Sunday morning coffee shop and OLIVE

I went down to get coffee. As I was waiting in line I over heard two people exchanging job leads. I got my coffee (and doughnuts of course ;)) on my way out I noticed a mature looking guy wrapping up a job interview, which seemed to have gone very well!

The face of how we conduct business is changing, it is a change for better --I think. We are making an effort to look outside of the box --jobs advertised in the newspaper (a very dry and impersonal approach) vs career discussions over coffee on a Sunday morning.

As I was sipping my coffee, I leafed through pages of January edition of IEEE Spectrum magazine. The first few sentences of an article caught my eye:

"CODE THREE! Code Three!" shouts a police officer over a radio. "There's been an explosion at Global Financial Trust!"

I looked for the author's name. David Kushner. I know him, not personally, but through the articles he occasionally writes for Spectrum magazine. Just last month, he wrote a piece on making (serious) amount of money through on-line video games.

This article, is about SimHospital, a simulation used for medical training through the application: On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment, or OLIVE.

"The answer is simple", Kushner writes, "in a simulation you can learn to drive a car with out crashing, trade securities without breaking your company's bank, manage complaining customers without alienating them, treat patients without killing them."

Or perform a job interview without bombing it!

Next stop is report on COG, "Canadian Organic Growers", and Toronto's 3Rs Working Group.

Startup weekend

If I told you that a company was to be established from ground up during a weekend would you be intrigued to know more? Or would you casually dismiss the idea as impossible! Well, if you are in the second group I have news for you --that it is possible. Check out www.vosnap.com. This is not the whole story. There is more to come.

Image converter

Recently, I needed an image converter to convert gif to eps format. 2 out of 3 applications I tried didn't work.

First I tried Doc-Print v3.3 provided on VeryPDF.com. The binary was relatively small and downloaded in few seconds--on a broadband connection. The set up was fast and within few clicks the software seemed to be good to go. The application needed a machine restart to complete installation --although a nuisance but shutting down all windows and open applications deemed to be a very small price to pay to achieve the goal. After restarting the computer, I tried it out anxiously. To my surprise the application didn't start. The window flashed and disappeared. So, I used the uninstall exe provided by the software to uninstal --I had to manually remove a config.ini from under the program directory and then remove the program directory.

I moved on to my ImageMagick, next link on the Google search result page. This one took a while to just load up the mirror sites. I quickly moved on.

The third link, however, was the winner, Advanced Batch Converter 3.9. The downloaded took a few seconds. Installation was quick. It didn't require a machine restart. The application was user friendly. Under 5 minutes, I had my gif image converted to eps! :)

Bioelectrics

The terms biomedicine, biomedical engineering and such are recent additions to my vocabulary as they are being more and more used in technical and non-technical context. Today I came across a brand new term, bioelectrics. As I am typing this up I realize it is being immediately underlined red—looks like the word has not made to the Word processor dictionary either. I am using Word 2002 – SP3. Just shows how fast we are moving forward and breaking new grounds in science and technology. Hold this thought.
Back to bioelectrics: the article appeared in IEEE Spectrum, August 2006 edition. Let me capture the thought by quoting directly from the article:
“40 Thousand volts, four thousand amperes, and over one hundred million watts squeezed into a cubic centimeter. You’d think that would be enough to vaporize just about anything, and it certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of electricity you’d want to apply to your body. But if our research continues to succeed as it has, years from now we’ll be asking some cancer patients to do just that. And it might just save their lives.”
Per the article the period this amount of energy is applied to the cell is in the matter of nanoseconds. The energy applied to the cell is enough to create a huge electric field at the membrane of the cell and break it down. As a result a hole will be created across the membrane of the cell. Ions will pour in and cause the cell to short circuit. We just destroyed a bad cell in matter of nanoseconds!
I admit it’s fascinating. Like any other R&D project millions of dollars is spent with a small hope that this: applying high voltage to the cell is going to someday be branded as the cure for cancer. That’s the goal. But, even if that is not achieved, the least something good comes out of it.
That concerns me most. You see each edition of Spectrum has many WOW stories like this. As mentioned before we are moving forward in the science and technology field with incredible speed—pairing disciplines that have almost nothing to do with each other. Despite this we still don’t have a cure for cancer and HIV. In the previous centuries, 18-20, I call these the golden centuries, so much good was done. Human life improved by Louis Pasteur’s extraordinary contribution to microbiology and medicine, getting an X-Ray would have been impossible had Marie Curie not discovered Radium and so much more.
Just what exactly do we, the generation of 21 century, have to be proud of? Oh, I know! ipod! (I know I am being too sarcastic) But, I think you get the point.

Cheap Chips

There is enough bandwidth above and around 60GHz to join a DVD and HD TV wirelessly and expect 2 gig-per-second transmission of data.
The problem is not that these frequencies are not utilized yet, in fact Mercedez-Benz uses 77-GHz bandwidth in its adaptive cruise control. The suggested manufacturer price for the 2007 Merecedez, S550 is only 85400 USD!

To take advantage of this frequency bandwidth in wireless consumer electronics cheap transceivers are needed.
Silicon!
IBM engineers revealed the first experimental 60-GHz transmitter and receiver this month. They have utilized an alloy of germanium and silicon. The working model is able to transmit and receive 630 megabits per second over a distance of 10 meters.
Concurrently, a group of researchers at University of California, L.A. are taking a different approach. They are taking advantage of the widespread CMOS technology.
CMOS technology is so common that there is no doubt that the chips that result will be cheap. Integration of many devices with CMOS technology is very easy. The drawback is inability to predict how transistors and everything else will behave at that frequency.
With the advent of R&D in this area there is hope that we can rid our lives from clutter and displeasure of looking at the farm of wires around the house. However, we shall await for when this technology is “mature and inexpensive”.

"Bluetooth on Steriods"

chip making material (silicon germanium)
+ unlicensed 60 gigahertz spectrum a.k.a millimeter wave band
= the bulky cables behind the TV becoming obsolete!

Cell Trio

The tiny square shaped object that the guy in the image is holding is called "Cell trio" --the revolutionary new chip designed from ground up for multimedia applications running on networks.

You console gamers out there will be ecstatic to know that Cell trio is promising to provide a much more improved 3-D graphics --this translates to amazing game experience, doesn't it? The first product to use this new chip is Sony PS3.
Now, I am not a fan of playing console games, in fact I admit I have never played! But it seems there is a big market demand for such enhancements that has initiated collaboration among the three giant hi-tech companies, Sony, IBM and Toshiba to shell out $400 million to bring this chip to the market.
This is a significantly good start for the New Year for the chip industry since this chip is using the 32-nanometer technology --meaning the width of the smallest circuit wire on the chip is 32-nanometer. Amazing!