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Rodney Brooks on advancing the use of robots in the world (speech from the Makir Fair).
Related: posts on robotics - Surgeon-engineer advances high-tech healing - Cardiac Cath Lab: Innovation on Site - Toyota Software Development for Partner Robots
Toyota has developed a thought-controlled wheelchair (along with Japanese government research institute, RIKEN, and Genesis Research Institute). Honda has also developed a system that allows a person to control a robot through thoughts. Both companies continue to invest in innovation and science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. The story of why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now is their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.
The BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, has succeeded in developing a system which utilizes one of the fastest technologies in the world, controlling a wheelchair using brain waves in as little as 125 milliseconds (one millisecond, or ms, is equal to 1/1000 seconds.
Plans are underway to utilize this technology in a wide range of applications centered on medicine and nursing care management. R&D under consideration includes increasing the number of commands given and developing more efficient dry electrodes. So far the research has centered on brain waves related to imaginary hand and foot control. However, through further measurement and analysis it is anticipated that this system may be applied to other types of brain waves generated by various mental states and emotions.
Related: Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk - Real-time control of wheelchairs with brain waves - Toyota Winglet, Personal Transportation - Toyota Robots - More on Non-Auto Toyota - Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year
Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.
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The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.
Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant.
Initial proof of science was generated by Dr. John Coleman at the University of Toronto between 1989 and 1999. Since then, the process has been refined to allow algae to tolerate high heat, high salinity, and the alcohol levels present in ethanol production. This is another example of the benefit of university research and investing in science and engineering innovation.
Related: Ethanol: Science Based Solution or Special Interest Welfare - Converting Emissions to Biofuels - Student Algae Bio-fuel Project - Kudzu Biofuel Potential - Global Installed Wind Power Now Over 1.5% of Global Electricity Demand
Great post: Productivity gains in software engineering are powering innovation
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
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In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains the population as a whole is making.
What do you think? I definitely see a huge improvement of productivity in web application software development myself.
Related: 10x Productivity Difference in Software Development - Is Productivity Growth Bad - The Software Developer Labor Market - Myths of Manufacturing Productivity
photo of Barbara Liskov by Donna CoveneyBarbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages.
Liskov, the first U.S. woman to earn a PhD from a computer science department, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing.”
“Computer science stands squarely at the center of MIT’s identity, and Institute Professor Barbara Liskov’s unparalleled contributions to the field represent an MIT ideal: groundbreaking research with profound benefits for humankind. We take enormous pride that she has received the Turing Award,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield.
“Barbara Liskov pioneered some of the most important advances in fundamental computer science,” said Provost L. Rafael Reif. “Her exceptional achievements have leapt from the halls of academia to transform daily life around the world. Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research.”
The Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery and is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who helped the Allies crack the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II.
Related: 2006 Draper Prize for Engineering - Thompson and Tits share 2008 Abel Prize (Math) - von Neumann Architecture and Bottleneck - MIT related posts
photo of the batteries for the cesium clocks in the family van by Tom Van BaakProject GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test is not your average home experiment but it is another great example of experiments people run at home.
By keeping the clocks at altitude for a weekend we were able to detect and measure the effects of relativistic time dilation compared to atomic clocks we left at home. The amazing thing is that the experiment worked! The predicted and measured effect was just over 20 nanoseconds.
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But the time dilation was somewhere in the 20 to 30 ns range. The number we expected was 23 ns so I’m very pleased with the result.
Related: Home Experiments: Quantum Erasing - Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids - Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant - Statistics for Experimenters
How To Become A Software Engineer/Programmer
1) Know that you love software before you commit to it. You’ll know when you take your first pseudocode class: a clear division forms between the people who get it and the people who don’t. If you’re in the “don’t” section, choose another career.
2) If you don’t like teaching yourself new things, the skills you learn today will be irrelevant in less than a decade. Accept the commitment to learn throughout your career as a coder, or accept your eventual fate as a has-been.
3) College degrees matter less than hands-on knowledge and time spent at the keyboard. I outpaced my entire class in college because I bought my own programming books that deviated from the coursework, and as a result I learned things they were not teaching in school.
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5) Early on, decide if you want to focus on application development or software engineering. Application development deals with making user interfaces, interfacing different systems together, solving business process problems, and exposing applications to the outside world (i.e. web services and other remoting techniques). Software engineering deals with creation of utilities and processes that support information processing, tends to be more math intensive, requires a lower-level understanding of the trade, and rarely deals with the systems that expose the software to an end user. There are core differences in these two disciplines and 100 shades in between, so figure out what you like.
Good blog post; those thinking of a career in software development should read the whole thing. By the way if you are a programmer already that loves it and looking for a new position: my work is hiring a Ruby on Rails developer.
Related: Joy in Work, Software Development - The Software Developer Labor Market - A Career in Computer Programming - The Manager FAQ - IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure?
Irrigation system can grow crops with salt water
The pipes are made from a plastic that retains virtually all contaminants while letting clean water through to the plants’ roots.
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The dRHS system, which has been in development for ten years, was initially trialled in the UK using tomato plants, and has since been tried out in the US. The next trials will take place in Chile, Libya, Tanzania, Mauritius and Spain. Tonkin says 20,000 metres of pipe are on their way to the Middle East, where it will be tested with water that’s more saline than sea water.
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It has also won international recognition for its work, most recently at the international Water Technology Idol event in Switzerland, organised by Global Water Intelligence magazine and the International Desalination Association.
Christopher Gasson from Global Water Intelligence magazine says that the competition was a three-way tie last year but this year, the winner stood out. “The dRHS irrigation system addressed a bigger problem than the other technology that it was competing against,” he said. “Agriculture water is where 70 per cent of water goes. By 2025 two thirds of the world’s population will experience water shortages and so farming will be badly hit.
This is good news. I am still skeptical that this is as good as the article makes it sound. Just as simple as “flushing out the pipes.” But I am hopeful we will find desalination-type solutions. Clean water is a huge problem facing the world now, basically I just figure with enough engineers focused on finding workable solutions we will find several that have a huge impact. If not, we are in real trouble.
Related: Cheap Drinking Water From Seawater (2006) - Water From Air - Nearly Waterless Washing Machine - Water and Electricity for All
Kate Yuhas, an eighth-grader at Brighton’s Scranton Middle School, Michigan. Photo courtesy Kate Yuhas.Brighton eighth-grader rewarded for her love for science
“Kate has a talent for science and math, and she’s won medals at Science Olympiad,” said her mom, Johanna, who coaches the team. “Kate has always had science-themed parties. My husband and I are both engineers, and we talk a lot about science at home.”
The essay contest asked participants to consider one of three images on the EngineerGirl! site and to discuss its potential purposes and functions using engineering creativity.
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Read Kate’s essay: The Cure to Vitamin D Deficiency
The Engineer Girl website has done a smart thing and posted all the essays online. It is a simple act but one so often other organizations fail to do in similar circumstances.
Related: Students Create “Disappearing” Nail Polish - Tinker School: Engineering Camp - Science for Kids - Building minds by building robots - Kids on Scientists: Before and After
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. The presentation was given at Google I/O 2009. The demo shows what is possible in a HTML 5 browser. They are developing this as an open access project. The creative team is lead by the creators for Google Maps (brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen) and product manager Stephanie Hannon.
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Very cool stuff. The super easy blog interaction is great. And the user experience with notification and collaborative editing seems excellent. The playback feature to view changes seems good though that is still an area I worry about on heavily collaborative work. Hopefully they let you see like all change x person made, search changes…
They also have a very cool context sensitive spell checker that can highlight mis-spelled words that are another dictionary word but not right in the context used (about 44:30 in the webcast).
For software developer readers they also highly recommended the Google Web Development Kit, which they used heavily on this project.
Related: Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources - Read the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog in 35 Languages - Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast - Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices
Photo by sbisson from Geneva, Switzerland, November 2006 .
NeXT is the computer company Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple. Then he left NeXT to buy out Pixar. And then, of course, went back to Apple.
Related: The Web is 15 Years Old - The Second 5,000 Days of the Web - 2007 Draper Prize to Berners-Lee - Google Server Hardware Design
I think this is pretty cool; I’m sure some will object though. It was “designed by a team of veterinarians and engineers to clean the dog very very well. Its very very safe.” You probably can’t afford one for your house though: it cost $30,000. The
The Dog-Washing Machine is available in France and elsewhere, too (the video above is from Vancouver, Canada).
I imagine some will react emotionally that it must be mean because a machine sounds mean. I don’t really see why it must be mean. Plenty of people pay others to wash their dogs and the dogs jump around and bark and shake when they are getting lathered up. That isn’t cruel, I don’t see why this would be.
Related: Friday Dog Escape Fun - posts on engineering entrepreneurship - Making Magnificent Mirrors with Math
The Million Dollar Programming Prize
Because these two methods are complementary, we combined them, using many versions of each in what machine-learning experts call an ensemble approach. This allowed us to build systems that were simple and therefore easy to code and fast to run.
Interesting article. See some other posts on challenge prizes.
Read: posts on programing - Problems Programming Math - Programmers (comic)
Using Barn Owls (Tyto alba erlangeri) For Biological Pest Control In Israel
Great stuff.
Related: Pigs Instead of Pesticides - Pesticide Laced Fertiliser Ruins Gardens - posts on birds
Tiny Machine Commands a Swarm of Bacteria
Sylvain Martel, Director of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, previously showed a way to control bacteria attached to microbeads using an MRI machine. His new micro-machine, which measure 300×300 microns and carry tiny solar panels, will be presented this week at ICRA ‘09 in Japan.
On such a small device there is little room for batteries, sensors or transmitters. So the solar cell on top delivers power, sending an electric current to both a sensor and a communication circuit. The communication component sends tiny electromagnetic pulses that are detected by an external computer.
The sensor meanwhile detects surrounding pH levels–the higher the pH concentration, the faster the electromagnetic pulses emitted by the micro-machine. The external computer uses these signals to direct a swarm of about 3,000 magnetically-sensitive bacteria, which push the micro-machine around as it pulses. The bacteria push the micro-machine closer to the higher pH concentrations and change its direction if it pulses too slowly. This is more practical than trying to attach the bacteria onto the micro-machines, says Martel, since the bacteria only have a lifespan of a few hours. “It’s like having a propulsion engine on demand,” he says…
Related: Self-assembling Nanofibers Heal Spinal Cords in Mice - Nanotechnology Breakthroughs for Computer Chips - Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells
I ran across another site that ranks this blog first for engineering, which I always like - even if I realize the ranking is just one computation and hardly definitive.
Google returns this blog 3rd in search results. Yahoo also has us 3rd (behind 2 different blogs than Google show). We are the 5th results on live search. The ranking on Top 100 Engineering Blogs slipped to 7th (they eliminated the subscriber factor from the calculation, and that hurt our ranking). We are the number one ranked engineering blog on blogged.
Related: #2 Engineering Blog - Best Research University Rankings - 2008 - Curious Cat Science and Engineering Search - Science and Engineering blog directory
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Resources for improving the health care system
