Author: Ben Debski

When the Blackberry hit the scene in 2003, it appeared as a novel slice of multi tasking genius: business folks proudly admitted to being mildly addicted to their shiny “crackberries”. The gadget, a brainchild of Canadian company Research in Motion, seemed invincible. Today we know differently. The past few years have proved taxing for the Blackberry and the triumphant advance of its arch rival the iPhone has deemed it unfashionable in comparison. Last summer’s riots in London soiled the reputation of the brand name further, as Blackberry’s free BBM messenger service was the favoured tool of communication between looters and troublemakers.

As a result of unfortunate associations and mounting competition, Blackberry sales have plummeted dramatically, which is partially to blame for RIM’s disastrous losses; the company suffered a net loss of $125m (£78m) for the three months to March 2012, while it took home a profit of $934m the previous year. The decline of individual consumers has certainly contributed to the company’s shortfall, but the most significant blow has been the drop in orders from big corporations, entities that that now prefer to equip their staff with iPhone or Android devices.

In a desperate attempt to win back its quickly diminishing corporate clientele, the company’s new CEO Thorsten Heins has confirmed that Blackberry will be returning to its foundations and target business customers above all. To realise the plan, the launch of the latest version, the Blackberry 10, is expected to launch later this year, along with a new operating system that is well overdue. Time will tell if these steps will help to turn RIM’s fortunes around.

Fifty years ago, particle physicists faced an unexpected challenge. Their best mathematical models could account for some of the natural forces that explain the structure and behaviour of matter at a fundamental level, such as electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force responsible for radioactive decay. But the models worked only if the particles inside of atoms had no mass. How could huge conglomerations of such particles – proteins, people, planets – behave as they do if their constituent parts weighed nothing at all?

Some physicists invented a clever workaround. They suggested that a type of particle exists that had never been detected; it was eventually named in honor of the British physicist Peter Higgs. For a half-century, physicists searched for the elusive “Higgs boson particle.” Now, following research conducted at CERN, the huge particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, the hunt may soon be over.

At first blush, the idea behind the Higgs boson particle sounds outlandish. Higgs and his colleagues suggested that every elementary particle really is massless, just as the mathematical models require, and hence all particles would ordinarily zip around at the speed of light. But suppose that everything around us – every single particle in the universe – is immersed in a huge, unseen vat of Higgs particles. Whenever most kinds of particles move from point A to point B, they continually bump into Higgs boson particles, slowing their motion. When we observe them, they appear to lumber along like holiday shoppers in a crowded store. From their slow motion, we infer that they have mass. While a 50-year search for a hypothetical particle reminiscent of a bizarre fairytale might seem quixotic, the Higgs boson particle stands at the centre of the “Standard Model” of particle physics. Every experimental test of the model so far has matched theoretical expectations.

In some striking examples, the agreement between prediction and measurement has stretched out to twelve decimal places, making the Standard Model the most accurate scientific theory in human history. The model successfully accounts for three of the four basic forces of nature; only gravity remains beyond its purview.

Cosmic meaning
Higgs boson particles might have played an even more substantial role at earlier moments in cosmic history. My own research, along with that of physicists around the world, has focused on what effects Higgs boson particles might have had just fractions of a second after the big bang – effects that could explain the shape of the universe.

And yet, for all that, we still have no direct evidence that Higgs boson particles even exist. According to the Standard Model, Higgs boson particles scatter off each other, so they too, should have mass. The latest research indicates that Higgs boson particles (if they exist) should be among the most massive critters of the subatomic realm, more than 120 times as massive as the familiar proton.

To produce such a particle in the laboratory requires revving up protons to nearly the speed of light and smashing them together, which the Large Hadron Collider at CERN accomplishes trillions of times per second. The energetic collisions produce all manner of debris, which physicists carefully track with huge detectors and sift with sophisticated computer algorithms.

Physicists confront two major hurdles in their hunt for the Higgs boson. First, they must identify patterns in the debris that could have come from the production and rapid decay of a Higgs boson particle. The sought-after signal is well understood in principle, given what we know about the Standard Model. So is the background noise from all of the other junk that comes flying out when two protons collide with colossal energy. Physicists searching for a few Higgs-like needles in a mind-bogglingly large haystack must comb their data for anomalies in the debris that cannot be accounted for by known processes.

The second difficulty concerns statistics. The rules of quantum theory, on which the Standard Model is built, are at root probabilistic. There will always be statistical flukes in the data, just as any series of coin tosses can produce an unexpected string of seven heads in a row. To know with confidence that the coin is ordinary, with no hidden features, one must log a sufficiently large number of coin flips and check whether the data includes equal numbers of heads and tails over the long run. After thousands of coin tosses, if the data still shows a bias toward heads, one may be justified in thinking that the coin has some rather unusual properties.

The same holds true for all of the chaff from the protons’ collisions. Before physicists can claim that their anomalies really come from Higgs boson particles, they must gather enough data to rule out flukes. At CERN, two independent teams of physicists recently announced that their data were consistent with detection of a Higgs boson particle, though there remained a 1-in-2,000 chance that the signal came from mundane, non-Higgs processes. So the teams will continue smashing protons together, gathering more and more data, and sifting for signs of a Higgs boson.

We might not have the Higgs boson in hand right now. But the latest news is the strongest indication yet that the 50-year hunt for one of the most fundamental bits of matter might well be coming to a successful conclusion. The next time the CERN teams call a press conference, it could be weighty news indeed.

David Kaiser is Professor of Physics and the History of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012

Long the most fragmented nation on earth, China is being brought together like never before by a new connectivity. Its internet community is expanding at hyper speed, with profound implications for the Chinese economy, to say nothing of the country’s social norms and political system. This genie cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. Once connected, there is no turning back.

The pace of transformation is breathtaking. According to Internet World Stats, the number of internet users in China has more than tripled since 2006, soaring to 485m in mid-2011 – more than three times that in 2006. Moreover, China’s rush to connectivity is far from over. As of mid-2011, only 36 percent of its 1.3bn people were connected – far short of the nearly 80 percent penetration rates seen in South Korea, Japan, and the US.

Indeed, with the cost of connectivity falling sharply – China’s mobile users are expected to surpass PC users by 2013 – and, with urbanisation and per capita incomes also rising sharply, it is not unreasonable to expect China’s internet penetration rate to cross the 50 percent threshold by 2015. That would be the functional equivalent of adding about three-fourths of all existing internet users in the US to the network.

Nor are the Chinese casual and infrequent internet users. Consistent with what the social-network theorist Clay Shirky has dubbed a society’s penchant for unlocking the “cognitive surplus” embedded in net-based activities, survey data from the China Internet Network Information Centre suggest that Chinese “netizens” log an average of 2.6 hours per day online – a full hour longer than the average 15-49-year-old Chinese citizen spends watching television.

China’s microblogs, or social networks, where usage tends to be most intense, were estimated to have approximately 270m users as of late 2011. And there is plenty of upside. Worldwide, about 70 percent of all internet users currently engage in some form of microblogging, which is the fastest-growing segment of the internet. In China, this share is just 55 percent.

Powering potential  
When it comes to analysing China, it is always easy to get carried away with the numbers – especially those driven by the country’s sheer size. But the real message here concerns the implications of connectivity, not just its scale.

A key implication is the internet’s potential to play a significant role in the emergence of China’s consumer society – a critical structural imperative for a long-unbalanced Chinese economy. With connectivity comes a national awareness of spending habits, tastes, and brands – essential characteristics of any consumer culture.

The consumption share of China’s economy, at less than 35 percent of GDP, is the lowest of any major country. Surging Chinese internet usage could well facilitate the pro-consumption initiatives of the recently enacted twelfth Five-Year Plan.

The internet could also enable freer and more open communications, upward mobility, transparent and rapid dissemination of information and, yes, individuality. China’s leadership has been increasingly vocal in raising concerns about growing inequalities that might otherwise hinder the development of what they call a more “harmonious society.” Online connectivity could be a powerful means to help China come together and achieve this goal.

Finally, there is the internet’s potential as an instrument of political change. That is hardly an inconsequential consideration for any country in the aftermath of last year’s monumental Arab Spring, which was facilitated in many countries (especially Tunisia and Egypt) by network-enabled mobilisation.

While reform of China’s single-party state has always been viewed as an important objective in modern China – from the so-called Fifth Modernisation of Wei Jinsheng in the late 1970’s to recent speeches by Premier Wen Jiabao – meaningful progress has been limited. Is this likely to change as China embraces the Internet?

China is no exception in requiring leadership, accountability and responsiveness as conditions of political stability. Its rapidly expanding internet community has repeatedly raised national awareness of tough local issues. This was especially evident in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, ethnic violence in Xinjiang in 2009 and the high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou in 2011.

As the Arab Spring demonstrated, the internet can quickly transform local incidents into national flashpoints – turning the new connectivity into a potential source of political instability and turmoil. But that has been the case only in countries ruled by highly unpopular autocratic regimes.

Censoring growth  
By contrast, China’s leadership is viewed with a much greater degree of public sympathy. Their quick and direct response to the recent incidents in Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Wenzhou are important cases in point. Senior Party leaders – especially Premier Wen – were quick to lead an empathetic national response that was largely effective in countering the outpouring of concern expressed on the internet.

None of this is to deny the dark side of the Chinese internet explosion – namely, widespread censorship and constraints on individual freedom of expression. China’s “SkyNet” team (rumored to be greater than 30,000) is the largest cyber police force in the world.

Moreover, while China is not alone in censoring the internet, self-policing by many of the nation’s largest portals amplifies official oversight and surveillance. Recent restrictions on microbloggers – especially denial of access to those who use untraceable aliases – have heightened concerns over Chinese internet freedom. Such restrictions of course, cut both ways – potentially limiting personal expression, but also constraining disguised and reckless vigilante attacks.

Filtered or not, a long-fragmented China now has a viable and rapidly expanding network. The power of that network – especially insofar as economic, social and political change is concerned – is rather hard to predict. But connectivity adds a whole new dimension of cohesion to modern China. That can only accelerate the speed of its extraordinary development journey.

Stephen S. Roach is a member of the faculty at Yale University, a non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012