Tuesday, June 8, 2010

New Technologies

A few weeks ago I attended the International Microwave Symposium to see and hear the latest cutting edge technology that is being discussed. This conference is about technologies ranging from the high frequencies of the tens of megahertz to greater than one terahertz.
I was able to listen in on some pretty interesting ideas and presentations of technology. Since many radio frequency waves need to be amplified among the many topics discussed was improvement in amplifier efficiencies. Several of the papers presented dealt with microwave amplifiers being used in the tens of gigahertz range. This is good since the more efficient an amplifier is the less energy that will be consumed. This can only help us achieve further energy consumption reduction.
A whole session was devoted to radar techniques and from the topics discussed it seems like a lot of innovative radar applications are being researched and developed. This should bode well for certain commercial applications of radar that can benefit human safety. This also means that there may be more defense research applied to more evasive munitions.
Another major area of discussion was Terahertz technology and projects that might be possible. A Terahertz signal has a wavelength on the order of the thickness of human hair. Light is in this frequency range but is treated differently. Several space projects were discussed as possibilities as this may provide more insight in to the cosmos. This projects are multi-million dollar multi-year efforts that rely solely on a willing government for funding. This is currently very difficult to do as the political climate is very stormy when it comes to government expenditure. The real difficult with terahertz technology is low efficiency components that are hard to produce. This is because we have only begun to start research in this area from an engineering perspective.
The new technology that is supposed to revolutionize many commercial products ar radio frequency minature electrical machines, otherwise known as RF MEMS. MEMS have been discussed as a future breakthrough nanotechnology that could alter medicine and other areas of life. I will discuss these technologies in a blog posting at some point in the near future. RF MEMS show promise since they will be able to allow filtering that can adapt to the demands required from the signal. This technology has the potential to alter much of our wireless life in the connected domain, but some of these designs require materials which are rare. It is only reasonable that any company that wants to commercialize this technology will think about the cost of the resource they are using.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Net Neutrality

The Internet has by far been the most revolutionary technology of the last twenty years. I remember the first time I interacted with it. It was a time when websites were fairly basic and the Internet was primarily existing at research institutions and universities. Flash forward to today and the Internets is a bustling place with commerce, press, individual spaces, social networks, and even streaming video. All of this has brought us together in many ways that people never thought of.
The problem is that with the increasing amount of applications, websites, blogs, and social networks there is more information that has to be transferred between servers and computers. More information means that more bandwidth is desired per user and when this is coupled with the increasing amount of users there is a problem for the Internet service providers (ISP). They are limited in the amount of bandwidth they can support and are unlikely to upgrade equipment at frequent intervals to increase their bandwidth. All the ISPs must maintain decent speeds in order to maintain their customer base. In order to balance all these factors the ISPs must make some tough decisions.
In the early years of the Internet content didn't need to be filtered as the amount of data was not great. Congress at some point in the 90's passed a law which would lapse in the 2000's. Our reliance on the internet as a forum for information dispersal and communication of ideas has significantly altered our society. Every major institution of politics has a website that displays plenty of information related to their business. In the next election cycle I would expect every candidate to have a facebook page and a twitter account as a requirement and not a luxury. With this increased usage the networks that we use are unable to supply the demand. The ISPs have indicated their interest in seperating the speed at which content would be delivered to the viewer and charging for the faster rate. Some of these companies have conflicts of interest in that they are parts of conglomerates with magazine, film, and television production divisions. These companies may be involved in political activities that they could effectively squash the opposition by drastically slowing their data rate. Comcast which has been caught altering the download rates of peer to peer sharing networks claims that this was done to stop illegal downloading of copyrighted material. The practical elimination of illegal activities is a benefit of the new system providers are proposing.
In my opinion it is generally better to require unfettered and unaltered access to the internet. This is what made it a tool that led to such dynamic growth of technology. Any benefits from the elimination of illegal downloading of copyrighted material and/or the banning of child pornography websites would come at a huge cost to the free and democratic society we live in. We should definitely stay away from any censorship like Australia is proposing as this sets a bad precedent for authoritarian dictatorships.