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Friday, February 13, 2009
Cache & Packets
A winter of doping, taxing and internal combustion
By Efrain Viscarolasaga
MHT's Galen Moore: Military snipers aid accuracy with iPhone
Innerscope Research sensor vest tests biometric response to visual aids
Terrafugia's flying car simulation
A trio of non sequiturs that have been sitting on my desk while I try to persuade my editors to put a satellite office in Honolulu:
Our friends at The Scuderi Group LLC in Springfield, who have designed a new kind of internal combustion engine, report the first assembly of a proof-of-concept prototype that the company will be unveiling at the upcoming SAE World Congress automotive show in Detroit in April. Since we first covered The Scuderi Group back in 2005, executives there have boasted of a new design for internal combustion engines that can increase efficiency by 40 percent and reduce harmful emissions by 50 percent to 80 percent.
It has been a bold claim, but the company’s testing and modeling research, using the design originally created by the engine’s inventor, the late Carmelo Scuderi, have verified the claims. The prototype, however, will represent the first full-performance version of the design on public display.
“It is a major milestone for the company and the technology,” said Scuderi Group president (and Carmelo’s son) Sal Scuderi, who said the prototype will be the first step in verifying the company’s predicted data.
For you gearheads, Scuderi’s “split-cycle hybrid” divides the four strokes of a standard engine over a paired combination of one (intake/compression) cylinder and one (power/exhaust) cylinder. The two cylinders are connected by a crossover chamber with high-speed valves that allow each piston and cylinder to perform their respective functions independently.
A taxing season
With city, state and federal agencies all rapidly building deficits in order to help weather the economic tides, new taxes are being proposed most everywhere. In Massachusetts, the Patrick administration has turned its sights, once again, to a tax loophole that absolves telecommunications companies from paying property tax on things like telephone poles, wires and base stations on state land.
The issue has raised its head before, but the loophole, which dates back to 1918 and was aimed at encouraging the telephone company to build out its network statewide, has never been closed. The newest proposal, included among the governor’s recent economic initiatives, would reportedly raise $50 million in new revenue from the communications companies operating in the state, which would most certainly pass at least some of that cost on to customers.
A new wrinkle in the debate lies in the governor’s Broadband Initiative Fund, a bill created last year that aims to direct $40 million in general obligation bonds to communications companies to help build out their networks, particularly in rural areas. While the bill has yet to be enacted, some industry officials, including representatives of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, have pointed out the contradiction — encouraging buildouts with one hand, while potentially slowing them down with new tax obligations with the other.
AT&T and Verizon Wireless, the region’s largest wireless carriers, have pooled some resources to fight the tax, reminding the state and customers that the two firms have invested heavily in local infrastructure over the past year (Verizon claims it invested $600 million in the Bay State last year, while AT&T recently announced an expansion of its 3G network in many cities and towns in central and western Mass.) That investment, they say, could be threatened by the new tax.
While nothing is written in stone as yet, it is something to keep an eye on.
Another Hall of Fame that won’t admit A-Rod
Congratulations are in order for Worcester-based Allegro Microsystems Inc.’s John Macdougall and Ken Manchester, both of whom were inducted last week into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C.
While not household names, the engineers, who worked with Allegro predecessor Sprague Electronics in the 1980s and beyond, played a crucial role in developing the process of ion implantation for semiconductors, which is still one of the most prominent methods of “doping” silicon circuits in use today.
Unlike the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, “doping” in the Inventors’ Hall of Fame is a reason to get in, rather than be shut out.
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