Category Archives: Technology

How Google Earth Is Changing Science

How Google Earth Is Changing Science (broken link removed) by Manfred Dworschak:

Google Earth wasn’t really intended for scientists….
But now the scientific community is discovering how useful the software is for their own work.

With a single keystroke, biologist Born superimposes colored maps over the Arctic. The maps show him where the ice sheet is getting thinner and the direction in which the pieces of floating ice on which walruses like to catch a ride are drifting. All of the ice data, which comes from satellites and measuring buoys, is available on the Internet. By loading the data into the program, Born can detect how global warming is affecting the migratory behavior of his giant walruses.

The way simple to use tools will be used is hard to predict. By making tools (and ideas – open access research) readily available (and customizable – Google Map API) allows the community to build upon the tool in wonderful and unanticipated ways.

Tools, that may indeed be technically superior, may languish while simple to use, widely available, tools can flourish and create great benefits (from the network effect).

NSF Undergraduate Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

NSF Undergraduate Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM)

program details from NSF (web site for schools)

This program makes grants to institutions of higher education to support scholarships for academically talented, financially needy students, enabling them to enter the workforce following completion of an associate, baccalaureate, or graduate level degree in science and engineering disciplines. Grantee institutions are responsible for selecting scholarship recipients, reporting demographic information about student scholars, and managing the S-STEM project at the institution.

The program does not make scholarship awards directly to students; students should contact their institution’s Office of Financial Aid for this and other scholarship opportunities.

Thanks to Marisa Dorazio, Edmonds Community College, for mentioning this. Apply for the scholarships available from Edmonds Community College. The deadline to apply is Friday, August 18. The application form has contact information in case you have any questions.

NSF Funds Center for Quality of Life Technology

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) have been awarded a $15 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish an engineering research center that will develop technologies to help older adults and people with disabilities live independently and productively.

“The purpose of our new center is to foster independence and self determination among older Americans and people with disabilities,” said Kanade. “If the technology we develop at the QoLT ERC can delay the need to send people from their homes to assisted living or nursing facilities by even one month, we can save our nation $1.2 billion annually. We need to apply the same ingenuity that we’ve used for military, space and manufacturing applications to improve the human condition.”

Japan has also been investing heavily in such technology including robots. Japan’s population is more elderly and the needs and benefits to Japan have lead them to invest heavily in technology to assist an aging population.
Continue reading →

China Builds a Better Internet

China Builds a Better Internet (site broke the link so I removed it)

China is looking to become a scientific leader, with projects like China’s Next Generation Internet, to strengthen their economy by creating

its own scientific and technological breakthroughs—using a new and improved version of today’s dominant innovation platform, the Internet. “CNGI is the culmination of this revolutionary plan” to turn China into the world’s innovation capital, says Wu Hequan, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
…
The United States’ reluctance to invest in IPv6 makes it more likely that China will be in a position to gain the first-mover advantage it seeks. A draft version of a January 2006 report by the Department of Commerce on IPv6 contained a section on competitiveness that highlighted several threats to U.S. Internet leadership, including a further shift of high-tech R&D and product innovation eastward and less available investment capital because of the higher costs of maintaining IPv4 networks. What remains to be seen is whether China can develop the services that take advantage of the next-generation Internet. But China’s researchers are already working on it. At the IPv6 Global Summit in April, China’s major telecommunications and Internet companies got up on stage one by one and told the audience that they have research facilities dedicated to developing these services.

IPv6 is coming, in fact it is already here, though in a limited way. The work started in 1994 when the IPv6 working group was established and proposed standard adopted by the Internet Engineering Steering Group.

IEEE-USA chief calls for IPv6 adoption:

Adoption of a next-generation Internet Protocol by China, Japan and South Korea and other Asian countries should raised questions about U.S. innovation policy, the president of IEEE-USA told an IPv6 conference here Friday

Google Tech Talks

Webcasts of great engineering talks at Google via: Google TechTalks

Videos include:

Classic Botanical Illustrations Presented Poorly

Classic Botanical Illustration, A Curious Herbal by Elizabeth Blackwell. The British Museum has made this fantastic material available online. Unfortunately they have done it with an absolutely horrible way. So you can experience “turning pages” they force you to download extra software.

Then you get to try turning pages in the book. Go ahead and try, its like an arcade game trying to figure out exactly how the mouse has to move to actually let you get to the next page. Ok, I exaggerate a bit but I can tell you this – let 10 average web users try to view this book and they will have great difficulty. Museums should not be so out of touch with the public that they produce such fancy unusable stuff. There is no reason this material shouldn’t be presented in a very user friendly way. Nothing of value is gained for all the pain they inflict with their unusable format.

They really need to put whoever approved this setup back in some part of the British Museum that doesn’t have to keep up with technology. Then they should either hire someone from Jakob Neilsen, Jared Spool or 37 Signals organizations to run their online activities or get the name of someone from those organizations that can help them. Because they have great content to share and they need to do much better than this.

Frankly it isn’t really worth going through all that unless you really really want to see the book or you have already learned how to use poorly designed interfaces. You also need to have permission and the ability to download a plugin to your computer. The bozos also don’t even provide a way to link to the book. Go ahead and go to the British Museum site and look around and you will find it eventually.

Toyota Robots

photo of Toyota partner robot

Toyota Announces Overview of “Toyota Partner Robot”

Toyota wants its partner robots to have human characteristics, such as being agile, warm and kind and also intelligent enough to skillfully operate a variety of devices in the areas of personal assistance, care for the elderly, manufacturing, and mobility. Furthermore, since each area requires a special set of skills, Toyota is promoting the development of three different types of partner robots (walking, rolling, and mountable), each with its own areas of expertise.

Read posts about the Toyota Productions System (TPS) on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.

Others are making progress on human like robots including Sony and Honda. See Sony QRIO Robots in action in this flash video below:

And read more about Honda Robots: ASIMO and P3.

Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab

Robert Scoble videotaped his visit to the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab and posted the video to Microsoft’s channel 9 – which has quite a few interesting videos.

They have some of the coolest people I’ve ever met and the robotics might surprise you (two of the students were building soccer-playing robots on top of Segways, other students were building surgery tools, really great stuff).

More robotics webcasts from Channel 9.

Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity

Photo of solar sheet manufacturing

Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity by Kevin Bullis

This week, Nanosolar, a startup in Palo Alto, CA, announced plans to build a production facility with the capacity to make enough solar cells annually to generate 430 megawatts. This output would represent a substantial portion of the worldwide production of solar energy.

According to Nanosolar’s CEO Martin Roscheisen, the company will be able to produce solar cells much less expensively than is done with existing photovoltaics because its new method allows for the mass-production of the devices. In fact, maintains Roscheisen, the company’s technology will eventually make solar power cost-competitive with electricity on the power grid.

Nanosolar also announced this week more than $100 million in funding from various sources, including venture firms and government grants. The company was founded in 2001 and first received seed money in 2003 from Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Information on the nanotechnology involved from the Nanosolar site.