The grants focus on improving grid resiliency during a cyberattack and speeding recovery.
The Energy Department announced a roughly $33 million investment Tuesday in seven projects aimed at securing the electric grid against cyberattacks, physical attacks and weather disasters.
The projects are designed both to make grid systems more secure against cyberattacks and to improve their ability to withstand a cyberattack, according to a department fact sheet.
(3Ders.org) The rapid advance of 3D printing technology means that hybrid-material wind turbine blades complete with metal mesh inserts are no longer the stuff of imagination. These energy savers with “sci-fi-level” performance could become reality in as soon as two years. Philip Totaro of Totaro & Associates, “The greatest challenge for wind turbine blade structural and manufacturing engineers is to implement the idealized performance and noise mitigated designs of aerodynamics engineers,” explains Totaro. “Limitations of previous generations of manufacturing technology and the reliance on lower cost materials have limited the type of spar/shear web structures which could be utilized.” But 3D printing could be about to change all that, Totaro says.
The sun fired off yet another powerful solar flare yesterday (Sept. 10), its seventh in seven days.
The flare, which peaked at 12:06 EDT (1606 GMT), covered North and South America in high-energy light. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) released a statement that warned of strong, high-frequency radio blackouts and navigation-system disruption, potentially lasting up to an hour.
Like the six other flares observed since Sept. 4, this one came from a sunspot known as Active Region (AR) 2673, which is currently turning away from Earth and will soon be out of sight.
At the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre on Wednesday (Sept. 6), 16 partners gathered to launch the EuroEXA project, which invests €20 million over three-and-a-half years into exascale-focused research and development.
Led by the Horizon 2020 program, EuroEXA picks up the banner of a triad of partner projects — ExaNeSt, EcoScale and ExaNoDe — building on their work to develop a complete HPC system based on ARM Cortex processors and Xilinx Ultrascale FPGAs. The goal is to deploy an energy-efficient petaflops system by 2020 and lay a path to achieve exascale capability in the 2022–23 timeframe.
All told, the European Commission is planning a €50 million investment for the EuroEXA group of projects, spanning “research, innovation and action across applications, system software, hardware, networking, storage, liquid cooling and data centre technologies.”
http://gamesforchange.org/festival2012
How to “Get Better”: Approaches to LGBTQ-relevant Video Games
Presented by: Robert Yang
Given today’s attempts at LGBTQ outreach and advocacy, e.g. the “It Gets Better” campaign, it makes sense to explore more queer-relevant content through engaging and thoughtful video game design. So how do we get LGBTQ content “right”? For that matter, what does “LGBTQ content” even entail? What are the ways that video games imply notions of gender and sexuality through their graphics, sounds, interfaces, and mechanics? Listeners will take away design techniques to integrate socially relevant content into games, ethical concerns in doing so, and a very brief overview of LGBTQ issues.
Crafting Science Learning Games that People Will Play — Two Voices, One Goal.
Presented by: Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Scott Kirk
Jodi and Scott will tell a tale of woe, hope, and compassion about co-developing educational games. With a dual mission, entertainment and learning, the games developed by EdGE and GameGurus are walking the fine line of research and commercial development. The vastly different perspectives of an educational researcher and a commercial game designer present challenges, tension, grief, and ultimately opportunities for new types of games that can make a difference.
Jodi will explain the need for grounding the game in solid pedagogical design so that research measurements will be effective and convincing to funders and educational systems. Scott tries to fit those constraints into the world of development timelines, budgets, and profit margins. It all works when both teams have the creative spark, worthy goals, and a lot of energy.
If coding games is the new literacy, then… presented by: idit harel caperton.
Posted in energy
