May 1, 2009, 5:19 AM CT

Shift in Simulation Superiority

Science and engineering are advancing rapidly in part due to ever more powerful computer simulations, yet the most advanced supercomputers require programming skills that all too few U.S. scientists possess. At the same time, affordable computers and committed national programs outside the U.S. are eroding American competitiveness in number of simulation-driven fields.

These are some of the key findings in the International Evaluation of Research and Development in Simulation-Based Engineering and Science, released on Apr. 22, 2009, by the World Technology Assessment Center (WTEC).

"The startling news was how quickly our assumptions have to change," said Phillip Westmoreland, program director for combustion, fire and plasma systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and one of the sponsors of the report. "Because computer chip speeds aren't increasing, hundreds and thousands of chips are being ganged together, each one with a number of processors. New ways of programming are necessary".

Like other WTEC studies, this study was led by a team of leading scientists from a range of simulation science and engineering disciplines and involved site visits to research facilities around the world.

The nearly 400-page, multi-agency report highlights several areas in which the U.S. still maintains a competitive edge, including the development of novel algorithms, but also highlights endeavors that are increasingly driven by efforts in Europe or Asia, such as the creation and simulation of new materials from first principles......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 30, 2009, 5:21 AM CT

Making Brighter, Full-Color Electronic Readers?

Thinking about getting an e-reader but not sure if you like reading the dim screen? An international collaboration of the University of Cincinnati, Sun Chemical, Polymer Vision and Gamma Dynamics has announced Electrofluidic Display Technology (EFD), the first technology to electrically switch the appearance of pigments in a manner that provides visual brilliance equal to conventional printed media.

This new entry into the race for full-color electronic paper can potentially provide better than 85 percent "white-state reflectance," a performance level mandatory for consumers to accept reflective display applications such as e-books, cell-phones and signage.

"If you compare this technology to what's been developed previously, there's no comparison," says developer Jason Heikenfeld, assistant professor of electrical engineering in UC's College of Engineering. "We're ahead by a wide margin in critical categories such as brightness, color saturation and video speed".

This work, which has been underway for several years, has just been reported in the paper "Electrofluidic displays using Young-Laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions."

Main author Heikenfeld explains the primary advantage of the approach.

"The ultimate reflective display would simply place the best colorants used by the printing industry directly beneath the front viewing substrate of a display," he says. "In our EFD pixels, we are able to hide or reveal colored pigment in a manner that is optically superior to the techniques used in electrowetting, electrophoretic and electrochromic displays."........ Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:06:35 GMT

Google Phone Book Results

Google Inside's author noticed recently that you can now do a reverse phone book look up straight from the front page of Google. He says he got a hang up call, typed the number into Google's search window, hit enter, and got the name and address of the Phone's owner.Am I the only one that is slightly creeped out by how much information Google actually has access to?Well, probably not....

The more profound question is this: How much do we choose to share about ourselves on the web without giving much thought to who might see it?



David Griner had a thought-provoking piece recently about privacy on the web. He relates a conversation he had with a friend that started after he suggested that participating in social media could put our jobs at risk. David's friend compares sharing something about yourself in a closed room of friends as opposed to in the open universe of social media on the web.



The truth is that at least if I stand on my roof with a megaphone and yell stuff about myself, the sound eventually dies and all that exists after that is what my neighbors remember. With Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., it's a relatively permanent record. People can bookmark it or download it.



Can I find stuff on you? It depends. If you Google me ("Greg Cruey" with the quotes), you get a lot of stuff about me. I live on the web. Just the first 20 links have my personal blog, my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, my Suite101 profile, and a small host of blog entries I've written. You can find out a lot about me on those pages. And after a dozen or so years of writing for the web, my name turns up on about 15,000 pages according to Goggle. Google my wife and you get 34 entries. You get the web page of a closed school she used to teach at. You get a Classmates.com profile for someone (probably one of my distant relatives) who shares both her first and last name. You get a couple of dead links and a few pages where I've mentioned her by name in something I wrote.



How much is out there really does depend on what you share....



© Zach Klein Posted by: Greg Cruey      Read more     Source

April 20, 2009, 9:33 PM CT

"Instant On" Computing

The ferroelectric materials found in today's "smart cards" used in subway, ATM and fuel cards soon may eliminate the time-consuming booting and rebooting of computer operating systems by providing an "instant-on" capability as well as preventing losses from power outages.

Scientists supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) nanoscale interdisciplinary research team award and three Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University recently added ferroelectric capability to material used in common computer transistors, a feat researchers tried to achieve for more than half a century. They reported their findings in the April 17 journal Science.

Ferroelectric materials provide low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory. Smart cards use the technology to instantly reveal and update stored information when waved before a reader. A computer with this capability could instantly provide information and other data to the user.

Scientists led by Cornell University materials scientist Darrell Schlom took strontium titanate, a normally non-ferroelectric variant of the ferroelectric material used in smart cards, and deposited it on silicon--the principal component of most semiconductors and integrated circuits--in such a way that the silicon squeezed it into a ferroelectric state......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 13, 2009, 12:56 AM CT

Relief for overheating laptops

Our modern age has become accustomed to regular improvements in information technology, says Slava Rotkin, but these advances do not come without a cost.

Take the laptop, for example. Its components, particularly its billions of semiconductor electronic circuits, are growing ever tinier while the instrument's power and capacity increase. But heat generated by electric current can cause the circuits to melt and the laptop hardware to fail.

Indeed, says Rotkin, an assistant professor of physics, a laptop in use can generate heat faster than an everyday hotplate and almost as fast as a small nuclear reactor.

Developing better methods to dissipate this heat has been listed as a "grand challenge" for modern electronics by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) , a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers.

Rotkin and colleagues at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center and at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, have developed a heat-dissipation method that cools carbon nanotube electronics by utilizing nonconventional radiation in a "near-field zone" just above the substrate, or surface, on which the nanotubes rest.

The new cooling method requires that the nanotubes' substrate be composed of a polar material such as silicon-dioxide (SiO2), says Rotkin. The method channels excess heat from the nanotubes into the substrate which, being much larger, can be more effectively cooled by the vents that push cool air through laptops......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

March 31, 2009, 3:53 PM CT

Faster computer chips

Engineers at Ohio State University are in the process of developing a technique for mass producing computer chips made from the same material found in pencils.

Experts think that graphene -- the sheet-like form of carbon found in graphite pencils -- holds the key to smaller, faster electronics. It might also deliver quantum mechanical effects that could enable new kinds of electronics.

Until now, most scientists could only create tiny graphene devices one at a time, and only on traditional silicon oxide substrates. They couldn't control where they placed the devices on the substrate, and had to connect them to other electronics one at a time for testing.

In a paper reported in the March 26 issue of the journal Advanced Materials, Nitin Padture and colleagues describe a technique for stamping a number of graphene sheets onto a substrate at once, in precise locations.

"We designed the technique to mesh with standard chip-making practices," said Padture, College of Engineering Distinguished Professor in Materials Science and Engineering.

"Graphene has huge potential -- it's been dubbed 'the new silicon,'" said Padture, who is also director of Ohio State's Center for Emergent Materials. "But there hasn't been a good process for high-throughput manufacturing it into chips. The industry has several decades of chip-making technology that we can tap into, if only we could create millions of these graphene structures in precise patterns on predetermined locations, repeatedly. This result is a proof-of-concept that we should be able to do just that"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

March 16, 2009, 8:04 PM CT

Better computers by shifting sound to light

By reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone, scientists may have a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs and transistors are built.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have for the first time converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.

Usually used piezo-electric speakers, such as those found in a cell phone, operate at low frequencies that human ears can hear.

But by reversing that process, lead scientists Michael Armstrong, Evan Reed and Mike Howard, LLNL colleagues, and collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nitronex Corp., used a very high frequency sound wave - about 100 million times higher frequency than what humans can hear - to generate light.

"This process allows us to very accurately 'see' the highest frequency sound waves by translating them into light," Armstrong said.

The research appears in the March 15 edition of the journal Nature Physics.

During the last decade, pioneering experiments using sub-picosecond lasers have demonstrated the generation and detection of acoustic and shock waves in materials with terahertz (THz) frequencies. These very same experiments led to a new technique for probing the structure of semiconductor devices......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:32:15 GMT

Elonex ONEt Ultra Portable Notebook

This week’s Deal of the Day (if we had such a thing) would be this refurb Elonex ONEt Ultra-Portable Netbook computer, priced at a totally measly £99.99. Weight 650g, 7 inch TFT screen, Linux, WiFi, 3 x USB ports, SD card reader, 2GB SSD drive and 128 MB memory. Grab ‘em while they’re hot and sizzling.

 One thing you instantly notice about this the Elonex ONEt is its size and weight; it is an excellent travel companion as well as perfect PC for carrying around the house. The outer casing has an attractive piano-black finish, the keyboard is tactile, the mouse pad easy to use and the 7-inch digital screen provides a perfectly clear image. Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:03:38 GMT

Application Stores For Everyone

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 5244112 Oh Apple, you used to be so cool with your mobile computing platform and your ubiquitous application store. Now, everyone has gone and shown up to the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona and announced their own application store for their own mobile computing platform. Now, instead of the just the Apple iTunes App store, there are going to be no less than seven application stores for seven different mobile platforms.

There is going to be the Nokia's Ovi Store, Windows Marketplace, App Store for Symbian, Android Market, BlackBerry Applications Center and the Palm Software Store. Now granted, the Palm store has been around since December, and the Android Market has been on the block since October, but the application store seems to be the way things are headed. Apple, I have to admit, did get this digital distribution thing right on the iPhone platform. I can attest that I have used the iTunes App store much more than I had ever anticipated, and they have earned a fair chunk of my money.

I am curious to see what other industries are going to follow Apple's suit. Will the next PSP have a media slot, or will games be downloaded? With broadband speeds creeping up and applications becoming smaller and more nimble, I suppose it won't be long before all software is simply digital.

via Macrumors. Posted by: Chris Matier      Read more     Source

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:00:14 GMT

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 3G - Review

The new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with 3G is, on the face of it, much of a muchness as far as small computers go. It’s pretty hard to find any real differentiation between mini notebooks when all of them use the same processor, same screens and similar storage and memory specs. However the Dell stands out because of a) the name, b) the fact that it’s the one which will probably sell the most via the company’s corporate connections, c) because it has a built-in 3G mobile broadband card and finally d) because you can buy them on mobile phone style pricing (Vodafone UK, Vodafone AU). So I thought it would be interesting to take an in-depth look at one for those of you who may be considering going small-sized with your next computer purchase.

Friendly Note: This review is kinda wordy so if you’re only interested in the verdict, skip to the end.

Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source