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Using the Internet as a Model for Energy
Is Bob Metcalfe a little crazy, or simply a visionary? In a keynote speech he gave at the GreenNet conference in San Francisco, he suggested that we should take the lessons we learned about innovation and entrepreneurship while building the Internet and apply them to the field of energy production. The result, he asserted, would be a smart grid that delivers a "squanderable abundance" of cheap and clean energy.
Metcalfe puts his money where his mouth is. The 3Com founder and co-inventor of Ethernet is a venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners. He drew a number of comparisons between the Internet and his vision of a smart grid, which he called the "Enernet." He noted that it needs to have an architecture, layers, standards, and storage -- all things that the Internet has, but which the current energy grid lacks to some extent. For example, "the current grid doesn't have much storage at all," he observed.
Metcalfe also observed another parallel between the energy grid and the Internet: the early Internet was built around the idea of conserving bandwidth, just as those in the energy field say we need to conserve power. Today, however, "We are using [a] million times more bandwidth. If the Internet is any guide, when we are done solving energy, we are not going to use less energy but much, much more...just like we have in computation." When scientists tell him there are limits to the amount of energy that can be produced, he points out that those building the Internet found ways around what were thought at the time to be laws of nature. On the other hand, Metcalfe dates the start of the Internet to 1946, when the transistor was first created...and he figures that, as with the Internet, it will take decades before we build out a smart grid that is as useful for energy as the Internet is for other things.
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World's First Programmer Gets Her Day
The computer programming field, even today, is so male-dominated that we often forget the world's first programmer was a woman. And now she has an unofficial day to honor her. March 24 was declared "Ada Lovelace Day" by software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson, and bloggers around the web took up the call to write about the topic.
In 1843, Ada Lovelace wrote a series of instructions for Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical computer. Her program, had Babbage's Analytical Engine ever been built, would have been able to calculate a series of Bernoulli numbers. The Victorian-era countess also saw the possibility for computers to go beyond the original vision for their use as number crunchers.
Her influence is widely felt even today, as it was her insight that made the modern programming field possible. The US Defense Department named a programming language after her in late 1980. The British Computer Society has awarded a medal in her name since 1998, and ten years later started a yearly competition for female students of computer science. It is hoped that Ada Lovelace Day will extend her influence to encourage more girls to choose technical careers by reminding everyone of the important contributions women have made to technical fields over the years.
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This is Your Brain on Silicon?
Scientists have been trying for decades to duplicate the human brain in silicon. Today, they came one step closer, as a team of scientists in Europe unveiled a chip with 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. The chip is said to do better at duplicating the brains ability to learn than any other machine. Although its connections amount to a mere fraction of those found in the human brain, the researchers that created the chip say it can be scaled up.
The scientists behind of the project that created the chip, FACETS (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States), believe that creating a computer version of the human brain will assist in the development of powerful new computers with massively parallel capabilities. While this is not the first time scientists have tried to use computers to model the human brain, this project takes the work done up to now one step further.
Karhheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University in Germany who is the project coordinator, explains that "rather than simulating neurons, we are building them." Neurons and synapses get recreated as circuits of transistors and capacitors on a standard eight-inch silicon wafer. They are designed to produce the same sort of electrical activity one would find in the biological versions. The hardwired approach lets researchers run simulations without needing as much computing power as using software would require; plus, they run faster and scale better. The current chip can run 100,000 faster than a real human brain. There are certain things they can't do, however, such as simulate the effect of drugs on the human brain. Until they can simulate the effect of caffeine on computer chips, humans probably need not worry that they will be replaced.
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