Category Archives: Engineering

Automatic Dog Washing Machine

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).

The brainchild of French entrepreneur Romain Jerry, the Dog’O’Matic takes about 30 minutes: 5 minutes for the actual washing with soft jets of water and a mild shampoo and an additional 25 minutes for drying with warm air.
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A French reporter tried the invention with her own dog, and though the pooch initially tried to jump out of the machine, the dog quickly calmed down once the process started and completed the wash.

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.

The Million Dollar Programming Prize

One of the main areas of collaborative filtering we exploited is the nearest-neighbor approach. A movie’s “neighbors” in this context are other movies that tend to be scored most similarly when rated by the same viewer. For example, consider Saving Private Ryan (1998), a war movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks. Its neighbors may include other war movies, movies directed by Spielberg, or movies starring Tom Hanks. To predict a particular viewer’s rating, we would look for the nearest neighbors to Saving Private Ryan that the viewer had already seen and rated. For some viewers, it may be easy to find a full allotment of close neighbors; for many others, we may discover only a handful of neighboring movies.
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A second area of collaborative-filtering research we pursued involves what are known as latent-factor models. These score both a given movie and a given viewer according to a set of factors, themselves inferred from patterns in the ratings given to all the movies by all the viewers [see illustration, “The Latent-Factor Approach“]. Factors for movies may measure comedy versus drama, action versus romance, and orientation to children versus orientation to adults. Because the factors are determined automatically by algorithms, they may correspond to hard-to-describe concepts such as quirkiness, or they may not be interpretable by humans at all.
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The model may use 20 to 40 such factors to locate each movie and viewer in a multidimensional space. It then predicts a viewer’s rating of a movie according to the movie’s score on the dimensions that person cares about most. We can put these judgments in quantitative terms by taking the dot (or scalar) product of the locations of the viewer and the movie.
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We found that most nearest-neighbor techniques work best on 50 or fewer neighbors, which means these methods can’t exploit all the information a viewer’s ratings may contain. Latent-factor models have the opposite weakness: They are bad at detecting strong associations among a few closely related films, such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).

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 for Bilogical Pest Control in Israel

Using Barn Owls (Tyto alba erlangeri) For Biological Pest Control In Israel

Agricultural pests come in all forms, but worldwide it is small mammals, mostly rodents, that are responsible for the destruction of about 35% of the total world agriculture. To combat rodents, farmers use rodenticides. However, these pesticides are relatively ineffective as they are short-lived
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During the late 1960’s, hundreds of birds of prey (some of them threatened and endangered species) were killed throughout Israel from secondary poisoning after eating rodents that had been poisoned with rodenticides.
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Once farmers grasp the concept that their ‘winged’ neighbours can help to solve rodent damage if they stop using poisons, Barn Owls and Kestrels will be able to rise to the occasion and control rodents. By living in harmony, both farmers and these birds will be able to benefit from living in co-existence. As we are just beginning to understand the power of nature we realise its many economic benefits, even in modern times. As Barn Owls and Kestrels truly know no boundaries, they not only solve economic problems, but are also bringing peoples together. This is very much needed in the Middle East.

Great stuff.

Tiny Machine Commands a Swarm of Bacteria

Researchers in Canada have created a solar-powered micro-machine that is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. The tiny machine can carry out basic sensing tasks and can indirectly control the movement of a swarm of bacteria in the same Petri dish.

Sylvain Martel, Director of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the Ã‰cole Polytechnique de MontrÃ©al, 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…

Top Ranked Engineering Blog

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.

Historical Engineering: Hanging Flume

photo of hanging flume overlook in Colorado, by John Hunter, Creative Commons Attribution.

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While driving from Dinosaur National Monument to Mesa Verde National Park last year I passed the sight above with the remnants of a hanging flume. The Montrose Placer Mining Company built a 13 mile canal and flume to deliver water from the San Miguel River for gold mining operations. The last 5 miles of the flume clung to the wall of the canyon itself, running along the cliff face in the photo above (see more photos).

Constructed between 1888 and 1891, the 4 foot deep 5 foot 4 inch wide hanging flume carried 23,640,000 gallons of water in a 24 hour period. The mining operations used water and sluice boxes to separate the gold from lighter materials (dirt and gravel).

The technology was not yet available to pump the water directly from the river at the necessary volume and pressure to wash the gold from the gravel, therefore they constructed the flume to transport the water.

Graphene: Engineered Carbon

A material for all seasons

Graphene, a form of the element carbon that is just a single atom thick, had been identified as a theoretical possibility as early as 1947.
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Its unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon chips.

But that’s only one of the material’s potential applications. Because of its single-atom thickness, pure graphene is transparent, and can be used to make transparent electrodes for light-based applications such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or improved solar cells.
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Graphene could also substitute for copper to make the electrical connections between computer chips and other electronic devices, providing much lower resistance and thus generating less heat. And it also has potential uses in quantum-based electronic devices that could enable a new generation of computation and processing.

“The field is really in its infancy,” says Michael Strano, associate professor of chemical engineering who has been investigating the chemical properties of graphene. “I don’t think there’s any other material like this.”

The mobility of electrons in graphene — a measure of how easily electrons can flow within it — is by far the highest of any known material. So is its strength, which is, pound for pound, 200 times that of steel. Yet like its cousin diamond, it is a remarkably simple material, composed of nothing but carbon atoms arranged in a simple, regular pattern.

“It’s the most extreme material you can think of,” says Palacios. “For many years, people thought it was an impossible material that couldn’t exist in nature, but people have been studying it from a theoretical point of view for more than 60 years.”

Global Installed Wind Power Now Over 1.5% of Global Electricity Demand

graph of global installed wind power capacity

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

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Globally 27,339 MW of capacity were added in 2008, bringing the total to 121,188 MW, a 29% increase. The graph shows the top 10 producers (with the exceptions of Denmark and Portugal) and includes Japan (which is 13th).

In 2007, Europe had for 61% of installed capacity and the USA 18%. At the end of 2008 Europe had 55% of installed capacity, North America 23%, Asia 20%, Australia 1.5%, Latin America .6% and Africa .5%. Country shares of global capacity at the end of 2008: USA 21%, Germany 20%, Spain 14%, China 10%, India 8% (those 5 countries account for 73% of global capacity).

USA capacity grew 50% in 2008, moving it into the global lead for the first time in a decade. China grew 107%, the 3rd year in a row it more than doubled capacity.

Surgeon-engineer advances high-tech healing

Catherine Mohr, 40, is herself a rare creature. Part surgeon, part engineer, she designs instruments and procedures for laparoscopic, or minimally invasive, surgery as well as the surgery curriculum at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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The spider – better known as the DaVinci surgical robot – was created by the Sunnyvale company Intuitive Surgical Inc., where her husband, Paul Mohr, is an engineer and she is director of medical research. She designed the special surgical instruments that attach securely to the DaVinci’s strong, wristed arms, and has helped to design the next generation of the robot.

She also designed a procedure for using the robot for gastric-bypass surgery. Her paper on the procedure was published in 2006 in Obesity Surgery, a medical journal. “Someone who needs a gastric bypass has a thick abdominal wall,” Mohr explains. “It can take months for incisions to heal, so you want to do the operation through the smallest incision you can.”

The operation is also ergonomically challenging for the surgeon. “What you’re doing inside is very challenging, and you can’t stand terribly close because these patients are so large,” she says. “It seemed to me that this was something we should do with the robot.”

The surgeon uses controllers to drive the laparoscopic instruments held by the robot, and a screen to view the action. “You don’t cut what you can’t see,” she says.

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Today, during remarks at the National Academy of Sciences, President Barack Obama announced the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.

President Barack Obama said, “This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views. I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.”

PCAST will be co-chaired by John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate.

Members of the council include: Shirley Ann Jackson, Craig Mundie, Eric Schmidt and Ahmed Zewail.