August 8, 2006, 9:30 PM CT

Electricity Blackouts: A Hot Summer Topic

Intense heat and record-breaking energy demand strained New England's electrical grid nearly to its limit on Wednesday, Aug. 2, but the regional system rose to the challenge, says an MIT professor who studies the economics of electricity distribution.

"They did really well in managing the system on a very difficult day," said Paul Joskow, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics and Management.

Electricity demand in New England peaked at a record-high 28,021 megawatts on Aug. 2, as per ISO New England, the company that operates the region's electrical grid.

Unlike California, which endured a two-week heat wave that left a number of homes in the dark, New England was lucky that the mercury approached 100 degrees for only two days last week.

"If that (heat) had gone on for a week, they would have started having failures of equipment..... and there might have been rolling blackouts," said Joskow, who is also director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

To reduce the strain on the power grid, ISO New England offered payments to businesses willing to lower their electricity usage during the day. The company also bought electricity from Canada and directed excess power from Maine, the only New England state spared the heat crisis, to other states.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 8, 2006, 0:30 AM CT

System To Put Wastewater To Work

In the midst of the worldwide energy crisis, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have been continuing their work on a microbial fuel cell that generates electricity from wastewater. Advances in the design of this fuel cell in the last year have increased the power output by a factor of 10 and future designs, already in the minds of the researchers, hope to multiply that power output by 10 times again. If that goal can be achieved, the fuel cell could be scaled up for use in food and agricultural industries to generate electrical power - all with the wastewater that today goes right down the drain.

Lars Angenent, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemical engineering, and a member of the University's Environmental Engineering Science Program, has devised a continually fed upflow microbial fuel cell (UMFC). In a paper published online in the Environmental Science Technology, Angenent describes how wastewater enters from the bottom of a system and is continuously pumped up through a cylinder filled with granules of activated carbon. A number of prior microbial experiments used closed systems with a single batch of nutrient solution, but because this system is continuously fed from a fresh supply of wastewater, Angenent's UMFC has more applications for industry since wastewater is continually outputted during industrial production.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 7, 2006, 10:31 PM CT

Search Engines Are Not Biased

Search engines are not biased towards well-known Web sites. In fact, they actually produce an egalitarian effect as to where traffic is directed, say researchers at the Indiana University School of Informatics.

Their study, "Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias," appears in the Aug. 7-11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and challenges the "Googlearchy" theory -- the perception that search engines push Web traffic toward popular sites, thus creating a monopoly over lesser-known sites.

As the Web becomes larger and more complex, search engines have taken on an increased role in guiding Internet users to their destinations. Yet, some are concerned that search engines, by means of their ranking algorithms, create a vicious cycle where popular sites receive more and more hits.

"Empirical data do not support the idea of a vicious cycle amplifying the rich-get-richer dynamic of the Web," said Filippo Mencer, associate professor of informatics and computer science. "Our study demonstrates that popular sites receive on average far less traffic than predicted by the Googlearchy theory and that the playing field is more even".

Menczer was joined in the study by IU post-doctoral fellow Santo Fortunato; Alessandro Flammini, assistant professor of informatics; and Alessandro Vespignani, professor of informatics.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 7, 2006, 9:53 PM CT

Kayaks Adapted To Test Marine Robotics

MIT researchers are working toward the day when a team of robots could be put into action like a team of Navy SEALs -- doing such dangerous work as searching for survivors after devastating hurricanes or sweeping harbors for mines.

Working in labs that resemble machine shops, these engineers are taking small steps toward the holy grail of robotics -- cooperative autonomy -- making machines work together seamlessly to complete tasks with a minimum of human direction.

The tool they're using is the simple kayak.

The researchers are taking off-the-shelf, $500 plastic kayaks and fitting them with onboard computers, radio control, propulsion, steering, communications and more to create Surface Crafts for Oceanographic and Undersea Testing (SCOUTs).

Much of the technology being tested is ultimately intended for use in underwater robots, or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), but testing software on AUVs can easily become a multimullion-dollar experiment.

"I want to have master's students and Ph.D. students that can come in, test algorithms and develop them on a shoestring budget," said Associate Professor John J. Leonard of mechanical engineering. Leonard, together with MIT research engineer Joseph Curcio of mechanical engineering and an intern, Andrew Patrikalakis, unveiled SCOUT last fall in a paper for the IEEE Oceans Conference.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

August 6, 2006, 10:32 PM CT

55 Ways To Have Fun With Google

You probably use Google everyday, but do you know. the Google Snake Game? Googledromes? Memecodes? Googlesport? The Google Calculator? Googlepark and Google Weddings? Google hacking, fighting and rhyming? In this book, you'll find Google-related games, cartoons, oddities, tips, stories and everything else that's fun. Reading it, you won't be the same searcher as before! (From the author of Google Blogoscoped.).

Buy, download, share.

The book contains over 220 pages and is available to buy at Lulu.com for $16.50 or Amazon for $19.66.

You can also download the full book as PDF (or Word). it's free to share & remix & do fun stuff with.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 6, 2006, 10:21 PM CT

Longest Running Scientific Experiment

In 1984, the European Journal of Physics published a report on the three longest-running scientific experiments. The youngest of the three experiments (shown above), begun in 1927, has been measuring the fluidity of high-viscosity pitch by counting the frequency of drops out of a funnel (they fall once every 8 or 9 years-though no one has ever been around to see it happen).

The second oldest of the experiments is the Beverly Clock (shown at left) at the University of Otago in New Zealand, which draws its energy from ambient temperature fluctuations that cause the air inside an air-tight chamber to expand and contract. As per Beverly's calculations, "one can obtain more than sufficient energy to drive an efficient clock mechanism, typically a one pound weight falling one inch each day, from a volume of one cubic foot of air expanding under a 6 degree diurnal variation of temperature".........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 6, 2006, 9:06 PM CT

All Our N-gram are Belong to You

Here at Google Research we have been using word n-gram models for a variety of R&D projects, such as statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, entity detection, information extraction, and others. While such models have commonly been estimated from training corpora containing at most a few billion words, we have been harnessing the vast power of Google's datacenters and distributed processing infrastructure to process larger and larger training corpora. We observed that there's no data like more data, and scaled up the size of our data by one order of magnitude, and then another, and then one more - resulting in a training corpus of one trillion words from public Web pages.

We think that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 6, 2006, 0:04 AM CT

You Go Girl!

on the agenda this week for girls visiting the Edgerton Center at MIT.

For eight years the Edgerton Center has sponsored a four-day program called You Go Girl! which focuses on hands-on science and exploration activities for girls in the Greater Boston area who will be entering ninth grade in the fall.

The program, which ran from July 31 to Aug. 3, was the brainchild of Daniele Lantagne, an MIT student who was looking for an opportunity to expose young girls both to science and to certain life skills they would need as they entered high school.

This year 21 girls were at MIT for the week. "The idea is to expose girls to a variety of engineering and science fields by running them through some hands-on activities in the different disciplines," said Amy Fitzgerald, a technical instructor in the Edgerton Center and the director of the program.

The girls have varied backgrounds. "Some (of the girls) love science, some hate it, some are heading off to private high schools, a number of to the local urban high," said Fitzgerald. In the morning, they work in small groups on projects in science or engineering.

This year the girls explored mechanical engineering -- building motorized Lego cars, which they also programmed using software from the Media Lab. Other activities centered on electrical and chemical engineering.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

August 5, 2006, 6:23 PM CT

Eye-tracker Quake controls!

Hmm. The problem with this guy is he assumes everyone's seen eye-trackers before and that we won't think he's just controlling the game from under the table.

Where's his other hand? Ahahh!

OK: I jest. I am prepared to believe that eye-trackers exist, and I suppose now that this sort of computer voodoo will probably be mainstream by, like, tomorrow, and that I've just not been keeping up with the latest in awesome hardware developments. Sigh.

Question though: how the hell do you aim?........

Posted by: Gina      Permalink         Source

August 4, 2006, 0:21 AM CT

Answer To A 20-year-old Metal Question

What happens to metals when you bend them? The question isn't as easy as you may think. A research team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Southern California, using a unique X-ray probe, has gathered the first direct evidence showing that, on average, a 20-year-old model is a useful predictor of stresses and strains in deformed metal.*.

But the measurements also show that averages can be deceiving. They mask extremely large variations in stresses that, until now, had gone on undetected. The experiments have implications for important practical problems in sheet metal forming and control of metal fatigue, which is responsible for a number of structural materials failures.

When metals deform, the neat crystal structure breaks into a complex three-dimensional web of crystal defects called "dislocation walls" that enclose cells of dislocation-free material. The effect is like micron-sized bubbles in foam. These complex dislocation structures are directly responsible for the mechanical properties of virtually all metals, and yet they remain very poorly understood in spite of decades of research. Twenty years ago, the German researcher Häel Mughrabi theorized that the stresses in the dislocation walls and the cell interiors would be different and have opposite signs--an important result for modeling the effects of shaping and working metal on its properties. Until now there has only been indirect evidence for Mughrabi's model because of the problem of precisely measuring stress at the micron level in individual cells in the dislocation structure.........

Posted by: Sarah      Permalink         Source

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