Solar Panels – Crystalline vs Amorphous

October 2, 2011 By

Solar Panels Crystalline vs Amorphous

The majority of solar energy roofing systems that have been installed over the last several decades use wafer-based crystalline silicon cells to convert solar energy to electricity. Typically, these crystalline solar panels have sunlight conversion efficiencies that range from 8 to 15 percent. unfortunately, crystalline solar panels are a pricey option in solar energy roofing, due to a complicated and labor intensive manufacturing process.

On the other hand, a newer and less expensive type of solar photovoltaic panel has emerged in the solar panel roofing scene: Amorphous solar photovoltaic panels. Because amorphous solar roofing systems require a less intensive manufacturing process, they are far more affordable than their crystalline counterparts. Amorphous panels do, however, have lower conversion efficiencies than crystalline systems. Typical amorphous panels have energy conversion efficiencies that range from 2 to 4 percent.

Solar Panel Roofing

More and more, home and business owners are turning to solar energy roofing solutions as a way to combat rising energy costs and promote environmental responsibility.

Well-suited for the notoriously unpredictable (and sometimes harsh) weather in in the Mid-west, as well as throughout the country, solar PV panel systems can dramatically reduce the heating and cooling costs of your home or business. in fact, a 10 kW system of solar PV panels will generate the energy equivalent of 583,000 lbs of coal over it’s lifetime Over that same lifetime, solar pv panel installation will add to your bottom line. in just the first six years of usage, the anticipated total savings, revenue, and incentives of a $225,000 installation are greater than $250,000. the ability of your building to be self-sufficient in energy production will also allow you to sell excess energy to other companies. On top of the savings, your business/home will demonstrate environmental awareness. Our company will also provide an interactive system that will display the output gained by the installation of your solar pv panel so that you can see results instantly.

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Molycorp Invests in Groundbreaking Wind Energy Technology Company

September 29, 2011 By

Molycorp, inc. (NYSE:MCP), the Western hemisphere’s only producer of rare earth oxides (REO) and the largest REO producer outside of China,

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The First Solar Eclipse for 2010

September 20, 2011 By

1316489421 24 The First Solar Eclipse for 20102010 brings us a decade into this century and in the middle of the first month it will bring us the first solar eclipse of the year. on January 15th the annular solar eclipse will be in the middle of the African continent traveling across the Indian Ocean and on towards Asia.

The annular solar eclipse is not a total eclipse of the sun. what occurs is that the center of the sun will be blocked out by the shadow of the moon. The outer rim or diameter of the sun will be visible displaying an orange ring. The path that the greatest annularity will take begins in Cameroon taking an easterly course over the Indian Ocean. It will curve towards the north east to pass over the southern tip of India and Sri Lanka then onwards to Myanmar and China. Countries like Mozambique, Madagascar and Singapore are in the sub solar path.

Duration of this solar eclipse is estimated to be around 11 minutes and 8 seconds. The instant when the axis of the shadow from the moon passes closest to the Earth’s center will occur at 07:06 UT time. since this is an annular solar eclipse the magnitude will only be measured at .919. The magnitude is the fraction of the diameter of the sun that will be obscured by the moon.

There is only one other solar eclipse that will take place in the year 2010 and that is on July 11th. this is categorized as a total eclipse. The shadow of the moon will obscure all the diameter of the sun. The greatest eclipse path will take place over the South Pacific and it will just graze the tip of Chile and Argentina. these are the only two continental places where this total solar eclipse will be viewable. South pacific islands like Easter Island are near the greatest eclipse path. Partial viewing of about ten or twenty percent may occur over Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia. The duration of this total solar eclipse is five minutes and twenty seconds. The next total solar eclipse won’t be until the fall of 2012.

These are the only two solar eclipse occurrences for the year of 2010. The following year will bring us four more however; none of these will be a total or an annular solar eclipse. different kinds of solar eclipses occur at least twice a year which means that you can plan ahead to view one. below is a chart of solar eclipses for the next two years:

YearDateType of Solar EclipseViewable Location2010January 15AnnularAfrica, India, Myanmar, China2010July 11TotalSouth Pacific, Easter Island, Chile, Argentina2011January 4PartialEurope, Africa, Asia2011June 1PartialEastern Asia, Iceland2011July 1PartialAntarctica, South Africa, new Zealand2011November 25PartialAntarctica, South Africa, new Zealand

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The Web, Apple, NeXT and the evolution of search

August 8, 2011 By

While the Phandroid lobby echoes Google’s one-sided plea for ‘openness’, spare a thought for the Worldwide Web which spawned all this innovation, and the NeXT seed of Apple [AAPL] CEO, Steve Jobs, which enabled the world’s first-ever Web server, 20 years ago.

1312810242 91 The Web, Apple, NeXT and the evolution of search

[ABOVE: an early NeXT-hosted Web page. c/o CERN.]

NeXT for the Web

August 6 marks the date the first-ever Web page went online, powered by the world’s first-ever Web server, situated at http://info.cern.ch. Assembled by Sir Tim Berners-Lee using a NeXT computer, the browser was also an editor, enabling an interactive Web experience.

Unfortunately, with the exception of NeXT machines, most computers just weren’t capable of handling all these features, which is why a browse-only Web was born. who ran NeXT? Steve Jobs. It was his next step project after losing a battle for control of Apple, all those years ago.

The move to launch the first Web browser followed years of work at CERN, which celebrates March 9, 1989 as the official anniversary of the Web, it being the day when Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal".

It is interesting that Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer both as the server and as the tool with which to write the first browser. Not only did the NeXT architecture allow him to create an interactive experience which we didn’t really see come to fruition for years online, but that experience had to be whittled down in order that other platforms could participate.

An Internet of things

That’s the power of NeXT’s Unix and object-oriented architecture. and that’s still the power of NeXT in its now not-so-new role at the heart of OS X, and, of course, iOS. just fifteen years ago Apple acquired NeXT, on December 20, 1996.

iOS is arguably Apple’s biggest focus. Mobile is so critical to Apple strategy that I sometimes wonder which non-mobile-related Apple board meetings then Google CEO and Apple board member, Eric Schmidt, was actually able to attend. Perhaps we’ll find out more about this when that Steve Jobs biography is published.

This month’s Nature carries an article that’s stingingly critical of Google’s main business, Search. Entitled, "Search needs a shake-up" University of Washington scientist Oren Etzioni wrote that the main obstacle to progress in search: "...seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination."

He’s a proponent of spoken word search. "More and more, we’re going to be accessing the Web through mobile devices with tiny screens," he said in a release. "As you do more and more of that, it becomes harder and harder to type in keywords and see long lists of blue links."

"People are going to be clamoring for more intelligent search and a more streamlined process of asking questions and getting answers," he said.

Tools already exist for this. Etzioni’s pushing open-source tool, ReVerb, which takes a step beyond text-based search to one in which it identifies objects, people, places, things, and attempts to uncover relationships between them. You can try some sample searches here.

A new chapter for search

All the signs show the Web is becoming an augmented reality solution. We see hints of this everywhere: Google Maps, various assistance apps, translation engines, the evolution of leading operating systems…

This future direction clearly includes location-based data that’s responsive to a user’s needs; it encompasses voice search and will one day become sufficiently intelligent to predict a user’s needs before the user knows them themselves.

I guess I’m saying that this August 6, the anniversary of the world’s first Web browser we should also spare a thought for a change in the way we will browse the Web in future. We’ll use apps. We’ll use intelligent assistants, such as the Apple-acquired Siri.

Apple’s advantages in mobile and on the desktop are being combined. in future some anticipate the difference between the iOS and OS X to disappear and for both operating systems to become unified. That’s by no means beyond the pale, given both share the same basic roots.

Evolve, or die

Given that the Web is becoming ever more critical to the implementation of today’s desktop, notebook and mobile solutions, then we should consider the next step evolution of search as a big deal.

(Can anyone else recall the ever-enigmatic Steve Jobs, when he said of his company’s relationship with Google, "We didn’t enter the search business, they entered the phone business. Google wants to kill the iPhone – we won’t let them.")

A huge weight of historical and technological imperatives mean search is changing.

It will be interesting to see which of Google’s competitors manage to first embrace that change.

And also how deeply Google will be able to respond, given so much of its income still comes from text-based ads in search results and on conventional websites. in an information-centric age, will people want ads muddying up their search results, particularly if delivered by speech?

Share and share alike

Like the Web, search is a child. It will continue to evolve. The way we interrogate search engines will become more important than the search engine itself.

Ultimately our intelligent assistants will query all available data sources (Google, Yahoo, Bing, you name it) to assess the best and most accurate response to any spoken question. There’s no need to build the search data, it already exists, it’s about how we navigate that information.

With this in mind it will be interesting to see if Google will be willing to enable this next step evolution of information technology by sharing its own search algorithms, data collections and patented search technologies freely with competitors at no cost. this is what it seems to expect from its competitors in order to enable its own adventures in mobile, after all, in its complaint that ‘hostile’ patent holders (Translation: everyone in the smartphone biz apart from Google) are attempting to hamper Android evolution.

Your thoughts?

Please do follow me on Twitter so I can let you know when I post new reports here at Computerworld. 

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Early Talking Doll Recording Discovered

August 8, 2011 By

Early Talking Doll Recording Discovered

ScienceDaily (July 17, 2011) — on may 11, 2011, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California recovered sound from an artifact that historians believe is the earliest surviving talking doll record. the artifact is a ring-shaped cylinder phonograph record made of solid metal, preserved by the National Park Service at Thomas Edison National Historical Park. Phonograph inventor Thomas Edison made the record during the fall or winter of 1888 in West Orange, New Jersey.

On the recording, an unidentified woman recites one verse of the nursery rhyme "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." the voice captured on the 123-year-old record had been unheard since Edison’s lifetime. the recording represents a significant milestone in the early history of recorded sound technology.

Recovering and Identifying the Sound

The metal record is significantly bent out of its original round, cylindrical shape. for this reason, curators at Thomas Edison National Historical Park were unable to play the recording using conventional methods. at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Senior Scientist Carl Haber and Computer Systems Engineer Earl Cornell used a three-dimensional optical scanning technology developed during 2007-2009, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, to create a digital model of the surface of the record. with this digital model, they used modern image analysis methods to reproduce the audio stored on the record, saving it as a WAV-format digital audio file. they were able to recover all but the first syllable of the first word of the recording. Once the recording could be heard, historian Patrick Feaster of Indiana University played a key role in identifying and dating the recording by finding relevant references among archival documents. Researcher René Rondeau of Corte Madera, California provided additional fact-checking assistance.

Talking Doll Records made of Tin

In search of a market for his invention the phonograph, Edison first attempted to make talking dolls during 1888. the prototype model described in laboratory notes and newspaper articles between September and December of that year was distinctive for using a record made of solid tin. in November 1888, the New York Evening Sun announced that Edison’s talking dolls had just been "perfected," and that "nothing remains but to manufacture them in large quantities." no commercially viable method of duplicating sound recordings had yet been developed, so Edison hired women with suitable voices to make as many records as he thought would be needed once his talking dolls were put on the market: "there were two young ladies in the room…who were continually talking to the tiny speaking machines, which a skilled workman was turning out in great numbers."

Significance of the Recording

According to Feaster, this New York Evening Sun report marks the first time anyone is known to have been employed specifically to perform for the phonograph, so these women were arguably the world’s first professional recording artists. if the goal was to stockpile these tin records "in large quantities" to supply the eventual demand for talking dolls, as the New York Evening Sun suggests, then they may also have been the first phonograph recordings ever manufactured for sale to the public, even though they were never actually sold.

It was more than a year later, in April 1890, when Edison placed a talking doll on the market. by that time, however, he had switched the design to use records made of wax rather than tin. the dolls failed to sell because they broke too easily — due in part to the fragility of the records. It is unclear why Edison switched from tin to wax records for the talking doll.

Provenance of the Artifact

National Park Service museum curators first cataloged the object in 1967, found among items left in the desk of Edison’s secretary William H. Meadowcroft, located in the library of the Edison Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. A paper tag found tied to the cylinder reads: "Tin Phonograph Cylinder […]l Record." the artifact is the only example of a talking doll record from 1888 known to survive today.

Hear the recording. www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/talking-doll-record-hear-the-recording.htm

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the above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by National Park Service.

Note: if no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Nonprofit group’s aim is to replenish Northern Virginia’s native plants

July 3, 2011 By

Nonprofit group’s aim is to replenish Northern Virginia’s native plantsadvertisement

For about a decade, John and Lisa bright have led hundreds of volunteers in an effort to preserve and replenish the region

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Power of the Mighty Tongue!

June 2, 2011 By

1307043608 33 Power of the Mighty Tongue!

The Bible teaches that there is great power of the tongue…it can be used to heal and to hurt. Read James 3, it describes the very destructive power of an untamed tongue.

Just stop for a moment and think how it felt when someone last praised you. They may have said how great you looked or what a good job you did. It probably made your day!

Then stop and think how it felt when someone criticized you, called you a name or said something untrue. we say we won’t let it ruin our day, but we all know how hard it is to shake a verbal (or written) attack. I dare say we’ve all had this happen. I know that I have and it stings and hurts and has a direct bearing upon how I am able to fulfill my duty as a wife and mother. a stick in the eye or a stone upside of the head would probably have been less painful.

It’s not just the verbal words that can hurt people. this is the era of technology. we can now be “stung” with an untamed tongue via the keyboard. Instead of a verbal “lashing” that we can audibly hear, we get the “flame” that burns. Both cause great pain!

It has been said that the tongue of man is like a fire, which can set a whole forest ablaze. As we know from the huge wildfires in the past, a small flame can ignite a huge fire!

James tells us that the tongue is a fire, ignited by hell itself! the tongue is so mighty that when it is uncontrolled it can wreak havoc with our bodies and the bodies of those that the deadly poison has been aimed at!

We can send a man to the moon, harness the power of an atom, yet we can’t seem to bridle our own tongue?!

As I tell my children (and often remind myself), we will have to account for every word that comes out of our mouth and every word that we have written. therefore, we must remember that we need to be very careful of what we say verbally as well as with what we write in our emails, blogs, forums. God sees and knows it all. we can send something anonymous, but we are not anonymous to God.

We can call ourselves religious, Catholic, Christian or whatever…but if we fail to tame our tongue (and our response to those who “flame” us) we can not be considered as such.

Let us resolve to bite our tongues if we must! I know mine has nearly bled at times and I’ve had to literally get up and walk away from the keyboard when being “attacked”.

Let us RESOLVE to HEAL with our tongues! What power we have to do GOOD! may God bless and heal you and those who have hurt you!

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Article Details – ttglive

May 27, 2011 By

1306459822 14 Article Details ttglive

Tuesday, may 17, 2011

Travel firms can no longer rely on the cashed-up over 50s market to boost sales, a report by old-age specialist Saga has revealed.It warns that discretionary spending on items such as holidays is falling down the agenda for this once lucrative ‘grey’ market as the high cost of living, record petrol prices and tax increases take their toll.Saga surveyed 12,000 adults in the over 50s age group about how their lifestyle had changed over the last 12 months and 61% said they had been forced to cut back on non-essential spending.Cut backs included cancelling holidays, eating out less and buying fewer clothes.“Financial burdens for the over 50s have worsened with living costs soaring,” said Saga director general Dr Ros Altman.“we are witnessing a significant decline in discretionary spending. This has worrying implications for the whole economy.”another worrying trend, added Saga, is that the value of savings banked by the over 50s has also reduced due to historically low interest rates, leaving less spending money for treats such as holidays.

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My car wont start, its a ford orion. there is a loose earth wire hanging, do u know if its this?

March 21, 2011 By

My car wont start, its a ford orion. there is a loose earth wire hanging, do u know if its this?

i have replaced the starter motor but still nothing

Your description is not giving enough info. Yes it can be the loose wire IF it is ground (earth) wire. or it could be just a loose wire to something un-related.

If you has the starter replaced, get the mechanics who did the work to fix it again.

Good Luck.

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A windmill that removes water

March 19, 2011 By

1300531821 28 A windmill that removes water

SHEDD – For more than 150 years windmills have pulled water outof the ground for use on farms and ranches from coast to coast.

But Oak Park Farms owner Don Coon may be the first person inNorth America to use a windmill to do the opposite: to get rid ofwater that normally floods his property.

Wednesday afternoon, Coon explained how the system, which hasbeen operating since December, has removed standing water fromabout 14 acres of a 66-acre field west of Shedd. It was the firststop on the annual South Valley field crops and conservation toursponsored by the OSU Extension Service and the Linn Soil and WaterConservation District.

“It has worked great,” Coon told nearly 75 farmers and cropspecialists. “We had it installed by late December and this fieldwas a lot wetter than it is now. at times, we can’t even use athree-wheeler to fertilize this area because it’s so wet.”

The system is an updated version of the historic 702 Aeromotorwindmills that dotted the countryside for decades. It features a16-foot-diameter fan – although fans up to 20 feet in diameter areavailable. the tower is 53 feet tall.

The system requires a wind of just 5.5 miles per hour to getstarted. once operating, it can continue with a wind as low as 3.4mph.

“When the wind is 12 to 18 miles per hour, it’s perfect,” Coonsaid. “When the wind hits 23 miles per hour, the fan tail turnsinto the wind and the fan actually slows down to protectitself.”

The fan is connected to a lifting mechanism that pulls water outof a concrete cistern about 8 feet deep. Tiling – underground drainpipes – moves water from the field to the cistern, Coon said. Thewindmill pumps the water into a wooden weir, which then flows intoa drainage ditch that ends up at the nearby Calapooia River.

Depending on wind speed, the system can remove from 50 to morethan 500 gallons of water per minute.

“Our goal is to keep removing water steadily,” Coon said.

Coon said it would cost about $15,000 to $20,000 to run a powerline to operate an electric pump and there would be a monthly powerbill.

“I also looked at solar power and that’s when we came up withthe wind power idea,” he said.

Tom Conlon, who owns Iron Man Windmill Company in Eugene, saidthe system costs about $20,000 and Coon expects a payback within 10years.

Conlon said he has been involved in the windmill business sincethe 1970s and has installed numerous units in China. there,windmills are used to irrigate crops and fill reservoirs.Information gleaned over many years there has been used to greatlyincrease efficiency and decrease maintenance.

This is the first windmill Conlon is aware of that is removingwater from soggy land, rather than extracting it forirrigation.

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