Latest World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management | Better quake warning system

http://latest.shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/03/shaw-capital-management-headlines-better-quake-warning-system/

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/03/137_83924.html

03-27-2011 17:40

Dear editor,

The recent earthquake and tsunami dealt a severe blow to the Japanese community and shook the world. The impact is huge in terms of loss of lives, devastation, and its spillover across the globe.

It highlights the wrath of nature, when Mother Nature is suffering from changes due to its inhabitants ? humans at large. Climate change, environmental degradation, and depletion of natural wealth is creating turmoil everywhere, leading to a “Crisis of Civilization.”

I am deeply moved. The article I wrote on June 2010 in The Korea Times has practical implications for the tectonic shifts and its repercussions. Earthquake and tsunami are intricately linked due to geo-morphological changes in the Earth’s surface. Debabrata Das’s article, referred to in my article and published in Science and Culture, has deep implications by unearthing this complicated relationship.

Earthquakes occurred in the Philippines, and northern India during March 21 and 22, 2011. One could have an “early warning system” developed by knowing the chances of earthquake and then taking care of the resultant tsunami effect, if precautions are taken beforehand.

Because of two vital factors, as mentioned by Debabarata Das, it might happen: (1) March 19 is full moon day and (2) the moon is in perigee position, i.e., nearest to the Earth. So, a high alert warning could save many lives.

Dr. Gouranga Das
Associate economic professor
Hanyang University, Erica Campus
Ansan, Gyeonggi Province
dasgouranga@yahoo.com

Latest World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management | Scots academics build mechanical arm for fast memory

http://latest.shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/03/shaw-capital-management-headlines-scots-academics-build-mechanical-arm-for-fast-memory/

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/2011/03/28/scots-academics-build-mechanical-arm-for-fast-memory-40092291/

NEWS

Academics have developed a low power memory technology with application for smartphones, cameras and other consumer gadgets.

Read this

History of storage: Cuneiform tablets to flash

Read more

The ‘mechanical arm’ storage technology, developed by scientists at Edinburgh University, Seoul National University and Konkuk University in South Korea, uses a tiny cantilevered arm to deliver charge to gate electrodes in storage devices.

“We’ve come up with a new way to do the [electrode] charging which consumes very little power,” researcher Eleanor Campbell, who worked on the technology in Edinburgh’s chemistry department, told ZDNet UK on Monday. “We have a very little cantilevered arm, which is charged by attaching to a voltage source, and we charge the gate electrode by moving the arm down.

“With conventional flash memory, you have a gate, which is charged by electrons tunnelling. That’s what determines the level of current and whether you have a one or a zero stored,” Capmbell continued.

“But you have to have quite a high electric field to allow the electrons to tunnel to charge the gate, and there’s a delay with that — about 10 microseconds — to charge the gate, and 10 milliseconds to erase it. [However ] the arm movement takes place in nanoseconds,” she said.

The mechanical arm technology cuts the power cost of charging and reading data off the gates and is faster, Campbell said, although she gave no exact timings.

 We’ve come up with a way to do the [electrode] charging which consumes very little power. 

– Eleanor Campbell, Edinburgh University

The technology requires a tiny arm to be assigned to each gate — or each bit of data — and, although this carries a cost of manufacture, it gives you greater flexibility for writing and erasing data, Campbell said.

In this case, the technology was demonstrated by measuring a current passing through a carbon nanotube, with the binary value of the data determined by an electrode that controlled the current, Campbell said. She went on to add that the technology could be extended.

“We’ve demonstrated this by using a nanotube transistor, mainly because we’re nanotube experts, but in principle the idea could be applied to other transistors for the charging and erasing steps,” she said. “How practical it will be to really integrate this and to have millions of these [arms] on a processor is another matter.”

The device will also work for multi-bit programming, as the signal users can get or store via the arm depends on the charge level at the gate, Campbell said.

Latest World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management

http://latest.shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/category/financial/

A few hours later, TEPCO Vice President Sakae Muto said a new test had found radiation levels 100,000 times above normal — far better than the first results, though still very high.

But he ruled out having an independent monitor oversee the various checks despite the errors.

Officials acknowledged there was radioactive water in all four of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex’s most troubled reactors, and that airborne radiation in Unit 2 measured 1,000 millisieverts per hour, four times the limit deemed safe by the government.

Those high airborne readings — if accurate — would make it very difficult for emergency workers to get inside to pump out the water.

Officials say they still don’t know where the radioactive water is coming from, though government spokesman Yukio Edano earlier said some is “almost certainly” seeping from a damaged reactor core in one of the units.

The discovery late last week of pools of radioactive water has been a major setback in the mission to get the crucial cooling systems operating more than two weeks after a massive earthquake and tsunami.

The magnitude-9 quake off Japan’s northeast coast on March 11 triggered a tsunami that barreled onshore and disabled the Fukushima plant, complicating a humanitarian disaster that is thought to have killed about 18,000 people.

A magnitude-6.5 quake off the northeast coast Monday morning briefly prompted a tsunami warning, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. The agency said the epicenter was 50 miles east of Oshika Peninsula in Miyagi prefecture, near one of the areas hardest-hit by the March 11 quake and tsunami.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, but the quake — one of dozens that have shaken Japan in the past two weeks — added to the sense of unease in a nation already on edge.

Muto acknowledged it could take a long time to clean up the Fukushima complex.

“We cannot say at this time how many months or years it will take,” he said, insisting the goal now is to keep the reactors cool. AP