Valluvar's Musings

Unix guys win Japan prize

2011-01-27T11:34:00.000+05:30

Is your battery alive ?

2010-12-11T12:09:00.000+05:30

It is understood that over a period of time the lifeforms that we see around will tend to be cyborgs, augmented mechanically for greater functionality. In a complete flip we have seen a machine (ok battery ) augmented functionally by a biological entity. Researchers have found that the efficiency of a Li ion battery can be enhanced many times over by getting tobacco mosaic viruses to attach themselves to the electrode. Shades of Arthur C Clarke and Rama.....
Read more here.

Solar powered lifeforms

2010-12-09T12:12:00.001+05:30

This amazing insect has been found with solar harvesting structures in its abdomen. Read more here.

Video on the Sensei Fukoka's method

2010-12-01T15:26:00.003+05:30

2G revenues

2010-11-29T11:56:00.000+05:30

There has been a lot of noise on the "2G spectrum scam" where the UPA telecom minister stands accused of policy formulations that have cost the country 1.7 Lakh crores of lost revenue and personal corruption. Leaving the personal corruption angle aside (lets assume for the sake of argument that it's true) a simple dissection of the matter at hand yields the following inferences.

1. The 1.7 lakh crores is the retrospective interpolation of the average yield based on the numbers achieved in the 3G auction.
2. If a similar yardstick is applied to say , power distribution by state owned disco's, every power minister can be accused of exactly the same crime of causing the nation losses of lakhs of crores of 'potential revenue'. Ditto for fertilizer, road transport and virtually any sector that is granted some public subsidy to increase penetration. Hence either the review methodology must be applied across sectors or telecom should be understood as a GDP multiplier.
3. The teledensity when the government of the day (NDA) moved from spectrum auctions to revenue sharing, is a small fraction of what it is now. It can be argued (and quite convincingly) that the growth in teledensity was inversely proportional to the cost of ownership and prevailing call rates. The single largest reduction in call rates can be directly attributed to government allowing lower spectrum charges which resulted in lower call rates and increased competition. Also spectrum costs went from cap-ex to be expended before rollout to op-ex that could be paid as it were generated.
4. Obviously the biggest beneficiaries are telecom users, also know as aam aadmi etc. The maid who takes care of my house has 2 phones on a monthly income of say 8-10 K. Would this kind of equitable usage of spectrum happened if the government keeps the call rates in the stratosphere ? Contrast 12 rupees a minute to 30 pisae for the same in 10 years.
5. If the CAG formulas are applied our average call rates will still be in the 2-3 rupees range. how does this benefit the common man ?
6. 3G is now slowtracked successfully by auctioning the spectrum at ridiculous prices. End of the day the telecom companies dont pay for the spectrum, you and i do and that's why ARPU is so important in the business. What we need in this country is cheap and abundant data bandwidth, internet penetration in india is still bad as the cost of broadband is prohibitive even today.
7. Now the same is being applied to mobile data. Looks to me like a conspiracy to keep data exclusive and out of the reach of the common man. If anything there should be a JPC to probe the de facto hijacking of spectrum (a finite resource) by the elite. Keeping out the riff-raff, in the best traditions of the british raj !!

Colony Collapse Syndrome Cracked

2010-10-09T13:44:00.000+05:30

A very serious issue that has been off the radar for many people seems to have been finally understood. Once cannot underestimate what CCS will do to the agrarian economy. Finally after blaming pesticides, cell phone radiation and maybe even the little green men from mars, entomologists working with US army researchers have fingered the culprits as a deadly combination of a virus and a fungus (saprophyte). Read more here.

what is the higher judiciary smoking ?

2010-09-30T17:31:00.003+05:30

The Allahabad high court finally came up with it's crack smokers verdict on the Ramjanambhoomi- Babri masjid title dispute for which almost a century of wrangling has passed. To say the summaries i hear at this point are shocking is to put it mildly. Clearly this is an attempt by the judiciary to have a go at policy rather than interpret the law which is what they are paid to do. Watch this space for more analysis once the judgment copy is public.

Sustainability Series : Abey speaks

2010-06-11T12:27:00.000+05:30

Abey is an old friend who has kindly (though rather late) contributed this opinion piece.

When Shiv asked me to contribute my thoughts on Sustainability my first reaction was 'Oh cool. This is something interesting to write about. Plus it will earn me some good karma."

Notwithstanding the incentive of good karma, writing about it is proving to be tougher than it looked. After all 'sustainability' is a hot topic and worst case if I read up a few experts on the subject am sure I could regurgitate something quote intelligent unquote. The problem however is this. The more I think about it and the less I like it.

Sustainability is a crutch word. On it hangs the perceived absolution of many an environmental sin. On the one hand you have industry who hugs it as a quasi marketing tool. Its good to look green for customers and shareholders and there is also some obvious feel good factor that the industry leader will feel when signing off on a green initiative: "I am not a cut throat destroyer of the environment after all." Of course we will politely discount the unsaid: profit before environment.

On the other side you have the environmentalists: little puny stick insect figures who are usually squashed by rolling the juggernaut of destruction wearing the pleasing garb of good times, wealth, prosperity, Bacardi rum sips under cool equatorial coconut palms, and dressed in designer bodies.

In these caterpillar tracks of a consumption driven economy we talk sustainability. And it is just that. Talk where everyone is complicit. Even if you are reusing your plastic bags, all you've done is put up a personal shrine to your belief in the sanctity of the environment. Not that such shrines are not valuable. Individually they contribute to modifying the collective consciousness which will eventually bring about the change.

Meanwhile....Sustainability is a train of thought that is extraneous to any entrepreneurial discussion. It is a layered on activity usually driven by regulatory concerns or as is common in India by how un-bribe-able the enforcing officer or department is. This is not going to change unless there is a fundamental rethink on how we generate our wealth. Laws maybe tightened, departments and officers may become incorruptible, but as long as the underlying fundamental structure of wealth that is denoted by consumption and debt, remains unchanged, sustainaility will remain what it is: A cocktail dress that will make you feel good at the dinner convocation honoring environmental heroes.

Choka is right. True sustainability can only be achieved once it disappears from our vocabulary and becomes part of our culture's genetic heritage. And the ideal vehicle for such a transformation is when society is organized into self sufficient communities driven by consensus, engaging in deliberate thought as to the impact of our actions, and careful considered execution of enterprises that will bring in lasting and sustainable sustainability.

MIT Team Unveils Airplane that Uses 70 Percent Less Fuel Read more: MIT Team Unveils Airplane that Uses 70 Percent Less Fuel | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

2010-05-18T11:32:00.001+05:30

Inhabitat reports :

Today a team of researchers at MIT unveiled their latest feat of engineering — an airplane that uses 70% less fuel than conventional aircraft. The MIT team was one of six groups — and the only university led team — across the US chosen by NASA to help redesign current aircraft to increase fuel efficiency, lower emissions and allow planes to take off on shorter runways. The team accomplished all of NASA’s set goals with their innovative D-series plane, lovingly referred to as the “double bubble”.

Read more: MIT Team Unveils Airplane that Uses 70 Percent Less Fuel | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

Shape of things to come: Open source hardware

2010-05-11T12:58:00.000+05:30

This is a topic close to home as we are advocates of open source software but manufacture proprietary hardware. I have always wanted to open source our designs as the market is bigger than what any one company can service. However not everyone is convinced that it is the way to go. What is needed is a GPL like license that works for hardware innovation. IAC given the Indian context IP is so much bull. The Foocamp annual fest threw up 13 innovators who are making million + out of open hardware. The OH industry is estimated to cross a billion dollars by 2015. Very interesting if somewhat counterintutive business wise.

Open source hardware $1m and beyond - foo camp east 2010 from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Civil Liberties : How safe are our EVM's.

2010-05-10T16:05:00.000+05:30

While the opposition has been complaining of EVM manipulation, the EC has consistently rubbished these claims. The video below claims that EVM's can be cracked and manipulated easily. Given what i know of electronics and embedded systems the claims are highly credible. Check out the video below.

The attack of the superweeds

2010-05-10T12:52:00.000+05:30

Maybe the fact that Intelligent design holds sway in the US, has induced this problem. After all anyone who believes in Darwin's theory of evolution also believes in the inherent arms race between prey and predator. Clearly the weeds have struck back. In what is being described as 'the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,', heavy use of the defoliating agent Roundup has accelerated the development of super weeds that are resistant to, surprise, Roundup. The entire agri economy in the US depends on mass poisoning of fields with such 'herbicides' and then planting with GE verities of the crop that are resistant to it. Little wonder that the genes have crossed over to weedy relatives of the crop. Super weeds have the potential to kill agriculture due to cost escalation in handling. Wonder what Monsanto will do now....
I wonder how many people know that monsanto was one of the first and largest producers of Agent orange, used extensively by the US occupation forces in Vietnam. Another was our good friend Dow chemicals.
This article in today's ET is scary for what such moves mean in the long run. Points to ponder.

SC bans drugging people and calling the result 'evidence'

2010-05-05T13:10:00.000+05:30

In a long overdue move the Supreme Court of India banned the use of drugs and polygraphs is the pursuit of law enforcement. These practices are routine in India and are deceptively called 'Brain Mapping' and 'Narco Analysis'. Nice way to say they drug the shit out of the alleged perpetrator and use the induced verbal diarrhea as evidence in court. Significantly this has been ruled as violative of Article 20 (3) of the Constitution, which prohibits self-incrimination.

Read more here...

Demand Side Management : Other voices

2010-05-04T14:57:00.000+05:30

Matt Millman of relampled an ESCO company based in the US, has a good writeup on the ESCO model, demand side management and how LED's fit into the the space. The data he has used is so close to what our own analysis tells us, that i was wondering if my colleague Atul wrote it :) What it confirms is that no economy is that different from any other given the 'flattening' effect of Globalization. It all appears quite fractal, different from the top, but identical at some scale.

Sustainability Series : Akash Ganga

2010-05-04T14:45:00.000+05:30

Akasha Ganga or the River from the sky is an innovative NGO scheme that has shown a path to sustainable use of water and also establishes a scheme for water harvesting and storage. The project led by B.P.Agarwal has won the 2010 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability

Sustainability Series : Sustainability by numbers

2010-05-04T14:34:00.001+05:30

Most of us believe things as articles of faith. That our current consumption driven lifestyle is unsustainable is more an article of faith than based on any hard data. Of course i acknowledge that hard data does not often capture the essence of a decaying or destroyed landscape. However in a democracy where accountability of the ruling class to the people is still important, there needs to be an unambiguous way of deciding what deserves attention and what does not. Hence numbers in all their glory become important in preparing a case.
Sustainable Development - a gateway is a portal run by the Government of India with some canadian funding. The four categories of indexing sustainability are

1. Environmental indicators
2. Economic indicators
3. Social indicators
4. Institutional indicators

the site has data captured from various surveys and institutions. Worth the 30 minutes it takes to skim through it.
What i liked most about the site is that there is no commentary on the data provided. It is left to the gentle reader to use the data as they see fit in measuring sustainability.

Read more...

Horizontal gene transfer to mammals

2010-05-03T13:02:00.000+05:30

The Science daily reports that for the first time conclusive evidence of lateral transfer of genetic material from parasites to their hosts was found. Very interesting. Calling some one a louse may no longer be incorrect :)

I love this

2010-04-29T12:19:00.000+05:30

The LA Times Reports :

Happy Meal toys and other promotions that come with high-calorie children's meals will soon be banned in parts of Santa Clara County unless the restaurants meet nutritional guidelines approved Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors.

"This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's' love of toys" to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure.

Read more here.

Sustainability Series : Choku Speaks

2010-04-29T11:24:00.001+05:30

In response to my request for thoughts on sustainability Chockalingam Muthiah, a wise friend of mine was kind enough to provide his insights in a mail (reproduced below). Choku, as he is known is a genuine Green Karmayogi, one who put's his money where his mouth is. A Gandhian who has changed his entire life around the concept of sustainability also practices Natural Farming apart from being a successful businessman. Choku is one of the few who has walked the talk and has been living off-grid in the middle of bangalore for almost 4 years now.

Hi shiv,

There is so much in the language we use that we do not pause to know the meaning but use it because they are fashionably in vogue.

Amazing, great, fine, cool and so many more.

Sustainability is one such word.

So i am trying to find out what is sustainable.
To be able to sustain what?

Sustainable:
"being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged " - Merriam-Websters

This is the current english meaning from the Dictionary and it was not very convincing for me.
So i went to root word:

Sustain:
"L. sustinere "hold up, support, endure" - Etymology, Latin.

Hold up, support or endure what?

We do even more with our lives to the extent perhaps even our creator had not envisaged at the time of Adam or Eve.

I feel the key is, we should take charge of our lives to be able to support or endure.

Even for the basic needs we depend on Electricity boards, Water supply Board, of late the cola giants for water, Corporates for food and the list ever boring.

One of our learned freedom fighters, who was also a qualified economist, observed that we fit our legs into a standard size shoe whereas our feet are supposed to be clothed by the footwear.
In my childhood we always stiched hardy shoes that were measured for my feet and the arche support etc.

We have become so mediocre that we go to malls and pride ourselves in shopping the best.

My son wants one for football, one for cricket, one for school and of course one to look cool.

Centralised supplies will corrupt us, make us mediocre, fits us in standard sizes, are inefficient because of cross subsidy, and the consumption economy it serves, is wastefull of resources.

I believe we all can sustain life on earth if we decentralise and disconnect from the grid supplies of everything.

Communal or individual arrangement for consumption will only be sustainable and give us the fitness and time to enjoy the life of being.

Less of doing translates to more of being.

We are human beings afterall!

Best,

Chocku

The World has enough for everyone's needs,
but never enough for one man's greed:
M.K.Gandhi

Sustainable living series

2010-04-28T16:11:00.000+05:30

The last decade has seen the word "Sustainable" attain cult status among the glitterati and hence a tremendous amount of interest among the general public. As part of the energy efficiency industry i am often asked to comment on sustainability or better still offer sustainable solutions for traditional problems using technology as the enabling vehicle.
Sadly, but for a few honourable exceptions sustainability to most people is business as usual with a technological twist that suitably lowers their consumption. This is shallow and imho not what sustainability is all about !
This series will have small opinion pieces written by guest columnists and try to look beyond the veil and unmask pseudo sustainability. I invite my fellow bloggers to send me their opinion pieces on sustainability, issues with consumption etc to help put together a collection of articles in this blog that will pique the interest of the intelligent netizen.

Counterintuitive cleanup conundrum

2010-04-27T14:24:00.001+05:30

Slashdot is carrying a crazy story today on why less is actually more.

Scientists estimate that the US Clean Air Act has cut a major air pollutant, sulfate aerosols, by 30% to 50% since the 1980s, helping greatly reduce cases of asthma and other respiratory problems. But NPR reports that this good news may have a surprising downside: cleaner air might actually intensify global warming. One benefit of sulfates is that they've been helpfully blocking sunlight from striking the Earth for many decades, by brightening clouds and expanding their coverage. Researchers believe greenhouse gases such as CO2 have committed the Earth to an eventual warming of roughly 4 degrees Fahrenheit, a quarter of which the planet has already experienced. But thanks to cooling by aerosols starting in the 1940s, the planet has felt only a portion of that warming. And unlike CO2, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries, aerosols last in the air for a week at most, so cutting them would probably rapidly accelerate global warming.

Read More in the LA Times

Demand Side Management

2010-04-27T11:34:00.003+05:30

The Energy Conservation Act 2001, passed by the government of India is finally getting into mainstream implementation. Looks like it takes a decade for the implications of the act to sink in and funds to get allocated for the same. The government has however woken up. It is clear (as a former top technocrat once confessed to me) that the government can never put up enough infrastructure to meet the projected demand. Forget meeting the demand, even a fraction of the demand cannot be met. The alarming growth in Consumer power demand had also put an end to the cross subsidy route that has worked well till now. Basically any serious industry comes up with captive power or tries to enter a serviced zone where adequate power and backup is available.
Hence the current focus on demand side management. As the name implies the policy planners are trying to reduce the energy consumed for a given task to reduce the demand projection for a given growth rate of GDP. This is indeed laudable as a law. Further the Act has teeth. The nodal body heading this initiative in each state has funds to offer as carrots and penalties for non-compliance to wave as a stick. They have also identified the top energy consumers by industry and are using the new Energy Auditor function to track the actual implementation on the ground.
What does this imply for Industry ?

A huge socially important initiative is underway and offers Indian consumers an opportunity to upgrade their infrastructure to optimally use what is fast becoming a scarce resource, power. It opens up the floodgates of innovation and provides space for innovative companies to build great products and services around this demand. In a way this is a decisive move against the L1 culture that characterizes indian procurement, private or public. Specs are diluted, standards stretched in getting the cheapest product for a given job. Obviously energy efficiency is not key when lowest unit cost is the main criterion for selection. The move of the government in creating the BEE and imposing minimum standards for key products is laudable and will work wonders for raising the energy efficiency of Indian operations. Currently our energy efficiency of manufacture in most areas is probably the lowest in the world. The absence of capital for technology up-gradation is the main culprit.

This is a very interesting phase for innovative indian startup's in the energy efficiency space as the scale of the indian market allows them to become global very fast if they know their game. The beauty of local consumption driven growth is that it is relatively immune to global trends. Watch this space for action.
Get the details here. and here.

IPL, BCCI and the real question

2010-04-22T22:57:00.003+05:30

Anyone with a power connection in India would surely have not missed the IPL tamasha over the last week. While i like Tharoor, i cannot condone such self serving Kleptocracy.
I am sure that the average alert netizen is in possession of the major facts. How there is crony capitalism, hidden stakes, match fixing, etc in the IPL, BCCI etc. However i have but one question

1) After all this crap, why is the BCCI, which according to Wikipedia is

" The Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI, is the apex governing body for cricket in India, headquartered at Mumbai. The board was formed in December 1928 as the national governing body for all cricket in India. BCCI replaced Calcutta Cricket Club. It is a society, registered under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act. The BCCI often uses government-owned stadiums across the country at a nominal annual rent. It is a private club consortium. Basically to become a member of a state-level association, you need to be introduced by another member and also pay an annual fee. The state-level clubs select their representatives (secretaries) who in turn select the BCCI officials. BCCI are not required to make their balance sheets public. In the past, tax exemptions were granted to BCCI on the grounds as promoting cricket was a charitable activity but since 3 year due to IPL that stand has come into question. [1]

As a member of the International Cricket Council (ICC), it has the authority to select players, umpires and officials to participate in international events and exercises total control over them. Without its recognition, no competitive cricket involving BCCI-contracted Indian players can be hosted within or outside the country."

Given a monopoly on cricket in India ? Why is the stewardship of a "gentelman's game" vested with such an obviously corrupt body ? I can understand what the ICC wants, beggar britons dont have much choice but to fellate choice sub-continental meat, starting with Dalmia who actually gave modi the ideas he seems to pioneer today. Why is the Republic of india that is represented by an unambiguous constitution putting up with the national team being run by a "private body, registered as a society in T.N" without anyone questioning this franchise. Why on earth would a stricken union minister want to be pres of the BCCI and the minister of agriculture ? Altruism ? Especially when his daughter and in-laws seem to have multi crore stakes in the IPL :)

Cut the bull shit .. Why is cricket the monopoly of BCCI which is not a body accountable to the CAG ? Why was the ICL hounded out ? Why cant we have 2 or 3 or 100 leagues that compete on a transparent rating system ? Why are the players quiet ? Why has no government including the current opposition never had a problem with this ? Why does an NCP minister forward stolen commercial intelligence to someone who in theory is an opponent? Well my friends the ruling classes have figured out how our constitution can be circumvented in the pursuit of power. Nothing new in this, just a stupid population that is so ready to be seduced, that its child's play for the old feudal class.
While the government of the day and their predecessors seemed to agree that competition is good for the consumer, why the consensus on keeping the de facto national game in "private and unaccountable " hands ? As they say in the past " follow the money". But with the apathy that i know exists, what the hell!!!

Compulsory voting revisited

2010-04-18T11:09:00.002+05:30

With the media reporting the return of the Gujarat local body voting bill, it is heartening to see the constitutional checks and balances still working. This blog has pointed out in the past that such idiotic unenforcable laws that are truly anit-democratic will run into issues with constitutional propriety. here. The sangh parivar's fundamental problem stems from the fact that the founding fathers thought out the constitution rather well. My undying gratitude to the constituent assembly for their foresight and the concept of underlying "Spirit of the Consttitution". The recent very stupid anti beef consumption laws passed in the karnataka legislature is another such case in point. On one hand we see progressive legislation like the RTI getting passed and as a counterpoint the right wing rushes in crap like this. Anyway they even tried to "review" the constitution in Vajpai's period. Wake up time...

US DOE releases SSL energy report

2010-02-19T14:02:00.001+05:30

From LEDS Magazine

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has released a new report that analyzes the potential energy savings of broadly deployed solid-state lighting (SSL) sources – predominantly LED- and OLED-based products. The DOE projects that between 2010 and 2030, SSL could save 1,488 terawatt-hours representing a savings of $120 billion at today's energy prices.

The full report is available here

Indian Railways : The LED shift

2009-10-02T17:49:00.001+05:30

ALLAHABAD, September 5, 2009: In another step towards energy conservation, Indian Railways has decided to install special types of eco-friendly LED (Light Emitting Diode) based lights in the coaches of trains. Presently, small bulbs, CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lights) are used for lighting purpose in the coaches of trains. Though these lights provide efficient lighting but they consume comparatively more energy than the LED lights. Further, they are also burden on the alternator and the batteries of the coaches. Pointedly, a Light Emitting Diode (LED) is a semiconductor device which converts electricity into light. Each diode is about 1/4 inch in diameter and uses about ten milliamperes to operate at about one-tenth of a watt. LEDs are small in size, but can be grouped together for higher intensity applications. LED lights are more rugged and damage-resistant than compact fluorescent and incandescent bulbs. LED lights don't flicker.
LED based Luminaire are more efficient, compact, quick light up in micro-seconds, ideal for use in applications that are subject to frequent on and off cycle, dimming feature, cool long life, more than 50 thousand hours, shock resistant, maintenance free and having no toxicity. There will be reduction of power consumption by 30-35 per cent on account of implementation of LED based coach lighting scheme. It would also reduce the burden on alternator and batteries of the coach which are being fitted in the lower part of the coach.
Source: The Times of India

stupid idea on stilts: Compulsary voting

2009-05-09T01:19:00.002+05:30

The state of the polity requires some comment. I see a lot of nonsense about compulsory voting in the media (with the traditional honourable exception of The Hindu). I would ignore this but for the fact that this is clearly propaganda from the religious right that always benefits from the same. Bit of sociology, but we will not get into it now. Forgetting ideology, any policy that cannot be enforced is stupid. How will the 'government' enforce this when the census is half baked and we have a billion folks around. Do all urban voters (who are not so difficult to enumerate) enfranchised ? If so why do i see pictures of disenfranchised voters holding their EPIC's in my morning paper ? How can every eligible voter be made to turn out ? Clearly this is a red herring. There is no scope for any compulsory anything in a human society. Of course this is to appeal to the Taliban & Rama Sene ! Want Some ?

We beat moore's law 5 x !

2008-09-04T22:03:00.003+05:30

Obviously roti, kapada our makan is more important.
From wikipedia

" states that every decade, the price of LEDs have fallen by 10x while the performance (measured in flux per unit) has increased by 20x, for a given wavelength (color) of light. It is considered the LED counterpart to Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors in a given integrated circuit doubles every 18 to 24 months.

Haitz's Law is named after Dr. Roland Haitz, a now-retired scientist at Agilent Technologies."

heads up - 5 most ridiculous ELUA's

2008-09-04T21:55:00.001+05:30

Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.

Read more here.

K-T boundary, ticks killed the dinos

2008-09-04T21:50:00.001+05:30

Interesting theory, that seems kinda right.

Asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct, but a new argument is that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force -- biting, disease-carrying insects.

Read more here.

4 exciting new LED lighting products from Alternate

2008-08-31T13:29:00.005+05:30

Alternate Lighting has announced the commercial debut of 4 new led lighting products in various verticals.
The indoor segment saw the introduction of 2 variants of 'ColdSpark' a 2.5 W GU5.3 MR16 compatible warm and cool white lamp. This is a direct drop in replacement for indoor halogen fixtures rated at 20W. There is also a 5 W range that is targeted at the 50W halogen replacement market.
The company has entered the industrial segment with 'Solitaire' a 1 W neutral white high CRI industrial sewing machine task lamp. This product is expected to have high penetration as it allows up to 50 % reduction in lighting costs for the price sensitive garment export industry.

OE shipments of 'Rhodium' a hybrid grid - solar capable street lighting solution with output range from 20W right upto 75W have also commenced.
The rural lighting segment was addressed using the 'Aadhi' community lighting solution. Aadhi is highly rated as it produces about 9 hours of constant lumen light from a single day's charge.

Disclosure : I work at Alternate.

அபூர்வமான மொழிபெயர்ப்பு கருவி

2008-08-31T13:03:00.003+05:30

அங்கில தட்டச்சில் எழுதப்பட்டு சொயமாக கூகுளின் மென்பொருளால் மொழிபெயரபடுகிறது. இதன் பொருட்டு இன்ச்ச்ரிப்ட் தட்டச்சு மறையுமா ? பியன்படுட மிக சுலபமாக உள்லதூ. தொகபது சுலபம் அல்ல.

End of an era

2008-06-24T11:19:00.002+05:30

George Carlin, the funniest man in the world, finally gave up and succumbed to a heart attack. The master has brightened many a day for me and provided shrewd insight into people and culture on the vehicle of his comedy. The world is a poorer place, but hey what the hell no one has escaped this planet alive. Read more about the masters life.
Good bye george. May the sun (or Joe pesci) protect you...

Why the left is wrong on energy taxation

2008-06-06T11:30:00.003+05:30

There has been a significant jump is auto fuel costs across india. Petrol in Bangalore (highest in the country) is about Rs 58.60 /Lit (USD 5.15 / Gallon) to Delhi (lowest) which is about Rs 50.60 /lit (USD 4.45 / gallon). Diesel has shown a similar jump in costs though it is still heavily subsidized. This consumer hike is also accompanied by a huge hit in taxation as both customs duty and excise have been cut. The state governments (who typically levy between 20 - 26 % VAT) may cut the rates slightly, however the rise is not likely to fall below 8 % or so. This is still fine if you look at the background.

The public debate has been on how ´fair´ the hike is and the left front (along with the ever opportunistic right wing hindu parties) have been talking of cutting taxes to the bone etc. While i generally am sympathetic to the leftś agenda, this time around yechury is very wrong. And he is also being stupid in calling the losses incurred bythe oil majors ńotional´. Notional does not mean imaginary. The private majors (reliance, shell et al) have already scaled down local sale (reliance exports bulk of its production), shut down bunks and generally used the rise in crude to improve their margins. The left talks of windfall profit tax, but there is no jurisprudence to back that. The left always loves revolution :)

So instead of beating around the bush, lets seize the bull by the horns and let the cat out of the bag (thanks jim hacker). The real problem is rise in consumption, aspirational life styles that are unsustainable and the usual thick headed human need to elevate the standard of oneś living. In a way Georgie Podgie Bush is right in that costs are rising due to higher consumption by india and china. People who were taking the bus to work a generation ago are worrying about parking for the second car. What the US did with its post WW 2 loot, india is trying to emulate in the 21st century. Well, wake up, the party is over.

The future is renewable power and a lot less of it than now. Distributed generation and consumption is the order of the day. While i will not comment on the use the state puts its oil taxes to, i for one am firmly for higher taxation on fuels to *curb consumption*. As a acid test i will track automotive sales for the next 2 quarters. I am betting that the fuel price hike will have no effect on auto sales and will serve to weed out the more inefficient models. Lets see...

Ahoy !

2008-06-06T11:26:00.002+05:30

It has been a while since i wrote anything here. Mostly laziness and a lot of bandwidth consumed by my startup. Anyway the world has been busy and while i was away, managed to push up energy costs 100 %. In a way this is good as the only language we understand is force. Watch this space.

Some more

2007-11-07T14:38:00.000+05:30

Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever.

Humour

2007-11-05T11:03:00.000+05:30

A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it.

IBM turns chip industry trash to solar industry treasure

2007-10-31T10:51:00.000+05:30

IBM Corp. is scheduled to announce today that is has developed a way to easily refurbish scrap material left over from the creation of microchips so it can be used in solar energy panels, a process that could save money and help feed the solar industry's growing appetite for silicon.

Big Blue said it plans to share the technique with the semiconductor industry. Analysts say it could be widely adopted.
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/10/30/1030silicon.html

Energy Self-sufficiency in the 21st Century

2007-10-17T13:27:00.000+05:30

Wisdom

2007-08-22T11:54:00.000+05:30

All his life he has looked away... to the horizon, to the sky, to the future. Never his mind on where he was, on what he was doing. -- Yoda

JouleSort: A Balanced Energy-Efficiency Benchmark

2007-08-22T11:46:00.000+05:30

Abstract:
The energy efficiency of computer systems is an important
concern in a variety of contexts. In data centers, reducing
energy use improves operating cost, scalability, reliability,
and other factors. For mobile devices, energy consumption
directly affects functionality and usability. We propose and
motivate JouleSort, an external sort benchmark, for evaluating
the energy efficiency of a wide range of computer systems
from clusters to handhelds. We list the criteria, challenges,
and pitfalls from our experience in creating a fair energyefficiency
benchmark. Using a commercial sort, we demonstrate
a JouleSort system that is over 3.5x as energy-efficient
as last year’s estimated winner. This system is quite different
from those currently used in data centers. It consists of
a commodity mobile CPU and 13 laptop drives, connected
by server-style I/O interfaces.

Read the paper here.

Google's paper on power provisioning for data centers

2007-08-22T11:41:00.000+05:30

Abstract:
Large-scale Internet services require a computing infrastructure that
can be appropriately described as a warehouse-sized computing
system. The cost of building datacenter facilities capable of delivering
a given power capacity to such a computer can rival the recurring
energy consumption costs themselves. Therefore, there are
strong economic incentives to operate facilities as close as possible
to maximum capacity, so that the non-recurring facility costs can be
best amortized. That is difficult to achieve in practice because of
uncertainties in equipment power ratings and because power consumption
tends to vary significantly with the actual computing activity.
Effective power provisioning strategies are needed to determine
how much computing equipment can be safely and efficiently
hosted within a given power budget.

Read the paper here here.

Silicon nanoparticles enhance performance of solar cells

2007-08-22T11:40:00.000+05:30

Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell’s life, researchers now report.

“Integrating a high-quality film of silicon nanoparticles 1 nanometer in size directly onto silicon solar cells improves power performance by 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum,” said Munir Nayfeh, a physicist at the University of Illinois and corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters.

A 10 percent improvement in the visible range of the spectrum can be achieved by using nanoparticles 2.85 nanometers in size, said Nayfeh, who also is a researcher at the university’s Beckman Institute.

In conventional solar cells, ultraviolet light is either filtered out or absorbed by the silicon and converted into potentially damaging heat, not electricity. In previous work, however, Nayfeh showed that ultraviolet light could efficiently couple to correctly sized nanoparticles and produce electricity. That work was reported in the August 2004 issue of the journal Photonics Technology Letters.

To make their improved solar cells, the researchers began by first converting bulk silicon into discrete, nano-sized particles using a patented process they developed. Depending on their size, the nanoparticles will fluoresce in distinct colors.

Nanoparticles of the desired size were then dispersed in isopropyl alcohol and dispensed onto the face of the solar cell. As the alcohol evaporated, a film of closely packed nanoparticles was left firmly fastened to the solar cell.

Solar cells coated with a film of 1 nanometer, blue luminescent particles showed a power enhancement of about 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, but less than 3 percent in the visible range, the researchers report.

Solar cells coated with 2.85 nanometer, red particles showed an enhancement of about 67 percent in the ultraviolet range, and about 10 percent in the visible.

The improved performance is a result of enhanced voltage rather than current, Nayfeh said. “Our results point to a significant role for charge transport across the film and rectification at the nanoparticle interface.”

The process of coating solar cells with silicon nanoparticles could be easily incorporated into the manufacturing process with little additional cost, Nayfeh said.

Atanu Dey on ICT

2007-08-18T12:00:00.000+05:30

Atanu is a development economist and a very perceptive individual. He also has a lot of common sense that's becoming increasingly rare in this information overloaded world. Atanu on the digital divide.

Supergyre identified by the Aussies

2007-08-17T10:56:00.000+05:30

The aussies have broken new "ground" in identifying an undersea current that links the three southern hemisphere oceans. It would have been easier if they could ask a whale :)
From Science Daily
Australian scientists have identified the missing deep ocean pathway – or ‘supergyre’ – linking the three Southern Hemisphere ocean basins in research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate.The new research confirms the current sweeping out of the Tasman Sea past Tasmania and towards the South Atlantic is a previously undetected component of the world climate system’s engine-room – the thermohaline circulation or ‘global conveyor belt’.

Wealth from Oceans Flagship* scientist Ken Ridgway says the current, called the Tasman Outflow, occurs at an average depth of 800-1,000 metres and may play an important role in the response of the conveyor belt to climate change.

So, What's Life anyway ?

2007-08-17T10:43:00.000+05:30

A startling discovery, something that makes you go back to first principles and question the very axioms on which your value system rests. Inorganic interstellar life ! Read on

From : Science Daily
Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space have been revealed in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. They also point to a possible new explanation for the origin of life on earth.Life on earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is nothing short of alien, going beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

Ultrafast quantum computer: optically controlled electrons

2007-08-16T14:45:00.000+05:30

Some more on the rapidly expanding portfolio of controlled light. Qbits meet photons.

From Physorg.org
Susan Clark and Kai-Mei Fu, both of Stanford University, and Thaddeus Ladd and Yoshihisa Yamamoto, both with Stanford University as well as the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, have published their results on the new scheme in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“We still don't know what a final quantum computer will look like,” Ladd explained to PhysOrg.com. “Large scale quantum computation is a technology that is still very far away from being implemented, and will probably incorporate many new ideas that have not been imagined yet. The important development in this paper is finding a physical implementation of an existing theoretical idea [using phase gates to couple non-local spins] and estimating the speed.”

On a single semiconductor chip, the researchers combine fast single-bit rotations and fast two-qubit gates, both of which are optically controlled. In quantum computing, the orientation and phase of the electron spin serve as the bit state, and the gates are responsible for performing reversible operations on input data to produce output data.

The semiconductor chip is a square millimeter in size, and consists of a loop of cavities—together, this apparatus is called a “loop-qubus.” Each cavity holds a quantum dot, which is a small piece of semiconductor that contains, in this scheme, a single electron. By focusing optical pulses at individual quantum dots, the electron spins rotate, changing the state of the bit.

The architecture is built on the idea of using phase gates to couple non-local spins. The optical pulses can provide a means to couple distant electron spins, or qubits, so that the phase of one qubit can depend on the phase of another qubit. When coupled, the qubits’ spin states form a “qu-bus,” which is the basis of a two-qubit gate.

The operating speed of a quantum computer is measured by its clock signal, which could take many different forms. In the optical control scheme, the pulses, which could be supplied by a laser, provide a clock rate for the system. Ladd explained that there are several limitations on speed for quantum computers.

“In quantum computing, not only is the state of the bit (0 or 1) important, but also the phase of the bit,” he said. “How quickly we can control the phase of the qubit, in our scheme, depends on the magnetic field. Increasing the magnetic field increases how fast the phase for any single qubit changes in time and ultimately sets the limit of how fast we can control our qubits. In the article, we give the limit of about 100 GHz, which is assuming a very high magnetic field, which would require superconducting magnets to achieve.

“The second limitation on speed is the time it takes for the phase of one qubit to change the phase of another,” he continued. “This must be done with pulses that are slower than the rate light moves in and out of each optical cavity, so this brings the speed down to more like 10 GHz. Finally, as the computer gets bigger, the amount of time it takes for light to propagate around the system will also limit speed, perhaps bringing the speed of physical qubits down to GHz compared to classical computers.”

Darwinism

2007-08-09T11:24:00.000+05:30

Lighting fixtures market to exceed $94 billion by 2010

2007-08-03T16:08:00.000+05:30

LEDMag reports :
The worldwide market for lighting fixtures is expected to top $94 billion by 2010, according to a report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

The lighting industry encompasses industrial, commercial, residential and public lighting, and growth is expected mainly in the end-use sectors of construction and other industrial development activities.

The global lighting fixtures market comprises of several companies engaged in the development and manufacture of a range of fixtures from basic sconces to complex chandeliers. High quality and product innovation remain key competitive strategies for global majors, while price has emerged as a strong competitive platform in recent years.

The report says that solid-state lighting using LEDs and other technologies is expected to play a major role in lighting the future. Demand is to be stimulated by highly priced, technologically advanced and long lasting energy-saving products such as non-incandescent portable fixtures, high intensity discharge (HID) lighting, electronic ballasts, and portable fixtures using LEDs. The emergence of solid-state lighting technology that offers increased energy savings and advanced capabilities is poised to act as a significant challenge to existing lamps and fixtures manufacturers worldwide.

Europe currently represents the largest market in the global lighting fixtures market and is projected to cross US$23.5 billion by the year 2009. The Asia-Pacific region is poised to post the fastest compounded annual growth rate among the regional markets, at 6.5% over the ten-year analysis period.

The global lighting equipment market is expected to witness growth mainly in the end use sectors of construction and other industrial development activities. Another factor that is to contribute to growth of the market is booming end-use sectors in developing regions. Growth in industrialization and construction activities in these regions is spurring accelerated demand for lighting equipment.

Also, a rise in living standards, coupled with increased real estate activity, is expected to position China as the leading market for lighting equipment, with growth in the industrialized Western Europe and North America exhibiting less than global average. With the market in these regions mostly dependent on new construction activity, efforts are on to maximize energy efficiency in existing buildings.

42.8 % and counting

2007-08-02T11:19:00.000+05:30

A major landmark has been achieved by a team at University of Delaware. Static concentrator based Si solar cells have achieved 42.8 % combined efficiency. From renewable energy access :
In November 2005, the UD-led consortium received approximately $13 million in funding for the initial phases of the DARPA Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) program to develop affordable portable solar cell battery chargers.

The highly efficient VHESC solar cell uses a novel lateral optical concentrating system that splits solar light into three different energy bins of high, medium and low, and directs them onto cells of various light sensitive materials to cover the solar spectrum. The system delivers variable concentrations to the different solar cell elements. The concentrator is stationary with a wide acceptance angle optical system that captures large amounts of light and eliminates the need for complicated tracking devices.

The VHESC would have immediate application in the high-technology military, which increasingly relies upon a variety of electronics for individual soldiers and the equipment that supports them. As well, it is hoped the solar cells will have a large number of commercial applications.

Today, the American soldier carries a pack that weighs nearly 100 pounds of which about 20 pounds are the three-day supply of batteries needed to power their gear. The DARPA program aims to dramatically reduce the battery logistics pipeline and provide the soldier with more power at reduced weight, thus improving mobility, survivability and the availability of advanced electronic technologies on the battlefield.

Death Head moth (Acherontia styx)

2007-07-25T12:10:00.001+05:30

There is still a lot of fauna left in Bangalore. Photographed this beauty is a dark corridor of my house on 20th July 2007. Beautiful specimen. The lighting used was a 50 lm 1 W power led driven 350 mA 4000K flashlight at a viewing angle of about 40 deg supplemented by the camera's xenon flash. Click on the image for the full res image.

Graphene Nanoelectronics: Making Tomorrow’s Computers from a Pencil Trace

2007-07-25T11:24:00.000+05:30

Physorg has this report:
A representation of conduction channels on a graphene nanoribbon interfaced with gold contacts. Researchers believe graphene’s extremely efficient conductive properties can be exploited for use in nanoelectronics.

The world is running out of copper and other metals. This is a very important development.

Wisdom

2007-07-25T11:23:00.000+05:30

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx

Nanocrystals Key to Better Fuel Cells

2007-07-17T14:33:00.000+05:30

A new way to make cubic zirconia with very small crystal sizes could be key to making hydrogen fuel cells more reliable and cost-effective.

The invention by a team led by Zuhair Munir, distinguished professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UC Davis, was recently included in Nanotech Briefs magazine's Nano50 awards for 2007. The awards recognize technologies, products and people most likely to impact the state of the art in nanotechnology.

Fuel cells combine hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air to release energy, leaving only water as a waste product. Fuel cells could be an alternative power source for vehicles and other uses, but there are significant challenges to their widespread use. Current fuel cells run at temperatures of 1,500 to 1,800 degrees F (800 to 1,000 degrees C). Just reaching working temperature requires energy, and the heat quickly wears out metal, plastic and ceramic components. Prevailing fuel-cell designs also require an expensive platinum catalyst.

The new technology could allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, 122 to 212 degrees F (50 to 100 degrees C).

Munir, Umberto Anselmi-Tamburini and Sangtae Kim at UC Davis invented a method to make oxides such as cubic zirconia (zirconium oxide) with extremely small grain sizes, on the order of 15 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or the size of a few atoms. At that scale, the crystals conduct electricity very well, through the movement of protons. The material could be used in fuel cells that are based on chemical oxides.

Munir was also recipient of the 2007 UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The prize includes a cash award of $35,000, thought to be the largest of its kind in the nation.

A patent application has been filed for the technology. A paper describing the technique was published in the journal Applied Physics Letters last year. The Nano50 awards will be presented during the National Nano Engineering Conference in Boston, Nov. 14 and 15, 2007.

We love kalamari

2007-07-14T14:42:00.000+05:30

My kids could feast on this beastie for a year :)
One of the largest giant squid ever found has washed up on a remote Australian beach, sparking a race against time by scientists to examine the rarely seen deep-ocean creature.

The squid, the mantle or main body of which measured two-meters (6.5 feet) long, was found by a walker late on Tuesday on Ocean Beach, near Strahan, on the western coast of island state Tasmania.

"It's a whopper," Tasmanian Museum senior curator Genefor Walker-Smith told local media on Wednesday. "The main mantle is about one meter across and its total length is about eight meters."

Scientists would take samples from the creature, identified by state parks officials as an Architeuthis, which can grow to more than 10 meters (33 feet) in length and weigh more than 275 kilograms (606 pounds). The Tasmanian animal was 250 kg, Pemberton said.

new Wildlife photo blog

2007-07-12T15:27:00.000+05:30

A friend of mine Ulhas Anand has started this very nice blog themed on the photographs that he takes. Ulhas is a long time conservation activist and birdwatcher. Worth looking at especially if you want good pictures of south india flora and fauna.

ACPI standard explained

2007-07-11T13:31:00.000+05:30

MIPS / Watt is the ultimate metric to measure the efficacy of computing. With the race to develop faster and quicker machines a proliferation of high power consumption devices have hit the marktet. The article below explains the ACPI standard and how it reduces consumption in modern PC's.
Read more here.

ALPL develops worlds smallest LED driver

2007-07-03T16:40:00.001+05:30

The title says it all. Hate to boast but i need to :)

Goldman Sachs on renewables

2007-07-03T15:58:00.000+05:30

Money like water finds its own level. The buzz on renewables has been getting louder for some time and i guess big money knows when it is time to switch on the sun.
From CNNmoney.com (where else :)

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank heavyweight long known for its enthusiasm for alternative fuel sources, outlined five events Thursday it says are key to the rising sector's growth.

1 - Enacting renewable portfolio standards - These standards, known as RPS, require utilities to buy a certain amount of power from renewable resources - usually between 10 and 25 percent. The idea is to provide a reliable market where producers of renewable electricity can sell their energy.

About half the states now have them, and the energy bill currently under debate in the Senate includes a proposal to set a national RPS at 15 percent.

But the proposal faces stiff opposition from the electric utility industry and senators from the Southeast. They say some areas of the country, like the relatively windless Southeast, have far fewer renewable resources available, and therefore setting RPS standards should be left up to the states.

2 - Boost enforcement of RPS standards - There are plenty of RPS standards out there and plenty more feel-good proposals, said Tim Kingston, a Goldman managing director, in a speech at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum on Wall Street. "But unless you put real teeth into it, the incentives that drive money into that space are not going to be there."
3 - Enact a carbon cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax - Carbon dioxide is one of the primary greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. Burning fossil fuels is one of the main ways carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere.

There have been several proposals either to cap carbon emissions or impose a tax on fossil fuels in order to cut their use. The United States has so far rejected those calls, instead opting for a voluntary approach that has not resulted in an overall reduction of carbon emissions.

But with the Democrats now in control of Congress, Kingston expects the prospect of a cap or a tax to be revisited.

"We're confident one or the other will be implemented soon," he says.

4 - A significant increase in fossil fuel prices - Oil prices have skyrocketed in the past few years, more than tripling since 2002.

Most analysts blame surging demand - mainly from the United States and developing nations - that has led to oil consumption amounts that are nearly equal to the amount the world produces.
The slim difference between production and consumption has deepened the effect of geopolitical tensions, refinery problems, natural disasters and other events, as the world is less able to deal with a disruption in supply. This has pushed prices even higher.

The high prices and high demand have also attracted the attention of investors, further inflating prices.

Some analysts say this scenario is not going to change and may only get worse as the world's oil consumption continues to grow, although this view is by no means unanimous.

5 - The 2008 presidential election - The Bush administration has so far opposed both mandatory carbon regulation and renewable portfolio standards. Most renewable energy investors hope the next administration will be more receptive to these ideas.

New polymer to increase energy density

2007-07-03T15:53:00.000+05:30

Science daily reports
North Carolina State University physicists have recently deduced a way to improve high-energy-density capacitors so that they can store up to seven times as much energy per unit volume than the common capacitor. High performance capacitors would enable hybrid and electric cars with much greater acceleration, better and faster steering of rockets and spacecraft, better regeneration of electricity when using brakes in electric cars, and improved lasers, among many other electrical applications.A polymer called PVDF has interested physicists as a possible high-performance dielectric. It exists in two forms, polarized or unpolarized. In either case, its structure is mostly frozen-in and changes only slightly when a capacitor is charged up. Mixing a second polymer called CTFE with PVDF results in a material with regions that can change their structure, enabling it to store and release unprecedented amounts of energy.

The team, led by Vivek Ranjan, concluded that a more ordered arrangement of the material inside the capacitor could further increase the energy storage of new high-performance capacitors, which already store energy four times more densely than capacitors used in industry. Their predictions of higher energy density capacitors are encouraging, but have yet to be experimentally tested.

what out (CFL's) here i come

2007-06-29T12:37:00.000+05:30

A road map that probably curdles the blood of the CFL vendors.Cree is the first vendor of the block with these numbers. However given that Philips and Osram are the biggies in this game and have a decent opto-electronic inventory themselves we will probably not see too much blood on the roads :)

Dust to Dust

2007-06-28T11:09:00.000+05:30

New Scientist Environment has this report on a microwave technology to turn plastics back into Diesel oil and gas. Could be the way to handle these mucky plasitcs. I like the idea of stuffing the car tank with plastic bags and driving to work.
A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas.

All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers).

Key to GRC’s process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.

GRC's machine is called the Hawk-10. Its smaller incarnations look just like an industrial microwave with bits of machinery attached to it. Larger versions resemble a concrete mixer.

"Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process," says Jerry Meddick, director of business development at GRC, based in New Jersey. "We release those hydrocarbon molecules from the material and it then becomes gas and oil."

Whatever does not have a hydrocarbon base is left behind, minus any water it contained as this gets evaporated in the microwave.

Amdahl's Law

2007-06-27T16:44:00.000+05:30

Bigger is not better, faster is not quicker. This is the theme of this post.
The Law of diminishing returns is not exactly a new phenomenon, it was originally noticed in parallel computers by IBM engineer Gene Amdahl, one of creators of the IBM System 360 Architecture. The original describes the problem in parallel computing terms however this simplified version pretty much describes the problem in terms of any modern computer system:

"Each component of a computer system contributes delay to the system If you make a single component of the system infinitely fast...
...system throughput will still exhibit the combined delays of the other components." [3]

As the clock speeds goes upwards the actual performance of the CPU does not scale exactly with the clock speed. A 2GHz CPU is unlikely to be twice the speed of a 1GHz CPU, indeed on everyday tasks people seem to have some difficulty telling the difference between these speeds.

The reason for the lack of scaling is the fact that memory performance has not scaled with the CPU so the CPU is sitting doing nothing for much of it's time (HP estimate this at 70% for server CPUs). Additionally the latency of memory has barely improved at all so any program which requires the CPU to access memory a lot will be effected badly by memory latency and the CPU will not reach anything near it's true potential. The CPU memory cache can alleviate this sort of problem to a degree but it's effectiveness depends very much on the type of cache and software algorithm used.

Many of the techniques used within x86 CPUs may only boost performance by a small amount but they are used because of the need for AMD and Intel to outdo one another. As the clock speed increases ever higher the scaling problem increases further meaning that the additional effort has less and less effect on overall performance. Recent SPEC marks for two Dell workstations show that a greater than 50% increase in CPU speed and the addition of hyper-threading results in only a 26% increase in SPEC marks [2]. Yet when the Itanium 2 CPU got an 11% clock speed boost and double the cache the SPEC mark increased by around 50%

Of course there are other factors which effect the performance of CPUs such as the cache size and design, the memory interface, compiler & settings, the language it's programmed in and the programmer who wrote it. Changing the language can in fact be shown to have a much greater effect than changing the CPU [4]. Changing the programmer can also have a very large effect [5].

This is why computing as you know today is not sustainable. Technology vs Hype. Unfortunately we all know who wins this game...

Analysis of Philips's takeover of ColorKinetics

2007-06-22T11:56:00.000+05:30

From LED Magazine by Jim Witaker:
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but this deal shouldn't come as a huge surprise; successful, innovative, technology-rich LED lighting specialist attracts the attention of lighting giant with self-professed commitment to solid-state lighting as the future of the lighting industry. A bit of handholding ensues, possibly some flirtation with other potential suitors, then the marriage is announced. And no more squabbling about who gets to light the Empire State Building.

The deal makes a lot of sense on many levels for both sides, much like last year's announcement of cooperation between GE and Nichia. Speaking of which, we can speculate that GE and probably Osram as well would have had a strong interest in acquiring CK. Was there a bidding war that pushed the price offered by Philips up to $34 per share? As I said, this is just speculation.

Among many benefits of the deal, Philips gains an established US-based LED fixture supplier. Philips' own North American Solid State Lighting Luminaires business will be "merged" with Philips CK in Burlington, MA (LEDs Magazine has decided that Philips CK is a lot easier to type than the official name of Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions.) The Philips group in New Jersey has been around for less than 2 years and has made some progress in architectural and other lighting markets. But these projects have not used Philips LED luminaires, and instead the company has partnered with smaller suppliers and integrators such as LED Effects (see News).

One issue, said Philips, was the time taken to redesign "European" luminaires for the North American market and gain the necessary UL listing. Another issue, in the view of external observers, was patents – there is a widely-held (but unsubstantiated) belief that CK's strong patent portfolio prevented Philips from launching color-changing LED luminaires into the US market. Some industry participants looked forward to the day when Philips would challenge CK head-on, possibly in court. Now the goalposts have been shifted, and the patent dispute between CK and TIR Systems (now also part of Philips) will also quietly disappear. The outcome of this case would have been extremely interesting, since we all wanted to know what the real deal is with CK's core patents (Prior art or not? Obvious or not?). Backed by Philips, the CK portfolio takes on a whole new dimension, and there won't be any more lawsuits. There might, however, be a lot more licensees.

However, this should be viewed as a positive for the solid-state lighting industry, since it removes a degree of uncertainty and allows the industry to move forward. Competitors will view Philips with even more trepidation, since the company is now firmly positioned as a core part of the SSL industry. Philips' existing SSL activities joined with CK and TIR make a powerful combination, not forgetting of course that Philips owns Lumileds, the largest power LED manufacturer*.

Even so, the SSL industry is at an early stage in its development, and there are plenty of opportunities for a multitude of players to compete in a wide range of different applications. The general illumination market is still wide open, and Philips will have to continue to work hard to become the major player in this area – even with CK on board.

* Although Lumileds and CK will now be part of Philips, don't expect CK to start using Lumileds devices exclusively; CK works closely with Cree and Osram and was also using Nichia LEDs in some of its products shown at Lightfair, and this situation will undoubtedly continue. And speaking of Cree; as of the end of March this year Cree held about 4% of shares in Color Kinetics.

Carbon neutral bangalore

2007-06-22T11:42:00.000+05:30

A new site that is aimed at educating the public on carbon emissions and energy use reduction has 'sprung' up. It is bangalore centric (smart move) and focussed on the city and its environs. They also seems to have plans to create a portal that serves as a clearing house for 'green' products. Check it out here.

Follow the money

2007-06-21T12:34:00.000+05:30

A list of energy investments that have been made by Vinod Khosla. In my personal opinion Corn ethanol is a stupid and in fact criminal idea, being touted as the intermediary to Cellulosic ethanol, which is no where near where it should be technologically. This is gives one a clear picture of the people with "long term vision". I dont think that it is an accident that Corn is in the end.Read and think.

1) Cellulosic - Mascoma, Celunol, Range Fuels, 1 stealth startup

2) Future Fuels - LS9, Gevo, Amyris Biotechnologies, Coskata Energy

3) Efficiency - Transonic Combustion, GroupIV Semiconductor, 1 stealth startup

4) Homes - Living Homes, Global Homes

5) Natural Gas - Great Point Energy

6) Solar - Stion, Ausra

7) Tools - Nanostellar, Codon Devices, Praj

8) Water - 2 stealth startup

9) Plastic - Segetis, 1 stealth startup

10) Corn/Sugar Fuels - Altra, Cilion, Hawaii Bio

The vertical limit

2007-06-21T12:14:00.000+05:30

A new (?) project seeking to use high rise space for agriculture is in the pipeline. The basic idea is very similar to what the moties used to do in their cities (Jerry Pournelle & Larry Niven, The mote in god's eye). So life imitates art. Still a good concept though i am not convinced on the energy balance of the system. From the Website:
Advantages of Vertical Farming
Year-round crop production; 1 indoor acre is equivalent to 4-6 outdoor acres or more, depending upon the crop (e.g., strawberries: 1 indoor acre = 30 outdoor acres)
No weather-related crop failures due to droughts, floods, pests
All VF food is grown organically: no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers
VF virtually eliminates agricultural runoff by recycling black water
VF returns farmland to nature, restoring ecosystem functions and services
VF greatly reduces the incidence of many infectious diseases that are acquired at the agricultural interface
VF converts black and gray water into potable water by collecting the water of
evapotranspiration
VF adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible
parts of plants and animals
VF dramatically reduces fossil fuel use (no tractors, plows, shipping.)
VF converts abandoned urban properties into food production centers
VF creates sustainable environments for urban centers
VF creates new employment opportunities
We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on
earth
VF may prove to be useful for integrating into refugee camps
VF offers the promise of measurable economic improvement for tropical and subtropical
LDCs. If this should prove to be the case, then VF may be a catalyst in helping to reduce or even reverse the population growth of LDCs as they adopt urban agriculture as a strategy for sustainable food production.
VF could reduce the incidence of armed conflict over natural resources, such as water
and land for agriculture

Gyan

2007-06-21T12:13:00.000+05:30

Matz's Law: A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

Philips LED's for the London Dome

2007-06-20T13:51:00.000+05:30

LED Magazine reports :
Philips Electronics is providing LED-based exterior lighting and displays for the exterior of The O2, the iconic building in London formerly known as the Millennium Dome. Philips has been engaged by AEG Europe, who own and operate The O2, in a multimillion pound deal. AEG is one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world.

Philips has been charged with creating a striking visual design made up of a combination of floodlighting and LEDs. Bright blue LED rings representing the O2 bubbles surround the 12 masts emerging from the dome.

Philips will also provide over 1500m2 of video screens, including LED displays wrapped around the 12 external cylinders around the perimeter of the dome. These 7-m high displays consist of LED nodes mounted on a flexible mesh with 100 mm pitch. The power consumption is 2.1 kW for each cylinder display.

The O2 centrepiece is an indoor Arena for up to 20,000 fans that will host over 150 world-class music, entertainment and sport events in its first year of opening. There will also be a Live Music Club with a capacity of over 2,300, an exhibition space, a cinema complex, and the "Entertainment Avenue." The O2 is an official venue for the 2012 Olympics hosting both the gymnastic and basketball events.

In Peninsula Square, Philips will erect a state of the art 170m2 video screen which will act as an information board. There is also the potential to screen live shows from the Arena and Live Music Club to the public.

Inside The O2, Philips will set up video screens so that visitors can view previous live shows and previews of forthcoming events. The entertainment district surrounding the main Arena will give Philips more opportunities to demonstrate state of the art technology in lighting by making this large public area an interesting and ‘must visit’ attraction.

Additionally Philips will produce innovative lighting designs for the 2,200 capacity Live Music Club, so that the audience can enjoy stunning light shows adapted to suit a variety of live events.

Philips was chosen as a Preferred Supplier as leaders in LED technology and the best in the industry at lighting iconic buildings. Peter Maskell, Managing Director of Philips UK said: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to work with AEG in the re-development of the Millennium Dome as an Icon of Entertainment for the 21st Century. A structure as unique as The O2 has presented us with both challenges and opportunities but our experience in the fields of architectural and public space lighting and the construction of large scale video screens has allowed us to rise to these challenges with spectacular results. We look forward to further developing our relationship with AEG as the Greenwich site matures into an established part of the itinerary for visitors to London."

Google invests $10 M in hybrids

2007-06-20T13:28:00.000+05:30

USA today reports :
Internet search giant Google (GOOG) hopes to speed the development of plug-in hybrid cars by giving away millions of dollars to people and companies that have what appear to be practical ways to get plug-ins to market faster.

But the money, announced Monday afternoon at Google headquarters in Mountain Valley, Calif., totals just $1 million so far with another $10 million pledged, which might not be enough to move the needle.

Auto development is crushingly expensive, especially when it involves the kind of advanced battery and powertrain technology used in plug-in hybrids.

Though automakers are tight-lipped about what they spend, bringing a plug-in hybrid to market could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Google is not going to get into the business of building and selling hybrid electrics. Our focus is on accelerating their developing through research, testing and investment," says Google.org's Dan Reicher, who was assistant energy secretary under former President Bill Clinton. Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google.com.

Micorcavity plasma lamps

2007-06-15T13:32:00.000+05:30

Another interesting technology that may have promise are Al foil lamps. The main attraction is not the efficacy but the cost of manufacture. The Al lamps (each thinner than a human hair) are a sandwitch of Al-Sapphire (Al Oxide) -Al. From Physorg :
Researchers at the University of Illinois are developing panels of microcavity plasma lamps that may soon brighten people’s lives. The thin, lightweight panels could be used for residential and commercial lighting, and for certain types of biomedical applications.
“Built of aluminum foil, sapphire and small amounts of gas, the panels are less than 1 millimeter thick, and can hang on a wall like picture frames,” said Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U. of I., and corresponding author of a paper describing the microcavity plasma lamps in the June issue of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Like conventional fluorescent lights, microcavity plasma lamps are glow-discharges in which atoms of a gas are excited by electrons and radiate light. Unlike fluorescent lights, however, microcavity plasma lamps produce the plasma in microscopic pockets and require no ballast, reflector or heavy metal housing. The panels are lighter, brighter and more efficient than incandescent lights and are expected, with further engineering, to approach or surpass the efficiency of fluorescent lighting.

The plasma panels are also six times thinner than panels composed of light-emitting diodes, said Eden, who also is a researcher at the university’s Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory.

A plasma panel consists of a sandwich of two sheets of aluminum foil separated by a thin dielectric layer of clear aluminum oxide (sapphire). At the heart of each lamp is a small cavity, which penetrates the upper sheet of aluminum foil and the sapphire.

“Each lamp is approximately the diameter of a human hair,” said visiting research scientist Sung-Jin Park, lead author of the paper. “We can pack an array of more than 250,000 lamps into a single panel.”
Completing the panel assembly is a glass window 500 microns (0.5 millimeters) thick. The window’s inner surface is coated with a phosphor film 10 microns thick, bringing the overall thickness of the lamp structure to 800 microns.

Flat panels with radiating areas of more than 200 square centimeters have been fabricated, Park said. Depending upon the type of gas and phosphor used, uniform emissions of any color can be produced.

In the researchers’ preliminary plasma lamp experiments, values of the efficiency – known as luminous efficacy – of 15 lumens per watt were recorded. Values exceeding 30 lumens per watt are expected when the array design and microcavity phosphor geometry are optimized, Eden said. A typical incandescent light has an efficacy of 10 to 17 lumens per watt.

The researchers also demonstrated flexible plasma arrays sealed in polymeric packaging. These devices offer new opportunities in lighting, in which lightweight arrays can be mounted onto curved surfaces – on the insides of windshields, for example.

The flexible arrays also could be used as photo-therapeutic bandages to treat certain diseases – such as psoriasis – that can be driven into remission by narrow-spectrum ultraviolet light, Eden said.

It should be stressed that while these lamps may have some niche applications, the name of the game from this point on (given the state of the planet) will be high efficacy devices. We expect 100 lm/W to be the entry level by 2010. This leaves LED's (which by that time should achieve 200 lm/W) and Triband phosphor flourescents (maybe about 120 lm/W or so) to handle the bulk of the market. Interesting that Sapphire is used in both LED's (as substrate for GaN) and in Microcavity technology.

Wisdom

2007-06-15T11:54:00.000+05:30

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. -- John Naisbitt, Megatrends

The US DoE SSL funding program

2007-06-13T10:38:00.001+05:30

The DoE in the US has come up with a funding program to companies working on improving SSL efficiency. The program is for some very specific advances identified by the DoE.
They are

* Internal Quantum Efficiency (IQE)
* Reliability and Defect Physics for Improved Emitter Lifetime and Efficiency
* Phosphors and Conversion Materials
* Extraction Efficiency
* Organic Light Emitter Research
* Strategies for Improved Light Extraction of OLEDs

More details can be had here.

End of Sapphire

2007-06-13T10:33:00.000+05:30

An Aussie firm claims that they have grown GaN on a 6 inch (152 mm) glass substrate. Both are big ticket news items as 6 inch substrates can cut cost significantly (as opposed to the 2 inch substrates in vogue now). Further Glass is bound to be cheaper than the sapphire that is currently used to grow GaN epitaxially. While SiO2 is also used it is basically only cree who is onto this technology. From LED Mag:

BluGlass Ltd of Sydney, Australia says it has succeeded in producing what it claims is the world’s first blue light emission from the uniform deposition of gallium nitride on a 6-inch diameter coated glass wafer.

The latest increase in scale offers the LED market the possibility of additional cost efficiencies, claims CEO David Jordan. Compared to current 2-inch industry-standard sapphire or silicon carbide substrates for commercial blue LED production, a 6-inch wafer has nine times the area.

The company is also developing a remote plasma CVD process for low-temperature deposition of GaN.

If it moves tax it!

2007-06-13T10:16:00.000+05:30

Some biofuel woes. Newsobserver reports :
Bob Teixeira decided it was time to take a stand against U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

So last fall the Charlotte musician and guitar instructor spent $1,200 to convert his 1981 diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil. He bought soybean oil in 5-gallon jugs at Costco, spending about 30 percent more than diesel would cost.

His reward, from a state that heavily promotes alternative fuels: a $1,000 fine last month for not paying motor fuel taxes. He has been told to expect another $1,000 fine from the federal government.

To legally use veggie oil, state officials told him, he would have to first post a $2,500 bond.

Teixeira is one of a growing number of fuel-it-yourselfers -- backyard brewers who recycle restaurant grease or make moonshine for their car tanks. They do it to save money, reduce pollution or thumb their noses at oil sheiks.

They're also caught in a web of little-known state laws that can stifle energy independence.

State Sen. Stan Bingham, R-Denton, is known around Raleigh for his diesel Volkswagen fueled by used soybean oil. The car sports a "Goodbye, OPEC" sign.

"If somebody was going to go to this much trouble to drive around in a car that uses soybean oil, they ought to be exempt" from state taxes, he said.

The state Department of Revenue, which fined Teixeira, has asked legislators to waive the $2,500 bond for small fuel users. The department also told Teixeira, after the Observer asked about his case this week, that it will compromise on his fine.

But officials say they'll keep pursuing taxes on all fuels used in highway vehicles. With its 29.9-cent a gallon gas tax, the state collects $1.2 billion each year to pay for road construction.

Corporate solar is here

2007-06-12T16:17:00.000+05:30

As with much else the maveric pair running google have shown the corporate world how not "to be evil". While How evil google is another story the following excerpt shows how you can save money and be the good guy.
At the Mountain View campus Google will be installing a cool 16 megawatt array of photovoltaic solar panels, the largest of any corporate campus in the continental United States, perhaps even one of the largest in the world.

Covering a total of six roofs, four of which are main buildings of the Googleplex alone, and even a few solar panels on support structures among the parking lots.

Generating enough energy to power around 1,000 Californian homes, approximately thirty percent of the peak consumption in several Mountain View office facilities will be sustained on these arrays.

Clean, sustainable and renewable energy sources are part of a project to reduce the environmental impact Google has, as a company.

Improving environmental practices according to Google, is part of their corporate responsibility as corporate citizens, as well as healthy business planning and Google Solar is a practical beginning.

This project will be a large investment in renewable energies, one that Google expects to prove as profitable.

Remember oil lens binoculars

2007-06-12T16:09:00.002+05:30

Yes. The dune staple for remote viewing seems to have a bit more of science i thought. New Scientist tech reveals that The first liquid camera lens with no moving parts, and that can switch between two levels of magnification, has been designed by a German research team. The work is an important step towards liquid zoom lenses that can sweep through a range of magnifications.

Liquid lenses bend light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids. When the two liquids are held in the right container, the boundary between them can be made to curve in a way that focuses light simply by applying a voltage.

Liquid lenses have attracted much attention because they are potentially smaller than conventional optics and cheaper to build. Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.

But the greatest savings in size and cost can be made with zoom lenses. Altering the focusing power of a set of liquid lenses should provide the same effect as changing the distance between solid, fixed-focus lenses in a traditional zoom lens.

Humour :)

2007-06-12T16:09:00.001+05:30

Knebel's Law: It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Gyan

2007-06-07T10:21:00.000+05:30

Do not clog intellect's sluices with bits of knowledge of questionable uses.

Fuel cell breakthrough

2007-06-05T14:36:00.000+05:30

Ecogeek reports :
Acumentrics manufactures 5000-watt solid oxide fuel cell systems (SOFC) for power applications. They are also developing combined-heat-and-power units (which are like boilers that produce electricity) for the home market. In 2000 they acquired a novel fuel cell technology. Since then, they have increased the output of a single fuel cell tube from 1 watt to 60 watts. Today they have over 30 units working in the field, including ones that power visitor’s centers at Exit Glacier National Park in Alaska, and Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio.

One of their key innovations was making ceramic fuel cell technology shatter resistant. It is shatter resistant because of its shape -- it is a tube, not a thin sheet as most others have used --with a special composition of layers that prevents them from flaking off. Solid oxide fuel cells must handle temperature swings from 20 to 800ºC. Many other solid oxide fuel cells crack when they are cycled on and off, because of thermal shock.

But what really makes Acumentrics different is that they aren't waiting around for the mythical hydrogen economy. The fuel cells run on natural gas, propane, ethanol, diesel, biogas, and biodiesel. While using non-hydrogen fuel means that the cell will produce CO2, Acumentrics fuel cells consume half as much fuel as a comparable small-engine generator, per kW. So they produce the same amount of electricity, while consuming half as much fuel, and producing half as much CO2.

Heat->Sound->Electricity

2007-06-05T14:33:00.000+05:30

A radical approach to harness heat as electricity through sound is making the rounds. University of Utah physicists developed small devices that turn heat into sound and then into electricity. The technology holds promise for changing waste heat into electricity, harnessing solar energy and cooling computers and radars.Read more here.

More corn ethanol turmoil

2007-05-24T11:11:00.000+05:30

The WSJ has a report on what is being fed to Pigs and cows now that corn is more expensive.

A very strange thing is happening right now in livestock operations in the United States. As corn becomes a hot commodity for ethanol production, livestock producers are replacing some of their animal feed with products that would look more at home in the candy aisles of supermarkets. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, producers are feeding their cows and pigs an odd assortment of junk food, including hard candy, trail mix, licorice, chocolate bars, French fries, and cheese curls, among other things.

Why would farmers mix sugary, salty, and high-fat foods into animal feed? Corn prices have jumped to $4 a bushel, twice the level of just a few years ago. And as corn prices go up, it means that farmers have to pay more to get their animals to slaughter weight. They have found, not surprisingly, that tater tots, peanuts, and chocolate chips can pack on the pounds. Some cattle producers have replaced 100 percent of their feed with discarded junk food.

More than half a century ago, the livestock industry started messing with animals’ diets, confining them indoors, and replacing their natural grass diet with a high-protein diet of grain. Why? Thanks to subsidies that encouraged overproduction, corn and soybeans were cheap. But today, with these inputs not quite as alluring, it’s somehow become cost effective to feed livestock—the very animals that eventually end up on our dinner plates—discarded junk food. That’s definitely not a step in the right direction

Osram LED's for Opel head lamps

2007-05-24T11:00:00.000+05:30

Osram has developed exterior lighting for a concept car using new thin film Ostar and golden dragon LED's. Quite an achievement given the light output required. From the article
LEDs from Osram Opto Semiconductors have been used for all the exterior lighting on the Opel GTC concept car. Using thin-film LED chip technology, Osram says that its LEDs have received a huge boost in brightness, which reduces the number of devices needed for each specific lighting application.

In each headlight, two Ostar LEDs are used for the dipped beam, with three further OSTAR LEDs providing the high beam.

Parking lights and daylight running lights (DRLs) are provided by Golden Dragon LEDs, and each fog light is equipped with one Ostar LED. For the interior lighting, red TopLEDs from Osram were featured to backlight the dashboard instruments, accen-tuating and complementing the red design accents on the steering wheel and seats of the sports coupe.

In addition, LEDs are utilized in automobiles to increase road safety. These compact light sources have a quicker response time and are brighter than incandescent lamps, factors which contribute to the safety of passengers, par-ticularly in instances when sudden braking is called for.

LEDs give car designers new freedom to give the front and rear light clusters an eye-catching make-over. The front of the Opel GTC is a good example with its large vertical air intakes and trapezoidal grille giving it a smooth yet aggressive appearance.

Wake up Aussies

2007-05-23T13:15:00.000+05:30

The BBC reports that the Australian wheat exports have been badly hit by the worst drought in the century. Point is every ton of wheat requires 100's of tons of water to grow. In effect that aussies are exporting the very water that they can ill afford to. The Murray-Darling basin is finished and the water available is barely enough to drink. Finally the ills of food export are catching up with mankind. Food should be locally grown and consumed. For residents of the worlds driest continent to ravage their land in the name of economic development is akin to Kalidasa cutting the branch while sitting on it. The meat & wool business is even more dangerous from the sustainability perspective. It takes 500 tons of water for one ton of beef !

Food or Fuel

2007-05-23T11:00:00.000+05:30

More on the corn ethanol issue. Clearly the effects of using a major food crop for fuel has already being felt in the America's. While these are still early days to draw firm conclusions, the trend emerging is clearly scary. One wonders if corn ethanol is a transportation strategy or a population control program. The numbers seem to indicate that the average US grocery basket was dearer by $47/month due to the increased demand for corn as fuel. Read more here.

Gold from waste - new twist to 'data' mining

2007-05-22T11:25:00.000+05:30

The implications of e-waste are becoming clear day by day. For the record e-waste has 17 times more gold that gold bearing ore and 40 times more copper. Given the prices of metals it looks like mining refineries may soon switch to extracting the metals from waste rather than mining it. China seems to have a lead in this (basically no environmental) with pesants doing this for peanuts. India has a strong recycling industry (informal) and safe e-waste treatment may be the way to go. There are however caveats as the environmental costs are high. This needs to be addressed urgently. In fact e-waste should be recycled in areas where hazardous industries are already using similar processes for different purposes so that the effluent treatment can be centralized and the investments amortized faster.

Hydrogen economy : Ga & Al

2007-05-21T12:03:00.000+05:30

Physorg reports
Purdue researchers demonstrate their method for producing hydrogen by adding water to an alloy of aluminum and gallium. The hydrogen could then be used to run an internal combustion engine. The reaction was discovered by Jerry Woodall, center, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process. The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it," said Woodall, who presented research findings detailing how the system works during a recent energy symposium at Purdue.

The technology could be used to drive small internal combustion engines in various applications, including portable emergency generators, lawn mowers and chain saws. The process could, in theory, also be used to replace gasoline for cars and trucks, he said.

Hydrogen is generated spontaneously when water is added to pellets of the alloy, which is made of aluminum and a metal called gallium. The researchers have shown how hydrogen is produced when water is added to a small tank containing the pellets. Hydrogen produced in such a system could be fed directly to an engine, such as those on lawn mowers.

"When water is added to the pellets, the aluminum in the solid alloy reacts because it has a strong attraction to the oxygen in the water," Woodall said.

This reaction splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in water, releasing hydrogen in the process.

The gallium is critical to the process because it hinders the formation of a skin normally created on aluminum's surface after oxidation. This skin usually prevents oxygen from reacting with aluminum, acting as a barrier. Preventing the skin's formation allows the reaction to continue until all of the aluminum is used.

OLED's at work

2007-05-21T11:42:00.000+05:30

A beautiful (that is the right adjective) new keyboard the Optimus has raised the humble keyboard to the the next level. Each key is a complete bitmapped OLED display that allows any character, image or bit map to be assigned to the key. For people who use scripts other than latin this is a major move forward. Yet another amazing LED application.

Commercial : Innovative new off-grid product

2007-05-11T14:48:00.000+05:30

Alternate Lighting has introduced a battery backed low cost LED table lamp in AC and Solar chargeable formats. The lightweight 7 LED lamp is targeted at rural households (and given the current power scenario, even metros :) and provides upto 3 hours of off-grid operation. Comes with a built in Ni-Cd battery pack and charger electronics. Quite a unique and off-beat product (even if i have to say so myself :) The lamps are available for online purchase on eBay.

Autonomous valve train & HCCI

2007-05-11T11:49:00.000+05:30

A new idea from Purdue seems to be the next big thing in making the IC engined (petrol) auto a bit more eco-friendly. The concept is based on variable valve timing that is facilitated by an autonomous power and control system for the valve train ( i wonder if this can be called a valve train as it has not connection with the crankshaft). The kicker seems to be the fact that the more granular valve control independent of the timing allows the implementation of homogeneous charge compression ignition that in turn pushes up efficiency by about 20 %. Read more here.

nature: quantum karma - super massive supernovae

2007-05-08T21:46:00.000+05:30

What defines krazilec ? Surely leto-2 was referring to super massive supernovae! The natural universe, if obeserved, far exceeds mere human inventivness in granduer. Behold a 150 solar mass super nova and reflect on your physical universe..

Read more below

Berkeley (May 7th, 2007) An exploding star first observed last September is the largest and most luminous supernova ever seen, according to University of California, Berkeley, astronomers, and may be the first example of a type of massive exploding star rare today but probably common in the very early universe.

Unlike typical supernovas that reach a peak brightness in days to a few weeks and then dim into obscurity a few months later, SN2006gy took 70 days to reach full brightness and stayed brighter than any previously observed supernova for more than three months. Nearly eight months later, it still is as bright as a typical supernova at its peak, outshining its host galaxy 240 million light years away.

UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellows Nathan Smith and David Pooley estimate the star's mass at between 100 and 200 times that of the sun. Such massive stars are so rare that galaxies like our own Milky Way may contain only a dozen out of a stellar population of 400 billion.

"This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova," said Smith, who led a team of astronomers from UC Berkeley and the University of Texas. "That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We've never seen that before."

"Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley astronomer and leader of the ground-based observations at the University of California's Lick Observatory in California and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted."

Based on the Lick and Keck observations, plus data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Smith, Pooley, Filippenko and their colleagues argue that the stellar explosion was not your run-of-the-mill supernova, but a possible pair-instability supernova.

Stars with masses at least 10 times greater than our sun end their lives after burning hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, and on to larger elements until they reach iron, when fusion stops. Toward the end of this process, the heat produced in the core of the star becomes insufficient to support the outer layers, which collapse inward, finishing the fusion process and crunching the core to a neutron star or black hole. The outer layers of the star are blown off in a bright flare-up we observe as a supernova.

For stars much more massive than this, ranging from 140 solar masses to as many as 250, the temperature at the core becomes so great that before the fusion cascade is complete, high-energy gamma rays in the core start annihilating one another, creating matter-antimatter pairs, mostly electron-positron pairs. Since gamma radiation is the energy that prevents collapse of the outer layers of the star, once the radiation starts disappearing, the outer layers fall inward. The net result is a thermonuclear explosion that, theoretically, would be brighter than any typical supernova. In this type of supernova, the star is blown to smithereens, leaving behind no black hole.

"This discovery forces us to go back to the drawing board to understand how the most massive stars die," Smith said. "Instead of just winking away into a black hole, they apparently can suffer these brilliant explosions that can be seen far across the universe. The fact that this thing is so bright, and stayed bright for a long time, makes our chances of detecting them in the early universe much better."

Such pair-instability supernovas should theoretically produce a greater percentage of heavy elements. According to Smith, the radioactive decay of
nickel-56 produces most of the light of a supernova, and this pair-instability supernova produced about 20 solar masses of nickel, compared to maybe 0.6 solar masses in a Type Ia supernova. Astronomers think that a large proportion of the universe's first stars were supermassive stars like this that, upon exploding, seeded the early universe with the heavy elements from which planets and later, humans, were made.

"We may have witnessed a modern-day version of how the first generation of the most massive stars ended their lives, when the universe was very young," Filippenko said.

The star that produced SN 2006gy apparently expelled a large amount of mass prior to exploding, reminiscent of the star eta Carinae, a so-called luminous blue variable which, at 100 to 120 solar masses, is the most massive star in our galaxy.

"This is also very exciting because it suggests that eta Carinae, only 7,500 light years away, might possibly explode in a similar manner, becoming a spectacularly bright star in our sky," Filippenko said.

"We don't know for sure if Eta Carinae will explode soon, but we had better keep a close eye on it just in case," added Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., who was not involved in the research. "Eta Carinae's explosion could be the best star-show in the history of modern civilization."

University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby first observed the supernova on Sept. 18, 2006 in the galaxy NGC 1260, located in the constellation Perseus. Filippenko's team immediately began observing it with its dedicated supernova search and monitor telescope at Lick, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope.

Filippenko and his graduate student Ryan Foley subsequently obtained spectra of the star using the Lick 3-meter Shane telescope and the DEIMOS spectrograph mounted on the Keck II telescope.

Pooley led the Chandra observation, which allowed the team to rule out the most likely alternative explanation for the supernova, namely that it was an explosion of a white dwarf star into a dense, hydrogen-rich environment.

"If that were the case, this supernova would have been 1,000 times brighter in X-rays than what we detected with Chandra," said Pooley. "This must have been an extremely massive star."

"In terms of the effect on the early universe, there's a huge difference between these two possibilities," said Smith. "One pollutes the galaxy with large quantities of newly synthesized elements, and the other locks them up forever in a black hole."

"One exciting repercussion of this is that, if pair-instability supernovas really are this bright, it gives us hope that the James Webb Space Telescope might actually be able to detect these explosions from the first stars, thereby verifying that they may actually exist," he added.

Solid State ! really

2007-05-07T13:55:00.000+05:30

Sheets of glass with a veneer of natural stone backlit by LED's! this is solid state lighting through and through. The light sources are good enough to illuminate the stone and bring out its natural beauty from inside. From the LED Mag article

Lighting designers Chaos Design Consultants have installed an illuminated bar in the atrium of the Hilton Hotel, Heathrow.

Dancer’s Bar consists of 9 panels of a special product consisting of a thin veneer of real natural stone, which is bonded on to glass, the end result being beautiful translucent panels.

In order to produce the "floating" effect required by the client, Chaos installed panels of Prismex behind the veneer of natural stone and then edgelit each panel with a total of 450 white LEDs.
Prismex is an ultra-slim acrylic which makes it ideal to use where space is at a minimum. The acrylic also has a special pattern printed on it, which allows the light to be picked up and evenly spread across the panels.

Techwatch: Nano light sources

2007-05-07T13:52:00.000+05:30

The nano buzz around lighting is getting louder. Cornell announces the development of nano-light emitting fibers that could revolutionalize lighting and especially LCD backlighting as we know it. I guess we should welcome 'the sheet screen' if this can be scaled. From the article in Just Chromatography:

Every day scientists continue to surprises us with the new discoveries; however, the most noted and admired by the vast majority of folks as well as science professionals are the achievements and developments in the field of nanotechnology. We all get easily amused when we see the next “nano” research headline because the “nanotech world” is not yet fully understood or explored.

Recently Craighead Research Group at Corenll University reported their next “nano” breakthrough. They created a so-called “Nano-Lamp” - a microscopic collection of light-emitting fibers with dimensions of only a few hundred nanometers.

According to the research article published in “Nano Letters”, the scientists were able to create one of the smallest manmade source of light that world has ever seen. The light-emitting spots on the fibers measure less than 250 nm in diameter which makes this light source smaller than the wavelength of light that they emit - 600nm. The fibers are made from a polymer with ruthenium-based molecules using a complex technique called - electrospinning - when a small droplet of polymer solution is placed on a metal needle tip followed by application of a high voltage between the tip and gold electrodes in a silicon base placed a few millimeters away.

A light-emitting nanofiber spans gold electrodes that are 500 nm apart and ruthenium-based molecules embedded in the fiber light up when exposed to an electric field of 3-4 V. An interesting fact is that when researches applied a high voltage of 100 volts, the orange light was bright enough to be seen by a human eye in the dark.

'Tabletop' fusion back

2007-05-07T13:48:00.000+05:30

After a rather rough ride in the 1990's table top fusion or fusion of light atomic nucleii at room temprature (as opposed to the core of the sun) is making a comeback. The US Navy has thrown its weight behind one of the new genere of experiments in this line. Excerpt from Dailytech.com :

Cold fusion, the ability to generate nuclear power at room temperatures, has proven to be a highly elusive feat. In fact, it is considered by many experts to be a mere pipe dream -- a potentially unlimited source of clean energy that remains tantalizing, but so far unattainable.

However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein among its distinguished authors, the article claims that Spawar scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community.

Cold fusion has gotten the cold shoulder from serious nuclear physicists since 1989, when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were unable to substantiate their sensational claims that deuterium nuclei could be forced to fuse and release excess energy at room temperature. Spawar researchers apparently kept the faith, however, and continued to refine the procedure by experimenting with new fusionable materials.

Szpak and Boss now claim to have succeeded at last by coating a thin wire with palladium and deuterium, then subjected it to magnetic and electric fields. The researchers have offered plastic films called CR-39 detectors as evidence that charged particles have emerging from their reaction experiments.

The Spawar method shows promise, particularly in terms of being easily reproduced and verified by other institutions. Such verification is essential to widespread acceptance of the apparent breakthrough, an important precursor to scientists receiving the necessary funding to fuel additional research in the field.

Highway power

2007-05-02T14:06:00.000+05:30

wind turbines powered by the breeze generated from the renowned Jersey highways, to help reduce the amount of electricity being used.
The big shocker of this story? The wind turbines won’t be built on the side of the highway. They will be built in under the road. It is proposed to use the power thus generated to run a light railway. Not bad as a lateral idea. How much pertol one needs to burn to make the wind turbines break even is anyones guess :)

Solar plant in ontario

2007-04-30T15:37:00.000+05:30

The canadians are putting us a 40 MW solar plant. For a country blessed with so much hydro power this is a move that smacks of vision. Contrast this with Bangalore's bescom whose inept babus claim (on paper) that the situation is normal. This is when the average banglorean faces 2- 6 hours of 'unscheduled' disruption. What the government cannot fix, the people should.
Read more here

The LED pie

2007-04-27T12:21:00.000+05:30

Japan as ever seems to be way ahead of the others. The curious thing is how desperate the Chinese are to sell their semi-conductor even though they make a hell of a lot less than the Japanese. The taiwanese production is not a surprise. Funnily the larger the volume the greater the price. That is the led market for you. Read more here.

Light guides from Kaye Effect

2007-04-27T11:57:00.000+05:30

Very cool video. Must see. I had no clue that liquids behaved this way. Hat tip : Atanu Dey

glumbert.com - Leaping Shampoo

Algae based bio reactors

2007-04-26T13:03:00.000+05:30

Something that is much better than all the fuss about corn ethanol which is a silly idea on stilts. This can be viewed as cellulosic ethanol's first and possibly best entry into the industry. From the article in Green power :

BioKing Green Energy NV has developed new, high performance and continuous photo-bioreactors for algae for the purpose of producing biodiesel. BioKing Green Energy NV is a recently formed subsidiary, fully owned by BioKing Inc. It will engage in research and development of algae cultivation as an energy source for the production of biodiesel, which is an economically feasible and eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based fuels. The production facilities for algae bio fuels will be based in the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Hans and Marco van de Ven, founders of BioKing states: “With the increasing interest in biodiesel as an alternative to petrodiesel, many have looked at the possibility of growing even more oilseed crops as a solution to the problem of peak oil. However, there are two problems with this approach. Firstly, cultivation of even more oilseed crops will usurp valuable space needed to grow food crops to feed mankind. And secondly, traditional oilseed crops are not the most productive or efficient source of vegetable oil. Micro-algae have the highest potential of energy yield in vegetable oil crops. Some species of algae are ideally suited for biodiesel production due to their high oil content, some as much as 50 percent, and their extremely fast growth rates. They can grow in adverse conditions like deserts and saline water. That is why algae are the crop of the future.”

BioKing Inc. is a developer of scalable photo-bioreactors for the production of biodiesel developed with patented technology. They also produce other valuable bio-commodities produced from algae oil. This technology has the potential to dramatically improve biodiesel yields from algae oil.

“After only 3.5 hours inside the newly designed continuous photo-bioreactor system algae can be collected and processed,” van de Ven states. “ With our fast growing algae and our advanced photo-bioreactor it only takes four days to be in full production and to collect the first algae. And the cost of biodiesel feedstock will only be 5 to 10 cents a liter.”

3D nano tower arrays - 2

2007-04-26T12:59:00.000+05:30

More details emerge on the latest in Photo voltaics Excerpt below :
The GTRI photovoltaic cells trap light between their tower structures, which are about 100 microns tall, 40 microns by 40 microns square, 10 microns apart—and built from arrays containing millions of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes. Conventional flat solar cells reflect a significant portion of the light that strikes them, reducing the amount of energy they absorb.

Because the tower structures can trap and absorb light received from many different angles, the new cells remain efficient even when the sun is not directly overhead. That could allow them to be used on spacecraft without the mechanical aiming systems that maintain a constant orientation to the sun, reducing weight and complexity – and improving reliability.

“The efficiency of our cells increases as the sunlight goes away from perpendicular, so we may not need mechanical arrays to rotate our cells,” Ready noted.

The ability of the 3D cells to absorb virtually all of the light that strikes them could also enable improvements in the efficiency with which the cells convert the photons they absorb into electrical current.

In conventional flat solar cells, the photovoltaic coatings must be thick enough to capture the photons, whose energy then liberates electrons from the photovoltaic materials to create electrical current. However, each mobile electron leaves behind a “hole” in the atomic matrix of the coating. The longer it takes electrons to exit the PV material, the more likely it is that they will recombine with a hole—reducing the electrical current.

Because the 3D cells absorb more of the photons than conventional cells, their coatings can be made thinner, allowing the electrons to exit more quickly, reducing the likelihood that recombination will take place. That boosts the “quantum efficiency” – the rate at which absorbed photons are converted to electrons – of the 3D cells.

Fabrication of the cells begins with a silicon wafer, which can also serve as the solar cell’s bottom junction. The researchers first coat the wafer with a thin layer of iron using a photolithography process that can create a wide variety of patterns. The patterned wafer is then placed into a furnace heated to 780 degrees Celsius. Hydrocarbon gases are then flowed into furnace, where the carbon and hydrogen separate. In a process known as chemical vapor deposition, the carbon grows arrays of multi-walled carbon nanotubes atop the iron patterns.

Once the carbon nanotube towers have been grown, the researchers use a process known as molecular beam epitaxy to coat them with cadmium telluride (CdTe) and cadmium sulfide (CdS) which serve as the p-type and n-type photovoltaic layers. Atop that, a thin coating of indium tin oxide, a clear conducting material, is added to serve as the cell’s top electrode.

In the finished cells, the carbon nanotube arrays serve both as support for the 3D arrays and as a conductor connecting the photovoltaic materials to the silicon wafer.

The researchers chose to make their prototypes cells from the cadmium materials because they were familiar with them from other research. However, a broad range of other photovoltaic materials could also be used, and selecting the best material for specific applications will be a goal of future research.

Ready also wants to study the optimal heights and spacing for the towers, and to determine the trade-offs between spacing and the angle at which the light hits the structures.

The new cells face several hurdles before they can be commercially produced. Testing must verify their ability to survive launch and operation in space, for instance. And production techniques will have to scaled up from the current two-inch laboratory prototypes.

“We have demonstrated that we can extract electrons using this approach,” Ready said. “Now we need to get a good baseline to see where we compare to existing materials, how to optimize this and what’s needed to advance this technology.”

Intellectual Property Partners of Atlanta holds the rights to the 3D solar cell design and is seeking partners to commercialize the technology.
Another commercialization path is being followed by an Ohio company, NewCyte, which is partnering with GTRI to use the 3D approach for terrestrial solar cells. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has awarded the company a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant to develop the technology.

“NewCyte has patent pending, low cost technology for depositing semiconductor layers directly on individual fullerenes,” explained Dennis J. Flood, NewCyte’s president and CTO. “We are using our technology to grow the same semiconductor layers on the carbon nanotube towers that GTRI has already demonstrated. Our goal is to achieve performance and cost levels that will make solar cells using the GTRI 3D cell structure competitive in the broader terrestrial solar cell market.”

Nano towers were covered in this blog previously.