Any one who can tell me what this item from the powerhouse collection is will be in the running to win a book prize. A second book for the first person to explain the physics phenomena it is used to show.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
The square kilometre array (SKA) is a $2 billion international radio-astronomy project to create the largest radio-telescope in the world. In simple terms the SKA project will compose hundreds of small radio antennas centred on the desert in northern Western Australia and stretching across the Australian mainland to New Zealand.
Well that is if Australia wins the bidding to host this international behemoth of science. Currently it is a race between us and South Africa. The bidding process has been going on for three years. The original 4 competitors are down to just 2 now and the final decision is not due in 2012. This is truly a 21st century undertaking.
The technology to undertake the task doesn’t exist anywhere in the world YET, but a recent announcement by the CSIRO and Germany’s Max-Planck-Gesellschaft to cooperate in the research brings it all a little closer.
Technologies like;
The telescope’s computing and communications systems will need to cope with very high data transport rates. In the inner array the data will be transported to a central processor at the rate of 80 Gigabytes per second per antenna, while long haul links servicing the outer and remote array-stations may need a capacity of 2 Terabytes per second per station. This is more than the current total internet traffic in Europe!
The German – Australian partnership adds weight to the Australian bid to host the SKA. The rewards to Australia would be enormous; in the short term building the infrastructure would create many jobs. The development of expertise in the local economy to deliver this truly next generation device would place Australia at the fore-front of the world in communication and information technology.
In the long term SKA would become another way Australia utilises our vast resource of space for more than just mining, the expertise for this project would be an exportable commodity.
For NSW, host to the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), the CSIRO organisation managing Australia’s bid, this would mean development of whole areas of technological expertise and access to the many brilliant minds that will come to work here throughout the life of this exciting project.
For more information
CSIRO ATNF
Aus SKA
“>SKA international
A recent article in New Scientist has determined that there are six genes associated with intelligence in humans, but that together they account for only 1% of the total variation across a population.
The research, led by Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, identified six genes that were strongly associated with high or low intelligence, but even the most powerful of these accounted for just 0.4 per cent of the variation in intelligence between individuals. The six together accounted for about 1 per cent of the variation in intelligence. Dozens of previous studies on twins and adopted children have established that about half of the variation in intelligence is down to environment,
So this leaves around 49% of our intelligence to be explained.
In a separate article artificial intelligence researchers have created a virtual personality called Eddie and instilled in it the ‘theory of mind’, or the understanding that other people believe different things to yourself. This ‘ability’ arrises in humans at around 5 years of age and its lack can be a symptom of disorders like autism.
Reported in New Scientist is seen by some as a breakthrough and others as not such a big deal. In effect the ability came through adding a logic step to the code controlling Eddie, put in basic form the code reasons that;
“if somebody can’t see something they don’t know it”
The nay-sayers suggest that it will only be a real break through when the artificial intelligence can learn this reasoning for itself.
And finally, still on intelligence, Panasonic is to build plasma televisions with thicker and stronger glass, to stop the delicate TV’s being broken by flying wii controllers that slip from players hands.
Science is great, it can determine the basis for intelligence, create artificial intelligence but it takes a designer to re-engineer a product to make up for our lack of it.
A fine old computer from the Powerhouse Collection.
If you are one of the technically literate (which I can assume, as you are reading a blog) then you will be aware of the ongoing discussion telling people to reduce their energy use by switching off idle computers.
An automated CPU switch off system that shuts down idle computers after working hours has helped DIIRD reduce energy at both its former headquarters and its new offices at Melbourne’s Southern Cross building.
http://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/
In an earlier post to this blog we said that world wide if we all switched off our idle computers then we could save billions of tonnes of CO2. Hopefully we are all listening and have set up our power saving options to switch off screens and screen savers, stop hard-drives and switch off computers if they are left idle. That at the end of each day we shut down our systems for the night and especially for weekends.
But it was good to read at ecogeek the other day that computers are actually saving plenty of energy as well;
Computers were helping us become more efficient. First, by using their power to design more efficient practices. And second, and much more significantly, by allowing people and things to travel digitally, instead of physically.
Telecommuting a couple days per week, reading news online, emails, document downloads, and instant messages all allow people and things to travel while consuming much smaller amounts of energy. What’s more, online shopping has reduced trips to retail stores, resulting in significant energy savings.
So by using your computer to reduce your other energy activities (10W saved for each 1W used), and switching off your machine when it is idle and pulling the plug at the wall when shutting down for the night you can make great inroads into your computing energy use and greenhouse impacts.
Then if you source “green electricity” you will be an eco – champion.
