Tag: NY Times

New techniques shed light on ancient codex & palimpsests

Posted on by Ray in data access, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Read an article the other day from New York Times, A fragile biblical text gets a virtual read about an approach to use detailed CT scans combined with X-rays to read text on a codex (double sided, hand bound book) that’s been mashed together for ~1500 years.

How to read a codex

Dr. Seales created the technology and has used it successfully to read a small charred chunk of material that was a copy of the earliest known version of the Masoretic text, the authoritative Hebrew bible.

However, that only had text on one side. A codex is double sided and being able to distinguish between which side of a piece of papyrus or parchment was yet another level of granularity.

The approach uses X-ray scanning to triangulate where sides of the codex pages are with respect to the material and then uses detailed CT scans to read the ink of the letters of the text in space. Together, the two techniques can read letters and place them on sides of a codex.

Apparently the key to the technique was in creating software could model the surfaces of a codex or other contorted pieces of papyrus/parchment and combining that with the X-ray scans to determine where in space the sides of the papyrus/parchment resided. Then when the CT scans revealed letters in planar scans (space), they could be properly placed on sides of the codex and in sequence to be literally read.

M.910, an unreadable codex

In the article, Dr. Seales and team were testing the technique on a codex written sometime between 400 and 600AD that contained the Acts of the Apostles and one of the books of the New Testament and possibly another book.

The pages had been merged together by a cinder that burned through much of the book. Most famous codexes are named but this one was only known as M.910 for the 910th acquisition of the Morgan Library.

M.910 was so fragile that it couldn’t be moved from the library. So the team had to use a portable CT scanner and X-ray machine to scan the codex.

The scans for M.910 were completed this past December and the team should start producing (Coptic) readable pages later this month.

Reading Palimpsests

A palimpsests is a manuscript on which the original writing has been obscured or erased. Another article from UCLA Library News, Lost ancient texts recovered and published online,  that talks about the use of multi-wave length spectral imaging to reveal text and figures that have been erased or obscured from Sinai Palimpsests.  The texts can be read at Sinaipalimpsests.org and total 6800 pages in 10 languages.

In this case the text had been deliberately erased or obscured to reuse parchment or papyrus. The writings are from the 5th to 12th centuries.  The texts were located in St. Catherine’s Monastary and access to it’s collection of ancient and medieval manuscripts is considered 2nd only to that in the Vatican Library.

~~~~

There are many damaged codexes scurried away in libraries throughout the world today but up until now they were mere curiosities. If successful, this new technique will enable scholars to read their text, translate them and make them available for researchers and the rest of the world to read and understand.

Now if someone could just read my WordPerfect files from 1990’s and SCRIPT/VS files from 1980’s I’d be happy.

Comments:

Picture credit(s): From NY Times article by Nicole Craine 

Acts of apostles codex

From Sinai Palimpsests Project website

Moore’s law is still working with new 2D-electronics, just 1nm thin

Posted on by Ray in Market dynamics, R&D measures, Strategy, Visionary leadershp

ncomms8749-f1This week scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created two dimensional nano-electronic circuits just 1nm tall (see Nature Communications article). Apparently they were able to create one crystal two crystals ontop of one another, then infused the top that layer with sulfur. With that as a base they used  standard scalable photolitographic and electron beam lithographic processing techniques to pattern electronic junctions in the crystal layer and then used a pulsed laser evaporate to burn off selective sulfur atoms from a target (selective sulferization of the material), converting MoSe2 to MoS2. At the end of this process was a 2D electronic circuit just 3 atoms thick, with heterojunctions, molecularly similar to pristine MOS available today, but at much thinner (~1nm) and smaller scale (~5nm).

In other news this month, IBM also announced that they had produced working prototypes of a ~7nm transistor in a processor chip (see NY Times article). IBM sold off their chip foundry a while ago to Global Foundries, but continue working on semiconductor research with SEMATECH, an Albany NY semiconductor research consortium. Recently Samsung and Intel left SEMATECH, maybe a bit too early.

On the other hand, Intel announced they were having some problems getting to the next node in the semiconductor roadmap after their current 14nm transistor chips (see Fortune article).  Intel stated that the last two generations took  2.5 years instead of 2 years, and that pace is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.  Intel seems to be spending more research and $’s creating low-power or new (GPUs) types of processing than in a mad rush to double transistors every 2 years.

480px-Comparison_semiconductor_process_nodes.svgSo taking it all in, Moore’s law is still being fueled by Billion $ R&D budgets and the ever increasing demand for more transistors per area. It may take a little longer to double the transistors on a chip, but we can see at least another two generations down the ITRS semiconductor roadmap. That is, if the Oak Ridge research proves manufacturable as it seems to be.

So Moore’s law has at least another generation or two to run. Whether there’s a need for more processing power is anyone’s guess but the need for cheaper flash, non-volatile memory and DRAM is a certainty for as far as I can see.

Comments?

Photo Credits: 

  1. From “Patterned arrays of lateral heterojunctions within monolayer two-dimensional semiconductors”, by Masoud Mahjouri-Samani, Ming-Wei Lin, Kai Wang, Andrew R. Lupini, Jaekwang Lee, Leonardo Basile, Abdelaziz Boulesbaa, Christopher M. Rouleau, Alexander A. Puretzky, Ilia N. Ivanov, Kai Xiao, Mina Yoon & David B. Geohegan
  2. From “Comparison semiconductor process nodes” by Cmglee – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_semiconductor_process_nodes.svg#/media/File:Comparison_semiconductor_process_nodes.svg

More women in tech

Posted on by Ray in Information economy, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary leadershp, Visionary organizations

Read an interesting article today in the NY Times on how Some Universities Crack Code in Drawing Women to Computer Science. The article discusses how Carnegie Mellon University, Harvey Mudd University and the University of Washington have been successful at attracting women to enter their Computer Science (CompSci) programs.

When I was more active in IEEE there was a an affinity group called Women In Engineering (WIE) that worked towards encouraging female students to go into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).  I also attended a conference for school age girls interested in science and helped to get the word out about IEEE and its activities.  WIE is still active encouraging girls to go into STEM fields.

However, as I visit startups around the Valley and elsewhere I see lots of coders which are male but very few that are female. On the other hand, the marketing and PR groups have almost a disproportionate representation of females although not nearly as skewed as the male to female ratio in engineering (5:6 in marketing/PR to 7:1 in engineering).

Some in the Valley are starting to report on diversity in their ranks and are saying that only 15 to 17% of their employees in technology are females.

On the other hand, bigger companies seem to do a little better than startups by encouraging more diversity in their technical ranks. But the problem is prevalent throughout the technical industry in the USA, at least.

Universities to the rescue

The article goes on to say that some universities have been more successful in recruiting females to CompSci than others and these have a number of attributes in common:

  • They train female teachers at the high school level in how to teach science better.
  • They host camps and activities where they invite girls to learn more about technology.
  • They provide direct mentors to supply additional help to girls in computer science
  • They directly market to females by changing brochures and other material to show women in science.

Some Universities eliminated programming experience as an entry criteria. They also broadened the appeal of the introductory courses in CompSci to show real world applications of doing technology figuring that this would appeal more to females.  Another university re-framed some of their course work to focus on creative problem solving rather than pure coding.

Other universities are not changing their programs at all and finding with better marketing, more mentorship support and early training they can still attract more females to computer science.

The article did mention one other thing that is attracting more females to CompSci and that is the plentiful, high paying jobs that are currently available in the field.

From my perspective, more females in tech is a good thing and we as an industry should do all we can to encourage this.

~~~~

Comments?

Photo credits: Circuit Bending Orchestra: Lara Grant at Diana Eng’s Fairytale Fashion Show, Eyebeam NYC / 20100224.7D.03621.P1.L1.SQ.BW / SML