Infotrade

Rapid Digitization Creating Haves, Have Nots As IT capabilities quickly improve and IT costs decrease, machines do more work; productivity and wealth grow, but employment levels and median incomes stagnate and fall, said Brynjolfsson, who co-authored the book "Race Against the Machine" with Andrew McAfee. "Digital Technology has changed very rapidly, but organizations and [worker] skills simply aren't keeping pace. As a result, millions of people are being left behind. Their incomes and jobs are being destroyed, leaving them worse off than they were before the digital revolution," he said. "There's no economic law that says technology has to help everybody. Tech progress has been helping parts of the company, but not other parts of the economy." Rising Productivity, Shrinking Employment As we continue our rebound from "The Great Recession," unemployment rates remain high and median incomes are stagnant -– if not shrinking...

Researchers have developed a solar cell made entirely of carbon, an inexpensive substitute for the pricey materials used in conventional solar panels.   The Bao group's all-carbon solar cell consists of a photoactive layer, which absorbs sunlight, sandwiched between two electrodes. (Photo: Mark Shwartz / Stanford University)     in Share 4   October 31, 2012  By Mark Shwartz  Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today. The results are scheduled to be published in the online edition of the journal  ACS Nano  this week.  "Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost," said study senior author Zhenan Bao , a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a working solar cell that has all of the components made of carbon...

1.  Aerogel Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties. 2.  Carbon nanotubes Carbon nanotubes are long chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp 2  bond, even stronger than the sp 3 ...