Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

Posted on December 19, 2012 by mea

Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Since then Adafruit has grown to over 35 employees in the heart of NYC. We’ve expanded our offerings to include tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves before going in to the Adafruit store. We pride ourselves on having great prices, the best customer service, technical support and fast shipping. We hope we can assist you on your journey of learning! Want to learn more? See what others are saying on the Adafruit press page!

via Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits.

From: Entrepreneur of 2012: Limor Fried

In October Fried moved her 35 employees from a 2,000-square-foot loft near Wall Street to a 12,000-square-foot industrial space in SoHo, then hired 15 more people. Just a week after the move, Fried was bubbling with excitement, obvious even over the din of 500 packages being prepped for the daily UPS shipment. “It’s a new chapter in the business,” she exclaims. “I think we can quadruple our current size.” No mean feat, considering Adafruit has shipped more than half a million kits in the last seven years, and revenue has doubled every year for the past three.

Here’s a comment from slashdot…

I’m near retirement and have worked in embedded software for four different companies. In all my years of experience, the best engineers I have encountered were those educated at MIT. Limor Fried is not only from MIT, but she did a stint at the MIT media laboratory. I’ve bought lots of products from her and the quality is first rate, her circuit boards are works of art with tin plating on the solder pads (compare that to a Velleman board) and legible annotation.

Why Groupon and Living Social Are Doomed

Posted on December 3, 2012 by mea

This effect has been confirmed empirically by a team of marketing researchers who tracked three businesses for a year after they offered a social coupon. All three companies lost money the month they offered the coupon and will have difficulty earning it back. According to analysis done by the two researchers,
V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan, the companies would need 15, 18, and 98 months (almost eight years) to earn back their lost profits. The reason? “The three businesses had difficulty retaining most of the new customers who were attracted to the coupon offers,” the two researchers wrote in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

via Why Groupon and Living Social Are Doomed – The Daily Beast.

Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

Posted on November 10, 2012 by mea

Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time “distance learning” programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).

via Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review.

Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

From: MOOCs will eat academia

MOOCs will almost certainly hollow out the teaching component of universities as it stands today. I don’t see anything on the horizon that will reverse this tide. In most technical fields, the nuts and bolts technical interview and on-the-job learning and performance monitoring long ago replaced any faith in degrees as credentials. That leaves very few fields, such as law, where you absolutely do need the degree as a credential.

A Slower Speed of Light | MIT Game Lab

Posted on November 7, 2012 by mea

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum; the searchlight effect increased brightness in the direction of travel; time dilation differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world; Lorentz transformation warping of space at near-light speeds; and the runtime effect the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light. Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience

via A Slower Speed of Light | MIT Game Lab.

Smartphones to Use Half the Power as Researchers Claim to have solved Efficiency Problem

Posted on November 5, 2012 by mea

Almost everyone who owns a smartphone would have noticed that whenever they stream videos or play games their device gets warm and starts to drain battery rapidly. Engineers claim that power amplifiers are to blame for this behavior and that these chips waste as much as 65 per cent of their energy. The professors Joel Dawson and David Perreault, through their startup Eta Devices claim to have solved this problem with a new power amplifier design.

via Smartphones to Use Half the Power as Researchers Claim to have solved Efficiency Problem – ParityNews.com: …Because Technology Matters.

The new technology, dubbed asymmetric multilevel outphasing [PDF], is basically a super fast electronic gearbox that would select the best possible voltage to send across the transistors that would minimize power consumption. This process is done as many as 20 million times per second.

A Bandwidth Breakthrough

Posted on October 25, 2012 by mea

Testing the system on Wi-Fi networks at MIT, where 2 percent of packets are typically lost, Medard’s group found that a normal bandwidth of one megabit per second was boosted to 16 megabits per second. In a circumstance where losses were 5 percent—common on a fast-moving train—the method boosted bandwidth from 0.5 megabits per second to 13.5 megabits per second. In a situation with zero losses, there was little if any benefit, but loss-free wireless scenarios are rare.

via A Bandwidth Breakthrough – Technology Review.

The technology transforms the way packets of data are sent. Instead of sending packets, it sends algebraic equations that describe series of packets. So if a packet goes missing, instead of asking the network to resend it, the receiving device can solve for the missing one itself. Since the equations involved are simple and linear, the processing load on a phone, router, or base station is negligible, Medard says.

The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing

Posted on October 5, 2012 by mea

Artificial intelligence researchers at Google regularly log into a D-Wave computer over the Internet to try it out, and 2011 also saw the company sign its first customer. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin paid $10 million for a computer for research into automatically detecting software bugs in complex projects such as the delayed F-35 fighter (see “Tapping Quantum Effects for Software that Learns“). Questions remain about just how its technology works, but D-Wave says more evidence is forthcoming. It is readying an improved processor that Rose calls the company’s first true product rather than a piece of research equipment. D-Wave is expected to announce other major customers in coming months.

via The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing – Technology Review.

“At an engineering level they’ve put together a setup that’s impressive in various ways,” says Scott Aaronson, an MIT professor who studies the limits of quantum computation. “But in terms of the evidence that they’re solving problems using quantum mechanics faster than you could classically, I don’t think it’s there yet.” A fierce critic of D-Wave in the years following its 2007 demo, Aaronson softened his stance last year after the company’s Nature paper showing quantum effects. “In the past there was an enormous gap between the marketing claims and where the science was and that’s come down, but there’s still a gap,” says Aaronson, who visited the company’s labs in February. “The burden of proof is on them and they haven’t met the burden yet.”

Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer

Posted on July 13, 2012 by mea

Instead of the complex hardware required to produce holograms, the Media Lab system, dubbed a Tensor Display, uses several layers of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), the technology currently found in most flat-panel TVs. To produce a convincing 3-D illusion, the LCDs would need to refresh at a rate of about 360 times a second, or 360 hertz. Such displays may not be far off: LCD TVs that boast 240-hertz refresh rates have already appeared on the market, just a few years after 120-hertz TVs made their debut.

via Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer – MIT News Office.

The Grossman Group

Posted on July 1, 2012 by mea

Our focus is on the application and development of cutting-edge simulation tools to understand, predict, and design novel materials with applications in energy conversion, energy storage, thermal transport, surface phenomena, and synthesis.

via The Grossman Group.

Graphene Improves Desalination Efficiency by Factor of 100