Archive for October, 2008
Earth’s Most Customer Centric Company: Differentiating with Technology
About the Lecture
In this lively presentation Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com discusses many of the technological advances that have enabled Amazon.com to be the “earth’s most customer centric company”.
Bezos talks about Amazon’s first 30 days of operation, shows the very first home page and explains how the existence of a little known book warehouse in Roseburg Oregon led to the decision to locate Amazon in Seattle. Since 1997, Amazon has spent $800 million on technology, more than it has spent on either warehousing or marketing. A self-proclaimed “EECS-geek”, Bezos tells of technological advances that have not only enabled customers to find products, (and now at 28 million items), enabled products to find customers. Hear how Amazon developed “real time personalization”, how the company performs “active experiments” and learn more about salad spinners than you could ever imagine.
Also appearing is MIT alum Robert Frederick, Manager of Amazon Net Services. Frederick explains how these services enable other retail services to interact with Amazon. Hear how the company that “runs on computer science” plans for more technological advances in the future.”"
Physics 10 - Lecture 23: Relativity II
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf0Wrgairfw&feature=channel[/youtube]
“The New Epoch” and the 21st Century Imperative for Engineering History
About the Lecture
Great civil engineers finds an aesthetic appropriate for their building’s material and structure, asserts David Billington, whose life work has been the study of some of the world’s most stunning engineering feats.
He reviews his own intellectual journey, first honoring some of his forebears, including Elting Morison, industrial historian and a founder of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society, and R. G. Collingwood, philosopher/historian. Billington describes a momentous turn in his career at Princeton, when architecture students in one of his courses rebuked him: “They told me, we hate what you’re teaching us. … You’re teaching us stick diagrams and formulas. That’s how you teach structural engineering. Why can’t we study beautiful structures?”
They showed him a picture of the Salginatobel Bridge, built by “an obscure Swiss engineer, Robert Maillart,” about whom there was little published in English. This led to a major stretch of research by Billington, and opened up his lifelong interest in how great engineers delve deep into the nature of their building material, such as Maillart’s reinforced concrete, and discover how to make it beautiful.
In studying the work of Maillart and other European engineers, Billington learned that “truly great bridges are extremely interesting aesthetically.” They often result from competitions, satisfying criteria of structural art while wasting neither material nor money. Says Billington, the engineers “get elegance out of discipline — they find play within discipline.” While most of Billington’s admired bridges were built in the 20th century (by men born in the 19th), he also pays tribute to Christian Menn, designer of Boston’s Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, completed in 2002 — an asymmetrical cable stayed bridge that has become a regional landmark.
“Basic form and structure comes from the engineer’s imagination,” says Billington, which puts engineers “far ahead of us academics, who often think we make innovations and explain them to practitioners.” Menn and his peers are “out there doing art,” and Billington’s mission is to teach it. He gives his students a sense of how the engineer’s mind works, by assigning students to build small-scale versions of structurally significant bridges. These models show up in art exhibits, and Billington shows many slides of such work during his talk.
In a footnote, Billington discusses the dismal state of U.S. infrastructure, including the catastrophic failure of the Minneapolis bridge in 2007. This steel truss bridge, like so many in the U.S., was the product of an anonymous design process, says Billington, where bridges are copied decade after decade, in an “unthinking acceptance of designs that are already flawed.”
A Roadmap for the Edge of the Internet
About the Lecture
In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms — a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.
Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. These new enterprise data centers aim to maximize efficiency, both in utilization and power consumption. It’s better to have fewer, bigger and well-integrated machines, says Benner, working as much as possible. Since even idle servers use a lot of power, users should share processing time in a manner that keeps the processors occupied. Benner describes computer architecture and software that aims at “statistically multiplexing jobs,” matching peaks in one group’s workload to nonpeaks in another group’s. Ideally, users remain blissfully unaware of this traffic management, and need never worry whether their information is getting crunched next door, or on the other side of the planet.
Benner hopes that companies will see advantages in migrating their data and services to a bigger, shared infrastructure, especially now with the near-ubiquity of high bandwidth networks. Given the rapid rise of energy costs, and the burdens of supporting a growing IT administration, it may save money “to move work to where it can be done most efficiently,” he says.
Human Augmentation
About the Lecture
These two MIT Museum speakers hope you’ll walk away from their talk with a good case of augmentation envy – or at least a healthy respect for what technology can do for the human body and soul.
John Hockenberry has used a wheelchair for 30 years, since a car accident left him a paraplegic. He tells us the public has viewed spinal cord injuries like his as “something horrific,” or “staggeringly poignant.” But in the last 10 years, disability has moved from being “an extraordinarily fringe activity” to a central issue facing society, that of “marrying technology with humanity in a way that is organic to the body, appropriate to the spirit and sustainable to the community.” Hockenberry believes that the needs and demands of disabled people are helping push science toward creating a set of design principles “that will allow this issue of human restoration and augmentation to merge into a kind of seamless unity.”
In illustration of this claim, Hugh Herr describes the astonishing strides engineers are making in the development of “Human 2.0.” He starts with himself — a victim of frostbite during a 1982 mountain climbing accident. After losing both feet below the knee, Herr headed for the machine shop, and realized he didn’t have to accept the version of his body provided by nature. So he cobbled together a pair of prostheses perfect for climbing (which made him over 7 feet tall), followed by other foot-ankle replacements made lightweight and responsive through carbon composite materials and computers. These designs are better than his originals, suggests Herr. “What’s fun about having part of your body artificial is that you can upgrade. It’s depressing to me, too bad that you folks have biological limbs.”
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have fueled the work in Herr’s lab. He’s now building robotic versions of arms and legs that restore capability, using computers and powered systems with sensors and motors. Stroke victims can use similar models, wrapped around an impaired limb, to restore symmetry between their left and right sides. The big prize will be a neural interface, a way of growing and reactivating an amputated nerve, so that it begins to convey sensory information through the complex networks of the brain. “The dream here is that one day I and other people with limb amputations will not only be able to walk across a sandy beach but feel the sand against their prosthesis,” says Herr.
Researchers haven’t imposed limits on their attempts at augmentation – or improvement. An MIT lab has designed a “socio-emotional prosthesis,” Herr tells us – using deep brain stimulators that leave subjects feeling “happy, calm, content.” Hockenberry wonders in conclusion whether we are “blowing away the notion of normal entirely and creating a completely improvisational notion of what it means to be human.” Herr proposes that in the future, “when we have many, many types of intimate technologies that are inside and attached to our bodies, it will unleash a renaissance in expression.”
The Internationalization of Spanish Companies: Ferrovial, The Rise of a Multinational
About the Lecture
Move over, Italy. Rafael del Pino is here to claim Spain’s rightful spot as a major European player in the global infrastructure market. Founded by del Pino’s father in 1952 as a builder of sleeper cars for trains, Ferrovial has diversified into a conglomerate with a hand in construction, real estate, road building design and operation, water treatment and desalination, airport ownership and operation, among other activities, and with 104 thousand employees in 43 countries. Del Pino describes some of the milestones passed, and hurdles overcome, during Ferrovial’s 50 years of expansive growth.
The company’s largest triumphs come from winning contracts in other nations: Ferrovial developed toll roads in Colombia, then Chile, and in 1988 bid on a huge ring highway around Toronto that involved committing 600 million Euros of Ferrovial’s own money. Not all Canadians were receptive to a Spanish company building and running a road with electronic tolls, and indeed, when the system didn’t work correctly at the start there was a great deal of public criticism, followed by a big fight with a new, opposition government.
Ferrovial bought its first airport in northern Chile in the late 90s, “in the middle of a desert, with some copper mines around and not much else.” They got the bid because of “a good relationship to the public works minister,” and because no previous experience was required. In 2004, Ferrovial “became more courageous,” and invested in the U.S., buying the Chicago Skyway from the city. Other acquisitions included a public works builder in Poland, and a joint venture in the U.K. with a company that runs three of London’s Tube lines.
Work with London’s Tube lines made Ferrovial’s acquisition of BAA (which runs Heathrow Airport) possible. Ferrovial, says del Pino, leverages airports as much as it can, and the BAA enterprise will leave Ferrovial with a net loss in 2008 of at least 300 million Euros, some of which flows from extensive renovations and rebuilding at a key terminal. Del Pino says the company’s shares have fallen by half in one year as a result of this venture and that “we’re being punished by uncertainty with BAA.” He notes sarcastically, “This is how the market reflects our wonderful management skills.” He’s dug in for the long run, though. “We’re a UK company based in Madrid.”
Recent History of Boston Transportation
About the Lecture
Frederick Salvucci’s perspective on transportation development is an amalgam of civil engineering, history, economics, policy, and not least, the direct impact on people’s lives. Here he surveys the evolution of transportation in Boston and beyond from the 1830s to the present.
Salvucci covers significant junctures in transportation history, beginning in the 1830s with horses pulling streetcars on wagon wheels, then steel wheels. In the 1870s, electrification of streetcars alleviated the phenomenon of overworked horses succumbing in the streets, causing both traffic jams and a public health hazard. “It was a really messy affair,” Salvucci says.
By World War I, automobiles increasingly crowded Boston streets, competing with streetcars and encouraging the growth of suburbs. Salvucci acknowledges urban planner Sam Bass Warner, Jr.’s book Streetcar Suburbs for telling this story. Not only the location of housing was affected. On the outskirts of Boston, at the ends of the radial subway lines, amusement parks and dance halls arose, luring city dwellers.
With the Eisenhower administration came the interstate highway system, inspired by the model of the German Autobahn. Salvucci characterizes this period as a time when people held “an unprecedentedly high belief that the government is capable of doing things; not exactly where the government reputation is today!” This roadway network forms the basis of the trucking industry, the “way the American economy moves today,” says Salvucci. He commends Eisenhower for accomplishing “something impressive…a whole different economy out of this major investment of the public sector.”
But highway construction also eliminated jobs and razed neighborhoods. An automobile- dependent society rediscovered the virtues of public transportation. Salvucci credits Massachusetts GOP governors John Volpe (1960s) and Frank Sargent (1970s) with enlightened views promoting mass transit, though he admits “I don’t usually say good things about Republicans” unless they’re dead.
Salvucci also pays homage to activist Catholic priests fighting for the interests of residents in Boston neighborhoods threatened by destructive road construction plans. He singles out Richard Cardinal Cushing as “a rough justice guy.”
The lecture concludes with the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife, whose complementary tastes Salvucci borrows as a parable for the necessity of balancing and integrating priorities. Land use planning, transportation development, economic growth, and the welfare of individuals are inextricably intertwined.
Nanophotonics: Discovering the Magic of Light in Nanostructures
About the Lecture
Evelyn Hu meticulously describes designing and building a new generation of optical materials from nano-sized elements. She hopes to harness “the magic of light in nanostructures.”
Hu walks through her research of exploring and exploiting the properties of different optical materials. She first cites the most important aspects of an optical material, such as its color (emission and absorption wavelength); its ability to convert energy efficiently; how long it remains excited when stimulated; and whether we “get more output than we put in.”
Hu looks for optical material in nature, then superimposes another pattern on it, substantially transforming it at the atomic level. In one case, she uses gallium arsenide of a wavelength or so thickness, and pokes such tiny holes in it that photons of light behave differently when they encounter the structure. As Hu says, “I’m sculpting out a particular environment for photons.” Her gallium arsenide nanostructures contain a tiny cavity or “sweet spot” that creates a high intensity electromagnetic field that interacts in a specific way with photons and atoms. Each structure has a unique optical signature. Hu makes an analogy to an organ pipe, an acoustic resonator, which due to its unique geometry, produces a different pitch as air moves through it.
Hu goes on to describe how a nanostructure works with simple low energy, high energy electron states, and how the cavity exerts influence on atoms to create a relationship between electronic and photonic states, what she calls “weak coupling.” Hu has also been mixing matter and light to create new quantum states. She describes placing an atom precisely in the sweet spot, exciting it to release a photon, changing the photon’s state and stimulating an atom again: “If I do this procedure exactly right… we can transfer energy between the environment and the atom almost forever.”
To achieve the optimal effect, atoms and photons must behave predictably and do as they’re directed. To accomplish this, Hu and colleagues have fashioned semiconductor quantum dots 50 angstroms wide as tunable optical emitters, and fabricated photonic crystal membranes with patterns etched out by electron beams. Hu’s found she can control and manipulate the release of photons more and more precisely within her nano environments, creating new quantum mechanical states, and exerting a “much more powerful influence on the nature of light.” This work, concludes Hu, has “profound implications for processing information.”
Digital Evolution
About the Lecture
The world is counting on the fulfillment of (Intel co-founder) Gordon Moore’s Law for at least another half century. In Craig Barrett’s view, solutions to the crucial challenges of our time depend on improving on already nano-sized microprocessors every few years.
He points to the astonishing improvements in efficiency and miniaturization in Intel’s semiconductors, which around 1972 came loaded with 2,000 transistors that could be seen with the naked eye. Today’s integrated circuits, 11 generations down the road, bear 1-2 billion transistors that can be seen only with a scanning electron microscope. Intel has had to make other improvements too, says Barrett, as they moved into the nanoscale, attempting to improve functionality and performance without power dissipation. Dual and quad core microprocessors now permit parallel computing within a single PC. Barrett recounts how the first teraflop computer he worked on at Sandia Labs required 10 thousand Pentium processors and took up 2,000 square feet. “The challenge is in the next six to eight years, going to exascale, getting up to a million teraflops,” through multiple core processors, he says, and then there will be a “huge challenge in terms of software paradigms.”
These changes must come, says Barrett, if the world is to confront its “grand challenges,” such as making solar energy affordable, solving issues of carbon sequestration, and figuring out the hydrogen cycle. Those extra teraflops and exaflops will also prove essential to the next generations of visual computing, where scientists (and gamers) want the feel of HD reality on their computer screens. Barrett says silicon photonics will help pave the way for such improvements.
Barrett wants current and emerging technologies put to use as well in education, which he sees as fundamental to helping developing economies. He describes efforts Intel is making to get computers into classrooms around the world, as well as providing training in their use, and helping with broadband connectivity. He also wants computer power brought to bear on the U.S. healthcare scene, which he describes as more of a looming financial crisis than a bankrupt social security system. He’s looking for a political candidate who sees the value of revamping healthcare to take advantage of electronic medical record-keeping, and personalized remote monitoring and diagnostics, “to shift the issue of healthcare from the hospital to individuals and the home.”
The Second Law and Energy (Panel)
About the Lecture
In this valedictory panel to the two-day symposium, 10 speakers offer brief takes on how the Second Law of Thermodynamics might prove useful in seeking answers to our current energy challenge.
Even before the oil embargo of 1973, Thomas Widmer recalls, Joe Keenan and his MIT colleagues wrote of an “entropy crisis.” They analyzed the flow of work in industries and saw great inefficiencies that became crippling when fuel prices spiked. Despite 30 years of improvement, says Widmer, “the effectiveness of energy use is still less than 12%.” In selling ideas to policy makers, he advises, talk about “energy productivity” rather than conservation.
Ernest S. Geskin doesn’t believe alternative energies will be viable quickly enough to make a serious difference in climate change, so his objective is to improve combustion. He outlines several methods he’s developing that increase the availability of generated heat, reduce heat losses, and integrate combustion with materials production and processing, such as in steelmaking.
James Keck says that “improving the efficiency and reducing emissions of auto engines and power plant burners requires an ability to model hydrocarbon combustion.” He recommends using a method “firmly based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the rate controlled constrained equilibrium method,” which, among other advantages, generates fewer equations, and is applicable to any separable system.
Seeking ways to make reactions more efficient and “less exergy destructive,” Noam Lior recommends a detailed, top-down methodology. His lab has been examining oil droplet and coal combustion in an attempt to understand why exergy losses take place, and to determine “which process will give us the highest exergy efficiency.”
Debjyoti Banerjee’s research focuses on enhanced cooling and explosives sensing. His lab explores phase changes for boiling and condensation, and develops new models in molecular dynamics, harnessing the energy of nanosphere transport processes. A “nanobubble” serves as a heat engine, and Banerjee is examining how “nanofins help in transferring heat.”
Richard Peterson is taking a look “at how small you might be able to make the classic thermodynamic heat engine, so you could integrate it into portable equipment or other devices requiring power, and burn fuel with much higher energy density than found in a battery.” He notes that “your efficiency takes a nosedive as you shrink the engine.”
Erik Ydstie is concerned with dynamic systems like power plants, and how they can be improved, by manipulating their inputs and outputs. By designing better controls to regulate these complex systems, there’s a “lot of scope to improve the efficiencies of these plants. You could get quite a bit of mileage by running them better.”
Ron Zevenhoven “presents the embryo of an idea: Can the infrared radiation that causes the enhanced greenhouse effect be put to better use?” He wants to see whether science can modify the infrared radiation that leaves the earth, in order to cut back on radiative forcing higher up.
Zhuomin Zhang discusses radiation entropy and how near-field thermophotovoltaic devices “may be another way of effectively using energy.” He wonders how to apply the entropy concept to near-field radiation when interference is a problem.
Ahmed Ghoniem says that while we won’t run out of cheap fossil fuels for some time, “we need to think about an insurance policy” in response to the predictions of a four to six degree rise in Earth’s temperature by the end of the century. “The dirty little secret is once you burn the fuel you automatically generate entropy — you lose about 20% right off the bat.” Ghoniem asks whether “combustion and heat engines can be reinvented to reduce entropy generation, practically and at scale.”
