Google Logo Commemorates Birthday to Robert Norton Noyce 84th

Robert Norton Noyce Birthday 84th

Google Logo Commemorates Birthday to Robert Norton Noyce 84th

Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 - June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip that sparked the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley Noyce's name is also a mentor and father figure to a whole generation of entrepreneurs.

He was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. He was the third of four sons of the Rev. Ralph Brewster Noyce His father is a 1915 graduate of Doane College, 1920 graduate of Oberlin College, and graduated in 1923 from the Chicago Theological Seminary. He was a Congregational pastor and associate superintendent of the Conference of Congregational Churches of Iowa in the 1930s and the 1940s. His mother, Harriet May Norton, a graduate of Oberlin College in 1921, is the daughter of the Rev. J. Milton Norton, a Congregational minister, and Louise Hill. He has been described as an intelligent woman with a will to rule

Robert Norton Noyce

Childhood memory of his father's beatings involving the ping pong and feel absolutely shattered when his mother's reaction to the news was thrilling disturbed "Is not that a good father to let you win?" Even at the age of five years, Noyce was offended by the idea of ​​intentionally losing anything. "That's not a game," he sulked to his mother. "If you're going to play, play to win!"

In the summer of 1940, when he was 12, he built a mini-sized airplane with his brother, which they use to fly from the cage roof Grinnell School. Then he built a radio from scratch and his sled motor with a propeller and welding machines from the former washing machine.

Education

He grew up in Grinnell, Iowa and attended local schools. He exhibited a talent for math and science while in high school and took courses in physics Grinnell College student's senior year. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945 and entered Grinnell College in the fall of that year. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in physics and mathematics from Grinnell College in 1949. He also received the signal honor of her classmates: Brown Derby Prize, which recognizes "the senior who won the best value with the least amount of work". He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. He studied first transistor, developed at Bell Laboratories, in Grinnell School classrooms.

Meanwhile, Noyce scholars attending courses physics professor Grant Gale and fascinated by physics. Gale won two of the first transistor ever come out of Bell Labs and showed them to his class and Noyce terpikat.Hibah Gale advised to follow the doctoral program in physics at MIT that he did.

Career

After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, he took his first job as a research engineer at Philco Corporation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He left in 1956 for the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California.

He joined William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, but left with the "Eight traitorous" in 1957, after experiencing problems with respect to quality management, and co-founded the influential Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce passionate presentation of his vision is the reason Sherman Fairchild has agreed to create the semiconductor division to Eight traitor.

Noyce and Gordon E. Moore founded Intel in 1968 when they left Fairchild Semiconductor.Arthur Rock, chairman of the board of Intel and major investor in the company said that for Intel to succeed, Intel needed Noyce, Moore and Grove. And it requires them in that order. Noyce: visionary, was born to inspire; Moore: The Virtuoso technology; and Grove: technologist turned management scientists [22] relaxed corporate culture that Noyce brought to Intel is a carry over from the force at Fairchild Semiconductor.

He treats his employees as family, rewarding and encouraging teamwork. Your follow-happiness of his management style set the tone for many Valley success story. Noyce's management style could be called a "roll up your sleeve." He avoids the luxury car company, reserved parking spaces, private jets, offices, and furnishings that support a less structured environment, a relaxed working where everyone contributes and no one benefited from lavish perquisites.

With the decline in regular executive privilege, he stood as a model for future generations of Intel's CEO. At Intel, he oversaw Ted Hoff invention of the microprocessor-the second revolution.

Building the headquarters of Intel, Robert Noyce Building, in Santa Clara, California, named in his honor, such as Robert N. Noyce '49 Science Center, which houses the science division of Grinnell College.

In a recent interview, Noyce was asked what he would do if he's "Emperor" of the United States. He said that he would, among other things, "make sure we are preparing the next generation to thrive in high-tech age, and that means low education and poor, as well as at the graduate school level .."

Family

He married Elizabeth Bottomley in 1953 and divorced in 1974. They have four children together. On November 27, 1974 married Ann Noyce Schmeltz Bowers. Bowers was the first Director of Personnel for Intel Corporation and the first Vice President of Human Resources for Apple Inc. He now serves as Chairman of the Board and founder trustee Noyce Foundation. Active all his life, Noyce enjoyed reading Hemingway, flying his own plane, hang gliding, and scuba diving.

He believed that microelectronics will continue to advance in complexity and sophistication far beyond its current state, leading to questions about what the public will make use of technology.

Noyce died of a heart attack at home on June 3, 1990 at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. At the time of his death, he was president and CEO of Sematech Inc., a nonprofit consortium conducting basic research into semiconductor manufacturing. It was organized as a partnership between the governments of the United States and 14 companies in an effort to help the American computer industry catch up with Japan in the field of semiconductor manufacturing technology.

Awards and honors

In July, 1959, he filed U.S. Patent 2,981,877 "Semiconductor Device and Structure of Lead", the kind of integrated circuits. Efforts to independently recorded only a few months after the key findings of the inventor Jack Kilby. For his co-invention of integrated circuits and the impact of changing the world, three presidents of the United States in his honor.

Noyce is a holder of honorary degrees and awards. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Technology in 1987. Two years later, George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Hall of Fame Business. President George HW Bush presented the award, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering, in a black tie ceremony held at the State Department. In 1990, Noyce also shared with Jack Kilby, inventor of the transistor John Bardeen, and several other celebrities, received the "Lifetime Achievement Medal" for the celebration of two centuries of the Patent Act.

Noyce received the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1966. [28] He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1978 "for contributions to silicon integrated circuits, the foundation of modern electronics." In 1979, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Noyce was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. The National Academy of Engineering awarded him the 1989 Charles Stark Draper Prize.

Mr. Noyce inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1989. Science building at his alma mater, Grinnell College, named after him.

Legacy

Noyce Foundation was founded in 1991 by his family. The Foundation is dedicated to improving public education in mathematics and science in grade K-12.

Edited from Stanastanza

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Niagara Falls displays dazzling light shows

Niagara Falls displays dazzling light shows in winter

NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario – You can't take a boat ride into the roar and spray of Niagara Falls in the winter, but this time of year offers a different spectacle: Nighttime illumination of the falls in a changing array of colors - red, white, blue, purple, orange, amber and green.

The tourism season at Niagara Falls is slowing,
but November started the busy season for those
who light the falls in colors every night.

In spring and summer, the colored lights shine for just three hours, but with less daylight in winter, curtains of color wash over the falls each night for up to seven hours.

Crowds gather along the sidewalk and railing on Niagara Parkway to see the show as mist rises from the falls and basin in front of them; others watch from the windows of hotels and restaurants on the Canadian side.

The display starts with patriotic themes - red, white and blue for the American Falls, red and white for the horseshoe-shaped Canadian Falls - and frequently includes colors to honor a cause. When Niagara Falls hosted the first wedding following New York's legalization of same-sex marriage in July, Mayor Paul Dyster arranged for a rainbow of colors, the symbol of gay pride. On Nov. 16, the falls were lit by white light for 15-minute stretches for lung cancer awareness, a request made by Christine Dwyer, who founded a group called Make Some Noise for Lung Cancer Awareness after losing her best friend to the disease.

"I think it validates us a bit," said Dwyer, of Becket, Mass. She said supporters sent her emails after the lighting saying, "I heard about this, I'm in tears, I'm so grateful."

The light beams emanate from a bank of 18 spotlights, each 30 inches in diameter, sitting atop a raised stone bunker across the road. For more than 50 years, Peter Gordon, 80, has been manning the light show, splitting the week with "the rookie," Dick Mann, 78, who has been at it just under 30 years. Both are from Ontario.

"I never get tired of it," Gordon, 80, said one night in November, the start of his busy season, when fewer daylight hours mean longer nights to light.

The best views come on crisp winter nights, Gordon said, when the mist is transformed to sparkling ice crystals that catch the soft colors.

For the past year, Gordon and Mann have used a relatively new technology to control the lights - computerized touch screens. But the history of Niagara's illumination goes back more than 150 years. The falls were lit for the first time at 10 p.m. on Sept. 14, 1860, when 200 lights like those used to signal for help at sea were put in place for a visit from the Prince of Wales. Electricity was first used in 1879. An Illumination Tower, still used today, was built in 1899.

Colors appeared in 1907 when gelatin films were included in a 36-light system near the base of the gorge designed by General Electric Co. of Schenectady. Workers, including Peter Gordon's father, were paid $3 a night to change the gels when a foreman shouted cues.

The Niagara Falls Illumination Board, a cross-border body established in 1925, has kept the lights on most nights since with a few exceptions. They were turned off during World War II, for example, to conserve power.

The control room where Gordon and Mann work 75 feet above street level has a musty old feel with stone walls, well-worn wooden floors, cobwebby beams overhead and a couple of bare bulbs above a bank of humming generators. "This place is a dump, really," said Gordon, laughing.

But then there's that million-dollar view. After changing the lights' colors on the touchscreen, the controller can see the result 15 seconds later by looking out the windows or stepping through a door to a platform outside where the lights are mounted.

On the face of the waterfalls, colors fade to white as the next colored gel covers the spotlight and a new hue spills with the water over the falls. With each color change, it's as if someone has dumped dye into the river above as it careens over the edge to the rocks below.

The 4,000-watt spotlights burn with a combined brilliance of 8.2 billion candles, about what NASA used to light the runway for night space shuttle landings. Gordon staggers the lights to avoid repeating color combinations, changing them as often as every five minutes to keep things fresh for tourists milling across the street below.

Like other landmarks, including the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower, the falls have been lit to honor a variety of causes: Alzheimer's Disease, World AIDS Day, Canada's Remembrance Day, March of Dimes and others. The charities are not asked to pay the $85 an hour it takes to light the falls. The cost is split among Niagara Falls, N.Y., Niagara Falls, Ontario, Niagara Parks and Ontario Hydro. Each bulb costs $1,500.

Not everyone loves the illumination. "All that does is make it into a sideshow," said Niagara Falls historian Paul Gromosiak, who advocates for keeping the falls in their most natural state and questions the logic and expense of using artificial light on a natural wonder. "The only light we should have on the falls is moonlight."

As midnight nears, Gordon goes back to the patriotic colors that began the night, leaving them on for 15 minutes. The colors retract and the water rushes white for the last few minutes, and the falls fade to black.

Republished from USAtoday

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World's Oldest dog Dies

Mish Whalen writes

Pusuke, who was listed as the oldest living dog in Guinness World Records, died on Dec. 5, 2011 in Sakura, Japan. He reached the ripe old age of 26 years and 9 months.

A male cross-breed dog Pusuke is seen in this file photo from Dec. 24, 2010.

Pusuke was certified for the Guinness title last December. The previous record was held by a 28-year-old beagle from the U.S. who died in 2003.

Quoted from MSN

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NASA finds alien planet in 'habitable zone'

NASA finds alien planet in 'habitable zone'

Closed captioning of: Planet found in 'habitable zone'

story of course has to do with our current earth but we learned today there may be another one out there. astronomers report the discovery of what they are calling an earth-like planet 600 light years away from here. while it is very big it looks like us and they believe it has a temperate climate, perhaps in the 70s all the time. now imagine what we could do with this new place. it could be our chance to start fresh. a place where the chicago cubs always win, where there is always free parking, productive lawmakers and uninterrupted cell phone service. it's called kepler 22-b. while we can work on the name it doesn't hurt to dream.

A 'major milestone' in search for Earth's twin

NASA's Kepler telescope confirms first alien planet found in habitable zone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new exoplanet candidates, researchers announced Monday.

This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22,
a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.

The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation. These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700.

The potentially habitable alien world, a first for Kepler, orbits a star very much like our own sun. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to finding a planet like our own — one that could conceivably harbor life, scientists said.

"We're getting closer and closer to discovering the so-called 'Goldilocks planet,'" Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said during a news conference on Monday.

Hunting down alien planets 

The $600 million Kepler observatory launched in March 2009 to hunt for Earth-size alien planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars, where liquid water, and perhaps even life, might be able to exist.

Kepler detects alien planets using what's called the "transit method." It searches for tiny, telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet transits — or crosses in front of — the star from Earth's perspective, blocking a fraction of the star's light.

The finds graduate from "candidates" to full-fledged planets after follow-up observations confirm that they're not false alarms. This process, which is usually done with large, ground-based telescopes, can take about a year.

The Kepler team released data from its first 13 months of operation back in February, announcing that the instrument had detected 1,235 planet candidates, including 54 in the habitable zone and 68 that are roughly Earth-size.

To date, just over two dozen of these potential exoplanets have been confirmed, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of the instrument's discoveries should end up being the real deal.

More discoveries to come 
The newfound 1,094 planet candidates are the fruit of Kepler's labors during its first 16 months of science work, from May 2009 to September 2010. And they won't be the last of the prolific instrument's discoveries.

"This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

Mission scientists still need to analyze data from the last two years and on into the future. Kepler will be making observations for a while yet to come; its nominal mission is set to end in November 2012, but the Kepler team is preparing a proposal to extend the instrument's operations for another year or more.

Kepler's finds should only get more exciting as time goes on, researchers say.

"We're pushing down to smaller planets and longer orbital periods," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at Ames.

To flag a potential planet, the instrument generally needs to witness three transits. Planets that make three transits in just a few months must be pretty close to their parent stars; as a result, many of the alien worlds Kepler spotted early on have been blisteringly hot places that aren't great candidates for harboring life as we know it.

Given more time, however, a wealth of more distantly orbiting — and perhaps more Earthlike — exoplanets should open up to Kepler. If intelligent aliens were studying our solar system with their own version of Kepler, after all, it would take them three years to detect our home planet.

Sources MSN

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