If his goal is defensive publication, entities like IP.com provide a Prior Art Database that assures an invention's novelty is established around the world. It's dated and distributed to libraries and patent offices worldwide. However, I think the poster is interested in academic publication, which is something else entirely. (My advice there is to find journals and conferences that have published similar types of algorithms, then write his paper in the same style as papers from those sources. All journals and conferences have templates for authors to follow and combining those with published examples is about the best the inexperienced author can do.)
If you visit the John Gorrie Museum State Park in Apalachicola, Florida, you'll learn more about Gorrie than what is on the web. For example, he employed forced-air distribution of the cooled air by means of vents into multiple rooms, much as central air conditioning systems do today.
As it happens, while he started work on an air conditioning system to help his fever patients, he moved to ice production as a quicker way to market. At that time, people used ice for cooling when necessary, so there was an existing market and distribution system for it. However, the ice was shipped from the North, and thus very expensive, so there was a ready market for an ice machine making inexpensive ice.* The idea of central air conditioning was a bigger conceptual leap for the times, especially since there was no electrical grid and motive power would have to be supplied by steam engines, which would make the central cooling of buildings very expensive.
By the time Carrier arrived, in the 20th Century, the economics had changed; the electrical grid, combined with a ready industrial need for refrigeration, made all the difference -- as did his location: Carrier was from New York. ________ *He thought; in reality he was "a hick from the sticks," without the funding needed to bring his invention to market, and was never able to complete with the entrenched power of the ice companies of the day -- who, of course, saw the ice machine as a threat to their existing businesses and did all they could to discourage him. Recall that there were no venture capitalists at that time; if you were a struggling inventor you either had the backing of wealthy friends (Gorrie didn't), or you got a government grant to support your work (as Samuel F. B. Morse had done with the telegraph a few years earlier). The building animosity of North vs. South that would soon lead to the Civil War didn't help matters, either; he was a Southerner, while the potential financial backers (and the ice companies) were all in the North.
Few people have heard of the true inventor of both air conditioning and the artificial ice machine, Dr. John Gorrie, of Apalachicola, Florida, who received the first patent (number 8080) for a machine to make ice, on May 6, 1851. While it was reduced to practice (he used it to cool the rooms of his fever patients, and gave iced drinks to his guests at parties -- a fantastic novelty in 1850s Florida) he was unable to make a financial success of the venture. His machine was the first to make use of the refrigeration method of air conditioning.
"By no means is the concept novel, the idea of combining the two," Kozubal said. "But no one has been able to come up with a practical and cost-effective way to do it."
Or, maybe,
Inventing a device simple enough for easy installation and maintenance is what has impaired desiccant cooling from entering into commercial and residential cooling markets.
As TFA states, desiccant cooling has been known since at least Carrier's work at the turn of the 20th Century. The trick has always been to make a practical desiccant cooling system.
...but that's precisely the point -- the existing menu from the magic machine is already so large, few (albeit not zero) people would take the time to develop "mashups" on their own. It's too easy to just take the work of others, rather than slave away at the stove for hours -- with uncertain results. Most people wouldn't bother, and just select from what's available; after a while they forget where they put the double-boiler and the candy thermometer, how to knead bread and beat egg whites to make soufflés, and their own inventive cooking skills are lost. Paradoxically, the ability to have any meal produced anywhere in the world has led to a loss of cooking knowledge in the general population, and a concentration of the skill in a few.
Returning to the Internet, one sees this effect in university undergraduate students already. While plagiarism has always been a problem, the new wrinkle is that when they copy from a web site they've found via Google, the students actually don't understand that they've done anything wrong -- they were asked to produce a 10-page paper on the botany of Easter Island, and they've produced one, full of true, valid facts and insight. The trouble is, it's not their insight, but that of the guy who wrote the web site from whom they copied the text, and the students don't appreciate the difference. They expect to be graded down for factual errors, and don't understand how a factually-correct report can be rejected (and they get into academic hot water) just because someone else said the facts first.
Talk to any university professor with freshman classes and I think you'll hear confirmation. People growing up with the Internet are less used to generating content themselves than those in the pre-Internet era, and tend not to understand the difference (and importance) between finding an insight on the web and generating it themselves.
n.b.: While I'm sure that the above sounds like it should end with, "and get off my lawn!", keep in mind that (a) I actually like people on my lawn; (b) one has to be of a certain age to see the pre-Internet baseline, so that one can detect any change at all; and (c) I'm not saying the overall effect is bad, or that I want to go back to the buggy-whip, pre-Internet era. I'm simply saying that one should understand both the expected and the unexpected consequences of the Internet. Even the best medicine has side effects.
I'll never understand how instant access to all the information in the world is somehow bad for you.
Instant access to all the information in the world is bad for you, if you need to learn how to create information. It's like any any other economic situation -- if you supply free products to to a market, producers in that market become scarce (cf. the effect of foreign humanitarian aid on local farmers).
Consider a cooking analogy: If there were a machine that produced whatever food you wanted at the push of a button -- anything from McDonald's to the finest European chefs -- all for free, who would spend the years it takes to learn the techniques necessary to produce quality meals himself? A few people, to be sure, but the majority of the population would take the output of the machine without spending the time necessary to develop the skills to create their own meals. (Even if you knew how, you might still use the machine, because it was so much faster than cooking yourself, so your skills would rust.) Over time, as the number of producers dropped and everyone became dependent upon the machine, the amount of experimentation and innovation with new meals would be reduced and food consumed around the world would become more homogeneous. Note that, at the beginning, life is great -- any of the world's best meals available anywhere in the world, for free! -- but the long-term effect is more troubling.*
If one considers a hypothetical measurement of information quantity vs. location (either geographically or per individual), the history of communication has been one in which the standard deviation of this measurement has been reduced over time. Beginning with the spoken word, then accelerating with the written word, then the printing press, the telegraph, etc., it has been easier and easier information "peaks" to be distributed into the "valleys", leveling the overall graph. To date, it has also increased the mean value of information per location (or person). The question is whether this process can be continued indefinitely once everyone has exactly the same information and the graph is completely flat. ________ * One can consider this magic cooking machine to be an extension of the explosion in international travel, communication, and food processing technology that has occurred in the last century. Foods only available regionally in 1940 are now globally available, and food, worldwide, is far more homogeneous now than it was then. Note that this is not an ergodic process; an individual's diet is likely to be more varied now than it was in 1940, but globally, the diets of different individuals are likely to be more similar now than they were then.
Nah -- too high. According to the site you provided, it'll be 600 km up when it crosses the coast. However, the folk to the northwest of Glendambo, SA should get quite a look. You'll remember Glendambo -- it's the town with the famous sign:
"Welcome to Glendambo Elevation 150m Population........ Sheep........22,500 Flies........2,000,000 (approx.) Humans........30"
The term for this type of electricity generation is the Seebeck effect. Typically a very small voltage is generated per pn junction, so many hundreds of junctions are placed in series to generate a significant voltage.
The rotating sails (i.e., propeller blades) are inclined to the wind; it's how all propellers work -- when rotated, they provide the force to the car that accelerates it to speeds higher than the wind. However, the power flow is from the wheels to rotate the propeller, not the other way around.
He states quite clearly, several times, that they don't use the "sail" word, because it confuses people into thinking that the power flow is in the opposite direction. Like all propeller-driven craft, the power flow is from the craft to the propeller.
The energy comes, ultimately, from the wind. One might as well ask, "Where would the energy to move a sailboat faster than the prevailing wind come from?"
It's possible to design a car that will travel into the wind, although the net power flows in the reverse from the present example -- going upwind, the power would flow from the propeller (which would probably look more like a turbine than a propeller) to the wheels.
Ah, no. I can do no better than to quote ThinAirDesigns:
The key thing to remember is that due to the tailwind, the wheels are traveling over the ground much further than the propeller is traveling through the air[1] -- thus using the force x distance calculations for work and power it's easy to see that when we are traveling the speed of the wind, we can gain more power from the wheels (faster moving ground) than we have to expend in the air (slower moving air).
________ [1] As he is about to mention, this is best considered at the moment when the car is moving at the speed of the wind. In this case, there is no wind over the propeller, since the car and the wind are traveling at the same rate in the same direction; however, the wheels are moving relative to the ground at the speed of the wind, and therefore turn the propeller and supply additional thrust to the car, accelerating it.
I always felt that bullying was an iterated prisoner's dilemma situation. It's well-known that the optimum strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma is cooperate first, then tit-for-tat thereafter. In this context, "tit-for-tat" would mean fighting back.
IMHO the biggest problem with traffic lights isn't synchronization; it's the behavior of the drivers. At least in my area the lights are attached to inductive sensors placed in the tarmac, and the way they're supposed to work is that they sense the presence of the car approaching the light and, after a suitable period of wait time hysteresis (which starts from the last time the light switched, and so may already be expired), switch the signals and allow the car to pass.
Unfortunately, drivers (again, at least in my area) aren't very clueful about the presence of the sensors, and will stop way, way back of the stop bar, before they get to the sensor, or pass over it and stop halfway into the intersection. The sensors are huge, roughly 2m by 8m, so it's not like you have to be precise to hit them, and they are visible as grooved loops in the tarmac just behind the stop bar, but I can't count the number of times I've been stuck behind a long line of cars at a light, with the first car stopped before it got to the sensor. As far as the light can tell, there's nobody stopped at the light, so we wait and wait.
I've driven with people who have stopped before the sensor and then complained about how poorly the lights are "synchronized." Apparently, traffic light sensors are not common knowledge.
Recording is no problem, it's sending it back. [...] Even with the big dish it has and a 70 metre dish on the ground here, you only get about 1 kilobit per second of transfer out at Pluto.
Exactly right. "The 2.1m HGA [High-Gain Antenna] was designed to meet a requirement for a minimum of 600 bits/s downlink telemetry rate at 36 AU to return the Pluto data set" (page 19); further, "The downlink system will guarantee that the entire Pluto data set (estimated to be 5 Gbits after compression) in 172 days with one 8-hour pass per day using the DSN [Deep Space Network] 70m antennas. If there is sufficient power, such that both TWTAs [Traveling-Wave-Tube Amplifiers] can be used, the time to downlink the data set can be reduced to less than 88 days" (page 21).
To be sure; I was simply under the mistaken impression that contact with the craft was made much less frequently -- perhaps monthly or quarterly -- due to the fewer number of operable instruments present on the craft and the expense of funding such a large fraction of the DSN with a single program. I wasn't aware that we were still getting that much data from the craft.
It's nice to be pleasantly surprised once in a while.
Reading that operations report I was most impressed by these two lines:
There were 97.9 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 1 of which 61.3 hours were large aperture coverage.
and
There were 62.3 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 2 of which 39.3 hours were large aperture coverage.
Wow -- that's an incredible amount of Deep Space Network time in a week -- and, looking at earlier reports, it seems to be representative of the time used in a typical week. I had no idea that the Voyagers were consuming that much DSN time. I assume "large aperture coverage" means use of the 70m dishes -- also an impressive number.
Since we're all assuming you're in the UK, join the RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain. Their website offers local information, tutors, and a lot more, including a good bookstore. Plus, their monthly magazine, Radio Communication (RadCom) is a wonderful entry into wireless electronics. IMHO, it's far superior in technical content (both beginning and advanced) than QST, the publication of the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, which siphons some of its technical content off to its sister publication for experimenters, QEX.
The resurgence of American amateur radio equipment companies is one of the great untold stories recently. I mean, one still has Japanese industry stalwarts Icom and Kenwood, who led the Japanese domination of the industry in the 1970s, but even Yaesu was bought by Motorola a few years back. The real news, though, is the new, innovative startups, doing state-of-the-art, truly wonderful designs, with simultaneous high performance, high quality, and reasonable prices. Companies like Elecraft and software-defined radio pioneer FlexRadio Systems come to mind, producing products unmatched by any of the mainstream companies.
You need to live longer, or perhaps just somewhere else. Hurricane Wilma took out the phone system, cellular and all, in nearly all of South Florida -- 3 million people -- for days on end. The wonderful thing about amateur radio is that I could contact my family (living outside the disaster area) and report that we had survived without serious injury, almost immediately after the storm. It just took my radio, a little generator I (and most Floridians) keep for just such emergencies, and a long wire I threw over some trees.
In that case, it's bound to be cool. And by cool, I mean patent encumbered.
Not if they want the standard to be approved. 802.15 voters do not take kindly to approving standards for which they will then have to pay royalties to use. Politically, it's almost impossible to get a royalty-bearing patented technology into an 802.15 standard.
Slashdot Mirror
If his goal is defensive publication, entities like IP.com provide a Prior Art Database that assures an invention's novelty is established around the world. It's dated and distributed to libraries and patent offices worldwide. However, I think the poster is interested in academic publication, which is something else entirely. (My advice there is to find journals and conferences that have published similar types of algorithms, then write his paper in the same style as papers from those sources. All journals and conferences have templates for authors to follow and combining those with published examples is about the best the inexperienced author can do.)
If you visit the John Gorrie Museum State Park in Apalachicola, Florida, you'll learn more about Gorrie than what is on the web. For example, he employed forced-air distribution of the cooled air by means of vents into multiple rooms, much as central air conditioning systems do today.
As it happens, while he started work on an air conditioning system to help his fever patients, he moved to ice production as a quicker way to market. At that time, people used ice for cooling when necessary, so there was an existing market and distribution system for it. However, the ice was shipped from the North, and thus very expensive, so there was a ready market for an ice machine making inexpensive ice.* The idea of central air conditioning was a bigger conceptual leap for the times, especially since there was no electrical grid and motive power would have to be supplied by steam engines, which would make the central cooling of buildings very expensive.
By the time Carrier arrived, in the 20th Century, the economics had changed; the electrical grid, combined with a ready industrial need for refrigeration, made all the difference -- as did his location: Carrier was from New York.
________
*He thought; in reality he was "a hick from the sticks," without the funding needed to bring his invention to market, and was never able to complete with the entrenched power of the ice companies of the day -- who, of course, saw the ice machine as a threat to their existing businesses and did all they could to discourage him. Recall that there were no venture capitalists at that time; if you were a struggling inventor you either had the backing of wealthy friends (Gorrie didn't), or you got a government grant to support your work (as Samuel F. B. Morse had done with the telegraph a few years earlier). The building animosity of North vs. South that would soon lead to the Civil War didn't help matters, either; he was a Southerner, while the potential financial backers (and the ice companies) were all in the North.
Exactly.
Few people have heard of the true inventor of both air conditioning and the artificial ice machine, Dr. John Gorrie, of Apalachicola, Florida, who received the first patent (number 8080) for a machine to make ice, on May 6, 1851. While it was reduced to practice (he used it to cool the rooms of his fever patients, and gave iced drinks to his guests at parties -- a fantastic novelty in 1850s Florida) he was unable to make a financial success of the venture. His machine was the first to make use of the refrigeration method of air conditioning.
Or, maybe,
As TFA states, desiccant cooling has been known since at least Carrier's work at the turn of the 20th Century. The trick has always been to make a practical desiccant cooling system.
...but that's precisely the point -- the existing menu from the magic machine is already so large, few (albeit not zero) people would take the time to develop "mashups" on their own. It's too easy to just take the work of others, rather than slave away at the stove for hours -- with uncertain results. Most people wouldn't bother, and just select from what's available; after a while they forget where they put the double-boiler and the candy thermometer, how to knead bread and beat egg whites to make soufflés, and their own inventive cooking skills are lost. Paradoxically, the ability to have any meal produced anywhere in the world has led to a loss of cooking knowledge in the general population, and a concentration of the skill in a few.
Returning to the Internet, one sees this effect in university undergraduate students already. While plagiarism has always been a problem, the new wrinkle is that when they copy from a web site they've found via Google, the students actually don't understand that they've done anything wrong -- they were asked to produce a 10-page paper on the botany of Easter Island, and they've produced one, full of true, valid facts and insight. The trouble is, it's not their insight, but that of the guy who wrote the web site from whom they copied the text, and the students don't appreciate the difference. They expect to be graded down for factual errors, and don't understand how a factually-correct report can be rejected (and they get into academic hot water) just because someone else said the facts first.
Talk to any university professor with freshman classes and I think you'll hear confirmation. People growing up with the Internet are less used to generating content themselves than those in the pre-Internet era, and tend not to understand the difference (and importance) between finding an insight on the web and generating it themselves.
n.b.: While I'm sure that the above sounds like it should end with, "and get off my lawn!", keep in mind that (a) I actually like people on my lawn; (b) one has to be of a certain age to see the pre-Internet baseline, so that one can detect any change at all; and (c) I'm not saying the overall effect is bad, or that I want to go back to the buggy-whip, pre-Internet era. I'm simply saying that one should understand both the expected and the unexpected consequences of the Internet. Even the best medicine has side effects.
Instant access to all the information in the world is bad for you, if you need to learn how to create information. It's like any any other economic situation -- if you supply free products to to a market, producers in that market become scarce (cf. the effect of foreign humanitarian aid on local farmers).
Consider a cooking analogy: If there were a machine that produced whatever food you wanted at the push of a button -- anything from McDonald's to the finest European chefs -- all for free, who would spend the years it takes to learn the techniques necessary to produce quality meals himself? A few people, to be sure, but the majority of the population would take the output of the machine without spending the time necessary to develop the skills to create their own meals. (Even if you knew how, you might still use the machine, because it was so much faster than cooking yourself, so your skills would rust.) Over time, as the number of producers dropped and everyone became dependent upon the machine, the amount of experimentation and innovation with new meals would be reduced and food consumed around the world would become more homogeneous. Note that, at the beginning, life is great -- any of the world's best meals available anywhere in the world, for free! -- but the long-term effect is more troubling.*
If one considers a hypothetical measurement of information quantity vs. location (either geographically or per individual), the history of communication has been one in which the standard deviation of this measurement has been reduced over time. Beginning with the spoken word, then accelerating with the written word, then the printing press, the telegraph, etc., it has been easier and easier information "peaks" to be distributed into the "valleys", leveling the overall graph. To date, it has also increased the mean value of information per location (or person). The question is whether this process can be continued indefinitely once everyone has exactly the same information and the graph is completely flat.
________
* One can consider this magic cooking machine to be an extension of the explosion in international travel, communication, and food processing technology that has occurred in the last century. Foods only available regionally in 1940 are now globally available, and food, worldwide, is far more homogeneous now than it was then. Note that this is not an ergodic process; an individual's diet is likely to be more varied now than it was in 1940, but globally, the diets of different individuals are likely to be more similar now than they were then.
Nah -- too high. According to the site you provided, it'll be 600 km up when it crosses the coast. However, the folk to the northwest of Glendambo, SA should get quite a look. You'll remember Glendambo -- it's the town with the famous sign:
"Welcome to Glendambo
Elevation 150m
Population........
Sheep........22,500
Flies........2,000,000 (approx.)
Humans........30"
The term for this type of electricity generation is the Seebeck effect. Typically a very small voltage is generated per pn junction, so many hundreds of junctions are placed in series to generate a significant voltage.
The rotating sails (i.e., propeller blades) are inclined to the wind; it's how all propellers work -- when rotated, they provide the force to the car that accelerates it to speeds higher than the wind. However, the power flow is from the wheels to rotate the propeller, not the other way around.
He states quite clearly, several times, that they don't use the "sail" word, because it confuses people into thinking that the power flow is in the opposite direction. Like all propeller-driven craft, the power flow is from the craft to the propeller.
The energy comes, ultimately, from the wind. One might as well ask, "Where would the energy to move a sailboat faster than the prevailing wind come from?"
It's possible to design a car that will travel into the wind, although the net power flows in the reverse from the present example -- going upwind, the power would flow from the propeller (which would probably look more like a turbine than a propeller) to the wheels.
Ah, no. I can do no better than to quote ThinAirDesigns:
________
[1] As he is about to mention, this is best considered at the moment when the car is moving at the speed of the wind. In this case, there is no wind over the propeller, since the car and the wind are traveling at the same rate in the same direction; however, the wheels are moving relative to the ground at the speed of the wind, and therefore turn the propeller and supply additional thrust to the car, accelerating it.
I always thought distilled beer was called malt liquor. No?
I always felt that bullying was an iterated prisoner's dilemma situation. It's well-known that the optimum strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma is cooperate first, then tit-for-tat thereafter. In this context, "tit-for-tat" would mean fighting back.
IMHO the biggest problem with traffic lights isn't synchronization; it's the behavior of the drivers. At least in my area the lights are attached to inductive sensors placed in the tarmac, and the way they're supposed to work is that they sense the presence of the car approaching the light and, after a suitable period of wait time hysteresis (which starts from the last time the light switched, and so may already be expired), switch the signals and allow the car to pass.
Unfortunately, drivers (again, at least in my area) aren't very clueful about the presence of the sensors, and will stop way, way back of the stop bar, before they get to the sensor, or pass over it and stop halfway into the intersection. The sensors are huge, roughly 2m by 8m, so it's not like you have to be precise to hit them, and they are visible as grooved loops in the tarmac just behind the stop bar, but I can't count the number of times I've been stuck behind a long line of cars at a light, with the first car stopped before it got to the sensor. As far as the light can tell, there's nobody stopped at the light, so we wait and wait.
I've driven with people who have stopped before the sensor and then complained about how poorly the lights are "synchronized." Apparently, traffic light sensors are not common knowledge.
Exactly right. "The 2.1m HGA [High-Gain Antenna] was designed to meet a requirement for a minimum of 600 bits/s downlink telemetry rate at 36 AU to return the Pluto data set" (page 19); further, "The downlink system will guarantee that the entire Pluto data set (estimated to be 5 Gbits after compression) in 172 days with one 8-hour pass per day using the DSN [Deep Space Network] 70m antennas. If there is sufficient power, such that both TWTAs [Traveling-Wave-Tube Amplifiers] can be used, the time to downlink the data set can be reduced to less than 88 days" (page 21).
To be sure; I was simply under the mistaken impression that contact with the craft was made much less frequently -- perhaps monthly or quarterly -- due to the fewer number of operable instruments present on the craft and the expense of funding such a large fraction of the DSN with a single program. I wasn't aware that we were still getting that much data from the craft.
It's nice to be pleasantly surprised once in a while.
Reading that operations report I was most impressed by these two lines:
and
Wow -- that's an incredible amount of Deep Space Network time in a week -- and, looking at earlier reports, it seems to be representative of the time used in a typical week. I had no idea that the Voyagers were consuming that much DSN time. I assume "large aperture coverage" means use of the 70m dishes -- also an impressive number.
That much DSN time must be very expensive.
No.
Since we're all assuming you're in the UK, join the RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain. Their website offers local information, tutors, and a lot more, including a good bookstore. Plus, their monthly magazine, Radio Communication (RadCom) is a wonderful entry into wireless electronics. IMHO, it's far superior in technical content (both beginning and advanced) than QST, the publication of the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, which siphons some of its technical content off to its sister publication for experimenters, QEX.
The resurgence of American amateur radio equipment companies is one of the great untold stories recently. I mean, one still has Japanese industry stalwarts Icom and Kenwood, who led the Japanese domination of the industry in the 1970s, but even Yaesu was bought by Motorola a few years back. The real news, though, is the new, innovative startups, doing state-of-the-art, truly wonderful designs, with simultaneous high performance, high quality, and reasonable prices. Companies like Elecraft and software-defined radio pioneer FlexRadio Systems come to mind, producing products unmatched by any of the mainstream companies.
It's a refreshing change.
You need to live longer, or perhaps just somewhere else. Hurricane Wilma took out the phone system, cellular and all, in nearly all of South Florida -- 3 million people -- for days on end. The wonderful thing about amateur radio is that I could contact my family (living outside the disaster area) and report that we had survived without serious injury, almost immediately after the storm. It just took my radio, a little generator I (and most Floridians) keep for just such emergencies, and a long wire I threw over some trees.
NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has a bunch of data on the storm, including the estimated 3-hour Planetary Kp-index, and a bunch of other data and alerts.
A readable description of the relationship between geomagnetic events and aurora can be found here.
Nothing is as bad for the future of America as Fox says.
BTW, I've seen thousands of comment trolls, but I think this is the first story submission troll I've seen.
Not if they want the standard to be approved. 802.15 voters do not take kindly to approving standards for which they will then have to pay royalties to use. Politically, it's almost impossible to get a royalty-bearing patented technology into an 802.15 standard.