I know it's a supply and demand problem, but an overabundance of supply for internships in certain fields shouldn't allow companies to accept unpaid interns. This can make it very hard for people without significant financial support from their family to enter these fields.

Engineering students in the US have pretty good internship opportunities which are frequently paid well over minimum wage and if they like you it can lead to job offers and help young engineers build their professional network.

That other industries might not even pay their interns seems very wrong to me. Companies aren't in the business of training interns for charity so the company must derive some benefit, therefore the interns should be paid at least minimum wage. Even if the work output is low the company can use internships as a recruitment and assessment method for hiring new full-time workers.

MOVPE/MOCVD growth methods are not inherently limited to small chips that are centimeters in size. Researchers might be growing smaller samples during R&D because of limited reactor sizes, and the expense and difficulty of handling large wafers. Once the technology is demonstrated on small wafers the design can be scaled up for growth on larger wafers.

Commercial MOCVD reactors may grow on dozens of small wafers simultaneously in a single chamber, and the wafer sizes can also be increased. Commercial LEDs are grown by MOCVD on 6" wafers, maybe even 8" by now I'm not sure.

The paper that I have next to my toilet doesn't have anything written on it...

What you say would be true for a low alititude orbit.

According to Tom Murphy's analysis: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/ a satellite in geosynchronous orbit is so far enough away that it is only shaded for a very short period of time per day, and then only when it is near the equinox so that the earth is directly between the sun and the satellite, resulting in about 0.7% shaded time on average.

Or course at the end of the day the economics still don't seem to work out for solar power unless launch costs drop dramatically.

I've been having the same problem using Chrome on Windows, so that's not going to fix it yet.

The gist of your example is about a person using the 5th amendment to successfully avoid prosecution for what is considered a crime in their jurisdiction. This is possible if the person is so careful that the only incriminating evidence is their testimony or encrypted data. You happen to use the example of somebody breaking a law that you consider unjust. However this isn't a good argument since it can equally well apply to a careful person breaking a law that you consider just such as the laws against murder.

The 5th amendment is still a good thing but your argument doesn't really do anything to support it. Your post is really just complaining about certain laws against certain sexual activities that exist in some jurisdictions.

I might even go so far as to say that your argument actually describes a necessary drawback of the 5th Amendment which allows a very careful person to get away with a crime. But this drawback is more than balanced out by the important societal benefits that the 5th Amendment brings to the guilty and innocent alike.

It's not just "more difficult", it's scientifically impossible to capture all of the power from temperature differentials. The maximum possible efficiency of such a heat engine is described by Carnot's Theorem and is (1-Tc/Th) where Tc and Th are the absolute temperatures of the cold and hot reservoir. So if 100MJ of heat flows from a hot water reservoir into a cold water reservoir through a heat engine you can only capture a single digit percentage of that energy for the temperature differences under discussion

So taking a 25 degree heat difference as 275K cold water and 300K hot water then the optimum efficiency of the heat enginer is only 8.3%, and the actual efficiency will of course be less.

This printer would work extremely well for MEMS devices since the complex structures such sensors can now just be printed rather than deposited and etched over and over again in a microchip fab.

I'm not sure how printing MEMs devices serially is going to be faster than parallel mass production on 12" or 18" silicon wafers. Printing them is analogous to laboriously machining a part in a CNC mill compared to stamping in a forge. Photolithography and etching are pretty fast processes. Well, etching can be slow but it can be done very well in parallel to multiple large wafers at once so per-device it's fast. Doing the printing as a prototype for a standard MEMs process production run won't work well since the material properties would be different.

And you still need to connect your MEMs devices to a circuit, so now you have to do a tricky hybrid integration process to pick up your tiny polymer MEMs devices and connect them to a chip and package your now non-planar device. Plus you need to be able to selectively metallize some of your surface for many MEMs applications - not sure how you do that given that stereolithography "printing" works on photohardening polymers not metals.

Right now it can take weeks to make complete microchip with the current fabrication methods. The fabrication size of this printer isn't that great however since most of what is seen in the TFA looks to be around 100 nanometers compared to the 28 nanometers a modern fab can make. However, it would be great to have for rapid prototypes of processors or be used to make devices that fabricate well at large sizes like flash memory.

It's a big leap going from hardening a polymer to printing full complex semiconductor circuits with dielectrics and metal interconnect. Unless you're just thinking of using this stereolithography process to replace the standard mask-based planar photolithography in the foundry, which might be a valid point if the stereolithography is faster or cheaper than electron-beam lithography or ordering a mask of the dimensions that this machine is actually capable of. Right now e-beam lithography can do this but it's slow and expensive.

For something like this to be applied to semiconductor processing another thought would be construction of stamps for nano-imprint lithography. Printing them might be cheaper or faster than the standard techniques of e-beam or optical lithography and etching at least for short runs.

What I don't understand about the plastic bag banning movement is why they turn straight to banning instead of a more capitalistic approach: Mandated charges for plastic bags. Suppose the total cost of a bag is 5 cents, including production, transportation (which are swallowed by the store), and the negative environmental externality. If this cost is passed on fully to customers then they will understand the true cost of choosing a disposable plastic bag over a re-usable one and they can then make an informed economic choice on how to proceed, and many, but not all, will choose re-usable bags. Right now the costs are hidden so consumers take the convenient choice rather than the informed choice.

The average US house uses about 1.3kW averaged over time. Obviously it can spike up to several kW or over 10kW when lots of appliances and any heating/cooling is turned on, but the batteries can handle spikes in load.

Source: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

It's 10 kilowatt hours not kilowatts per hour. A kilowatt hour is a unit of energy which could supply a 1kW load for 10 hours, or equivalently a 10kW load for one hour, or any other load at power P [kW] for a time t [hours] where t=E/P where E is the energy in kilowatt hours. Power is the rate of consumption of energy, where a watt is 1 joule per second, and energy is what's actually needed to do a given unit of work.

kW/h is basically a nonsense unit which means 10,000 joules per second per hour. This would be a power "acceleration" unit if you actually wanted to use it. Calling kWh kilowatts per hour is a pretty common misunderstanding that you see a lot in the news so as a EE I feel compelled to clarify when possible.

I haven't seen the numbers, but I have heard that a big part of the cost difference between running STEM and humanities degree programs is the higher cost of the faculty. STEM professors, especially full professors at a research university, can command very high salaries outside of academia, so naturally the academic salaries have to be at least somewhat comparable in order to attract qualified candidates. Some of this salary will be payed for by grants and research contracts, endowed positions, and so on, but it is still an expense for the university.

I know you're probably joking, but Apple buys chipsets and analog hardware for their cellphones from companies like Qualcomm, Triquint, and so on, so I think that these researchers are safe.

For wide bandwidth modulation formats this is a bit of a pain since you need a very wideband, high current, power supply. so they are doing an A/theta modulator but trying to simplify the bias control on the PA to avoid that.

No, they're doing something more complicated than A/theta modulation (aka envelope tracking aka envelope elimination and restorataion aka ...). They are doing an outphasing amplifier which splits the original signal into two constant amplitude variable phase signals which will reproduce the original signal when they are recombined, but they are adding some envelope tracking elements to further improve efficiency since wideband combiners will absorb the differential section of the input signals as loss.

What I'm not clear on is why they are doing this when they have a predistortion loop anyway. a pure predistortion loop should be able to achieve very similar results without any need for the PA bias adjust. you can also do it with 1 PA instead of two.

A predistorter doesn't have much of anything to do with PA efficiency (the point of this MIT research), PD's are for linearity. High efficiency PA topologies typically take a hit to linearity. Fancy techniques like outphasing and envelope tracking are better than some but they still reduce linearity. Poor linearity means increased distortion. Distortion increases error rates in digital transmissions, and it also leads to signal leaking into adjacent signal bands, which isn't allowed in the tight cellular spectral environment. So they put a PD in there to linearize things a bit further. That's probably why they are using discrete bias levels instead of continuously variable - they can optimize their PD loop to work best in these four well-characterized states which gets most of the efficiency gain while making the linearization easier.

I don't know, looks like somebody's thesis to me. Doesn't look like it's particular practical. Also, first rule of looking at schemes like this. How much of that power they saved is being used in the more complicated digital circuitry. That's the reason you don't see PD loops in cell phones. It's a wash, you spend so much power analyzing the signal to do PD that you burn up the savings . Now if you have a 10W transmitter, PD makes lots of sense.

These are not fundamental limitations. It's making more and more sense as digital processing and DSP chips get faster, cheaper, and lower power. The point of research is to try to push the state of the art and it may not be "practical" when the research paper is hot off the press. If it's good enough then it will be practical some time down the road, and if it isn't good enough then it will be left aside as a lesson learned. Apparently the researchers think its good enough to found a startup company, so they're either foolish or they understand it better than you. Time will tell.