Peter B. Seel - Digital Universe

1 1.Bright, P. (2016, February 10). Moore’s law really is dead this time. ArsTechnica.com. Retrieved from, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/moores-law-really-is-dead-this-time.

2 2.This was Twain’s response in a letter to an inquiry from a reporter on May 31, 1897. It has often been misquoted online as “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”.

3 3.Intel Corporation (2005). Moore’s Law press kit. Retrieved from, http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/moores_Law_40th/index.htm?iid=tech_mooresLaw+body_presskit.

4 4.Kanellos, M. (2005, March 9). Moore says that nanoelectronics face tough challenges. Cnet News. Retrieved from, http://news.cnet.com/Moore-says-nanoelectronics-face-tough-challenges/2100-1006_3-5607422.html.

5 5.Intel Corporation. (2021). Moore’s law: Raising the bar. Retrieved from, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-gordon-moore-law.html.

6 6.Kurzweil, R. (2009). The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. New York: Penguin.

7 7.Dr Yale Patt. Personal communication, April 17, 2007.

8 8.Diagram retrieved from, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1970-2020.png.

9 9.Moore, G. E. (1965, April 19). Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics, 38(8). Retrieved from, https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/03/102770822-05-01-acc.pdf.

10 10.Moore, G. E. (1975). Progress in digital integrated electronics. Technical Digest. Proceedings from the 1975 International Electron Devices Meeting of the IEEE, pp. 11–13. Retrieved from, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4804410.

11 11.Kanellos, M., Op. cit.

12 12.Hruska, J. (2019, July 11). Is Moore’s law alive, dead, or pining for the fjords? Even the experts disagree. ExtremeTech.com. Retrieved from, https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294805-is-moores-law-alive-dead-or-pining-for-the-fjords-even-experts-disagree.

13 13.Martindale, J. (2020, January 16). Here’s why a 5nm iPhone A14 chip would be such a big deal. Digital Trends.com. Retrieved from, https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/5nm-iphones-herald-super-faster.

14 14.Internet World Stats. Retrieved from, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

15 15.Friedman, Thomas E. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the 21st century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 374.

16 16.Ibid.

17 17.MP3 is an acronym for the MPEG-1 audio layer 3 compression scheme used to shrink music files by 90 percent.

18 18.Macmillan, D. (2009, March 3). The music industry’s new internet problem. Business Week.

19 19.McIntyre, H. (2019, April 2). The global music industry hit $19 billion in sales in 2018, rising by almost 10%. Forbes.com. Retrieved from, https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2019/04/02/the-global-music-industry-hits-19-billion-in-sales-in-2018-jumping-by-almost-10/#20b7eb8318a9.

20 20.Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1984, August). The social construction of facts and artefacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14, pp. 399–441.

21 21.Ferguson, N. (2017). The square and the tower: Networks, hierarchies, and the struggle for global power. New York: Penguin Random House. This is a superb text on how network theory applies historically to many fields of study, especially telecommunication and the internet.

22 22.Joy, B. (2000, April). Why the future doesn’t need us. Wired, 8(4) Retrieved from, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html.

23 23.Heath, N. (2018, September 19). “Moore’s law is dead”: Three predictions about the computers of tomorrow. TechRepublic.com. Retrieved from, https://www.techrepublic.com/article/moores-law-is-dead-three-predictions-about-the-computers-of-tomorrow.

24 24.Hruska, J. (2019, July 18). Intel acknowledges that it was “too aggressive” with its 10nm plans. ExtremeTech.com. Retrieved from, https://www.extremetech.com/computing/295159-intel-acknowledges-its-long-10nm-delay-caused-by-being-too-aggressive.

25 25.Drew, S. (2006, November 13). Moore’s law is dead, says Gordon Moore. Hot Hardware. Retrieved from, https://hothardware.com/news/moores-law-is-dead-says-gordon-moore.

26 26.National Nanotechnology Initiative (n.d.). What is nanotechnology? Retrieved from, https://www.nano.gov/nanotech-101/what/definition.

27 27.Shankland, S. (2018, 12 December). Intel 3D chip stacking could get you to buy a new PC. CNET.com. Retrieved from, https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-3d-chip-stacking-could-get-you-to-buy-a-new-pc. Martindale, Op. cit.

28 28.Bright, Op. cit.

29 29.Heath, Op. cit.

30 30.Bright, Op. cit.

“When you’ve got 5 minutes to fill, Twitter is a great way to fill 35 minutes.”

Matt Cutts, former head of Webspam team at Google

“The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.”

Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law Professor

The effects of Moore’s law in creating ever more powerful information processing and communication devices and software over the past half century have led to a dramatic expansion of the use of these tools in daily life. Few of us living and working in the digital universe could contemplate daily life without our mobile phones, laptops, and tax preparation software. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous worldwide and are now so commonplace that we pay little attention to their users – unless they bump into us while composing a text message. We no longer assume that a lone person walking along staring into space and having a loud conversation with an unseen person is emotionally disturbed. We know this person is merely using a phone with a wireless headset. What is remarkable is the relatively rapid diffusion of mobile devices used in public places since 2001, and technology savants predict that this explosion in the number of mobile communication technologies will only increase in this century.

While these mobile telecommunication devices are highly visible, I would argue that other digital communication technologies have had an equal or greater effect on networked societies. Few have evolved as quickly or been as widely adopted in information-oriented societies as email and its relations, texting and tweeting. 1While text messaging used to be the teenage communication medium of choice, adults of all ages are now texting instead of calling or emailing. Email is seen by many users (and that includes myself) as both a remarkable communication tool and a daily curse. On the plus side, a single important email message can be sent with a single click to a list of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people at once. On the negative side, a single spam advertising message can be sent with a single click to lists of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people at once. Tele-connected people swim daily in an ever-rising sea of relevant messages and irrelevant spam. Estimates for the global volume of spam emails range from 45 to 73 percent of total email volume sent each day – and research firms estimate that spam messages cost global businesses $158 billion each year due to lost productivity and the need to filter email traffic. 2Even a conservative estimate would indicate that the effect of spam messages on the business and organizational use of email has turned into a massive cat-and-mouse game of attempting to outwit global spammers.

Perhaps only a telephone conversation can equal email or a text message in terms of communication speed and efficiency. Email is the clear technology of choice when a written record of communication must be generated, when there are multiple recipients to a message, or if a digital document needs to be attached to the message. I routinely spend an hour every day, seven days a week, writing email messages and replying to them. This includes a significant amount of time deleting spam messages inviting me to make millions of dollars in Nigerian financial dealings, refinance my home, view photos of how certain celebrities have aged, or contribute to innumerable social causes. All of the unfiltered spam needs to be screened, lest an important message be overlooked. I have stopped looking at the extensive list of filtered messages and I can only hope that some valid messages are not tossed out with the spam.