Atomic quantum memory makes the grade

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

An atomic memory (glowing green), made at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, can be used to store quantum information in telecomunication purposes. From left to right: Michał Dąbrowski, Radek Chrapkiewicz and Wojciech Wasilewski.Physicists at the University of Warsaw claim to have developed a fully functioning atomic memory that is simple to make and with numerous applications.

The main element of the memory device is a glass chamber that is 2.5 centimetres in diameter and 10 centimetres long.  It has rubidium coated sides that are filled with one of the noble gases.

The scientists said when the tube is gently heated, rubidium pairs fill the inside and when quantum information is stored, photons from a laser beam imprint quantum states on the rubidium atoms that can then be retrieved using another laser pulse.

The researchers use a camera capable of detecting individual photons and with speeds tens of times higher than the fastest cameras.

The memory states only last from a few microseconds up to 10s of microseconds and this is useful in telecommunications which can transmit quantum signals to the next relay station.

The physicists have patents pending on some of their research efforts.

Scientists turn human waste into rocket fuel

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

Pratap Pullammanappallil from the University of Florida with his anaerobic digesterResearchers at the University of Florida (UF) claim to have discovered a way to turn human excrement into rocket fuel.

The engineers have conducted trials at the behest of NASA and fit into plans to build a site on the moon and needed to solve the conundrum of what to do with something that’s essentially excess baggage.

The UF scientists said they attempted to discover how much methane could be made from uneaten food, packaging and human waste.

Faculty member Pratap Pullammanappallil said: “The idea was to see whether we could make enough fuel to launch rockets and not carry all the fuel and its weight from Earth for the return journey. Methane can be used to fuel the rockets.  Enough methane can be produced to come back from the moon.”

Experimenting with a package containing all sorts of rubbish, they ran tests and discovered a process they used would make 290 litres of methane per crew per day.

They formulated an anaerobic digestion process which destroys pathogens and produces a biogas which also, incidentally, can produce around 200 gallons of non drinkable water annually from the waste. That water can be split electrolytically into oxygen and hydrogen, the former element being used as a back up breathing system.

Expect 450Mbps mobile broadband by 2019

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

roundAlthough category 9 and category 10 LTE modems are not expected to be released until the end of 2016, take up of the devices will soar meaning that by 2019 there will be 64 million smartphones using the protocols.

That’s according to a report from ABI Research, which said that they’ll have downlink speeds of up to 450Mbps.

ABI pointed out that Qualcomm last week released its first mobile modem semiconductor – the Gobi 9×45 – to support such speeds but they won’t be incorporated into smartphones until the third quarter of next year.

But while the rest of the world will benefit from high mobile broadband speeds, that isn’t going to be true for the USA – ABI estimates that people there aren’t going to be able to enjoy speeds of 300Mbps in the near future.

In Western Europe, LTE (4G) penetration remains low and operators want to shift people to LTE before they even consider implementing LTE-Advanced.

In fact, it will be Chinese and South Korean operators who will be first off the block with networks allowing up to 450Mbps downloads.

Whatever the time scales, it’s obvious that many smartphone users worldwide are going to enjoy some pretty satisfactory download speeds over the next few years.

Former HP goddess aims for US president

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

6874335353_8791daf3a9_bFormer HP boss  and peddler of expensive printer ink Carly Fiorina is apparently going to have a crack at being the next republican president of the US and is standing on a ticket that she is the only woman candidate and the only CEO.

Fiorina has been talking privately with potential donors, recruiting campaign staffers, courting grass-roots activists in early caucus and primary states and planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire starting next week.

She would be considered an outsider. She has sought but never held public office and her last campaign was in such a disarray it could hurt her current one.  After all how can you stand saying you are an effective manager when you owe nearly $500,000 to consultants and staffers from your failed 2010 Senate bid in California?

Republicans have spoken about Fiorina with disdain, saying she has an elevated assessment of her political talents and questioning her qualifications to be commander in chief.

However analysts say that she might make a better candidate than the suited men that the GOP traditionally chooses.

She is also a free-market advocate who would act as an antidote to the “left wing” views of Elizabeth Warren.

The GOP also has a problem attracting women voters with some of its prominent members favouring stances on issues like rape, abortion and glass ceilings which are so backward they were out of date when the book of Leviticus was written. The party claimed to supporting women during the mid-terms only to award all the committee chair roles to white men after the election.

Helping Fiorina chart her political future are consultants Frank Sadler, who once worked for Koch Industries, and Stephen DeMaura, a strategist who heads Americans for Job Security, a pro-business advocacy group in Virginia.

When Fiorina was CEO at HP she was famously described as more important than the King of Spain, by an aide.

EU wants to widen “right to be forgotten”

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

thanks-for-the-memory-movie-poster-1938-1020198195European privacy regulators want Internet search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing (MSFT.O) to scrub results globally, not just in Europe, when people invoke their “right to be forgotten”.

The European Union’s privacy watchdogs agreed on a set of guidelines on Wednesday to help them implement a ruling from Europe’s Supreme Court that gives people the right to ask search engines to remove personal information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”.

Google has been scrubbing results only from the European versions of its website such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France, but they still appear on Google.com.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the head of France’s privacy watchdog and the Article 29 Working Party of EU national data protection authorities, told a news conference that from the legal and technical analysis we are doing, they should include the ‘.com’.

Google said the company had not yet seen the guidelines but would “study them carefully” when they are published.

Google has previously said that search results should be removed only from its European versions since Google automatically redirects people to the local versions of its search engine.

However some feel that Google’s current approach waters down the effectiveness of the court ruling, given how easy it is to switch between different national versions.

The search engine has problems in Europe. Google is facing multiple investigations into its privacy policy and is bogged down in a four year EU antitrust inquiry.

The EU ruling has pitted privacy advocates against free speech campaigners, who say allowing people to ask search engines to remove information would lead to a whitewashing of the past.

BT censors sites without court order

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

russian censorsBT has started blocking access to 24 torrent sites this past weekend, including IPTorrents and TorrentDay.

It is the first time that a UK ISP has blocked private torrent sites, without a court order demanding it does it.

The High Court has ordered six UK ISPs to block subscriber access to dozens of the world’s largest torrent sites. The latest order was issued last month after a complaint from the major record labels. It expands the UK blocklist by 21 torrent sites, including limetorrents.com, nowtorrents.com, picktorrent.com, seedpeer.me and torlock.com.

Over the weekend, BT and Sky implemented the new changes, making it harder for their subscribers to reach these sites. But BT appears to have gone above and beyond the court order, limiting access to various other sites.

According to TorrentFreak several users of private torrent sites get an “error blocked” message instead of their favourite sites. These include the popular IPTorrents.com and TorrentDay.com trackers, as well as scene release site Scnsrc.me.

The fact that BT has targeted IPTorrents and Torrentday is significant. Both sites require prospective users to obtain an invite from a current member they have over a hundred thousand active users.

BT used the same error message that is returned when users to try access sites covered by High Court injunctions. It is also the first time that a UK ISP has ever blocked a private torrent site. It is also significant because it indicates that ISPs are now starting to accept that they are not safe havens and have to censor the web.

IPTorrents is still accessible via https and via the site’s alternative .me and .ru domains. In addition, VPNs and proxy servers are often cited among suggested workaround techniques.

NSF spends a fortune on cloud-based supercomputers

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

whirlwind-computer

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has invested $16 million to build cloud-based and data-intensive advanced computing systems for the open science community

In a statement the NSF said that high performance computing (HPC) had become central to the work and progress of researchers in all fields, from genomics and ecology to medicine and education, new kinds of computing resources and more inclusive modes of interaction are required.

It has splashed out on two new supercomputing acquisitions for the open science community that it says will complement existing resources with capabilities that allow advanced computing to be available to a broader portfolio of emerging scientific frontiers and communities. The new resources are anticipated to come online in early 2016.

The “Bridges” system will be housed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the “Jetstream” computer will be  co-located at the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) and The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Irene Qualters, division director for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at NSF  said that Bridges and Jetstream will expand the capabilities of the NSF-supported computational infrastructure, pushing the frontiers of science forward in the life sciences, the social sciences and other emerging computational fields by exploiting interactive and cloud systems.

“Bridges and Jetstream offer a mix of new capabilities and usage modalities, from large memory nodes to virtualization technologies that allow a PC-like experience via the cloud. Together, these technologies will let a broader swath of researchers use advancing computing while making new kinds of scientific inquiry possible.”

A $9.6-million NSF grant will fund the acquisition of the system, to begin in November 2014, with a target production date of January 2016.

Jetstream–led by Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI)–will add cloud-based computation to the national cyberinfrastructure. Researchers will be able to create virtual machines on the remote resource that look and feel like their lab workstation or home machine, but are able to harness thousands of times the computing power.

Craig Stewart, PTI executive director and associate dean for research technologies at Indiana University said that the new Jetstream cloud system will operate at the border between the existing NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure and thousands of researchers and research students who will be new to use of NSF XD program resources. Jetstream will give researchers access to cloud computing and data analysis resources interactively, when they need them.

Jetstream is supported by a $6.6-million NSF grant and will go into production in January 2016.

100TB hard drives to arrive by 2025

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

science_fiction1940An industry consortium today released a roadmap for new recording technologies could yield 100TB hard drives in about 10 years.

Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC)’ s figures show hard-drives which are 10 times the capacity of today’s biggest hard drives. Apparently, it will be achieved using up-and-coming techniques such as laser-assisted recording technology.

The ASTC’s roadmap shows HAMR and BMPR technologies combining to grow bit areal densities and technologies such as Bit Patterned Media Recording (BPMR) and Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) will result in up to 10-terabit-per-square-inch (Tbpsi) areal densities by 2025, compared with today’s .86 Tbpsi areal densities.

Industry analyst Tom Coughlin wrote in his bog that this implies that a 3.5-inch HDD built with that technology could have about 10X the capacity of the 10TB HDDs in 2025, or 100TB.

Western Digital’s HGST division has been sealing helium gas in its enterprise drives to reduce friction created by spinning platters, thereby allowing it to pack them more tightly together. Its Ultrastar HelioSeal product line now has 8TB and 10TB hard drives.

Using Helium instead of air, HGST is able to pack more platters into a hard drive.

Seagate’s largest capacity drive using conventional recording is 6TB. The company has been using a technology called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), which overlaps data tracks on a disk platter like shingles on a rooftop to increase that to 8TB.

However, SMR likely to continue adding areal  density and adding helium is limited.

The problem is that as disk drive densities increase, the potential for data errors also increases due to a phenomenon known as superparamagnetism. This is when there is a magnetic pull between bits on a platter’s surface can randomly flip them, thus changing their value from one to zero or zero to one.

Seagate believes it can produce a 30TB drive by 2020 using (HAMR). HAMR integrates a semiconductor laser onto a hard drive recording transducer. The lasers are able to set down smaller bits, but ones that are also harder to overwrite, which makes the media more stable by reducing overwrite errors.

Social networks under fire over soldier’s murder

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

facebokFacebook is under attack in the UK because it failed to supply information needed which might have prevented the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

Michael Adebowale, one of the killers of the soldier, had 11 Facebook accounts but GCHQ has only seen six of those despite requests.

A parliamentary committee said yesterday that Adebowale used Facebook to communicate with a Yemeni Al Qaeda operative but the social network’s auto warning system didn’t register the conversations.

The sister of Lee Rigby claims Facebook has “blood on their hands”.  The committee said Facebook had failed to turn over all the information GCHQ requested.

But it’s not just Facebook that was criticised in the parliamentary report –  Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Blackberry don’t accept the UK has any jurisdiction over content.

PM David Cameron has joined in on criticising Facebook but this morning a former senior civil servant at MI6 said that policing Facebook is “almost impossible” because of the amount of data posted on a daily basis.

Facebook said it doesn’t allow terrorist content on its site and stops people using the social networking site for such purposes. The problem appears to be that the US legal jurisdiction prevents US companies from sharing this type of information with foreign powers.

Imaging hub gets £29 million funding

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

glasgowA unit called the Quantum Imaging Hub is to receive funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences research Council (ESPRC) to the tune of £29 million over the next five years.

The hub includes academics from the universities of Glasgow, Bristil, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Oxford and Strathclyde and has over 30 industry partners.

Industry partners and other interested bodies  include Scottish Enterprise, BP, Compound Semiconductor Tech, ST Microelectronics, Thales Optronics Ltd, Toshiba and the UK Astronomy Technology Centre.

The hub will be working on some pretty groovy stuff, including cameras that use one pixel to see through smoke, imaging systems that can see round corners, and earthquake warning systems.

A camera development led by scientists at Heriot-Watt uses photon timing techniques to see round corners and see through walls or biological tissue.

The Quantum Imaging Hub is to be coordinated from a quantum technologies facility the University of Glasgow is building.

IBM bets on the mobile market

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

horseraceEnterprises wanting to leverage their legacy systems using devices like smartphones and tablets are being tempted by IBM to enter its garden of mobility delights.

The company said it has added a number of pieces to its Mobility Services jigsaw.

That includes “desktop as a service” (DaaS) intended to let companies implement desktop features on mobile devices using a subscription service offered using the IBM Cloud.

IBM, using research figures from Juniper, estimates that one billion smartphones and tablets owned by workers will be use in enterprises by 2018.

That gives IBM the chance to sell enterprises services that include integration, support, maintenance, security and compliance.

Big Blue claims that will give enterprises the ability to deliver applications to hosts of mobile devices in hours rather than months.

IBM is also offering what it describes as the “trifecta” of mobile, cloud and analytics services.  Trifecta usually means a type of bet on horse races – usually called a triple – which we’re not sure IBM wants to mean by this word.

The DaaS offering uses the Citrix Worspace Suite via cloud infrastructure from its subsidiary, Softlayer.  IBM explains that, for example, this would let a saleswoman or man to click an icon on a tablet and turn it into a personal work desktop with access to large sales presentations and the like.

Apple iPad leads but others snap at heels

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

The late Steve Jobs with an iPadOut of the 74.53 million tablets expected to ship during the current calendar quarter, the Apple iPad will take the lead with 26.8 percent of the worldwide shipments.

That’s according to Digitimes Research, which said that out of those 74.5 million tablets, 20 million will be iPads, 27.8 million will be from other multinational vendors such as Samsung and Lenovo, and 26.7 million will be so-called “white box” or unbranded units.

Taiwan is the ghost in the tablet machine and accounts for two thirds of the global market for tablets with firms like Foxconn, Pegatron, Compal and Quanta churning them out.

While figures for tablets shipping in the fourth quarter seem healthy, and rose by sequential quarter by 17.6 percent, if you compare the figures year on year, there’s a decline of shipments by 10.1 percent.

The pundits have many theories as to why the tablet market is showing signs of stalling, but the favourite is that in Western markets most people already have one or more tablet and see little or no reason to either buy more tablets or to upgrade.

And increased sales of smartphones with larger screens – so called phablets – are nibbling away at the tablet market.

People start buying TVs again

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

oldtvShipments of TVs worldwide rose in the third quarter by four percent, bucking a trend that showed several previous quarters of weak growth.

LCD TV shipments rose by nine percent, according to IHS subsidiary Displaysearch, fuelled by uptake of TV screens in North America.

Plasma and CRT shipments continue to steadily decline.

China showed strong shipments, showing a nine percent growth in the quarter. That sector had been weakened a year ago after the central government withdrew subsidies.

Displaysearch analyst Paul Gagnon said the last few years were “difficult” for shipments and revenues but there is more resiliency now.  He said that in some regions there is a renewed replacement cycle, while larger screen sizes and 4K and better resolutions continue to tempt people to upgrade.

Here are the main 4K shipment leaders by brand.
tvbrands

Microsoft done for tax evasion in China

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

fb_share.af4030d35be0Chinese mandarins have the pip at Microsoft and fined the software giant more than $140 million in back taxes.

The case is being seen as the first major case concerning cross-border tax evasion in the country, as regulators ramp up pressure on US corporations doing business there.

According to China’s Xinhua official news agency, Microsoft must pay the Chinese government $137 million in back taxes and interest, as well as more than 100 million yuan in additional taxes a year in the future.

Microsoft did not confirm the report but said that in 2012 the tax authorities of China and the United States agreed to a bilateral advanced pricing agreement about Microsoft’s operations in China.

China receives tax revenue from Microsoft consistent with the terms of the agreed advanced pricing agreement.

An advanced pricing agreement sets the tax treatment of transfer pricing, or methods of booking prices and sales between subsidiaries, which Microsoft uses across the globe.

According to its fiscal 2014 annual report, Microsoft’s overall effective tax rate was 21 percent still lower than the US corporate rate of 35 percent because it funnels earnings through “foreign regional operations centres” in Ireland, Singapore, and Puerto Rico.

China was less patent than Western powers about this sort of thing. Microsoft was reporting losses for six years in China of more than two billion yuan while peers enjoyed profits. The taxman decided that this was unreasonable. It said the US company fessed up to tax evasion and its mainland subsidiary had agreed to pay the central government.

Ruby on Rails is dying

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

damsel-in-distress-4Ruby on Rails is dying off, despite the fact that those with the skill can make a killing according to a new report from Quartz.

Quartz found that by using US job listing data collected by Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution, and dividing by its shoe size,the most valuable programming skill to have today is Ruby on Rails. If you have the skill you can take home an average salary of $109,460.

But other data indicates that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards.

Quartz homed in on the demand for workers with programming-specific skills and based it all on a large data set which was nearly two years old. Phil Johnson at ITworld had a look at some other figures collected by MS Gooroo, which has collected data from over 300,000 job listings in the US, UK and Australia.

While this confirmed that Ruby on Rails experts were still getting paid a bomb, The percentage of US job listings mentioning Rails in July 2014 was 1.1 percent, which was down from 1.8 percent in December 2013, an almost 40 percent drop. While the pay for Rails engineers is high, demand over the last year seems to be dropping.

Rails is a framework, and not a programming language, but Ruby is the language upon which Rails was built. The most recent TIOBE index of programming language popularity, which is based on web searches for languages, from this month, Ruby was ranked 14th, down from 13th in November 2013 and 11th in January 2013.

Another PYPL index of programming languages, which ranks languages based on searches for web tutorials about them, ranked Ruby 10th, the same spot it held one year ago and down slightly from January, 2013 when it ranked 9th.

It looks like demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills, however, has been on the decline, at least for the last year.

If use of the Ruby programming language itself can be considered a reliable proxy for the use of Rails, its use by engineers has also been dropping at least moderately since the beginning of 2013.