Aussie swimmer blames social media for failing to bag gold in 100m Olympic final

When Aussie swimmer Emily Seebohm failed to take gold in an Olympic swimming final she'd been tipped to win, she gave an excuse few had been expecting: social media.

Australian swimmer Emily Seebohm went into Monday’s 100-meter backstroke Olympic final as the hot favorite. She ended up with the silver, but what surprised people most was that her race time was significantly slower than what she clocked in the previous day’s heat. Even Canada’s Missy Franklin, who took the gold, came in with a slower time.

Shortly after the race, 20-year-old Seebohm came up with an excuse never before uttered by an Olympian, but one which certainly reflects the technological age we now live in.

You see, according to Seebohm, she messed up because she stayed up too long the night before the big race responding to messages of encouragement on Twitter and Facebook.

“I guess when you swim that fast in the heat, then people put pressure and more pressure on you, saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to get the gold.’” Seebohm told Australian reporters after her loss. “Maybe I just started believing that and just thought I’d already won by the time I had swum and I hadn’t even swum yet.

“I don’t know, I just felt like I didn’t really get off (social media) and get into my own mind.”

“You’re going to win gold”

She said that with so many people telling her via social media sites that she was going to win gold, she simply started to believe it. “When they tell you a thousand times you are going to get it, somewhere in your mind you are just like, ‘I’ve done it’. But I hadn’t and that was a big learning curve and I obviously need to sign out of Twitterand log out of Facebook a lot sooner than I did.”

Seebohm later said her disappointing performance was also down to nerves, and not just the social media sites. However, the Aussie swimming team’s coach, Matt Brown, clearly sees the likes of Facebook and Twitter as a major distraction.

“I’d love to throw away some of those phones,” he said. “That’s the age we are living in. Emily has already learned that no matter how experienced you are you keep learning.”

The Social Media Games

In the run up to the London Olympics, there was much talk of it being the most connected Games ever, but most reports focused on sports fans rather than the participants.

These days, many high profile athletes have Facebook and Twitter accounts, with masses of devoted followers tracking their every post and tweet. At a time when they’d be better off focusing on their upcoming event, it seems some, like Seebohm, are getting caught up in the online conversation.

Speaking before the Games began, Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the London 2012 organizing committee and himself a two-time Olympic gold medalist, said, “I have found quite a close correlation between the number of tweets at competitive times and the level of under-performance.”

Coe continued, “From a personal perspective, when I was an athlete I just wanted complete and total focus,” he said. “I knew it was my time and that they don’t come around that often. If I was focusing on trying to defend a title I wouldn’t be reading Twitter, I wouldn’t be interested in it. Why would I?”

Aussie shooter Alethea Sedgman said that while it was good to keep in touch with family and friends, it was better to “focus without Facebook.”

Guidelines

The British Olympic Association (BOA) have even gone as far as to draw up a list of guidelines for its athletes regarding social media.

“Don’t forget your rivals may be reading,” the BOA warns. “Other competitors may gain confidence if they read any comments you make about poor form in training, feeling tired, upset or low on confidence.”

Whether Seebohm’s experience makes other athletes sit up and take notice remains to be seen. Hopefully any social media addiction won’t get so bad that we start seeing runners, smartphone in hand, snapping photos of themselves as they cross the finishing line, and then posting it on Facebook just prior to collecting their (silver?) medal on the podium.

[Source: londonnow, AP]

Solar Cells Can be Built Using Any Semiconductor

Researchers at the Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley found that inexpensive semiconductors can be used to create photovoltaic devices via a gate field, as long as a certain geometric shape of the electrode is maintained.

Zoom

Solar cells could be seeing much more widespread use and application as a result of research results announced by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. The technology is called screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics, short SFPV. The approach utilizes the electric field effect as well as a "carefully designed partially screening top electrode" that "lets the gate electric field sufficiently penetrate the electrode and more uniformly modulate the semiconductor carrier concentration and type to induce a p-n junction."

"Our technology requires only electrode and gate deposition, without the need for high-temperature chemical doping, ion implantation, or other expensive or damaging processes," said William Regan, lead author of the study. "The key to our success is the minimal screening of the gate field which is achieved through geometric structuring of the top electrode. This makes it possible for electrical contact to and carrier modulation of the semiconductor to be performed simultaneously."

The Berkeley scientists said that they shaped the electrode contact into narrow fingers using copper oxide in one configuration and, in another configuration, they created a single-layer graphene surface. "With sufficiently narrow fingers, the gate field creates a low electrical resistance inversion layer between the fingers and a potential barrier beneath them," the researchers said. "A uniformly thin top contact allows gate fields to penetrate and deplete/invert the underlying semiconductor. This results in both configurations are high quality p-n junctions."

"Our demonstrations show that a stable, electrically contacted p-n junction can be achieved with nearly any semiconductor and any electrode material through the application of a gate field provided that the electrode is appropriately geometrically structured," Feng Wang, co-author of the study, noted.

Apple Buying into Twitter

APPLE

Apple iOS honcho Scott Forstall introduces Twitter integration at the WWDC conference on June 6, 2011

We already know that Apple is a Twitter fan. It’s baked the social network into both of its operating systems, OS X and iOS, in a manner that’s a departure from its tradition of building every possible aspect of its products itself. Now Evelyn M. Rusli and Nick Bilton of the New York Times are reportingthat the relationship could lead to something a lot more significant: In recent months, Apple has been in discussions to buy a chunk of Twitter.

In another report, Shira Ovide and Jessica E. Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal confirm the Times story, sort of: They write that the talks in question happened more than a year ago.

Rusli and Bilton say that negotiations aren’t currently in progress, and that the conversation has involved Apple spending in the hundreds of millions in a deal that could value Twitter at more than $10 billion, which would mean that Apple would be taking a stake of less than 10 percent. So the idea might have led nowhere, and even if something does happen, the impact on the industry could be less than history-making. Still, it’s fun to ponder the implications.

The notion of a deal between the two companies is nothing new: It dates back at least as far as May 2009, when rumor had it they were deep in discussions of a potential Apple buyout of Twitter. That scuttlebutt sounded profoundly fishy, mostly because it was part of a long tradition of speculation involving Apple buying well-known companies–everything from Sony to Hulu–which has always led absolutely nowhere.

Now, Apple does snap up other businesses all the time. But it likes to spend its money on small companies with low profiles which it can integrate entirely into its own efforts. Its decision this week to purchase mobile security startup Authentec is a classic example.

The odds are still against Apple buying part of another well-known company, but these new rumors aren’t unthinkable in the way they once might have been. CEO Tim Cook has said that as he prepared to succeed Steve Jobs last year, Jobs told him not to ask what Steve would do, but to do what was right. It’s not that tough to imagine Cook and Co. concluding that a tighter relationship with Twitter feels right.

That scenario certainly sounds more likely than one in which Apple pours its energies into building its own mammoth social network from scratch. While the company has a long-standing reputation for being bad at social networking, that’s not quite fair: It’s more that it’s evidenced little interest in it over the years.

It launched its most meaningful social effort of its own, the Ping social features built into iTunes, back in 2010. But the whole effort seemed half-hearted in a way that Apple’s efforts rarely are, and when Ping didn’t immediately catch on, the company didn’t do much with it.

Game Center, the multi-player features built into iOS and, as of this week, OS X, is the closest thing Apple has to a social-networking success story. However, it doesn’t really encroach on the turf of the major general-interest networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Apple is technology’s most fastidious, detail-oriented major player. When it builds something, it worries about every seam, every pixel, every element of the experience. Social networking, by contrast, is inherently untidy. It’s about turning features over to real people and getting out of the way. That doesn’t play to Apple’s strengths, which helps explain why Ping failed to capture the imagination of both Apple and consumers.

But Apple can’t pretend that social networking doesn’t matter. As Cook put it in his appearance at the D conference last May, the company doesn’t need to own a social network–but it does need to be social. So partnering up with an existing major social network, and maybe even owning part of it, could make sense.

As long as Apple and Google are squabbling over Android, that network isn’t going to be Google+. And Facebook, which will get integrated into OS X and iOS this fall, is more of an Apple rival than a potential junior partner. (Both would like to be the single technology company at the center of the lives of people around the world.)

That leaves Twitter, which needs all the help it can get as it does battle with the twin behemoths that are Facebook and Google. A deal with Apple would be a coup. It might also be a worthwhile way for Apple to invest a tiny sliver of the billions it has in the bank.

Of course, any financial transaction between the two companies wouldn’t be a big whoop in itself. What would be fascinating would be if Apple influence started to show up in Twitter, or Twitter helped to shape Apple products. Or both. It would be a blast to see Apple’s chocolate get mixed up with Twitter’s peanut butter.

I’m not going to get emotionally invested in that possibility, though. Remember, both the Times and the Journal are talking about the discussions in the past tense. They could have been tentative explorations that have permanently concluded. Like Tim Cook said, Apple understands that it’s important to be social–but maybe even Apple is still figuring out exactly what that means.

Why Many In The U.S. Did Not Get The Olympics Opening Ceremony In London

This weekend on Forbes.com, “LondonOlympics: The Most Embarrassing Opening Ceremony?” was not intended to represent the American reaction to the event. Unlike many other commentators here and around the world, I was not thinking about Danny Boyle, or the budget or any of the back story. I just watched it.

And I found it hard to watch. Not because I am a hater or an enemy of inclusiveness. Not because I am a fan of the Chinese Communist state and value conformity. Not because I am ignorant of England’s contributions to world culture. Quite the opposite on all counts.

I found it hard to watch for some of the same reasons that many in England loved it. I thought the that there was a sharp distinction between the “ produced” bits and the “crowd” bits. Some of the high-production elements worked for me (007, the Queen and her corgis, Beckham in the boat, the final Olympic rings fireworks) but I found the choreographed crowd actions to be cliche, disjointed and amateurish. Mass movement does not necessarily constitute a performance. (In fairness, some of the American reaction, including my own, was shaped by NBC’s poor editing of the event. Many comments reported that the BBC did a far superior job, which I do not doubt.)

London has become an important hub of contemporary art and there are many contemporary artists who create performance works for large numbers of people. The Tate Modern itself has staged all manner of large-scale art experiences in their vast Turbine Hall, so there is no question that England has the intellectual and cultural capital to have done something truly forward-looking.

Because I was reviewing the event as a “content experience” I did not share the same contextual frame that the news industry used to prepare the public for what they were going to see. Many viewers, particularly in America, had a similar reaction to mine and felt that the coverage didn’t reflect their experience of the event. For them, my story was refreshing and validating.

But for people who genuinely enjoyed the spectacle, I’m afraid it seemed mean and small minded. I have read all of the more than 300 comments and replied to as many as I could intelligently. Perhaps 80% of them agreed with me, often hilariously so. A small number took me for a rude person and responded in kind (and then some!) Many of those that disagreed took the time to explain why.

Having taken that all in, I have to say that I think the ceremony did expose some cultural rifts between our two countries. Specifically, England, in fact, has a deep tradition of amateurism that is very much part of its identity. Atul Gawande expressed this very clearly last year in his article “Personal Best,” in the New Yorker:

What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying too hard. For the Brits, coaching, even practicing, was, well, unsporting. In America, a more competitive and entrepreneurial spirit took hold.”

These are Gawande’s words, not mine, but reading them helped me to understand, perhaps, this gap I have been experiencing after writing about my reactions to the ceremony. Not that I represent America, or am a “typical” or “mainstream” American in any way. I’m not. But, by gum (to sound American!), my reaction to this would seem to come from an internalization of that more professional approach that Gawande (an American physician and journalist) ascribes to our country.

What that means in terms of the ceremony is that what I found sloppy and amateurish, the Britons found charming and quirky and representative of themselves in all their self-deprecating glory. It’s not that I wanted or expected it to be robotically perfect like the Chinese in 2008, but I missed the new British spirit that I felt when I was in London last summer. For all of the ways that England has become a radically more diverse society, the rigidity between high and low is more tightly integrated into its culture than in the U.S..

Now, the actual income inequality in America is huge and growing, so I’m not holding the U.S. above the U.K. as actually being more democratic—but we (deeply) think of ourselves that way. It might have something to do with that Revolution a while back that was based on overturning perceived tyranny.

That all being said, I think that the Americans that were disappointed in the opening ceremonies (myself included) were expecting something more brilliant than the retrospective mashup of recent British (pop) culture that we got. It was more like a bad Broadway musical than a unique performance that could have only been imagined in England. We were expecting what the host’s great artists and writers, musicians and designers, filmmakers, engineers and performers can deliver: Intelligence, incisiveness, discernment and craft. In short, a vision of the future better than our own.

[Note: These shows  diversity of opinion ] 

Top Technology Job Trends of 2012

I recently stumbled upon Indeed’s top job trends site. The site features an itemized list of the fastest growing keywords found within job postings across millions of jobs from thousands of job sites. It provides a particularly good insight into some of higher growth areas of the technology job market.

The results may surprise you. From a relative volume point of view, jQuery (an Open Source JavaScript Library) is the clear winner with a growth of more than 800,000%, #2 is PaaS (also known as Platform as a Service) with a 500,000% rise and Hadoop (an Open Source Big Data platform) at more than 400,000% increase.

This job trends graph shows relative growth for jobs found matching various technology search terms.

From an absolute percentage point of view, unsurprisingly Social Media is the clear winner with more than 1.5% of all job postings containing the term. More surprising is the second spot going again to jQuery with close to 1% of all searches.

Shows absolute searches across all job postings as a percentage.

I also compared a few of the buzzwords du jour, “Big Data” and “Cloud Computing” The winner is Big Data.

Cloud Vs Big Data

For my last comparison I looked at job postings involving Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Google. Interestingly, Twitter is the clear winner.

Job postings

The site also notes that Information Technology job postings have decreased -7% since June 2011. Yet clicks on Information Technology jobs have increased 11% since June 2011. This may show that the amount of job searches is increasing faster than the volume of job postings.

Another Interesting stat are the most populous metro areas ranked by job postings per capita for second quarter of 2012.

Rank	Metropolitian Area	Job Postings Per 1000 People
1	San Jose, CA	161
2	Washington, DC	118
3	Raleigh, NC	112
4	Hartford, CT	102
5	Boston, MA	91