Duke University Pratt School of Engineering released the results of a study on Engineering and Innovation. Americans believe that they will fall behind and China is the most likely candidate for taking the lead. The respondents felt that reasons for the falling behind is that engineering is not a preferred profession, “not glamorous enough”, and lower paid for the extensive education with a call to beef up lower schooling towards a higher turnout for engineering.

One area I see for further consideration is litigation and its effects, Americans are excluded from research in some areas of cyber security due to the inability to conduct reverse engineering in some cases. There is possibly other areas that are affected in a similar matter. Patent madness especially in software and other decisions that US Legislature has taken to protect aspects of intellectual property may also well be contributors to the problem and should also be addressed. Do not be surprised that China gets the upper hand in cyber security over the next 15 years. They have a lot of research going on and it is unhindered by those laws that affect US researchers.

If America keeps legislating to protect IP in the broad manner taken through recent years, they risk dropping rapidly behind those that are not hindered by similar legislation. There is probably nothing wrong with very targeted legislation to some areas, but presently some is hindering American researchers.

America will see a lot of change this century, and much will be forced upon it by the global financial power shift as it continues to move around. Even if the US remains at the top of the stack, which I doubt it will, it will have a lot of its competitive edge removed. Innovation as was seen through the majority of the last century will be needed and this wont happen with the issues of infringement and legislation that is currently present.

See ya round

Peter

Flash disks, SSD and the like have progressed a phenomenal amount over the last few years. This has led to a great many benefits. Ever growing storage for our phones and cameras, Panasonic now have there SD card digital camera’s. In the latest ACM Queue Magazine there is an article on the latest on the Flash NAND technology and what new devices are heading to market and no doubt sooner than later. Soon we shall see Flash with 64 times the density we currently have which will deliver 250GB on a chip. Now lets me see, isn’t a DVD standard format about 4.5, This could mean that on a USB drive we soon will have them with enough storage to store over 55 full length movies, or at least a couple of HD ones. The article is a bit technical for the layperson, however we are going to start to see some great innovation in this space. A Samsung disk spoken about is a 32 GB which has a PATA interface and will soon have SATA for quick installation to a regular home PC. Demands in this space will start to drive down the price of these disks, SATA will help that process along. So we might see SSD type disks with RAID inbuilt is one possibility. Our PC’s might get a new way of thinking. These disks could act as near line storage as with some innovation could act as a buffer between our slower hard disks and normal RAM, Mobile devices with a 250GB storage will alter the capabilities of portable devices immensely. A PC and thats anything slightly bigger than a Blackberry could have mirrored storage, The current devices like the Asus EEpc could potentially have 2 1TB storage units each of which have RAID 5 across 5 chips within each storage device, that takes the place of current SSD disks, yep still no moving parts

I am sure the storage vendors and PC and mobile vendors are way ahead of my thinking, and this will all seem a bit ordinary in a couple of years when the products come to market, but then I will probably need that sort of storage for my HD video camera in 2011.

See ya round

Peter

Interesting project going on at University of Reading. A small robot is being controlled by tissue taken from a rats brain. It is hoped that in due course as they study this the scientists expect to make useful findings that might allow a better understanding of such things as Alzheimer's and other brain disorders Read the rest of this entry »