Mannerisms

Hurricane Milton’s record-breaking speed and pressure have alarmed scientists. Milton has tied in third place for the fastest sustained wind speeds measured in a hurricane since records began. At 180 mph top speeds, the storm shares rank 3 with three other hurricanes, while only five hurricanes were ever measured at higher speeds. Milton also had the fifth lowest pressure ever ...

The urge to regulate beats strong these days and nowhere stronger than in AI. The issue is: Will the protections afforded by regulation slow down innovation and increase legal and compliance costs which will affect the success of pioneering companies and startups? The common sense route would be to set up a body like the IAEA or ICANN to set ...

Thanks to AIRPM for this one – the ten UK universities which handed out the most penalties to students for using AI: University No. of students who received an academic penalty due to the use of AI (2022-2024) Birmingham City University 402 Leeds Beckett University 395 Coventry University 231 Robert Gordon University 211 University of Hull 193 Birkbeck, University of ...

Out of the world’s top 15 growth hubs, 14 are forecast to be located in Asia, according to the Growth Hub Index 2024 by estate agents Savills. These cities are set to develop particularly quickly by 2033, based on rising wealth, expanding economies and the potential for new development and business expansion. Four Indian cities feature in the top 10, ...

OCTOBER, 1961, is the target date for orbiting a United States astronaut in space. Early next year, one of the seven astronauts now in training will be tossed into space in a non-orbital flight in preparation for the final event. So, 64 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of December 7th 1960. Neither of these two events, ...

The term podcast, first mentioned in 2004, is believed to have been created either by combining the words iPod and broadcast or Portable-on-demand (Pod) and broadcast. The podcast  has quickly gained popularity around the globe aided by the rise of digital audio platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. However, the consumption of podcasts varies quite a bit from one country ...

The new government has swallowed the previous government’s rhetoric about the importance of semiconductors without realising that the old government’s proposed support of £1 billion over ten years is derisory, Ed confides to his diary. A billion quid is a huge sum to our new masters but to an industry whose annual capex is $170 billion and annual R&D spend ...

“Predicting the future of information technology, especially on a ten year time scale, can be a perilous business,” said Intel technical marketing manager Steve Cutler back in 2009, before going on to make ten predictions on how technology would evolve. “One of the defining characteristics of IT is a rate of change that is so fast it is unmatched in ...

In the EU, 22 percent of employed people ages 15 to 64 worked from home in 2023, according to new data by Eurostat. This consisted of nine percent who said they usually worked from home and 13 percent who said they worked from home only occasionally. The share of employees working from home has increased by eight percentage points since ...

40 years ago a chip company which had the fastest bipolar process in the world used it to make ADCs, dividers and ASICs among other applications. After several changes of ownership it evolved into a company with a unique GaN-on-Silicon microLED technology developing microLED displays. Moral: Adapt

Of the 25 world leaders included in a release by Morning Consult, only eight can currently claim positive net approval ratings in their own country. The exceptions are Prime Ministers Narendra Modi, Anthony Albanese, Dick Schoof, Simon Harris and Donald Tusk of India, Australia, the Netherlands, Ireland and Poland, respectively, as well as the presidents of Mexico, Argentina and Switzerland, ...

In the 14th century Dick Whittington set out for London in the belief that its streets were paved with gold. Today it would be Palo Alto. Some 30 years ago I impertinently suggested to a PA resident, fresh from completing his third IPO, that he must have trousered around $300 million. “Yes” he said, “but that’s not much round here.” ...

Thanks to IDC for this one – the top  ten IDMs:

Nearly three in five young Africans said that they are either very or somewhat likely to consider emigrating to another country in the next three years, according to the African Youth Survey 2024 by Ichikowitz Family Foundation. This marks a seven percentage point increase from 2022, when the last survey wave was conducted, likely driven by the improving freedom of ...

64 years ago, this story appeared in Electronics Weekly’s edition of October 26 1960  

President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have collected roughly $781 million from a variety of partisan interest groups up until June 30, 2024, according to data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) collected and analyzed by the nonpartisan research group OpenSecrets. Not included is the reported $100 million in funds the Harris campaign raised in ...

I have achieved something remarkable, Ed confides to his diary, I have scuppered the Russkies’ hypersonic missile programme. Last month the fourth out of five Russkie Satan-2 hypersonic missiles to be tested blew up on take-off taking most of the Plesetsk cosmodrome with it. The underground supply chain which I was running between Western chip suppliers and the Russkie military ...

21 years ago, we were bring told that computers would be thinking for us within five years. At the 2003 DATE, Professor Emile Aarts, scientific programme director at Philips Research Labs, said that, within the next five years, home computer systems would start making decisions on our behalf. Giving a keynote speech at the conference last week, Aarts outlined his ...

Between 2014 and September 25, 2024, more than 30,000 people either died or went missing in the Western, Central and Eastern Mediterranean according to data by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Even with the numbers of missing and dead migrants increasing across major migration routes in Africa and Asia between 2022 and 2023, the Mediterranean is still by far ...

Conventional wisdom was once that it was necessary to remove the oxide layer on a wafer after masking to guard against contaminants. A Swiss genius proposed that leaving the oxide layer on might act as protection for the circuitry thereby increasing reliability. His idea enabled mass production of ICs  Moral: Counter-intuition should not be scoffed at