Promoting Mundane Science

http://rael.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/very-old-site/Mundane_Science.pdf

NSF Research Proposal

I applied for NSF again. I am concerned about being disqualified because of my grades, but they actually didn't really mention that last year, and at least this time I have a much better research proposal.


Impact of policy on clean energy technology diffusion in US states

Keywords: environmental economics, public policy, climate change, technology policy

Introduction:

Global climate change is a pervasive and hugely consequential negative externality stemming from energy consumption that needs to be managed in order to ensure prosperity for generations to come. Substituting clean energy generation technology such as wind and solar for fossil fuels is a primary component of mitigating climate change. Dominant carbon emissions reduction policy tools are carbon emissions taxes, emissions trading systems, and renewable portfolio standards for clean energy. Technology diffusion is a particularly challenging stage of technological innovation in the energy industry. Understanding the effects of policy on clean energy technology diffusion in each state is central to fostering cooperation amongst states and developing effective policies for reducing US carbon emissions.

High Speed Rail From China

NYT article about China licensing high speed rail technology to help build high speed rail lines in California. Germany, Italy, and Japan are also competing for California's business.

G.E. estimates that the United States will spend $13 billion in the next five years on high-speed rail routes. China, with a much more ambitious infrastructure program, will spend $300 billion in the next three years on overall expansion of its rail routes, mainly high-speed routes, according to G.E.

...
A high-speed rail link for passengers from Beijing to Shanghai will be finished by the end of 2011 or early 2012, and cut the journey to four hours, from 10 hours now, Mr. Zheng said.

New York to Atlanta or Chicago is a similar distance, and takes 18 to 19 hours on Amtrak, which must share tracks with 12,000-ton freight trains and many commuter trains.

I wonder if rail is safer or more dangerous than airplanes. It seems like it should be safer.

Ebay for Innovation

http://www.innocentive.com/ A kind of interesting platform for innovation.

bill gates and technology development vs just go get stuff done

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-02-bill-gates-and-our-innovation-addiction-a-recipe-for-climate/

too late, i've already sold out! as of monday i'll be a real employee of IVL.

Bill Gate's website actually also looks really interesting, will have to read more of that.

Mass Innovation Nights

I went to a networking event the other day. It was one of a series of Mass Innovation Nights at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, which is a pretty cool place, btw! It was interesting and very new to me.

Saw a design collective making fancy housewares called Urban Animal. Turns out they are located in Somerville!

Not So Fast

EDN has a good article about the recent hubbub over battery technology. A research team at MIT found that they could increase the charge and discharge rates, but it seems there's still a long way to go before that becomes a reality in commercial cells.

BYD E6 Electric Car

BYD is a Chinese battery company, and they made a car. Seems awesome. It could be sold in Europe by 2010.

So far, all we know is that the E6 will be a 5 seater with an acceleration of 0 to 100 kph of around 10 seconds. Top speed should be top speed of 160 kph (100 mph), and the battery pack, which is located under the rear passenger seats, will be based on BYD's own lithium-ion iron phosphate technology. Range per charge is expected to be 300 km (186 miles).

But most impressive of all:

"BYD projected the battery had a life of 2,000 cycles, for a lifetime range of about 600,000 km (373,000 miles)"

Wow! Even if thats just half true, it's still pretty good.

Stocking the House

Today, Toby and I went bed shopping, and we made a purchase. We went to a Sleepy's and got a Kingsdown bed. It was expensive. The idea, though, is that you only buy one every twenty years or so. We bought a bed that is on the soft side, but is not too soft. They said they did a lot of research on sleep technology, and they recommended a bed type for us that matches our body type. Basically, it says that a heavier person should sleep on a firmer bed while smaller people, like us, should sleep on softer beds. It is so that you lie as flat as possible instead of sagging in the middle.

Next Generation Cars

I thought I'd do an overview of people and projects related to cars.

We took the WTP girls to the Media Lab today for a tour. We looked at the Smart Cities Group's City Car. They have a "robot" electric car, which can be steered by joystick or whatever controller you want, really. This brings up interesting issues with putting limitations on what a user should be allowed to do in the interest of safety. Anyway,

I was surfing for other projects related to cars, and there's this other group that is working on a fully automatic steering vehicle in CSAIL. They competed and did ok in the DARPA Urban Challenge. They got beat out by Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Virgina Tech. Tsk tsk.

Job Searching Schemes and Devious Thoughts

One of my goals right now is to find a job in life science research, preferably related to neuroscience and a job that does not require me to kill mice/rabbits/frogs/other vertebrates simply for a single organ or cells, or just because they have become unfit for the research. Anyway, while I am looking through university career sites as well as biotech career websites, I thought I would try out a different scheme. I would look through faculty of interest, and read a couple of their papers and then e-mail them about how much I love their work and why I would be a qualified and competent research associate.

So I printed out a couple of papers. The first one I read was a review paper related to the biomolecular mechanisms behind learning and memory, using the small marine snail Aplysia as a model of study. For a little history of the study of learning and memory in neuroscience: somewhere around the 1950's, investigators discovered that if you poke or shock (lightly, not fatally) the Aplysia, it withdraws its gill and siphon as a natural defense reflex. If you continue to shock a few times, and then lightly touch it a few hours later, it becomes sensitized to the touch stimulus, and withdraws its gill and siphon anyway even though your touch is pretty harmless. And if you continue to touch it harmlessly, it habituates and doesn't respond to touch stimuli any longer with its defense reflex. As life science research methods improved, the focus on learning and memory shifted to animals of higher complexity (such as rats and other vertebrates), and Aplysia drifted out of popularity. The paper I read essentially proposed to unify two disagreeing theories on the learning mechanisms in Aplysia, and explained that this was similar to findings in animals of 'higher intelligence'. The investigator further concluded that perhaps learning and memory mechanisms had developed early on in evolution and have been conserved through time, through natural selection. And I had an epiphany.

Neurobiology makes it difficult to believe in free will, since we are mostly controlled by mechanical, biochemical processes. So with that in mind (yes, first consider suspending free will, and then you can consider this part), I wonder if humans actually have control over their learning? We don't actually take the knowledge and concepts we want to remember and place them into our memory, we make up tactics to facilitate our ability to learn. We make up mnemonics, explain a difficult concept to ourselves a number of times before it sinks in, but we don't actually make it sink in, if that makes sense. Like the simple organism Aplysia, or even an earthworm, our learning and memory follows a few basic rules. If the basic learning and memory circuitry is essentially a passive process (aka no divine intervention, or other will at work), then why wouldn't the same be true for more complex organisms? Of course, the circuitry becomes progressively more complex as we travel through our evolutionary timeline. Complicated, yes, but still passive. Sort of like a supercomputer?

Wireless Sensor Networks

I am writing my thesis, and I found lots of cool slides and presentations about wireless sensor networks.

MIT Startup

One of the guys on 41w left (with only 1 sem left!) to work on this startup.

Drop Box

review

Engineering Company

http://www.vtech.com/

they contacted me through a job search site. i already have a job, but they seem like fun.

Beth's rat made the spotlight!

woooowww video

Mr Green

blog about energy efficiency standards on electronics.
http://www.powerint.com/wordpress/

bubbles!

I'm taking a heat transfer and phase change class, and we talk a lot about interfaces and surfaces, and bubbles! It turns out the shape of a bubble can be approximated pretty well as a function of the density and surface tension of the bubble liquid, the density of the medium it's in, and the curvature at the top of the bubble. With those, you can plot the entire shape of bubble!


For bubbles sitting on a surface there's also something called the contact angle (theta), which is different for each combination of liquid+surface, and how pure the liquid is and how clean the surface is blah blah. It's basically the interior angle the liquid drop forms with the surface, and it can go from almost 0 (the liquid spreads out on the surface) to almost 180 (the liquid balls up on the surface, but isn't quite spherical because gravity squishes it a bit). For example, the same bubble, but with a contact angle of 130 with the surface:


It's the same shape as the full bubble, just cut off when the interior angle reaches 130. For a contact angle of 40, you get:

Anyways, I thought that was pretty cool.
-jenny.

Maximum Power Transfer Theorem

is wacky

it's not the same thing as efficiency.

GPS

Toby and I had GPS while in California, and we have a lot of opinions about it. I'll have to finish this post later.

San Francisco and Makani Power

This is the Makani Power office.

We've been hanging around the Berkeley area, and I think it's really great. I am trying to move to the Bay area by this fall, and we're thinking about where we would want to live. The Berkeley area has great markets and shops. We went to an Italian deli today and a Persian deli a couple days ago. There are great ethnic restaurants, like Thai and Indian. I also swapped some music with my friend Lynn. And we got giggles!

Of course, I am nervous about being able to get a job here. Makani Power seems promising. At the end they asked me who else they should interview and recruit. They also asked me how to get more female applicants. Apparently they got 5/500 female applicants or something like that. I am actually kind of surprised I don't know more EE people and EE women. I know some people, but they're not my class or looking for a job. But I told them I am working on the issue because I'm going to be an EE tutor for a summer program targeted at high school girls to get them interested in math and science. Mostly, it is to boost their confidence in their own abilities and interests. At the same time, even in China, there are still more men in engineering than women even at the height of equal expectations for boys and girls. Am I saying there is a genetic difference? I wouldn't say that because then it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, but perhaps there is something besides social pressures. It may something about how girls and boys learn or something.