Archive for May, 2008
A Noble Award for IBM magneto-wizard Parkin
In case you missed it, IBM fellow Stuart Parkin was awarded the Daniel E. Noble Award for fundamental contributions to the development of magneto-resistive devices for nonvolatile RAM. These advances greatly enhanced the capabilities of modern disk drives. In recent years Parkin has been prominent in work that led to Racetrack Memory, which uses electron spin, rather than the charge, to create electronic devices. Parkin received the award along with Jim Daughton and Saied Tehrani. The award was announced at the IEEE International Magnetics Conference in Madrid.
Add comment May 18, 2008
Greg Leake’s .NET StockTrader 2.0 tries out load balancing
.NET StockTrader 2.0 shows how Microsoft thinks many people will use WCF to build SOA applications. It also has a bit of the look and feel of some Java app frameworks for distributed caching! If that is so it is a bit of a trojan horse.
Add comment May 13, 2008
HP discovers memristor
H-P’s discovery of the memristor, a fourth circuit type, may mean a new member joins the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor in the pantheon of circuit element types. HP researchers created a working memristor on their way to creating a successful nano-scale crossbar switch. The memristor’s existence had been theorized 37 years ago by UC Berkeley professor Leon Chua.
The thing is a triumph for flux and hysterisis, formulated on titanium dioxide. The memristor will enable a new era of nanoscale electronics, say the scientists.
EETimes’ Colin Johnson went straight to the source with his story on the memristor. He spoke at length with Chua, who postulated the part in a 1971 paper. Chua sees this in grand historical strokes. A sample:
The hold-up over the last 37 years, according to professor Chua, has been a misconception that has pervaded electronic circuit theory. That misconception is that the fundamental relationship in passive circuitry is between voltage and charge. What the researchers contend is that the fundamental relationship is actually between changes-in-voltage, or flux, and charge. Such is the insight that enabled HP to invent the memristor, according to Chua and Williams.
“Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years — voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge,” said Chua. “The situation is analogous to what is called “Aristotle’s Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration — the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic text books have been teaching using the wrong variables — voltage and charge–explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies.
The hold-up over the last 37 years, according to professor Chua, has been a misconception that has pervaded electronic circuit theory. That misconception is that the fundamental relationship in passive circuitry is between voltage and charge. What the researchers contend is that the fundamental relationship is actually between changes-in-voltage, or flux, and charge. Such is the insight that enabled HP to invent the memristor, according to Chua and Williams.“Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years — voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge,” said Chua. “The situation is analogous to what is called “Aristotle’s Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration — the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic text books have been teaching using the wrong variables — voltage and charge–explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies.
Colin Johnson on Chua and the Memristor - InfoWeek, May 2008
Add comment May 5, 2008
Google imaging
Google said it had found a means for recognizing images with some of the panache with which it finds words in text. The prototype for precision image search was described at the International World Wide Web Conference in Peking. Is the assertion hyperbole?
Image processing is not easy, unless you can narrow down the problem, the canvas. It’s my understanding that you can set up a rig so that, yes, you can figure if a bottle on a conveyor has its cap on right. But looking for a face in an airport or a dreidle in a bag of marbles – no dice. In other words, if you can control the context you can perceive the image. But John Markhoff’s write up on this topic in the New York Times suggests image analysis is a largely unsolved problem. The Google guys seem to say as much in their paper.
Markhoff does present an expert opinion that what Google implies is not doable. Markhoff is a favorite here.. he is the only person to comment to date on this blog!
Figuring Google’s research culture is not too easy. Every employee is supposed to do some R&D, in a way, if we read correctly the company’s mandate for employees to divert 20% of their time to brainstorming projects.
Another article by Markhoff dated May 1 discusses a new memory architecture from H-P, Interest has to be a little piqued given the weirdness of the race track memory IBM has been buzzing about of late. We hope to get to some write-up on that soon.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3833337.ece
Add comment May 3, 2008
