Month: April 2008

Smartphone Ending Poverty?

“You don’t even need to own a phone to benefit from one”. Part of I.D.E.’s work included setting up farm cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale. “People making $1 a day can’t afford a phone, but if they start making more profit in their farming, you can bet they’ll buy a phone as a next step”

chipchase gets the NYT writeup.
2008-04-13:

Americans, and particularly those in lower-income groups, are deriving clear economic benefits from phones—even though low-income groups are far less likely to own a phone. if the 38% of these 45.2m low-income, bottom quintile households that do not now have phones were to start using them, and earn money at the same rate as those households that do own phones—it would add $2.9b to household incomes.

i am especially interested in the m-banking aspect. death to payday loans. somewhere, koranteng is smiling.

Superconductivity

293 Kelvin, but at > 200 gigapascal, so not deployable. this is the kind of pressure that breaks diamond anvils. Earlier milestones: 200 Kelvin, 185 Kelvin – the field has improved by ~100 kelvin since i started paying attention in the early 90s.
Graphene superconductors exist, as of 2019:

his lab at MIT had found superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene — a 1-atom-thick sheet of carbon crystal dropped on another one, and then rotated to leave the 2 layers slightly askew. The discovery has been the biggest surprise to hit the solid-state physics field since the 2004 Nobel Prize–winning discovery that an intact sheet of carbon atoms — graphene — could be lifted off a block of graphite with a piece of Scotch tape. And it has ignited a frenzied race among condensed-matter physicists to explore, explain and extend the MIT results, which have since been duplicated in several labs. The observation of superconductivity has created an unexpected playground for physicists. The practical goals are obvious: to illuminate a path to higher-temperature superconductivity, to inspire new types of devices that might revolutionize electronics, or perhaps even to hasten the arrival of quantum computers. But more subtly, and perhaps more important, the discovery has given scientists a relatively simple platform for exploring exotic quantum effects. “There’s an almost frustrating abundance of riches for studying novel physics in the magic-angle platform”

Also as of 2019, new states of superconductivity are being found:

Superconductivity has been shown in monolayer crystals of, for example, molybdenum disulphide or tungsten disulfide that have a thickness of just 3 atoms. ‘In both monolayers, there is a special type of superconductivity in which an internal magnetic field protects the superconducting state from external magnetic fields’. Normal superconductivity disappears when a large external magnetic field is applied, but this Ising superconductivity is strongly protected. Even in the strongest static magnetic field in Europe, which has a strength of 37 Tesla, the superconductivity in tungsten disulfide does not show any change. However, although it is great to have such strong protection, the next challenge is to find a way to control this protective effect, by applying an electric field.

Letting 9 YO Ride the Subway Alone

for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

good for her. there are enough sheeple with a safety fetish already.

Yahoo Maps higher res

The Yahoo! Maps team is happy to announce the single biggest imagery update on maps.yahoo.com since the program inception. we’ve enabled up to 2 extra zoom levels of aerial photography and satellite imagery for the Satellite button for 100s of cities around the US. Not only can you see more detail, but in many places the imagery has gotten a welcomed refresh as well. To see what I mean, check this out new view of Denver City Hall.

welcome to 2006. for real high res, check out the google maps equivalent.

Superinsulators

When they tried to pass a current through the material, the researchers noticed that its resistance suddenly increased by a factor of 100K once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold. The same sudden change also occurred when the researchers decreased the external magnetic field. Like superconductors, which have applications in many different areas of physics, from accelerators to magnetic-levitation (maglev) trains to MRI machines, superinsulators could eventually find their way into a number of products, including circuits, sensors and battery shields.

Analog Cable Waste

There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net Neutrality becomes a non issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ? That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up 6mhz. That translates into about 38mbs per second. Thats 38mbs PER NETWORK. Transition basic cable networks from analog to digital over the next 3 years and all of the sudden there will be 100s of megabits available on the smallest cable systems and more than a gigabit of bandwidth available on the largest.

shut down the analog cable channels. they each waste 38mbps with their crappy programming

NanoEngineer

an open-source 3D multi-scale modeling and simulation program for nano-composites with special support for structural DNA nanotechnology. It features an easy-to-use interactive 3D graphical user interface for designing and modeling large, atomically precise composite systems.