting circuits and integrated on a single chip, the new device has been used to perform two important quantum-computing algorithms. Its development moves us closer to the creation of practical quantum computers that solve real-life problems.

10th place: Seeing pure relics from the Big Bang

Michele Fumagalli and Xavier Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz and John O’Meara of Saint Michael’s College in Vermont take 10th spot for being the first to catch sight of clouds of gas that are pure relics of the Big Bang. Unlike other clouds in the distant universe – which appear to contain elements created by stars – these clouds contain just the hydrogen, helium and lithium created by the Big Bang. As well as confirming predictions of the Big Bang theory, the clouds provide a unique insight into the materials from which the first stars and galaxies were born.

Anyway, one of my dreams may come true!  MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

MIT will couple online learning with research on learning

MIT’s online learning initiative is led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif, and its development will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning under his leadership.

“Students worldwide are increasingly supplementing their classroom education with a variety of online tools,” Reif said. “Many members of the MIT faculty have been experimenting with integrating online tools into the campus education. We will facilitate those efforts, many of which will lead to novel learning technologies that offer the best possible online educational experience to non-residential learners. Both parts of this new initiative are extremely important to the future of high-quality, affordable, accessible education.”

Offering interactive MIT courses online to learners around the world builds upon MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online publication of nearly all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials. Now in its 10th year, OpenCourseWare includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.

MIT President Susan Hockfield said, “MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”

OCW will continue to share course materials from across the MIT curriculum, free of charge.

MITx online learning tools to be freely available

MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.

“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted.” Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”

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We build strategies and everything that goes with them.

Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.

Anyone can publish on the web, but it would be better if some people didn’t; the world does not need another site that provides advice on how to unlock an iPhone or find cheap car insurance.  Now new evidence shows that search engines have upped their game to make sure their results are not dominated by such low-quality sites.

Search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knock-offs, but even they get overwhelmed.  As recently as March, for example, the first 10 results from a Google search for “how to organize your desktop” contained nine links to pages churned out by “content farms” –  websites that publish reams of articles, often of dubious quality, that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars.

That prompted New Scientist to ask computer scientist Richard McCreadie at the University of Glasgow, UK, to look into the issue.  The results show that Google and Microsoft have won a major victory in the fight against such content farms.  In the process they may have inflicted serious pain on two organizations often cited as providers of content farm material: Seed, a project from AOL, appears to have stopped commissioning content from freelance writers, though the firm declined to comment.  And Santa Monica-based Demand Media has seen its stock price fall be over 50% since it went public earlier this year for $1.5 billion.

Most of the credit for such changes has been given to Google, which this February announced that it had updated its search algorithm in a bid to prioritize sites that publish original and well-researched material.  It won’t provide details, but many site owners noticed that the update detected and penalized sites that publish multiple near-identical articles, a favorite tactic of content farms.  For example, the traffic flowing from search engines to eHow, a Demand Media site, dropped 20% after the update.  Google has also enlisted users to keep up the fight – it says that it now demotes sites that people choose to exclude from search results.

To test how successful Google and Microsoft’s Bing have been at fending off content-farmed results, McCreadie ran 50 search queries known to be a target of content farmers, such as “how to train for a marathon” in March and August this year.  Then he paid people to examine the results for links to low-quality sites, where “low quality” was defined as uninformative sites whose primary function appears to be displaying adverts.

The results are striking.  In the case of the marathon query, sites that contained lists of generic tips, such as “invest in a good pair of running shoes” were present in the top 10 in March but had disappeared by August, while high-quality sources, such as Runner’s World magazine, now appear near the top.  Similar trends were found throughout the 50 queries.

The story is far from over.  Search engines play such a prominent role in our lives – Google alone handles over a billion queries a day – that companies constantly vie for the top places in the results.  Sites can rank highly by producing authoritative material, but this is expensive, so there will always be those looking for a cheap short cut.  Content farms may be out for now, but with billions of dollars hanging in the balance, it’s just a matter of time before the next battle commences.

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We build strategies and everything that goes with them.

Some of the largest organizations in the world, including many in the mortgage and finance industries, trust us with the most important aspects of their business. From defining clients’ brands and identities to developing ongoing campaigns in a variety of media, we provide the communications and measurement tools to move them forward. Applying our experience and dedication to the media and the message, bloomfield knoble handles every detail of our clients’ strategic marketing initiatives.