Oren Gershtein from one of Israel’s leading high-tech incubators
An excellent interview with Oren Gershtein: incubating innovation CEO at Van Leer Ventures Jerusalem, one of Israel’s leading high-technology incubators.
Some comments from my examiners’ reports
- “The topic of the thesis is of great interest to the NMR community.”
- “The work presented is at the interface between physics, chemistry and electronics.”
- “The work presented is original, highly interesting, well documented, and represents an important step for the low-field NMR community.”
- “This thesis demonstrated wide ranging research capability covering electronics, physics, biophysics and chemistry.”
- “The thesis is well written, well referenced and the standard of presentation is high.”
- “It presents a very large volume of work spanning technical areas from RF design to NMR measurements and analysis on selected materials.”
- “The work shows clear evidence of not only good electronic design, construction and testing skills, but also solid scientific experimental design, method and careful interpretation of results.”
- “The candidate is clearly aware of previous work in the field and appropriate references to existing work in the field.”
- “The thesis was well written and the absolute minimum number of typographic and related errors was encountered.”
- “The end result of the work appears to be not only a portable NMR system that is a significant improvement on the system that the candidate started with, but also a huge amount of measurement data that produces some interesting results.”
Double win for Massey at science awards
From here.
Massey University professors have won two of the four medals presented at last night’s New Zealand Association of Scientists Awards in Wellington.
Science sector set for high-tech transformation
From here.
The Government will boost investment in the science sector to transform Industrial Research Limited (IRL) into an advanced technology institute, which will function as the ‘high-tech HQ’ for New Zealand, Prime Minister John Key announced today.
“New Zealand’s world-leading performance in the primary sectors has been off the back of world-class science, much of which is publicly-funded,” says Mr Key.
“The Government’s number one priority, as recommended in the Powering Innovation report released today, is to transform and grow IRL by focusing it on supporting industry development.
“The high-tech manufacturing and services sectors have great potential to achieve the same cutting-edge reputation – but they need the support and expertise of technology-focused research to grow, to increase exports and ramp up productivity.
“High-tech sectors could contribute substantially more to the economy than they currently do. We already have successful companies in this sector, particularly in areas like ICT, biotechnology and medical technology, but we need more of them and we need them to be bigger,” says Mr Key.
“Over the next five years, we will effectively double the size and capability of IRL, transforming it into an advanced technology institute with up to 700 staff and with a far greater reach than at present.”
Just finished a short-term contract
I have just completed a 4 month short-term contract for a small company. This stint back inside the electronics industry slotted very nicely inside the time window between submitting my PhD thesis and my PhD oral examination. My thanks go to my former employer — it was an excellent 4 months!
I cannot talk about the contents of the job as I signed an NDA. However I do have a few thoughts on the state of electronics design now compared to the state of electronics design 10+ years ago when I quit my job and began university studies.
In a nutshell, electronics parts (or components) are now significantly smaller, cheaper, more integrated, faster, and lower power than they were 10 years ago. Micro-controllers have become commodity items, available at very low prices in vast numbers of different configurations, with some even available on auction sites such as TradeMe in New Zealand. Software tools have become more sophisticated, although the difference appears to be far less marked than for hardware, and the GNU GCC compiler and tool-chain is now available for many different embedded platforms.
Breadboarding and building prototype circuit boards was once a slow and cumbersome process, but is hardly required now for the first prototyping round as so many core components are available as kits, complete with software. The speeds time to market considerably.
Wireless everything is almost a given, and little RF knowledge and expertise is required to implement inter-device wireless comms or wireless connections to the internet.
What does all this mean for me as I ponder where electronics design is headed. The rate-of-change even over the last decade is almost scary. I stepped out of the room, waited a while, then stepped back in again, and the room appears very different. Perhaps the most important meta-idea that I took away from this job, aside from crash-courses on lots of new technologies, is where I feel I want to go post-PhD. I had come to find electronics a little boring years ago, but coupled with math, physics and biophysics, the game changes. The fact is, I can do far more now than I could previously. And if I did decide to re-enter the electronics industry, my focus would be primarily on interesting science-engineering interfaces, rather than the purely on the (slightly boring) electronics implementations. I have lots of ideas sitting at this interface and only time will tell whether any of them come to fruition.
The Rising Value of a Science Degree
STEM = science, technology, engineering and math
From here:
If you’re trying to figure out what to study in college, a new report suggests you would do well choosing a major in science, technology, engineering or math.
The report, based on Census and National Science Foundation data analyzed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shows that professions that depend heavily on skills learned in these fields are the second-fastest growing occupational group in the United States, after health care.
While traditional fields like computer engineering and laboratory research make up about 5 percent of the work force, demand for science, technology, engineering and math skills is spreading far beyond, to occupations in manufacturing, utilities, transportation and mining, as well as to sales and management. As a result, the study, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith and Michelle Melton, argues that there is a shortage of so-called STEM workers.
The scientific and technological disciplines have “become the common currency in the labor market,” Mr. Carnevale said. With more companies concentrating on technology, “if you’re going to sell in a technical world you’ve got to be credible,” even to be in sales, he said. “You can’t sell to an engineer unless an engineer thinks you’re also an engineer.”
With a shortage of people trained in such fields, many technology and scientific companies in the United States are forced to recruit from abroad, the study’s authors say.
My CV is here :-)
Do People with Doctoral Degrees get Jobs in New Zealand Post Study?
From here.
By field of study, graduates in ‘Natural and physical sciences’ were the least likely to be in employment in New Zealand four years after they last studied (with a New Zealand-based employment rate of 57 percent), while graduates in ‘Society and culture’ were the most likely to be employed in New Zealand (New Zealand-based employment rate of 65 percent).
Paul Callaghan’s new NMR book
(
)Taking the reader through the underlying principles of molecular translational dynamics, this book outlines the ways in which magnetic resonance, through the use of magnetic field gradients, can reveal those dynamics.
The measurement of diffusion and flow, over different length and time scales, provides unique insight regarding fluid interactions with porous materials, as well as molecular organization in soft matter and complex fluids.
The book covers both time and frequency domain methodologies, as well as advances in scattering and diffraction methods, multidimensional exchange and correlation experiments and orientational correlation methods ideal for studying anisotropic environments.
At the heart of these new methods resides the ubiquitous spin echo, a phenomenon whose discovery underpins nearly every major development in magnetic resonance methodology.
Measuring molecular translational motion does not require high spectral resolution and so finds application in new NMR technologies concerned with ‘outside the laboratory’ applications, in geophysics and petroleum physics, in horticulture, in food technology, in security screening and in environmental monitoring.
- Provides a comprehensive explanation of the principles of molecular translational motion measurement using NMR spin echo methods.
- Incorporates a detailed introduction to the principles of NMR spectroscopy, as well as a primer on relevant thermal processes and fluid dynamics.
- Written by one of the world’s leading experts in this field, a scientist responsible for many of the leading developments and discoveries associated with Pulsed Gradient Spin Echo NMR.
- Clearly written in a pedagogical style with introductory essays at the start of each chapter, detailed mathematical derivations, and over 250 figures.
- Targetted at a branch of magnetic resonance which is rapidly growing, and which is finding new applications in chemical engineering, medical MRI, petrophysics, environmental science, food technology.
- Relevant to new technologies based on portable and low field NMR.
Available from Amazon: Translational Dynamics and Magnetic Resonance
Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA
This is hardly new news for America or New Zealand, and to many of us (scientists and engineers) it is blatantly obvious.
“So the decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.”
Apparently this is not so obvious to others.
Full article online at Forbes here.
Installing Elsevier’s document class for TeXShop
To install the Elsevier document class, do the following: [Read More...]
