The exploding laptopA Dell laptop ignited at a conference in Japan several months ago. Digital photographs of the incident were posted online almost immediately showing flames from the laptop and burn marks on the table cloth. The company has documented various other such incidents in the recent past. The main culprit in this issue seems to be the Lithium Ion batteries that are increasingly being used in electronic components. Most notebooks exclusively use these batteries as a power source. The batteries in the Dell notebooks are manufactured by Sony, and both of them have now initiated a recall of more than 4.1 million laptop batteries. Consumers are being made aware of the problem and are advised to contact the company for replacements.
The disappearing mathematician The mathematics research community is buzzing with talk about Grigory Perelman. Better know as Grisha, this mathematician from Russia became an overnight celebrity when he claimed to have cracked what is known as the “Poincare conjecture” which, for the last hundred years or so, has puzzled mathematicians the world over. Will Davis, a graduate student in mathematics, described Grisha’s finding as meaning, “even less to the average person than Wiles’ proof of Fermat, because nobody even understands the statement of Poincare.”
Grisha posted a few short papers on the Internet, and after going through a lecture tour in the United States, he disappeared into the Russian woods in spring 2003. Meanwhile, the world’s leading mathematicians pored over his ideas which were proved to be correct many times over. With speculation about him being the favorite to win the Fields medal, the Nobel equivalent for Mathematics, no one could find him!
He resigned from the institute where he was working and stopped responding to e-mail. Representatives from the International Mathematical Union finally tracked him down to inform him that he did actually win the Fields medal, but were disappointed when he turned it down! Apparently he felt isolated from the mathematical community and did not wish to appear as one of its leaders. The Fields medal comes with a prize of around $15,000.
Bow chika bow wow Sex and music — classic combination or disaster in the making? A recently released study indicates that teenagers who listen to lyrics containing references to casual sex are more likely to initiate sexual intercourse as compared to those that do not listen to such music. The study showed that the effects were widespread, being similar across both female and male, whites and non-whites. The researchers felt that such lyrics might convey incorrect ideas about the other gender in both females and males and also increase the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies. Also, more than a third of the teenagers in the study reported that they do not regularly use condoms.
Andy Chen, a senior in management information systems, found the study to be lacking. “The study might be correct and true, but I think that’s ridiculous,” he said. “The same thing can be said about movies. When people just randomly hook up in movies, are people who watch those movies more likely to initiate sex? I think the study can’t make that conclusion without addressing the whole picture.”
Phillip Schulte, a graduate student in statistics, agreed with Chen. “A causal relationship would be difficult to establish in this type of study,” he said. “Perhaps some teenagers instinctively initiate sexual intercourse and later listen to such music, only then to find it appealing. Furthermore, the study clearly lacks any control of numerous other variables that might be involved, such as those related to the home situation of the teenagers or their upbringing.”
