Mark Foster and Alexander Gaeta’s team at Cornell Universityhave figured out a way to pack more data into the pulses of light that carry data through the worldwide network of fiber optics. They are calling their approach a “time telescope,” and say it has the potential to increase fiber optic data speeds by 27 times.
They pass pulses of light, carrying data of course, through two “time lenses” - a silicon waveguide that combines a passing (data-carrying) light pulse with another infrared laser pulse in a way that causes the two pulses to be crushed together “like a soda can that’s been stepped on,” with the rear catching up to the front right at the lens’s focal point.
The result is that using the same fiber channels that already span the globe, we could pack 27 times more information with a decompression lag at the receiving end of only a millisecond.
In keynote addresses today at the Intel Developer Forum, Eric Kim (head of Intel’s Digital Home Group) and Intel CTO Justin Rattner discussed what happens and what’s needed when the full Internet converges with broadcast networks. The television, they said (both the device and the experience) has arrived at an inflection point.
Delivering interactive product placements, games and on-demand video on non-traditional TVs, such as digital connected CE devices, will require innovation in how that content is actually distributed from TV service providers.
This key phrase from Intel’s press release about the keynote address stood out for me:
“At the center of the TV evolution is more processing power.”
Processing, and the ability to differentiate products through software, will continue to be the key driver behind inventive solutions to problems such as the one Rattner describes, “By the year 2015, you can expect 15 billion consumer devices capable of delivering TV content with billions of hours of video available. We’ll need much more sophisticated ways to organize content and provide it on demand.”
Moores Law has given us the processing performance density and speed to make some incredible things happen. If we remove all the perceived barriers by considering the extremes – infinite processing at zero cost and using zero electricity (and perfectly bug-free code) – we can begin to imagine huge leaps of innovation far beyond the ones already happening in the immediate future of TV.
ETV Motors, a company that specializes in self-charging hybrid-electric propulsion systems for cars, has suggested in a letter to the EPA that the government consider a new multiple standard.
In a USA Today article, CEO Dror Ben-David says ETV advocates a three-pronged rating for fuel efficiency: one number to show how far the car can go on a single plug-in battery charge, a second number to show how energy intensive the battery is, and a third for how much gasoline it consumes to drive a generator or the wheels when the battery runs out.
Ben-David says the U.S. decision is important. “Most of the world looks at the United States as the standard provider and will adopt what the U.S. is doing.” Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says, “It’s really critical that the test procedure that’s decided on accurately reflects what people are going to experience.”
ETV Motors is a Rainier client. Read the full article in USA Today.
Medical device “Plug-and-Play” interoperability is a crucial issue today with the eventual goal being an integrated clinical environment, in which all devices are interconnected, in plug-and-play fashion, for better management. Most medical devices used in hospitals don’t “talk” to each other in event the simpest of ways that our PCs “talk” to our printers!
Peter Szolovits, a professor of computer science at MIT who studies medical data integration says “where you have a bunch of data simultaneously, you can do a better job of trying to understand what’s going on with the patient.”
The issue is important enough for Mass General Hospital in Boston to have established the MD PnP program dedicated to “leading the adoption of open standards and technology to interconnect medical devices for improving patient safetyand healthcare efficiency.”
MD PnP is part of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and now the group has proposed a new set of standards for an”Integrated Clinical Environment.” Julian Goldman, director of MD PnP, calls the standards “a comprehensive [design] platform… that allows the global community to innovate and build cool things on top of it that improve patient safety.”
Mark Foster and Alexander Gaeta’s team at Cornell Universityhave figured out a way to pack more data into the pulses of light that carry data through the worldwide network of fiber optics. They are calling their approach a “time telescope,” and say it has the potential to increase fiber optic data speeds by 27 times.
In keynote addresses today at the Intel Developer Forum, 
ETV Motors
