Search Results - IEEE Spectrum

SEARCH RESULTS

RESULTS FOR ""November 2006""

Consumer Electronics: June 2007

Article: Have you bought an LCD television in the past year or two? If so, you probably looked for the biggest screen you could get for your money. You might have paid a few more dollars for a brand you recognized or saved a few dollars by picking up a no-name television at Costco, so long as the size-to-dollar ratio was …

Who Cares Whether Johnny Knows Science?

At Work: April 2007

Article: We expect too much of education, and that is why we blame it for nearly everything that goes wrong. To every initiative touting education as a silver bullet, there comes failure and the inevitable school-bashing reaction. Economic growth often figures in the debate, for virtually every national development plan emphasizes education as an economic investment,…

Patent Power

Computing: November 2006

Article: Quality--not quantity--counts when it comes to patent portfolios. For evidence, look no further than Micron Technology, in Boise, Idaho, the world's second-largest maker of memory chips. Micron logged 1569 U.S. patents in 2005, just over half of IBM's 2972, for example. Now consider the resonance of those patents: how many other people cited them, how…

Goodbye, CRT

Consumer Electronics: November 2006

Article: The next television you buy won’t contain a cathode-ray tube. And thanks to the imminent worldwide transition from analog to digital television, you probably will be buying a new TV soon--you and more than a billion other consumers around the world. With the United States going fully digital in 2009 and other developed countries following closely on…

The New Search for E.T.

Aerospace: November 2006

Article: It doesn’t look like much: just a clapboard shed in a clearing, surrounded by tall pines. No plaque or other marking announces what goes on here. Inside stands a 4-meter-tall black metal frame covered in Mylar, looking sort of like a giant’s box kite waiting for a stiff breeze. Beneath the shroud of plastic are a largish mirrored disk, a…

German Maglev Tragedy

Green Tech: November 2006

Article: On 22 September, a train demonstrating magnetic levitation crashed on a 30-kilometer test stretch in northwest Germany near the Dutch border, killing 25 of the 29 people aboard. Though it was a freak accident—the train collided with a maintenance vehicle left on the track—it’s a setback for a technology that’s still struggling for…

Electric Cars For Enlightened Stars

Green Tech: November 2006

Article: It’s been all the rage in the last couple of years for Hollywood celebrities to flaunt ownership of hybrid cars like Toyota’s modest Prius. But even better than a hybrid--which, after all, still gets all its energy from gasoline and therefore also emits carbon dioxide--would be an all-electric, zero-emissions car. Fortunately, for the…

Crowning the Clean Tech Stars

Energy: November 2006

Article: Last November, two electrical engineers attending a seminar in Palo Alto, Calif., on environmentally beneficial technology decided that they personally could make a difference. Laurent Pacalin and Michael Santullo didn’t have money to invest or a big company behind them, but they had an idea: they would hold a contest.In January, they started raising…

The Case of Earth's Incredible Shrinking Field

Aerospace: November 2006

Article: Earth’s magnetic field has been monitored carefully since the 1830s, when the German polymath Karl Friedrich Gauss invented a way to measure its intensity. Since then, the field has decayed at the startling rate of about 5 percent per century [see photo, ”Tangled Story”]. Has Earth’s field been in a spiral of decay for longer…

Q&A With Bioengineer Tejal Desai

Biomedical: November 2006

Article: Prof. Tejal Desai is a leader in a field with a big name—biological microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS)—that deals with very small items. She uses the tools of semiconductor manufacturing to make minuscule medical devices, such as a miniature artificial pancreas and scaffolding for tissue regeneration. She’s been widely recognized as…

Laser on Silicon

Computing: November 2006

Article: Scientists at Intel and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have managed to combine an indium-phosphide light emitter and a silicon chip to produce a hybrid laser that, years from now, could lead to cheap terabit-per-second connections within and around computers.Lasers and other optoelectronic devices carry billions of bits through our…

Q&A: Paul G. Richards, Nuclear Arms Seismologist

Energy: November 2006

Article: Paul G. Richards is the Mellon Professor of the Natural Sciences at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in Palisades, N.Y. For the last twenty-plus years, his work has focused on the use of seismological methods to study nuclear weapon test explosions and their implications in both the scientific and political arenas. He has served as an…

Metcalfe's Law: Right? Wrong?

Computing: November 2006

Article: We knew our September issue on technology and terrorism would raise hackles. But we didn’t realize that our July feature ”Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” by Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly would churn up its own little storm of controversy, drawing remarks from none other than Bob Metcalfe himself. The inventor of Ethernet,…

Pulse Prediction

Geek Life: November 2006

Article: For IEEE Fellow Monte Ross, the dedication last spring of a new telescope in Harvard, Mass., is a kind of vindication. The facility, designed and operated by Harvard University’s Paul Horowitz, is the first to be specially crafted to search for signals of light, rather than radio, from intelligent extraterrestrial beings [see Ross’s article,…

Serpent Mother

Geek Life: November 2006

Article: Neither words nor pictures do full justice to the Serpent Mother, a fire-breathing steel-and-electronics dragon that debuted this past August at Burning Man, an annual orgy of art, technology, and water deprivation held in the Nevada desert. Serpent Mother took six monthsï»' to create. Her 55-meter-long body supports a hydraulically activated moving head.…

Blood Test

Computing: November 2006

Article: Researchers have been toiling for years to produce biometric devices to quickly and reliably indicate whether people are actually who they say they are, using traits unique to them. These traits include fingerprint patterns, the arrangement of tissue in the eye’s iris, and the timbre of a person’s voice.A new type of biometric identification…

Certification Uncertainty

At Work: November 2006

Article: Congratulations. You’ve got a bachelor’s, a master’s, and maybe even a doctorate in engineering, not to mention years of work experience. But do you need to jump on the certificate bandwagon?Well, it depends.Certifications confirming your proficiency in certain technologies from hardware and software vendors—such as Red Hat Certified…

News Briefs

Computing: November 2006

Article: BOTTOM LINE Despite embarrassing disclosures of board member surveillance that cost Hewlett-Packard’s chairman Patricia Dunn her job, the company is on track to surpass IBM this year as the world’s largest tech company. HP’s third-quarter earnings already put it into the No. 1 position on a rolling 12-month basis, and if it keeps up that…

Wi-Fi for the People

Computing: November 2006

Article: If you look hard enough, you can see the future of Philadelphia high above the streets. It’s a tiny white box with two antennas poking up from the roof of a café in Love Park, in the heart of the city’s main business district. Smaller than a shoebox, the radio transceiver and router allow anyone nearby with a laptop to …

Impossible Tradeoffs

Computing: November 2006

Article: I sometimes think that the essence of engineering is making intelligent tradeoffs between conflicting parameters. Improve one parameter and another one worsens. The art is in knowing where to make the best trade. As engineers, we are trained to quantify different tradeoffs, draw some kind of cost/benefit curve, and make a rational choice based on our…

Spin Doctoring

Biomedical: November 2006

Article: Copper connections are now a major factor threatening the reign of Moore’s Law in the design of very large-scale integration (VLSI) chips. These interconnects not only are costly but also drain a good part of the energy used to power the chips, more than the transistors themselves consume. Above all, they use up a lot of space.Many research groups…

Breathing Easy in Space Is Never Easy

Aerospace: November 2006

Article: During the hectic coming-and-going of visiting space crews aboard the International Space Station in September, the startling bulletin about a fire in its all-important oxygen-generating system was quickly denied and just as quickly overtaken by events. But the emergency--which, it turns out, was not a fire--has profound implications for the space…

Air Power

Computing: November 2006

Article: Wish you didn’t have to plug in your laptop and cellphone? A team of researchers from MIT may have just the thing for you. Yesterday, at the American Institute of Physics’ Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, Marin Soljacic, Aristeidis Karalis, and J.D. Joannopoulos described a scheme that would let devices get their power the same way they…

U.S. Climate Technology Plan

Energy: November 2006

Article: On 20 September, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released its Climate Change Technology Strategic Program Plan, a 243-page report that evaluates prospects for all relevant greenhouse-gas mitigation technologies and identifies the various sources of government support for development of the technologies. The climate technology road map has its…

Swiss Invent a Muscular Display

Consumer Electronics: November 2006

Article: As big as a picture window, yet thin enough to hang on the wall, today’s high-end display would be perfect if only it offered more detail and true color. Now researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich propose to solve both these problems with moveable gratings that break white light into a rainbow and bend the right …

Flat Panels on Display

Computing: November 2006

Article: One image good, three images better? All the big names exhibited at FPD International 2006, the display technology shindig held 18 to 20 October in Yokohama, Japan, sponsored, in the main, by Tokyo’s Nikkei Business Publications. The show proved once again that Asian companies will happily invent things first and nail down the applications…

Holiday Gifts 2006

Computing: November 2006

Article: The Ultimate Retrofit The style of a classic car is undeniable. So is the fact that most of them were built decades before satellite navigation, in-car video entertainment systems, and even power windows became common, making a ride in one a primitive experience by today’s standards. For those owners unwilling to sacrifice driving comfort for style,…

Broader Broadband

Computing: January 2005

Article: PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO MANIPULATION: MICHAEL R. VELLA You can never be too rich or too thin, as the saying goes. And for networking, you can never be too speedy. Unfortunately, to date, no wireless standard has been fast enough to send large files around the home. So if you want to send movies from your personal video recorder to your …

PAGE: 1

Master Bond: How to Evaluate Chemically Resistant Adhesives

IBM Video: Informix TimeSeries

IBM Webcast: Smart Metering Solutions Gain Competitive Edge

IBM Webcast: The Hidden Challenge in Meter Data Management: What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You!

APC: Estimating a Data Center’s Electrical Carbon Footprint

APC: Fundamental Principles of Network Security

APC: How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs

APC: Classification of Data Center Management Software Tools

APC: Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centers

APC: Electrical Efficiency Measurement for Data Centers

Nimbic: Achieving Maxwell‐accurate Electromagnetic Integrity in Chip‐Package‐System Design

IBM: Rational Team Concert Data Sheet

IBM: Fostering innovation and efficiency through collaborative change management

IBM: Collaborative software delivery: Managing today’s complex environment to improve software quality.

IBM: Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management

IBM: Requirements, quality and test management e-Kit

IBM: Accelerate quality with automation

IBM: Quality management across the product and service lifecycle

IBM: Deliver high quality applications faster with reduced risk and cost

IBM: Driving systems engineering value through trade studies

IBM: Enabling software reuse using successful component-based development practices.

IBM: Delivering a smarter planet: an exploration of systems of systems

IBM Rational solutions for smarter government services

IBM: Enabling the delivery of high-quality financial products and services

IBM: Systems Eng - The foundation for success in complex systems development

IBM: Turning Product Development into Competitive Advantage

IBM Informix TimeSeries: Benchmark Testing Demonstrates Unprecedented Performance and Scalability for Meter Data Management

IBM: Build Smart Metering Solutions with IBM Informix TimeSeries

COMSOL: Drastically Improve Compute-Intense Applications in the SuperComputing Cloud