cilinc.net » technology

water swirl hydropower plant

maz — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:40:59 +0000

The swiss association GWWK has built the first hydropower plant with water swirl technology. This way of energy generation is especially desinged for small constructions with drop heights starting from 0.7 meters. The originator of the technology called “gravitation water vortex power plant” is from Austria: Zotlöterer

credit: GWWK

How does it work?
According to Daniel Styger from GWWK you can imagine a filled bath tub. Opening the drain automatically leads to a swirl in the water while draining off. This phenomenon caused by the gravitation is the basis of this patented technology.

One more fact is remarkable about the plant in Schöftland (Switzerland): it’s a collaborative project financed by 100 private sponsors.

technologies that changed the world

maz — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:41:31 +0000

On computerscienceschools.net you can find an interesting list if the 10 tech milestones in the past 130 years.

I largely share this view – except the iPod. To my mind this device is just a consitent enhancement of Sony’s good old cassette-based Walkman based on today’s technology – although I have to admit that the Apple’s success is impressive. I would trade the iPod in for a technology from the energy sector like the battery or solar cells or perhaps already photovoltaics.

credit: Phoenix Solar

the text is looking in your eyes

maz — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:26:54 +0000

Imagine there were input devices which could allow text to know if and how it is being read – how would this change the reading experience?

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence is working on devices and systems to recognize the reading flow of your eyes and respond to it. With “Text 2.0” pictures related to the text you are reading at this moment can be displayed and further explanations or translations of certain words can be shown just in time. A really fascinating prospect of future reading experiences.

“the biggest change in the Internet”

maz — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:38:15 +0000

Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names at ICANN, called it “the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years”. What is he talking about? What would you expect? Maybe social networks?

No, he his talking about the new multilingual domain names like adresses in arabic or cyrillic. One may think that this is a minor change and a multilingual web should be a basic feature but in fact the different character sets make it a big thing. Just have a look at these figures: Web addresses formerly based only on 37 characters–A though Z, the 10 numerical digits, and the dash symbol–can now use 90,000 characters from several languages, many of these being Chinese characters.

Visit the first russian domain or read more about this topic at technologyreview.com.

robot operated by chaos

maz — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:08:00 +0000

The AMOS-WD06 is a biologically inspired six-legged walking machine that is able to adapt it’s behavior self-organized. The learning machanism is based on the chaos theory.

18 sensors drive 18 motors by means of a simple neural control circuit, thereby generating 11 basic behavioural patterns (for example, orienting, taxis, self-protection and various gaits) and their combinations. The control signal quickly and reversibly adapts to new situations and also enables learning and synaptic long-term storage of behaviourally useful motor responses. (Nature Physics)

Thanks to my friend Thomas for pointing me to this interesting aproach of modular neural control (via heise).
Surfing the edge of chaos is – at least imho mostly – a good driver for innovation.