When a Tech 'Breakthrough' Isn't Really 127
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "'More than 8,600 press releases have been issued over the years with "breakthrough" in the headline, a majority of them by computer and electronics companies,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. He examines whether hyperbole and hype has robbed the term of much of its meaning, focusing on a recently announced 'breakthrough' by Intel involving optical computing. From the article: 'Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous.'"
This story is AMAZING (Score:5, Funny)
I am not exaggerating
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Past Tense & Specificity (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm always skeptical when it's used in a present tense. For example, "The Segway is a breakthrough in transportation technology."
When the Segway first premiered, I heard this. Yet, it has been anything but a 'breakthrough' nor has it changed my life in anyway (with the exception of some humor at the Segway's expense).
My point is that you can only really use the term in the past tense when something really did signal a breakthrough. Like the invention of solid state transistors. At the time, did they really realize how big it was? Maybe, but that's not always the case.
Breakthroughs are also sometimes relative, for instance Srgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band might have been a musical breakthrough for rock but mean little to computer scientists. Likewise, proving Fermat's last theorem might have been a breakthrough for mathematics but meant little or nothing to a musician.
So, in the end, I think 'breakthrough' is used prematurely but it also is used relative to fields a lot. I don't think the author bothered to look at the thousands of uses of the word to see if it was followed by "for physicists" or "for medicine" in which case they might have been genuine breakthroughs in that sense. The difficult breakthroughs are the ones that do affect everyone (like the transistor or radio) but they are becoming harder to pinpoint as many inventions these days aren't actual inventions but instead integration of already existing inventions to form a new utility for those devices.
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of any technological advancement as being analagous to peeling through the layers of an onion. The really useful/ubiquitous advancement doesn't occur until after you've gotten through all the layers. Piercing one of the layers, however, is worthy of being called a breakthrough. I would posit that the term shouldn't be used if someone else has already determined how to pierce the layer in question. After all, Quantum Mechanics was not invented and refined with the explicit goal of creating lasers and s
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2, Insightful)
And concerning the Segway, I can't say yet that it won't change my life, I just need to actually see at least one of them before I have an opinion
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:1)
I hypothesized that security guards either (a) need that to get around, or (b) are planning to use that to chase people that violate security. Neither theory made me feel good.
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:5, Interesting)
Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).
Genius - Used to be someone who was consistantly and spectacularly intelligent (Einstein, Fermi, etc). Now it is anyone who happens to figure something out or is relatively smart. "My 3 year old can hum the national anthem, isn't he a genius?"
Star - Anyone who is appearing on your show or in your movie. "We have a star on our show tonight, Zsa Zsa Gabor!"
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:3, Funny)
Celebrity - At least in the UK, anybody who has ever appeared on TV, or is related to or has slept with someone who has been on TV. (At least this is true in the UK)
Amen for hilarious (Score:2)
Now I don't know, maybe he even has a point. I'm not an American, so I can't tell. I can even r
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Had to do some editing for you. Never underestimate their stupidity.
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:1)
Um. No one is forcing them to be a fireman. Is being paid to risk your life a determining factor in whether you are a hero or not? If a man rushes into a building and rescues an old lady. If he is a fireman he is not a hero, if he is a regular civilian then he IS a hero? What if he was a fireman who was not on duty, is he still not a hero because he had special training? Great personal risk I think is more the thing
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Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).
MAN, I could not agree with you more. It is shit like this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higglytown_Heroes) that makes this even worse. They try to teach kids that EVERYONE (janitor, plumber, baby-sitter, etc.) is a freakin hero. Th
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
The definitions have not changed, and neither has the use of superlatives and hyperbole to express emotion. People have been doing it for as long as people have been talking.
We use terms like genius and hero in a broader context than the dictionary definition warrants precisely because of the narrow dictionary definition. A more "general" word would lack the emotional punch otherwise. Like all things, it's all about context. The context of genius when talking excitedly about one's child's latest
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
Yes (especially if she gets stopped by a cop).
creating vast amounts of electromagnetic radiation
Yes, at least in the form of movies and shows.
via gravity-induced nuclear fusion following the Main Sequence?
Well, okay, you've got a point there. But, if her house gets burnt to ash and no one can approach it for a few billion years, we'll know that she finally became a star, albeit a rather minor one.
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:2)
They refer to firemen as heroes so that they don't have to pay them (or at least, not as much).
"Controversial" (Score:2, Insightful)
It's like, what? Did you run out of otherwise reasonably descriptive words to describe this episode, because you use it so much, I can't hardly imagine that "Bones" would be watched by anyone unless immediately after they feel an intense need to call their best friend and discuss at length the moral issues involved with creating a 3D CG representation of
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I think it was about a week ago [talklikeapirate.com].
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Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Past Tense & Specificity (Score:1)
He's using the wrong definition (Score:3, Funny)
Hewlett and Packard would be puking their guts out (Score:1, Insightful)
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Press Releases (Score:2)
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You're kidding, right? (Score:2)
That's funny. Ha ha... err... you _are_ kidding, right?
Reporters nowadays do the exact opposite, to the extent where they practically (A) _created_ a whole class of bullshit pseudo-science, and (B) spawned a whole wave of distrust in science as a whole.
Reporters want sensational stuff, they want headlines that sell, they want "breakthroughs", "controversy", etc, to the point where they'll even create
Just consider the definition (Score:2, Informative)
As long as there are barriers to progress (and they never seem to run out) we will have breakthroughs. As the saying goes: "If the Shoe Fits..."
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You must acquit?
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-matthew
"breakthrough" is no breakthrough itself... (Score:2, Interesting)
Contradiction? (Score:2, Funny)
Breakthroughs ARE More Common (Score:2, Interesting)
Two sides... (Score:3, Informative)
First off, more breakthroughs than ever are being made these days. Our technological advances are being made at an almost "silly" rate. We have made so many more in the past century than in the millenium that preceeded it. Why? Better education, greater body of knowledge, and of course computing doesn't hurt. So yes, there are alot of breakthroughts taking place.
However, the term is also used as marketing hype. It still has a buzz to it after all these years of being misused, so I don't think companies will stop using it as a marketing scheme.
In reference to IBM in the article... they certainly use the term "breakthrough", and much of what they do deserves recognition as such as they have pushed the envelope with their R&D. Of course Intel has also done a fantastic job. Some of what these companies do isn't necessary ground breaking work, as it has been done before. So I find it difficult to determine if the term should be used still since the work has been done before, but the difference is that when one of these large companies does it, it is so much more likely to succeed.
I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
1942 manhattan project
1945 first a-bomb, + hiroshima & nagasaki
1947 transistor invented
1949 Comet (passenger jet) Unveiled
1951 electricity from nuclear power plant
1952 US Airforce orders B52
1955 U2 Tested
1956 first O/S
1957 silicon wafer, FORTRAN, sputnik
1958-59 first IC, ALGOL, LISP
1961 VTOL, first man in space, CTSS
1962 spacewar computer game
1964 computer mouse & windows
1968 Douglas Engelbart demos the above, hypertext, collaborative computing and more
1969 feb Jumbo jet (747) first flight
1969 apr concorde first Mach 2 passenger jet first flight
1969 apr QE 2 ship first voyage
1969 Jul first man on moon
1969 Multics
1971 intel 4004
1972 C
1973 skylab, ethernet, UNIX, work on TCP/IP started
1974 Altair and Scelbi
1975 apollo & soyuz dock
1976 viking landings on Mars, Apple I, ethernet launched
1977 voyager 2 launched, Apple II, commodore
1978 visicalc, vi
1979 wordstar
1980 TCP/IP RFCs
1981 space shuttle, IBM PC
1982 BSD gets TCP/IP
1983 Apple Lisa
1983 "Unix Review compares six Unix-compatibles for IBM PCs"
1983 GNU project
1984 Apple Mac, X Windows
1985 Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft Windows
#Stagnation starts
1986 chernobyl, challenger blow up
1988 stealth fighter
1989 stealth bomber
1990 WWW (hypertext revisited)
1991 Linux started (UNIX rehash)
1992 Windows NT, NetBSD, FreeBSD
1993 Mosaic
1994 webcrawler
1995 Windows 95, Altavista
1996 pathfinder mars rover/lander (viking rehash)
1997 google (good but not really a great leap )
2003 spirit+opportunity mars rovers
Looking at the past 10-20 years I can say there really hasn't been as many leaps. Most are just rehashes of the same thing done before. Some not actually done better just more popular. Linux is just UNIX revisited. Just go look at the video of Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968 and you'll see we haven't really made that many advances in the computing fields.
As for aerospace:
All NASA can do is try to stop the space shuttles from blowing up.
They're talking about going to the Moon again (so 1960s). Then there was all that fuss about sending probes to mars. Oh wow, like wasn't that done in 1976?
Then there's the supersonic jetliner and big passenger jet... Heck the 747 design is still being used to this day (and it works pretty well too).
Only thing new so far is the space tourism innovation by the Russians. Where on a regular schedule anyone reasonably fit and healthy with USD20 million bucks can go to space.
Automobile tech? No breakthroughs. Now if there's practical gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel cell+filter that'll be a breakthrough.
Nuclear fusion/fission? No significant progress at all.
They've already spent billions and decades on hot fusion with not much to show for it, maybe they should just spend a bit more time and money investigating the cold fusion stuff - even if it isn't fusion, there's evidence that it could be an interesting phenomena. Or just spend some billions to make fission better.
AI has been a field for bullshit artists.
But medical tech has had some advances. You can now actually implement brain augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis with current communications/computing and medical technology. But the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA etc may hold the progress back in that field (they'll want a penny for your^H^H^H^H_their_ thoughts or more). And then there's the threat of lawsuits of course.
Still TB and many other diseases seem to be threatening to make a comeback, so it's not been that great either.
Lifespans are up mainly because infant mortality is down, and ER treatment is much better.
Now, tell me of something really innovative in the past 10 years. No hypersonic jetliner to be seen. When the Concorde came out it was definitely not a rehash. The first man on the moon in 1969 was not
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Almost all innovation in the 20th century happened in the first half, with the second half being primarily a working out of the technical details and integration into everyday life.
My grandmother was born in 1886 and died in 1980. She was born into a "a world lit only by fire", just four years after Edison's first commerical power plant. She lived to see ubiquitous
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Find some great innovations that happened in the 1980s and 1990s and add them to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest innovations come from basic research, and one of the common characteristics of basic research is that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, they're just looking.
Just look at some of the examples you point to that we use in everyday life. The way in which most of the western world functions right now would be substantially different without all sorts of things that people barely noticed at the time researchers discovered the last piece that fell into place to make it a reality.
No, we don't have a cure for cancer yet, but there's no saying that when a cure for cancer comes around it won't turn out that the discovery depended on technologies developed over the last 25 years.
For a perfect example, look at RSA encryption. The major innovation of RSA was to pair together a couple of extremely old math tricks that had previously been thought of as cute but useless. Does that mean that the breakthrough for RSA should be credited to Fermat or Sun Tzu? It certainly took until the last few decades to recognize the value of their work...
-JMP
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You seem to like aerospace. What about the International Space Station? The Hubble Telescope? And most scientists would probably disagree with you that the recent Mars missions were about doing a "Viking rehash."
Similarly, why dismiss what's been done in the computing fields? Is incremental resea
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Not to mention last year's Deep Impact mission.
I mean, hitting a comet with half a spacecraft while the other half records it?
That's like hitting a bullet with another bullet and having the ejected shell casing take pictures. That is some badass stuff, and required huge advancements in many areas of
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The difference is like just improving cars compared to making a plane when there was no such thing as a plane before.
Why should I be impressed with an _ongoing_ search for an AIDS cure? It's not like they found one yet. What next, I should be impressed with someone's search for the homework his dog ate?
BTW HIV is not very contagious and its spread can be controlled - it's because of the idiot politicians t
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The 747 is a great plane for what the market needs.
There could be faster planes, but social issues put those to a halt. i.e. Noise.
Now, if someone has a break through in 'anti gravity' then that would spawn a whole new set of industries, many of which we can't imagine.
The problem with your list is that it is focus on your interests. add medical breakthroughs to that list and they would be
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Question: When was the last time you saw something really new ?
Such a cynical outlook... (Score:3, Informative)
- GPS
- nanotech
- cloning
- lasik eye surgery (one of the greatest inventions in the world if you previously had poor eyesight)
- global finance
- advances in manufacturing materials (polymers, alloys, etc.)
- You seem to ignore the internet as a whole. While the bits and pieces examined by themselves are
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And yah wordstar probably shouldn't be there - coz Douglas Engelbart already demoed wordprocessing in 1968. And that's way before Wordstar.
Yeah the exponential growth of the internet and the WWW is probably one of the few major noteworthy things in the 1990s.
I'm not saying there are have been no advances, but remember the original topic was about "tech breakthroughs".
So forget my list, go make your own list - go look up w
This isn't a breakthrough (Score:2)
If the headline "This isn't a breakthrough" were used, it'd still show up in the list of headlines with the word breakthrough, right? :)
Ten year factor... (Score:2)
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Semantics (Score:2, Informative)
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A military offensive that penetrates an enemy's lines of defense.
3. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
(From www.answers.com)
Press release writers can legitimately use the word to mean the first definition (a solution to a problem), while implying the third (emotive, hyperbolic) definition even if it doesn't actually m
wrong crowd (Score:1)
It's not just the word "breakthrough" (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually do research in optical computing, but the problems aren't unique to that field. I'm always getting pressured to use words/phrases like "novel", "highly accurate", "unique", etc (basically just non quantitative positive adjectives) to make the titles of my talks or publications more sexy or provocative.
It's annoying becuase they are just noise words. If something is really unique, a breakthrough, etc, those adjectives will be applied to your product (research, idea technology, choose your noun here) by others. Your job as an engineer or scientist should be to report the facts on your (noun here) in an unbiased and neutral fashion, giving meaningful benchmark figures regarding what it allows you to do. It's okay to focus on the strengths, but provide quantitative data, not meaningless adjectives and buzzwords. Fortunately more and more journals are stating not to use such meaningless drivel in their guidelines.
In my research, whenever I see phrases like "good/excellent agreement with...", instead of "this shows a standard deviation of X%", I automatically assume someone is just putting a shine on lame results. This prejudice is pretty accurate, but of course not 100% so. I'd estimate 90% or so.
The problem of course is the overly strong influence marketing has on us. Richard Feynman had a pretty good rant about this stuff. We really need to start punishing people/institutions for insulting our intelligence with this noise. He was more concerned with advertising campaigns which insult our intelligence, but the same trend has broadened itself.
In the end, I think it's important we become more cognisant, thus more resistant, to transparent marketing techniques. When an institution is singing its own praises, be skeptical.
On a tangent, if someone tells you "this is a quantum leap in XXX!", reply "so you mean to say it's the smallest possible change you can make?"
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If you're really curious about this subject, read Don Watson's Death Sentence: the decay of public language [theage.com.au] (link to
Re:It's not just the word "breakthrough" (Score:4, Insightful)
The very existence of widespread grammar and spelling errors (e.g., loose/lose, would of/would have, pluralizing with apostrophes) demonstrates to me that most people don't read very much if at all. Now good spelling is not always correlated with being well-read (one of the smartest and most well-read people, more well-read than I, that I know is a horrible speller), but when I see people claiming that they get all the useful information they need from sites like Digg or
I've been recently reading a book of lectures given by Max Planck in the early 1900's. While the scientific content the first couple lectures isn't above anything a typical high-schooler could (or should) be able to understand, I found the level of sophistication of his language to be surprisingly high, and yet I get the feeling that this was typical in that context for 100 years ago. Maybe we are just better at speaking succinctly... I think that is in some part true... but mostly I think we are simply losing our ability to express ourselves as well as our forefathers, that we lack much of their skill to communicate nuance and abstraction.
A good recent example is the Pope's speech that caused such a stir. Now plenty of folks use any excuse imaginable to attack the Pope, and I doubt few if any of the people reacting with anger or violence even read (or even _could_ read) His Holiness' speech in its context and entirety. However, I cannot imagine that anyone with the capacity and will to actually understand what was said would respond with any criticism the like of which we've heard over the past few weeks. I found myself wishing for a thorough grounding in philosophy because I knew I was missing many of the implications of the Holy Father's words. My degree in Computer Science has done almost nothing to prepare me to consider the significance of Hellenistic thought and its relation and importance to modern faith.
Does it matter? It should, but public perception, as ignorant as it may be, ends up having a much stronger effect regardless of whether it is based on fact or not, and those people, civic, religious leaders or anyone with an opinion, who have something nontrivial to say will suffer, as do we all, from a society that is indifferent, or even hostile, to in-depth communication or a use of language beyond that of a small child.
You may have noticed that His Holiness expressed his sorrow for how his speech was received, not what he said. Far from being the usual weaselly apology of a politician who is only sorry he was caught, Pope Benedict correctly expressed the fact that the people who were angry did not, in fact, understand what he was trying to say. Could he have prevented this misunderstanding? Probably, but
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BTW, I read the Pope's speech and when asked what was in it I said: he complains about people using reason less an less. Sadly, what happened next only proved him right.
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And if the person whom you say that to knows anything - they'll regard you (correctly) as a blithering idiot, because quantum doesn't mean 'smallest' when used in as an adjective. Even in Physics it doesn't always mean 'small[est]' - it sometimes means 'discrete'.
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But I'm not talking about the word quantum. I'm speaking about the phrase 'quantum leap' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_leap [wikipedia.org], which
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But if you use the word(s) 'quantum' or 'quantum leap' in reference to banking say... You aren't talking about physics are you?
Anyone who would the Wikipedia as a reference, especially after pretending that the meaning of a term in one field has the same meaning in another, meets the very definition of 'blithe
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Hot buttered damn!!!
Holographic pr0n at last!!!
We are aproaching the Technological Singularity (Score:2)
Here for a description of the Technological Singularity [wikipedia.org] in Wikipedia.
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I suppose you can say that we are having "breakthroughs" every day compared to the past, but that's sort of a misnomer. People in the 15th Century were having breakthroughs of that type, probably every day, compared to their nomadic hunter gatherer ancestors. This is usually termed "progress", whereas a "breakthrough" se
Breakthrough is broken (Score:3, Insightful)
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I get an ironic smirk when I read/hear about a revolutionary new tech: I parse that as "a complete 360, bringing us back to point A".
Yeah, I'm one sarcastic consummer.
Tech / Science Reporting (Score:1)
Like everyone else, all I can think is Segway (Score:2, Interesting)
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
While optical computing is a neato thing and it will probably make a splash in the computer world by enabling high performance systems to basically do things faster, is it really going to change the way we do computing? I mean, over the years, we have changed the way we do computing from a hardware standpoint. Things have advanced, technologies
1947 (Score:1)
"A Bell spokesman says the development of the transistor is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world electronic circuity can be made with germanium. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before personal computing becomes ubiquitous.'"
The real breakthroughs do not have any direct, short-term effect on our lives. Instead, they happen in a theoretical setting and they eventually lead to giant shifts in real world technology. Apple moving to a
Deflation of discoveries (Score:1)
Thoreau had something to say about this: (Score:3, Informative)
Thoreau, of course, was a technologist and business entrepreneur whose process for combining clay with graphite was a breakthrough in the development of pencil "lead..."
hype (Score:2)
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of abuse of the Queen's English going on. To some extent it's understandable. The world has more "newspapers" (real and virtual) than ever before, but stuff is happening at pretty much the same rate as ever; which means that, in order to fill more papers,
THRILLER (Score:2)
It used to mean that, well, a movie "thrilled."
It's become so overused now that it can only be taken to mean a genre of movie, and not as an adjective describing it.
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Web Thinkers Congregate here [htpp]
Breakthrough = Break + Through (Score:2)
Borrowing from another example, lets go back to the solid state transistors. At the time, there was a barrier for semiconductor based technology. Transistors made it possible to (here we go) break through that barrier. Not just some concept, or exciting tecnology or invention.
I don't know how much of a barrier this (borrowing again) semiconductor laser f
Not just products, what about humans? (Score:1)
Puh lease.
It's a fair word to use, under some circs. (Score:2)
This is new? (Score:2)
I remember LOL at a radio interview a few years ago of a Microsoft Office project manager talking about making changes to their document format, ostensibly to make improvements, but mostly just to keep OpenOffice users from opening word documents. The quot
Marketting words (Score:2)
Usage (for "use")
Impact (for "affect")
Innovate (for "gratuitously change")
Open (meaning "published, but unusable")
I'd keep going, but my increased keyboard usage has adversely impacted my ability to innovate.
On slashdot (Score:2)
On slashdot, breakthroughs are lauded no matter how trivial. It is considered a breakthrough for the space elevator when they reach a consensus on what muzak will be playing over the elevators speakers.
I get sick of news of future breakthroughs (Score:2)
What is it coming to? (Score:2)
Can You Really Blame Them? (Score:2)
If the article headline was "Intel Tries Something with Optical Computing" then it wouldn't catch as many eyeballs.
People love to blame the media for their overuse of buzzwords, exaggeration of truths, and focusing on petty things like celebrity's lives. But remember it is us who read/buy/click based on their headlines, and sadly it works.
If they didn't do it, we wouldn't read/buy/clic
Moo (Score:1)
*Someone* has to say it... (Score:2)
"You keep using sat word. I don sink it means what you sink it means."
-- Inigo Montoya
While I'm at it, another one:
"A word means what I say it means. Nothing more and nothing less."
--Tweedledum
Face it, folks, between politics and marketing, nothing really "means" anything anymore.
Nothing new here (Score:2)
It's actually hard to express yourself when you really need to evoke some kind of extra-ordinary image with an adjective.
I have noticed that a lot of companies are no longer satisfied with supplying you with a simple product any more either. The
How about a breakthrough in journalism standards.. (Score:1)
Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous. An Intel spokesman says the laser chip is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be
In the bathroom at work.... (Score:2)
This is what i do: (Score:2)