Showing posts with label Instant Gratification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Instant Gratification. Show all posts

Instant Gratification


Instant gratification is definitely taking to long these days. We all want faster computers and that usually means faster memory access as well as CPU clock speeds. The new player on the horizon is memristors.

These promise denser memory storage, faster access and, ultimately, my gratification time taking a dive. Engineers have been clawing their way towards this current Holy Grail for some time now, but the materials have been a little more exotic than good old silicon.

The good news is that thin films of partially oxidized silicon do just fine. Mehonic et al published their data in the Journal of Applied Physics last month (1) and presented it to the cognoscenti at the European Materials Research Society conference which was reviewed by the BBC (2).

Thin silicon films respond to a small current that leave behind a resistive trace in zones of around 10nm. The access speed is about 100 times faster with a much lower potential power consumption.

So not only will my laptop be much faster in the future, but it won’t cook my vitals as I use it on my lap on the train. And the battery life, well that might be magnificent too.

  1. http://jap.aip.org/resource/1/japiau/v111/i7/p074507
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18103772



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The Lure Of Instant Gratification


          The economic condition of many parts of the world is currently looking worse than a few years ago. Thus many people are feeling poorer these days even if by standards of the developing and under-developed world, they are living comfortably.

This leads to an interesting question of behavior about how we respond to financial opportunities when we may be thinking about poverty, that is does our mood control our financial decisions or are we the creatures of cold financial logic that we would like to claim to be? Lei Lui et al have popped that question to groups of undergraduates and reported out in this week’s PLoS one (1).

The main experiment was to show groups either lots pictures of extreme poverty or luxurious affluence.  They then played a game with them – psychologists do like playing games. In this game each individual was given a choice of accepting a small amount of cash right away or waiting 3 days to receive more. They had to do this 64 times and were given the information that one of their choices would be randomly chosen to happen at the end of the game.

The results showed that those exposed to pictures of poverty were more likely to go for immediate gratification than wait to get richer.

Another two groups were exposed to the lottery of life by being given a basic payment and then drawing a card that would either give them a fat bonus or nothing.  They were all aware of what other people were getting. Again, those who were in the no bonus group were more likely to go for the ‘jam today, rather than jam tomorrow’ in the post-game testing.

This leaves me a little concerned as we have an election looming where the financial choices appear to be tax cuts for all us wannabe rich guys or a longer term rebuilding of a prosperous society. Our desire for instant gratification is likely to bite most of us in the backside as we won’t get past the wannabe stage to become an actual rich person.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033950


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