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There was a recent discovery by Singapore University Materials Engineering scientists here , who had created a new fast-charge anode to replace LiOn batteries and 1) allow them to be charged up to 70% in 2 minutes, 2) allow 10,000 recharge cycles, using Titanium Dioxide nanotubes. Titanium Dioxide is cheap and very widely available. The biggest problem (with cell phone batteries at least) is the high currents associated with fast charge times. A 2.0 A/h battery (200 mA for 10 hours) charging in 2 minutes would draw 20 amps in 6 minutes, 40 amps in 3 minutes, and 60 amps in 2 minutes. 15 amps at 120 volts can be turned into 150 amps at 12 volts, but that's welding current (assuming a 12v battery). Most battery chargers can't handle anywhere near that current, and most batteries aren't designed for that either. There would also be *a lot* of heat generated. On a car, you can recharge in 20-30 minutes, but you might want to stick with 60 amps. Its still a lot of power.

Of course a less cursory search revealed http://cdpt.ntu.edu.sg/Documents/ncomms%204%201811.pdf

1. Good CS programs: Two great universities with well-regarded CS programs - NTU and NUS
2. Language: All classes are in English; most people speak English (it's quirky Singlish, but you'll get by)
3. Infrastructure: The country and both schools have excellent infrastructure and your basic living comforts would be similar to or better than in the US
4. Travel and exposure: It's cheap and easy to explore neighboring countries (Malysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, China, India, Korea, etc). You can experience a rich diversity of cultures solely through weekend getaways
5. Diversity: Singapore itself is pretty diverse - you can experience elements of Chinese, Indian and other cultures within the city-state.
6. It's not "the West": Chances are, you have visited or will visit Europe anyway. Singapore will expose you to an entirely different worldview. Yet, you will not sacrifice basic comforts that you take for granted in the US

Full disclosure - I am an NTU alumnus.

You can follow the links in the article to the people who were responsible for the pictures. Since this is academia, I imagine most people would be only too happy to supply you with a copy. There's one readily available: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/HYYang/images/NanoChnPainting.jpg

Recent books I've read have even suggested the idea that we may someday have a flash-type memory implanted that will give us instant recall of data, much like Star Trek's Data could command.

It's easy to suggest chucking some electronic memory in to our heads to allow for perfect storage and retrieval of memory, but it vastly oversimplifies matters. How do we recall the memory from the flash memory, and how would it be different from what we do at the moment with information recall from the brain? How do we know that the information is in the memory, and what location it is stored at? How do we know if we know something, or that we don't know something? Do we scan the whole of the memory looking, dredging up every single memory in sequence until we get what we want, or do we have some search capability? How is this search performed, on what meta-data, and how is this meta-data created?

These are pretty much questions that are baffling scientists and philosophers about the human mind currently. Just how does the brain retrieve information so quickly and reliably, in a way that manages to pluck the right bit of information out of memory, ignoring things that aren't relevant? This is complicated more when leaps of intuition are taken in to consideration. What causes us to link seemingly irrelevant memories together to form something that decidedly is relevant to the situation at hand? Look up the the philospher's frame problem to get an idea of what I mean.

Changing memory from a lump of meat to silicon won't automatically solve these problems.

http://www.ntu.edu.sg/nbs/sabre/working_papers/05- 98.pdf

http://www.iihs.org/safety_facts/qanda/drl.htm (cites many sources).

For anecdotal evidence, I find that having lights on helps, because cars which have lights on and are moving are more obvious than cars which do not have lights on and are moving. Much like I notice cars that (while parked) have their lights on, and am prepared to see them pull out into traffic.

I still pay attention to the road otherwise, but this makes it easier for me to differentiate between non-objects (cars off to the side, parked, off), and important objects (cars which are traveling, active, on) on the roadway. Making my job easier is good.

Download "Network" SP1a
Microsoft Webpage on deploying SP1

You really pressed one of my buttons here. Did you actually read the article and judge for youself or did you just assume that it was lousy based on the ISI impact factor? By the way the impact factor for the the journal in question, American Journal of Physiology, is in the "mid-range" (~3-4), but not horrible (there are journals with impact factors less than 1). In fact, the whole idea of impact factors is pretty controversial and has been abused as a criterion for promotions, grant awards, etc.

There's plenty of bullshit published in the "so-called" top tier journals (Science, Nature, Cell, etc.) and plenty of excellent science published in what you are calling a low-impact journal.

Also, the group working on nanobacteria had to revise their work seven times - this is an unheard of level of skepticism and suggests that there is an unusual level of politics going on here.

If you don't mind studying abroad, you can try Universities in Singapore and Germany.

Singapore has this option of you earning your degree and working there. If I'm right, both Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore support this. The last time I checked, there was also something called Singapore MIT Alliance, which is again a fully funded programme.

The next option is Germany - education in Germany is absolutely free - you just have to pay for the living. And I'm guessing that getting scholarship to this effect should not be that hard. And besides, Germany has some real top notch research institutes and tech schools.

Everyone knows that Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is the world's largest wireless network campus in the world, even though it's beta noir, and long time rival, National University of Singapore has implemented a wireless network waaay before those crummers even thought heard about 802.11b. :-)

Everyone knows that Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is the world's largest wireless network campus in the world, even though it's beta noir, and long time rival, National University of Singapore has implemented a wireless network waaay before those crummers even thought heard about 802.11b. :-)

Intelligent Autonomous Systems, neat robot projects including a neural-network pole-balancer, with pictures and whitepapers
Link

Pole-Balancing Mini-Robot using neural networks
Link

Intelligent fuzzy logic and PCB fab with pictures and video
Link

Reinforcement Learning Pole-Balancing Applet by Appl
Link

Demonstrations of Several Solutions to the Pole-Balancing Problem by Jeff Lawson and Chris Lewis
Link

Hi

If anyone's interested, here is a description of Fermat's movement algorithm described more clearly along with other silly questions. This is the original set of answers I submitted to them.

And if you're even more interested, visit Robocode Repository for all the test bots and related information you will ever need.

Arun Kishore
[about to sleep...]

Does anyone know why this one person was so important??

The term is "scapegoating".

It's happened before; someone from MPAA apparently tracked the download behaviour of two students from a non-American university for two months, before firing an email to the university's sysadmin.

The local legend goes (and I stand corrected if this is not what really happened) that all universities on this island have cracked down on IPR violations ever since.