Blog on Unique Different Latest Technologies and its updates. by Vigneshwar Raj

Letter -To Steve Jobs, From Follower ...

2011-10-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Steve Jobs,

I don't know how to start, i don't know what to write ...

You don't have any idea that how you changed my life. All were just like a light. I like to share my experience that how you came into my life and how you changed my way of thinking.

1998
I am studying 4th or 5th standard hope so, i saw the first machine that is unimaginable in one of the computer expo, it is like some kind of alien machine for me, comparing to other sluggish pc's running windows 95 or DOS. That was totally different and that's where i heard the name first time "APPLE" and that alien machine is called "iMac". I saw its mouse, and you can't say it is a mouse.

I don't know who you are and you know what, Bill Gates was my hero.????

2002
I am studying 8th std, high school, i came to know that you are the founder of Apple Inc., and heard your name for the first time, still i don't know you fully, that time in India, that too in our city internet was very slow and unavailable in most of the places. Only Magazines and books are the only source for me to learn about latest tech updates.

2005
I read your life history for the first time in a CHIP Magazine, it featured your Stanford speech to the graduates. During those days i am mentally disturbed by many things, only your words became my moral support. I started to see things differently, only thing is my views doesn't co-operate with others, i don't its a problem or not. No one knows who you are and what you are. Very very few persons knew about you.

2006 - August
I joined college with lots and lots of dreams, my only goal was to do enter silicon valley and meet you. But things started to roll out. I was losing my hope and faith.

"Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did."

I forgotten your words, because i'm alone and i didn't love what i'm doing.

2006 - November

Saw a Great Hope, I felt very happy because i got a reason why i got in to that college. Guess what?

Team of Apple India visited my collge to set apple lab and to give macbook for students, which never happened in India before, I was in heaven.

I like to Say thanks to my Dean who bought the apple team to college. Finally i got a group that to discuss about you(Steve Jobs) and your Company(Apple Inc.,). My Beloved friend Mr. Renie Ananthakumar and me will be running to dean's room to get updated on Apple's lab.

Soon, a month later, the ignorant college management stopped the process. I don't want to tell the actual reason, as i'm totally disturbed now.

My dreams was shattered to pieces. For the next 6 months "zero updates". Lost my hope. College life was like a hell. Only man, the dean, who was quite supportive for us also left the college.

Now i got a reason why the hell i entered into this college for the first time.

2008 - August to 2009 December

One of my dream come true, I got my first macbook with lots of hope and dream. You became my true visionary. All your designs and product inspired me. i started to think, why is like this, why it can't be like that. I started to hate people who doesn't even think and do. I was changing crazy and i believe that one day i'll be reason why the world is changed.

I want to change the world like u did. I want to push the human race forward as u did. I want to change the world as smart as ever.

Started to love what i'm doing. Success tastes me every time and in parallel life started to hit me at the back for many reasons, again all my dreams and hope shattered.

2010 - February

Banner featuring Steve jobs

College Symposium time, it was called as Phazor X. It was featuring you completely. I want to know who you are to all of them.

You know one thing, out of 5000 people in my college including teachers, i can say only 10 people know who you are actually. Its a situation.

All they knew was Bill gates Windows PC..... Awesome isn't it. So i want to show who is the real visionary.

We did Documentaries about you, hardly there were 100 viewers for it, only 10 of them watching it. Even the teachers doesn't show interest on it. Just Think how the hell i survived in that college for 4 years.

Here's another shocking news, 75% of computer staffs doesn't know what is macintosh.... hard isn't it.

2010 - May

Finished my graduation, learned as much as i can. What next, i wanted to enter Apple and meet you or need to start my own company. Well i didn't get correct team to join hands with and i was waiting for the opportunity.

But i'm damn sure that i shouldn't enter the Indian MNC's and not to be slaves for them.

2011 - October

Thinking Different ... Dreaming Different.... I had a dream that i want to see you and part of the apple team. But you just got away. You just......gone. I was in tears this morning after read the newsfeed in facebook.

Today i can boldly say that i'm unique and my works are insanely great. The reason is only you... For the Past Seven years you just changed my life.

Now i'm saying this.... i'm not wasting my life by living on the other people's thoughts.

I would Stay Hungy... Stay Foolish till my dream come true......

With tears

Vigneshwar Raj

Images : allaboutstevejobs.com

Designing ... Engineering ... Are we good ? Episode "ZERO"

2011-10-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

Designing and Developing a product is not a easier task. Its goddamn crazy job, but it has a lot of responsibilities which cannot be easily said. It changes the thing on either way, good as well as bad. Its all in the hands of designer of the product.

I was Wondering that as a designer and engineer, are we good ? are we doing our job correctly ? Whether the people are getting benefited? ... etc, Lots of questions rolling in the mind.

I read some of the articles regarding design and i got this, i got my answers !!!

So what is Good Design really mean ?

Good Design is

Innovative
Makes a product Useful
Aesthetic
Understandable
Unobtrusive
Honest
Long-lasting
Thorough down to the last detail
Environmentally friendly
As little design as possible

These rules are said by Dieter Rams, industrial Designer. He is just awesome. Are we following this, Truth to be said "NO".

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams says there's one company which follows the Design Rules Strictly. What would be that company. Watch the Below Video

Yes, Apple Inc, That too Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive Team was pretty impressive. imac, ipod shuffle, iphone, ipod touch... etc., All those are Minimal Designs.

We shall discuss about this on Next Episode.

See you.

Thanks for Reading.

New Offshore Turbine Design Can Store Energy - Twirling Power -by Seatwirl

2011-09-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

Though there are some alternative wind turbine designs out there, generally speaking the windmill is a relatively mature technology. In other words, most turbines built will look largely the same. An idea currently being tested in Sweden, though, is about a novel turbine design as you can get.

The SeaTwirl... well, maybe thewebsite can explain what it is and how it works:

An illustration of SeaTwirl is seen above. 1 indicates the vertical wind turbine. 2 indicates the torus ring used by SeaTwirl to fill with water and store energy. 3 indicates the float body rotating in direct contact with the water and using the water as a roller bearing. 4 indicates the generator at the bottom of the float body. All these parts rotate together as one and the only thing not rotating is the generator axis and anchorage seen below the generator.

SeaTwirl uses a vertical axis wind turbine to absorb the wind energy and a torus ring to store this energy. SeaTwirl uses the physical law for conservation of momentum to enable the storage capacity. When energy should be stored SeaTwirl transports fluids from a less rotationally centered position to a more rotationally centered position to rotate faster, as a skater doing a pirouette. In this way it can store large amounts of energy at low speed and tap it at higher rotational velocity when the demand for energy rises.

It basically functions as a flywheel does. If you want a more thorough explanation, here's a video made by the company:

Daniel Ehrnberg, the inventor said that the ability to scale up to a massive turbine -- listed as a 10-megawatt rating capable of storing 25,000 kW-hours -- is still actually a ways off (four to six years, according to Erhnberg). The biggest prototype made so far was at 1:50 scale, but he told that it is "convinced that the larger SeaTwirl units will have a much better cost-effectiveness than today's technology." He noted it is "hard to say" what a full scale device will actually cost to build.

Ehrnberg also said that they plan to use undersea cables that are already in place in order to bring the power back to shore, at least for the early prototypes. The big advantage to something like this lies in the storage capability: by only sending the stored power to the grid at times of higher demand or lower wind speeds, one of the most common renewable energy pitfalls is avoided, or at least diminished. As offshore wind continues to ramp up in Europe and we get closer to the first turbines in U.S. waters, this is something to keep an eye on.

(Image and video via SeaTwirl/Daniel Ehrnberg, IEEE Spectrum)

New Facebook Timeline Profile Page - First Preview - Get Started with Tutorial

2011-09-22T22:29:00.000-07:00

You’ve been hearing about all the wonderful new Facebook features, and like us, you’re probably super-eager to get started with them.

If you’re willing to go through a series of eight steps, you can get into the brand-new Facebook Timeline right now.

Simply follow the instructions in our gallery below, and suddenly you’ll be basking in a new world of Facebook goodness, just like the developers are. Follow the instructions carefully, and good luck.

First, you’ll need to go to the Facebook developer page, which is a part of your Facebook account. Make sure you’re logged into your Facebook account, and then simply follow this link to get started.

Step 1

When you get here, click "allow.

Step 2

Click "create new app"

Step 3

Name it whatever you want, and give it whatever namespace you'd like -- it doesn't matter. Click the checkbox "I agree to the platform privacy policy." And then click Continue, pass the security check by filling in the Captcha, and you'll be ready for the next step.

Step 4

After you've verified yourself as a human, you'll reach this screen, where you'll need to click "Open Graph" on the left side.

Step 5

You'll see the next screen, entitled "Get Started with Open Graph" -- fill in anything you want (it doesn't matter) in those fields under the heading "start by defining one action than one object for your app." Click Get Started.

Step 6

On this screen, do nothing except scroll to the bottom and click "Save Changes and Next." Do the same thing on the next screen.

Step 7

You'll be taken to this screen. Wait a few minutes, and then go to your Facebook homepage. That's where you'll be invited to enable Timeline. Be patient at this point -- sometimes it requires you to wait before the changes take effect.

Step 8

When you go back to your Facebook homepage, you'll see this. Success! Click Get It Now, and you're in!

And After that what ... You got a Master piece Profile Page .. Enjoy

Beautiful Structures built by ROBOTS - Architects are Enjoying

2011-09-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Some of my roboticist colleagues at ETH Zurich are, somewhat surprisingly, architects. Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, both professors at ETH's Institute for Technology in Architecture, were among the first to use robots in architectural design. Since 2006 the duo has explored various manufacturing techniques, including both subtractive and additive fabrication, as well as a wide range of materials, to create astonishing structures entirely built by robots.

The use of robots, combined with digital design tools, means a new aesthetic becomes possible, with novel shapes and patterns that would be nearly impossible to achieve without the automated machines: industrial manipulators that are extremely precise and good at repetition.

Using robots, the two ETH architects, who run the Gramazio & Kohler design studio, have fabricated intricate building parts out of wood, concrete, bricks, and foam, and have used these parts to build complex, beautiful installations in Zurich, London, Barcelona, New York, and other locations.

The idea of using robotic systems as reconfigurable spaces or "smart furniture" is not new. But the way Gramazio and Kohler are using robots -- to actually build large environments -- is very innovative indeed. Though their creations thus far are limited in size, the architects are currently exploring the idea of applying robotic fabrication to the design and construction of high-rise buildings.

As you can see in the photos below, the results are impressive. In one of their projects, the architects fitted a manipulator robot in a modified freight container -- a "mobile fabrication unit" that could travel anywhere in the world. They took it to Manhattan a few years ago, where the robot built a 22-meter-long (72 feet) brick structure [photos below].

In another project, they used the robot as a milling machine, to create parts that could shape the acoustics of a room [photo below].

Here's how they describe a 2009 project to build a temporary spatial structure [photo, below] for a major public event in Wettswil am Albis, Switzerland:

The wooden structure consists of 16 contorted elements made from 372 slats. The entire construction is structural support, roof and skin of the building at the same time. The elements were constructed by a digitally controlled robot that cut and precisely placed the slats according to an algorithmic pattern. Each of the elements is individually rotated, producing a progression of subtly varied spaces. The logic of the openings and curvatures as well as the aesthetic details conform to the rules of wood construction. The digital processing bestows a new expression on the traditional wood material.

So what We are Waiting For ...!!!

Source: IEEE Spectrum

Android Application Development ebook - Download

2011-09-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

Having Android Smartphone & just roaming around for apps .... Why Can't you develop your own app with your own ideas and publish it in Market Place to earn MONEY ....

Well If u like to learn to developing Apps for Android, here is the book to kick start.

Android Application Development For Dummies

The fun and friendly guide to creating applications on the Android platform.

The popularity of the Android market is soaring with no sign of slowing down. The open nature of the Android OS offers programmers the freedom to access the platform's capabilities and this straightforward guide walks you through the steps for creating amazing Android applications. Android programming expert Donn Felker explains how to download the SDK, get Eclipse up and running, code Android applications, and submit your finished products to the Android Market. Featuring two sample programs, this introductory book explores everything from the simple basics to more advanced aspects of the Android platform.

Takes you soup through nuts of developing applications for the Android platform
Begins with downloading the SDK, then explains how to code Android applications and submit projects to the Android Market
Written by Android guru Donn Felker, who breaks every aspect of developing applications for the Android platform into easily digestible pieces

No matter your level of programming experience, Android Application Development For Dummies is an ideal guide for getting started with developing applications for the Android platform.

Do Schools Kill Creativity ? - Sir Ken Robinson Talk @ TED

2011-09-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

One of the finest speech i ever heard. Great to listen his ideas. Hope you will enjoy too ...
If you want to read the transcript of this speech hear it is ...

Transcript: Sir Ken Robinson TED2006

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Good morning. How are you? It’s been great, hasn’t it? I’ve been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I’m leaving.

There have been three themes, haven’t there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.

One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we’ve had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.

The second is, that it’s put us in a place where we have no idea what’s going to happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education — actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don’t you? I find this very interesting. If you’re at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you’re not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you’re not asked. And you’re never asked back, curiously. That’s strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, “What do you do,” and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They’re like, “Oh my god,” you know, “why me? My one night out all week.” But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it’s one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.

I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

And the third part of this is that we’ve all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn’t she, just seeing what she could do. And she’s exceptional, but I think she’s not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.

And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.

That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born …

I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, “What are you drawing?” and the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.”

When my son was 4 in England — actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we’re being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year — he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, “Nativity II.” But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: “James Robinson IS Joseph!” He didn’t have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened — we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, “You OK with that” and he said “Yeah, why, was that wrong?” — they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, “I bring you gold.” The second boy said, “I bring you myrhh.” And the third boy said, “Frank sent this.”

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?

I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare’s father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don’t think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be? “Must try harder.”

Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, “Go to bed, now,” to William Shakespeare, “and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It’s confusing everybody.”

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn’t want to come. I’ve got two kids, he’s 21 now, my daughter’s 16; he didn’t want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He’d known her for a month. Mind you, they’d had their fourth anniversary, because it’s a long time when you’re 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, “I’ll never find another girl like Sarah.” And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn’t matter where you go, you’d think it would be otherwise but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.

And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting?

Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education as an alien and say what’s it for, public education, I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it. They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. but they’re rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there’s something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.

So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you’re not going to be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.

In the next 30 years. according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. [12:27] More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about — technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.

Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it’s because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly.

But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally — by the way, there’s a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it’s thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren’t you, there’s a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.

If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she’s doing (oh, she’s good at some things) but if she’s cooking, you know, she’s dealing with people on the phone, she’s talking to the kids, she’s painting the ceiling, she’s doing open-heart surgery over here; if I’m cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone’s on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say “Terry, please, I’m trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break.” (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”)

And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’m doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she’s called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she’s wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point. It wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.

Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it — because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.

But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

I said, “What happened?”

She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.” Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.

She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater pro
ductions in history, she’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multimillionaire.

Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

Now, I think — What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future — by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

Raavanan Sacrificing for Volkswagen Jetta ...

2011-09-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

Tapasya to Brahma or Volkswagen Jetta !!!

Following his initial training, Ravana performed an intense penance (or tapasya) to Brahma (the Creator God), lasting several years. During his penance, Ravana chopped off his head 10 times as a sacrifice to appease brahma. Each time he sliced his head off a new head arose, thus enabling him to continue his penance. At last, Brahama, pleased with his austerity, appeared after his 10th decapitation and offered him a boon. Ravana asked for immortality, which Brahma refused to give, but gave him the celestial nectar of immortality. The nectar of immortality, stored under his navel, dictated that he could not be vanquished for as long as it lasted.Ravana also asked for absolute invulnerability from and supremacy over gods, heavenly spirits, other rakshas, serpents, and wild beasts. Contemptuous of mortal men, he did not ask for protection from these. Brahma granted him these boons in addition to his 10 severed heads and great strength by way of knowledge of divine weapons and magic. Thus ravana known as 'Dasamukha' (Dasa = ten, mukha =face).

My mind really got excited after seeing this advertisement in Times of India. Wow .. What a Thinking .... and now he sacrificed for Volkswagen Jetta .... !!!

iMac Print ... iPrinter

2011-09-14T03:17:00.000-07:00

I was just roaming in the web .... and got this....

Though Apple don't have product called iprinter, this might give a spark to them.

Apple Institutes New Charitable Matching Program for Employees

2011-09-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

Apple has launched a new charitable matching program for its employees, with the company offering to match employees' personal charitable contributions up to $10,000 per year. The program is currently limited to full-time U.S. employees, with plans to expand it to other countries over time. The new program was announced today in a company-wide email sent by new Apple CEO Tim Cook and provided to MacRumors.

Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Inc.,

Team:

I am very happy to announce that we are kicking off a matching gift program for charitable donations. We are all really inspired by the generosity of our co-workers who give back to the community and this program is going to help that individual giving go even farther.

Starting September 15, when you give money to a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, Apple will match your gift dollar-for-dollar, up to $10,000 annually. This program will be for full-time employees in the US at first, and we’ll expand it to other parts of the world over time.

Thank you all for working so hard to make a difference, both here at Apple and in the lives of others. I am incredibly proud to be part of this team.

If you’d like more information on the program, you can get it on HRWeb, which can be easily accessed through AppleWeb.

Tim

An Apple spokesperson has confirmed to MacRumors that the program is indeed now in place.

Steve Jobs' lack of a public record of philanthropy was highlighted just last week, with U2 singer Bono coming to Jobs' defense and noting that Apple has contributed "tens of millions of dollars" to the (Product)RED campaign against AIDS.

Slippery Futurism

2010-12-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism

By John Rennie / December 2010

His stunning prophecies have earned him a reputation as a tech visionary, but many of them don't look so good on close inspection.

Don't panic if you look for your computer today and can't find it. We have it on the authority of technology maven Ray Kurzweil that this year computers will have vanished because of miniaturization. As he said at the TED conference in February 2005:

By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.

If you have a different impression of the world today, Kurzweil would want you to know that he is technically correct. If the rest of the world fails to think that's enough, the rest of the world is wrong.

Of course, Kurzweil did not mean to say that all computers would actually disappear. Rather, embedded microprocessors would allow many of the functions once uniquely served by computers to disseminate to phones, tablet computers, and even cars, clothes, and key chains. And in that sense, 2010 might indeed be seen as a ringing vindication of Kurzweil's prophecy, because smartphones and iPads are everywhere.

But a moment's reflection reveals that expansive interpretation of Kurzweil's remarks to be, at bottom, insipid. Here's why: Many of those same devices were already popular commercial products in 2005. Stylus-based computer interfaces have been around since at least the 1980s. Microsoft introduced pocket and tablet versions of Windows in 2000 and 2001. Smartphones and PDAs emerged in the mid-1990s. Handspring brought out the Palm OS Treo in 2002. The RIM BlackBerry smartphone also came out in 2002.

So by Kurzweil's soft definition, the computer had already disappeared when he was on stage in 2005. In fact, much of his audience may have had its replacements in their pockets. If his rhetoric about computers disappearing by 2010 isn't meant to be taken literally, then essentially all that's left is the claim that smartphones and other digital devices would get smarter, smaller, and more popular, which would not win any prizes for sagacity.

Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.

Ray Kurzweil's genius is beyond dispute. He has been awarded the National Medal of Technology, a Lemelson-MIT Prize, and a raft of other international accolades and honorary degrees. He is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the United States. In high school he wrote software that could compose music in the style of classical composers (an achievement that earned him an appearance on the TV game show "I've Got a Secret" in 1965). He invented the first optical scanner capable of interpreting writing in any typeface, then directed the further development of the first CCD flatbed scanner and text-to-speech synthesizer so that he could build the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind. He has developed commercial speech recognition systems used around the world, founded a number of companies and started a hedge fund.

And yet, while garnering honors for his brilliance, Kurzweil has also become famous (or notorious) for his views on the technological future, which he has outlined in the best-selling books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), and The Singularity Is Near (2005). In brief, they describe his discovery of a "law of accelerating returns" that governs technological progress. Computer intelligence and other technologies will evolve exponentially fast, he says, bringing true artificial intelligence, human immortality, and fantastic nanoengineering capabilities within a very few decades. Within the century, they will push history to a technological singularity literally beyond imagination.

Kurzweil is confident, for instance, that by 2029 researchers, having reverse engineered the human brain, will build an AI that can pass as human. (He has a US $20 000 bet to that effect with computing pioneer Mitchell Kapor riding at the Long Bets Web site.) Neuroscientists, AI researchers, and others have objected that no one today has more than the faintest idea of how to accomplish these feats and that his time line is highly unrealistic. Kurzweil dismisses all such objections: The obstacles will undoubtedly melt away in the face of Moore's Law and the unstoppable acceleration of technology.

In his talks, Kurzweil says he began studying rates of technological change because he realized that a major reason tech businesses fail is not that they fail to build what they intend but that their timing is wrong: By the time their innovations come to market, the opportunity is past, having become irrelevant or having been seized by someone and something else. To help spread the gospel of accelerating returns, Kurzweil and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis established the Singularity University, in California, which offers 9-day executive training sessions (for $15 000) and 10-week graduate studies (for $25 000) on how to understand and master exponentially advancing technologies.

Illustration: Matt Mahurin

All these enterprises ride on the credibility of Kurzweil's vision. Since he began publishing his predictions 20 years ago, it is worth assessing their accuracy to date. Unfortunately, scoring Kurzweil's prophecies turns out to be a difficult and contentious exercise.
SCORECARD

Ray Kurzweil's assessment of his own 108 predictions from his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines

89 "Entirely correct" (by end of 2009)

13 "Essentially correct" (realized within just a few years)

3 "Partially correct"

2 "10 years off"

1 "Just wrong"

Paeans to Kurzweil's oracular prowess often begin by noting that in his 1990 book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, Kurzweil predicted the rise of the Internet as a medium for public communications, commerce, education, and entertainment. "By early in the next century, personal computers will be portable laptop devices containing cellular phone technology or wireless communications with both people and machines. Our portable computers will be gateways to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services…" he wrote.

The World Bank estimates that in 1990 only about 2 million people had Internet access. By 2000 that number had grown to 124 million with the transformative and all-consuming rise of the World Wide Web. On those grounds, Kurzweil's prediction might seem to be a gem. Nevertheless, some facts scuff its luster.

The first is that to see, in 1990, a society using networked computers for everyday tasks, you didn't need to be prophetic. You just needed to be French. France's government began issuing dumb terminals to telephone subscribers for free in 1981 to encourage use of the paid Minitel online information, or videotex, service. Minitel allowed users to look up phone numbers, purchase train and airline tickets, use message boards and databases, and purchase items through mail order.

"The French use almost three million computer terminals to perform such tasks as looking up phone numbers electronically and communicating with strangers over what has been dubbed the 'electronic singles bar,' " notes a 15 September 1987 article by Andrew Pollock in The New York Times.

That same article began by lamenting that, in the United States, "The vision of an electronic society in which consumers read the news, pay bills and make airplane reservations on their home computers has proved illusory." In other words, three years before Kurzweil's book, some people had not only imagined an online society but had already questioned whether it could catch on in the United States. Even so, by the late 1980s, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, and other commercial services were offering e-mail, conversation, information, and entertainment to subscribers with personal computers who were willing to pay up to $12 per minute for the privilege. The Videotex Industry Association estimated that in 1987, 40 such online services were serving 750 000 consumers. In addition, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of noncommercial electronic bulletin boards also served various interests over the phone lines.

What kept these services from mainstream success was high costs and technical difficulties. Pollock's article quotes Gary Arlen, publisher of the industry newsletter Interactivity Report, as saying that videotex "is languishing, and everyone is sort of waiting for the next breakthrough."

That breakthrough would of course be the invention of the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee proposed in 1989 and which debuted publicly in December 1993. The Web made the Internet easier, cheaper, and more adaptable for more users. But the early-adopting portion of the public had demonstrated an appetite for online services years earlier.

Popular culture in the late 1980s was also not short on visions of a heavily computerized, network-linked society. Most of these owed a debt to William Gibson's hit 1984 novel Neuromancer, a seminal work of "cyberpunk" fiction that popularized the term "cyberspace." Rather famously, Gibson has said he didn't know anything about computers when he wrote Neuromancer, so his vision didn't come from any remarkable insight into the technology. He was simply picking up on ideas that were already abroad in films such as Bladerunner and Tron from 1982, and in such novels as Bruce Sterling's 1988 award-winner Islands in the Net and the 1989 Japanese manga series Ghost in the Shell.

The fact that many sources anticipated Kurzweil's prediction of a vigorous online society does not discredit it. But the praise that congratulates him for the originality of the idea implicitly obscures all those others who did it before him.

Kurzweil makes lots of predictions. He really hit his stride in The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 1999, which included specific claims about what life would be like in 2009. (And that's just for openers: The book offers scenarios by decades up through 2099 and then speculates about how intelligences will contemplate the universe millennia from now.)

Kurzweil got a lot right. But in instance after instance, his unambiguously correct statements are wedded to others that sound close to reality…but are also somewhat off. They're like descriptions of the world as seen through a fish-eye lens.

"It is now 2009. Individuals primarily use portable computers, which have become dramatically lighter and thinner than the notebook computers of ten years earlier. Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes," he wrote, and if he had ended the sentence there, surely no one would disagree. But instead he continues: "—and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments. Computers with a high-resolution visual interface range from rings and pins and credit cards up to the size of a thin book." And: "People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies, which are networked using 'body LANs' (local area networks)."
"So far, I haven't seen Kurzweil straight-up admit that he was wrong. I think he would benefit from doing so on some of these points"
Michael Anissimov, Accelerating Future blog

Is that all true? Accept for now that smartphones, music players, and even chip-enabled credit cards should all count as computers because they contain a microprocessor, and that they can even be loosely called jewelry, clothing, or body ornaments. Even so, how many of us have more than a dozen of these "computers" on our persons? Beyond a Bluetooth-coupled phone and earpiece, how many are in any sense networked together? How many sport a "high-resolution visual interface"?

Or consider what Kurzweil wrote about education. He correctly projects that technology will play a much larger role in the classroom and that distance learning and teaching software will trend upward. But he also asserted that students would own and use computers that weigh less than a pound, with which they would interact primarily by voice and stylus. Teachers would "attend primarily to issues of motivation, psychological well-being, and socialization," while software handles instruction. Is this a recognizable, accurate description of schools today?

He also seems to have had high hopes a decade ago for the antitumor compounds called angiogenesis inhibitors. His footnotes direct attention to a front-page New York Times story from 3 May 1998 that is notorious in science-writing circles for having grossly overhyped the promise of the research. In his book's formal discussion, Kurzweil merely suggests that angiogenesis inhibitors would help to reduce cancer. Yet in a puckish chapter where Kurzweil chats with a fictional interviewer from the future, he has her say that his prediction was "actually quite understated. Bio-engineered treatments, particularly antiangiogenesis drugs…have eliminated most forms of cancer as a major killer." To which Kurzweil replies, "Well, that's just not a prediction I was willing to make." Talk about having it both ways.

It seems only fair to allow some latitude for interpretation on the dates. But even then, it is hard to define the rightness or wrongness of Kurzweil's predictions.

Kurzweil himself has no such difficulty, however. He knows precisely how well he's doing. Last January, Michael Anissimov of the Accelerating Future Web site posted an item in which he suggested that seven of Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 seemed to be wrong. Kurzweil replied with a note that argued it was wrong to single out merely seven predictions when he had actually made 108 in The Age of Spiritual Machines.

"I am in the process of writing a prediction-by-prediction analysis of these, which will be available soon and I will send it to you," he wrote. "But to summarize, of these 108 predictions, 89 were entirely correct by the end of 2009." Another 13 were "essentially correct," by which he meant that they would be realized within just a few years. "Another 3 are partially correct, 2 look like they are about 10 years off, and 1, which was tongue in cheek anyway, was just wrong," he wrote. So by his own scoring, he is at least 94.4 percent accurate.

Kurzweil has not yet released that analysis of his track record, so it is hard to know how some of his predictions for 2009—the adoption of intelligent highways and self-piloting cars, sharp reductions in cancer, and continuous economic growth for the United States and the stock market through 2019, for example—fit into his tally. Maybe one of those was meant tongue in cheek, or maybe he doesn't regard them as real predictions; otherwise, it seems as though he regards all of them as at least partly or imminently correct. Judge for yourself.

Based on Kurzweil's defenses of the items that Anissimov had questioned, however, his analysis seems unlikely to satisfy his critics. For instance, Kurzweil stood by his assertion that in 2009, 3-D chip architectures would be common. "Many if not most semiconductors fabricated today are in fact 3D chips, using vertical stacking technology," he wrote. "It is obviously only the beginning of a broad trend, but it is the case that three-dimensional chips are commonly used today."

Actually, 3-D integrated circuits are currently very much a niche product, with limited uses in DRAM, image sensors, and a few other applications. A market survey by Yole Développement, in Lyon, France, from 2008 projected that by 2015 3-D devices would represent about 25 percent of the memory market and only about 6 percent of the rest of the semiconductor market. Kurzweil is surely right that 3-D chips will become widespread within another few years, but it is simply wrong to insist that they already are.

Kurzweil also stands by his claim that computer displays built into eyeglasses would project images into users' eyes because some such systems do exist, and says, "The prediction did not say that all displays would be this way or that it would be the majority, or even common." Similarly, he defends his claim that translation software would be "commonly used" to allow people speaking different languages to communicate by phone by pointing to smartphone apps that emerged at the end of 2009. He allows that one could quibble about how "common" their use is.

"So far, I haven't seen Kurzweil straight-up admit that he was wrong. I think he would benefit from doing so on some of these points," says the blog post by Anissimov, who seems to admire the man but thinks futurists should be accountable for their statements.

Kurzweil's reply asserts that he is all for futurist accountability, "but such reviews need to be free of bias, fair, and not subject to selection bias and myopic interpretations of both the words used and the current reality." Still, it is hard to square his objection to "myopic," literal interpretations with his lawyerly defenses of his predictions that hinge on their precise wording and creative interpretations of the meaning of everyday words.

Kurzweil is extremely well informed about technologies in development and highly insightful about how they can feed into one another, particularly over the relatively near term. He is very good on trends, and his predictions are thought provoking. For the people who pay to hear him speak or to read his books, perhaps that is enough.

On the other hand, if Kurzweil is right that a failure to understand the timing of technological change is a major reason that businesses fail, then let's hope that nobody listening to Kurzweil takes his predictions at strict face value. Anyone who was encouraged 10 years ago to hit the market during the '90s with products or services contingent on cybernetic chauffeurs or widespread real-time speech translation could be in trouble.

Nevertheless, his unwavering confidence in the law of accelerating returns allows him to shrug off contradictory facts and perspectives as mere temporary inconveniences. A year here, a decade there: The accelerating returns of technology will sweep them all away en route to a singularity beyond human imagination ruled by one eternal truth—that Ray Kurzweil was, is, and always will be right.

At least 94.4 percent of the time, anyway.
About the Author

John Rennie was the editor in chief of Scientific American from 1994 to 2009. He now writes, blogs (The Gleaming Retort, http://blogs.plos.org/retort), and teaches journalism at New York University. He lives in New York City with his Emmy-winning video editor wife and their "swell dog," Newman. He is an occasional television commentator and a black belt in Kenshikai Karate, which is "a small Japanese style that none of your readers will have heard of."

An In-Depth Look at the Apple iPad

2010-01-28T03:54:00.001-08:00

We’ve been waiting, preparing and speculating about this product for – quite literally – years. Shrouded in secrecy, it’s been the main focus of the Internet rumour mill for far too long. Today, Apple finally unveiled the product they’ve been working on – The Apple iPad.

In this article, we’ll be outlining several of the most important and impressive features of the device, and getting you fully up-to-speed (complete with some gorgeous pictures!). Are you as excited as we are? Read on for all the details!

The Apple iPad

The Physical Hardware

The iPad itself has a 9.5 inch screen (height), and looks similar to an oversized iPod. The screen has a 1024-by-768-pixel resolution – perfect for browsing the web and reading eBooks. It comes bundled with either a 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive, and this determines the difference in price. It only weighs 1.5 pounds, or 1.6 for the model with 3G.

Though many people are calling it simply a large iPhone, this really isn’t the case. The larger screen size has been put to good use in applications across the board – particularly in Mail, which would seem to be far more user friendly than the iPhone version. The large software keyboard appears easy to type on, and is almost the size of a standard laptop keyboard.

Other hardware features include an accelerometer, digital compass, built-in speakers, an ambient light sensor, and a microphone. As you’d expect, it’s very environmentally friendly.

The Operating System

This was the main undecided factor surrounding the iPad, and one that remained a mystery until its unveiling today. It isn’t running OS X as we know it, and resembles the iPhone OS we’ve come to know and love. This means that all applications will be distributed through the App Store, in the same way as the iPhone. Good or bad news for developers, depending upon how you look at it.

It’s capable of running almost every iPhone application currently available – either in a scaled down mode, or resized to fit the full screen resolution. Hopefully this will mean than an app purchased for one device will also work on the other.

The iPad OS

Connectivity & Syncing

The iPad has a standard iPod dock connector, so you’ll be able to connect it to sync with iTunes as normal. Two different versions are available with wireless connectivity – one solely with Wi-Fi, and another with the addition of 3G. The model with 3G is slightly more expensive, does not require a contract, is unlocked for any micro-sim, and will be shipping 30 days later than the Wi-Fi only model.

Connectivity

Data plan pricing for the USA has been announced as $14.99 for up to 250mb per month (a seemingly awful deal, aimed at those just reading books), or $29.99 for unlimited data. These are with AT&T, though you’ll be able to use any data package from any carrier. The iPad also contains Bluetooth, which will let you connect to wireless headphones, or a wireless Apple keyboard.

The iPad also has a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a VGA adapter will allow you to connect it to an external display.

Battery Life & Charging

Battery life is quoted as 10 hours, though this is likely a “best case” scenario. It will vary dramatically depending upon what you’re using the device for – playing games will obviously drain it faster than reading an eBook.

If you don’t use the iPad at all, it will last for one month in standby mode.

That's thin.

iBooks

One of the major new features introduced today was the iBook Store, and the associated iBooks application. This is Apple’s eBook reader software, and it looks excellent (with several design cues taken from Delicious Library:

iBook

The accompanying book store will allow you to purchase and download eBooks directly onto the device. It’s creating a direct competitor to the Kindle, and adds welcome competition to the market. The app has numerous options to change the font and layout of your book.

iWork

Apple also announced a completely redesigned version of iWork, created specifically for the iPad. It’s capable of viewing, creating and editing documents created in Numbers, Keynote and Pages. Everything is done through drag-and-drop multi-touch, setting a new standard for what can be achieved with a touch interface.

These apps are priced at $9.99 each, and will be available through the App Store.

iWork on the iPad

Other Features

It does everything you’d expect. Mobile browsing with Safari, gorgeous multi-column email in Mail, Maps, iTunes music and video, Photos, a stunning interface to YouTube, Maps, Notes, a completely redesigned Calendar, and Spotlight search across the whole device.

Apple have a great video that I’d recommend watching to gain an overview of how the device works, and what the interface of each app looks like. You can also read an in-depth look at each feature on the iPad Features page.

Accessories

A number of different accessories are available, most notably a keyboard dock, and a case. The former is a dock for charging your iPad, integrated with a full-size keyboard. This will make typing on the device a far more enjoyable experience – particularly important considering the iWork suite is available for the iPad.

The case also looks interesting, protecting the iPad and holding it in a position that’s more appealing for typing.

iPad Accessories

Pricing & Availability

The iPad has come in at an unexpectedly low price, starting at only $499. This price increases if you’re looking for more storage, or would like 3G connectivity:

The iPad with Wi-Fi only will be shipping in around 60 days, with an additional 30 day wait if you’d like the 3G version. This is fairly reasonable, and hopefully Apple will be able to meet these shipping dates (and the associated demand!)

What’s Missing?

As with any product announcement, we’re bound to feel hard done by in a few areas. These would seem to be:

No camera or video conferencing
No multi-tasking
No super-cool fingerprint security (I can hope, can’t I?!)

What Do You Think?

We’ve waited a long time for this gadget, and it’s certainly going to gather a huge amount of press and media attention in the run-up to it’s launch. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one and trying it out, but what do you think?

Is your Apple gadget lust satisfied, or are you left wishing that the iPad had turned out to be something else entirely? Most importantly, will you be handing over your hard-earned $499?

Please share your thoughts!

POWER QUALITY TEXT BOOK - EEE

2009-12-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

Power Quality - Anna University Text Book Download....

DOWNLOAD

Note : PsCAD Not necessary ... u can get it from me... it has a huge filesize:-)

Operating System ebooks for CSE, ECE & EEE Dept. - Anna university

2009-12-09T07:53:00.000-08:00

Here u can find the ebooks for the Operating systems & for Anna University Syllabus.... All are Text Books...

William stallings
DOWNLOAD

Operating System concepts - Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin and Greg Gagne,

DOWNLOAD

TanenBaum

DOWNLOAD

Enjoy....!!!...More to Come

Robot Future - Surrogate

2009-12-06T20:04:00.000-08:00

The Reality of Robot Surrogates

How far are we from sending robots into the world in our stead?

Photo: Stephen Vaughan/Touchstone Pictures

Imagine a world where you're stronger, younger, better looking, and don't age. Well, you do, but your robot surrogate—which you control with your mind from a recliner at home while it does your bidding in the world—doesn't.

It's a bit like The Matrix, but instead of a computer-generated avatar in a graphics-based illusion, in Surrogates—which opens Friday and stars Bruce Willis—you have a real titanium-and-fluid copy impersonating your flesh and blood and running around under your mental control. Other recent films have used similar concepts to ponder issues like outsourced virtual labor (Sleep Dealer) and incarceration(Gamer).

The real technology behind such fantastical fiction is grounded both in far-out research and practical robotics. So how far away is a world of mind-controlled personal automatons?

"We're getting there, but it will be quite a while before we have anything that looks like Bruce Willis," says Trevor Blackwell, the founder and CEO of Anybots, a robotics company in Mountain View, Calif., that builds "telepresence" robots controlled remotely like the ones in Surrogates.

Telepresence is action at a distance, or the projection of presence where you physically aren't. Technically, phoning in to your weekly staff meeting is a form of telepresence. So is joysticking a robot up to a suspected IED in Iraq so a soldier can investigate the scene while sitting in the (relative) safety of an armored vehicle.

Researchers are testing brain-machine interfaces on rats and monkeys that would let the animals directly control a robot, but so far the telepresence interfaces at work in the real world are physical. Through wireless Internet connections, video cameras, joysticks, and sometimes audio, humans move robots around at the office, in the operating room, underwater, on the battlefield, and on Mars.

A recent study by NextGen Research, a market research firm, projects that in the next five years, telepresence will become a significant feature of the US $1.16 billion personal robotics market, meaning robots for you or your home.

According to the study's project manager, Larry Fisher, telepresence "makes the most sense" for security and surveillance robots that would be used to check up on pets or family members from far away. Such robots could also allow health-care professionals to monitor elderly people taking medication at home to ensure the dosage and routine are correct.

Right now, most commercial teleoperated robots are just mobile webcams with speakers, according to NextGen. They can be programmed to roam a set path, or they can be controlled over the Internet by an operator. iRobot, the maker of the Roomba floor cleaner, canceled its telepresence robot, ConnectR, in January, choosing to wait until such a robot would be easier to use. But plenty of companies, such as Meccano/Erector and WowWee, are marketing personal telepresence bots.

Blackwell's Anybots, for example, has developed an office stand-in called QA. It's a Wi-Fi enabled, vaguely body-shaped wheeled robot with an ET-looking head that has cameras for eyes and a display in its chest that shows an image of the person it's standing in for. You can slap on virtual-reality goggles, sensor gloves, and a backpack of electronics to link to it over the Internet for an immersive telepresence experience. Or you can just connect to the robot through your laptop's browser.

Photo: Anybots

Blackwell has been using QA to telecommute to his office for the past few weeks so he can enjoy the "sun streaming in" his windows in the morning while his robot sits next to his desk at the office, available for anyone to approach and ask him a question. He can hear and answer through a Bluetooth headset on his end, and he can follow colleagues if they want to show him something. "Or I can go pester them in their cubicles," he says.

Blackwell's real dream is a teleoperated robotic servant to wash the dishes and check the oil in his car while he's watching the kids. That might be creepy, considering it means that someone else—whether from a call-center type of operation run by a large company, an outsourced sea of computers, or someone logged in from three doors down (granted, with your approval)—could be peering into your world from afar (á la Sleep Dealer). But it could free up time for the good things in life if done right, Blackwell says.

Not all of today's telepresence robots are for personal use. Yulun Wang, CEO of InTouch Health, a Santa Barbara, Calif., company that provides medical telepresence robots to hospitals, says his goal is to solve the problem of getting "the right [medical] expertise to the right place at the right time." For urgent health-care needs such as stroke, critical care trauma, or high-risk pregnancy, medical specialists aren't available at every care center, Wang says.

That's where robots can help out. The St. Joseph Mercy Oakland hospital, in Pontiac, Mich., for example, "has the physician expertise and the technology to provide the latest in stroke care," Wang says. But outlying hospitals do not. With InTouch Health's RP-7i robot, controlled by a remote doctor through a joystick and a secure Internet connection, 31 Michigan hospitals take advantage of St. Joseph's doctors to treat patients with symptoms of stroke. According to Wang, only 4 percent of stroke patients across the country get treated with the right drugs. That's partly because drugs need to be administered within three hours of the first symptoms, which often can't happen in a remote location. Within the Michigan RP-7i network, Wang says, 85 percent of patients are now treated appropriately and in time.

RP-7 (RP-7i's predecessor) has also helped train and advise surgeons from more than 8000 kilometers away. In 2007, Dr. Alex Gandsas, head of the Bariatric and Minimally Invasive Surgery division of Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, used the robot to remotely train two Argentine doctors on a procedure to treat morbid obesity. For three months, the doctors in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, logged in to a robot in Baltimore that followed Gandsas on his rounds and in surgery.

When it came time to schedule three surgeries in Argentina, Gandsas reversed the process. He sent the robot to Argentina and logged in himself, becoming the "virtual doctor" observing during the procedures and postoperative rounds. "We concluded that operations can be learned totally by remote presence," Gandsas says. And with the number of surgeons graduating from medical school decreasing while the population increases, Gandsas believes "telemedicine will come to the rescue."

But no one would watch a movie about a doctor—or an action hero, for that matter—joysticking a robot around. So in Surrogates and many other films, the connection to the robot goes straight to the brain. "The keyboard was invented in the 19th century, and we still use it and love it," says Jose Principe, director of the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory at the University of Florida. "But that doesn't mean that there aren't better alternatives. The brain has exquisite control of muscles. There's the possibility of finding the code and translating it to machines."

Photo: InTouch Health

Principe and his collaborator, Justin Sanchez of UF's departments of pediatrics, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering, hope to link computer algorithms with biological systems, "short-circuiting the brain–spinal cord–muscle link" and using the brain's "intent" to control a robotic device.

In the late 1990s, neuroscientists discovered that by implanting electrodes in rats' brains and connecting them to computers operating robotic levers, it was possible to decode the intent of rats to move the levers for a food or drink reward. Then monkeys succeeded in mentally playing video games to get a juice reward. These experiments showed that the animals' motor cortices continued to produce the brain patterns they'd learned when physically moving a robot, even when the animals weren't actually moving their paws or arms.

The latest work from Principe and Sanchez is moving one level further, using the motor cortex for actions that aren't related to movement. Rats in their lab learned to maneuver a robotic gripper outside their cages to move an LED sideways—an action unrelated to any movement the rat can make on its own. Principe says this is a proof of concept that shows rats are using the motor cortex to do something other than move a body part.

The hope is that, eventually, a "high-level dialogue" between brains and computer agents could decide how to move a robot in the world, says Principe.

In the meantime, for lack of a good brain interface to the robotic surrogate of your dreams (and a few other technical obstacles), you'd best go out and face the world yourself.

Better Computing Through CPU Cooling

2009-10-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

FEATURE

Better Computing Through CPU Cooling

Photo: Dan Saelinger; Styling: Wendy Schelah; Electronics: courtesy of Tekserve

My friend recently gained a new appreciation for my work. She was trying to transfer family videos from old videocassettes to DVDs using various gadgets and software running on her laptop. Inevitably, though, the process always yielded a blank screen somewhere in the recording. These interruptions occurred because the laptop kept overheating. Only after she placed it on a stack of books with a fan blowing directly on it could the computer handle the job.

Heat is one of the worst enemies of electronics. Sit on the sofa with your laptop and you quickly feel the heat on your lap. Often though, overheating can be hard to diagnose. You may notice random errors occurring no matter what program you're running. This is especially true if you use your computer to play advanced video games, which can really tax the microprocessor and the graphics card. If your machine frequently experiences fatal errors or "the blue screen of death" on such occasions, chances are it has thermal management problems. And overheating doesn't just degrade a computer's performance; it can also shorten its useful life.

The electronics industry has tended to deal with overheating more at the system level—using cooling fans, for instance, to regulate rising temperatures inside computers. Until recently, heat was not considered a major problem to be addressed in the design of the ICs themselves. But higher circuit densities and faster clock speeds are making chips run so hot that manufacturers can no longer ignore the problem. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which reflects a consensus of chip manufacturers worldwide, managing heat generation within ICs will be a crucial issue in developing the next generation of electronics. Growing concern has in turn sparked new research into chip designs and novel materials that would allow electronics to run much cooler, thereby improving their performance and extending their life span.

Heat is an unavoidable by-product when operating any electronic device. Electronic circuits contain many sources of heat, including the millions and even billions of transistors that are routinely packed into modern ICs as well as the interconnects—the labyrinthine connections linking these components together. In the past, packaging engineers, not chip designers, were the ones who dealt with overheating. They would position components so that any excess heat would move first from the die to a heat sink, and then they'd use a flow of air—from a cooling fan, say—to dissipate heat into the surroundings. Still running too hot? Just use a bigger fan. For years, such coping strategies were sufficient. But now, with the electronics industry aggressively shrinking chip features below 50 nanometers and moving toward three-dimensional integrated circuits, the era of the big-fan solution has passed.

One good way to assess a microprocessor's propensity to heat up is by looking at its thermal design power (TDP), which represents the maximum sustained power that must be dissipated when the chip is performing a typical task. With each new generation of microprocessor, the TDP has grown. In the first Pentiums, for example, the TDP was below 20 watts; in the Pentium 4 it reached 90 W. The transition from single-core microprocessors to multicore microprocessors partially addresses the escalating TDP and worsening thermal-management issues, as the new multicore chips gain performance not by increasing clock frequencies but by adding processors. But other big heat issues remain, including the appearance of hot spots within the chip, where heat fluxes can climb as high as 1000 W per square centimeter. What's worse, according to ITRS projections, within the next five years, up to 80 percent of microprocessor power will be consumed by interconnect wiring in regions of the chips that are particularly difficult to cool.

MIGHTY MATERIAL: Graphene is a one-atom-thick layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb lattice. The material's high electron mobility and high thermal conductivity could lead to chips that are not only faster but also better at dissipating heat. This schematic shows a three-dimensional stacked chip with layers of graphene acting as heat spreaders. At present, though, graphene is extremely costly to manufacture.

Illustration: Bryan Christie Design

Designs intended to improve performance in state-of-the-art ICs can also unintentionally aggravate overheating. For example, the silicon-on-insulator technology used in some advanced chips incorporates buried layers of silicon dioxide to boost transistor speeds and reduce power consumption. But the thermal conductivity of SiO2 is only one-tenth to one-hundredth that of regular silicon substrates. And that diminished ability to conduct heat translates into faster temperature rise and earlier device failure.

Three-dimensional electronics, which are currently under development, likewise pose a real nightmare for heat removal. Compared with conventional, 2-D designs, ICs containing stacked dies promise higher integration density, lower interconnection complexity, and a smaller chip area. Researchers are considering various 3-D architectures, but they all share one thing: They are hard to keep cool. Any theoretical performance gain from 3-D electronics will be impossible to realize if thermal issues aren't addressed. Simulations show that a rise of 10¿C in the operating temperature of such an IC increases circuit delay by about 5 percent; doubling the heat density degrades performance by more than 30 percent.

Some of the thermal phenomena taking place in newer chips have never been observed before. For example, a material's thermal conductivity can change when it is formed into a nanostructure. To understand why, you need to know a little bit about what's going on at the atomic scale.

Most of the heat conduction in semiconductors (such as silicon) and electrical insulators (such as silicon dioxide) takes place by virtue of the vibrational motion of atoms in the crystal lattices of these materials. These complicated vibrations can be reduced to quantized modes, known as phonons, which in many ways resemble elemental particles. A given material can be characterized by the average distance that the phonons will travel in it at a given temperature. In silicon at room temperature, phonons travel around 50 to 100 nanometers. But if the device's features are on the order of 50 nm—as they already are in state-of-the-art microprocessors—the phonons will be subject to additional scattering at the boundaries and interfaces inside the chip, which in turn decreases the chip's ability to shed heat.

As device features approach just a few nanometers, the behavior of phonons gets even more interesting. In such cases, the phonons become spatially confined between layers of different materials and exhibit properties different from those in bulk crystals. While this confinement may prove problematic in many instances, it may also lead to new opportunities to improve device performance, by allowing the transport of the phonons to be precisely controlled and engineered.

These and other factors have led engineers to search for innovative ways to remove heat from electronic devices. One promising approach is to incorporate materials that have a high thermal conductivity into the chip. These can be used as fundamental building blocks for the electronics, or they can serve as specialized heat spreaders, which as their name implies help to move heat so that it doesn't concentrate and form a hot spot.

Two candidates for such applications are diamond and carbon nanotubes. Diamond, with a room-temperature thermal conductivity in the range of 1000 to 2200 W per meter per kelvin, is the best thermal conductor among bulk crystals and has been considered for use in heat spreaders and in composite silicon-diamond substrates. The room-temperature thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes is even higher than that of diamonds: around 3000 to 3500 W/m•K. Because carbon nanotubes are also excellent electrical conductors, researchers are exploring using them as transistor channels and interconnects and as thermal vias, which are channels used to move heat vertically through the layers of a chip or a 3-D stack to the heat sinks above or below.

HEAT WAVE: These simulations show temperature distributions in a conventional PC [bottom] and in a proposed three-tier, three-dimensional chip [top]. Areas of red and pink indicate substantial temperature rises. In a traditional two-dimensional IC, the entire die would rest on a heat sink, which dissipates excess heat. But in 3-D chips, some tiers are separated from the heat sink by many thermally resistive layers of material, so a large hot spot can form.

Illustration:CFD Research Corp.

Potentially better than either diamond or carbon nanotubes is graphene, which is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon arranged in a honeycomb lattice. The material exhibits unique electrical properties. In particular, it has extremely high electron mobility at room temperature. Electron mobility defines how easily an applied electric field moves the electrons in a given material. Higher mobility translates into faster devices.

The first freestanding graphene was produced in 2004, when a research team from the University of Manchester, in England, and the Institute for Microelectronics Technology, in Chernogolovka, Russia, used Scotch tape to peel off a single layer of carbon atoms from a sample of bulk graphite. Since then, the investigation of this material's unique properties has grown at an astonishing pace worldwide.

Researchers have proposed using graphene in carbon or hybrid silicon-carbon electronics and in ultrasensitive detectors. The new material could avoid many of the challenges that carbon nanotubes face. For one, its planar geometry means that it's much easier to grow or deposit on a substrate, to pattern or coat with other materials, and to make electrical contacts to. Already, research groups at the University of Manchester, Columbia University, IBM, and elsewhere have succeeded in fabricating field-effect transistors (FETs) from single and multiple layers of graphene. My group at the University of California, Riverside, in collaboration with researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as well as an independent group of researchers at IBM, have experimentally demonstrated that graphene FETs are less noisy—that is, they produce clearer signals—than their carbon-nanotube counterparts and can operate within the strict noise limits for data processing and communication applications.

Although graphene still has significant drawbacks, including the lack of a commercial manufacturing method, its potential as an electronic material looks promising. Recent developments suggest that it may also aid with thermal management. Last year, my group in the electrical engineering department at UC Riverside teamed up with researchers from the physics department to carry out the first measurements of the material's thermal conductivity and found it to be above 3000 W/m•K near room temperature—higher than that of diamond and on a par with that of carbon nanotubes [see sidebar, "Heating Up Graphene"].

Impressed by such high values, we then set out to find a theoretical explanation. It turns out that physicist Paul G. Klemens, an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, had already suggested a theory. Back in 2000, well before all the recent excitement about graphene had begun, Klemens had predicted that graphene would have a higher thermal conductivity than bulk graphite, provided the graphene sheet is large enough. In simple language, this happens because the low-energy phonons, which transfer the bulk of the heat, scatter less in a 2-D system like graphene than in a 3-D stack of graphite. In an ideal, pure sample of graphene, the phonons' travel distance would be limited only by the size of the graphene flake. Building on this and other work, we then developed our own detailed theory that takes into account the new data on graphene and explains why its thermal conductivity is so sensitive to the width of the graphene flake.

Photo: Guanxiong Liu, Nano-Device Laboratory, University of california, Riverside

TOUGH STUFF:

Graphene can sustain high electric currents and conduct heat extremely efficiently. This scanning electron microscopy image shows a single-atomic-layer graphene flake connected to metal bars, a basic building block for many electronic devices.

Graphene could be used in a number of ways to dissipate heat. For instance, it would work better than carbon nanotubes for making heat-dissipating, electrically conducting interconnects between transistors. Used as a heat spreader in a 3-D chip, it could be paired with thermal vias made of carbon fiber or carbon nanotubes. In situations where graphene's high electrical conductivity would prove a problem, it could be combined with an unconventional electrical insulator like synthetic diamond. If necessary, graphene can be converted into an electrical insulator by irradiating it with low-energy electrons.

In short, incorporating graphene into chip designs could yield devices that are faster, less noisy, and run cooler. Of course, the usefulness of graphene—or, for that matter, of diamond or carbon nanotubes—will depend not just on their physical characteristics but also on their cost and their compatibility with existing chip-manufacturing technology. It's also possible that the high thermal conductivity of graphene may decrease when it is embedded between layers of other materials or when the number of atomic layers gets too high. The exact extent of such changes is a matter of ongoing research. Still, the results so far provide reasons to be optimistic about graphene.

Managing heat in a nanoscale device becomes even more complex as chip designers continue to boost IC speeds while shrinking transistor channels. The relentless push of Moore's Law, which holds that the number of transistors per chip doubles roughly every 18 months, has led to ever higher speeds and drive currents and ever smaller chip features.

The speed and current limits of a chip are proportional to the electron mobility of the semiconductor materials used in its construction. In silicon at room temperature, electron mobility is mainly limited by phonons, which cause the electrons to scatter. A higher electron mobility usually corresponds to weaker electron-phonon interactions and thus less heat generation.

But efforts to increase electron mobility—and thus the speed and current a device can handle—can end up degrading the device's ability to dissipate heat. One approach, already used in conventional chips, is to create strain in the atomic lattice of the semiconductor substrate by forming it out of two materials with slightly mismatched lattice spacings. Often a combination of silicon and silicon germanium is used, the latter having slightly larger spacing between atoms.

A device that includes silicon germanium can have serious problems dissipating heat. That's because the thermal conductivity of SiGe, and of other alloys, is an order of magnitude smaller than that of its constituent semiconductors. So having a layer of SiGe in a device makes it more difficult for heat to escape from the transistor channel to the heat sink. In nanoscale chip architectures, problems caused by overheating in the transistor channels can cancel out any gains in mobility achieved by straining the lattice.

There may be ways to both enhance electron mobility and improve heat removal by devising ways to control the flow of phonons in the device. Such methods are termed phonon engineering. Our theoretical work suggests that sandwiching silicon nanowires or ultrathin silicon films between layers of diamond can increase electron mobility if the interface is good. Diamond not only has a high thermal conductivity, it is also acoustically harder than silicon (acoustical hardness is a product of a material's sound velocity and its mass density) and can be exploited to modify the phonon dispersion within the material. The acoustical mismatch between the silicon and diamond acts to partially suppress the phonons and electron-phonon scattering that would otherwise slow electrons down. Initial experimental results are encouraging, but the quality of the interface continues to be an issue. The rapid progress in depositing synthetic diamond films on silicon achieved in industry and research labs gives us hope that composite wafers with optimized phonon properties may soon become a reality. In other studies, we are investigating the usefulness of graphene for redirecting and controlling the phonons.

What other ways are there to deal with excessive heat? One promising new technology is thermoelectric cooling, either of the entire chip or of local hot spots. A thermoelectric cooler is essentially a heat pump that transfers heat from one side to the other when current is run through it. By design, it has no moving parts or liquid components and can be very robust and compact. Such devices are already being used to cool solid-state lasers and LEDs—and beer: The same basic technology can be found in those portable coolers that plug into the cigarette lighter of your car.

The main problem with thermoelectric cooling of ICs is finding a good material to use. One of the best bulk thermoelectric compounds is bismuth telluride, but it can't be integrated with silicon using conventional chip-fabrication technology. So investigators are seeking thermoelectric materials that are more compatible with manufacturing techniques but still retain their ability to wick away heat. Recent reports suggest that silicon nanowires or tiny blobs of silicon germanium and silicon (called quantum dots) may work.

A variation on this theme is to attach thermoelectric coolers to the chip's heat sinks instead of relying on air to carry away the heat. In January, a team led by researchers at Intel demonstrated the first chip-scale thermoelectric refrigerator.

Another approach is to introduce a liquid cooling system comparable to that in your car's engine or what was used in the early Cray supercomputers, which were cooled by Freon circulating through pipes. For state-of-the-art ICs, it may be possible to cool individual heat-dissipating elements on the chip using liquids. Liquid cooling avoids the thermal resistance that occurs at the interface of two solids. Exactly how to manage the microscale (if not nanoscale) plumbing remains an area of active research.

Efforts also continue to improve the thermal interface materials between the chip and the heat sink. The right kind of interface material can greatly improve heat removal and reduce the thermal resistance between the chip and its packaging. Common interface materials consist of an oil or grease embedded with ceramic or metal particles. But here again, fillers made from graphene look attractive. Even a tiny amount of graphene can lead to a substantial increase in thermal conductivity.

Although researchers are optimistic about these recent developments in thermal management, it will take years until any of the new materials and designs find their way into commercial chips. So you may be wondering what you can do in the meantime to keep your computer from overheating. Here's one easy fix: Open up your machine and remove any dust, which can accumulate and prevent heat from dissipating properly. Or follow my wife's example and aim a good strong fan at your computer. With any luck, that will tide you over until the more elegant solutions I've described here finally arrive.

This article originally appeared in print as "Chill Out".

About the Author

Alexander A. Balandin is chairman of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside. In "Chill Out", he describes new materials and designs to keep chips cool. He notes that people often confuse "photons," which are quanta of light, with "phonons," which measure crystal lattice vibrations and are the focus of Balandin's research. Once, an overeager assistant painstakingly changed phonon to photon on each flyer for a lecture Balandin was giving, assuming it was a typo.

To Probe Further

For more about Alexander A. Balandin's work on thermal management in electronic devices, see the Web site of the Nano-Device Laboratory at the University of California, Riverside: http://ndl.ee.ucr.edu. His work on phonon engineering is supported by the U.S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research. Balandin is also associated with two multi-institutional research consortia that are investigating materials and designs for future electronics: the Center on Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (http://www.fena.org) and the Interconnect Focus Center (http://www.ifc.gatech.edu).

Heating Up Graphene

Illustration by Bryan Christie Design

Measuring the thermal conductivity of something with a thickness of just one atomic layer is tricky. At the University of California, Riverside, we approached the problem this way: First, we prepared samples to measure, each consisting of a long graphene flake suspended across a trench in a silicon wafer and attached to heat sinks. We then heated the graphene flake with a laser. The heat wave propagated from the middle of the graphene to the heat sinks.

To measure the temperature at the center of the hot spot, we came up with an unconventional use for a micro Raman spectrometer. Ordinarily, Raman spectroscopy is an optical technique used to identify materials. The Raman spectrum of graphene has a clear peak, referred to as a G peak; the spectral position of the peak depends on the temperature of the sample. So by measuring the exact position of the G peak, we were able to use our spectrometer as a thermometer.

Only a small portion of the laser light ended up dissipating in the graphene. Most of the light passed through it and was reflected back. We determined the fraction of the light dissipated in the sample by comparing the Raman intensity of the graphene with that of bulk graphite. Knowing the temperature rise, the dissipated light power, and the geometry of the graphene flake, we then determined the graphene’s thermal conductivity. The measured values exceeded 3000 watts per meter per kelvin near room temperature and depended on the size of the graphene flake. We learned later that our results agreed with physicist Paul G. Klemens’s predictions years earlier. -Alexander A. Balandin

Thank you - spectrum

Professional Ethics and human Values Ebook - Anna University Syllabus book

2009-10-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

This book is the fruition of four decades of teaching Mechanical Engineering subjects including Quality Engineering, Total Quality Management, and Principles of Management for the Bachelor and Master degree courses in Engineering at Annamalai University, and then in Arunai Engineering College, Tiruvannamalai, by the author. Frank and continual feed back from the distinguished students and esteemed colleagues of the author obtained during teaching, enthused him in shaping this book into a valuable present to the scholars pursuing engineering.

This book amply covers the updated syllabus of Professional Ethics by Anna University. Besides the basic human values, Codes of ethics of major Indian professional societies, detailed risk analysis with illustrative examples are included. Further, twenty four crisp case studies covering a wide spectrum of topics in Professional Ethics, short-answer questions, long-answer questions with hints have been appended to sustain the interest of the engineering students. Besides the prescribed syllabus, ethics-related topics such as Social Acceptability SA 8000, Safety System OHSAS 18001 and Engineer-Manager interactions have also been explained. The student community as well as the teaching fraternity is certain to enjoy using this book, not only from the teaching-learning point of view, but also for their professional career and advancement.

Download book

How Hard Should It Be To Stop a Runaway Luxury Car?

2009-10-27T06:16:00.001-07:00

In Sunday's LA Times, there was a very interestingarticle investigating the question whether "Toyota'signition, transmission and braking systems may make it difficult for drivers to combat sudden or unintended accelerations and safely recover, regardless of their cause."

The story comes in light of the recent Toyota recall of 3.8 million vehicles involving driver side floor mats that might, if improperly installed, come loose or are not of the right type, jam certain Toyota models' accelerator pedals into the full open position. As Toyota notes, "A stuck open accelerator pedal may result in very high vehicle speeds and make it difficult to stop the vehicle, which could cause a crash, serious injury or death." The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall notice is here.

Toyota's recall followed a terrible car crash in California in late August that killed 19-year veteran California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor, his wife, teenage daughter and brother-in-law. Their borrowed 2009 Lexus ES 350 was traveling at 120 mph at the time, and despite his best efforts, Officer Saylor couldn't stop or slow down the car. A floor mat becoming stuck in the car's accelerator pedal is suspected as being the cause.

The LA Times says that there have been five related fatal crashes in the U.S. over the last two years involving runaway Toyota and Lexus vehicles. Toyota has maintained that sudden acceleration or runaway car incidents involving its vehicles are primarily due to improperly installed floor mats.

Critics, on the other hand, contend that the problem goes beyond floor mats, and may involve fundamental design issues in certain Toyota models, especially its luxury models which have highly complex electronically controlled or assisted systems.

(I wrote an article on software in cars earlier this year for Spectrum here.)

For instance, the Lexus ES 350 driven by Officer Saylor has a push-button starter, which is activated by the combination of a wireless electronic fob carried by the driver and a button on the dashboard, the Times says. To turn the car off in an emergency situation once it is in motion, you have to hold the start button down for a full three seconds: repeated pushing of the button does not work. The user's manual tells a driver this, but as the LA Times points out, this information is given only after telling drivers: "Caution, Do not touch the 'power' switch while driving."

In addition, shifting a car into neutral to try to disengage the engine from the transmission isn't easy either in an emergency situation. The Times story says, "the ES 350 is equipped with an automatic transmission that can mimic manual shifting, and its shift lever on the console has a series of gates and detents that allow a driver to select any of at least four forward gears. The arrangement of those gear selections could make it difficult to shift from a forward gear directly into neutral in a panic situation, Toyota spokesman Lyons acknowledged."

Spokesman Lyon added, rather worryingly, that, "You'd be surprised how many people around here [Toyota] don't know what the neutral position is for."

I guess most people no longer drive a manual shift anymore.

As for hitting the brakes to slow a car down, another issue pops up, says the Times. "The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears."

Tests indicate that a person would have to exert 225 pounds of pressure on a brake pedal to stop it - a mean feat for almost anyone, let alone a person trying to keep a car on the road while avoiding hitting anything as it is traveling at 176 feet per second.

Critics have been insisting for a decade, the LA Times reports, that Toyota and other auto manufacturers need to install a fail-safe mechanism in their highly computerized engine control systems that can quickly recognize and then stop sudden acceleration/runaway car events. One suggestion is for the car's engine to be turned off when a car's brakes are depressed while the accelerator is also being depressed (people who like to ride their brakes may not like this feature, though).

Even Toyota, which has long resisted such installing such a device, has acknowledged that it is now rethinking its position.

The LA Times story ends with a note that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into sudden acceleration events involving Toyota vehicles.

I'll let you know what it finds.

Firefox Themes - The Magic

2009-10-17T23:09:00.001-07:00

It’s amazing if you think about it. The new generation of web-browsers has become so flexible, so adaptable and so easy to use that you can design and use it according to your personal taste and needs. So if you are a Mozilla Firefox user, you can add almost any functionality you ever thought about viaexternal extensions. Furthermore, you can also personalize your web-browser, changing its look withFirefox Themes. Thus you can let your browser have a fresh Vista look or appear like Opera, Internet Explorer or Mac-Browser. But which look can you choose to guarantee the most enjoyable browsing experience? Well, it’s a tough one.

In fact, there are many of them. We’ve selected some of the most beautiful Firefox Themes, which work in Firefox 2 and listed them below. Usually the changes concern not only the visual appearance and interface (icons and background colors), but also the functionality of the “adapted” Firefox – e.g. extensions.Links checked: June/26 2008.

Firefox Themes

myFireFox
Firefox appears to become Internet Explorer 7.

Metal Lion – Vista

Kempelton PE

iFox Smooth

Pink Paula / PP 2
Firefox fur Madchen. Gibt es auch in Blau.

Aluminum Alloy

Red Cats (green flavor)

Qute

Phoenity
Classic.

Full with various plug-ins – Saferfox Xpanded, designed by Mankin Studios.

How can I install a Firefox Theme?

Just click on the selected theme on a web-site you can download it from, the Firefox changes its look immediately. Alternatively you can also drag the installer into the theme-window (”Tools” –> “Add-ons”). There you can activate or deactivate the theme.

Please keep in mind that not every theme works in every version of the Firefox browser.

Familiar Nanotech Refrain: The Physics Are There

2009-10-11T07:17:00.001-07:00

Familiar Nanotech Refrain: The Physics Are There

POSTED BY: DEXTER JOHNSON // THU, SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

I am impressed by the near daily news coming out of research labs around the world about scientists mixing one material with another on the nanoscale that could alter industries from electronics to medicine…someday…maybe.

I don’t typically comment about these experiments and results because it’s hard to know where to draw the line, and out of my own interest I have focused more on what is here and now.

But for some reason, which I still cannot totally account for, I was interested in this experiment at Cornell University with a carbon nanotube being used in the place of silicon as the basic element for converting light to energy for a solar cell.

I suppose the simplicity of the experiment, in which a single-walled carbon nanotube was wired in between two electrical contacts and a third underneath it and then a laser light focused on it, was appealing. And the rather impressive result where a “big photon” doesn’t give off its energy as an electron and excess heat, but rather two electrons, was another attractive part of this story.

But what I think got me about the news stories that covered this was Paul McEuen, the lead researcher, making a rather interesting appraisal of the work "We've made the world's smallest solar cell, and that's not necessarily a good thing," he is quoted as saying on the pages of the Next Big Future blog.

Or as McEuen’s grad student, Nathan Gabor, commented "What we've observed is that the physics is there."

Now if you can engineer the scaling of the device to industrial levels, and, perhaps most importantly, get the capital to take on such an enterprise and then actually succeed in the marketplace which is set up to only let established technologies succeed then this gets really interesting.

Tunable Logic - Pseudostatic

2009-10-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

New logic family could help optimize FPGA performance and power

Photo: - iStockphoto

OCTOBER 2009

As engineers shrink transistors to tinier dimensions, they're finding it harder and harder to keep the devices from leaking current and wasting power, even when they're switched off. Stanford University researchers, led by electrical engineering professor and Rambus cofounder Mark Horowitz, think they've found a way to effectively plug the leaks, at least for certain types of chips. They've invented a new family of logic circuits that let designers tune a transistor characteristic critical to balancing power loss and performance, even after the chips have been constructed.

"There's always a choice between power consumption and performance when you do a [circuit] design," says Rajit Manohar, a professor in Cornell University's school of electrical and computer engineering, who was not involved in the work. The Stanford technique, called pseudostatic logic, allows you to "pick your trade-off between power and performance" after the chip arrives at your door, he says.

When incorporated into a critical part of a reconfigurable IC, the design gave researchers the ability to tune the chip's performance and energy demands over a much wider range than current conventional techniques allow.

Most microprocessors can dial up performance at the expense of power consumption, or vice versa, by simply increasing or decreasing the supply voltage. Tricks like that, for the most part, only diminish dynamic power, which is lost when transistors switch. But as chips get smaller, dynamic power isn't the only factor affecting chip performance. Static power, lost by leaking current while transistors are off, sucks up valuable energy.

Leakage can be controlled by tricks that change the transistor's threshold voltage, below which the transistor is turned off. But these tricks have become less effective as transistors scale down, Manohar says. "A new knob is needed" that will control this leakage variable, says Bita Nezamfar, who worked on the new logic family while she was a graduate student at Stanford.

The Stanford researchers claim that pseudostatic logic, which they described in a recent issue of IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, could do the job better. The new logic yields the same effect as that of tweaking a transistor's threshold voltage, but it works by changing the voltage between the gate and source, which can be tuned over a wider range.

With pseudostatic logic, the supply voltage driving every other gate in a logic block is shifted, or skewed, by a certain amount. That means that when the transistor is off, the voltage between the transistor's gate and source isn't zero but rather some positive or negative value. A positive skew boosts performance, making transistors faster, while a negative skew reduces leakage.

Horowitz and his colleagues say that this type of logic is particularly useful for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are made of blocks of programmable logic and interconnect circuits and must serve applications with a wide variety of power and performance demands. The Stanford team substituted pseudostatic logic in the interconnect circuits of a test FPGA and were able to reduce power consumption by 35 percent without sacrificing performance. Or, they could choose to boost performance by 20 percent without eating up more power. However, their logic does require two extra voltage supplies to do the skew, which could put off companies whose designs can't accommodate the cost of added components and complexity.

Horowitz says his team is talking to the FPGA community about their logic, and that some companies he won't name have shown an interest in exploring its use.

Manohar, who cofounded the FPGA firm Achronix, says that incorporating the technology may not depend on whether it's a good idea or not. "Business realities don't always align with the best technology," he says. "There are a lot of options available to [industry] to improve their system," and they have to choose what to spend time on. And companies may prefer to stick with the designs they're used to. A spokesperson from FPGA firm Altera says that a leakage-reducing technique in use today, called body bias, should still work for future chips.

Inventors of the CCD Camera Chip Share Nobel in Physics

2009-10-08T03:21:00.000-07:00

IEEE Fellows Willard Boyle and George Smith started the digital-image revolution

Camera Men: Willard Boyle [left] and George Smith [right] in 1970.

BY NEIL SAVAGE // OCTOBER 2009

7 October 2009—Willard Boyle and George Smith, formerly of Bell Telephone Laboratories, in Murray Hill, N.J., will share half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), the basis for digital imagery in everything from pocket cameras to the Hubble Space Telescope. In announcing the awards, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called Boyle and Smith “masters of light” and said that, with fellow winner and optical-fiber pioneer Charles Kuen Kao, they “helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies.”

Boyle and Smith came up with the idea for the CCD during a brief meeting in 1969. The two were working on semiconductor integrated circuits, and Smith had been involved with trying to create an imaging chip for the Picturephone, which consisted of an array of silicon diodes. At the time, Bell Labs was also working on a new type of computer memory that relied on tiny bubbles of magnetism. As the two recalled in a 1976 article in IEEE Transactions on Electronic Devices , their boss, Jack Morton, urged them to look at whether it was possible to make a form of bubble memory using semiconductors.

The idea is fairly simple. You start with a layer of silicon, doped so that it’s deficient in electrons and oxidized at the surface. Atop the oxide, add an array of metal electrodes as gates, creating capacitors that can store charge. Then apply a voltage to the gate, which repels the silicon’s positive carriers—the holes—and creates a potential well at the surface of the silicon. When a photon strikes the silicon, it creates an electron-hole pair, and the electron moves toward an electrode into the well. Electrons accumulate in the interface between the silicon and the oxide. When you apply a sequence of high and low voltages to adjacent gates, the electrons move from one gate to the next, like water being poured from one bucket to another, until they reach the edge of the chip, where the level of charge can be read as a measure of light intensity.

“Essentially, this was the invention,” Smith recalled in a 2001 interview with the IEEE History Center. “Let’s not have any circuit in between. Let’s just put these things close together. If charge is stored here, just put a voltage over here that’s bigger than the voltage over there, and the charge will fall over. This voltage is then reset, and you repeat the process.”

Though their aim was to invent memory, Smith says it was obvious that the technology would work for imaging as well. And when random access memory (RAM) came along, attempts to create bubble memory were abandoned.

James Janesick, director of sensor development at Sarnoff Corp., says he’s long thought the two should receive a Nobel. “Besides seeing the edge of the universe, which is how I applied the technology at the time, it made billions and billions of dollars.”

Janesick was a young researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., in the early 1970s, where he worked on the imaging system for the Hubble. At the time, engineers were actually considering putting film in the telescope’s cameras and sending astronauts to retrieve it, or using old-fashioned vidicon camera tubes. The fact that CCDs were 100 times as sensitive as either film or camera tubes, Janesick says, led them to quickly sweep through the field of astronomy and completely dominate scientific imaging today.

Carlo Sequin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, joined Smith’s group to work on CCDs a couple of months after the initial invention. With Smith, he helped build the first CCDs that were compatible with the U.S. television format, thus reducing the size of TV cameras. “It was very exciting, because there was this very new principle that at the beginning seemed to be very simple,” Sequin says. In practice, he says, there were a lot of design issues to solve to make the device practical. Perhaps the greatest breakthrough came when Boyle and Smith developed the buried channel concept. By transferring the charges within the silicon instead of at the surface, they were able to avoid the losses caused by imperfections at the interface of the silicon and the oxide. That innovation allowed CCDs to grow from devices with only a few dozen pixels to arrays of 10 000 by 10 000 today.

“What used to be this incredibly simple principle is one of the most complex devices being built today, yet for $100 you find it in every camera,” Sequin says.

Imagers based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology are starting to take over in some areas, particularly in low-end cameras, where price is a greater issue than performance. These sensors are still not quite as sensitive as CCDs, but the same advances in lithography that have propelled microprocessors are improving CMOS sensors, and it’s widely agreed they’ll eventually displace CCDs.

Fine Fellows: IEEE Fellows and Nobel Prize winners Willard Boyle [left] and George Smith [right].

But Terrence Lomheim, an engineer in the sensor systems subdivision at the Aerospace Corp. and coauthor of a book on CCDs and CMOS, points out that “charge-coupled devices have held sway for 30 years.” He says Boyle and Smith managed to invent digital imaging years before the microelectronics revolution gave us the rest of today’s digital world. “Because of the basic concept they invented, they could get an early start on high-quality electronic imaging.”

Rod Alferness, chief scientist at what is now Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, who worked for Boyle in the mid-1970s, says that the work of all three Nobel winners, in fiber optics for communications and in CCDs for providing the photos and videos we now shunt around the Internet, helped create the information age we know today. “It’s a convergence of technologies that, when you put them together, you get something that’s very special,” he says.

Better control over nanotube growth promises important advances in electronics

2009-10-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

Researchers have found that using argon or helium during the nanotube growth process can influence their nature

Researchers at the Honda Research Institute, Purdue University and the University of Louisville have discovered a way to systematically grow carbon nanotubes with either metallic or semiconducting properties, solving a long-standing problem in nanotechnology research and paving the way for the widespread use of nanotubes in electronics.

Nanotubes are one-atom thick sheets of carbon rolled up in a cylindrical form, and come in two types: metallic and semiconducting. Metallic nanotubes are about 100 times stronger than steel while significantly lighter and stronger; semiconducting nanotubes, on the other hand, are among the best electrical conductors ever discovered.

When combined, these two kinds of nanotubes could be used as the basic building blocks to produce the next generation of transistors, as well as bringing important improvements to a number of fields including solar and battery technology.

Carbon nanotubes have been the object of intense research since they were discovered in the early 90s, but they need to be manufactured according to very specific standards in order to be employed successfully — this is particularly true with metallic nanotubes and has been a major obstacle to their effective employment so far.

The researchers have now managed to control almost systematically whether grown carbon nanotubes are metallic rather than semiconducting, with a 91 percent success rate for metallic nanotubes (compared to a previous success rate of 25-50 percent) and room for further improvement.

Nanotubes were "grown" in a vacuum chamber by exposing iron particles to methane gas containing carbon and hydrogen. The particles were heated to 800 degrees Celsius and, with time, the iron became oversaturated with carbon, which precipitated causing the nanotube to begin forming.

The researchers found they could control whether the carbon nanotubes will become metal or semiconductor by using either argon or helium in conjunction with water as the carrier gas that helps flow the methane into the chamber.

But there are still some questions to answer as the exact dynamics aren't entirely clear, particularly when it comes to understanding the role played by water in this process. "The water might promote the formation of the facets, and the argon might somehow prevent the water from doing so, but more research is needed to determine this," Eric Stach, associate professor of materials engineering at Purdue, commented.

Once an answer is found, the researchers will likely be able to fine-tune the process to obtain even higher reliability, meaning an even better control on the nanotube manufacturing process and far better results in all practical applications where nanotubes are to be employed.

Photonics Breakthrough for Silicon Chips

2009-10-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

Light can exert enough force to flip switches on a silicon chip

Photo Illustration: Brandon Palacio; flashlight: tom grill/getty images; circuit board: getty images

In 1867, Jules Verne imagined spaceships propelled by the pressure of light. In 1871 James Clerk Maxwell predicted that such pressure actually existed, and in 1900 Pyotr Lebedev confirmed that prediction experimentally. But 109 years later, engineers have yet to find a practical use for this odd force.

Maybe it's just too weak. Light pressure equals beam power divided by c, the speed of light. A one-milliwatt laser pointer, therefore, presses its object with the force of 3.3 piconewtons. You could lift a penny with laser pointers—you'd just need 30billion of them.

Yet such weakness becomes a strength when you're trying to nudge something of nanometer size and picogram mass. And the optics for directing light on such a scale already exist, in the form of miniature waveguides, couplers, and beam splitters, all of which are now routinely laid down on silicon-on-insulator substrates. We use these nanophotonic devices for optical processing. Why not also use them to exploit the ultralight touch that light itself can provide? Why not use light as an actuator, reaching right into the guts of an integrated circuit to throw tiny switches, either to control electronic circuits or, better yet, to reroute light itself, and the data that it carries?

Such a marriage of nanomechanics and nanophotonics would bring us a giant step closer to optical chips. That's important, because light has a vastly wider bandwidth than electricity, which would enable it to get around the critical bottleneck in computing: the connections between processors. If light could act directly on circuit elements without first being converted to electricity, entire systems would run faster. You could imagine yoking together the multicore processors in a chip, making them run much faster and more efficiently than they can now. And if we really master the technology, optically controlled switches might ultimately supplant transistors, ushering in an era of all-optical computers. The resulting speedup would be stupendous, even by the standards of modern computing.

At the beginning of 2007, shortly after I joined the engineering faculty at Yale, I began to assemble a team to find ways of using light to drive silicon devices on a nanometer scale. We would be building on nearly two decades of research.

The quest had begun with microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, which as the name implies are built in dimensions measured in micrometers. Today's engineers find it easy to build resonators—tiny tuning forks, basically—at that scale by simply embedding them within electronic circuits. The circuits drive the resonators through electromechanical coupling, typically by pairing them with electrical plates—one fixed, the other on the movable MEMS. In such a scheme, a current applied between the plates alters the gap between the plates, which changes the capacitance and further induces a current that oscillates in response to the motion of the plates. Basically, you feed in a steady current and get an oscillating one in response. In a cellphone, for example, such oscillators are used in filters, picking out the desired signal from the swath of frequencies your antenna pulls in.

The smaller the size of the plates and the gap between them, the faster the oscillation can be and thus the higher the frequency that can be isolated. At the nanoscale, such oscillators attain the frequencies needed for microwave communications. However, the high frequencies give rise to complex impedances both mechanical and electrical. Because the structure is so small, the impedances are often badly mismatched.

How badly are they mismatched? In high-frequency circuitry you normally want every component to have an impedance of around 50 ohms. At these tiny dimensions, though, you're going to end up with an impedance that's millions of times as great, which means that essentially none of your signal will get through.

Scaling down from MEMS to nanoelectromechanical systems, or NEMS, also brings on other, more fundamental problems. First, in the nano realm, the oscillators are so fast that the conventional electronic circuitry they work with can't keep up. Second, the oscillators' signals are so faint that they can get drowned out by the random noise that's endemic in any electronic circuit. A NEMS device can barely make itself heard over noise that's just one-thousandth as strong as what you'd find in a typical IC.

Here is where photonics saves the day: Photons, unlike electrons, don't interact with each other and so are immune to cross talk. Moreover, because light has a much greater bandwidth, or carrying capacity, photonic signals can carry far more bits per second than electronic signals, while dissipating much less power. Also, it's easy to route photons on a chip; you just build a photonic wire—an optical nanofiber, essentially—on the top layer of the silicon in your chip. Finally, because we are in a purely optical domain, impedance is no problem.

The one big problem with those wonderfully noninteracting photons is that because they are noninteracting, there's no obvious way to use one of them to control another. So that's where the mechanical force of light comes in.

Illustration: Emily Cooper

A Light Touch

There are two ways to picture the gradient optical force exerted in a waveguide. According to Maxwell's equations [top illustration] the asymmetry between the open air on top of the waveguide and the thin air gap underneath will distort the optical field [yellow], creating a downward force.

Or you can resort to ray optics [bottom]. While in a conventional waveguide the light reflects equally strongly off the top and bottom edges, here the proximity of the silicon oxide substrate, with its relatively high refractive index, causes the rays to drag. They therefore push down harder than they push up.

Click on the image for a larger view.

One such force, of course, is straightforward radiation pressure, like that of sunlight pressing on the sail of a future interstellar spacecraft. However, you can't harvest much momentum that way, and what you do collect will press in only one direction, which means you can't use it to both push and pull things, an important consideration (as we'll explain later). We therefore chose to exploit a different kind of optical force, one that often gets short shrift in university courses in optics. It's called the gradient optical force, and it arises from an incredibly evanescent bonding between light waves [see illustration, "A Light Touch," above].

The gradient optical force was first used in the 1970s, in "optical tweezers," which were designed to manipulate molecules in a kind of optical microscope. That such a force might also be used on a chip was suggested in 2005 by John Joannopolous's group at MIT, together with Federico Capasso's group at Harvard. Using theories ultimately derived from Maxwell's equations, they concluded that it would be possible to generate a gradient force in the piconewtons, more than enough to get a nanometer-scale oscillator thrumming. The researchers based their calculations on a device involving two parallel waveguides, which are light-conducting channels engineered to confine waves of a given frequency in a beam so that it can travel through the guide with very little loss. Even though the two waveguides kept their beams separate, the bonding of the optical fields between the beams was surprisingly strong.

We found in 2007 that we could exploit the same principle to get oscillation using one waveguide rather than two. In the single-waveguide case, the optical field around the waveguide must be asymmetrical, in order to create the imbalance that's needed to exert a net force.

Happily enough, you can create such a waveguide on a chip by etching away the oxide under a slab of silicon to form a slab, which looks rather like a tiny bridge. This slab can swing back and forth—that is, it can oscillate. Now when light propagates along the waveguide, it encounters asymmetry: The bottom boundary of the waveguide is separated from the silicon oxide substrate by a thin air gap—a dielectric substrate—whereas the top boundary borders on air alone. So, as Maxwell's equations predict, a net optical force arises in the direction perpendicular to the waveguide. The force is substantial—well, for our purposes at least.

It may be easier to visualize the physics by means of ray optics. In a symmetric waveguide, the high refractive index in the middle guarantees that the light rays will bounce back and forth equally on the top and bottom surfaces of the guide. This perfect symmetry yields no net optical force. However, when a silicon substrate is present along the bottom of the waveguide, the rays are more strongly attracted toward the bottom surface, because the refractive index of the substrate—1.45—is higher than air's 1.00. So think of it like this: The rays drag more forcibly along the bottom surface, applying a net force to the substrate.

So we've got ourselves a force and a mobile waveguide with which to harvest it. The next question is how to get light into the chip. It isn't easy to generate photons in silicon, so they have to be fed to the silicon waveguide from an external laser, through standard optical fibers. That scheme turns out to be harder to carry out than it might seem.

Silicon waveguides are normally made just several hundred nanometers wide, so that at a wavelength of 1550 nanometers, a telecommunications standard, they'll support only a single optical mode—a stable pattern that's guided within the waveguide's structure so that the signal doesn't disperse. A standard optical fiber, however, is dozens of times as wide. When you hook such a waveguide to such a fiber, the modes won't match up properly, and only about 0.1 percent of the light's power transfers. It isn't enough.

There are various tricks you can use to match the waveguide to the fiber, but because these tricks involve micromachining to an extremely high tolerance and at a very small scale, it is quite difficult. And the operations must be performed on each device, one at a time.

We found a better solution. In his lab at Caltech, Axel Scherer had developed some couplers for precisely this purpose: matching the light wave in an optical fiber to one in a silicon waveguide. Such couplers consist of optical gratings that are directly fabricated on silicon. Michael Hochberg, then a graduate student in Scherer's lab, began collaborating with us in 2007 and walked us through the design of these couplers.

This grating coupler has a horn structure with openings at either end: a large one that connects to the optical fiber and another with a cross-sectional area just one-thousandth as big that connects to the waveguide. In this scheme, the fibers are aligned from the top of the wafer, and you can test hundreds of devices repeatedly. You can provide light on demand, piping it throughout the chip, bending, splitting, and recombining it at will. And because the coupler ensures that the light goes from the waveguide to whatever device it is driving on the chip, very little of the light leaks out because of diffraction.

Mechanical devices require proper anchoring so that they can oscillate for a long time without losing too much energy. However, you'd rather not have such an anchor in a photonic design because it would tend to disturb the guided light wave, causing photons to scatter and thus be lost. We had to come up with several approaches to overcome this problem.

First, we built an interface between the stationary waveguide and the mobile waveguide, providing rigid mechanical support and thus focusing the light waves. This structure is called a multimode interference coupler, and by working effectively as an in-plane lens, it keeps the loss of light below 1 decibel.

Next, we built a nanomechanical interferometer on a silicon chip. We wanted this device not only because its ability to detect motion very sensitively is inherently useful, but also because it would help us keep track of what's going on in the various nanomechanical systems we devise.

Illustration: Emily Cooper

Motion Detector:

Photonic circuits form a chip-scale interferometer. Motion tends to modify the phases of the light waves, allowing an inference of the resonators' oscillation.

Click on the image for a larger view.

We built a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which splits one light beam evenly into two [see illustration, "Motion Detector," above]. One beam goes through a moving part of the device we're building—say, the mobile, bridgelike part of the oscillator we described above. The other beam serves as the reference. A movement of the chip will cause the mobile part to vibrate, changing the effective refractive index through which the light is traveling and thus shifting its phase with respect to that of the reference beam. When the two beams recombine, their waves will interfere, forming a pattern from which we infer the degree of movement.

Our on-chip interferometer can measure movement to a sensitivity of 2 x 10¹⁴ meter, in a frequency range around 1 hertz. The spring constant of our devices—the measure of stiffness—is typically in the range of 1 to 10 newtons per meter. Therefore, the force sensitivity is on the order of 0.02 piconewtons, enough to resolve the gradient optical force—if it exists.

By the end of 2007 we had designed and redesigned the device—complete with interferometer, grating, and support coupler—many times. We were getting a reasonable amount of light through the measurement system, and almost all the components were in place. Yet even so, we still did not see the effect of the optical force. At this moment, our group suddenly received an infusion of new talent: Mo Li, a longtime friend and collaborator from my days as a graduate student at Caltech, where we'd both worked under Michael Roukes, a pioneer of nanoelectromechanical systems. We also welcomed Wolfram Pernice, a gifted photonic device designer who, after obtaining his Ph.D. from Oxford, joined us as a postdoctoral fellow.

By January 2008, Li had put together many complete chips with movable beams, but he could observe no evidence of the optical force in the vibration of those beams. It became a blind game. We couldn't know whether the force was absent or simply undetected.

So we decided to separate the two problems of generating and detecting the optical force. To confirm that the interferometer was actually working, we actuated the device through the brute-force method of putting a sample chip on a piezoelectric disk, energizing the disk, and mechanically shaking the silicon photonic interferometer. The interferometer clearly indicated mechanical resonance.

Pernice worked around the clock and came up with new designs for the grating couplers and multimode interference couplers that allowed for much lower transmission losses, and therefore much greater sensitivity. Finally we were able to detect nanomechanical resonance at 10 megahertz without resorting to the piezodisk shaker. We therefore determined that the resonance had been induced purely by optical force.

The signal strength was enormous. With a slight increase of laser intensity, the beam resonance rose markedly, in nonlinear fashion. This result suggested that we could produce a force that was actually greater than we needed to move the picogram parts that make up a nanomachine. The actuation turned out to be just as efficient as that commonly used in MEMS devices, such as those that include inertial sensors of the kind used as gyroscopes. Of course, our NEMS system worked at a far higher frequency.

The next question involved the sign of the force. Just as electrically charged objects can either attract or repel each other, depending upon the sign of the charges, theory predicts that the gradient optical force should also be either attractive or repulsive, depending on the relative phase of the interacting light waves. Yet our devices exhibited only the attractive force. In other words, they were "monopolar."

To create a bipolar device, we went back to the original MIT/Harvard theory, which considers the optical forces that come into play between two opposing waveguides. As two waveguides approach each other in parallel, that is, side to side, the theory predicts that the waves from each waveguide will overlap to form a bonding (symmetric) mode or an antibonding (asymmetric) mode. When the waves are in phase, the optical force is attractive; when they are out of phase, the force is repulsive.

To demonstrate these effects, we developed a butterfly-shaped circuit having two "wings." In the left wing, the light is split equally into a top and a bottom arm, with the one on top having a longer waveguide to delay the light. This delay shifts the phase of the light waves. We then directed waves from each arm to recombine at the center of the butterfly, where the two suspended waveguides formed nanomechanical structures. If the light waves are out of phase at this point, the recombination should produce a repulsive effect. As for the identical right wing of the butterfly, its purpose is to make the whole structure symmetrical. That way, when the light proceeds into the right wing, the phase can be reversed, and the relative phase difference between both wings is maintained.

If the optical path difference between the two arms is an even multiple of the half wavelength, the waves will arrive at the nanomechanical devices in phase. The result should be an attractive force. If the delay is an odd multiple, you should get a repulsive force.

Everything worked according to theory. Better still, we found that by adjusting the relative phase of the interacting waveguide, we could tune the force from repulsive to attractive, or vice versa. (In practical experiments, we adjust the wavelength of the light source. This is equivalent to adjusting the delay phase in the wings.) In this fashion we have demonstrated all the predicted properties of the gradient optical force. Even more important, because this bipolar force can either push or pull, it allows us to manipulate components in both directions. We thus have complete control.

We achieved this push-me-pull-you control in late 2008. Now, instead of being limited to setting a vibrating beam in motion, we can push a nanomechanical lever in one direction—for instance, to open an optical switch and then pull it back again, closing the switch.

Illustration: Courtesy of mo li, wolfram pernice, tang group

Harp Strings:

A single photonic bus feeds 10 nanoscale cantilever waveguides, each of a different length and thus vibrating at its own rate, like a harp string. Each cantilever can register a deflection of just a fraction of the diameter of an atom. Together they can measure complex patterns of motion.

Click on the image for a larger view.

The waveguide beams prove that optical force can be used to throw switches inside silicon optical circuits. Now we are extending that principle to other NEMS devices. Recently we embedded a series of cantilevers in photonic circuits, got all the cantilevers to resonate, and detected all their resonances at once [see illustration, "Harp Strings," above]. We did all this by sending a light beam via a waveguide, which branched off into subsidiary channels.

With this setup we can integrate many sensors on a single photonic bus. Such a design is fully compatible with the standard wafer-scale processes used to fabricate chips, so large arrays could be mass-produced in a straightforward and low-cost way.

The light-force interaction brings NEMS device development to a true circuit level, making possible all sorts of applications. Such a device would detect signals so faint that it could measure the weight of just a sprinkling of molecules on top of it. It truly would weigh the molecules, not just detect them, because it would measure the change in the frequency of the resonator.

Further out, we expect to use the nanomechanics and nanophotonics on a given chip to achieve dual-mode sensing—that is, an optical spectrometer and a resonant mass sensor. If you have a fluorescent molecule, you can use the spectrometer to determine what the molecule is by its color, and you can use the resonant mass sensor to tell how many molecules there are.

Of course, you could also use light pressure to process RF analog signals better than is possible today, by combining optical and mechanical filtering. Optical filtering can, for instance, let only microwaves through, whereas mechanical filtering—using the oscillating beams we discussed earlier—can filter at a lower frequency range.

We can imagine using optical force to reroute light on the fly, allowing a photonic circuit to perform at a blindingly fast speed, far beyond anything that electronic controls can manage. This capability would go a long way toward realizing the dream of an all-optical computer, able to exploit the immense bandwidth of light to its fullest. Maybe if you left your hard drive at home, you could read it at a comfortable rate over the Internet—if we're still using hard drives by that time!

The most intractable bottleneck in today's high-end computers comes from having to use electronic signals to control photons. The sky will be the limit when we can at last use light to steer light.

This article originally appeared in print as "May the Force of Light Be With You."

About the Author

Hong X. Tang won a National Science Foundation Career award this year for using the pressure of light to operate nanomechanical devices, work he describes in ”May the Force of Light Be With You” [p. 46]. The award, worth US $400 000 over five years, is meant to encourage young scientists. Tang came to Yale in 2006 as an assistant professor of electrical and mechanical engineering.

40+ Web Development Tools

2009-10-04T03:19:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you were suddenly stranded on a desert island in the middle of nowhere, with only a USB drive, a dial-up internet connection, and a barebones computer with no software outside the operating system installed? Of course, you’d use the internet connection to call for help first, but what about after that? How would you keep your design business going?

Okay, maybe a scenario that’s a bit more likely would work better. What if your computer crashed, wiping out all of your data and programs, and you have a deadline in two days? Or maybe you want to be able to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice without taking anything more than a change of clothes and a USB drive. If you have the apps below, neither of those scenarios would be much of a problem.

The apps on this list can help you with everything from coding to graphics to running your business and managing your projects, all from a single USB drive. And while USB drives are getting bigger all the time (last I checked a 64GB one wasn’t too badly priced, and that’s 4GB more storage than my current MacBook has), you still need special programs in most instances to have true portability. The apps below are just that: truly portable and small enough to fit on a USB drive (often a very small USB drive).

Coding

Notepad++ Portable Edition

Notepad++ Portable Edition is a coding application that includes all the features you’d expect in a coding app. It’s written in C++ and runs on Windows. It’s open source and was released under the GPL license.

The portable edition includes all the features of the regular version. It has multi-view, supports a multi-language environment, a WYSIWYG editor, auto-complete, syntax highlighting and folding, and macro recording and playback, among its other features. It’s a great lightweight coding app.

Nvu Portable

Nvu Portable is the portable edition of Nvu Web Authoring Software. It includes a WYSIWYG editor and powerful file management. It’s aimed at users who might not be particularly technically savvy and only have a limited knowledge (or none at all) of HTML and CSS.

The portable edition has all the features and capabilities of the regular version. It works on Windows systems, and was released under the open source GPL license.

Oiko CSS Editor

Oiko CSS Editor is a full-featured CSS, (X)HTML and XML editor in a portable format. It works on Windows 98 through XP. It’s a fairly robust editor, with an easy-to-use interface, grouped view of properties and selectors, a tree view of your CSS’s structure, and includes active preview in both IE and Mozilla browsers.

Graphics and Multimedia

Blender Portable

Blender Portable is a portable version of the Blender 3D rendering program. It works with the PortableApps.com platform. The portable version includes all the features of the regular version of Blender.

Blender has a range of features for rigging, modeling, animating and rendering 3D images. It has a fully customizable window layout and a non-overlaping, non-blocking UI. And it includes a built-in text editor for annotations and editing Python scripts.

GIMP Portable

GIMP Portable is a good alternative to Adobe Photoshop in a portable format. While GIMP’s user interface takes a bit of getting used to compared to other photo editing programs, it’s actually quite flexible.

The portable version of GIMP has all the features of the full version, including layers and filters. It can also be extended and expanded, just like the full version.

Lightscreen Portable

Lightscreen Portable is a portable app that runs on Windows and lets you take screenshots of the desktop of whatever computer you’re on. It will perform five configurable actions (to capture window, screen, etc.) and each has its own hotkey.

Lightscreen will save images in PNG, JPEG and common other image formats. It also has a delay function for taking screenshots. It runs as a hidden background process and is activated with one or more hotkeys.

Portable Audacity OS X

Portable Audacity is portable audio editing software for Mac OS X. Audacity has tons of features, including the ability to record live audio, edit (including the ability to edit and mix an unlimited number of tracks), add effects to audio files, and work with a variety of different file formats.

While the full version of Audacity is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux machines, the portable version is available for Mac OS X and Windows. Considering it’s open source, it makes sense that a portable version for Linux would be developed if there’s enough demand.

Portable Inkscape OS X

Portable Inkscape is a portable vector graphics editing program. Inkskape has features similar to other vector graphics programs, including Illustrator, CorelDraw, and Xara X. It saves graphics in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format.

There is extensive documentation available for Inkscape on their website, a big plus if you’re new to using it. The portable version is only available for Mac OS X, though the full version is also available for Linux and Windows.

FastStone Capture

FastStone Capture is a portable screen capture utility. You can capture anything on your screen: windows, full screen, rectangular regions, objecs, freehand regions, and even scrolling windows (a big plus over many other screen-capture programs, portable or not).

Other features include the ability to add text annotations to captures, resize them, and use hotkeys for specific functions. FastStone Capture only works on Windows systems, but is compatible with Windows98 right up through Vista.

Fotografix

Fotografix is a portable graphics program that lets you both edit and create images. There are brush tools, support for custom brushes, layer and channel support (including adjustment layers and masking), and a variety of other tools included.

One of Fotografix’s biggest advantages, though, is it’s tiny file size: it’s only 367KB. If you want a really lightweight and easy to use graphics editor, Fotografix might be the right choice for you. However, it’s not as robust as a program like Photoshop, so keep that in mind.

Artweaver

Artweaver is a portable, freeware paint program. It lets you create sketches right from photos and includes a wide variety of brushes. It also lets you create new brushes and customize existing ones.

Artweaver also supports transparency and layers, and a variety of image formats (JPG, PNG, PSD, and more). It’s expandable via plugins, too. Artweaver works on Windows 2000, XP, or Vista.

VLC Media Player Portable

VLC Media Player Portable is a portable media player for using audio and video files. It will play MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV, MP3, and a host of other file formats. And, in addition to playing your various media files, it can also act as a media server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6.

Winamp Lite

Winamp Lite is the portable version of Winamp MP3 player software. Skins and plugins are also portable, making this another great solution for listening to MP3s on the go. Portable setup is a bit involved but not particularly complicated.

File Management

FileZilla Portable

FileZilla Portable is another PortableApps.com application for FTP. It supports FTP, FTPS, and SFTP file transfers, as well as management for transferring large files (over 4GB). There are tons of configuration options. It also supports HTTP/1.1, SOCKS5 and FTP-proxy, and includes logging to file, synchronized directory browsing, and remote file search.

WinSCP Portable

WinSCP Portable is an FTP program for Windows that includes SFTP and SCP protocols and directory synchronization. It’s been around for awhile but performs all common file operations and has an integrated text editor. It also supports batch file scripting and a command-line interface in addition to a GUI.

7-Zip Portable

7-Zip Portable is a PortableApps.com program that lets you compress and uncompress a variety of archived file types, including 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, and RAR files. It also supports creating encrypted 7z and ZIP archives and includes a powerful file manager. There are localizations for 63 languages available with the portable edition.

Toucan

Toucan lets Windows users back up and sync data between two drives (like your hard drive and USB drive). It’s completely portable and free to download. There are a variety of advanced backup settings you can use, including incremental backups with compression and advanced rulesets.

Testing

XAMPP

XAMPP is a complete, portable web server package of Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. It’s preconfigured, so all you need to do is unzip and install it. It includes phpMyAdmin, FileZilla FTP Server, SQLite, the Zend Optimizer, and MiniPerl, among other features. It’s a complete web, FTP and database server in a single package. There’s also a lite version that includes Apache, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, SQLite, and their related packages.

Portable Firefox

Portable Firefox is the portable edition of Mozilla Firefox. It’s a great app to take with you for working on other people’s computers, as you can store and access your own bookmarks, passwords, and preferences. The portable edition doesn’t leave anything behind on the computer you’re using, so you can be secure in saving your passwords and other information. It even appears to work with any extensions you install. It’s a PortableApps.com app, so it’s only available for Windows machines.

Don’t forget if you’re using Portable Firefox to also make sure you’ve downloaded some of the useful web development add-ons available.

Firebug – For viewing and on-page editing of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
CSS Viewer – A basic CSS property viewer.
HTML Validator – An HTML validator toolbar for Firefox.
Web Developer – Adds a menu and toolbar with various tools for web developers.
CodeBurner – An HTML and CSS reference guide built into Firefox.

Instant Rails

Instant Rails is a Ruby runtime solution with Ruby on Rails, Apache and MySQL, all ready to run. All you have to do is put it in the directory you choose and run it; there are no installation files.

Server2Go

Server2Go is a server package available with a variety of different configurations. There are packages that include Apache, PHP and SQLite; Apache, PHP, SQLite, and MySQL; Apache, PHP, SQLite, MySQL, and Perl; as well as mini packages (with only the needed files) and a “plain vanilla” package that doesn’t include PHP, Perl, or MySQL).

Portable Chrome

Portable Chrome is the portable vesion of Google’s Chrome browser. It includes all the features of the regular Chrome browser, including better stability and speed, tabbed browsing, and search right from the address bar.

Opera@USB

Opera@USB is a portable version of the Opera web browser. It’s very similar to the desktop version, though the differences aren’t expounded upon in the documentation for the app. The full version (and presumably the portable version) includes tabbed browsing, a password manager, an inline spell checker, and support for savable browsing sessions.

MoWeS Portable

MoWeS Portable is a portable web server for Windows. It’s been tested on Windows 98 through Vista. It’s free and released under the GNU/GPL license. The server is based on Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The biggest difference between MoWeS and many other portable server packages is that you can download MoWeS preconfigured with a variety of software options, including TYPO3, WordPress, PHPMyAdmin, OS Commerce, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla!, and others.

Planning and Productivity

Dia Portable

Dia Portable is a diagramming app similar to Microsoft Visio. It’s more focused on informal diagrams than Visio, though, and is great for casual use. It works with XML files, and also includes the ability to export files to EPS, SVG, PNG, WMF, and XFIG files. Dia also lets you print diagrams (including multi-page ones).

It’s compatible with Linux, Unix, and Windows systems. It can be used to draw UML diagrams, flowcharts, and other types of diagrams.

Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition

Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition is a Windows and Linux compatible calendar application. It’s a full-featured, stand-alone calendar application, perfect for scheduling and simple project management.

ToDoList

ToDoList is a portable project management and task list manager. It lets you subdivide tasks an unlimited number of times to make them more manageable. And it saves your task lists in XML format so that you can format them with stylesheets.

ToDoList is under constant development and is suitable for IT project management as well as more general task management (like the GTD method). There are French and Spanish versions available in addition to English.

Task Coach Portable

Task Coach Portable is another task manager that lets you manage your to-do list and tasks on the go. Features include an easy-to-use UI that makes it easy to create, organize, and manage tasks, as well as the ability to set a budget for particular tasks, set start dates and deadlines for each task, and more.

Business

GnuCash Portable

GnuCash Portable is another PortableApps.com application. It’s an open source financial management app with most of the features of commercial finance programs. It works with double-entry accounting, stock/bond/mutual fund accounts, and can handle invoices and accounts payable and receivable.

GnuCash is perfect for small business accounting and bookkeeping. It uses a checkbook-style register to make it easier for new users to learn. It also handles reports and graphs, multiple currencies, statement reconciliation, and more.

OpenOffice.org Portable

OpenOffice.org Portable is the PortableApps.com version of the open source OpenOffice.org suite of business programs. It includes all of the regular OpenOffice.org applications: Writer (a word processor), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (graphics), and Base (database).

OpenOffice.org is a great alternative to Microsoft Office and provides much of the same functionality in a free and open source package. It’s very easy to use in comparison with many other office suites, and it’s free.

AbiWord Portable

AbiWord Portable is a word processor that can open a variety of files from other word processing programs, including Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Open Document (OpenOffice.org), Office Open XML, RTF, HTML, and more. It includes all the basic functions you’d expect in a word processor, including spelling and grammar check and mail merge.

The portable version is built on the PortableApps.com platform and works on Windows 2000, XP, or Vista. There are plugins available to extend AbiWord’s functionality.

Other Useful Apps

Sumatra PDF

Sumatra PDF is a lightweight, portable, free PDF viewer for Windows. It’s designed to be portable, so there’s no “portable version” per se. It works with a variety of keyboard shortcuts, and can be configured as your primary PDF viewer.

Eraser Portable

Eraser Portable is a portable version of the Eraser security app. Eraser allows you to completely delete files from your harddrive by overwriting them multiple times with predefined patterns. It’s free and open source (under the GNU General Public License). This is a particularly useful app to have if you work with sensitive information on a regular basis, as it can be used to completely remove any traces of an original file.

OperaTor

OperaTor combines Opera and Tor to let you browse anonymously from any computer. No data is stored on the computer you’ve plugged your USB drive or other portable device into, making it particularly useful if you’re using a public computer. It also includes Polipo, a caching web proxy, adding an extra layer of anonymity and security.

Portable Windows Live Messenger 2009

If you need to keep in touch with your colleagues or clients, then Portable Windows Live Messenger2009 is a great way to do it. It’s a fully functional version of Windows Live Messenger 2009, just in a portable format you can use from any USB drive. It’s useful for a lot more than just instant messaging though: you can use it to share documents, and communicate via voice and video.

Foxit Reader v3.0

The Portable Freeware Collection offers Foxit Reader V3.0. Use Foxit to open and read PDF documents on the go. Just be aware that according to the comments on the download page, it can be difficult to install and configure.

KeePass

KeePass is a password management program for Windows. It’s free and open source and can help you keep track of all your passwords for FPT accounts, email, website passwords, and more. It saves everything in a single database file that you can open either with a key or key file.

TrueCrypt

TrueCrupt is a portable encryption program that will create a virtual encrypted disk and mount it as a real disk. You can encrypt an entire partition or USB flash drive. It uses parallization and pipelining to let data be accessed as fast as if the drive wasn’t encrypted. Be aware that TrueCrypt does require administrator privileges in order to access files, which is a major drawback if you may need to use public computers.

Pidgin Portable 2.1.0

Pidgin Portable is the portable version of the Pidgin instant messaging client (formerly Gaim). It supports AOL, MSN, ICQ, Jabber, and Yahoo IM. You can add encryption plugins to it to enable secure messaging.

WinPT Portable

WinPT Portable lets you encrypt files on your flash drive and then unlock them without having any special software installed. It’s still in development, so it’s not entirely bug-free, but according to most reports it’s a very polished build. The only thing it requires to run is GnuPGP, which is also available as a portable app.

Trillian Anywhere

Trillian Anywhere lets you use the Trillian IM client from a USB drive or disk. It lets you take your contact list and preferences with you wherever you go and use a full-featured but portable version of Trillian from any computer with an internet connection.

Further Resources

100 Portable Apps for Your USB Stick (for Mac and Win)
This is an excellent roundup of useful apps from makeuseof.com, though it’s not specific to development and design apps.
PortableApps.com Suite and PortableApps.com Platform
Many of the apps in this post are built on the PortableApps.com Platform. PortableApps.com offers a huge variety of programs for use on a USB drive or other portable media. The suite includes a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, and other useful programs.M
FreeSMUG
FreeSMUG offers free open source software for Mac users. Some of their apps include Adium, Cyberduck, Vienna, and Newspeak.
Linux for Travelers
Linux for Travelers offers a ton of information on portable computing for Linux users.