Archive for category Tech Talk Tuesday

Newswise Reports:

“The average energy efficiency of the top supercomputers in the world increased by 10 percent,” said Wu Feng (http://people.cs.vt.edu/~feng), an associate professor within the College of Engineering’s computer science and the electrical and computer engineering departments at Virginia Tech, of the latest rankings (http://www.green500.org/lists/2009/06/list.php).

The 10 percent increase in energy efficiency translates to a 10 megaflops/watt improvement, rising to 108 megaflops/watt from 98 megaflops/watt recorded in November 2008. (Megaflops stand for millions of floating-point operations per second.) Also, aggregate power of the list increased by 15 percent, to 230 megawatts from 200 megawatts. “While the supercomputers on the Green500 are collectively consuming more power, they are using the power more efficiently than before,” Feng added.

The Green500 List (http://www.green500.org) serves as a ranking of environmentally friendly, low-energy supercomputers and a complement to the TOP500 List. The Green500 debuted in November 2007 at the 2007 Supercomputing conference to provide a foundation for tracking trends in green supercomputing.

For the first time, the rankings show maximum energy efficiency remaining the same, but three 500-megaflops/watt supercomputers fell out of the Green500. “The three supercomputers that occupied the No. 2 spot on the November 2008 Green500 are no longer computationally powerful enough to be considered among the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, and hence, they dropped off the Green500 List. This occurrence thus provides further fuel to the argument for a ‘more inclusive’ Green500,” Feng said. “If the trend of performance doubling continues, the No. 1 machine on this Green500 is unlikely to make the November 2009 Green500 List.”

Topping the list is the BladeCenter QS22 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 4.0 Gigahertz, Infiniband, operated by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw.

Also significant: More machines range more than 200 megaflops/watt, while fewer machines are less than 50 megaflops/watt. “As more powerful supercomputers supplant the less powerful, these new machines are performing their computations more energy efficiently,” Feng said.

Meanwhile, a self-made accelerator-based supercomputer from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan catapulted into fifth spot. The self-made GRAPE-DR could be the first Green500 supercomputer with more than a million processing elements at 2.097 million, Feng said.

Conspiracy nuts,  here is a new twist for you: NASA has posted brand new photographs of the Apollo landing sites.  Of course, this comes just as the National Air and Space Agency admits it seems to have lost the original videos of the lunar missions. (Houston, We Erased the Apollo 11 Tapes).

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is the first “satellite for our satellite” to have a resolution high enough to capture the Apollo sites, reportedly able to photograph things as small as 4 feet across or four feet per pixel.

The pictures show the Apollo missions’ lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon’s surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules’ locations evident.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was able to image five of the six Apollo sites, with the remaining Apollo 12 site expected to be photographed in the coming weeks.

NASA reports “The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution.

The spacecraft’s current elliptical orbit resulted in image resolutions that were slightly different for each site but were all around four feet per pixel. Because the deck of the descent stage is about 12 feet in diameter, the Apollo relics themselves fill an area of about nine pixels. However, because the sun was low to the horizon when the images were made, even subtle variations in topography create long shadows. Standing slightly more than ten feet above the surface, each Apollo descent stage creates a distinct shadow that fills roughly 20 pixels.”

See all the photos here!

Slow Down: How Our Fast-Paced World Is Making Us Sick

By Linda Buzzell, AlterNet.

Not so very long ago, humans — like the rest of the animals and plants on earth — moved through our natural cycles at nature’s pace. Time was marked by the passing of the seasons, the life cycles of human, animal and plant life and the yet grander cycles of the moon and the other celestial bodies.

Homo sapiens, a late-appearing species in the long history of our unimaginably ancient planet and universe, evolved during the recent (as the universe views these things!) Pleistocene era, adapted for a life intimately connected with and expressive of our natural surroundings on the African savannah and beyond.

And this is how we lived for millennia.

In the last 150 years, however, the human relationship with time has radically changed. Some say the problems started earlier, with the development of agriculture or writing, but it was really the Industrial Revolution — the rise of the Machine — that put humans in thrall to mechanical processes and machine time. And the recent exponential speeding up into Cybertime has accelerated the process still further. Industrial time was bad enough (Charlie Chaplin did a wonderful job of visualizing that “cog in the wheel” feeling in his film “Modern Times”) but Cybertime can be dizzyingly discombobulating for a Pleistocene primate.

And that’s how many modern people feel — completely frazzled and out of synch with our deepest selves.

The results of this disconnection from nature and nature’s pace show up in therapists’ and doctors’ offices every day. Living under unnatural time pressures causes a myriad of psychological, social and physical ailments. Delinked from the natural rhythms of our bodies and the rest of the planet, we struggle with diminishing success to adapt to the strange mechanical and disembodied world we have created.

As a practicing psychotherapist and ecotherapist, when I see patients who are suffering from depression or anxiety I ask them to keep a time-journal in which they record the hours and minutes spent each day outside, as well as the hours spent inside in front of a screen. My clients are often shocked to realize how disassociated they have become from nature and our species’ natural ways of living, and the effect this disconnection is having on their psyche. In fact, a 2007 study from the University of Essex shows that a daily “dose” of walking outside in nature can be as effective at treating mild to moderate depression as expensive antidepressant medications that can sometimes have negative side-effects.

Time poverty is now a recognized psychological and social stressor. In a speeded-up, highly complex society, there just isn’t enough time for everything: our demanding jobs, our interlocking bureaucratic responsibilities (taxes, insurance, legal issues), our loved one, kids, our community (including the rest of nature), plus commuting and keeping up with traditional media and endless 24/7 online communications. Constantly rushing to keep up as we inevitably fall further behind, we find ourselves destroying not only our own health, but our habitat and the habitat of the people, plants and animals with whom we share the planet.

Click here to read the rest at Alternet.

Newswise — A destructive earthquake will strike a lone, wooden condominium in Japan next week, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Michael Symans will be on site to watch it happen.

Symans is among the team of researchers who will converge in the Japanese city of Miki to perform the largest earthquake simulation ever attempted on a wooden structure. The multi-university team, led by Colorado State University, has placed a seven-story building – loaded with sensing equipment and video cameras – on a massive shake table, and will expose the building to the force of an earthquake that hits once every 2,500 years.

The experiment will be Webcast live on Tuesday, July 14 at 11 a.m. EDT at www.nsf.gov/neeswood, and should yield critical data and insight on how to make wooden structures stronger and better able to withstand major earthquakes.

“Right now, wood can’t compete with steel and concrete as building materials for mid-rise buildings, partly because we don’t have a good understanding of how taller wood-framed structures will perform in a strong earthquake,” said Symans, associate professor in Rensselaer’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “With this shaking table test, we’ll be collecting data that will help us to further the development of design approaches for such structures, which is one of the major goals of the project.”

The 1994 magnitude 6.7 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., and 1995 magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, clearly demonstrate the seismic vulnerability of wood-framed construction, Symans said. The shake table experiment will offer researchers a chance to better understand how wood reacts in an earthquake, he said, and the resulting data could lead to the advancement of engineering techniques for mitigating earthquake damage.

As the ground shakes, the energy that goes into a building needs to flow somewhere, Symans said. Typically, a large portion of this energy is spent moving – and damaging – the building. There are proven engineering techniques for absorbing or displacing some of this energy in order to minimize damage, but the technology for doing so has not yet been thoroughly evaluated for wooden structures. Next week’s shake should produce sufficient data to allow the research team to develop accurate computer models of mid-rise wood buildings, which can subsequently be used to advance and validate some of these seismic protection techniques.

As one example, Symans is working on the application of seismic damping systems for wooden buildings. These systems, which can be installed inside the walls of most wooden buildings, include metal bracing and dampers filled with viscous fluid. A portion of the energy generated by the earthquake is spent shaking the fluid back and forth in the dampers, which in turn reduces the energy available to damage the wall or building structure. Recently completed shaking table tests at Rensselaer on wooden walls outfitted with such a damping system have demonstrated the viability of such an approach to mitigating damage in wooden buildings.

“The system allows a significant portion of the wood-frame displacement to be transferred to the dampers where the energy can be harmlessly dissipated,” Symans said. “With dampers in place, we have a better ability to predict how a structure will react to and perform during an earthquake.”

In the 1994 Northridge earthquake, all but one of the 25 fatalities caused by building damage occurred in wooden buildings, and at least half of the $40 billion in property damage was attributed to wood buildings. The quake resulted in nearly 50,000 housing units rendered uninhabitable, most of them wood-framed buildings. The advancement of seismic protection systems could help to save lives and prevent or limit damage in similar future earthquakes, Symans said. This is particularly important considering that most residential structures in the United States, even in seismically active areas, have wooden frames.

The Miki shake is the capstone experiment of the four-year NEESWood project, which receives its primary support from the U.S. National Science Foundation Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program. NEESWood is led by Colorado State University, in collaboration with Rensselaer, the University at Buffalo, the University of Delaware, and Texas A&M University. One intended end result of NEESWood is the development of new tools, software, and best practices that result in building code revisions and allow engineers and architects to design wooden structures which can better withstand earthquakes.

The seven-story structure has been built with new seismic design methods informed by NEESWood research for mid-rise wood frame construction. The tests in Miki, to be performed at the Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center, home of the world’s largest seismic shaking table, will be used to evaluate the performance of the building and, in turn, the new design methods.

David Rosowsky, who will join Rensselaer in August as the new dean of engineering, is also a co-investigator of the NEESWood project and will attend the shake in Miki next week.

“NEESWood aims to develop a new seismic design philosophy that will provide the necessary mechanisms to safely increase the height of wood-frame structures in active seismic zones of the United States, as well as mitigate earthquake damage to low-rise wood-frame structures. When this challenge is successfully met, mid-rise wood-frame construction will be an economic option in seismic regions in the United States and around the world,” said Rosowsky, currently the head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M.

“It’s exciting for Rensselaer to be a part of the international team participating in the NEESWood project. This project has already brought tremendous visibility to the School of Engineering at Rensselaer which, with its geotechnical centrifuge facility, already is a part of the NEES network of world-class laboratories for earthquake engineering,” Rosowsky said.

For more information on earthquake research and simulation at Rensselaer visit: http://www.nees.rpi.edu/.

Newswise — Nearly three-quarters of the Web sites advertised in computer spam studied by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Spam Data Mine so far in 2009 are tied to China, according to Gary Warner, UAB’s director of research in computer forensics. Warner has dubbed the trend the “spam crisis in China.”

“China has become a safe haven for Web site operators that use spam to promote their products because of the willingness of some Chinese Web-hosting companies to ignore spam complaints about those sites, which are hosted on their servers for a fee,” Warner said. “The hosting companies don’t create the spam, but rather declare themselves bullet-proof hosting sites – meaning that regardless of the illegal activities being reported, they will not terminate their customer’s spam-related Web sites or domains.”

Computer spam refers to unsolicited commercial advertisements distributed online via e-mail, which can sometimes carry viruses and other programs that harm computers. For the year to date, the UAB Spam Data Mine has reviewed millions of spam e-mails and successfully connected the hundreds of thousands of advertised Web sites in the spam to 69,117 unique hosting domains, Warner said. Of the total reviewed domains, 48,552, 70 percent, had Internet domains – or addresses – that ended in the Chinese country code “.cn”. Additionally, 48,331, 70 percent, of the sites were hosted on Chinese computers.

Further encouraging the Chinese spam epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap domain names. Domain names based in China can cost as little as one yuan, or 15 cents in U.S. currency. In contrast, U.S. domain names can costs as much as $35 a year, with a portion of the fees going toward efforts to detect fraud and abuse like spam. The low domain rates in China encourage Web page operators to buy numerous domains, leading to a continuous stream of spam promoting those various sites.

“Not only is it cheap to operate spam-promoted Web sites through the Chinese technology infrastructure, there is not enough revenue being generated to pay for the creation of programs or entities that could prevent such abuses from taking place,” Warner said.

Warner said that while only a very few companies in China are responsible for perpetuating the illegal spam activity, they risk the reputation of their entire nation’s Internet presence. Warner believes the solution lies in a renewed effort by the country’s government to target companies acting as a haven for cyber-criminals rather than a complete block of all Internet flow coming from China. He said China must develop mechanisms to accept and respond to spam abuse complaints. Read more on Warner’s blog at http://garwarner.blogspot.com/.

About UAB
The UAB computer forensics program is on the front lines of cyber crime and takes a three-part approach in its response to battling the problem. The first focus is on academic training to prepare the next generation cyber-crime investigators. The program also seeks to build a public awareness of cyber crime while conducting research to develop cutting edge options for taking on cyber criminals. For more, log on to http://www.cis.uab.edu/forensics/.

Laughingly, I often say that I have seen everything worth seeing…I swallowed my words when reading an article about The Image Mill.  As a child and a young woman, I spent a lot of time in Quebec City, Canada.  My grandmother and her sister were born there, my step-great grandfather, General Wilson, was commander of the Citadel which has, for centuries, protected the city.

There are few areas of Lower Town which I’ve not walked, and I know the St. Lawrence Seaway well as it was the entrance and exit for the Allan Line ships which my family owned.

The Image Mill is the world’s largest multi media projection screen.  Moving images are projected against the grain silos in Lower Town at the Port of Quebec.  The project was part of the 400th anniversary of the historical city.  The technology is brilliant, and the effect amazing.  The “show” takes 40 minutes and includes much reworking, improvement and enhancement to 20% of the original show.  The screen is 600 meters wide and 300 meters tall…the equivalent of 25 IMAX screens, and the effect is 3D.  It was, of course, the star attraction of the city’s 400th anniversary!

The screenings are Wednesday to Sunday starting mid-July until September 13, 2009 at the present time.  We have Ex Machina to thank for this extraordinary show, and the awesome Robert Lepage born in Quebec in 1957.  He’s a director, scenic artist, playwright, actor, film director and, at the top of the list, an applause worthy visionary.

The Image Mill transports those watching through four centuries of Quebec history in four movements: waterways (recounting the days of Quebec’s discovery and exploration), road building (that period in which the land was cleared, then developed),  rail expansion (the years of industrialiation and railway construction), and air travel (the era of balloons, airplanes and communications)  The production begins at 10:00 PM.

You can view this enormous work from many vantage points in Quebec City and Levis (on the other side of the St. Lawrence), and the wharves between the old Port Market and rue Dalhousie, north of Quai Saint-Andre will offer the best view.  Check out www.theimagemill.com and www.bonjourquebec.com.

Men and women have brains that work differently.

Find out more in this video.

How Our Brains Are Different