The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers. A wireless charging system would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. The all-electric Nissan Leaf, for example, gets less than 100 miles on a single charge, and the battery takes several hours to fully recharge. A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations. You could potentially drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to recharge.

The wireless power transfer is based on a technology called magnetic resonance coupling. Two copper coils are tuned to resonate at the same natural frequency – like two wine glasses that vibrate when a specific note is sung. The coils are placed a few feet apart. One coil is connected to an electric current, which generates a magnetic field that causes the second coil to resonate. This magnetic resonance results in the invisible transfer of electric energy through the air from the first coil to the receiving coil. Wireless power transfer will only occur if the two resonators are in tune. Objects tuned at different frequencies will not be affected, including humans.

In 2007, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used magnetic resonance to light a 60-watt bulb. The experiment demonstrated that power could be transferred between two stationary coils about six feet apart, even when humans and other obstacles are placed in between.

The MIT researchers wondered if their system could be modified to charge a car moving at highway speeds. The car battery would provide an additional boost for acceleration or uphill driving.

Here’s how the system would work: A series of coils connected to an electric current would be embedded in the highway. Receiving coils attached to the bottom of the car would resonate as the vehicle speeds along, creating magnetic fields that continuously transfer electricity to charge the battery.
To determine the most efficient way to transmit 10 kilowatts of power to a real car, the Stanford team created computer models of systems with metal plates added to the basic coil design.

Many modern day communication systems use fiber optics to transfer information from one location to another. Tiny beams of light transmit much of the information we access on a daily basis. The big hurdle is when the information gets to a location or computer, the information needs to be converted to electronic form so our systems can process the information, and then processed as light again so we can read it.

Caroline Ross, the Toyota Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has developed a new component, she calls a “diode for light“.

So why haven’t we been using light in our microchips until now?

The problem is harnessing light in such a way that the lasers powering them wouldn’t reduce in efficiency when transferring the information. However, they discovered a material, Garnet, which they could add to microchips, allowing the light to transfer properly.

One practical advancement from this discovery is these photonic chips can be processed using the standards we have now. Ross explains, “It simplifies making an all-optical chip. The design of the circuit can be produced just like an integrated-circuit person can design a whole microprocessor. Now, you can do an integrated optical circuit.”

This means the advancement discovered by MIT could have a much quicker shift to the commercial market. The improvements the technology could provide our computational devices is astronomical. First and foremost, light travels much faster than electrons. Also, the wires which are required to transmit electronic signals can only carry a single data stream while light can carry various streams of data through a single fiber or circuit.

The realistic advancements generated from these photonic chips will take us into the next phase of processing power. While the creative dreamer in me is simply asking, “Does this advancement get us one or even two steps closer to having actual lightsabers?“

An associate professor of aeronautics and her students at MIT have developed a system for controlling small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with your basic iPhone. Professor Missy Cummings and her class teamed up with Boeing’s research and development center in Seattle to pilot a small UAV with a few twists and turns of an Apple smartphone.

And it’s not your typical remote controlled plane. During the test, the controller was in Seattle while the UAV was buzzing around a football field at MIT campus – about 2,500 miles apart. Here’s how it works, according to Cummings –

“We’ve set the system up so that the iPhone connects into the cell network through a Wi-Fi hotspot capability, and on the other end, the vehicle is hooked up to a ground station that’s also hooked into a wireless hotspot. So the vehicle and the iPhone are then communicating over the internet, and this allows us to send whatever commands we want.”

The iPhone controls the UAV in two ways. First, the “pilot” can set location points on a map, and direct the plane to fly to that spot. Or, in a more awesome video game-like fashion, the pilot can use a built in camera to fly the plane manually, simply by tilting the iPhone to signal the desired direction. Check it out in action:

One of the goals of the project is to create a system that is easy to learn. This system is so intuitive, it can be mastered in a matter of minutes.

Cummings, who directs the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT, focuses her research on how to make control systems that are easy for people to learn and use. In principle, she says, the control system she and her team have created for smartphones could be used to control any aircraft, even a jumbo jet. In practice, it could easily replace the control systems not only for military drones, but for UAVs used by emergency personnel: for example, to track the progress of a forest fire in a remote area from a safe distance.

What do you think about the possibility of an iPhone piloting a jet? Let us know in the comments.

Researchers put together a group of 7,043 volunteers and tracked their (anonymized) electronic communications for three years.  The final report states, "To our knowledge, this is the largest social network ever constructed to study the impact of social networks on information worker productivity."

 

As for what researchers discovered in regards to the worker bee-boss relationship, "[H]aving strong connections to managers is shown to have positive association with revenue generation."  A full $588 in additional monthly revenues is the average result.

It can be good when regular employees talk to each other, too, as contact between one project and another correlated with an extra $115 per month in revenue.

People shouldn’t take this as a good excuse to spend the whole day on Facebook (which just hit the 200 million user mark), though.  Researchers used a definition of "social network" that’s not really up-to-the-minute and looked at emails and instant messages, not pokes and status updates.

The people who created the site are the MIT Free Culture student group. YouTomb says it,"Continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown."

"The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm."

YouTomb records the title of each video that is removed from YouTube along with a description of the video, who uploaded it, when it was taken down and a few screen shots. There are no actual videos that visitors to the site can watch.

The site is currently monitoring 223,246 videos and has flagged 4,396 videos that have been taken down for alleged copyright violation.

The companies that have removed the most videos include, TV Tokyo Corporation, Viacom International Inc, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and World Wrestling Entertainment.

YouTomb says its initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, but it is also interested in other video collections.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web sites are protected from legal action if they remove infringing content after receiving a takedown notice from the copyright holder.

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If you’re in the Boston area, you can check out the event (and RSVP) at the Facebook event page for Underground 2008. It’s free and open, but seating is limited so please RSVP on the Facebook page so the organizers can plan accordingly.

Having been a student entrepreneur myself, I’m a strong proponent of current students and recent grads starting companies. I wrote about this in an earlier article titled "Why Student Make Great Entrepreneurs".

One of my points in the earlier article was the value of the network students build (or have the opportunity to build). Personally, I’m not a particularly social guy and networking is one of my weaknesses, not my strengths. But even then, I’ve ended up working with over a dozen people that I met during my undergraduate days (University of Alabama, Birmingham) or my more recent graduate school program at MIT. If I could turn back the clock, I’d make a concerted effort to try and connect with even more of my academic peers — regardless of how uncomfortable it might have been to hang out at "networking events".

The Boston area has some of the best academic institutions in the world. Even then, I don’t think we’re yet doing enough to encourage student entrepreneurs. Scott Kirsner, who writes for the Boston Globe, recently wrote about this on his blog in an article titled "How Do We Better Connect Students to Boston’s Innovation Economy?" Scott’s been doing a great job himself helping interconnect the Boston entrepreneurial community. He was even nice enough to post recently about the upcoming Underground 2008 student entrepreneur event mentioned above.

If you’re a student entrepreneur, UNITE! Connect with your peers — particularly those not in your immediate circle or discipline. You’ll be thankful you did.

If you’re going to be attending this Saturday’s event, leave a comment and let me know (or grab me at the event). If you have topics you’d like me to cover during my presentation, let me know what’s on your mind.

Also, if you’re looking for online networking with fellow entrepreneurs, I encourage you to request access to the OnStartups Group on LinkedIn or join the OnStartups Facebook group.  It’s a great way to find entrepreneurs in your area or at your school.

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It’s the end to excessive CO2 production and global warming!  Or not, as cyclists are likely to start exhaling heavily and eating more meat (did anyone else see Tuesday’s Boston Legal?).  Widespread human-powered computing might cause the demand for new keyboards might go up, as well, after enough of the old ones get covered with sweat.  Regardless of the environmental impact, though, this was an impressive tech accomplishment.

Ten students pedaled for just 20 minutes, and Chris Mellor reports, "A spokesperson said that the human-powered session produced more computations than took place in the first 3,000 years of civilization.  He also said that more arithmetic calculations were computed than were done on the entire earth up to 1960."

Guinness was on hand to validate the accomplishment’s record-setting nature, and, with any luck, to provide similarly named refreshments.  A handful of MIT students might win some money, too, as they’ve entered Google’s Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest.
 

Almost Half of Search Queries Are Repeats

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to the study’s authors, hailing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and Yahoo. It really depends on how much time has elapsed since their first search.

If users repeat a query very soon after the initial search, they are most likely looking for new information, rather than trying to re-find. However, if they don’t search again for a span of days, they either don’t remember exactly what they saw before, or are more motivated to find that exact website.

Sometimes it just depends on how exact they are at remembering what query string they used before, but most of them (around 70 percent) are pretty decent at remembering.

The study seems to affirm that the higher the rank, the higher the likelihood a result will be clicked. This is demonstrated on re-finding missions when a previously clicked result shows up farther down the SERP. It is less likely to be clicked than a previously un-clicked result that now appears closer to the top.

This is in contrast to when the SERP is exactly the same as before. The previously clicked result is more likely to be clicked again.

The authors write:

We found that it was much more likely for a repeat result to be clicked if there was no change in rank: 88% percent of the clicks for overlapping-click queries were repeat clicks if there was no change in rank, while only 53% of the clicks were repeat clicks if there was a change in rank.If the rank of the result had not changed, the second click occurred relatively quickly, while if the rank had changed, it took significantly (p<0.01) longer. Changes to result ordering appear to slow re-finding.

The researchers advise that search engines should be more mindful of repeat queries in the future by tailoring results that are predictive of what searchers are trying to re-find. They suggest that the best way to do this may be by providing software to the end-user that keeps of record of their individual search queries and reproduces either queries or direct links to websites previously visited.

They downplay, however, the practice of using popular results, generated from users on the whole, to influence search results, as search spam could unduly influence them.

"In contrast, personalizing search results based on search history can help avoid potential problems caused by spam."

The topic of my panel session was “Commercializing Web 2.0: Hype vs. Reality”. There was considerable discussion on this topic here on OnStartups.com.

The conference is organized and run completely by MIT students – and it was an exceptional event. The conference was sold out days prior and the energy and attendance at the sessions was amazing.

For those of you that are curious, full online videos of the sessions are available for free here. [Note: For some reason, they require you to fill out a form to get access to the videos]

http://www.mitvcconference.com/webcast.htm

If there are particular sound-bites or quotes from the various sessions that catch your fancy, please leave them in the comments. I attended the social networking session, the digital media session, and of course, the Web 2.0 session.

Enjoy.

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Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.