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Curious Cat Science and Egineering blog full tag cloud
Google is investing huge sums in renewable energy with the aim of cheaper than coal renewable energy. Google.org (the philanthropic arm of Google) announced $10.25 million in investments in a breakthrough energy technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS).
EGS expands the potential of geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.
A recent MIT report on EGS estimates that just 2% of the heat below the continental United States between 3 and 10 kilometers, depths within the range of current drilling technology, is more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.
“EGS could be the ‘killer app’ of the energy world. It has the potential to deliver vast quantities of power 24/7 and be captured nearly anywhere on the planet. And it would be a perfect complement to intermittent sources like solar and wind,” said Dan Reicher, Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org.
Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative focuses on solar thermal power, advanced wind, EGS and other potential breakthrough technologies. Google has set a goal to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity, enough to power a city the size of San Francisco, in years, not decades.
(more…)
Nice post from Rich Hoeg - Lake Superior vs. Silicon Valley Hot Spots:
This is one small example of why Silicon Valley is so successful. To be economically successful, countries need to focus on big things (investing in infrastructure, sensible laws relating to innovation, creating and maintaining good capital markets, investing in science and engineering education, encouraging entrepreneurs, transportation systems…) and the small stuff like this. Silicon Valley continue to be a bright light (as do other places, like Boston) but overall the USA seems to be trailing, not leading, far too often lately.
Related: Engineering the Future Economy - USA Science Losing Ground - Diplomacy and Science Research - USA Broadband is Slow. Really Slow.
I really liked Gmail. Today Google has blocked me from accessing my email. I do nothing that remotely could be considered suspicious behavior. Yet without any preliminary warnings Gmail just blocked my access to email and provides only the following.
While this might not be evil it is extremely bad service. Email users need to trust providers to provide reliable service. To act with integrity, etc.. When instead they take unilateral, immediate action with no significant response one can only draw the conclusion that they are dealing with another Verizon or Comcast or the long litany of companies that cannot be trusted to treat you well or even remotely fairly.
They do provide a form to fill out, which I have done. They responded with the following: “Thanks for your report. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience. For your security, we may temporarily disable access to your account if our system detects abnormal usage. It will take between one minute and 24 hours for you to regain access, depending on the behavior our system detected.”
Not really clear is it? I still have no access. Google’s “mission”: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” How about making clear the information that Google itself says it has detected, this “abnormal usage.” Have they even made that information “accessible and useful.” No they have not. Google choosing to break Gmail access without notice and without explanation and even after questioning still providing no real explanation seems like a very serious threat to users of Gmail. Google seems to believe that breaking access to Gmail is not something they need to even know why they are doing it. I would say a policy that makes Gmail unreliable for users threatens to send users to a provider that does not chose to act in such a way. This seems like a very bad policy on Google’s part.
This is so frustrating, I actually liked gmail. But I guess I will have to look for a reliable provider unless Google can actually provide an explanation of how they will change to actually provide reliable email services.
My account is back now. Maybe it was down for an hour. Which, frankly, if it had been a technical glitch I would have been fine with. That it was a policy decision to break access without notice or explanation I find extremely worrying, however. How am I suppose to trust that they will not do so at any point in the future. If they send me some explanation of this choice to disable my account temporarily, I will update this post.
Related: Good customer service (why is it so rare) - Poor Customer Service from Discover Card - Google Video Customer Service - Google Customer Service - Why is Customer Service So Bad?
Larry Page on how to change the world
I think it’s everybody who cares about making progress in the world. Let’s say there are 10,000 people working on these things. If we make that 100,000, we’ll probably get 10 times the progress.
Posts on Google engineering: Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast - Google Investing Huge Sums in Renewable Energy - Marissa Mayer Webcast Google Innovation - High-efficiency Power Supplies
Over the last three years Google Summer of Code has provided 1500 students from 90 countries the chance to work on open source projects. Each participant will receive $4,500 as a stipend. Student applications will be accepted from March 24th to March 31st.
Details on the software projects are available now. Given the short time that the application is actually open getting a start looking for projects that interest you might be wise.
externs.com offers listings of science internships and engineering internships.
Related: Preparing Computer Science Students for Jobs - Open Source for LEGO Mindstorms - Open Source: The Scientific Model Applied to Programming - posts on fellowships and scholarships
While I worked in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) - part of the white house complex, I was able to hear some great speakers. However, those talks were only available to those of us that could make it to room 450 of the EEOB when it was scheduled. Google has far more speakers and they have posted webcasts of those talks online. It is great stuff, some excellent recent examples:
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Related: Google Technology Talks - Science and Engineering Webcast Libraries - Google Tech Webcasts #3
Over the last three years Google Summer of Code has provided 1500 students from 90 countries the chance to work on open source projects. It also has provide some great software and software enhancements to the open source community. Google has increased their funding by another $1 million. Each participant will receive $4,500 as a stipend.
I don’t understand why they have such a short window of opportunity to apply - but this is how they do it every year. They are accepting applications from open source projects, to act as mentoring organizations, through March 13th. Student applications will be accepted from March 24th to March 31st. See Google’s announcement.
externs.com offers listings of science internships and engineering internships.
Related: Preparing Computer Science Students for Jobs - IT Employment Hits New High Again - A Career in Computer Programming - Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Research Jobs - The Joy of Work - posts on fellowships and scholarships
Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google had written a very positive review of it on Amazon
The author of the book, Susan Lammers, is now publishing the interviews and new discussions online. For example: Butler Lampson 1986/2008 Reflections
Lampson: A beautiful program is like a beautiful theorem: It does the job elegantly. It has a simple and perspicuous structure; people say, “Oh, yes. I see that’s the way to do it.”
via: Confessions of a Science Librarian
Related: Founders at Work (Wozniak and more) - Donald Knuth, Computer Scientist - Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World - Lean Software Development - A Career in Computer Programming
How to make a Physical Gmail Notifier
The hardware itself is the popular Arduino board, the tinkerer’s dream device. I’m actually using a Boarduino, but any variant should work (subject to a small but important detail, see below). This might be particularly interesting with a Bluetooth Arduino..
The Arduino talks with your computer over a serial connection, which runs over the normal USB cable you use to communicate with your Arduino.
What is Arduino?: Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.
Related: Awesome Cat Cam - Windmill for Electricity in Malawi - Lego UAV - Rubick’s Cube Solving Lego Mindstorms Robot
Google, Gates, Indian Diaspora Bet on Children by Andy Mukherjee
Born into a poor, illiterate family in the western Indian state of Gujarat, Patel was lucky to break free of the poverty trap. Several people from his community had prospered in East Africa. They supported his studies.
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at 30 U.S. cents per child per year, the basic math, reading and writing skills required to help young learners retain their interest in education and keep them from dropping out of school are ridiculously cheap. It’s also critical enough to have caught the attention not just of wealthy Indian communities overseas but also of the Menlo Park, California-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Together, the two charities offered to help 10 million students for three years by pledging $9 million last year to Read India, an initiative of Pratham, a Mumbai-based not-for- profit organization for which Patel is a fund-raiser. Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc., chipped in last month with a $2 million grant to help fund Pratham’s annual survey of the qualitative aspects of primary education in India.
Related: Make the World Better - Using Capitalism to Help People - What Kids can Learn
Millions of users around the globe could not access YouTube for a couple hours yesterday. Why?
Well to understand, we need to start with how you normally connect to a web site. You click on a link to youtube.com. Your ISP looks up the internet address for youtube.com by looking at internet routing tables. Each domain has a name server that provides the IP address for where it should be found (for example, an IP address that shows youtube.com is 208.65.153.238).
Well what happened in this case is Pakistan decided to prevent anyone in Pakistan from accessing YouTube because the government didn’t like some video. The way Pakistan decided to accomplish this was to update their routing table to just direct all traffic that was meant to go to YouTube to a phony address which would then return nothing.
Why did many outside of Pakistan lose access to YouTube? Well their version of the routing table leaked out of Pakistan through PCCW (large internet provider), Then other internet providers adopted the incorrect information, until many around the globe were being directed to the wrong place.
You might find it amazing the routing system could allow such a thing to happen - it doesn’t seem very secure. You are right, that it doesn’t seem very sensible. When the internet was created some protocols were established that made sense then but don’t necessarily make sense for what the internet has become.
The problem was fixed when Google’s YouTube engineers contacted PCCW to inform them of the problem and have them correct it. I think if it was my site instead, I would have had difficulty figure out what was going on 
Once PCCW corrected their routing tables the fixed flowed through the system and everyone was able to see the great stuff like Marissa Mayer discussing Innovation at Google.
I would imagine Internet2 (well on its way to a computer near you) and IPv6 will take not be so venerable to such a mistake.
Related: Insecure routing redirects YouTube to Pakistan - YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan - YouTube Censorship Sheds Light on Internet Trust - The Web is 15 Years Old - Internet Undersea Cables - Harvard Course: Understanding Computers and the Internet - Net Neutrality - The Next Generation Internet - The Journey of Internet Packets - mistake proofing (the opposite of the current setup)
Towards more renewable energy posted to Google’s blog by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products:
To lead this effort, we’re looking for a world-class team. We need creative and motivated entrepreneurs and technologists with expertise in a broad range of areas, including materials science, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, land acquisition and management, power transmission and substations, construction, and regulatory issues. Join us. And if you’re interested, read about our previous work toward a clean energy future
Very cool. And I think something Google might be able to pull off well. It is also true this may be a distraction and not work well. For many companies that would be my guess for how it would play out. Google has done an exceptional job of allowing engineers to do what they do best. And I think there is a chance they can translate that into effectively managing such a project as this. Google continues to try what they believe even if that is not the conventional path. Good for them.
Related: posts on energy - posts on Google management - Google’s cheaper-than-coal target - Wind Power - Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity - 12 Stocks for 10 Years Update - Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast - Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (press release)
This interview and audience question and answer took place last week at the end of the Google Zeitgeist conference. Some interesting notes from Sergey:
Larry:
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Both:
Over at my regular job I was finally able to get us to put into place something that I have wanted to for several years: profiles of past NSF Graduate Research Fellows. We started with probably the most famous and certainly the richest: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin.
Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, graduated from University of Maryland with high honors in mathematics and computer science in 1993 and, as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, went on to Stanford to further study Computer Science. Early in his graduate studies, he showed interest in the Internet, specifically data-mining and pattern extraction…
In his short executive biography, Brin lists the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that supported him while at Stanford among his top achievements. Like NSF, Brin understands the importance of research in innovation, and sponsors it in part through Google’s “20% time” program - all engineers at Google are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them.
Read the full NSF Fellow profile of Sergey Brin.
Related: Directory and Advice on Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships - How to Win a Graduate Fellowship - NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Application Open
Marissa Mayer speech at Stanford on innovation at Google (23 minute speech, 26 minutes of question and answers). She leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Excellent speech. Highly recommended. Google top 9 ideas:
(inside these are Marissa’s thoughts) [inside these are my comments]
So far every time I hear one of Google’s leaders speak I am happier that I own a bit of stock - this is another instance of that.
Related: Technology Speakers at Google - Google’s Page urges scientists to market themselves - Innovation at Google - Amazon Innovation - Science and Engineering Webcast directory - Engineers - Career Options
How Google Earth Is Changing Science (broken link removed) by Manfred Dworschak:
With a single keystroke, biologist Born superimposes colored maps over the Arctic. The maps show him where the ice sheet is getting thinner and the direction in which the pieces of floating ice on which walruses like to catch a ride are drifting. All of the ice data, which comes from satellites and measuring buoys, is available on the Internet. By loading the data into the program, Born can detect how global warming is affecting the migratory behavior of his giant walruses.
The way simple to use tools will be used is hard to predict. By making tools (and ideas - open access research) readily available (and customizable - Google Map API) allows the community to build upon the tool in wonderful and unanticipated ways.
Tools, that may indeed be technically superior, may languish while simple to use, widely available, tools can flourish and create great benefits (from the network effect).
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