Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

[Nonc Hilaire]

Cars have platinum or palladium catalytic converters now, and they are commercially viable. You just need a microplating so a little goes a long way.

Japan had plans to completely run their power grid on hydrogen. What happened to that?

[noddy]

ACM | Where Have All the Domestic Graduate Students Gone?

One of the better replies


118582851_10157148416375806_72050482142881883_n.jpg

high cost of living and debt based education - you would have to be mad to take on a risky degree in a field that the world only wants the best of the best.

Debt-based education is certainly a factor.

What do you consider to be a "risky degree"?

all of them - only the top students get jobs, the rest have wasted their time.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... 4-130.html

The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/workpla ... 517zj.html

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

Visual Capitalist | Visualizing How Much Countries Spend on R&D

A very side note that 'Visual Capitalist' is a great band name, but he has a YouTube channel and other great stuff....'>.....

[Typhoon]

Times Higher Ed | Want to be an innovation hot spot? Don’t copy Silicon Valley [paywalled]

February 9, 2021

John Morgan

Twitter: @johncmorgan3

Dan Breznitz’s Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World might surprise some people. The forthcoming book advises regions to shun the Silicon Valley model of innovation. It says prestige research universities are peripheral to innovation. It uses lots of Wizard of Oz quotes.

Many politicians, policymakers, business leaders and journalists believe that innovation means one thing: the venture-capital-funded tech start-up model that sprang up in Silicon Valley around Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

But Professor Breznitz, the Munk chair of innovation studies at the University of Toronto and co-director of its Innovation Policy Lab, wants people to look beyond that to “innovation-based growth models that supply vast quantities of good jobs to people with multiple skills backgrounds, instead of a few fabulous jobs that are available only to the graduates of the world’s elite universities”.

The core argument of Innovation in Real Places is that “we should remember what innovation is and why we care about it”, Professor Breznitz told Times Higher Education. The first part comes down to realising that “innovation is not invention”, he explained.

The book defines innovation as “any activity along the process of taking new ideas and devising new or improved products and services and putting them in the market”.

It breaks innovation into four stages: novelty; design, prototype development, and production engineering; second-generation product and component innovation; and production and assembly.

In the early days of the technology giant Apple, much of that whole process happened in California. But those pushing the Silicon Valley “novelty” model as the route to growth are behind the times, Professor Breznitz said.

He argues that now that the innovation process can be cut into small stages and moved around the world, the spillover benefits from the US technology industry are accruing for people in Taiwan (the global hub for creating electronics and semiconductors needed for the products devised in Silicon Valley) and Chinese Pearl River Delta cities such as Shenzhen (which puts a “high degree of innovation” into the complex process of putting together tablets and smartphones from components manufactured around the world).

Back in California, the graduates of elite universities now working in start-ups might become billionaires, but they create “very few good jobs for the people around them, unless, of course, you are a celebrity chef or a plastic surgeon”, said Professor Breznitz, an Israeli-born academic whose previous books have compared Israel, Taiwan and the Republic of Ireland as innovation nations, and examined innovation across three Chinese regions.

In Israel, whose rapid growth in technological innovation saw it transition from relatively equal to highly unequal society, those not part of the technology industry are now “in a worse state – just like the people in Silicon Valley – because everything around them is much more expensive”, he continued.

“People don’t really think about the consequences [of the Silicon Valley model], and they don’t really understand that the world has changed and that there are many, many different paths to successful innovation-based growth,” said Professor Breznitz.

Taiwan, Finland and Sweden have excelled in innovation without unleashing massive inequality by specialising in parts of the innovation process beyond the Silicon Valley stage, he argued. Germany is another nation concentrating on “second generation” rather than “novelty” innovation.

And those countries have done so without having “world leading” universities. Three of the big “common obsessions of innovation consultants worldwide – venture capital, science parks, and globally competitive research universities – very rarely played roles” in successful regions, Professor Breznitz writes. The universities of Cambridge and Oxford have long soared in the THE World University Rankings, yet “looking at the UK’s economy, one would be hard pressed to find any discernible positive effects on innovation”, he observes.

Where universities do play a role in innovation regions – such as Taiwanese institutions or McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, highlighted in the book – they mostly don’t look anything like Stanford or Oxford, Professor Breznitz argued. These universities are “completely weaved into the local industry, in terms of training, in terms of creating R&D capabilities”, but “what they don’t do is somehow by themselves create all the start-ups” or “have a huge backyard” to start a science park, he added.

Stanford is a one-off, and if your innovation policy relies on universities, then “you are barking up the wrong tree”, he said.

Professor Breznitz intends his book to be readable and accessible to anyone “interested in local economic development”: a policymaker or citizen “who really cares about Yorkshire”, for example (the Wizard of Oz quotes seem to highlight the fantastical visions of the “misconception mongers” selling the Silicon Valley model).

If we “wake up to the global reality and change our innovation policies, there is no reason to believe that the future of democratic capitalism is either horrifying levels of inequality or depressing economic stagnation”; if not, “we will be doomed to one of these two options”, writes Professor Breznitz.

[Simple Minded]

Times Higher Ed | Want to be an innovation hot spot? Don’t copy Silicon Valley [paywalled]

Very true. thanks for posting.

Fascinating to see the increase in productivity caused a simple change in geometry of a hammer or crowbar, or the re-arragement of tools and/or parts on a production line. Oddly enough, new hammer and crowbar designs continue to materialize in DIY stores.

The Demming/CIP consultants, just after getting their checks isolate themselves from middle management and start walking around asking the people doing the work "What do you need to make your job better that management is not doing?"

[Typhoon]

American Affairs | The Crisis of Venture Capital: Fixing America’s Broken Start-Up System

[Doc]

https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... 000-years/

The Radioactive Diamond Battery That Will Run For 28,000 Years

It's powered by nuclear waste, but still safe for humans.

[Typhoon]

Another go at modular home construction

Cover

[Typhoon]

MIT PR | New lightweight material is stronger than steel

The new substance is the result of a feat thought to be impossible: polymerizing a material in two dimensions.

[Doc]

https://interestingengineering.com/ibm- ... spberry-pi

IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi

The microscope, which you can DIY also, works so well that he's been using it in his research papers.
Derya Ozdemir
By Derya Ozdemir
May 01, 2020
IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
1, 2

IBM Research engineer Yuksel Temiz developed a $300 modular and motorized microscope that combines his three favorite hobbies: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and LEGO.

His goal was to develop a lab tool for their research work on microfluidics for point-of-care diagnostics. The reasoning behind the microscope was rather simple: He was frustrated that his lab's microscope kept producing bad footage, and he thought his childhood obsession, LEGO, could help.
IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
Source: IBMResearch/Twitter

He wanted to replace the very expensive and sizeable macro lens imager platform at this lab with something cheaper and more comfortable to use.
IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
Source: IBMResearch/Github

In order to do that, he developed an open-source microscope using Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, and a LEGO frame. And boy, does it work...

SEE ALSO: TWO-LEGGED PUPPY GETS WHEELCHAIR MADE OF LEGOS THANKS TO 12-YEAR-OLD BOY
The recipe for the perfect microscope

In order to make his vision a reality, Temiz used LEGO bricks, a Raspberry Pi computer, an 8MP Raspberry Pi camera, and a 3D printer to put together the 10-micrometer resolution microscope.
IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
Source: IBMResearch/Github

The Raspberry Pi computer and the 8Mp camera enables the user to capture images and video footage. The Arduino uses a high-power LED to illuminate and drives the six stepper motors. Including the camera angle, sample position, magnification, and focus, the microscope is designed to be fully motorized. To top off all that, it features an HDMI display to enable an easy viewing experience.
IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
Source: IBMResearch/Github

On the outer shell, the microscope's main body is constructed entirely out of LEGO bricks and 3D-printed parts.

The LEGO microscope's functions can be controlled using a keyboard connected to the Pi, or a separate custom-built Arduino joystick. What a fun ride!
Cost only $300

The project cost him about $300, and the end product is so good that it rivals store-bought microscopes that cost a lot more.
IBM Engineer Builds $300 Microscope Using LEGO, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
Source: IBMResearch/Github

Temiz and his colleagues in the microfluidics lab at IBM Research have been using the LEGO microscope for the past two years and including the images, they took with it in their papers.

They've been able to take images of several things, ranging from microfluidics to blood and urine to be used for cancer and infectious diseases research, and more.
Walkthrough on GitHub

The great thing about this whole project is that Temiz has shared a detailed walkthrough on how he assembled the microscope on GitHub, by including all the files needed for the 3D-printed parts and schematics for the electronics.

The instruction manual is perfectly in the LEGO-style, and here, you watch the step by step DIY video, and if you happen to have access to a 3D printer, Raspberry Pi computer, and an 8MP Raspberry Pi Camera, you can make one for yourself too.
https://youtu.be/PBSYnk9T4o4
PBSYnk9T4o4

I found this article via click bait of all things. https://interestingengineering.com/ appears to be a real gem of a website. Lots of stories similar to the above.

[Typhoon]

American Affairs J | Web3, the Metaverse, and the Lack of Useful Innovation

So far, the year 2022 has certainly looked like a deflating technology bubble. After a decade of rising market caps, stocks for formerly hot “tech” companies fell far below their recent highs. By September 2022, exercise equipment maker Pelo­ton was down 90 percent from a year before; ridesharing company Lyft had fallen 70 percent; videoconferencing firm Zoom, 70 percent; electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, 60 percent; Meta (or Facebook), 60 percent; Netflix, 60 percent; the gory list goes on. Many recent new technologies have simply failed to meet expectations. For instance, despite predictions that the economic gains from AI would reach $15 trillion by 2030, the market for AI in 2021 was only $51.5 billion, expected to reach $62 billion in 2022.

This downturn is occurring at the end of record spending on innova­tion by venture capital firms and incumbents such as Google. Futuristic technologies such as quantum computing, nuclear fusion, bioelectron­ics, and synthetic biology have received massive funding in recent years. And while exuberance around a host of new technologies from the past dec­ade—like self-driving cars, delivery apps, home flipping, and augmented reality—recedes, VCs are working to inflate new bubbles around other, much-hyped technologies, such as the Metaverse and Web3, which is a part of the wider excitement around blockchain technologies. The shelf life of ebullience for the Metaverse and Web3 is, of course, unclear, but a much more important question is this one: how do such technology bubbles affect the broader economy and society?

Answering this question requires looking at the broader economic and social context in which these bubbles develop. Of course, this broader context is large and complex, but here is one road in: For at least a century now, there has been a widespread faith that technological progress will improve human well-being, including via economic growth. For much of the twentieth century, new industries developed around new technologies. These industries created well-paying jobs and flourishing communities. Use of the new technologies improved quality of life and, by enhancing productivity in mass production industries, greatly reduced prices, leading to even relatively poor people being able to afford increasing quantities of both necessities and modern conveniences. The period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries witnessed a remarkable era of innovation, perhaps the most significant in human history. Running water, electricity, mass production, the telephone, and the automobile provided improvements to our standard of living that have not been equaled by recent innovations.

But as economist Robert Gordon examined in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the technological growth engine hit hard times beginning in the 1970s. With the brief exception of a period between 1994 and 2004, which we will examine in greater detail below, improvements to business efficiency, or productivity, have remained stubbornly low since the 1970s. This period of low productivity growth has remained true right up through the technology bubble of the last decade, when technophiles were singing the praises of robots and AI. Indeed, contrary to expectations that the Covid-19 pandemic would spur ever widening adoption of automation in businesses, productivity was negative for the first two quarters of 2022.

. . .

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-s ... klin-medal

https://blog.seas.upenn.edu/penn-scient ... lin-medal/


https://live-sas-physics.pantheon.sas.u ... er-engheta


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nader_Engheta

After earning a B.S. degree from the school of engineering (Daneshkadeh-e-Fanni) of the University of Tehran, he left for the United States in the summer of 1978 and earned his Masters and PhD degrees from the Caltech.

He is one of the original pioneers of the field of modern metamaterials, and is the originator of the fields of near-zero-index metamaterials, plasmonic cloaking and optical nano circuitry (optical metatronics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Medal


Einstein, Tesla, Edison, Curie, Fermi, Graham Bell .. 126 of the Medal receivers got Nobel Price later on

[noddy]

American Affairs J | Web3, the Metaverse, and the Lack of Useful Innovation

So far, the year 2022 has certainly looked like a deflating technology bubble. After a decade of rising market caps, stocks for formerly hot “tech” companies fell far below their recent highs. By September 2022, exercise equipment maker Pelo­ton was down 90 percent from a year before; ridesharing company Lyft had fallen 70 percent; videoconferencing firm Zoom, 70 percent; electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, 60 percent; Meta (or Facebook), 60 percent; Netflix, 60 percent; the gory list goes on. Many recent new technologies have simply failed to meet expectations. For instance, despite predictions that the economic gains from AI would reach $15 trillion by 2030, the market for AI in 2021 was only $51.5 billion, expected to reach $62 billion in 2022.

This downturn is occurring at the end of record spending on innova­tion by venture capital firms and incumbents such as Google. Futuristic technologies such as quantum computing, nuclear fusion, bioelectron­ics, and synthetic biology have received massive funding in recent years. And while exuberance around a host of new technologies from the past dec­ade—like self-driving cars, delivery apps, home flipping, and augmented reality—recedes, VCs are working to inflate new bubbles around other, much-hyped technologies, such as the Metaverse and Web3, which is a part of the wider excitement around blockchain technologies. The shelf life of ebullience for the Metaverse and Web3 is, of course, unclear, but a much more important question is this one: how do such technology bubbles affect the broader economy and society?

Answering this question requires looking at the broader economic and social context in which these bubbles develop. Of course, this broader context is large and complex, but here is one road in: For at least a century now, there has been a widespread faith that technological progress will improve human well-being, including via economic growth. For much of the twentieth century, new industries developed around new technologies. These industries created well-paying jobs and flourishing communities. Use of the new technologies improved quality of life and, by enhancing productivity in mass production industries, greatly reduced prices, leading to even relatively poor people being able to afford increasing quantities of both necessities and modern conveniences. The period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries witnessed a remarkable era of innovation, perhaps the most significant in human history. Running water, electricity, mass production, the telephone, and the automobile provided improvements to our standard of living that have not been equaled by recent innovations.

But as economist Robert Gordon examined in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the technological growth engine hit hard times beginning in the 1970s. With the brief exception of a period between 1994 and 2004, which we will examine in greater detail below, improvements to business efficiency, or productivity, have remained stubbornly low since the 1970s. This period of low productivity growth has remained true right up through the technology bubble of the last decade, when technophiles were singing the praises of robots and AI. Indeed, contrary to expectations that the Covid-19 pandemic would spur ever widening adoption of automation in businesses, productivity was negative for the first two quarters of 2022.

. . .

all covid did was suck investment confidence out of the market - nobody was going to risk throwing money at anything until their was a return to normalcy.

also, it was impossible to spur more automation because we had a global chip shortage that is still happening to this day - wait lists of years for the microprocessors used in such tasks.

so, im thinking this is a theoretical person who hasnt been paying much attention.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.nature
Electronic metadevices for terahertz applications

Mod note. This work is sufficiently novel and interesting that the abstract should be quoted.

Abstract
The evolution of electronics has largely relied on downscaling to meet the continuous needs for faster and highly integrated devices1. As the channel length is reduced, however, classic electronic devices face fundamental issues that hinder exploiting materials to their full potential and, ultimately, further miniaturization2. For example, the carrier injection through tunnelling junctions dominates the channel resistance3, whereas the high parasitic capacitances drastically limit the maximum operating frequency4. In addition, these ultra-scaled devices can only hold a few volts due to the extremely high electric fields, which limits their maximum delivered power5,6. Here we challenge such traditional limitations and propose the concept of electronic metadevices, in which the microscopic manipulation of radiofrequency fields results in extraordinary electronic properties. The devices operate on the basis of electrostatic control of collective electromagnetic interactions at deep subwavelength scales, as an alternative to controlling the flow of electrons in traditional devices, such as diodes and transistors. This enables a new class of electronic devices with cutoff frequency figure-of-merit well beyond ten terahertz, record high conductance values, extremely high breakdown voltages and picosecond switching speeds. This work sets the stage for the next generation of ultrafast semiconductor devices and presents a new paradigm that potentially bridges the gap between electronics and optics.

[Mod note. One may speculate that this technology, should it prove feasible, may be extended to the visible or UV EM spectrum eventually leading to optical based computers.]

Nanoplasma-enabled picosecond switches for ultrafast electronics

"Electronic Metadevice" (will replace Transistors and) can make transistor based Semi chips obsolete

1000 times faster

[Mod note: How fortunate for your fellow expats that the West provided them with the education and opportunity to develop their skills and abilities and put them to work.]

[Nonc Hilaire]

Thank God for the Belch and rats with backpacks!

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/world/se ... index.html

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

Australia’s spy chief
U.S. technological edge eroding


https://www.reuters.com/world/aukus-nee ... 023-04-04/

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business- ... ence-chief

The balance of power in the region is shifting away from the US and its allies, Australia’s spy chief told the conference

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, chairman of the US Special Competitive Studies Project, told the Sydney Dialogue that China was unlike the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, because it was “an autocratic competitor that is run by technocrats that is very capable of inventing a new future”.
Andrew Shearer, the director general of Australia’s Office of National Intelligence, said the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region was starting to “shift away from the United States and its allies, undermining deterrence”.

SYDNEY — The U.S. technological edge is eroding, an Australian intelligence chief said on Tuesday, as a Sydney conference was told the AUKUS alliance of Australia, Britain and the United States must collaborate on quantum and hypersonic technology to compete with China.

US waisted lots of blood, treasure and time in Middle East , trying to bring "Liberal Democracy" to Afghanistan and Iraq and others .. mad mullahs thinking WTF is all this BaBy Bush doin and Obama "surging".

Trump was the only sane one, saying no matter what we getting out of here.

In the mean time, Xi was building up .. am sure in a few yrs, the "semi-sanction" will be the "other way round"

Still not too late.

hand (Greater) Middle East to Ayatollahs , shake hand , and leave

(The New) Persian Empire , , here we come

[Doc]

https://www.laserfocusworld.com/detecto ... ap-forward

NASA team’s PEACOQ quantum detector is a ‘leap’ forward
April 3, 2023
In a milestone for the quantum realm, NASA researchers built a quantum detector to precisely measure single photons at very high rates—with a clock frequency of 10 GHz

Older article:
https://www.laserfocusworld.com/detecto ... d-problems

New detectors solve age-old problems
Jan. 13, 2023
Advances in novel detectors are solving the most elusive mysteries in science—from quantum teleportation to neutrinos and dark matter.

[Typhoon]

M. Hutchinson | Back to the 50s – when military equipment ruled

Even as a participant in the derivatives market, I found new derivatives wrinkles pretty boring, however lucrative they might be. Equally in software, the latest “social media” app, however irresistible to billions of dozy consumers, leaves me cold. Fortunately, help is at hand. With international tensions ever-increasing, research money is pouring again into the military-industrial complex. Soon we shall thrill at the release of the 2020s equivalent of those 1950s giants: the B52 bomber, the U-2 spy plane, the USS Nautilus nuclear submarine, the Lockheed Starfighter and the AR-15 rifle. If technology is to thrill us, it needs to go VROOM!

Peter Thiel said it most memorably, when in 2011 he expressed the disappointment at recent tech innovations, saying: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.” . . .

[Doc]

M. Hutchinson | Back to the 50s – when military equipment ruled

Even as a participant in the derivatives market, I found new derivatives wrinkles pretty boring, however lucrative they might be. Equally in software, the latest “social media” app, however irresistible to billions of dozy consumers, leaves me cold. Fortunately, help is at hand. With international tensions ever-increasing, research money is pouring again into the military-industrial complex. Soon we shall thrill at the release of the 2020s equivalent of those 1950s giants: the B52 bomber, the U-2 spy plane, the USS Nautilus nuclear submarine, the Lockheed Starfighter and the AR-15 rifle. If technology is to thrill us, it needs to go VROOM!

Peter Thiel said it most memorably, when in 2011 he expressed the disappointment at recent tech innovations, saying: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.” . . .

Yeah at the current rate we will have sky net in no time. The AI F16s are capable of completing their mission including any need for dog fighting without human assistance.

[Typhoon]

True blue - M. Hutchinson | Why Britain lost its industrial dominance

In 1830, Britain was completely economically dominant, the only significant industrial power. Since that time, it has steadily lost its industrial dominance and that relative decline, while to an extent inevitable, was hurried along by a grossly malign approach to policy which persists today. Unless it is reversed, further accelerating decline is ahead.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


a trillion frames per second.



https://www.upworthy.com/mit-camera-speed-of-light-rp

MIT.png (94.13 KiB) Viewed 4616 times

[Typhoon]

A sign that the world has changed: the science reporting by the Daily Mail is superior to that by the Beeb - the BBC:

Daily Mail | How Taiwan's tallest building survived the earthquake