Imperial Valley News Center
Big Thinking About Big Data
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- Written by Wallace Ravven
Berkeley, California - To Michael Jordan, the smart way to extract and analyze key information embedded in mountains of “Big Data” is to ignore most of it. Instead, zero in on collections of small amounts of data.
The state, the drought and El Niño: It’s complicated
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- Written by Anne Brice
Berkeley, California - Just last year, researchers were saying there was no end in sight for California’s recent drought. During the past four years, the driest the state has been in a half-century - reservoirs and lake levels plummeted, leaves on giant trees grew brittle, plants shriveled and groundwater was depleted through excessive pumping for agricultural use.
Self-stacking nanogrids
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- Written by Larry Hardesty
Cambridge, Massachusetts - Since the 1960s, computer chips have been built using a process called photolithography. But in the past five years, chip features have gotten smaller than the wavelength of light, which has required some ingenious modifications of photolithographic processes. Keeping up the rate of circuit miniaturization that we’ve come to expect - as predicted by Moore’s Law - will eventually require new manufacturing techniques.
Physicists control electrons at femtosecond timescales
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- Written by Jennifer Chu
Cambridge, Massachusetts - When you shine a light on a conducting surface like silicon or graphene, that light jump-starts certain electrons into high-energy states and kicks off a cascade of interactions that happens faster than the blink of an eye. Within just a few femtoseconds - a thousand trillionth of a second - these energized electrons can scatter among other electrons like balls on a billiard table, quickly dissipating energy in an ultrafast process known as thermalization.
Diagnosing depression before it starts
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- Written by Anne Trafton
Cambridge, Massachusetts - A new brain imaging study from MIT and Harvard Medical School may lead to a screen that could identify children at high risk of developing depression later in life.
Sensible clean technology subsidies
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- Written by Peter Dizikes
Cambridge, Massachusetts - Governments often offer subsidies to consumers for clean-technology products, from home solar panels to electric vehicles. But what are the right levels of subsidy, and how should they be calculated? As a new paper co-authored by MIT researchers shows, governments can easily make subsidies too low when they ignore a basic problem: Consumer demand for these products is usually highly uncertain.
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