#AWARDS: "Ivan Sutherland Wins Kyoto Prize"

Known as the "father of computer graphics," Ivan Sutherland has won the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, presented to him yesterday at the Kyoto Symposium (San Diego, Calif.) Sutherland was lauded for his "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces." Known best for his pioneering Sketchbook which defined computer graphics (CG) for a new generation, EETimes has discovered that he is currently working on revolutionizing semiconductors with asynchronous logic at the Asynchronous Research Center at Portland State University (Oregon).


Ivan Sutherland, the 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Advanced Technology, receives his medal at the Kyoto Prize Gala.Further Reading

#DESIGNWest: "Mars ate my spacecraft"

Hear tales of woe and wonder when billion dollar spacecraft fly to their doom as a result of simple software safeguards that programmers skipped. Don't be a bad programmer--learn from your colleagues mistakes in the DESIGN-West session Mars Ate My Spacecraft: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


The Clementine mission to fly from the moon to a nearby asteroid was just one failure of many caused by overworked embedded software teams that did not write the code to use their watchdog timers.Further Reading

#CHIPS: ""IBM's 'electronic blood' both cools and powers"

The future will require exascale speeds for the realtime analysis of Big Data streaming in from the Internet and from massive new sensor networks like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope to be completed in 2024. To meet the need, IBM is partnering to create "electronic blood" that not only cools 3-D chips, but also to powers them configured as cognitive computers: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


IBM's exascale computer analytics will be both powered and cooled by a liquid electrolyte that flows between die in 3-D chip stacks.
Further Reading

#ENERGY: "Hydrogen Economy Touted in Coast-to-Coast Ralley"

By adopting hydrogen over gasoline, all current internal-combustion engines in automobiles and trucks could simply be converted over to a cleaner, sustainable home-grown fuel--hydrogen produced by solar-powered electrolysis from water--according to Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). This weekend, using a converted Toyota Tercel, MTSU will drive 2600-miles coast-to-coast in their hydrogen-powered vehicle to demontrate the safety and efficiency of the hydrogen economy: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Professor Cliff Ricketts inspects his Toyota Tercel converted for hydrogen fuel in the coast-to-coast demonstration planned this weekend.
Further Reading

#MARKETING: "Moore's Law Superseded by Wright's Law"

Moore's Law is not obsolete, but still applies to semiconductors and to virtually every other major product category with appropriate modifications. However, Moore's Law is not universal, and in fact recently lost a competition with Sinclair-Klepper-Cohen's, Goddard's and Wright's Law: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Growth of prediction errors for competing laws to Moore's Law shows Wright's Law the best at long-time horizons, Goddard's Law as the worse at short time horizons, and Sinclair-Klepper-Cohen the worst for long-time horizons.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has done a definitive study comparing the accuracy of Moore's, Sinclair-Klepper-Cohen's, Goddard's and Wright's Law, claiming that their determination will boost the accuracy of futurists who make predictions about the pace of technological change, which alternative candidate technologies to promote, and both corporate and government policies for global change.
Further Reading

#CHIPS: "Financial Predictions Harness Xeon Phi"

Intel’s many-integrated core (MIC) technology has prompted dozens of scientific- and engineering-benchmarks, but the massively parallel Xeon Phi co-processor can also boost financial predictions, according to new benchmarks recently published by Xcelerit Computing Ltd. (Dublin, Ireland): R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


The Intel Xeon Phi co-processor (red and blue) ran up to three-times faster than the traditional Xeon E5s (black) for parallel processing paths over 128k, offering up to three-times the performance for parallel paths as high as 1024k. SOURCE: Xcelerit
Xcelerit ran the financial benchmarks on a Xeon Phi coprocessor manages by twin Xeon E5-2670 main processors, each with 8 cores. By comparing the 16 Xeon E5 cores at 2.5-GHz to the 60 Xeon Phi cores running at 1-GHz, the benchmark puts to rest the question of whether more is better...
Further Reading

#WWIII: "China's Cyber-Espionage Defense Rings Hollow"

Often the best defense is a good offense, but not this time, since China's "moral equivalency" argument defending its U.S. cyber-espionage attacks rings hollow. Cyber-security experts Mandiant recently detailed thousands of civilian cyber-casualties inflicted by China's military, but China's defense is that the U.S. is attacking China's military computers--a non-sequitur. The U.S. military is one of the acknowledged world leaders in cyber-espionage, but it has yet to even be accused of indiscriminate targeting of civilian computers like China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


China's People's Liberation Army (left) is being pitted against the U.S. Cyber Command (right) which was quietly started in by the Obama administration and put on par with Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines by reporting directly to nuke-shepherds, the United States Strategic Command.

In David Sanger's recent book "Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power" he accuses the U.S. of attacking Iran's centrifuges to slow down their head-long run to acquire nuclear weapons. However, Iran's reported response has been to attack U.S. civilian computers at Bank of America, JP Morgan, Chase and Citicorp. And thus the stage is set for the U.S. to conduct cyber-attacks on military targets, while its adversaries, from Iran to China, retaliate by attaching civilians. Get all the details by clicking "Further Reading" below.
Further Reading

#ENERGY: "Roadmap to Sustainability Revealed"

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently unveils a roadmap for creating sustainable energy generation within every household, business and industry, by mimicking photosynthesis. By converting light into hydrogen fuel locally, with specially treated photovoltaic cells that split water molecules, its roadmap-to-sustainability establishes baselines for efficiency and the milestones that need to be achieved in order to make the technology practical and inexpensive: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


MIT's artificial photosynthesis prototype coats a PV cell with catalysts that efficiently produce hydrogen fuel from water using electrolysis.

MIT laid out its "roadmap to sustainability" at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) this week, you can read all about the milestones coming for artificial photosynthesis by clicking Further Reading below.
Further Reading