Silicon Microphotonics!! They use germanium embedded in silicon to scale our way to manage energy in communications… According with the experts; “ In the time that it takes you to read this sentence, today’s fastest computer, operating at on PetaFLOPs (quadrillion operations per second), will have been able to transmit the text of every word spoken by every person on the planet from the beginning of time to the present.”

5 Exabytes (billion gigabytes) to 2000AD +487 Exabytes 2000-2009 AD + 2500 Exabytes/yr by 2012

That is Scaling Information Technology in a way not expected or imaging by many. In the near future for large volume commercial applications, transceiver chips will stand alone from signal processing chips; and they will become monolithically integrated thereafter for chip-to-chip.

The market will emerge because the transceiver is the near term driver for silicon microphotonics. These transceivers have relevant attributes like aggregate data rate, power consumption, size and cost.

Silicon is the only material platform capable of supporting a standard cross-market, high-volume transceiver in the long term. And last, the architectural changes in interconnection that increase network dimensionality will trigger disruptive change in processor technology. Lionel Kimerling from MIT, USA said that at the congress.

Quality, Education…

The quality of a service is measured by meeting the costumer’s requirements; usually the simplest and least costly design is the best… The outcome in education is the ability of the student to demonstrate the knowledge acquired mostly by answering questions in tests, doing projects, and doing presentations. Education is one of the most complex services to deliver, that means among other things, that the measure of quality and its reliability have been the attention of many of us… We test ourselves, we test other people… the ways we have been using are standardized and proven designs.
We as populations, enter in Normal Curves, different ones. One person can have different curves according to the profile made through a personal timeline, abilities and interests, health and environment.
If we can tailor education with the curves we have of each person,  deliver to that person and adjust according to the progress made, then a human being can evolve learning timelessly and the limits are open…
According to the progress made is a very general approach because our brain jumps, doing little jumps sometimes, other times doing huge leaps and then suddenly a person can just get out of one of the characterized curves and go to other ones, like the ones we defined as a selected group of fine brains. Other times it goes to a group with less ability, and that, sometimes can be an unhappy event.
Why less ability? Sometimes people need to fit in a group that is less talented because the emotional coefficient of intelligence is as powerful as the ones we are used to measure the other type of intelligences, telling the brain to fit in the group as life goes on for the time being ( A very old survival skill). Other times it goes to less ability because of physical conditions like injuries or health debacles. Other possibility is that the emotional coefficient goes out of tune, in other words have a chemistry unbalance, and the brain undoes connections or cannot connect during the learning process; a person can forget the knowledge acquired once, or being in such emotional distress that learning is the least of its interests, and that, I have seen it in ALL ages. The learning curve of each person is unique, but again we can standardize it this time for the sake of comfort manage.
Tolerance is the permissible variation in the size of a quality characteristic. The question is how much do we need to tight a service like a standardized education? It is not only one quality characteristic to measure in any process or service but it can go right now as far as all kind of characteristics for the service being measured and enclosed in the nine dimensions of quality; performance, features, conformance, reliability, durability, service, response, aesthetics, and reputation. To determine which service characteristics are critical and estimate their tolerance we can use several techniques like design experiments to help define the optimal characteristics to measure. Critical tolerances should be established in conjunction with the process capability. If the service does not have the capability to deliver the service to a client then the final quality of the service in this case, learning cannot be accomplished. No design is perfect, continuous improvement and reevaluation are to be made if we want to ensure the service is still valid. Also it is costly and a waste of time to try to ensure that 100% of large amount of persons are going to learn with a standardized model of education that supports statements like “Sorry, it didn’t work for you”. So right now there is a normal curve of people between 18 and 24 years old that are enthusiastically engaged with high probability of success!!! In online education!!! And that, is a great accomplishment!! In time there will be a critical mass of humanity that can ensure that everybody reaches an amazing potential. There is a lot of work to be done… One of the wonderful things about mankind is that we learn unexpected things in unexpected ways, and we can apply that knowledge in unexpected fields, put it together in amazing inventions, in an almost unexpected time… like Udacity who is giving us the opportunity to the poor, the minorities and the isolated ones to be part of an amazing experiment in education!