Teen Girl Inventor Wins $50K Prize
erco
Posts: 20,256
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/teen-invention-could-charge-cellphones-20-seconds-143535710.html
Her "possibly revolutionary" idea is to use supercaps instead of batteries in cell phones for a 20-second recharge. “I’m going to be setting the world on fire,” she said.
But according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_double-layer_capacitor , "existing EDLCs have energy densities that are perhaps 1/10 that of a conventional battery."
Setting the world on fire, 10 percent at a time. Intel and Google are impressed. Did I miss something?
..
Her "possibly revolutionary" idea is to use supercaps instead of batteries in cell phones for a 20-second recharge. “I’m going to be setting the world on fire,” she said.
But according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_double-layer_capacitor , "existing EDLCs have energy densities that are perhaps 1/10 that of a conventional battery."
Setting the world on fire, 10 percent at a time. Intel and Google are impressed. Did I miss something?
..
Comments
There was not much in that story to miss, certainly not enough information to decide if it was a great idea or not.
No - notice it has the important trigger words of 'Cell Phone'; and Energy , once those are in there, details like reality-checks come a distant second.
Much like the buzzword "algorithm". I've seen seemingly intelligent people get crazed to license at any cost when they hear that someone has developed a "proprietary algorithm" for nearly anything. Droppin' the 'A' bomb always scores points.
Someone spun a nice yarn and got the idiots to drink their koolaid.
There is a much more professional version of this trick that happened recently when Yahoo bought Summly, which was nothing more than a thinly disguised veneer around SRI International's product. What made it acquisition worthy is the improbable story of a teen boy making it all happen. The real scenario is much more fabricated than was originally reported.
She won $50K for connecting a supercap to an LED?
We have a novelty torch that does exactly that. Only it also includes a dynamo, (squeeze driven), and it is shaped like a Cat, so the two eyes glow. Great never-go-flat backup torch. I think it came from a $1 $2 store ?
Give the kid a break. She's on her way to Harvard. Same place that helped usher into the world such intellectual marvels as Rogoff and Reinhart, napalm, and Jason Richwine.
And Mark Zuckerberg, don't forget the Justin Bieber of the tech world!
Is there more to this?
But the judges disqualified me when it set itself off.
My LG Rumor doesn't have 3G but does have a nice slide-out keyboard for texting. It can theoretically get onthe web but you wouldn't want to. It has a decent camera but totally inadequate display for pictures, does do multiple ringtones and pic popup when the phone rings, and has as a contact organizer every bit as good as Android. But if I don't use it to make calls, the batteries will go two weeks on a charge. Not on standby, either. I've left the phone on the stand by the front door while on a 10-day vacation to Costa Rica and come home to find it still powered up with several missed calls logged.
Switching to supercaps would only make this phone perform as poorly as an iPhone does with regular batteries. (It's also quite a bit smaller than an iPhone.) The wrinkle is that it doesn't last nearly so long when talking, about 4 hours. So if you're in the habit of having really long voice conversations you'd probably only get twenty or thirty minutes out of the supercap. Not very good.
But on yet another hand, if you mostly text your conversations with the network are very brief and you'd probably get a lot of use. So it's not a totally daft idea. There is probably more to her argument than just "hey, supercaps, they charge fast."
Thanks Loopy, you just gave me a great idea. Combine a supercap with a generator along the lines of the self winding watches and you won't need batteries or chargers. Carrying the phone around will keep the supercap charged. Gotta run off and file my patent on the idea........
But what do we do? We use electricity to make it easier to run faster. I am very fuzzy on what a workout is supposed to do these days. I just use the outdoor track.
Yes. From what I've read, you and several other people have missed that she is more than a girl with a notion and an LED. It would seem that Ms. Khare, who is studying nanochemistry, CREATED this supercapacitor. A fact that the article failed to make clear. http://www.electronicproducts.com/Power_Products/Batteries_and_Fuel_Cells/High_school_student_wins_Young_Scientist_Aware_for_supercapacitor_that_can_re-charge_cell_phone_in_seconds.aspx . According to Elektor, she created this hydrogenated TiO2-polyaniline super-capacitor with some help from her supervisor.
It's sad that the media can't seem to report stories in the way that they need to be reported. Most articles don't seem to be saying anything about why or how her creation is special. No, she doesn't think that this is the solution. But further development may make a super-capacitor with much higher storage and faster charging.
- Mark
By the way, why did they ever give the comany such a stupid name?
Definition of YAHOO
1. A member of a race of brutes in Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" who have the form and all the vices of humans
2. A boorish, crass, or stupid person
Oh, sounds about right.
Well, if you give up news links on the internet, you may have to rely on TV. Newspapers are nearly gone.
Yahoo is also an expression of discovery and joy. Obviously you have used the wrong search engine and only found a partial answer, like Meriam-Webster.
It is not Yahoo, it is Yahoo! Have you never seen an old movie where a miner discovers gold and yells "Yahoo!"?
Try actually using Yahoo search to get a good answer. It seems Google is getting a bit subversive with what it finds. Or you might be one of those Google loyalist.
In other words, the Internet is widely available, but the means to use it wisely are inherent in the user. User Beware. We are being fed more and more inferior data.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/yahoo
There is the problem. That slang recently entered into the language and is a bit to new for me:)
Thanks for posting the link. Now the award makes sense.
@Heater
RE: Oh, sounds about right...... ABSOLUTELY.
@Loopy
RE: User beware. Hit the nail on the head. Not only are they far from thorough and accurate, they all have their own agendas and axes to grind. Best to take what you read with a rather large grain of NaCl.
Hyphenation has yet to reach any form of universal standardization. Beside, when spoken, one hears an utterance of two syllables, or two closely associated words. Yahoo! is really part of the spoken language. And then, if you want to get into the whole question of what is a word, you begin to have difficulty with separating the individual Chinese characters into actual words. Some Chinese characters are not whole words, but what are termed 'bound forms' that are never used individually in proper Chinese, while other characters stand alone as meaning and are thus words. To make matters worse, Chinese can and do abbreviate in their own way.
Google has periodically demonstrated a dark side when you search for their competator's service from within Google. That "Don't be evil" seems to not apply when good old capitalistic competition takes hold. Maybe Yahoo does as well. MS undoubtly does, they always have.
Then some Yahoos come along and want to use "Yahoo!" instead. It's damn annoying.
Besides, Mr. Swift might have been inspired to call his people in Gulliver's Travels "Yahoos" just because he was annoyed by people that expressed their enthusiasm and joy openly. I honestly can't find anything either way, so we may never know and Swift is dead.
There is yet another problem in play. Dictionaries in all languages have a tenancy to ignore listing emotional utterances. These utterance exist in everyday colloquial language, but seem to avoid getting into print. At least they did before Mark Twain changed the way dialogue was written in English language novels.
For instance, Chinese makes no mention of any of them, but the Chinese translation of Japanese manga comics are packed with them. I've had to ask people to explain. I hear people saying these things, but there is nothing in the dictionaries. And searching the internet is equally devoid of information. Just open up a Spiderman magazine and you will see lots of 'words' that are not in dictionaries.
One reason for the problem might be that some dictionaries only research what has been published for new words to add to their corpus. And of course, the computer might add to the problem as no one reads mail from customers any more. I could write Merriam-Webster until I am blue in the face, but they might never modify their entry for Yahoo to reflect reality.
BTW, in California, the cry of Eureka by Mr. John Sutter is told again and again as he found the nugget that started the 1849 Gold Rush. We even have a town named Eureka, and another named Yreka.
But the happy-go-lucky cowboy would shout Yahoo! over any sort of insight or good fortune.
Actually I'm in two minds about that.
On the one hand there is the idea that there is, or should be, some kind of "standard English". After all as a young kid in a British school that is what they test your understanding of. They exepect you to be able to spell "correctly" as it is in the dictionary. They expect you to be grammatically correct as in ... well I never found out what book specifies that, I don't belive there is one.
On the other hand, we have the dictionary creators who seem to be prepared to accept any old Smile into their book. For example "wysiwyg" became a word in the Oxford dictionary in the 1980s because everyone was talking about "What you see is what you get" user interfaces in computers and it actually went on to mean other things as well. Who uses "wysiwyg" anymore?
So, should a dictionary specify a standard (Which is how it is presented to happless five year olds in school) or should it refelct common usage? As is what actually happens.
Clearly the English language is a bastard mess of many languages that have come before it. Perhaps the fact that it is so malleable is why it is still around and spread throughout the world.
"close English to any new words" Good God no. We'd end up like the French!