#ALGORITHMS: "How to Keep New Year's Resolutions"

New Year's resolutions often scatter on the winds of change during a typical year, with many of us failing to keep them after just a single week. By planning "bite-sized" but consistent progress toward resolutions, however, psychologists claim we can increase our chances of success.


As many as 45 percent of Americans will make New Year's resolutions for 2012, but less than half will keep them, according to psychologists. To improve your chances of keeping your resolutions, researchers offer some words of advice: Start with a plan, make bite-sized progress and regularly renew your efforts.
Further Reading

#DISPLAY: "Kyocera offers lifetime LCD supply"

A lifetime supply of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) is being guaranteed to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) by Kyocera Corp., which recently extended its acquisition of LCD and touchscreen suppliers by purchasing Optrex Corp.


Last year, Kyocera (Kyoto, Japan) acquired Sony's small- and medium-sized LCD fab, and last week it added Optrex (Tokyo) to its manufacturing base for OEM displays and touchscreens. Optrex specializes in ruggedized displays for industrial, automotive, medical, telecommunications and appliances.
Further Reading

#MARKETING: "Diverse Workforce Fattens Bottom Line"

The melting pot concept enhances enterprises the same as nations, since diverse groups combine the talents of their strongest members and compensate for individuals' weaknesses. The combination is a stronger overall organization.


Diversity in the workplace not only makes ethical sense and fulfills government mandates, but it actually fattens an enterprise's bottom line, according to a recent survey study performed by Canadian researchers. Led by Ryerson University (Toronto), the study found that diverse workforces are happier, more loyal and more productive.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Six Ways to Kill Enterprise Innovation"

Why do some companies succeed and others fail? Hiring even the most creative people will not result in an innovative company unless the six constraints that cause failure are nixed in advance.


Key to success in modern business is innovation, but other than hiring creative people, what determines whether an innovative company will be successful? Professor David Owens of the Vanderbilt University business school thinks he has the answer. You must simultaneously satisfy six constraints to succeed.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Freemiums Spreading to All Apps"

The business model by which software and services are offered free-of-charge for basic features, but require a payment for advanced features, is predicted to become the norm in 2012.


The use of freemiums--in which applications are free for basic use, but payments are required for advanced features--will intensify in 2012, making it entirely possible that by this time next year all relevant iOS applications will be free in most categories. In 2011, the number of freemium applications in the top 250 at the Apple App Store topped 88 percent, according to Allied Business Intelligence (ABI Research). The freemium business model uses in-application advertising and purchases for income, a trend that ABI Research predicts will extend to 100 percent of the top iOS applications by the end of 2012.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Smarter Technologies Help Santa Complete His Yearly Rounds"

A unified-field physicist visits Santa's workshop to unveil the smarter technologies that make the holidays magic.



Santa's magic might seem far-fetched to jaded grown-ups, but in the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke's famous maxim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," scientists have cataloged Santa's smart technologies during a past visiting scholar program to his North Pole workshop.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Giving Big Beats Giving More"

People mulling over stocking-stuffer gifts for the holiday season and businesses offering giveaways should study the findings of new research that looks into recipient perceptions about add-on gifts.


Researchers claim that giving one big gift is perceived as more generous by the recipient than combining a big gift with smaller stocking stuffers. Adding the smaller gifts decreases the perceived value of the one-big-gift. Researchers at the Pamplin College of Business (Virginia Tech) have analyzed the phenomenon and concluded that bundling together a big gift and a smaller stocking stuffer indeed does reduce the perceived value of the overall package for the recipient.
Further Reading

#DISPLAYS: "Touchscreens adopt on-cover over in-cell"

LCD vendors worldwide are being pressured by smartphone and tablet makers to quickly integrate touch into the display itself, using in- or on-cell sensors, but slow development has prompted add-on touchscreen vendors to offer interim sensor-on-cover, touch-on-lens, and similar one-glass solutions, at least for 2012.



In 2011, over 566 million projected capacitive touchscreens were shipped for smartphones alone, according to NPD DisplaySearch (Santa Clara, Calif.), and for 2012 that number is likely to mushroom as tablets, laptops, and all-in-one PC makers adopt add-on touchscreens in lieu of integrated touch with in- and on-cell LCDs.
Further Reading

#SPACE: "Advanced-Civilization Planetary Systems Discovered"

Stars that have evolved for billions of years longer than our sun have recently been found to have 18 gas-giant planets, potentially hosting advanced civilizations on any Earth-like planets there.


The 18 new planets recently discovered by ground telescopes were upstaged by NASA's space telescope, Kepler, which also recently announced a new cache of planetary discoveries, including the most promising Earth-like planet yet.
Further Reading

#MATERIALS: "Rare earth demand, supply rising for next five years"

Despite China's virtual corner on the market of rare earths, demand is skyrocketing along with investments in new mines worldwide that has some pundits talking of a "rare earth bubble."


The U.S., Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and even Afghanistan all have strategic efforts underway to reopen rare earth mines, many of which will be producing ore within five years.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Mobile Device Design Gets Smarter"

Smarter mobile devices could soon be defined with rules rather than instructions, by virtue of a new paradigm for developing hardware and software.


Next spring, a smarter paradigm for designing mobile devices will debut at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 17th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. There, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will unveil a language that describes a mobile device's functions as sets of rules instead of as instructions. This will allow the functions to be optimally partitioned into hardware and software on an ad hoc basis.
Further Reading

#MATERIALS: "Flexible substrates harness carbon"

Switching to a new formulation of cabon nanotube ink can enable the fabrication of smart devices that are flexible, fast, cheap and extremely durable, according to new results at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.


Berkeley Lab said the new material could be used for displays as well as for sensors that monitor cracks in bridges, buildings and planes, for medical bandages that actively treat infections, for disposable food packaging that detects spoilage, and to turn textiles into solar panels.
Further Reading

#ENERGY: "Smart Grids Driving $1 Billion Markets"

As the global energy grids modernize with smart meters, alternative generation and energy storage technologies, whole industries will get infusions of prosperity.


Further Reading

#CHIPS: "Researchers: Carbon better than copper for TSVs"

Three-dimensional chip stacks are better connected with through-silicon-vias (TSVs) filled with carbon nanotubes instead of copper, according to researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.



Image credit: Teng Wang, Kjell Jeppson, Lilei Ye, Johan Liu. Carbon-Nanotube Through-Silicon Via Interconnects for Three-Dimensional Integration. Small, 2011, Volume 7, pages 2,313–2,317. Copyright Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Reproduced with permission.
TSVs promise to speed up the communications among all the chips that make up an electronic system by stacking them in 3-D instead of laying them out flat on circuit boards. Unfortunately, filling the vias with copper causes problems with thermal expansion, since copper expands more than the surrounding silicon. Carbon nanotubes could solve this problem.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Smart Arrows Report Flight Stats"

Using micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers in arrows, smart archers now can precisely record the speed, distance and other flight statistics for their shots.


Archery is the latest sport to aid athletes by equipping arrows to record an archer’s performance for later review. By mounting a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer inside the tip of an arrow, archers can now take advantage of the same motion processing algorithms that have already revolutionized other professional sports.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Video Analytics Boosts Business Intelligence"

The millions of video surveillance cameras worldwide have opened a nearly billion-dollar market opportunity for smart software that can detect motion, recognize people, identify objects and track vehicles.


Analytics running on the video feeds from the millions of surveillance cameras worldwide are recognizing objects and their behaviors to provide situational awareness of remote locations. As these algorithms get smarter, a new market is forming that incorporates video analytics into business intelligence tools. This market has the potential to grow to nearly $1 billion by 2016, according to ABI Research.
Further Reading

#WIRELESS: "Fire Burns Apple iPad Rivals"

The low price of the Kindle Fire is attracting new budget-conscious touch-screen tablet users. Amazon hopes those users plan to use it more as a wireless shopping device than as a laptop or netbook alternative.


Amazon's Kindle appears to have hit a sweet spot in the consumer wallet with its full-color touch-screen tablet, according to IHS iSuppli. The group reports that Fire has already taken over the No. 2 slot, behind Apple's iPad, by selling below cost.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Tiny chip enables battery-free sensors"

A MEMS chip can harvest energy from vibrations inside car tires allowing a tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) to run battery-free, according to Belgian research institute IMEC.



The new MEMS energy harvester technology from IMEC, which can be used to power any low-current wireless sensor node, was reported Wednesday at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Vibrating transistor integrated on CMOS"

A micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) transistor was announced by Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) and Cornell University, giving SRC members access to on-chip timing solutions for their CMOS chips.


The MEMS-JFET builds a junction field-effect transistor (JFET) on top of a silicon resonator, providing both amplification and a rock-solid mechanical reference for on-chip channel-select filters and oscillators.

Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Profiting From IT as a Service"

By tracking computer usage and measuring it against return on investment, business analytics turns a data center into a profit--rather than a cost--center.


Running IT as a service requires that every project have a business case with tangible benefits, clear return on investment and key performance indicators that measure how IT projects affect business goals, according to a Gartner report. That report, “The Future of the Infrastructure and Operations,” advises that infrastructure and operations become a "full partner with business."
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Smarter App Prototyping Sans Programming"

Instead of requiring sophisticated programming skills just to design a mobile application, a smarter prototyping technology divorces design from coding, allowing business analysts to create demonstration apps before IT programs them.


Enterprise visualization software is no longer just for displaying the results of complex analytics, but can now be employed to accurately render the user experience for applications that have yet to be written.
Further Reading

#ROBOTS: "Pocket-Bots Swarm Over Social Apps"

Tiny coin-sized robots work together in swarms to test out socially oriented applications that employ cooperative behaviors that today require humans to perform.


Teams of humans--from soldiers to athletes--routinely work together to accomplish socially oriented tasks such as search-and-rescue missions. Robots, on the other hand, have so far been best deployed alone or under remote control. Now, however, Harvard University claims to have created an autonomous robot small and cheap enough to try out algorithms that coordinate team-like behaviors among legions of autonomous robots.
Further Reading