D-Wave Systems

The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing - Tom Simonite

The processor in every computer you've used is made from silicon and patterned with transistors that create logic gates—switches that are either on (represented by a 1 in the computer's programming) or off (a 0).  D-Wave's processors are also made up of elements that switch between 1 and 0, but they are loops of niobium alloy—there are 512 of them in the newest processor. These loops are known as qubits and can trap electrical current, which circles inside the loops either clockwise (signified by a 0) or counterclockwise (1). Smaller superconducting loops called couplers link the qubits so they can interact and even influence one another to flip between 1 and 0.

This delicate setup is designed so that the layout of qubits conforms to an algorithm that solves a particular kind of optimization problem at the core of many tasks difficult to solve on a conventional processor. It's like a specialized machine in a factory able to do one thing really well, on a particular kind of raw material. Performing a calculation on D-Wave's chip requires providing that raw material, in the form of the numbers to be fed into its hard-coded algorithm. It's done by setting the qubits into a pattern of 1s and 0s, and fine-tuning how the couplers allow the qubits to interact. After a wait of less than a second, the qubits settle into new values that represent a lower state of energy for the processor, and reveal a potential solution to the original problem.

What happens during that crucial wait is a kind of quantum mechanical argument. The qubits enter a strange quantum state where they are simultaneously both 1 and 0, like Schrodinger's cat being both dead and alive, and lock into a strange synchronicity known as entanglement, a phenomenon once described by Einstein as "spooky." That allows the system of qubits to explore every possible final configuration in an instant, before settling into on the one that is simplest or very close to it.

At least, that's what D-Wave's scientists say. Many questions remain about what actually happens inside the company's chips, not least in the heads of the company's own physicists, engineers, and computer scientists.

Frontiers in Computing

Darpa Has Seen the Future of Computing … And It’s Analog - Robert McMillan

"One of the things that’s happened in the last 10 to 15 years is that power-scaling has stopped,” he says. Moore’s law — the maxim that processing power will double every 18 months or so — continues, but battery lives just haven’t kept up. “The efficiency of computation is not increasing very rapidly,” he says.

Hammerstom, who helped build chips for Intel back in the 1980s, wants the UPSIDE chips to do computing in a whole different way. He’s looking for an alternative to straight-up boolean logic, where the voltage in a chip’s transistor represents a zero or a one. Hammerstrom wants chipmakers to build analog processors that can do probabilistic math without forcing transistors into an absolute one-or-zero state, a technique that burns energy.

It seems like a new idea — probabilistic computing chips are still years away from commercial use — but it’s not entirely. Analog computers were used in the 1950s, but they were overshadowed by the transistor and the amazing computing capabilities that digital processors pumped out over the past half-century.

Digital Processors Limited by Power; What’s the UPSIDE?

The Unconventional Processing of Signals for Intelligent Data Exploitation (UPSIDE) program seeks to break the status quo of digital processing with methods of video and imagery analysis based on the physics of nanoscale devices. UPSIDE processing will be non-digital and fundamentally different from current digital processors and the power and speed limitations associated with them.

Instead of traditional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)-based electronics, UPSIDE envisions arrays of physics-based devices (nanoscale oscillators may be one example) performing the “processing. These arrays would self-organize and adapt to inputs, meaning that they will not need to be programmed as digital processors are. Unlike traditional digital processors that operate by executing specific instructions to compute, it is envisioned that the UPSIDE arrays will rely on a higher level computational element based on probabilistic inference embedded within a digital system.

Probabilistic inference is the fundamental computational model for the UPSIDE program. An inference process uses energy minimization to determine a probability distribution to find the object that is the most likely interpretation of the sensor data. It can be implemented directly in approximate precision by traditional semiconductors as well as by new kinds of emerging devices.

Meet Russell Kirsch

An Unexpected Ass Kicking - Joel Runyon

“I’ve been against Macintosh company lately. They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things. With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.”

“That’s the problem with a lot of people”, he continued, “they don’t try to do stuff that’s never been done before, so they never do anything, but if they try to do it, they find out there’s lots of things they can do that have never been done before.”

Career Advice

Future-proofing your career - Charlie Ball

It's all going to change

The examples in my first paragraph help to illustrate the point. Some of the world's largest companies didn't exist 45 years ago.
...

Communication is vital

What are the consequences of a world where everyone can network with everyone? Good communication skills will become even more vital.
...

Information overload

The internet provides unparalleled access to an unimaginable amount of poor quality information. And some good stuff too. To parse any of this needs research skills.

Engineering Careers

It's time to give college a rethink - Ali Velsh

One word: Engineering

Whether you, your child, or both are financing college, to earn a decent return on that investment your student needs to base academic choices at least in part on employment trends. Universities, which have an interest in maintaining the status quo, aren't leveling with families about which courses of study make the most financial sense. "We know more about this than we ever tell young people," says Carnevale.

The plain truth is that if your child has the aptitude, he should pursue an engineering degree or study math and science. End of discussion.

Those majors can yield starting salaries of $50,000 and above. Accountants, actuaries, software developers, pharmacists, and nurses are also in high demand and highly compensated.

Engineering Careers

Going to college? You can study anything you like, as long as it's Engineering.

You're an Engineer? You're Hired - Christopher J. Gearon

At its worst in September 2009, the unemployment rate for engineers reached 6.4 percent, versus nearly 10 percent for all occupations. By the middle of last year, it had dropped to under 2 percent.

Engineering Students Use Factory Floor as Classroom - Christopher J. Gearon

Research shows that, compared to grad students in traditional programs, co-op students are "offered employment at a higher rate and progress at a faster rate," says Paul Stonely, CEO of the World Association for Cooperative Education, a Massachusetts-based organization that advocates for education integrating actual experience. They also seem to have higher grade point averages, higher graduation rates, and a better record of sticking with a chosen employer.

U.S News Rankings of Engineering Schools

More at Instapundit

Automated Construction

Printing a Home: The Case for Contour Crafting - Morgen E. Peck

Size is now the only thing holding back the technology. “We have a machine that can build a structure about 23 feet long, about 7 feet high and about 15 feet wide at this point,” says Khoshnevis.

He estimates that a full-scale printer would break down into three pieces and be small enough to fit onto a flatbed truck. All construction would happen on site. First, a designer would bring a digital blueprint for the house on a thumb drive and plug it into the printer while workers loaded it with concrete. Once the printer was activated, humans would play a supporting role, laying out supplies for the robotic gripper arm and preparing fresh batches of concrete. Humans would also install the windows and doors, since the task is so easy it’s not worth automating, Khoshnevis previously said.

Science and Engineering II

Engineering is a difficult course of study. Unfortunately the difficulties are often unnecessarily multiplied for students. The 'top' programs are usually plagued with inadequate instruction, overwhelming course loads, and a competitive atmosphere.

But worst of all is the fact that the necessary years of academic drudgery are completely detached from the real-world practice of engineering. While being a working engineer is also hard work, it is hard in an entirely different way.

First of all, as a working engineer you will work on a team with other engineers, all of whom will depend on your work and thus have a vested interest in your success. This takes the edge off the competitiveness and can even lead to a close-knit sense of camaraderie. Second, as an engineer you get the time to more fully investigate and solve the problem at hand. Your employer needs experts and if no experts are already available, you will become that expert. And third, as you develop professional expertise, the work itself becomes rewarding in a way that no throw-away student project can ever be.

So the relationships are healthier. Your expertise becomes deep and practical. And the rewards are more lasting and tangible.

And so my advice to discouraged engineering students is to hang in there. Being an engineer is a lot better than being an engineering student. If you have the gift for math and science, it can be a great career with a wide variety of rewarding opportunities. And if you are used to getting A's, do not be discouraged by B's or even C's. If you persevere, the hard work will pay off.


Confessions of an Engineering Washout - Douglas Kern

Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science.

...

I nearly fainted when I learned that I received a 43% on the Physics final. I nearly fainted again when I learned that the class average was 38%. ... Having allegedly mastered 43% of the course material, I was now deemed fit to take even harder Physics classes. I wondered: at the highest levels of physics, could you get a passing grade with a 5% score on a test? A 3% score? A zero? Could drinking from a fire hose actually slake your thirst?

Exhausted and demoralized, I stumbled into my next semester of engineering. My new math T.A. had all of my old T.A.'s inability to teach, but half of her mastery of English. One day in class I heard myself saying: "If I understood what I didn't understand about the problem, I would understand the problem, and therefore I wouldn't be asking a question." The T.A. stared at me across a void that seemed increasingly unbridgeable.

The course was called "Discrete Mathematics." Many people thought that the course was called "Discreet Mathematics." Wrong. To clarify: "Discrete Mathematics" is "the mathematics in which Kern was getting a D at midterm." "Discreet Mathematics" is "how Kern dropped that class along with the rest of his engineering course load and signed into liberal arts classes, all on the last day he was eligible to do so, because he couldn't stand the stress, abuse, and lack of comprehension anymore." No one waved goodbye to me at the engineering door.

The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching. Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of partial credit that bored T.A.s choose to dole out. Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals.

Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay - Joe Light and Rachel Emma Silverman

Science classes may also require more time -- something U.S. college students may not be willing to commit. In a recent study, sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that the average U.S. student in their sample spent only about 12 to 13 hours a week studying, about half the time spent by students in 1960. They found that math and science -- though not engineering -- students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.

Science and Engineering

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard) - Christopher Drew

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

...

Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

...

It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.

Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.

Stemming the Tide - Walter Russell Mead

Georgetown’s latest education report names Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) the safest bets for high wages and consistent demand. It reads:

High and rising wage premiums are being paid to STEM workers in spite of the increasing global supply […]

Demand for the [STEM] core competencies is far greater than the 5 percent traditional STEM employment share suggests, and stretches across the entire U.S. job market, touching virtually every industry. Since 1980, the number of workers with high levels of core STEM competencies has increased by almost 60 percent.

The deeper you dig into the report the better it gets for STEM graduates. Both undergraduate and graduate STEMS earn roughly 50% more than their non-STEM counterparts.

...

But something else emerges from this important study that students and parents need to keep in mind. What you study is more important than where you study it; students who take solid courses at solid schools will often learn more and do better than students who take empty classes as flashy name schools.

STEM Executive Summary - Carnevale, Smith, Melton (Georgetown Univ.)

Hot Fusion

Inside the World's Largest Fusion Reactor - Brooke Borel

At the forefront of the effort to realize fusion-based power is ITER, an international collaboration to build the world’s largest fusion reactor. At the heart of the project is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped vessel that contains the fusion reaction. In this vessel, magnetic fields confine a plasma composed of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen, while particle beams, radio waves and microwaves heat it to 270 million degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature needed to sustain the fusion reaction. During the reaction, the deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse, producing helium and a neutron. In a fusion power plant, those energetic neutrons would heat a structure, called a blanket, in the tokamak and that heat would be used to turn a turbine to produce electricity.

Static Electricity

A Shocking New Understanding of Static Electricity - Douglas Main

But Northwestern University researcher Bartosz Grzybowski led a study that appeared in Science last week that found things are not so black-and-white. His team's close examination of statically charged objects shows that both contain pockets of negative and positive charges. It is only the net total charge of each object that leads to their attraction. Furthermore, he found, static electricity is not caused solely by a migration of electrons or ions from one item to the other. In fact, Grzybowski says, static electricity may arise from a significant transfer of materials such as surface molecules.

Grzybowski admits it's bizarre to find a huge surprise in a topic that has been studied since Greek polymath Thales of Miletus first rubbed amber on wool in 600 B.C., and found it could then attract light objects like feathers. Leading lights such as Nikola Tesla and Michael Faraday have studied the phenomenon, but they too reached the same conclusion. "One assumption common to all these models is that one material was positively charged, and one negatively charged," Grzybowski says. "This is actually not true."

Alternative Energy

Is Fusion Power Finally For Real? - Elizabeth Svoboda

If fusion works as proponents claim, it could produce enough clean energy to power the world for hundreds and hundreds of years to come. One of the first hurdles is the tiniest component, the fuel: Hydrogen isotopes, such as deuterium and tritium, adamantly resist uniting, regardless of the amount of heat and steel and funding thrown into the effort.

But this past fall, physicists at NIF, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made an important advance with their elaborate building and enormous laser: They fired 121 kilojoules of ultraviolet light into the $3.5 billion facility's target chamber, causing deuterium and tritium nuclei to fuse into helium atoms, releasing 300 trillion high-energy neutrons. Even though NIF and other labs have created fusion before, the achievement brings researchers a step closer to conquering the ultimate challenge: a fusion reaction that produces more energy than is required to start it.

Small Nuclear Reactor Site Planned - Randall Parker

Small nuclear reactors might be the ticket to restarting growth of the US nuclear power industry.

This week the Tennessee Valley Authority signed a letter of intent with nuclear-reactor maker Babcock & Wilcox to work together to build up to six small reactors near Clinch River, Tennessee. If the plan goes ahead, these could be the first small modular commercial nuclear power plants.

Babcock & Wilcox has a long history of making nuclear reactors for US Navy ships. This gives them an advantage in the small nuclear reactor market. Whether this advantage can translate into a competitive product remains to be seen. In theory small reactors can be made in a manufacturing plant that can reach much higher levels of productivity than a construction site for a big nuke could hope to achieve.

Small Nuclear Reactors Get a Customer - Kevin Bullis

The plan comes at a time when many nuclear projects are stalled because of safety concerns and also for reasons of cost. Babcock & Wilcox's modular reactors require less capital than conventional ones, and they have some safety advantages as well.

Career Prospects

It's All in the Risk for Silicon Valley Job Seekers - Joseph Walker

It's an exciting and lucrative time to be a computer scientist. Computer science graduates received more offers than their accounting counterparts for the first time since 2008, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Meanwhile, veteran engineers are also being recruited heavily by startups and established companies alike.

Your Well-Paid, Middle-Class Job Is in Danger - Ruth Mantell

While technology may replace some workers, it also creates opportunities to use new skills.

"Some types of engineers won't be doing the type of engineering they are doing now if someone comes up with a technology that makes what they do obsolete," Hallock said. "But they are likely to do something related."

To succeed, a worker should "be an active learner," Manpower's Joerres said.

"Taking on responsibility for invention and innovation gives you a better chance of remaining in a position than the person to your right or to your left," Joerres said.

Tech Employment

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age - Vivek Wadhwa

In their book Chips and Change, Professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for the semiconductor industry and found that salaries increased dramatically for engineers during their 30s but that these increases slowed after the age of 40. At greater ages still, salaries started dropping, dependent on the level of education. After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50. Curiously, Brown and Linden also found that salary increases for holders of postgraduate degrees were always lower than increases for those with bachelor’s degrees (in other words, even PhD degrees didn’t provide long-term job protection). It’s not much different in the software/internet industry. If anything, things in these fast-moving industries are much worse for older workers.