Karen Bartlett is a writer, journalist and film maker.
Karen writes for The Times, The Sunday Times,The Guardian, WIRED and Newsweek. In broadcast Karen has made documentaries for the BBC World Service, and directed a series on the economic meltdown.
Karen’s book 'Architects of Death' about Topf and Sons will be published in March 2018. She is also the author of 'After Auschwitz', a critically acclaimed biography about Dusty Springfield, and a book about disease eradication in the Twentieth Century.
Growing Up X
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn't written out of history Half way down a winding country road in New York’s wealthy Westchester County, one of America’s most famous revolutionaries lies buried under three feet of crisp white snow. I...
Newsweek
How one man gave Congo’s women hope
Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps survivors to build a future Why are the lives of African women worthless? It’s a question that Denis Mukwege asks every day that he works with the raped and mutilated women of the Democratic Republic...
The Times - World
‘If they gave me a house, I’d take it tomorrow’
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Reader’s Digest, has returned to the area where he grew up. Now retired, he likes to remember the old days; he can point out his school — “it was tough” — the mosque where his family prayed and the spot...
The Times - World
Momma D: Dionne Warwick, the Grande Dame of Divas
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and P. Diddy Dionne Warwick opens up her arms in a stage bow: “I’m looking pretty good, don’t you think,” she says. The singer seems slightly surprised to be turning 70, and, with pearly white teeth a...
The Times - Arts
India's Barefoot Revolution
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening If all revolutions begin in unlikely locations, few could be as unpromising as Borda. It’s a poor village in the poorest district of one of the poorest states in India. Only the blasting from a nearby ...
The Times - World
It’s murder on your mobile, says The Killing’s Sarah Lund
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone forensics with actress Sofie Gråbøl Detective Sarah Lund is a Luddite. The loner heroine of Denmark’s hit crime drama The Killing is as much of a 70s relic as her Faroe sweaters: She makes notes by h...
Technology
Skateistan: How skateboarding took off with Afghan kids
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation, and no adults. “This country has more restrictions than just about any other,” Oliver Percovich says, explaining how his own passion for freedom and fun led to groups of boys and girls flying acros...
The Times - World
Life and Love with 'The Greatest': Muhammad Ali
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville, Kentucky, and saw an energetic young man holding court to a wide-eyed gaggle of neighbourhood boys, including her brother. “Who’s that big man?” she asked her mother, not knowing that the answer wo...
The Times - Arts
Polio's Last Stand
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential When 40-year-old Liberian civil servant Patrick Sawyer died of Ebola earlier this year in hospital in Lagos, having carried the disease from his home country to Nigeria, global health workers feared the epidemic would spread in West Af...
Newsweek
Bringing Anne Frank Home – to Germany
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing – clearing out the attic and getting rid of several generations’ worth of papers, clutter and possessions from their family home in Basel, Switzerland. Unlike most other pensioners, however, Elias is ...
Newsweek
A Race Apart: the beauty queens of the apartheid era
The Miss World finalists are now at the World Cup, but the women who represented South Africa in its past have divided memories So far the game has not been beautiful for the World Cup’s “33rd official team”. They have gone largely unnoticed in South Africa’s impressive new stadiums, despite d...
The Times - World
Maki Mandela: “As Nelson's child, I can say I am proud of him”
In the week that London marks the statesman's 90th birthday, his daughter reveals how she overcame her resentment that he was a father to the world, but not to her Nelson Mandela arrives in London today for what is likely to be his last major public appearance; a 90th birthday charity concert ...
The Times - World
The Vagina Monologues turns ten
Eve Ensler transformed the New Orleans Superdome into ‘Superlove' for a celebrity-studded event to campaign against violence towards women Few people know that New Orleans is the vagina of America. Few would suggest it. “It is fertile. It's a delta. And everyone wants to party there,” explains...
The Times - Arts
Could you build a bridge by setting some sliders on your smartphone and waiting two seconds for a highly complex calculation? This team working for an NGO in El Salvador did.
The Ranger supercomputer is the 17th fastest in the world. It’s a Texas computational mega-beast with 62,976 processor cores reaching a peak performance of 580 teraflops, memory of 123 terabytes and disk storage of 1.73 petabytes.
Computer speed is normally measured by researchers in the number of floating-point operations per second (flops). Ranger has a peak performance of equal to 5.8 × 10^14 flops.
By comparison, smartphones do about 100 megaflops = 10^8 flops. So, you could say that Ranger is 5.8 million times faster.
With power like that it’s hard to believe you could perform the same calculations on a smartphone – but researchers in the US have done just that.
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard are about to announce a widely available app that can provide real-time and reliable simulations to the same problems – from a smartphone anywhere on the planet.
That’s never been more relevant: Last year sales of smartphones overtook personal computers for the first time. A report by Canalys showed that in 2011 the number of smartphones shipped grew by a massive 62.7% – with 488 million smartphones compared to only 415 million PCs.
Sarah Perez on Techcrunch responded to the figures, asking “When will the post-PC era arrive? It just did.” Remember your kid isn’t going to get a desktop, she added – they’re getting a tablet, or a phone because “smartphones are PCs, too. The most affordable ones.”
The future of computing may be a little more complicated than that, but in essence we’ll be doing more of what we used to do on a computer – on our phones instead.
With apps like the one developed at MIT that could mean essential engineering and infrastructure – like building bridges – could be made more easily available on construction sites, and to communities in the developing world. The app could also be used for landmine detection, and determining the optimal shape for buildings.
One of the project leaders, David Knezevic, said:
“Smartphones are the new frontier in computational engineering.”
Knezevic, who is now at Harvard, first developed the app as a post-doctoral associate in mechanical engineering at MIT, working in the lab of Professor Anthony Patera.
“At the moment all of this work is done on desktops, or supercomputers,” Knezevic said. “Its time consuming, and very expensive.”The research team used the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a smart phone.
This kind of model reduction has been used before; in October I wrote about the team of Danish scientists who have developed the world’s first mobile brain scanner using a smartphone.
In this case, Knezevic believes the approach of the MIT team is distinguished by rigorous “error bounds” created using mathematical theories devised in Professor Patera’s labs. This tells a user the range of possible solutions, and estimates accuracy.
For Knezevic the hardest part of the project was developing those mathematical algorithms: “It took a decade of work in the MIT research group.”
The app uses a range of parameters that have been set by the user to draw data from the original supercomputer simulation. By moving the slider bars on the smart phone, someone who wants to build a bridge can estimate stresses by changing the density of the material, or the thickness of the pylons.
The result is a 3D visualization, developed at MIT by Phuong Huynh. Huynh, who is originally from Vietnam, said: “What was really challenging is that a smart phone doesn’t have a lot of memory, so we needed to work out how to extract only the data needed to create what is visual. In other words, for the visualization, you don’t need to use all the data relating to what is inside – only what is on screen.”
It all began as a brainstorming session, according to Huynh. That session turned into a research project – and is now soon to be developed more widely as an app on different smartphone platforms. Knezevic can’t reveal more yet, but expects full details will be announced within the next few months.
It will be the conclusion of years of work turning the most complex calculations into something simple, and user friendly. When you explain that it can solve, in a second, a problem that would take two hours on a supercomputer, Knezevic says that people, “instantly understand what it is all about.”
Knezevic adds that it is important to remember that the original simulations
will still be generated on a supercomputer. Smarter smartphones don’t make computers redundant – a recent article in WIRED by Robert McMillan highlighted the work of Wu Feng from Virginia Tech in making smaller supercomputers that can operate as business desktops, while Jason Perlow pointed out on Zdnet that ‘post-PC’ probably means greater integration between smartphones, tablets, desk tops and cloud computing.
If the nature of those relationships have yet to evolve, everyone agrees that the future will provide a more integrated, and mobile, experience – with small devices providing real answers to big problems.
This article was written or Conversations by Nokia with Republic Publishing
Welcome to my website. I hope these pages give you a flavour of some of my work in books, print, onl…
Last week I was in Istanbul attending a Youth Forum for teenagers from around the world. But not eve…
When Nelson Mandela retired after serving one five-year term as President of South Africa in 1999 he…
I’ve just returned from China, after a gap of about 16 years, and I met these undergraduates – comin…
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential
When 40-year-old Liberian civil servan…
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville,…
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and …
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening
If…
*Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps surv…
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Rea…
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone foren…
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation…
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn’t writt…
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing –…
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