Category Archives: Technology

iWoz

iWoz book cover image

iWoz, autobiography of Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder is now available. Quote from Guy Kawasaki:

Every engineer—and certainly every engineering student—should read this book. It is about the thrill of invention, the process of making the world a better place, and the purity of entrepreneurship. I, Woz is the personal computer generation’s version of The Soul of a New Machine. It is, in a nutshell, the engineer’s manifesto. I hope that the so-called “innovation experts” and MBAs choke when they read it.

Cobert report interview with Steve Wozniak. NPR interview: Computer Pioneer Steve Wozniak Tells His Story

Google India Looking for Engineers

Google not finding right talent in India to suit its needs

Google, which is considered to have a very low attrition rate even in the high-job-hopping Indian IT space, has found it more challenging to hire certain talent in India as compared to other parts of the world, the company’s Founder-Director Kavitark Ram Shriram admitted recently.

The Indian origin founding board member of Google and a well-known venture capitalist said at an ‘investing in India’ conference in San Francisco, “I know first hand that we have had a bit more of a challenge trying to hire engineers for Google in Bangalore compared to the other parts of the world.”

Google even has a we’re hiring link on the Google India home page.

Recent articles also point to other companies having trouble finding Indian engineers to fill all the jobs they hoped to fill.

NSF $76 million for Science and Technology Centers

NSF Awards $76 million for 2006 Science and Technology Centers to spur interdisciplinary research.

Centers offer the research and engineering community an effective mechanism to undertake long-term scientific and technological research and education activities, to explore better and more effective ways to educate students and to develop mechanisms to ensure the timely transition of research and education advances into service in society.
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Each center receives roughly $19 million dollars over 5 years, and if approved, receives an additional 5 years of support following a thorough evaluation.

Centers include: Layered Polymeric Systems at Case Western Reserve University and Multi-Scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes at Colorado State University.

Google Gadget Awards

If you’re a student with an email address ending in .edu, the Google Gadget Awards is your chance to win a Google programming competition – even if you’re not a programming ninja. If you’ve ever taken a web design class, you can probably create a gadget in a few minutes – no need to download anything or even own hosting space. Once you’ve submitted your gadget, people can add it to their Google homepage with a few mouse clicks.

Gagets are plugins for Google Desktop or code that run work on web pages. Apply by November 1st.

Google asks students for gadgets

What Kids can Learn

This is a fascinating interview discussing what children can learn if given a computer and little, if any, instruction. Very Cool. Links on the progress since this interview are at the end of the post.

Q: This is your concept of minimally invasive education?

A: Yes. It started out as a joke but I’ve kept using the term … This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley.

The interview explores what happened when:

Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

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Science Blogging Conference in NC

The Triangle Science Blogging Conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 20 January 2007, is free and open to: “scientists, educators, students, journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in discussing science communication, education and literacy—and how blogs can be a tool of those.” It looks interesting.

Tags: sciencebloggingconference

Google 2007 Anita Borg Scholarship

USA: Open to female, undergraduate seniors or graduate students at a university in the United States studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical fields. Apply by January 15, 2007. The scholarship recipients will each receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year. Remaining finalists will receive $1,000 each. Both groups will visit Google headquarters April 5-7, 2007 for workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.

Europe: Similar to the above, apply by January 12th, 2007

Open Science Computer Grid

The Open Science Grid is a distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific research:

Researchers from many fields, including astrophysics, bioinformatics, computer science, medical imaging, nanotechnology and physics, use the OSG infrastructure to advance their research. OSG provides help for new communities to adapt their applications to use the distributed facility and make their resources accessible.
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The OSG includes two grids: an Integration Grid and a Production Grid. The Integration Grid is used to test new grid applications, sites and technologies, while the Production Grid provides a stable, supported environment on which researchers run their scientific applications.

Computer scientist spearheads $30 million ‘Open Science Grid’

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced today that they have joined forces to fund a five-year, $30 million program to operate and expand upon the two-year-old national grid.

Engineered Ice Cream

Moo bella Vending Machine

Technology Innovation One Scoop at A Time

For the world’s best-engineered ice cream, go to the Union Court dining area at Boston University. What you’ll find is a vending machine that can make 96 varieties of ice cream to order from 12 flavors, two base mixes–premium and low carb–and three dry-ingredient mix-ins.
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The sophisticated internals are invisible to consumers, who use a touch pad and 15-inch flat-panel display to select flavors. What happens next is an ice cream geek’s dream: “We pump the base mix, aerate it, flavor it, flash freeze it, scrape it up off of a freezing surface, form it into a scoop and into the consumer’s cup in 45 seconds,” Baxter explains.

Very cool: Moo Bella web site with the flavor options and a video.
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Engine on a Chip – the Future Battery

micro engine - battery replacement

Engine on a chip promises to best the battery

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.
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The MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second — 100 times faster than those in jet engines.

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