Posts Tagged ‘Papert’
“By the 1980’s and 1990’s, Moore’s Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture”*…
“Quantum dots”
… and Moore’s Law— the assertion that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years– has indeed weathered pretty well since Gordon Moore coined it in 1965:
click here for a larger version
Still, all along the way there have been nay-sayers– those who believe that it simply must come to an end. Even Intel, which Moore co-founded after serving as Director of Research at Fairchild, the semiconductor pioneer at which he worked when he published his “law,” has now questioned whether “doubling every two years” can continue.
Of course, only time will tell. But believers can take heart in work recently published by Cornell researchers on their work with “quantum dots” [pictured at the top of this post].
Just as the single-crystal silicon wafer forever changed the nature of communication 60 years ago, Cornell researchers hope their work with quantum dot solids — crystals made out of crystals — can help usher in a new era in electronics.
The team has fashioned two-dimensional superstructures out of single-crystal building blocks. Using a pair of chemical processes, the lead-selenium nanocrystals are synthesized into larger crystals, then fused together to form atomically coherent square superlattices.
The difference between these and previous crystalline structures is the atomic coherence of each 5-nanometer crystal (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). They’re not connected by a substance between each crystal — they’re connected to each other directly. The electrical properties of these superstructures are potentially superior to existing semiconductor nanocrystals, with anticipated applications in energy absorption and light emission…
More at “Quantum dot solids: a new era in electronics?”
* “By the 1980’s and 1990’s, Moore’s Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The “law” said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you’re not running on what became known as ” Internet time,” you’re falling behind.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
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As we get small, we might send thoughtful greetings to a man who can no doubt come up with new uses for that power– Seymour Papert; he celebrates his birthday on this date (as he was born on February 29, Leap Day, in 1928). Trained as a mathematician, Papert has been a pioneer of computer science, and in particular, artificial intelligence. He created the Epistemology and Learning Research Group at the MIT Architecture Machine Group (which later became the MIT Media Lab); he directed MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; he authored the hugely-influential LOGO computer language; and he is a principal of the One Laptop Per Child Program. Called by Marvin Minsky “the greatest living mathematics educator,” Papert has won won a Guggenheim fellowship (1980), a Marconi International fellowship (1981), the Software Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), and the Smithsonian Award (1997).
Fence me in…
While those of us in the U.S. await a mesh network, BLDG BLOG reminds us that back at the turn of the last century there was a “ranchpunk” predecessor that spanned the American West…
“Across much of the west,” C.F. Eckhardt explains, “…there was already a network of wire covering most of the country, in the form of barbed-wire fences. Some unknown genius discovered that if you hooked two Sears or Monkey Ward telephone sets to the top wire on a barbed-wire fence, you could talk between the telephones as easily as between two ‘town’ telephones connected by slick wire through an operator’s switchboard. A rural telephone system that had no operators, no bills—and no long-distance charges—was born.”
The system relied upon the creative use of everyday materials as insulators; in fact, according to Delbert Trew, “the most clever, most innovative cowboys used every conceivable type of device as insulators to suspend the wire. I have found leather straps folded around wire and nailed to the posts, whiskey bottle necks installed over big nails, snuff bottles, corn cobs, pieces of inner-tube wrapped around the wire and short straps of tire holding telephone wires to the post.”
New York Times, June 1, 1902
Read more about this “oral internet of fences” at BLDG BLOG.
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As we hope that we’re heading back to the future, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Seymour Papert; he was born on this date in 1928 (actually, on February 29 of that year, which was a leap year). Trained as a mathematician, Papert has been a pioneer of computer science, and in particular, artificial intelligence. He created the Epistemology and Learning Research Group at the MIT Architecture Machine Group (which later became the MIT Media Lab); he directed MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; he authored the hugely-influential LOGO computer language; and he is a principal of the One Laptop Per Child Program. Called by Marvin Minsky “the greatest living mathematics educator,” Papert has won won a Guggenheim fellowship (1980), a Marconi International fellowship (1981), the Software Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), and the Smithsonian Award (1997).
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