Predicted hot technologies for 2012 (were they right?)
Following my retirement, we have closed our company for new business.
Please do not hesitate to contact me directly, our email portal remains open and I would be delighted to hear from you and provide ongoing support or advice.
Richard Thomson
support@rta-instruments.com
Companies represented up to the end of December 2023. Please now contact them directly.
k-Space Associates, Inc.
Phone: +1 (734) 426-7977
requestinfo@k-space.com
https://www.k-space.com
STAIB INSTRUMENTS GmbH
Phone: +49 8761 76 24 0
sales@staibinstruments.com
https://www.staibinstruments.com/
Monday 24 December 2012
Friday 21 December 2012
The World's fastest (yet)
The Titan supercomputer, a Cray XK7 system, at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory is the world's fastest with 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of
calculations per second).
Thursday 20 December 2012
Tuesday 18 December 2012
Thursday 13 December 2012
Olfactory retailing
Smells such as that of baking bread are very appealing but
scientists at the Washington State University and University of St
Gallen, Switzerland have been investigating what makes the most commercially inspiring odour. Writing in the
Journal of Retailing, the researchers describe exposing Swiss shoppers to a
simple (orange) scent and a more complex (orange-basil blended with green tea)
scent. They observed a significant jump in sales when the simpler scent was in
the air. Apparently the simple scent is more easily processed but at an
unconscious level, freeing the customer’s mind to focus on shopping and
spending more money.
Tuesday 11 December 2012
Memory Lane (256 bytes)
It is easy to forget how large and limited computers used to be. My first home computer was a Commodore 64 and
it, along with other classics such as the PDP11, are all included in the
recently opened Living Computer Museum. A couple of points for the
nostalgic historical record: The maximum score possible on the 255 levels of
Pac-Man is 3,333,360 and in June 1980 the VIC-20 became the first computer to
sell over a million units - it had 3.5 KB of usable memory.
Thursday 6 December 2012
Strawberry Fields Forever?
The Rolling Stones may have kept going for fifty years but real flower power may now be making a
comeback. A research group led by the University of Warwick are to embark on a
programme using flowers, such as Alyssum, that can soak up particular elements
and chemicals to restore poisoned soils. In addition to removing elements such
as arsenic and platinum from contaminated land the team hope to develop
suitable biorefining processes to recover high value materials.
Tuesday 4 December 2012
Are humans becoming less intelligent?
In a world containing the Large Hadron Collider and NMR body
scanners it may seem strange that a Stanford University geneticist would pose the question are humans becoming less intelligent?
Central to the query is the notion that ancient hunter-gatherers underwent a
process of extreme selection. The inability to conceive clever solutions to the
lack of food and shelter was rewarded with a rapid death and this was the
powerful driver behind the optimisation of the intelligence genes thousands of
years ago. Since then with the decline in this extreme selection and natural
genetic mutations it has, allegedly, all been downhill.
I leave it to the reader to reflect on what we mean by
intelligence as opposed to having intelligence genes. However I note that
several forums have extended the discussion into the impact of
technology on our intelligence, behaviours and even our very existence. With
the likes of GPS, curve fitting software and the internet are we becoming lazy
and less intelligent, or, are we subcontracting out the mundane and enabling us
to focus on what matters and thus be more innovative? Perhaps at the end of the
day, as any hunter-gatherer knows, a tool is a tool; it is what you do with it
that counts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)