Silence of Japan

Two Japanese researchers have developed the wonderfully named SpeechJammer. It actually does just that, it jams speech. Looking like a hand-held police radar gun, when pointed and "fired" it causes the speaker to start stuttering, then mumbling and finally stop speaking. The idea is based on the fact that in order to speak properly we need to hear what we are saying so that we can constantly adjust how we go about it. Difficulties arise when there is a slight delay between the time the words are spoken and the time they are heard. If that happens, people tend to get discombobulated and stop speaking. The SpeechJammer is a device that causes someone speaking to hear their own words delayed by 0.2 seconds. A must-have device for conference chairmen?

Spin filter

A group at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle have presented interesting work on using ferroelectric tunnel junctions as spin filters. Based on a ferromagnetic lanthanum strontium manganate / ferroelectric lead zirconate titanite / ferromagnetic cobalt sandwich structure the group found that the tunnel magnetoresistance acts as both a variable resistance and an electron spin filter. The group see applications for the spin filter in magnetic storage devices including magnetic random access memories.

Siemens value IP

The 2011 Annual Report of the European Patent Office (EPO) shows the continued importance that Siemens AG attach to obtaining patents. The company submitted 2,235 patent applications to EPO in 2011 well ahead of Philips (1,759) and Samsung (1,733). German companies filed the most patent applications (33,181) followed by France (12,107), Switzerland (7,786) and UK (6,464). The top technical field for EPO applications was medical technology.

Intel again

The latest data from IHS iSuppli confirms the position of Intel as the world's leading semiconductor supplier with 15.6% (by revenue) of the market in 2011. Intel's position is due to demand for its PC-oriented microprocessors and for its NAND flash memory used in consumer and wireless products. The second largest supplier remains Samsung Electronics; Intel's revenue for 2011 being $48,721M and Samsung's $28,563M.

Elementary my dear Citigroup

Last year the Watson the IBM computer defeated two champions of the US game show Jeopardy. Now, the US bank Citigroup and IBM have announced that they will use Watson 'to explore the use of deep content analysis and evidence based learning capabilities to help advance customer interactions, and improve and simplify the banking experience'. Watson's strength apparently is being able to take and interpret un-structured data and produce output that mere humans can make use of. I trust it knows that 'Reichenbach Falls' is not the announcement of a declining share price.

Gnome's Law?

Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687 in which he postulated the inverse square law of universal gravitation. Rumour has it that Newton was inspired by a falling apple. The eminent scientist was clearly forced into thinking about Malus domestica because Baehr and Maresch of Dresden did not produce the first ceramic gnomes until 1841, with the first garden gnomes not introduced into the UK until 1847. Promoted by a German scales manufacturer, a garden gnome called Kern is currently travelling the world being weighed at numerous points on the earth as a route to illustrate the impact of the earth not being a perfect sphere of uniform density. You can track Kern's progress and see his weigh loss/gain here. So far he has weighed the most, a chunky 309.82 grammes, at the Amundsen-Scott Research Station in Antarctica.

RTA matches Lance Armstrong's Tour de France record in 2011

RTA Instruments has won the k-Space Associates' Representative of the Year award for the 7th year running. We are all delighted and thank our customers for their confidence in the k-Space products and our ability to provide support across Europe with our knowledge, skills and experience. Our sales performance is accompanied by our contribution to ongong product developments at k-Space, particularly in relation to the kSA BandiT product line. We look forward to another winning performance and building on the strong platform we have built in the last 8 years with k-Space and continuing to develop our European customer base.