Good Morning all,
Well, I am so excited I can barely sleep. My Husband gets here in 4 days! (I better figure out a sleep schedule before then, because I don't want to be exhausted when he gets here).
Anyway, today I would like to mention two articles. First, there is an article about a young boy (age 9) who decided, after recovering from cancer, that he wanted to help others with cancer. Then, he wrote a book. So far, two books have been written. All proceeds go to supporting cancer research.
The second article I'd like to bring to your attention is about a recycling program in the phillipines where billboards and signs are turned into school childrens bags. Additionally, while making these bags, women from the local villages are taught how to sew. :)
Anyway, hope you enjoy the posts!
See you tomorrow! :)
Today's Top 5:
1. US Military Supercomputer Sets Record!
2. Turning Billboards into Bags (CNN)
3. "I Want to Help Other People with Cancer" Says 9 Year old Cancer Survivor (IC Wales)
4. US Rescues 70 People Stranded Off Yemen (Yahoo News)
5. Pen-Type Device Displays Characters Written in Air on Monitor (Tech On)
Honorable Mentions:
1. Study Finds Chinese Food Good for Your Heart (Eurekalert.org)
2. The 14-month-old Girl Who Can Hear for the First Time (Daily Mail UK)
Today's Top 5:
1. US Military Supercomputer Sets Record!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: June 9, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
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I.B.M.
The Roadrunner supercomputer costs $133 million and will be used to study nuclear weapons.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.
Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.
The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.
By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.
“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.
Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.
Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”
The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.
Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.
“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”
Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.
“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.
Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.
Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.
Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.
“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”
Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.
By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.
2. Turning Billboards into Bags
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/08/eco.billboards/index.html?eref=rss_latest
June 9, 2008 -- Updated 0436 GMT (1236 HKT) Share this on:
(CNN) -- Binggirl Clemente has worked in environmental advocacy in the Philippines for the past eight years. Today, she leads a project to recycle old billboards into bags backed by local NGO, the Earth Day Network.
The project also promotes environmental education and funds clean-up projects in the local community. Recently, she spoke with CNN.
CNN: How did you come up with the idea?
Clemente: Last year was the election period in the Philippines and there were a lot of advertising banners and campaign banners actually. It's really proliferating all over the country and since our advocacy is solid waste management, we already started talking about how are we going to address all this waste around us in the country?
Since my business is in the sewing industry, I thought why don't we try to sew it and make it into something. So we got one and tried to sew it, if the needle could go through it and it did. So I said maybe we could try to make something out of it, at first it was purses, and then eventually since it was May, and June is the start of the school year suggested why don't we make school bags out of it for the children in the public schools.
This became a concept in my company, and also be a good corporate social responsibility activity, so we started gathering [the old billboards]. It became a private activity for my company and some of our friends who involved themselves in there. So that's how it started making school bags and giving it away.
CNN: How did it become a community based project?
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Clemente: Somebody came to me, an artist, and said, "why are you inverting [the bags], why is it all white?" I said it was because we have a white thing so we can print what we want to say, "manage waste, goodbye garbage". And one more thing is that we don't want the faces of the politicians coming out in the bag! Since we've been sewing, we've been advocating in our environmental group, it's not only about the environment, it's also about poverty alleviation, women empowerment and employment.
So when we started this at just a small scale it just struck my mind why don't we make this as a community based. Instead of us making our bags, why don't we go out there and see if the women who aren't working if they'd like to learn how to sew. Teaching is not our business, sewing is our business, but there is a compatibility. I brought it up in the Earth Day Network program. They said, "yes that is a brilliant idea" It struck me that our priorities are empowerment, employment, poverty alleviation, so that's how we started thinking about it.
CNN: Why do they call Metro Manila the "billboard jungle"?
Clemente: Metro Manila is all about billboards and banners, billboards and banners. There is no standard size, you can go as big as you want or as small as you want. But no one wants to go small, they want big. There is no strict regulation as to where to install the billboards, this makes me sad because I came from that industry; I left 7 years ago. It would be nice to have a practice in one industry where there is a strict regulation, but what happened in the Philippines, especially in Metro Manila, there was no regulation at all.
Everybody can just put up their own structures anywhere for as long as they get approval from the land owner. Then it became cluttering, then people put them side by side, then on top of each other. There are a lot already, but that's not what gave us in concept. It was really the political banners that pushed us to say this is too much.
CNN: What are the greater environmental problems affecting the Philippines?
Clemente: Our problem here in Manila is we just dump our waste, we dump it everywhere. We don't have proper waste management, we have a law, but it's not being strictly followed. What we are doing here with the tarp bag is just one of the many wastes that is being generated in the country. Normally you recycle the paper, bottle and cans you can take back to factory, but these billboards have no factory to return to make a new tarpaulin.
CNN: What's your goal for this project?
Clemente: We're trying to make this whole system as good as we can, so we can set up others in different provinces, so that we will address the waste where it occurs. We are hoping to duplicate this in different provinces, so that every tarpaulin billboard in every province has its own management system, so it doesn't have to go back to Metro Manila to us here.
CNN: Who were you first clients?
Clemente: We wanted to touch base with the corporations who are using tarpaulins as their advertising banners, after they've used the tarpaulins as their advertising banners we want them to send it over to our village where we will make it into bags back for them. It's like buying back their waste and they can use them as their corporate giveaway bags.
CNN: How do you support the local community?
Clemente: These communities are being supported by the proceeds that we've received, we make the bags, the corporations buy them, we make a little profit, then those profits are used to fund all our projects like today and on Sunday, we will be giving away school bags. It didn't come from anybody's money anymore, it came from the money we have already generated, from our own activities.
CNN: What's the message you're trying to say with this project?
Clemente: What we're actually doing is information and we teach and campaign for a clean environment. We are teaching people to manage their waste so it will not create garbage. When you start mixing your waste, it will become garbage, it will be rubbish, but when you segregate it, it will be a resource.
People will have to start thinking that we need to recycle our waste, we don't just have to dump it. That's the main lesson we want to share with the whole world that when you're done with one thing, please don't throw it away, save it, it could be useful to some other people, it could be useful to your future needs. The more you save it, the more you're saving resources, you're saving it for the future needs.
3. ‘I want to help other people with cancer’
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/06/09/i-want-to-help-other-people-with-cancer-91466-21044780/
Jun 9 2008 by Cathy Owen, South Wales Echo
A NINE-YEAR-OLD who beat cancer after being given just a 25% chance of surviving has written a book about his ordeal.
Sam Viney, from Peterston-Super-Ely, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a form of cancer which attacks the nerve cells in young children, when he was just 18 months old.
His parents, Janet and Ian, were warned he had only a one-in-four chance of survival as he underwent months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment.
But the brave Peterston-Super-Ely primary school pupil, who is one of triplets, beat the disease and despite still having some side effects he is now in Year Four.
Despite his love of drumming, snorkelling and sailing, Sam’s favourite pastime is writing stories.
The idea of writing the first book, called The Lost Egg, was developed with his tutor, Mavis Ingram, who is also a cancer survivor and has been helping him catch up with school work after his illness.
He has sold the book to friends and family at 50p a time and managed to raise £200, which he handed over to Cancer Research UK Senior Nurse in Wales Barbara Moore at Cardiff’s Velindre Hospital, where he had some of his treatment.
While the first book has gone on sale at the Cancer Research shop in Whitchurch, Cardiff, Sam has written another called The Dinosaur’s Egg.
Sam, who also has an older brother, said he had been keen to give the money from his first book to Cancer Research UK.
“I didn’t want to keep it as I would have lots of money,” he said.
“Because I had cancer, I want to help other people with cancer.”
Mrs Ingram, 67, from St Fagans, near Cardiff, said that she had been tutoring Sam twice a week for around 18 months.
“He was a bit behind with his work because of his illness, but he is catching up brilliantly,” she said.
“I like to capture the imagination of children and Sam has very creative ideas, so I suggested the book as a way to get them down on paper and help his grammar, vocabulary and punctuation.”
Mum Janet said: “We are so proud of him.”
Copies of the book will be available in the Cancer Research UK shop in Merthyr Road, Whitchurch.
cathy.owen@mediawales.co.uk
4. US Rescues 70 People Stranded Off Yemen
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080609/wl_africa_afp/somaliayemenusimmigration
2 hours, 41 minutes ago
DUBAI (AFP) - A US Navy destroyer operating in shark-infested waters between Somalia and Yemen has rescued a boat in distress which was loaded with about 70 people, the US Navy said on Monday.
The USS Russell responded to a distress call on Sunday from the boat that had been adrift for two days after experiencing engine problems, said the US Navy Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain.
"There were approximately 70 personnel on board the vessel, some of whom were in need of immediate medical attention," a statement said, adding that the boat and passengers were being towed to Somalia to be turned over to the authorities.
The statement did not identify the people on board, but similar journeys are frequently made by desperate African migrants using small poorly-equipped vessels.
In April, 22 migrants drowned off the coast of Yemen after they were forced overboard by smugglers who were transferring around 120 people across the Gulf of Aden.
More than 1,400 clandestine immigrants died trying to cross from Africa in 2007, while more than 28,300 managed to reach the Yemeni coast, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in December.
The crossing takes two days at best and is made especially dangerous by shark-infested waters, strong currents and inhumane conditions on poorly maintained vessels open to the elements.
The USS Russell, a guided missile destroyer, is part of a task force operating in the Arabian Sea to "help develop security in the maritime environment", the US Navy said.
The waters off Somalia -- which has not had an effective central government for more than 17 years and is plagued by insecurity -- are considered to be among the most dangerous in the world due to frequent piracy attacks.
5. [TEXPO] Pen-type Device Displays Characters Written in Air on Monitor
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080609/153010/
Jun 9, 2008 17:01
Shinya Saeki, Nikkei Electronics
SMK's "Wireless Input Pen"
SMK Corp developed "Wireless Input Pen," which can transmit characters written in the air and displays them on a monitor.
The pen was exhibited at the company's exhibition "TEXPO 2008," which took place in Shinagawa, Tokyo from June 4 to 6, 2008.
The pen has a built-in triaxial acceleration sensor and the Bluetooth function. The sensor detects the positional information and recognizes the inputted characters. The characters are wirelessly transmitted to a monitor via Bluetooth. The maximum transmission distance is reportedly about 10m. It is expected that the pen will be used in place of a laser pointer in sales presentations.
According to SMK, it is the world's first pen-type device that can transmit characters written in the air to a monitor and the company is currently applying for a patent. Thus far, Anoto AB of Sweden and CandleDragon Inc have prototyped a pen that can transfer characters written on paper to a monitor, etc.
Honorable Mentions:
1. Study Finds Chinese Food Good for Your Heart
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/tju-ras060508.php
Contact: Rick Cushman
richard.cushman@jefferson.edu
215-955-2240
Thomas Jefferson University
Public release date: 9-Jun-2008
Chinese red yeast rice reduces repeat heart attacks/mortality rates
(PHILADELPHIA) – A clinical study on patients who have suffered a heart attack found that a partially purified extract of Chinese red yeast rice, Xuezhikang (XZK), reduced the risk of repeat heart attacks by 45%, revascularization (bypass surgery/angioplasty), cardiovascular mortality and total mortality by one-third and cancer mortality by two-thirds. The multicenter, randomized, double-blind study, was conducted on almost 5,000 patients, ranging in age from 18-70 over a five-year period at over 60 hospitals in the People's Republic of China. Corresponding author David M. Capuzzi, M.D., Ph.D, director of the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Program at Jefferson's Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine and Zonliang Lu, M.D., Ph.D, from the Fuwai Hospital at the Chinese Academy of Medical Science report their findings in the June 15th edition of the American Journal of Cardiology.
"It's very exciting because this is a natural product and had very few adverse side effects including no abnormal blood changes," said Capuzzi. "People in the Far East have been taking Chinese red yeast rice as food for thousands of years, but no one has ever studied it clinically in a double-blind manner with a purified product against a placebo group until now and we are pleased with the results. However, people in the United States should know that the commercially available over-the-counter supplement found in your average health food store is not what was studied here. Those over-the-counter supplements are not regulated, so exact amounts of active ingredient are unknown and their efficacy has not been studied yet."
The study looked at patients who had suffered a heart attack in the previous year. Study participants were given two-300-milligram XZK capsules or a placebo and tracked over a five-year period. The XZK capsules contained a combination of lovastatin, lovastatin hydroxyl acid, ergosterol and other components.
"I think it is surprising that a natural product like XZK would have this great an effect," said Capuzzi. "If further testing and study prove true, my hope is that XZK becomes an important therapeutic agent to treat cardiovascular disorders and in the prevention of disease whether someone has had a heart attack or not. But it is important to recognize the fact we do not know exactly how Chinese red yeast rice works. The exact ingredients from the XZK capsules have not been isolated and studied yet. Still the results were so profound, even out performing statins prescribed in numerous western populations, that further study should certainly be investigated."
The study was sponsored by Beijing Peking University WBL Biotech Co. Ltd (WPU), in Beijing, People's Republic of China. Dr. Capuzzi has no financial interest in this company.
2. The 14-month-old Girl Who Can Hear for the First Time
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLR_enUS253US253&q=Ava+Parson+can+hear+for+the+first+time
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:16 AM on 06th June 2008
Comments (1) Add to My Stories
Enlarge Magic moment: Ava Pearson with mother Lauren. Her first world was 'mama'
A baby girl who was born deaf can now hear after becoming one of the youngest people in Britain to have a cochlear implant.
Ava Pearson, 14 months old, can listen to bedtime stories and jiggle about to music thanks to the life-changing operation.
She is even starting to speak after being given an implant in one ear when she was nine months old and a second one in the other ear three months later.
Ava's speech therapist says her language skills are now ahead of other children the same age.
Her mother, Lauren, 31, from Belsize Park, said: "One week after the operation she started dancing to music and then four weeks later she said her first word, 'mama', which was huge for me.
"I realised she could hear when she kept pushing the top of a toy which played music and she started swaying to the tune. I couldn't believe it. Previously a siren could have gone past and she wouldn't have reacted.
"When she started babbling it was amazing - before that she only made guttural noises that she could feel in her chest." Mrs Pearson, a book publisher, and her husband Chris, a 31-year-old finance manager, first realised Ava was deaf when she didn't react to routine hearing tests at the age of three weeks.
Mr Pearson said: "We were very upset and it was a complete shock - there was no history of deafness in the family.
"Lauren started scouring the internet and discovered cochlear implants. We knew if you have them young it is better for speech and language development."
The couple decided to pay to have the implants at the private Portland hospital in the West End.
The cost, plus a year of speech therapy at the hospital and back-up equipment, is almost £52,000 and is being paid out of the family's health insurance.
Mr Pearson said: "We knew that time was of the essence and that it wouldn't be as fast on the NHS."
Speech therapist Natalie Opitz, who works at the Portland, said: "Ava is the youngest baby I have seen have the operation in this country. This is a remarkable case but it could be the norm for all deaf children."
A spokeswoman for the Royal National Institute for Deaf people said children are typically given the implants on the NHS aged between one and three but waiting lists for the operation vary across the country.
She added: "The RNID wants to see a national framework that gives equal access to all those who would benefit more from a cochlear implant than from hearing aids."
A cochlear implant is made up of a receiver, which is surgically implanted behind the ear with electrodes inserted into the cochlea. A speech processor is magnetically attached to the outside of the head and sends electrodes to the inner ear. These send a signal through the auditory nerve to the brain, where it is perceived as sound.
Ava's second implant allows her to tell the direction from which sound is coming.
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