Layar, a new interesting software for mobile phones that tells you information about what your phone camera is pointing at.

Jul 28, 2009

Courtesy: sciencealert.com.au

The University of New South Wales’ ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence has reported the first silicon solar cell to achieve the milestone of 25 per cent efficiency.

The UNSW ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence already held the world record of 24.7 per cent for silicon solar cell efficiency. Now a revision of the international standard by which solar cells are measured, has delivered the significant 25 per cent record to the led by Professors Martin Green and Stuart Wenham and widened their lead on the rest of the world.

Centre Executive Research Director, Scientia Professor Martin Green, said the new world mark in converting incident sunlight into electricity was one of six new world records claimed by UNSW for its silicon solar technologies.

Professor Green said the jump in performance leading to the milestone resulted from new knowledge about the composition of sunlight.
“Since the weights of the colours in sunlight change during the day, solar cells are measured under a standard colour spectrum defined under typical operational meteorological conditions,” he said.
“Improvements in understanding atmospheric effects upon the colour content of sunlight led to a revision of the standard spectrum in April. The new spectrum has a higher energy content both down the blue end of the spectrum and at the opposite red end with, dare I say it, relatively less green.”

The recalibration of the international standard, done by the International Electrochemical Commission in April, gave the biggest boost to UNSW technology while the measured efficiency of others made lesser gains. UNSW’s world-leading silicon cell is now six per cent more efficient than the next-best technology, Professor Green said. The new record also inches the UNSW team closer to the 29 per cent theoretical maximum efficiency possible for first-generation silicon photovoltaic cells.

Dr Anita Ho-Baillie, who heads the Centre’s high efficiency cell research effort, said the UNSW technology benefited greatly from the new spectrum “because our cells push the boundaries of response into the extremities of the spectrum”.

“Blue light is absorbed strongly, very close to the cell surface where we go to great pains to make sure it is not wasted. Just the opposite, the red light is only weakly absorbed and we have to use special design features to trap it into the cell,” she said.

Professor Green said: “These light-trapping features make our cells act as if they were much thicker than they are. This already has had an important spin-off in allowing us to work with CSG Solar to develop commercial ‘thin-film’ silicon-on-glass solar cells that are over 100 times thinner than conventional silicon cells.”

ARC Centre Director, Professor Stuart Wenham said the focus of the Centre is now improving mainstream production.
“Our main efforts now are focussed on getting these efficiency improvements into commercial production,” he said.
“Production compatible versions of our high efficiency technology are being introduced into production as we speak.”

By: Renat Zarbailov

Cloud computing is going to change the way you store, use, and share information. For a traveling professional like myself this approach is god-sent since I no longer have to carry thumb-drives to use the content on many different computers. Essentially the term cloud computting is a simple way to descrive SAS (software as a service). An example of a service like that is Google Docs. Simple, straightforward way to keep your documents accessible from any computer in the world connected to the internet. Another example is picnik (picnik.com), or photoshop.com. These two services provide online image editing that is simple to use, giving the user ability to store the edited and raw images files on the server. Furthermore, this way is more secure and affordable than that of the thumb-drive one since the access to your information is protected via user name and password. Plus, you will never have to buy another thumb-drive with more capacity or be afraid of loosing it. Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used under-the-hood, or how it’s managed. The term cloud computing probably comes from (at least partly) the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. We don’t care much what’s in the cloud or what goes on there except that we depend on reliably sending data to and receiving data from it. Cloud computing has become the new buzz word, born sometime in mid 2007, and driven largely by marketing and service offerings from big corporate players like Google, IBM and Amazon.

Interview with open video conference presenters and attendees on open video at the Open Video Conference 2009 in NYC.