First, I would like to say thank you to all of our visitors to NoumeniaCS and to let you know how much I appreciate you taking the time to visit this site. As many fans may have seen, the site has been inactive for a while. Unfortunately, that was because of both a technical and personal issue that needed my undivided attention. I have been able to get through the personal issue ok and my family is fine and moving forward, but I am still working on the logistics of this venture.
Second, I want to to point out that while this site is my passion it still is subject to the two fundamental laws of business. One create a greater market value than the asset value you spend and two it is a human endeavor and all your actions are to be orientated to that. In fact, the human endeavor part has been placed on the back burner by so many professionals that it should be the first thing that is taught in the course of any study. Which is what we try to focus on here at NoumenicaCS, the human endeavor of bringing CST’s to market.
There are plans on the direction that NoumeniaCS is going and to the look, feel, and direction of the brand of NoumeniaCS. These will take time and happen in the future but I would like to again to say thank you to all of our visitiors, subscribers and fans for the patience and we want to reward you with a product that you can trust, enjoy and reference to about CST’s and the business of bringing them to market. I do not want to take much more time, so this post is intentionally short. Take care and may you find/ follow your bliss, and allow that to bring you prosperity. .
(Phys.org)—Integrated circuits, which are in everything from coffeemakers to computers and are patterned from perfectly crystalline silicon, are quite thin—but Cornell researchers think they can push thin-film boundaries to the single-atom level.
Their materials of choice are graphene, single atom-thick sheets of repeating carbon atoms, and hexagonal boron nitride, similarly thin sheets of repeating boron and nitrogen atoms. Researchers led by Jiwoong Park, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, have invented a way to pattern single atom films of graphene and boron nitride, an insulator, without the use of a silicon substrate. The work is detailed in an article in the journal Nature, published online Aug. 30.
The technique, which they call patterned regrowth, could lead to substrate-free, atomically thin circuits—so thin, they could float on water or through air, but with tensile strength and top-notch electrical performance.
“We know how to grow graphene in single atom-thick films, and we know how to grow boron nitride,” Park said. “But can we bring them together side and side? And when you bring them together, what happens at their junctions?”
As it turns out, researchers’ patterned regrowth, which harnesses the same basic photolithography technology used in silicon wafer processing, allows graphene and boron nitride to grow in perfectly flat, structurally smooth films—no creases or bumps, like a well-knitted scarf—which, if combined with the final, yet to be realized step of introducing a semiconductor material, could lead to the first atomically thin integrated circuit.
Simple really is beautiful, especially in the case of thin films, because photolithography is a well-established technique that forms the basis for making integrated circuits by laying materials, one layer at a time, on flat silicon.
Patterned regrowth is a bit like stenciling, Park said. He and colleagues first grew graphene on copper and used photolithography to expose graphene on selected areas, depending on the desired pattern. They filled that exposed copper surface with boron nitride, the insulator, which grows on copper and “fills the gaps in very nicely.”
“In the end, it forms a very nice cloth you just peel off,” Park said.
The research team, which includes David A. Muller, professor of applied and engineering physics, is working to determine what material would best work with graphene-boron nitride thin films to make up the final semiconducting layer that could turn the films into actual devices.
The team was helped by already being skilled at making graphene—still relatively new in the materials world—as well as Muller’s expertise in electron microscopy characterization at the nanoscale. Muller helped the team confirm that the lateral junctions of the two materials were, indeed, smooth and well connected.
The paper’s co-first authors were chemistry graduate student Mark Levendorf and postdoctoral associate Cheol-Joo Kim, who fabricated the graphene and boron nitride samples and also performed the patterned regrowth at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility.
The work was supported primarily by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation through the Cornell Center for Materials Research. Provided by Cornell University
Below is an interesting article about news overload that media, marketers, social media marketers, social scientists, educators, and communication designers and managers need to pay attention to. Apparently the public is more receptive to increase of information volume as long as they have control of the filtering of that volume. The ones that have the hardest times are the ones that have not developed the skills to filter this information. The article below from http://phys.org/news/2012-08-overwhelmed-instant-access-news-americans.html helps give some more information on the study and the findings. Be sure and visit the site.
Overwhelmed by instant access to news and information? Most Americans like it
By: Erwin White
Overwhelmed by instant access to news and information? Most Americans like it August 30, 2012 by Erin White “Information overload” may be an exaggerated way to describe today’s always-on media environment. Actually, very few Americans seem to feel bogged down or overwhelmed by the volume of news and information at their fingertips and on their screens, according to a new Northwestern University study.
The study was published in the journal The Information Society. “Little research has focused on information overload and media consumption, yet it’s a concept used in public discussions to describe today’s 24/7 media environment,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern and lead author of the study.
Most of the previous literature on information overload dynamics has involved fighter pilots or battlefield commanders.
To better understand how everyday Americans perceive the amount of information available through traditional and new media, researchers recruited vacationers in Las Vegas to participate in focus groups. Seven focus groups were conducted with 77 total participants from around the country. The, small informal nature of the focus groups helped to reveal participants’ strategies for finding news, entertainment and gossip.
“We found that the high volume of information available these days seems to make most people feel empowered and enthusiastic,” Hargittai said. “People are able to get their news and information from a diverse set of sources and they seem to like having these options.”
Most of the participants said television was their most used form of media, followed closely by websites. When asked how they felt about the amount of information available to them, few mentioned feeling overwhelmed or that they suffered from “information overload.”
Here are highlights of the responses:
· Participants had near-unanimous enthusiasm about the new media environment
· Online news was regarded more positively than TV news
· Cable news was often criticized for its sensationalism and stream of repetitive stories
· Trivial social media posts and opinionated political pundits are top sources of frustration when seeking information”
There’s definitely some frustration with the quality of some of the information available,” said Hargittai. “But these frustrations were accompanied by enthusiasm and excitement on a more general level about overall media choices.”
The few participants who did feel overwhelmed were often those with low Internet skills, who haven’t yet mastered social media filters and navigating search engine results, Hargittai noted. Provided by Northwestern University
A convergence of emerging technologies and emerging possibilities is at the heart of this, the greatest period of transformation in human history. Our world is changing in ways that are hard to predict…sometimes …
In robotics there has been a great deal of underreported news about the advances in this industry. One of the things that we aim to do is increase the awareness of this CST and the impact that is and will have on our future. Of course we have seen the floor and yard bots and we are well aware of the use of robots in manufacturing but with an ageing population, robotics are becoming increasingly important in the medical industry.
Android development is also making significant progress in that they mimic human actions enough to allow us to be partly fooled into believing that they are organic being instead of electronic/mechanical beings. I use the term mimic because that is what all of technology does, it mimic’s nature. Below I am posting a brief summary of where the robot industry is and where its trajectory is possibly going.
Wikipedia gives the characteristics to define robots as:
“Defining characteristics
While there is no single correct definition of “robot”,[6] a typical robot will have several, or possibly all, of the following characteristics.
It is an electric machine which has some ability to interact with physical objects and to be given electronic programming to do a specific task or to do a whole range of tasks or actions. It may also have some ability to perceive and absorb data on physical objects, or on its local physical environment, or to process data, or to respond to various stimuli. This is in contrast to a simple mechanical device such as a gear or a hydraulic press or any other item which has no processing ability and which does tasks through purely mechanical processes and motion.[citation needed]
Mental agency
For robotic engineers, the physical appearance of a machine is less important than the way its actions are controlled. The more the control system seems to have agency of its own, the more likely the machine is to be called a robot. An important feature of agency is the ability to make choices. Higher-level cognitive functions, though, are not necessary, as shown by ant robots.[citation needed]
A sentient car, like the fictional KITT, which can make decisions, navigate freely and converse fluently with a human, is usually considered a robot.[citation needed]
An autonomous wheeled or tracked device, such as a self-guided rover or self-guided vehicle, is almost always characterized as a mobile robot or service robot.[citation needed]
A mechanical humanoid, like ASIMO, is almost always characterized as a robot, usually as a service robot.[citation needed]
Even for a 3-axis CNC milling machine using the same control system as a robot arm, it is the arm which is almost always called a robot, while the CNC machine is usually just a machine. Having eyes can also make a difference in whether a machine is called a robot, since humans instinctively connect eyes with sentience. However, simply being anthropomorphic is not a sufficient criterion for something to be called a robot. A robot must do something; an inanimate object shaped like ASIMO would not be considered a robot.”
The evolution of robots when placed on a relation time scale shows a clear but steady acceleration of development. The following graph came from the same source.
Timeline of robot and automata development
Date
Significance
Robot name
Inventor
1st century AD and earlier
Descriptions of over a hundred machines and automata, including a fire engine, wind organ, coin-operated machine, and steam-powered aeliopile, in Pneumatica and Automata by Heron
Also in the same post some of the trends are listed as well. This helps to give an idea where the robotic development is heading. The main examples are as follows again this is directly taken from the same source and a podcast follows as well to give an example of what the entrepenuers are seizing on.
“Overall trends
Japan hopes to have full-scale commercialization of service robots by 2025. Much technological research in Japan is led by Japanese government agencies, particularly the Trade Ministry.[136]
As robots become more advanced, eventually there may be a standard computer operating system designed mainly for robots. Robot Operating System is an open-source set of programs being developed at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, among others. ROS provides ways to program a robot’s navigation and limbs regardless of the specific hardware involved. It also provides high-level commands for items like image recognition and even opening doors. When ROS boots up on a robot’s computer, it would obtain data on attributes such as the length and movement of robots’ limbs. It would relay this data to higher-level algorithms. Microsoft is also developing a “Windows for robots” system with its Robotics Developer Studio, which has been available since 2007.[137]
New functions and abilities
The Caterpillar Company is making a dump truck which can drive itself without any human operator.[138]
Many future applications of robotics seem obvious to people, even though they are well beyond the capabilities of robots available at the time of the prediction [139][140]. As early as 1982 people were confident that someday robots would:[141] 1. clean parts by removing molding flash 2. spray paint automobiles with absolutely no human presence 3. pack things in boxes—for example, orient and nest chocolate candies in candy boxes 4. make electrical cable harness 5. load trucks with boxes—a packing problem 6. handle soft goods, such as garments and shoes 7. shear sheep 8. prosthesis 9. cook fast food and work in other service industries 10. household robot.
Generally such predictions are overly optimistic in timescale.
Reading robot
A literate or ‘reading robot’ named Marge has intelligence that comes from software. She can read newspapers, find and correct misspelled words, learn about banks like Barclays, and understand that some restaurants are better places to eat than others.”
The purpose of this was to give a brief blast of information to orientate the reader basically where we are at in terms of robotic technology. My usage of Wikipedia as a source was not to delve into a deep discourse about the details and impact that robotic innovations bring to society, nor the limited value of using one source. The source served its purpose as it provided plenty of information to help me help the reader to orientate to the topic. The topic itself on the Wikipedia page has a lengthy list of references and further reading if you wish to expand your understanding of this CST, which is why I decided to use it for the descriptions and the graphs.
I understand there are fans that are far more knowledgeable and curious of the intimate details of this technology and that will be explored further as NoumeniaCS develops. We will start posting the news and blogs by the people involved in this CST in the near future, but for now this article is meant to be a primer for that development.
Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 7:55 AM 
