Author Archives: curiouscat

Aussies Look to Finnish Innovation Model

Aussies look to Finnish Innovation Model:

Australian policy makers are looking to Finland for inspiration in their drive to bring the nation closer to the dream of thriving technological innovation. The country’s president and other Finnish representatives are in Sydney to share with Australian researchers the strides the nation has made in the past three decades. Home of companies such as Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, Finland has captured the attention of governments looking to shift their economic base away from traditional industries towards a more innovative focus.

Finland’s research and development spend accounts for 3.5 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP), a higher percentage than that of most European Union nations. It intends to lift this percentage to four per cent by 2010. Australia’s spending on research in comparison was 1.8 per cent of GDP in 2004/05, below the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 2.3 per cent.

Using IT to Improve Construction

Teicholz awarded top construction engineering prize:

One of CIFE’s biggest innovations is a program that visualizes the various stages of a construction project over time using 3-D models, like a digital movie. The models, which integrate hundreds of building components in an understandable way, can be shared early in the design stage and can straightforwardly communicate a complex schedule to everyone, Teicholz says. “Better decisions can be made about every aspect of the design rather than trying to improve the design after everyone has completed their work,” he says.

The need to correct mistakes after the fact is seen all too often in construction projects, says Martin Fischer, professor of civil and environmental engineering and current CIFE director. Walls built prematurely might have to be torn down, for example, or two work crews that did not communicate might plan to be in the same place at the same time. Time, labor and materials are wasted, and the final cost of the project increases.

Cost of Powering Your PC

The cost of leaving your PC on

Have you ever wondered how much it’s costing you to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
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Here’s the kilowatt-hour calculation for my server, which draws ~160 watts: 160 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 1401.6 kilowatt-hours

The other thing you’ll need to know is how much you’re paying for power in your area. Power here in California is rather expensive and calculated using a byzantine rate structure. According to this recent Mercury News article, the household average for our area is 14.28 cents per kilowatt-hour. 1401.6 kilowatt-hours * 14.28 cents / 100 = $200.15 So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.

Power could cost more than servers, Google warns: “A Google engineer has warned that if the performance per watt of today’s computers doesn’t improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag.”

Women Working in Science

Progress Over the Long Term

The commission found that women have doubled their share of bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering over the last four decades. In 1966, they earned one quarter (24.8 percent) of bachelor’s degrees in those fields, while in 2004, they earned half (50.4 percent). Over the same time span, women also gained a dramatically greater percentage of master’s degrees – 13.3 percent in 1966 versus 43.6 percent in 2004. At the doctorate level, the increase was especially noteworthy – 8 percent in 1966 compared to 37.4 percent in 2004.

Proportion of Females in the following fields, from the article:
Psychologists 67.3%
Biological Scientists 48.7%
Computer Programmers 26.0%
Chemical Engineers 14.3%
Mechanical Engineers 5.8%

Trash + Plasma = Electricity

The Prophet of Garbage (broken link removed):

Startech’s trash converter uses superheated plasma to reduce garbage to its molecular components.
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Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200ËšF syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid.
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Over the past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology to turn garbage into energy. “The best renewable energy is the one we complain about the most: municipal solid waste,” says Louis Circeo, the director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It will prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a landfill.” A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle 2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people amasses in that time span.

Related: Turning Trash into Electricity

Broken link http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

IBM Believes New DRAM will Double Performance

IBM drives road to denser CPU memory

By combining techniques in process and circuit design, IBM believes it can put as much as 48 Mbytes of fast DRAM on a reasonably sized CPU when its 45nm technology becomes available in 2008.
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BM combined two advances to enable the new memory integration. The company found a way to migrate its deep trench technology used for DRAMs from CMOS to its silicon-on-insulator (SOI) logic process. In a paper last December, IBM described that work that involved suppressing the floating-body effect in SOI.

Undersea Restaurant

Take a vacation and visit this cool engineering project: Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa Rangali Island (they broke link so I removed it).

More Lego Learning

Let Go of My Legos:

The eighth-grade Physics by Design class at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., has a reputation for being downright fun. But most students don’t refer to it by its conventional title, they just call it Lego. That’s right. Lego. You won’t find students here nodding off to sterile terms in a textbook; instead, they’re elbow-deep in bins of colorful plastic bricks building cars and movable robotic arms. And because they’re learning to program whatever they build with the help of Robolab software and a microcomputer embedded in a Lego brick, they really understand the meaning of torque, velocity and momentum.

Having fun is good, but the real key is creating environments where learning is fun, as is the case here. I believe people naturally learn and the largely learn to suppress that desire when subjected to bad formal education as they learn to equate learning with bad experiences.

Catnap Benefits

The health benefits of 40 winks

A six-year Greek study has just concluded that people who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.

Too tired to work? Then have a snooze:

The state-backed siesta is part of a â‚¬7 million (Â£4.7 million) campaign begun yesterday by the Health Ministry to encourage the French to sleep more and better. A third of the population does not sleep enough, experts say. Tiredness is blamed for 20 per cent of road and domestic accidents, and for low efficiency at work and school, obesity, depression and many other ills.

A nap a day keeps lost productivity at bay

According to a Cornell University study, sleep-deprived workers cost U.S. industry $150 billion a year in reduced job productivity and fatigue-related accidents.

Chimps Used Stone “Hammers”

Ancient chimp-made ‘hammers’ fuel evolutionary debate:

The stone hammers that the team discovered, essentially irregularly shaped rocks about the size of cantaloupes – with distinctive patterns of wear – were used to crack the shells of nuts. The research demonstrates conclusively that the artifacts couldn’t have been the result of natural erosion or used by humans. The stones are too large for humans to use easily and they also have the starch residue from several nuts known to be staples in the chimpanzee diet, but not the human diet.

Using so-called “percussive technology” to free the edible parts of nuts is more complicated than it sounds. “We know that modern chimpanzee behaviour regarding nut-cracking is socially transmitted and takes up to seven years to learn,” Mercader says. “Some of the nuts require a compression force of more than a thousand kilograms to crack. And the idea is to crack the shell but not smash it – it’s not a simple technique.”

The discovery suggests that a ‘chimpanzee stone age’ reaches well back to ancient times. “Chimpanzee material culture has a long prehistory whose deep roots are only beginning to be uncovered,” the authors write.