TECHNOLOGY: Study Shows Google’s Dominance of Online Advertising

Old but still good. Via MIT's Technology Review:

Analysis of the mobile Web browsing habits of over three million people has revealed previously unseen patterns in how the major advertising companies carve up the Internet. Among the findings of a new study is that Google’s advertising tentacles extend to at least 80 percent of online publishers. It also found that if only a small fraction of Web surfers opted out of being shown shown ads based their previous online behavior, it would significantly decrease the industry’s profits. 

The new study was carried out by academics at Stony Brook and Columbia universities, with researchers from two major telcos: AT&T in the U.S. and Telefonica in Spain. They used records of 1.5 billion mobile Web surfing sessions from 2011, supplied by an unidentified mobile network operator, to see which sites people visited and which online ad companies provided ads on those pages.

MATHEMATICS: Why Math Classes need a makeover

Why Math Classes need a makeover:

INNOVATION: Intel tech brings us closer to the world of 'Minority Report'

Via CNET:

You've spent years -- decades -- typing on a keyboard and dragging your mouse around to control your computer. Intel wants to radically shake that all up. 

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on Tuesday offered a glimpse into the company's vision of the near future with demonstrations of cutting-edge technologies, including gesture controls, facial recognition security prompts, drones that know how to move around obstacles and a jacket that can help the visually impaired sense what's around them. 

At the heart of many of the demonstrations during his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show was Intel's RealSense 3D, the company's depth-sensing camera technology. Intel is banking heavily on the future of RealSense. If successful, it could mean a radical change in how we interact with computers.

INNOVATION: Moving over from Silicon

Meanwhile, from the University of Southern California:

When it comes to electronics, silicon will now have to share the spotlight. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering describe how they have overcome a major issue in carbon nanotube technology by developing a flexible, energy-efficient hybrid circuit combining carbon nanotube thin film transistors with other thin film transistors. This hybrid could take the place of silicon as the traditional transistor material used in electronic chips, since carbon nanotubes are more transparent, flexible, and can be processed at a lower cost. 

Electrical engineering professor Dr. Chongwu Zhou and USC Viterbi graduate students Haitian Chen, Yu Cao, and Jialu Zhang developed this energy-efficient circuit by integrating carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film transistors (TFT) with thin film transistors comprised of indium, gallium and zinc oxide (IGZO).

TECHNOLOGY: Skilled Foreign Workers a Boon to Pay, Study Finds

From online.wsj.com:

Want a pay raise? Ask your employer to hire more immigrant scientists.

That's the general conclusion of a study that examined wage data and immigration in 219 metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2010. Researchers found that cities seeing the biggest influx of foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics—the so-called STEM professions—saw wages climb fastest for the native-born, college-educated population.

TECHNOLOGY: Stem pipeline problems to aid STEM diversity

From news.brown.edu:

Decades of effort to increase the number of minority students entering the metaphorical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline, haven’t changed this fact: Traditionally underrepresented groups remain underrepresented. In a new paper in the journal BioScience, two Brown University biologists analyze the pipeline’s flawed flow and propose four research-based ideas to ensure that more students emerge from the far end with Ph.D.s and STEM careers.

INNOVATION: World’s First Parallel Computer Based on Biomolecular Motor

And now, news from Germany.

A new parallel-computing approach can solve combinatorial problems, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the Dresden University of Technology collaborated with an international team on the technology. The researchers note significant advances have been made in conventional electronic computers in the past decades, but their sequential nature prevents them from solving problems of a combinatorial nature. The number of calculations required to solve such problems grows with the size of the problem, making them intractable for sequential computing. The new approach addresses these issues by combining well-established nanofabrication technology with molecular motors that are very energy-efficient and inherently work in parallel. The researchers demonstrated the parallel-computing approach on a benchmark combinatorial problem that is very difficult to solve with sequential computers. The team says the approach is scalable, error-tolerant, and dramatically improves the time to solve combinatorial problems of size N. The problem to be solved is "encoded" within a network of nanoscale channels by both mathematically designing a geometrical network that is capable of representing the problem, and by fabricating a physical network based on this design using lithography. The network is then explored in parallel by many protein filaments self-propelled by a molecular layer of motor proteins covering the bottom of the channels.