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Cool 3D Building Projection

Posted on October 27, 2010  Comments (2)

Fun video from Russia showing some great 3D projections.

Related: Volkswagen Fun Theory: Piano Staircase – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote – Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT – Cat Fun: Rocky the Standing Cat

Google’s Self Driving Car

Posted on October 12, 2010  Comments (5)

Google thinks big. Google thinks like engineers. Google is willing to spend money taking on problems that other companies don’t. They have been developing a car that can drive itself. They see a huge amount of waste (drivers lives and drivers time) and seek a solution.

Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside.

Related: Larry Page and Sergey Brin Webcast – Energy Secretary Steve Chu and Google CEO Eric Schmidt Speak On Funding Science Research – Google’s Ten Golden Rules – CMU Wins $2 million in DARPA Auto Race

sOccket: Power Through Play

Posted on October 8, 2010  Comments (3)

In a fun example of appropriate technology and innovation 4 college students have created a football (soccer ball) that is charged as you play with it. The ball uses an inductive coil mechanism to generate energy, thanks in part to a novel Engineering Sciences course, Idea Translation. They are beta testing the ball in Africa: the current prototypes can provide light 3 hours of LED light after less than 10 minutes of play. Jessica Matthews ’10, Jessica Lin ’09, Hemali Thakkara ’11 and Julia Silverman ’10 (see photo) created the eco-friendly ball when they all were undergraduates at Harvard College.

photo of sOccket creators: Jessica Matthews, Jessica Lin, Hemali Thakkara and Julia Silverman

sOccket creators: Jessica Matthews, Jessica Lin, Hemali Thakkara and Julia Silverman

They received funding from: Harvard Institute for Global Health and the Clinton Global Initiative University. The

sOccket won the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award, which recognizes the innovators and products poised to change the world. A future model could be used to charge a cell phone.

From Take part: approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide use kerosene to light their homes. “Not only is kerosene expensive, but its flames are dangerous and the smoke poses serious health risks,” says Lin. Respiratory infections account for the largest percentage of childhood deaths in developing nations—more than AIDS and malaria.

Related: High school team presenting a project they completed to create a solution to provide clean water – Water Pump Merry-go-Round – Engineering a Better World: Bike Corn-Sheller – Green Technology Innovation by College Engineering Students

Watch a June 2010 interview on the ball:
Continue reading →

Friday Fun: Robocup 2010, Robot Football

Posted on July 23, 2010  Comments (11)

Robocup 2010 took place in Singapore and 2 German team faced each other in the finals. Robocup is an international research and education initiative. RoboCupRescue is a related effort to develop rescue robots for hostile environments.

Related: RoboCup 2008: Robot Football (Soccer) – Robot Playing Table Tennis – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair

Letting Children Learn – Hole in the Wall Computers

Posted on July 19, 2010  Comments (6)

The hole in the wall experiments are exactly the kind of thing I love to lean about. I wrote about them in 2006, what kids can learn.

Research finding from the Hole in the Wall foundation:

Over the 4 year research phase (2000-2004), HiWEL has extensively studied the impact of Learning Stations on children. Hole-in-the-Wall Learning Stations were installed in diverse settings, the impact of interventions was monitored and data was continually gathered, analyzed and interpreted. Rigorous assessments were conducted to measure academic achievement, behaviour, personality profile, computer literacy and correlations with socio-economic indicators.
…
The sociometric survey found:

  • Self-organizing groups of children who organize themselves into Leaders (experts), Connectors and Novice groups.
  • Leaders and Connectors identified seem to display an ability to connect with and teach other users.
  • Key leaders on receiving targeted intervention, play a key role in bringing about a “multiplier effect in learning” within the community.
  • Often girls are seen to take on the role of Connector, who initiates younger children and siblings (usually novices with little or no exposure to computers) and connects them to the leaders in the group

I believe traditional education is helpful. I believe people are “wired” to learn. They want to learn. We need to create environments that let them learn. We need to avoid crushing the desire to learn (stop de-motivating people).

If you want to get right to talking about the hole in the wall experiments, skip to the 8 minute mark.

Related: Providing Computer to Remote Students in Nepal – Teaching Through Tinkering – Kids Need Adventurous Play – Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids

Wind Power Capacity Up 170% Worldwide from 2005-2009

Posted on July 15, 2010  Comments (8)

graph of global installed wind power capacity from 2005-2009Chart showing global installed wind energy capacity by Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog, Creative Commons Attribution. Data from World Wind Energy Association, for installed Megawatts of global wind power capacity.

_________________________

Globally 38,025 MW of capacity were added in 2009, bringing the total to 159,213 MW, a 31% increase. The graph shows the top 10 producers (with the exceptions of Denmark and Portugal) and includes Japan (which is 13th).

Wind power is now generating 2% of global electricity demand, according to the World Wind Energy Association. The countries with the highest shares of wind energy generated electricity: Denmark 20%, Portugal 15%, Spain 14%, Germany 9%. Wind power employed 550,000 people in 2009 and is expected to employ 1,000,000 by 2012.

From 2005 to 2009 the global installed wind power capacity increased 170% from 59,033 megawatts to 159,213 megawatts. The percent of global capacity of the 9 countries in the graph has stayed remarkably consistent: from 81% in 2005 growing slowly to 83% in 2009.

Over the 4 year period the capacity in the USA increased 284% and in China increased 1,954%. China grew 113% in 2009, the 4th year in a row it more than doubled capacity. In 2007, Europe had for 61% of installed capacity and the USA 18%. At the end of 2009 Europe had 48% of installed capacity, Asia 25% and North America 24%.

Related: Wind Power Provided Over 1% of Global Electricity in 2007 – USA Wind Power Installed Capacity 1981 to 2005 – Wind Power has the Potential to Produce 20% of Electricity by 2030

Tool to Make Creating Android Applications Easy

Posted on July 12, 2010  Comments (0)

I am skeptical this will be really useful but it is a good thing to try. I can believe we could get good tools to allow non-programmer to create simple applications – but I think it will take years to get decent tools. Try App Inventor for Android. I might have to try it myself.

I would image sure most of the applications created will be horrible. It certainly is different from Apples attempts to restrict developers of iPhone apps as much as possible. The move certainly seems to open the development of simple applications beyond those that “are thrilled when a computer reminds them they’re missing a bracket or semicolon” :-)

Related: Arduino: Open Source Programmable Hardware – 4 and 8 Year Old Sisters Impress with Squeak – App Inventor for Android – Droid Incredible

Fiber to the Home

Posted on July 2, 2010  Comments (0)

A very simple overview of fiber to the home.

Related: Plugging America’s Broadband Gap – Next steps for Google’s Experimental Fiber Network – Net Neutrality, Policy, Economics and Intelligent Engineering – How Do You Fix an Undersea Cable?

Droid Incredible

Posted on June 19, 2010  Comments (7)

image of Droid Incredible cell phone

The Droid Incredible really is a great gadget. I am too cheap to get it but if I were to use a cell phone much I think this is the one I would get. I personally prefer more open software like Android (which the Droid Incredible uses) to Apple (though Apple’s user experience is great, I admit).

The Droid Incredible by HTC features a body design that measures 4.63 x 2.3 x 0.47 inches (HxWxD), making it easy to slip into your pocket. A large, 3.7-inch HD screen with 480×800 resolution graces the front of the device. The responsive OLED touch screen features rich colors and is easy to use.

With a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal flash memory, the Droid Incredible delivers incredible performance, letting you run multiple applications. It includes an 8-megapixel camera with auto focus and 2x power LED flash, and also Google Maps Navigation, which provides GPS-based turn-by-turn voice guidance to get you where you need to go.

Related: more Curious Cat gadget posts – Apple’s iPad – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote – Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT – Cell phone Microscope

New Server Uses 75% Less Power and Space

Posted on June 14, 2010  Comments (1)

SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

[SeaMicro] has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.
…
Today’s servers are so inefficient when it comes to being properly utilized,” Feldman said. “This misalignment between the server and the work load is the root of the power consumption problem.”

So SeaMicro guessed that servers could benefit instead by using lots of smaller processors, and it got lucky when Intel started promoting its low-power, low-cost Atom chip for netbooks. That lowered power consumption, since Atom processors deliver three times the performance per watt versus Intel’s server chips.
…
But SeaMicro also attacked the power consumption in the rest of the system, which accounts for about two thirds of the power consumed by a server.
…
it applied the concept of virtualization to the inside of a server. Feldman designed custom chips that could take the tasks that were handled by everything beyond the Intel microprocessor and its chip set. The custom chips virtualize all of those other components so that it finds the resource when it’s needed. It essentially tricks the microprocessor into thinking that the rest of the system is there when it needs it.

SeaMicro virtualized a lot of functions that took up a lot of space inside each server in a rack. It also did the same with functions such as storage, networking, server management and load balancing. Full told, SeaMicro eliminates 90 percent of the components from a system board. SeaMicro calls this CPU/IO virtualization. With it, SeaMicro shrinks the size of the system board from a pizza box to the size of a credit card.
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This advance is coming just in time. Google said recently that if current power trends continue, the cost of energy consumed by a server during its three-year life span could surpass the initial purchase cost for the hardware. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that volume servers consume more than 1 percent of the total electricity in the US—representing billions of dollars in wasted operating expense each year.

Related: Google Server Hardware Design – Data Center Energy Needs – Google Uses Only Outside Air to Cool Data Center in Belgium

Sub $100 Tablet in 2011

Posted on May 30, 2010  Comments (3)

I must admit I am skeptical. If it happens this looks very cool.

One Laptop Per Child Revamps Tablet Plans

On Thursday the foundation announced a partnership with chip maker Marvell to collaborate on a sleek and cheap touch-screen tablet for developing-world school children, a device it now plans to launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2011 for less than $100. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) says that’s close to two years ahead of its scheduled release for the so-called XO-3, the long-awaited upgrade to the non-profit’s XO, the so-called “hundred-dollar laptop” launched in 2007.
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The first XO, for instance, never reached its price target of $100; it now sells for $172. About 2 million of the devices have been sold–a significant achievement for a small nonprofit, but far less than its initial projections. And a flashy double touch-screen model known as the XO-2 was quietly scrapped last year when OLPC decided it couldn’t be made cheaply enough.
…
As for Marvell, the partnership with OLPC could lend more credibility to its Moby tablet, which is designed for educational uses like electronic textbooks. OLPC is also building Marvell’s chips into an upgraded form of its XO, known as the XO 1.75, later this year. “When we first met Nicholas, we were very moved by his leadership,” says Dai Weili, Marvell’s chief operating office. “We’ve got the cost structure, feature capability and scalability to support his vision for many years to come.”

Related: OLPC and Marvell partner to design a line of tablets – $100 Laptops for the World – A Child’s View of the OLPC Laptop – Apple’s iPad

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