#ALGORITHMS: "Gig.U to Extend LAN Speed Among Schools"

Universities nationwide are banding together to extend the gigabit per second speeds typical of modern local-area networks to long-distance connections among signatory educational institutions.

Many modern PCs offer gigabit per second local-area network speeds to those willing to upgrade their switches and cables from the 10/100 megabits per second, which most people get by with on their LANs. Gig.U, on the other hand, plans to promote gigabit per second speeds over long-distance connections between signatory universities.

Gigabit per second speeds perform between 10 and 100 times faster than the typical 100- and 10-megabit per second local area network, respectively. But the difference is only a matter of seconds for the small files typically transferred by most home users. For real-time gaming, however, almost no time-lag will be perceived when gamers run on a LAN. However, extending even 100M bps LAN speeds to a broadband connection among remote gamers can cost $100 to $200 per month from Internet Service Providers.

Universities, on the other hand, routinely transfer large files for scientific research, making gigabit per second connections a real time-saver. And like the network gamer, simulations and visualizations of scientific data can be performed remotely if a user's terminal has access to gigabit per second connections.

Universities nationwide have signed onto Gig.U by soliciting ideas for how to extend gigabit per second local-area network speeds over long-distance connections.
Many technical universities have already extended such high-speed LAN connections among themselves, such as MIT's 10G bps Regional Optical Network that operates on the eastern seaboard. Stanford University has a Google-sponsored pilot program that extends gigabit per second LAN speeds to nearby residents there, and Case Western--a Gig.U signatory--has a similar pilot program in Cleveland.

The other 28 universities backing Gig.U, however, want to level the playing field by providing such high-speed connections among even remotely located universities, from Alaska to Hawaii. The 29 universities include: Arizona State, Case Western, Colorado State, Duke, George Mason, Howard, Indiana, Michigan State, North Carolina State, Penn State, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest, West Virginia and the Universities of Alaska, Chicago, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisville, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Florida, Virginia and Washington.

The Gig.U effort will likely take several years to develop, since the current stage of the program merely has universities circulating a request-for-information (RFI) from interested parties about how to provide gigabit-per-second to remote universities in an economical manner. The idea is to solicit partnerships with industry and other remote users who also need high-speed connections, such as health-care institutions, in order to come up with creative methods of financing long-distance high-speed networks. If workable solutions are forthcoming, the next step will be request-for-proposals (RFPs) about how to actually implement the solutions proposed by the RFIs.

Initiated by The Aspen Institute's Communications and Society Program, the effort will be directed by Blair Levin, former Executive Director of the National Broadband Plan and a Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Further Reading

#3D: "Smarter 3D Employs Eye Tracking"

LG claims to have solved the problems with glasses-free 3D displays with a smarter eye-tracking technology that adapts to the viewing angle of the user. Available this fall in a 20-inch monitor, the smarter 3D solution eliminates the need for glasses and is compatible with normal 2D imagery.

Glasses-free 3D displays, called auto-stereoscopic displays, have in the past depended on lenticular lenses that fit over displays to divert separate images to the right and left eyes. Unfortunately, lenticular lenses scramble regular 2D images. Parallax barriers are an alternative to lenticular lenses, but they do not provide a wide variety of viewing angles. LG has solved this last remaining problem with smarter eye-tracking technology that adapts the parallax barrier as the viewer's head moves.

Parallax barriers work similarly to lenticular lenses in that they divide an image into alternating stripes for the left- and right-eye. However, instead of using a lens to bend the alternating stripes to the correct eye, a parallax barrier uses a second layer of alternating clear and black lines to block the left-eye stripes from reaching the right eye, and vice versa. The brain fills in the gaps between stripes, resulting in completely separate images reaching the correct eyes without the need for lenticular lenses or 3D glasses.

Unfortunately, the tiny parallax-barrier stripes must be precisely located in order to correctly block the right-eye stripes form the left eye and vice versa. Thus in the past, parallax-barrier displays have only been successful with smaller screens like cell phones where users keep their heads centered on the screen anyway. However, larger displays did not work well with parallax barriers, because users are much more likely to move their heads out of the correct central location.
LG's solution was to add an eye-tracking camera that adjusts the parallax barrier so that it reliably diverts the left- and right-eye stripes to the correct eye even for users moving their heads.

The application of LG's smarter glasses-free 3D technology will be in its new 20-inch wide D-2000 display. The only major limitation is that it can only track the location of a single user's eyes. Thus the technology is not appropriate for TVs where multiple users may be watching from different angles. However, for single users, LG's smarter eye-tracking technology solves all the problems associated with auto-stereoscopic 3D displays and is suitable for still images, movies and gaming. The display also has a built-in conversion capability that adds some degree of 3D to 2D movies and games (but not still images).
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Seven Reasons HTML5 Is Killing Flash"

Seven inherent features in HTML5 are eliminating the need for Adobe Flash as well as enabling Websites to add capabilities that rival native applications. The fifth generation of the hypertext markup language--HTML5--is adding capabilities once reserved for plug-ins and native applications. Test your browser's HTML5 compatibility by visiting The HTML5 Test site.

Today, more than 109 million mobile users have HTML5-ready browsers, but by 2016, more than 2.1 billion mobile users will be compatible, according to ABI Research. There remain significant details to work out, which could delay the final specification until as late as 2020. However, long before then, HTML5 features will be available that virtually obsolete Flash, as well as enable normal Website developers to create universal applications that run on any platform.

According to ABI Research senior analyst, Mark Beccue, there will be 25 key HTML5 features available to most users over the next three to five years. Smarter Technology recently asked Beccue to pick the seven top features out of those 25 that will be most important to users. Here is his list:

#1-Video Play: The No. 1 reason to use Flash today is to play video, but HTML5 includes a tag for videos that allows it to play with all the start, stop, pause and other features people already expect from YouTube and other Flash-based sites.

#2-Video Record: This feature is not a common today, but will become increasingly important, according to Beccue, because virtually all new mobile devices with Web access also have video cameras.

#3-Audio Play/Record: Today, you need Flash, Quicktime or Java to play or record audio, but with HTML5 it is just another tag.

#4-Apps: HTML5 allows Web pages to directly access the same routines that make browsers work, enabling them to run free standing just like an ordinary application. (Try this feature out by downloading the Financial Times app.)

#5-Rich 2D Graphics: All types of sophisticated two-dimensional graphics will be built-into HTML5, enabling faster operation and nearly instant loading compared with the slow loading time for sites using rich graphics today.

#6-IM: Instant messaging will be built into HTML5 by virtue of Web sockets--which, once opened between two users, will allow instantaneous communications. (Try this out by running this Websocket demo in two windows.)

#7-Real-Time Streams: Websockets will also allow any Web-page designer to easily add real-time data streams--from stock market prices to surf reports--which today requires complicated programming outside the capabilities of most HTML coders.
Further Reading

#ENERGY: "U.S. Renewables Outpace Nuclear Power"

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that renewable energy sources in total have surpassed nuclear power, and are likely to widen the gap unless new nuclear plants are built.

U.S production of energy from renewable sources recently passed that from nuclear reactors despite administration efforts to revitalize U.S. nuclear power generation with federal loan guarantees for constructing new nuclear reactors.

In his 2011 State of the Union speech, President Obama said, "We need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country."
Obama's attempt to paint nuclear energy green, however, was before the nuclear disaster in Japan, which has prompted nations worldwide to back away from nukes, including Germany which has pledged to concentrate on renewable energy and shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022.

The Obama Administration, on the other hand, is currently proposing to add $36 billion to the current $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plant construction in its FY2011 budget, bringing the total to $54 billion—nearly tripling the money currently available for new nuclear reactors.

Renewable energy passed that of nuclear power in March 2011 (in quadrillion BTUs). (Source: Energy Information Administration)
Meanwhile the world continues to reel from the triple meltdown at the Fukushima-daichi nuclear complex in Japan. Efforts there have been plagued by problems and missteps.

In the wake of this continuing fiasco, one bright light shines--namely, that renewable energy sources have already passed nuclear power generation in the U.S. and are on-track to outpace oil too.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that renewable energy sources--which include hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, and bio-mass/fuels--were responsible for 0.805 quadrillion BTUs of energy, or about 17 percent of the total U.S. energy generation, in March 2011. Nuclear, on the other hand, provided 0.687 quadrillion BTUs, or about 14.5 percent, according to EIA estimates.

Comparing the entire first quarter of 2010 to 2011, renewable energy sources rose about 15 percent, according to the EIA, and compared with the first quarter of 2009, renewable energy rose over 25 percent, marking accelerated growth in 2011.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Client-Based Virtualization Gains Momentum"

Server-hosted virtualization is the poster-child of cloud computing where thin clients share a single IT-managed image. However, client-hosted virtualization is gaining momentum by claiming to offer IT cost savings, simpler centralized management, plus an enriched user experience comparable to stand-alone PCs.

In the beginning, IT had to spend weeks setting up, provisioning, upgrading and maintaining fleets of PCs on each of their user's desks. Server-hosted virtualization was a major step forward by cutting those times down to days or in some cases just hours, plus the thin-clients were cheaper than putting a PC on every user's desk. Today, however, the cost of PCs has dropped to nearly match that of thin clients, plus the resultant client-hosted virtualization infrastructure cuts IT set-up, provisioning, upgrading and maintenance times down to minutes instead of hours or days.

Client-hosted virtualization for 1,000 users requires only a single server (compared with 20 for server-hosted virtualization), as well as laptop support and quicker recovery, provisioning, patching, setup and upgrades.

Client-hosted VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) executes all application code on a desktop PC, which to the user appears to be a normal local operating system with all the advantages of high-speed execution for bandwidth-intensive applications like HD (high-definition) video, plus it works with all their local USB peripherals. In the background, however, their OS is really a copy of a centralized image managed by IT for up to 1,000 users from a single server, which can be located on-premises or in the cloud.

Server-hosted VDI, on the other hand, executes code on a server which can only handle about 50 users and must maintain not only the image, but must also house the user's data, requiring 20 to 25 times more IT hardware resources and up to 20 times the IT personnel over client-hosted VDI. In addition, local USB peripherals are difficult to install and using high-bandwidth media like HD video is nearly impossible to support for large numbers of users.

Intel, for one, is championing client-hosted virtualization as the wave of the future. Intel calls this intelligent desktop virtualization and is promising a new breed of multi-core processor to directly support client-hosted VDI. However, IT does not have to wait for these specialized processors to get in on this emerging trend, because many inexpensive desktop PCs today are already configurable for client-hosted virtualization from companies like Virtual Computer, RES Software, Wanova, MokaFive and Scense.

For example, Virtual Computer has been delivering its NxTop desktop-virtualization platform as an alternative to server-hosted VDI for 18 months. Recently, sales have skyrocketed fivefold, prompting Virtual Computer to announce this month a new Global Partner Program to keep up with demand.

"Client-hosting greatly reduces the cost of virtualization; plus, it eliminates the complexity and many of the limitations inherent in server-hosted VDI," said John Glendenning, senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development for Virtual Computer. "And with the new Global Partner Program, we have created a channel for IT that should greatly simplify implementing client-hosted virtualization for businesses of nearly any size."
Further Reading

#ROBOTICS: "Smarter Robots to Inspect Aging Nukes"

With valves and pipes being allowed to leak up to 20 times their original limits by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), according to a recent Associated Press report, smarter robotic inspectors are being proposed to detect underground leaks before they release radiation into groundwater.

More than three-quarters of aging U.S. nuclear reactors have leaked radioactive tritium from underground pipes at one time or another, according to the Associated Press, which recently concluded a year-long study. In response, Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a tennis-ball shaped robot to inspect underground pipes for cracks before they can contaminate groundwater.

Since the earliest nuclear reactors were built in the 1960s, more than 400 accidental radioactive leaks have been reported, according to the AP study, which maintains that over and over again, the safety standards set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have been relaxed in order to allow reactors to continue operating, rather than making the costly repairs to bring reactors back into compliance. As a result, the danger of radioactive contamination of groundwater is increasing, according to MIT.
"We have 104 reactors in this country [and] 52 of them are 30 years or older," said MIT professor Harry Asada, director of MIT’s d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology. "We need immediate solutions to assure the safe operations of these reactors."

A spherical robot equipped with a camera is being proposed to navigate underground pipes at nuclear reactors to locate potential cracks that could leak radioactive water. (Source: MIT)

Groundwater contamination has already occurred at many nuclear reactor sites, where underground pipes carry water to cool reactor vessels, leaching radioactive tritium into the soil around them. Unfortunately, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that the industry has only very limited methods to monitor these underground pipes for leaks. Instead of direct inspections, today nuclear engineers depend on ultrasonic waves to reveal cracks, and induced voltage gradients to measure corrosion on pipe coatings. If any anomalies are detected, the only way to inspect the pipes now is to dig them up.

The new spherical robot designed by MIT aims to provide a way to directly inspect these underground pipes without digging, namely by navigating them from the inside to check of cracks and signs of corrosion. The tennis-ball shaped robot, designed by Asada and colleagues at MIT's d’Arbeloff Laboratory, can withstand the extreme radioactivity within the pipes and carries a video camera and transmitter to send back images that can be inspected by engineers to determine their condition.

To insure that the robot could navigate the pipes without getting stuck inside, its design was made free from external appendages or propellers. Instead, the smarter propulsion method harnesses the pressure of the water flowing through the reactor, re-channeling it to provide thrust. Tiny channels and valves within the skin of the robot switch the direction of liquid flow internally so that it is emitted as a jet on the opposite side of the desired direction for the robot to move.

Though still in the prototype stage, the researchers are also working on a camera pan and tilt mechanism powered by internal water flows. The camera itself will be fixed in position, but an internal two-axis gimbal will rotate the sphere in place to any desired direction.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Five Reasons IaaS Will Top $4 Billion by 2015"

Infrastructure as a service is one of the fastest growing paradigms in the portfolio of cloud-based services. Here are the five reasons why IaaS is set to grow to become a $4 billion market by 2015.

Just as software as a service shifted software from being an enterprise asset that is licensed to being a service that is provided, and platform as a service shifted software development and hosting capabilities for specific computer architectures from being an asset purchased en masse to being a service provided on demand, infrastructure as a service allows all enterprise hardware architectures to be virtualized, including processors, storage, firewalls and other network resources.

Besides the savings in capital expenditures associated with building large data centers, IaaS reduces the labor costs of maintaining 24/7 network administrators, and greatly reduces the energy power budget for an enterprise. IaaS is delivered by platform virtualization where servers, software, data center space, and network equipment are outsourced to cloud service providers.

According to In-Stat, IaaS is destined to grow quickly over the next four years, culminating in a $4 billion market by 2015, with the top five markets being hospitality, food, health care, social services and retail.

Here are the five reasons that IaaS is destined to skyrocket:
Cloud-bursting: Without IaaS, enterprises must invest in servers that run at 10 percent of capacity 90 percent of the time, just so they can handle the bursts in activity that occur only 10 percent of the time. By off-loading these bursts to cloud-based services, substantial savings in capital expenditures can be reaped by an enterprise.

Virtualization: Virtualization is the process of running low-level code beneath operating systems, rather than using separate load balancers as would otherwise be needed. Virtualization manages failover, redundancy, monitoring, clustering and other infrastructure management tasks.

Hypervisor Convenience: IaaS combines hardware and software resources by virtue of low-level code, called a hypervisor, that runs independent any chosen operating system. The convenience of the hypervisor involves its taking inventory of hardware resources and allocating them based on demand.

Resource Pooling: IaaS software works by running virtualization code--the hypervisor--to allocate hardware resources on-demand, thereby enabling resource pooling among departments of an enterprise.

Multi-tenant Computing: Because of the resource pooling made possible by virtualization of resources, organizations with similar interests in regard to security requirements and compliance can share resources, called multi-tenant computing.

These five areas will be the drivers that bring IaaS to new levels in the next few years.
Further Reading

#BUSINESS; "Women Leaders Take Heart: Times Are Changing"

More androgynous and transformational views of leadership are opening opportunities for women in management, despite the persistent cultural perception that masculinity is required for strong leadership.

Although strong leadership continues to be perceived as an overtly masculine character trait, progress is being made toward a more androgynous view, especially for middle managers. In addition, a transformational leadership style, which offers mentoring and gender-neutral rewards as incentives, may enable women to sidestep stereotypical prejudice, according to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University.

This new study’s results counter past perceptions. In fact, more than 68 studies on how women are perceived in leadership roles found that overall they are still perceived as poor business leaders due to cultural stereotypes. Women are especially disadvantaged by a double-edged sword. Namely, that they are assumed to be poor leaders unless they prove otherwise by deeds, but that when they do demonstrate strong leadership they are perceived as "masculine" and presumptuous.

Fortunately, times are changing, especially when compared to historical studies from the 1960s when Betty Friedan published her ground-breaking book "The Feminine Mystique," which was one of the first public expressions of how women are discriminated against for leadership roles in the business place.

Even today, however, women are often assumed to be poor leaders--unless they prove themselves with acts of strong leadership. And even though many will perceive them as masculine and presumptuous as a result, adoption of a transformational leadership style including mentoring and the use of gender-neutral rewards as incentives, can often mitigate prejudice and result in managerial advancement.

Middle management, in particular, has become more tolerant of androgynous leadership roles which women often fit well. Qualities, such as assertiveness and competitiveness are still associated with both strong leadership and masculinity, but women who express them are not automatically disadvantaged as was often the case in prior years.

The Northwestern University study found a change in perception. "Cultural stereotypes can make it seem that women do not have what it takes for important leadership roles, thereby adding to the barriers that women encounter in attaining roles that yield substantial power and authority," said Northwestern professor Alice Eagly. Nevertheless, a distinct shift toward more androgynous leadership roles is spreading in different parts of the world and within subcultures here in the United States. For instance, educational institutions often view leadership less as a masculine quality.
In the study, the researchers conducted new meta-analysis using three separate paradigms to provide independent tests on the validity of perceived leadership stereotypes. These paradigms are think-manager/think-male, agency-communion, and the masculinity-femininity spectrum.

Eagly, a faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern, performed the meta-analysis with professors Anne Koenig at the University of San Diego, Abigail Mitchell at Nebraska Wesleyan University and Tiini Ristikari at the University of Tampere (Finland).

Further Reading