Building Bigger, Better Wind Turbines

Wind power is one of the fastest-growing forms of power generation in the United States, with more capacity added onshore than coal and nuclear generation combined over the past four years. But to sustain that high growth rate into the next decade, the industry will have to start tapping offshore wind resources, creating a need for wind turbines that are larger, lower-maintenance, and deliver more power with less weight.

To support research in this area, the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $7.5 million to six projects, each aiming to develop advanced drivetrains for wind turbines up to 10 megawatts in size. Five of the projects use direct-drive, or gearless, drivetrain technology to increase reliability, and at least two use superconductivity technologies for increased efficiencies and lower weight.

Current designs can't be scaled up economically. Most of the more than 25,000 wind turbines deployed across the United States have a power rating of three megawatts or less and contain complex gearbox systems. The gearboxes match the slow speed of the turbine rotor (between 15 to 20 rotations per minute) to the 2,000 rotations per minute required by their generators. Higher speeds allow for more compact and less expensive generators, but conventional gearboxes?a complex interaction of wheels and bearings?need regular maintenance and are prone to failure, especially at higher speeds.

On land, where turbines are more accessible, gearbox maintenance issues can be tolerated. In rugged offshore environments, the cost of renting a barge and sending crews out to fix or maintain a wind-ravaged machine can be prohibitive. "A gearbox that isn't there is the most reliable gearbox," says Fort Felker, direct of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's wind technology center.

To increase reliability and reduce maintenance costs, a number of companies?among them Enercon and Siemens of Germany, France's Alstom and China's Goldwind Global?have developed direct-drive or "gearless" drivetrains. In such a setup, the rotor shaft is attached directly to the generator, and they both turn at the same speed. But this introduces a new challenge: increased weight.

To achieve the power output of a comparable gearbox-based system, a direct-drive system must have a larger internal diameter that increases the radius?and therefore the speed?at which its magnets rotate around coils to generate current. This also means greater reliance on increasingly costly rare-earth metals used to make permanent magnets.

Kiruba Haran, manager of the electric machines lab at GE Global Research, one recipient of the DOE funding, says direct-drive systems get disproportionately heavier as their power rating increases. A four-megawatt generator might weight 85 tons, but at eight megawatts, it would approach 200 tons.

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Perry Breaks With a Fellow Texan: Bush

But in recent years, Mr. Perry has broken politically with Mr. Bush, questioning his credentials as a fiscal conservative, accusing him of going on ?a big-government binge? and playing down some of Mr. Bush?s accomplishments in Texas in light of his own.

Mr. Perry?s public statements exposed a long-simmering rivalry that had been little known outside the political fraternity here but underscores the rightward drift of the Republican Party since Mr. Bush was president. More acutely, Mr. Perry?s criticism holds potential peril and benefit for him should he decide to mount a presidential campaign, allowing him to establish an identity distinct from Mr. Bush but risking a guerrilla campaign against him by the former president?s inner circle.

Mr. Perry, who aides say will make a decision within weeks, has been meeting around the country with potential fund-raisers, went to Colorado last week for a gathering of prominent conservative rainmakers held by members of the Koch family, which helped finance the Tea Party movement. An inevitable question is whether Republicans will be willing to nominate another Texas governor so closely connected to the last one.

On government spending, immigration and education, Mr. Perry?s criticisms of Mr. Bush have given him cachet with conservatives, especially with Tea Party voters who blame the former president for allowing spending and the reach of government to grow rapidly.

Those criticisms have burnished the Perry image as less prone to ideological compromise or a fuzzy ?compassionate? brand of conservatism, an appealing trait to those Republican primary voters seeking purity in their nominee. And they have helped Mr. Perry escape the shadow of Mr. Bush, whose sponsorship, along with that of his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, was critical to Mr. Perry?s rise.

But it antagonized Mr. Bush?s old team, many of whom endorsed Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in her unsuccessful primary challenge to Mr. Perry last year. Some are indicating that they will oppose Mr. Perry should he join the presidential race with an anti-Bush message.

One close associate of the former president, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid a personal confrontation with the governor, warned Mr. Perry against establishing his own conservative bona fides by criticizing Mr. Bush, saying, ?If you?re really trying to be the nominee and want to go the distance, you just don?t want the former president of the United States and his people working against you.?

Another, speaking anonymously as well, said, ?He?s going to need all the help he can get from all the Republicans he can muster, so he ought to be prudent about that.?

The rivalry has become lore here in the state capital, at times bordering on urban legend. ?An eight-foot alligator in the sewer,? said Mr. Perry?s chief political strategist, David Carney. Emphasizing that the two men were friends with more similarities than differences, Mr. Carney said, ?They are in the same church, different pews.?

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Perry would be interviewed for this article, and people close to both said the rivalry existed far more between their aides than between them personally.

The relationship between the camps includes a rich mix of political differences, class distinctions, loyalty questions and perceived slights of campaigns past. And it is a uniquely Texas story, opening in the Western dust bowl where both emerged ? Mr. Perry as a conservative Democratic state lawmaker from a modest farming family and Mr. Bush as a failed Republican Congressional candidate of famous New England stock.

Mr. Bush had returned to his hometown, Midland, in 1975, to break into the oil business, after his years at Phillips Academy, Yale and Harvard Business School ? time away from the state that Mr. Perry?s close associates brought up frequently in interviews. Mr. Perry returned to his struggling family farm in Paint Creek roughly two years later, after graduating from Texas A&M and serving as a captain in the Air Force.

Successfully running for the Texas House of Representatives in 1984, he won early attention as a dogged campaigner who flew himself to his own events in a beat-up propeller plane.

In 1989, Mr. Rove, already a powerful Texas political consultant, helped persuade Mr. Perry to join the Republican Party and run for agriculture commissioner.

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Mozilla's pdf.js version 0.2: sample PDF now renders in HTML5, JavaScript

Mozilla's pdf.js project has reached its first milestone: a "pixel-perfect rendering" of a sample PDF (a paper on Mozilla's Tracemonkey JavaScript engine). Well, perfect in one specific browser and OS combination.

The pdf.js project currently produces different results depending on the browser and OS you are using. If you're running a Firefox nightly on a Windows 7 machine, where the browser can use Direct2D and DirectWrite, the result is perfection (assuming you ignore a bug in DirectWrite's font hinting). The paper isn't rendered so well on other platforms, nor on older versions Firefox. It's even worse in other browsers.

Nevertheless, some serious progress has been made, considering that the sample file contains formatted text, graphics, tables, and graphical diagrams. As a result, the project has been bumped to version 0.2.

The pdf.js project was announced last month, with the goal of not having to rely on plugins like Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader to display PDF files. Instead, the aim is to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

The group will start by making a Firefox extension available to interested users that enables inline PDF rendering using pdf.js. The next step will be to ship pdf.js with Firefox. The team hopes this will result in a substantial usability and security improvement for Mozilla's users since pdf.js uses only safe web languages and doesn't contain any native code pieces attackers could exploit.

Last but not least, pdf.js will hopefully turn into a community driven and governed open-source project. It will be used in Firefox, but it will ideally also be ported to other browser and opened up for use in other applications. The project pdf.js is being licensed under a very liberal 3-clause BSD license and external contributors are welcome to join.

"We chose the pixel-perfect rendering of this paper as our first milestone because getting there required solving some hard problems, and it's easier to focus attention on one target," the pdf.js team said in a statement. "We want to prove that a competitive HTML5 PDF renderer really is feasible, and not just fun talk. Many more hard problems remain, but we haven't come across any so far that are so much harder than what we've already solved to make us rethink the viability of pdf.js."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44554-mozillas-pdfjs-version-02-sample-pdf-now-renders-in-html5-javascript.html

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Gaming 28 - Revisiting the Village

A Futures Market for Computer Security

Information security researchers from academia, industry, and the U.S. intelligence community are collaborating to build a pilot "prediction market" capable of anticipating major information security events before they occur.

A prediction market is similar to a regular stock exchange, except the "stocks" are simple statements that the exchange's members are encouraged to evaluate. Traders will buy and sell "shares" of a stock based on the strength of their confidence about the future outcome?with an overall goal of increasing the value of their portfolios, which will in turn earn them some sort of financial reward. Traders may choose to buy or sell additional shares of a stock, and that buying and selling activity pushes the stock price up or down, just as in a real market.

Some of the stocks being considering cover a few months, such as: "The volume of spam e-mail will increase by 10 percent in the third quarter of 2011." Others will ask participants to gauge the likelihood of far-off events, such as the chance that the U.S. House of Representatives will pass a bill with "cyber" and "security" in its title in the first session of the 112th Congress, or whether broadly used encryption algorithms will be defeated within the next 24 months.

Greg Shannon, chief scientist of the CERT program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, who is involved with the project, says the purpose is to provide actionable data.

"If you're Verizon, and you're trying to pre-position resources, you might want to have some visibility over the horizon about the projected prevalence of mobile malware," Shannon said. "That's something they'd like to have an informed opinion about by leveraging the wisdom of the security community."

Predictions markets have effectively forecasted all manner of events and trends, from the success of sports teams to the sales of new products. The pilot project will rely on software and services provided by Consensus Point, a Nashville-based company that has helped to build employee-driven prediction markets for several major companies, including General Electric, Best Buy, and Qualcomm. Best Buy's prediction market?called "TagTrade"?is designed to give management an early indicator of which new products or ideas are likely to succeed, and whether specific new stores will open on time.

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Gaming 28 - Revisiting the Village

Google to kill off Blogger, Picasa brands in time for Google launch

Google intends to retire several non-Google name brands, such as Blogger and Picasa, in the next four to six weeks. The search giant plans to rename them as Google products, unifying the company's brand in time for the public launch of Google+, according to two sources familiar with the matter cited by Mashable.

Blogger and Picasa aren't going away ? they are two very popular Google products after all ? instead, Google intends to rename them as Google Photos and Google Blogs, respectively. Several other Google brands will also be likely affected by the move, but it's not yet clear which ones.

YouTube will not, however, be rebranded. The technology giant shut down Google Videos, Google's answer to YouTube before it gave up and bought the video sharing service, in May 2010.

This rebranding effort from Google is hardly the first time we're seeing such a move. Google acquired JotSpot in October 2006 and rebranded it as Google Sites in February 2008. In July 2007, Google acquired VOIP platform GrandCentral and relaunched it as Google Voice in March 2009.

Blogger and Picasa were also Google acquisitions, although both companies have owned by Google for far longer. Blogger was acquired in February 2003 and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world. Picasa was acquired in July 2004.

The rebranding will likely upset some existing customers, but Google wants to do it anyway so that it can completely integrate both services into Google+. The company launched the social network as a field trial last month, with an obvious attempt to take on Facebook and Twitter.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44552-google-to-kill-off-blogger-picasa-brands-in-time-for-google-launch.html

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Perry Breaks With a Fellow Texan: Bush

But in recent years, Mr. Perry has broken politically with Mr. Bush, questioning his credentials as a fiscal conservative, accusing him of going on ?a big government binge? and playing down some of Mr. Bush?s accomplishments in Texas in light of his own.

Mr. Perry?s public statements exposed a long-simmering rivalry that had been little known outside of the political fraternity here but underscores the rightward drift of the Republican Party since Mr. Bush was president. More acutely, Mr. Perry?s criticism holds potential peril and benefit for him should he decide to mount a presidential campaign, allowing him to establish an identity distinct from Mr. Bush but risking a guerrilla campaign against him by the former president?s inner circle.

Mr. Perry, whose aides say will make a decision within weeks, has been meeting around the country with potential fund-raisers, and last week went to Colorado for a gathering of prominent conservative rainmakers held by members of the Koch family, which helped finance the Tea Party movement. An inevitable question is whether Republicans will be willing to nominate another Texas governor so closely connected to the last one.

On government spending, immigration and education, Mr. Perry?s criticisms of Mr. Bush have given him cachet with conservatives, especially with Tea Party voters who blame the former president for allowing spending and the reach of government to grow rapidly.

Those criticisms have burnished the Perry image as less prone to ideological compromise or a fuzzy ?compassionate? brand of conservatism, an appealing trait to those Republican primary voters seeking purity in their nominee. And they have helped Mr. Perry escape the shadow of Mr. Bush, whose sponsorship, along with that of his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, was critical to Mr. Perry?s rise.

But it antagonized Mr. Bush?s old team, many of whom endorsed Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in her unsuccessful primary challenge to Mr. Perry last year. Some are indicating that they will oppose Mr. Perry should he join the presidential race with an anti-Bush message.

One close associate of the former president, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid a personal confrontation with the governor, warned Mr. Perry against establishing his own conservative bona fides by criticizing Mr. Bush, saying, ?If you?re really trying to be the nominee and want to go the distance, you just don?t want the former president of the United States and his people working against you.? Another, speaking anonymously as well, said, ?He?s going to need all the help he can get from all the Republicans he can muster, so he ought to be prudent about that.?

The rivalry has become lore in the state capital, at times bordering on urban legend. ?An eight-foot alligator in the sewer,? said Mr. Perry?s chief political strategist, David Carney. Stressing that the two men were friends with more similarities than differences, Mr. Carney said, ?They are in the same church, different pews.?

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Perry would be interviewed for this article, and people close to both said the rivalry existed far more between their aides than between them personally.

The relationship between the camps includes a rich mix of political differences, class distinctions, loyalty questions and perceived slights of campaigns past. And it is a uniquely Texan story, opening in the Western dust bowl where both emerged ? Mr. Perry as a conservative Democratic state lawmaker from a modest farming family, Mr. Bush as a failed Republican Congressional candidate of famous New England stock.

Mr. Bush had returned to his hometown of Midland in 1975, to break into the oil business, after his years at Phillips Academy, Yale and Harvard Business School ? time away from the state that Mr. Perry?s close associates brought up frequently in interviews. Mr. Perry returned to his struggling family farm in Paint Creek roughly two years later, after graduating from Texas A&M and serving as a captain in the Air Force.

Successfully running for the Texas House of Representatives in 1984, he won early attention as a dogged campaigner who flew himself to his own events in a beat-up propeller plane.

In 1989, Mr. Rove, already a powerful Texas political consultant, helped persuade Mr. Perry to join the Republican Party and run as agriculture commissioner.

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A Busy Romney Sets the Pace

The message seemed to be ?I?m energized? as he zipped to and fro with a bedraggled group of photographers and reporters in his wake. There he was, signing the shirt of Bobby Grogis, 11, (?Awesome!? the lad exclaimed) or whipping supporters into a rousing rendition of ?Hooray for Romney,? adding, ?This is the song they sang during my dad?s campaign, and it worked.? (Mr. Romney?s father, George Romney, was the governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968.)

But it was one hot and sometimes muggy day, and by the time Mr. Romney finished his first parade, in Amherst, his blue Boston Red Sox shirt and brown pants were soaked. ?Maybe next time I won?t wear my long underwear,? he joked to his supporters.

Not to worry, though. By the time Mr. Romney arrived here in Laconia, he was in a fresh blue shirt and khakis and could pose with confidence beside JoAnn Marchant, who was wearing a tiara and a ?Mrs. Woman New Hampshire? sash.

As he came to the end of the parade route after 4 p.m., he was even ready for more. ?Where?s the next parade?? he asked. But there were no more, so he could go home.

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A Busy Romney Sets the Pace

The message seemed to be ?I?m energized? as he zipped to and fro with a bedraggled group of photographers and reporters in his wake. There he was, signing the shirt of Bobby Grogis, 11, (?Awesome!? the lad exclaimed) or whipping supporters into a rousing rendition of ?Hooray for Romney,? adding, ?This is the song they sang during my dad?s campaign, and it worked.? (Mr. Romney?s father, George Romney, was the governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968.)

But it was one hot and sometimes muggy day, and by the time Mr. Romney finished his first parade, in Amherst, his blue Boston Red Sox shirt and brown pants were soaked. ?Maybe next time I won?t wear my long underwear,? he joked to his supporters.

Not to worry, though. By the time Mr. Romney arrived here in Laconia, he was in a fresh blue shirt and khakis and could pose with confidence beside JoAnn Marchant, who was wearing a tiara and a ?Mrs. Woman New Hampshire? sash.

As he came to the end of the parade route after 4 p.m., he was even ready for more. ?Where?s the next parade?? he asked. But there were no more, so he could go home.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7efa111f170c34486b072c085e55855f

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