Post: #1

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/tee....html?vp=1

Quote:A California teen’s invention could potentially knock down cellphone-charging time to a superfast 20 seconds.
So far, the energy-storage device has powered only an LED light, but it has the potential to do much more.
The future certainly looks bright for 18-year-old Eesha Khare, who pocketed a $50,000 prize for the Young Scientist award from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz., for her tiny and possibly revolutionary device.
Khare sees the device as potentially powering car batteries, cellphones or any electronics that could use a rechargeable battery.
“My cellphone always dies,” Khare explained to NBC San Francisco, when asked what inspired her invention.
The supercapacitor, she explains on CBS San Francisco, is “basically an energy source device that can hold a lot of energy in a small amount of volume.”
The Harvard-bound teen has caught the attention of Google, who has approached her about her device.
Regardless of what happens to the supercapacitor, we're sure to hear more from the high school senior—at least according to Khare. “I’m going to be setting the world on fire,” she said.

Post: #2

Necessity is the mother of invention...
Would make sense that a female addicted to her phone finds away to charge the battery faster.

Post: #3

(05-20-2013 09:49 PM)kinjutsu Wrote:  Necessity is the mother of invention...
Would make sense that a female addicted to her phone finds away to charge the battery faster.

Beat me to it. Well played.

Post: #4

(05-20-2013 09:49 PM)kinjutsu Wrote:  Necessity is the mother of invention...
Would make sense that a female addicted to her phone finds away to charge the battery faster.

Indeed, maybe a man will invent a device that instantly drains the power from all nearby cellphones. One can only dream.

Post: #5

Oh cool, another frivolous female invention that PC-feminists can circle jerk over.

Good for Eesha though, assuming her father, brother, or some other male in her life didn't do the actual heavy-lifting behind the scenes.

Post: #6

(05-20-2013 09:51 PM)Gmac Wrote:  

(05-20-2013 09:49 PM)kinjutsu Wrote:  Necessity is the mother of invention...
Would make sense that a female addicted to her phone finds away to charge the battery faster.

Indeed, maybe a man will invent a device that instantly drains the power from all nearby cellphones. One can only dream.

Or just jam their shit.
   

Post: #7

damn impressive at 18

why hate

Post: #8

Not hate mind you...
I can see feminist parading this girl around to be the poster child of their bs.
Women are more capable than Men noise.


For every girl that creates something to make "her" life a little bit easier, there are 10,000 men creating solutions to REAL problems.

Post: #9

This girl did something more impressive by 18, than most people do their whole lives. Why hate? Because she is a girl? Seems silly.

Props to her.

Post: #10

Some critical article, she didn't come up with stuff "alone".
http://theeestory.ning.com/profiles/blog...e=activity

Post: #11

(05-20-2013 10:44 PM)void Wrote:  Some critical article, she didn't come up with stuff "alone".

It's a whole family of IRTs.

Post: #12

Nobody comes up with anything alone. I'd guess she's an important member of the group who is developing the project? Still, props to her, most people at 18 don't even know where their head is.

Post: #13

Negatives:

- Brace yourself for yet another 'Women in tech' circlejerk.
- One less excuse for a girl to separate herself from her Smartphone.
- Female IRT?
- She's pretty damn smug.
- An 18-year-old girl did this by herself? How stupid does the MSM assume we are?

Positives:

- Would bang.

Post: #14

(05-20-2013 10:47 PM)Volk Wrote:  Nobody comes up with anything alone. I'd guess she's an important member of the group who is developing the project? Still, props to her, most people at 18 don't even know where their head is.

I suppose... but the benchmark for "impressive" intellectual curiosity for an 18 year-old girl is pretty low.

Most girls, even "smart" girls, would just roll their eyes and run away when dad is talking about boring, icky stuff like transistors and processors.

Her father's background, from void's link:

Quote:Manoj Khare is responsible for the architecture of Vihana's specialized processor and for the development of the Vihana hardware subsystem.He has worked on various aspects of computer systems for the past 16 years.Prior to Vihana, Manoj Khare was Principal Engineer and project leader in the Platform Architecture group in the Enterprise Architecture Lab at Intel Corp, responsible for definition of Intel's next-generation Itanium Server platforms.His responsibilities spanned systems architecture, interconnect protocol definition and server performance analysis.Previously, Manoj was Lead Architect and Project Leader responsible for the definition of the Scalability Port interconnect, a scalable point-to-point cache coherent interconnect for multi-node Itanium Server systems.He was a key contributor on the definition and design of Intel's Xeon & Itanium-2 Server Chipset (E8870 chipset).

Manoj has also worked on several microprocessors at Intel.He defined the backside bus protocol and L3-cache architecture on Intel's Itanium processor.He has worked on 80486 processor validation and Pentium processor platform performance analysis.He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Intel Achievement Award.Manoj currently holds 6 issued patents, and has 13 applications at various stages of filing.He received his MSEE from the University of Rochester, and his BSEE from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Circumstantially interesting, indeed--that her invention comes from an area of expertise that would be right in her father's wheelhouse.

As I alluded in my first post in this thread, I am/was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, but the Bayesian prior that young girls tend not to make... material... contributions to materials engineering would take a lot to be shifted, and the circumstances certainly don't help.

Post: #15

It was not really my link. However it explains a lot. The apprentice - master relationship has been dominant for centuries for a reason. Just recently in the Americas it has been lost and replaced with a system that kinda works but makes money. We should see this instead as a case for that kind of teaching, where somebody with a wealth of knowledge and patience can instill passion and even teach a girl at an age where the average only worries about makeup and makeout.

Post: #16

(05-20-2013 11:15 PM)Volk Wrote:  It was not really my link. However it explains a lot. The apprentice - master relationship has been dominant for centuries for a reason. Just recently in the Americas it has been lost and replaced with a system that kinda works but makes money. We should see this instead as a case for that kind of teaching, where somebody with a wealth of knowledge and patience can instill passion and even teach a girl at an age where the average only worries about makeup and makeout.

Fixed. My bad, void; thanks for heads up, Volk.

Post: #17

She better sell this for a billion bucks. I alone would drop a couple hundred for a charger like that.

iPhone's suck for battery life and when your job(s) is dependant on it being charged...

Post: #18

So the girl's dad was in the supercapacitator business already?

Post: #19

This reeks strongly of heavy parental assistance designed to ensure Ivy League admission. Hell I remember the science fair we had to submit to senior year in high school, and you could tell pretty damn easily who had a daddy at Intel or Hewlett-Packard doing their project for them.

Post: #20

Is this... finally... a woman making a useful discovery? I am so touched that I want to believe that her father had nothing to do with this, just to set a precedent for a woman actually doing something useful compared to all Amelia Earharts of the world.

Post: #21

If you examine most genius's lives, you'll see that their parents had some but very little influence over them. For example, Einstein's father was an Engineer but understood nothing about magnetic fields. Mozart's father was a composer but Mozart was creating songs at the age of 7.

Meanwhile this girl does exactly what her parents were already involved in. Hmmm. Time will tell if this chick is actually an inventor or just taking credit for her parents talents so she can go to an Ivy League school like Bortimus suggested.

Post: #22

Of all the NASA scientists, electrical engineers and MIT graduates out there --- no one ever thought of the capacitor thing before?

I wonder how this invention works?

As far as i know a capacitor is simply a circuit board component that stores up a charge then releases it. To charge a battery in 20 seconds I bet the thing might damage your battery too?

This reminds me of one time I went to a trade show and somebody was saying how in wires that much of the energy (or efficiency) is wasted because when you pass electricity through a wire it also wastes energy by creating a magnetic field. He showed using some voltometer that if he were to use an opposing magnetic force to push magnetic force back into the wire that more electricity actually comes out the other end into that voltometer. It sounded great and I could save a lot on my electric bill --- until I asked him what are you using to create that magnetic field to push the other magnetic field back into the wire. Answered turned out to be electricity itself! You are wasting money and electricity trying to save electricity.

I'm not an electrical engineer and I'm not sure if I'm describing it right but my point is that there has to be some kind of catch to this.

Post: #23

This could be a case of a girl genius. They've gotta be out there, even if there are far fewer of them than male geniuses due to the well-known greater clustering around the mean of female IQ.

However, I'd put my money on it being a case of a nice bit of teen research, no more earth-shaking than many others, but the award given to her as part of the pro-girl agenda.

And what self-respecting male would say "I'm going to set the world on fire"?

Post: #24

Silly news piece designed to boost female ego.

Every engineer that has ever designed anything that has used a battery has thought about and decided against using capacitors instead of batteries.

http://engineerexplains.com/answr/Capaci...tery1.html

Quote:Is there any advantage to using a capacitor as a battery or in place of a battery?

Capacitors can indeed be used to store small amounts of energy. However, compared to a battery they have very low energy densities. As for being interchangeable with batteries, no not really. i.e. if you have a device that uses AA batteries, you will not be able to obtain a AA sized capacitor that you could simply place in that device. Even if you could, the AA batteries will last many hours of use, whereas a capacitor that size may only be seconds (at best minutes).

To store the same amount of energy as a battery, you need much more space for capacitors. So by using capacitors instead of batteries, devices will be able to charge rapidly but they will be double or triple the size, maybe even larger, thanks to capacitors instead of batteries.

Also, pretty amazing coincidence that her "amazing breakthrough" is in the very field her father works in. Non-story guys. I just feel bad for the boys that might have had an amazing project get rejected just because they have a penis instead of a vagina.

Post: #25

(05-21-2013 03:23 AM)mymeowcat Wrote:  Of all the NASA scientists, electrical engineers and MIT graduates out there --- no one ever thought of the capacitor thing before?

I wonder how this invention works?

That's exactly what I was thinking. How is this teenage girl going to have some insight that somehow slipped past all those engineers making batteries for Mars rovers. Something doesn't quite add up here. I'm not hating on the girl, but I have the feeling there is some....