Robot Looks for Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Robot watches out for rare bird:

The system uses two video cameras to capture continuous images of the sky that are scrutinised for evidence of bird life by sophisticated software.
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“We have caught some very exciting images of birds.” No pictures of the charismatic red, white and black ivory-billed woodpecker have yet turned up.
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Advanced algorithms analyse each frame, discarding the images it believes does not contain an image of a bird and saving those that it thinks does.

$35 million to the USC School of Engineering

The 2006 Slate 60: Donations

Ming Hsieh, 50, founder of Cogent, a technology firm in Pasadena, Calif., that specializes in sophisticated identification systems including fingerprinting, gave $35 million to the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering in Los Angeles to coincide with the 100th anniversary of its electrical-engineering program. Hsieh (pronounced “shee”) graduated from the university in 1984 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering after earning his bachelor’s degree in the same field a year earlier. In exchange for this gift, his first to the university, the department has been renamed in his honor. Born on a rice farm in northern China, Hsieh grew up very poor. As a child, he constructed small radios and televisions from spare parts, according to a university spokesman. His interest in electronics was stoked by an uncle, and Hsieh emigrated to the United States to attend college after coming into an inheritance. He recently became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Digital Pen

Cool gadget –Logitech io2 Digital Pen. Take notes on paper and then dock the pen in your computer and have the notes captured in your computer. It can convert your handwriting to digital text as though you typed it in. You can also import drawings and sketches from the pen as jpg, gif, png etc. files. It seems the pen only works with their paper which seems like a bad design for customers, but those interested in gadgets might like it.

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

Cool Falkirk Wheel Canal Lift

Falkirk Wheel:

The wheel, which has an overall diameter of 35 metres, consists of two opposing arms which extend 15 metres beyond the central axle, and which take the shape of a Celtic-inspired, double-headed axe. Two sets of these axe-shaped arms are attached about 25 metres apart to a 3.5 metre diameter axle. Two diametrically opposed water-filled caissons, each with a capacity of 80,000 gallons (302 tons), are fitted between the ends of the arms.

These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their combined capacity of 600 tonnes of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes’ principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters, the amount of water leaving the caisson has exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180Â° in less than four minutes while using very little power. It takes just 22.5 kilowatts (kW) to power the electric motors, which consume just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy in four minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water.

Pretty cool – follow link for more info and larger image. Less cool canal photos: Monocacy Aqueduct in Maryland, USA,here is the aqueduct (in this case, a bridge that is an carries a water for a canal).

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.