Indonesia's Nanotechnology Center
Indonesia will have a nanotechnology research center, said Dedy Mulyadi of the Ministry of Industry as quoted by
detik.com. The ministry has setup a roadmap for 15 years research and development in nanotechnology.
Indonesia has abundant natural resources like silica sand. The research should improve Indonesian industrial performance.
The plan will be discussed after the presidential election.
Labels: Indonesia, nanotechnology
ICR failed in Indonesian Election
An Indonesian news portal
article criticized the decision to choose Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) as a method to report the counts result from regional level to the central data center in Jakarta. It is reported that M. Shalahuddien of Indonesia Security Incident Responses Team on Internet Infrastructure (ID-SIRTII) mentioned some reason why this decision was already in the beginning criticized from many parties. With ICR the reports which are written by hand would be scanned and the characters would be recognized and stored automatically as digital data. However, given the fact that Indonesians have various style ofhand writings (even though the characters are Latin ones), the failure rate could be very high. Not yet accounted is that the power availability in many areas in Indonesia is not stable. It is said that 500 regional chapters of the Election Comittee were giving up already with their tired operators. As the result, the reporting is running very slow than expected.
This is the example how the clarity of the concept may influence the IT implementation.
The Election was held on April 9, in which 11,000 candidates fought for 550 seats in Indonesian parliament. Being voted also were regional representatives (similar with Senator in the US) and the provincial parliament legislatures.
Labels: election, ICR, Indonesia, IT
Post-silicon era in sight?
In recent edition of Technology Review online magazine, a group of MIT researchers are reported to claim that they are succeeded in making and operating
a new non-silicon transistor with only 60-nm gate length but with better performance than a 65-nm silicon transistor.
The transistor is made of indium-gallium-arsenide as substitute of silicon and indium-aluminium-arsenide as substitute of silicon-dioxide as gate material. Jesus del Alamo explained that wirh this compound material the Moore's law can be maintained in the future. Electrons can flow faster in the material than in silicon, provides a basis for better shrinking in smaller transistors.
The question is, how much is needed to convert the whole design and production lines which are currently used for silicon-based transistor?
