$4.4B is quite the investment(especially considering the current international economic gyrations) and it’s the amount that IBM (International Business Machines), Intel, and three other companies announced that they are investing to “create the next generation of computer chip technology.” From the Sept. 28, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
The five companies involved are Intel, IBM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, TSMC and Samsung. New York State secured the investments in competition with countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The agreements mark an historic level of private investment in the nanotechnology sector in New York. [emphasis mine]
Research and development facilities will be located in Albany, Canandaigua, Utica, East Fishkill and Yorktown Heights. In addition, Intel separately agreed to establish its 450mm East Coast Headquarters to support the overall project management in Albany. [emphasis mine]
The money is being spent on two projects,
The investment in the state is made up of two projects. The first project, which will be led by IBM and its partners, will focus on making the next two generations of computer chips. These new chips will power advanced systems of all sizes, including, among other things computers and national security applications. This new commitment by IBM brings its total investment in chip technology in New York to more than $10 billion in the last decade.
The second project, which is a joint effort by Intel, IBM, TSMC, Global Foundries and Samsung, will focus on transforming existing 300mm technology into the new 450mm technology. [emphasis mine] The new technology will produce more than twice the number of chips processed on today’s 300 mm wafers thus lowering costs to deliver future generations of technology with greater value and lower environmental impact.
I had to read that bit about increasing the size of the chips a few times since the news items I come across usually crow about decreasing the size.
I have been intermittently following news about the nanotechnology sector in New York state for some time (scroll about 1/2 way down my January 29, 2010 posting). In 2008, IBM announced a $1.5B investment toward the nanotechnology sector in that state.
I wish there had been some description of the investments in the nanotechnology sector as opposed to the generalized statements about jobs, purchasing ‘Made in NY’ technology, and the reference to millimeter (mm) scale computer chips. As for the “450mm East Coast Headquarters,” they may want to rethink that name.
Companies are finding more ways to publicize and promote themselves and their products. For example there’s Intel, which seems to have been especially active lately with its Tomorrow Project (my August 22, 2011 posting) and its sponsorship (being one of only four companies to do so) of the Discovery Channel’s Curiosity television programme (my July 15, 2011 posting). What I find interesting in these efforts is their range and the use of old and new techniques.
Today I found (August 30, 2011 article by Nancy Owano) a documentary made by Robert Spence, Canadian filmmaker and eyeborg, for the recently released Deus Ex: Human Revolution game (both the game and Spence are mentioned in my August 18, 2011 posting) from the company, Eidos Montréal. If you’re squeamish (medical operation is featured), you might want to miss the first few minutes,
I found it quite informative but curiously US-centric. How could they discuss prostheses for the legs and not mention Oscar Pistorius, the history-making South African double amputee runner who successfully petitioned the Court for Arbitration for Sport for the right to compete with able-bodied athletes? (In July this year, Pistorius qualified for the 2012 Olympics.) By the way, they do mention the Icelandic company, Össur, which created Pistorius’ “cheetah” legs. (There’s more about Pistorius and human enhancement in my Feb. 2, 2010 posting. [scroll down about 1/3 of the way])
There’s some very interesting material about augmented reality masks for firefighters in this documentary. Once functional and commercially available, the masks would give firefighters information about toxic gases, temperature, etc. as they move through a burning building. There’s a lot of interest in making augmented reality commercially available via smartphones as Kit Eaton notes in an August 29, 2011 article for Fast Company,
Junaio’s 3.0 release is a big transformation for the software–it included limited object recognition powers for about a year, but the new system is far more sophisticated. As well as relying on the usual AR sensor suite of GPS (to tell the software where the smartphone is on the planet), compass, and gyros to work out what angle the phone’s camera is looking, it also uses feature tracking to give it a better idea of the objects in its field of view. As long as one of Junaio’s channels or databases or the platforms of its developer partners has information on the object, it’ll pop up on screen.
When it recognizes a barcode, for example, the software “combines and displays data sources from various partner platforms to provide useful consumer information on a given product,” which can be a “website, a shopping micro-site or other related information” such as finding recipes based on the ingredients. It’s sophisticated enough so you can scan numerous barcoded items from your fridge and add in extras like “onions” and then get it to find a recipe that uses them.
Eaton notes that people might have an objection to holding up their smartphones for long periods of time. That’s a problem that could be solved of course if we added a prosthetic to the eye or replaced an organic eye with a bionic eye as they do in the game and as they suggest in the documentary.
Not everyone is quite so sanguine about this bright new future. I featured a documentary, Fixed, about some of the discussion regarding disability, ability, and human enhancement in my August 3, 2010 posting. One of the featured academics is Gregor Wolbring, assistant professor, Dept of Community Health Sciences, Program in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of Calgary; and president of the Canadian Disability Studies Association. From Gregor’s June 17, 2011 posting on the FedCan blog,
The term ableism evolved from the disabled people rights movements in the United States and Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. It questions and highlights the prejudice and discrimination experienced by persons whose body structure and ability functioning were labelled as ‘impaired’ as sub species-typical. Ableism of this flavor is a set of beliefs, processes and practices, which favors species-typical normative body structure based abilities. It labels ‘sub-normative’ species-typical biological structures as ‘deficient’, as not able to perform as expected.
The disabled people rights discourse and disability studies scholars question the assumption of deficiency intrinsic to ‘below the norm’ labeled body abilities and the favoritism for normative species-typical body abilities. The discourse around deafness and Deaf Culture would be one example where many hearing people expect the ability to hear. This expectation leads them to see deafness as a deficiency to be treated through medical means. In contrast, many Deaf people see hearing as an irrelevant ability and do not perceive themselves as ill and in need of gaining the ability to hear. Within the disabled people rights framework ableism was set up as a term to be used like sexism and racism to highlight unjust and inequitable treatment.
Ableism is, however, much more pervasive.
Ableism based on biological structure is not limited to the species-typical/ sub species-typical dichotomy. With recent science and technology advances, and envisioned advances to come, we will see the dichotomy of people exhibiting species-typical and the so-called sub species-typical abilities labeled as impaired, and in ill health. On the other side we will see people exhibiting beyond species-typical abilities as the new expectation norm. An ableism that favours beyond species-typical abilities over species-typical and sub species-typical abilities will enable a change in meaning and scope of concepts such as health, illness, rehabilitation, disability adjusted life years, medicine, health care, and health insurance. For example, one will only be labeled as healthy if one has received the newest upgrade to one’s body – meaning one would by default be ill until one receives the upgrade.
Here’s an excerpt from my Feb. 2, 2010 posting which reinforces what Gregor is saying,
This influx of R&D cash, combined with breakthroughs in materials science and processor speed, has had a striking visual and social result: an emblem of hurt and loss has become a paradigm of the sleek, modern, and powerful. Which is why Michael Bailey, a 24-year-old student in Duluth, Georgia, is looking forward to the day when he can amputate the last two fingers on his left hand.
“I don’t think I would have said this if it had never happened,” says Bailey, referring to the accident that tore off his pinkie, ring, and middle fingers. “But I told Touch Bionics I’d cut the rest of my hand off if I could make all five of my fingers robotic.” [originally excerpted from Paul Hochman’s Feb. 1, 2010 article, Bionic Legs, i-Limbs, and Other Super Human Prostheses You’ll Envy for Fast Company]
I don’t really know how to take the fact that the documentary is in fact product placement for the game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. On the up side, it opens up a philosophical discussion in a very engaging way. On the down side, it closes down the discussion because drawbacks are not seriously mentioned.
Seeing into the future and making prognostications is an ancient human pastime dating from before the oracle at De;phi*. Brief tangent: for anyone needing a refresher on Delphi and the oracle (from the Wikipedia essay),
Delphi is perhaps best known for the oracle at the sanctuary that was dedicated to Apollo during the classical period. According to Aeschylus in the prologue of the Eumenides, it had origins in prehistoric times and the worship of Gaia. In the last quarter of the 8th century BC there is a steady increase in artifacts found at the settlement site in Delphi, which was a new, post-Mycenaean settlement of the late 9th century.
Not everyone wants to rely on supernatural means or the movement of the planets (astrology) to predict the future. Intel for example has developed something called, The Tomorrow Project (from the project home page),
What kind of future do you want to live in? What are you excited about and what concerns you? What is your request of the future? Brian David Johnson Intel’s Futurist asks these questions and more with The Tomorrow Project, a fascinating initiative to investigate not only the future of computing but the broader implications on our lives and planet.
This is a unique time in history. Science and technology has progressed to the point where what we build is only constrained by the limits of our own imaginations. The future is not a fixed point in front of us that we are all hurdling helplessly towards. The future is built everyday by the actions of people. It’s up to all of us to be active participants in the future and these conversations can do just that.
The Tomorrow Project engages in ongoing discussions with superstars, science fiction authors and scientists to get their visions for the world that’s coming and the world they’d like to build. [emphasis mine]
Here’s a video of Brian David Johnson, Intel’s futurist, talking about The Tomorrow Project (watch for the title on the screen at the beginning),
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0a40vp1Uyc
Did you spot the typo? I laugh and groan in sympathy as I’ve had similar things happen. For some reason, this type of mistake is always in the most obvious spot. BTW, the Intel website features the video with a corrected title.
Chip maker Intel has commissioned leading science fiction authors to pen short stories that imagine future uses for the firm’s technology.
The collection, called “The Tomorrow Project”, aims to capture the public’s imagination regarding the company’s current research.
…
The project features work from UK sci-fi author Ray Hammond, who took research in development at Intel’s labs and used it as the basis for “The Mercy Dash” – the story of a couple battling futuristic traffic technology in a race to save a mother’s life.
“I was more nervous approaching this than I have been with any of my full-length novels. I’ve never written short stories, so the form was new to me,” Mr Hammond told BBC News.
The author’s work has been made freely available for download from Intel’s site and Mr Hammond has been delighted by the reaction.
You can go here to download the full anthology or select one or more of the stories. The other three authors included in this anthology are Douglas Rushkoff, Markus Heitz, and Scarlett Thomas.
Johnson doesn’t explain clearly enough (for me) what makes his futurecasting unique. The Canadian Army hired a novelist (Karl Schroeder) in 2005 to write a futuristic book about nanotechnology as I noted in my February 16, 2009 posting, which also mentions that they had commissioned another such novel (I haven’t come across any news about it since).
Jamais Cascio seems to do something similar to Johnson’s futurecasting (from the Bio page on Cascio’s website),
Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers, Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and cultural transformation, specializing in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. [emphasis mine] His work focuses on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, emphasizing the power of openness, transparency and flexibility as catalysts for building a more resilient society.
I look forward to hearing more about The Tomorrow Project as it unfolds. Perhaps they’ll expand their conversation past “superstars, science fiction authors and scientists” and engage some of the rest of us.
The Discovery Channel (US broadcast television outlet) has announced a new television show, Curiosity, which will have only four sponsors. Intel has agreed to commit at least $10M over 60 episodes. The first airing is Aug. 7, 2011 in the US with global broadcasting (210 countries and territories) to start in Sept. 2011. From Brad Steinberg’s July 13, 2011 article in AdAge MEDIAWORKS,
Intel has committed at least $10 million to sponsor Discovery Channel’s new series “Curiosity,” which will feature ads from only four advertisers in total.
“Curiosity” represents something of a change for Discovery, whose highest-profile programs until now have comprised big-budget documentaries such as “Life” in 2010 or “Planet Earth” in 2006. “Curiosity” is more akin to “60 Minutes,” exploring topics from intelligence to neuroscience to nanotechnology. [emphasis mine]
…
Intel will serve as a “presenting partner” of “Curiosity,” said Nancy Bhagat, VP-marketing strategy at Intel. In addition to running elements in four premiere episodes of the show and appearing on its website, Curiosity.com, Intel will participate in initiatives from Discovery’s education unit designed to involve students. Social media and mobile marketing are also part of the mix.
Intel hopes to avoid the hard sell, said Ms. Bhagat. “It’s not about us launching a new ad campaign,” she said. “It’s really about the content behind the idea of ‘Curiosity’ itself.”
But viewers will find it difficult to avoid Intel’s messages. Discovery will create short-form vignettes featuring Intel employees discussing what sparks their curiosity. Intel will also be the centerpiece of a show segment called “What Makes Us Curious.” The Intel-backed content will prod viewers to go online to learn more about specific topics. Intel will make use of “Curiosity” in more than 40 countries.
Yes, I imagine it will be awfully hard for viewers to miss Intel’s messages.
The product is called the Simatic IPC227D Nanobox PC and it’s from Siemens. Of course, the ‘nano’ is what caught my attention. For the record, I could find no mention of this being a nanotechnology-enabled product; it appears that this is purely an advertising/marketing ploy. From the May 3, 2011 news item on physorg.com,
The nano-format PC uses new, high-performance Atom [emphasis mine] processors from Intel. These processors consume little energy and generate almost no heat, which is why the computer doesn’t need a fan and can be installed practically anywhere. In its basic configuration, the computer measures only 19 x 10 x 6 centimeters and is completely maintenance-free. Instead of a hard disk, it has temperature-resistant CompactFlash cards with up to eight gigabytes of capacity or solid-state drives (SSDs) of at least 50 gigabytes. What’s more, the BIOS setup data is magnetically stored so that no batteries are needed as a safeguard.
The compact computer is also available for display and operating systems. Known as the Simatic HMI IPC277D Nanopanel PC, this version is embedded with 7-inch, 9-inch, or 12-inch high-resolution industrial touch displays. The displays consume very little power, thanks to LED backlighting that can be dimmed by up to 100 percent.
The Atom processor from Intel is not a single atom processor, this too is an advertising/marketing ploy.
A data memory can hardly be any smaller: researchers working with Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have stored quantum information in a single atom. The researchers wrote the quantum state of single photons, i.e. particles of light, into a rubidium atom and read it out again after a certain storage time (“A single-atom quantum memory”). This technique can be used in principle to design powerful quantum computers and to network them with each other across large distances.
I do find it a bit confusing when companies use terms for marketing purposes in ways that could be construed as misleading. Or perhaps it’s only misleading for someone like me, not really scientific but not really ‘general public’ material either.
I first came across the marketing campaign for Intel®’s 2nd generation Core™ Processor Family via a fun fact sheet. From the Feb. 25, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
Last year, Intel unveiled its Core™ processor family that, for the first time, used a full-featured system-on-a-chip 32 nanometer process technology to complement the CPU-specific technology. …
# A nanometer is so small that it takes a billion of them to make a meter. A billion is a huge number. A stack of a billion sheets of paper would be 100 km high. If you could walk a billion steps, you would go around the earth 20 times.
# The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 was large enough that it was pieced together by hand. By contrast, more than 60 million 32nm transistors could fit onto the head of a pin. (A pin head is about 1.5 mm in diameter)
# More than 4 million 32nm transistors could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. (A period is estimated to be 1/10 square millimeter in area)
…
# Compared to Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, introduced in 1971, a 32nm CPU runs over 4000 times as fast and each transistor uses about 4000 times less energy. The price per transistor has dropped by a factor of about 100,000.
The marketing piece that has really excited my interest is The Chase Film,
What I find particularly interesting about this marketing campaign is the number of channels, the variety of materials, the time frame, and the range of audiences being addressed. Apparently the film (which is a remarkably slick production that crosses platforms seamlessly from live action to animation to a game format to Google Earth to Facebook and so on in the context of a ‘chase’ story) was presented yesterday at TED 2011 the same day it started, March 1, 2011 while at least one version of the film was posted on Youtube 2 months ago.
It looks to me like they are simultaneously ‘narrowcasting’ and ‘broadcasting’ to their audiences and this is an approach I heartily agree with. I know it’s fashionable in ‘communications’ circles to say that there is no such thing as a general audience which is why communication should be targeted to specific audiences. Two big issues arise with this kind of thinking (a) a tendency to preach to the converted and (b) a failure to properly identify the audiences.
Taking Intel as my example, that company broke ground when it started advertising its computer chips on television. While dumbfounding the rest of the industry, Intel took the computer chip into daily conversation. I don’t know how they bought the media but I am assuming there was some strategy regarding the programmes they chose for their early advertising breaks. In essence, the advertising was both general and targeted and identified an audience that no one else in the industry though existed.
You could say this new marketing strategy is general and targeted. Placing the video on Youtube is sending it out to the ‘general’ public. The concept behind the video is very engaging and as I noted, this is a very slick cross-platform piece. It’s the type of work you want to look at several times so you can catch everything.
Bringing the video (I gather one of the speakers is from Intel ETA Mar.4.11, I was wrong; it’s one of 10 winners of their “Ads worth spreading competition“) to TED (Technology Education Design) 2011 could be considered narrowcasting since only registrants (able to pay a high registration fee, interested in cutting edge ideas, and innovative thinkers) will see it at this time (these talks are made available for free months later). The registrants and the speakers for an event of this nature could be viewed as ‘influencers’. In other words, people who are ‘cool’ and whom others will follow. As you do, for example, on Twitter which is how I found this video.
I think I’m going to coin a phrase, ‘ripplecasting’ to describe what Intel is doing here. You throw a stone in the water and it causes ripples just like sending a speaker to TED 2011 where a registrant tweets (comments on their Twitter feed) which gets retweeted and so on. Sending a ‘fun’ factsheet to Nanowerk, is targeted communication to the nanotechnology community gets us back to narrowcasting.
ETA Mar.3.11: In rereading the previous passage, I think I wasn’t as clear about my ‘ripplecasting’ concept as I’d thought but then I am in the process of developing it. Here I go again, ripplecasting is a way of describing narrowcasting, broadcasting, and the use of new media and social media. I think Intel’s new product provides an excellent example of ‘ripplecasting’ with its use of tv advertising, outreach to industry media, presentation at TED 2011 which gets tweeted, and so on it goes.
I mentioned time frames earlier, this the 2nd year of Intel’s campaign, they unveiled their new product family in Jan. 2010.
The February 2011 NISE (Nanoscale Informal Science Education) Net newsletter pointed me towards a video interview with Amy Moll, a materials scientist (Boise State University) being interviewed by Joe McEntee, group editor IOP Publishing, for the physicsworld.com video series,
Interesting discussion, yes? The Making Stuff series on PBS is just part of their (materials scientists’ working through their professional association, the Materials Research Society) science outreach effort. The series itself has been several years in the planning but is just one piece of a much larger effort.
All of which puts another news item into perspective. From the Feb. 7, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
The Arizona Science Center is enlisting the expertise of professors in Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering in showcasing the latest advances in materials science and engineering.
The engineering schools are among organizations collaborating with the science center to present the Making Stuff Festival Feb. 18-20. [emphasis mine]
The event will explore how new kinds of materials are shaping the future of technology – in medicine, computers, energy, space travel, transportation and an array of personal electronic devices.
No one is making a secret of the connection,
The festival is being presented in conjunction with the broadcast of “Making Stuff”, a multi-part television series of the Public Broadcasting Service program NOVA that focuses on advances in materials technologies. It’s airing locally on KAET-Channel 8.
Channel 8 is another collaborator on the Making Stuff Festival, along with ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, the Arizona Technology Council, Medtronic, Intel and Science Foundation Arizona.
I highlight these items to point out how much thought, planning, and effort can go into science outreach.
Nano haikus (from the Feb. 2011 issue of the NISE Net Newsletter,
We received two Haikus from Michael Flynn expressing his hopes and fears for nanotechnology:
Miracle fibers
Weave a new reality
Built from the ground up
Too Small to be seen
This toxin is nanoscale
Can’t tell if it spilled
Paul Otellini, Chief Executive Officer of Intel, just announced that the company will invest $6B to $8B for new and upgraded manufacturing facilities to produce 22 nanometre (nm) computer chips. From the news item on Nanowerk,
“Today’s announcement reflects the next tranche of the continued advancement of Moore’s Law and a further commitment to invest in the future of Intel and America,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. “The most immediate impact of our multi-billion-dollar investment will be the thousands of jobs associated with building a new fab and upgrading four others, and the high-wage, high-tech manufacturing jobs that follow.”
…
The new investments reinforce Intel’s leadership in the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the world. Intel’s brand-new development fab in Oregon – to be called “D1X” – is scheduled for R&D startup in 2013. Upgrades are also planned for a total of four existing factories in Arizona (known as Fab 12 and Fab 32) and Oregon (known as D1C and D1D).
“Intel makes approximately 10 billion transistors per second. Our factories produce the most advanced computer technology in the world and these investments will create capacity for innovation we haven’t yet imagined,” said Brian Krzanich, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Manufacturing and Supply Chain. “Intel and the world of technology lie at the heart of this future. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we can retain a vibrant manufacturing economy here in the United States by focusing on the industries of the future.”
While Intel generates approximately three-fourths of its revenues overseas, it maintains three-fourths of its microprocessor manufacturing in the United States. This new investment commitment also allows the company to maintain its existing manufacturing employment base at these sites.
In early 2009 and in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, Otellini announced a $7B investment to upgrade four manufacturing facilities to produce 32 nm computer chips (my posting of February 11, 2009). So this 2010 announcement represents an ongoing commitment,
This new capital expenditure follows a U.S. investment announcement made in February 2009 to support state-of-the-art upgrades to its manufacturing process. Those upgrades resulted in 32nm process technology which has already produced computer chips being used today in PCs, servers, embedded and mobile devices around the world. Intel’s first 22nm microprocessors, codenamed “Ivy Bridge,” will be in production in late 2011 and will boost further levels of performance and power efficiency.
It’s interesting how these new nanoscale sized chips are the implementation of a top-down engineering approach to nanotechnology-enabled products resulting in ‘more of the same’ features, i.e. faster, more efficient. Where are the paradigm-shifting features and capabilities of the nanoscale?
I found a new magazine, nano: The Magazine for Small Science, this morning (thanks to Andy Miah). There’s an eclectic range of material some of which you can access for free here. I’m particularly interested in the ‘Nano’ versus nano article by Andrew Carruthers as it’s all about marketing and branding and how nanotechnology branding should not be left to marketing communications departments in various businesses. He uses Apple’s iPod Nano and Tata’s Nano Car as two examples of businesses that used the word nano to brand their products. I understand that neither product is considered truly nano-based which makes the examples rather telling since they are branding exercises that could be described as purely ‘fantasy’.
Carruthers does mention ‘Silver Nano’ products (which are nano-based) marketed by Samsung but there is no comparison of the marketing strategies or even a discussion of the difference between ‘fantasy’ and genuine nano products. That said, I have no idea what his constraints were with regard to word count.
Carruthers states the main issue this way,
Like so many areas of research, nanotechnology can be discussed quite easily with people who understand it, but can effortlessly mutate into a perfect nightmare when explaining it to people who do not. At some time or another, many of us will have been placed in a position where it was necessary to explain our professions and areas of research to people who may not understand them. On many occasions, such people seem keen yet are completely dumbfounded by colourful explanations. There is a sense of dismay [emphasis mine] as they and others ‘misinterpret’ descriptions, ask seemingly unrelated questions, and generally find endeavours at explanation incomprehensible and bewildering. In the main, people are quite genuinely either oblivious to nanotechnology, or have a decidedly skewed notion of ‘what it does’. This chasm within public understanding can be quite easily filled by other means, and the real difficulty is when that chasm becomes filled by marketing communications, rather than fact.
I don’t agree with him about having a “… sense of dismay …” when people misunderstand or misinterpret information as I think those interactions provide useful data for the person who’s doing the explaining. Sometimes a ‘wrong’ question points you in a completely direction because it wasn’t the question that was wrong, it was you.
In my opinion, marketing communication and pop culture are for most people the top purveyors of science information, like it or not. The challenge is finding a way to get your own messages out there and heard by using some of the same strategies or even incorporating some of the ‘noxious’ marketing communication messages. I’m not sure whether Carruthers would agree with me or not but, given the tone of his article, I think not. You can read the article for yourself here.
Quantum Tamers; Revealing our weird and wired future is a documentary being presented October 17, 2009 at the Quantum to Cosmos (Q2C) festival in Waterloo, Canada. From the Azonano news item,
The documentary brings together a stellar line-up of quantum experts to explore promising future technologies involving super quantum computers, ultra secure quantum codes to safeguard our communications, and even teleportation.
Although quantum principles are not fully understood, quantum technologies are already responsible for many advances in technology we already use including lasers and their many applications, magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), modern micro circuitry, plus CDs and DVDs.
For more about the festival including details about when and where the documentary will be shown, go here.
Since the January 2009 announcement, by Paul Otellini, Intel CEO, that Intel would be investing $7B US to retool three plants for the manufacture if 32 nanometre chips, I’ve been interested in Intel’s progress. This morning I found an article by Ellen McGirt on Fast Company which details Intel’s latest reinvention. I was intrigued to note that the $7B US investment was mentioned without a single hint that it’s a nanotechnology initiative. From page 5 of the article,
When he [Otellini] made the unusual decision to travel to Washington, D.C., early this year to announce his $7 billion bet on U.S. manufacturing, “no one knew where the bottom was [in the economy], and there was a lot of uncertainty,” he recalls. The business case for U.S.-based facilities may not have been clear to others, but to Otellini, it’s right out of the Intel playbook: If the company controls manufacturing, it can control quality. “Now, we’re going to be a generation ahead.” He had another motive, too: “I wanted to get the attention of the government and to send a message to other companies that Intel was investing in the United States at a time of great uncertainty, and that we should reinvest together in the infrastructure of the country.” If this was a considered effort to improve Intel’s standing for future infrastructure projects, it’s not one other companies have picked up on. The response from other business leaders, he says, has been mute. “On the other hand, the President called and said that it was the only piece of good economic news since he’d been inaugurated,” Otellini says.
It’s an interesting article not least for how the writer portrays the various personalities.
I had a little wake-up call this morning on reading one of Andrew Maynard’s recent posts (here) where he is excoriating the publicity practices of some peer-reviewed journals. He mentions two articles that I have posted about here (the China deaths and the Canadian nano safety article from yesterday, October 15, 2009) and notes that the articles are being held back from public scrutiny for rather long periods while they are being made available to journalists and science writers with the effect that they are not receiving the scrutiny that they should. I had vaguely noticed that the first article was not available when I went looking and that the access information for the article I mentioned yesterday was vague but I didn’t make much of it. So, thanks Andrew for making me stop and think about it.
I’m going to watch at least part of the live stream for the PEN event (Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation) that’s taking place this morning (9:30 PST), so this is going to be a quick posting.
In my master’s project (The Nanotech Mysteries wiki), I featured a 2007 news item about a student designer at Cornell University who used textile fibres coated with nanomaterials in her clothing designs. (You can see the wiki page here.) Today, I caught a news item on Azonano about some textile scientists at Cornell University who launched a start-up that markets these kinds of fabrics.
Fabrics with embedded nanoparticles to detect counterfeiting devices, explosives and dangerous chemicals or to serve as antibacterials for hospitals, law enforcement or the hospitality industry are just a few of the products that a new company, [iFyber LLC] launched by two Cornell researchers, will produce.
This is exciting as I’ve gotten to follow the story a little further than usual. Generally, I find out about a product and then learn that it had its origins in an academic laboratory.
Intel has announced a new 22 nanometre (nm) chip. From the news item on Nanowerk,
Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini today displayed a silicon wafer containing the world’s first working chips built on 22nm process technology. The 22nm test circuits include both SRAM memory as well as logic circuits to be used in future Intel microprocessors. “At Intel, Moore’s Law is alive and thriving,” said Otellini. “We’ve begun production of the world’s first 32nm microprocessor, which is also the first high-performance processor to integrate graphics with the CPU.
I posted about the 32 nm chip and Intel’s investment in retooling three of their manufacturing facilities to produce the chip here. As I recall, IBM has a 28 nm chip.
I’m not sure what to make of all this. I find these innovations exciting but I always wonder about the practicalities. Since these chips aren’t visible to the naked eye, how does your computer get fixed (e.g. chip replacement) by your average computer repair shop? How reliable are these chips?
Finally, here’s a posting I found on Techdirt about copyrighting hummus, etc. There is a group in Lebanon who are planning to sue Israel for using words like hummus, tabbouleh, etc. to describe their food products. It seemed a little odd to me when I scanned the headline but as Techdirt sardonically points out, the word champagne is for the exclusive use of wine producers in France and there have been other successful attempts at this type of copyright claim. (As I recall, not even French wine producers from regions other than Champagne can call their product champagne.) I followed one of the Techdirt links here for more information. My understanding after viewing a tv clip and reading the article (both Israeli-produced) is that the Lebanese group is motivated by the fact that Israel has been more successful at marketing and selling these products internationally. I also wonder how the other countries that market and sell these products will react to Lebanon’s proposed copyright claim.