"Go For It"

“Go for it - astronomy and astrophysics are rich and exciting fields that offer plenty of opportunities for young scientists to contribute. Master the basics, keep up with the latest discoveries, don't stop asking questions - and finding answers."

When I recently learned about this whiz kid, I became truly amazed with her achievements as a student and as a young scientist.

She was a consistent honors student since elementary, a Valedictorian at the Philippine Science High School in 2001 and a Summa Cum Laude, Physics major at the Ateneo De Manila University in 2005.

Immediately after graduating in college, she took up the High Energy Physics masters-level course at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy and graduated in 2006.

And presently, she is taking up her doctorate course in Astrophysics at the prestigious Princeton University in New Jersey.

As for her accomplishments as a scholar, she has the following:

• Honorable Mention, Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award, American Astronomical Society (January 2008)
• Centennial Fellowship, Princeton University Graduate School (2006-2010)
• Merit Prize Fellowship Grant, Princeton University Graduate School (2006-2010)
• Martin Schwarschild Graduate Fellowship, Princeton University (2006-2007)
• Academic Scholarship, Ateneo de Manila University (2001-2005)
• Merit Science Scholarship, Department of Science and Technology (2001-2005)

Another interesting work of her is the culmination of a 5-year long campaign to find particular types of black holes and I quote,

"This is like searching for a "needle in a haystack" since the objects we are targeting are very rare and are not immensely bright. We searched through a million objects and found 900 of these ones. My work is focused on figuring out how rare these objects really are. This is not as simple as it sounds because one has to carefully figure out the difference between *how many objects we have found* versus *how many objects there really are.* For example, the telescopes will miss those objects that are too faint to be detected, so those have to be taken into account."

This whiz kid is no other than 24-year old Reinabelle Co Reyes, a second year PhD student at the Princeton University.

You can also visit her site at http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rreyes/ to know more about her.

May her story become an inspiration to all of us!

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Asia's Power Bloc

As we continue to feature the best of the best in the field of technology, this time we will feature the biggest names around Asia, Japan and India.

This is ranked according to company name, market value ($bil), sales ($bil) and country:

I. Semiconductor

• MediaTek. 17.2. 1.7. Taiwan.
• Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. 48.4. 9.7. Taiwan.

II. Software and Services

• Infosys Technologies. 27.4. 3.2. India.
• Satyam Computer Services. 7.9. 3.2. India.
• Tata Consultancy Services. 27.6. 4.3. India.
• Wipro. 17.2. 3.5. India.
• Yahoo Japan. 20.5. 1.8. Japan.

III. Technology Hardware and Equipment

• Lenovo Group. 5.1. 14.5. China.
• Ibiden. 12.4. 3.4. Japan.
• Nintendo. 63.0. 8.2. Japan.
• Chi Mei Optoelectronics. 7.5. 5.9. Taiwan.
• Compal Electronics. 4.0. 11.7. Taiwan.
• Delta Electronics. 7.6. 3.2. Taiwan.
• Acer. 4.6. 11.3. Taiwan.
• Wistron. 2.4. 6.8. Taiwan.
• Hon Hai Precision Ind. 42.1. 40.5. Taiwan.

IV. Telecommunications Services

• China Mobile. 216.5. 37.1. China.
• Bharti Airtel. 39.2. 4.3. India.
• Telkomunikasi Indonesia. 23.5. 5.7. Indonesia.

V. Conglomerate

• LG Group. 9.6. 70.9. South Korea.

Out of the 20 technology players, it is interesting to note of the following:

• 40% of the companies came from Taiwan while India has 25%
• 45% are in the technology hardware and equipment sector
• 50% has more than US $ 10-49 billion in market value
• 10% has more than US $ 50 billion in market value
• 30% generated more than US $ 10 billion in sales last year

Other interesting developments are:

• Lenovo is now one of the biggest names in the computer sector with its acquisition of the IBM Personal Computer unit
• Infosys, Satyam and Tata are some of the biggest names in the global BPO sector

reference: Forbes.com. "The Asian Fab 50", Deborah Orr and Scott DeCarlo, Sep. 06, 2007.

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In Support for a Partner

As our way of supporting one of our Institutional Partners, the Philippine-Sino Center for Agricultural Technology (PhilSCAT) in particular, we would like to share with you that they will be having their 5th Anniversary tomorrow, March 25.

At their headquarters in CLSU campus, Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, this year's celebration shall be graced by Agriculture Asst. Secretary Dr. Josyline Chio-Javelosa as the Guest of Honor.

This year's program highlights the awarding of Plaque of Recognition to PhilSCAT Director Dr. Romeo B. Gavino and his Chinese counterpart co-Director Mr. Cheng Liangji for their excellent and continuous services rendered to PhilSCAT and their contributions in alleviating the condition of Filipino farmers through research, development and extension activities on hybrid rice and agricultural mechanization technologies.

With the theme, "Paving the Way to a Modern Agriculture thru Mechanized Hybrid Rice Farming System", the opening ceremonies shall be composed of a morning Mass, a Motorcade, Field visit and a short program. During the opening program, 16 PhilSCAT staff who rendered 5 years or above of service to the project will also be accorded a Service Award.

In the afternoon, there will be a technical symposium where results of selected recent PhilSCAT R & D studies will be presented. This symposium aims to bring awareness to various PhilSCAT clientele the new undertakings of the Center including technologies developed and research studies completed.

A demonstration of PhilSCAT technologies at the Center's demo-farm such as the actual operation of the PhilSCAT Rice Combine where participants will be encouraged to personally operate the machine.

On the following day (March 26), there will be an Employees Day featuring sports festival among PhilSCAT staff. The celebration shall be capped by a retreat cum workshop which shall be held in San Fernando, La Union.

Overview of the Center

The Philippine-Sino Center for Agricultural Technology (PhilSCAT) is a special R and D agency under the Department of Agriculture. It implements the collaborative program in agriculture and related fields between the Philippines and the People's Republic of China, with Central Luzon State University (CLSU) as the lead implementor and the Bureau of Postharvest Research and Extension (BPRE), Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) and Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) as partners.

PhilSCAT's current technology scope under Phase I (2003-2008) is Hybrid Rice and Agri-mechanization.


reference:

Josue S. Falla, Ph.D, CESO V, Director II, BPRE, & Concurrent Chief, TPPD, Philippine-Sino Center for Agricultural Technology (PhilSCAT), Department of Agriculture CLSU, Munoz Science City 3120 Nueva Ecija, Philippines.

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On Global Tech Ranking

After "The Power of 2", I will continue with presenting 15 of the American's richest personalities in the field of technology by Forbes.com last March 5 (by company, global rank, name, age and worth in US $ billion):

• Microsoft. 3 - William Gates III, 52, 58.0
• Microsoft. 41 - Paul Allen, 55, 16.0
• Microsoft. 43 - Steve Ballmer, 52, 15.0
• Oracle. 14 - Larry Ellison, 63, 25.0
• Google. 32 - Sergey Brin, 34, 18.7
• Google. 33 - Larry Page, 35, 18.6
• Google. 142 - Eric Schmidt, 52, 6.6
• Dell. 40 - Michael Dell, 43, 16.4
• Ebay. 120 - Pierre Omidyar, 40, 7.7
• Apple. 189 - Steve Jobs, 53, 5.4
• Intel. 288 - Gordon Moore, 79, 3.7
• Yahoo. 462 - David Filo, 41, 2.5
• Yahoo. 524 - Jerry Yang, 39, 2.3
• Siebel Systems. 652 - Thomas Siebel, 55, 1.9
• Facebook. 785 - Mark Zuckerberg, 23, 1.5

It's worth to note that the youngest in the Billionaire's Club now is the 23-year old Mark Zuckerberg who founded Facebook.com.

Another interesting fact is that all of them are self-made.

Other things that we can learn from them:

• 7 are more than 50 years of age
• 7 have more than US $ 10 billion in worth
• 7 are in the top 100 richest people
• 3 companies have 2 or more billionaires

How I wish we will have a Filipino company who will make it in the list...

Excerpt from March 5, 2008, "The World's Billionaires" issue of Forbes.com.

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"The Road Ahead"

When we launched this initiative in November, 2007, it was our dream to slowly make it mainstream within the year 2008.

Now, in less than 5 months of the blog's existence, we're happy to share our progress in terms of (as of March 13):

• Ads Impressions has 834 in March while February has 764
• Visitors Per Day in March is 6.58 while February has 1.24
• Pageviews in March is 207 while February has 81
• Pages/Visit in March is 2.62 while February has 2.25
• Bounce Rate in March is 60% while February has 53%
• Ave Time on Site (mins) in March is 7:32 while February has 6:09
• Absolute Unique Visitors in March is 13 while February has 4
• Loyalty of Visitors in March is 10.13% while February has 2.78%
• Visitors from different countries is 6 in March while 3 in February

And out of the hundreds of millions of websites globally, Alexa.com now ranks us at 9.3M in March, compared to 12.4M when we started. That's an increase of almost 25% in just within a month.

These very encouraging developments will give us more motivation to feature more topics for our readers and partners this year.

Especially the big leap that we have experienced with Alexa.com is an indication that the road ahead for an Innovative Collaboration Ecosystem in the Philippines is still wide and open for all of us.

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The Power of 2

Using the ranking made by Alexa.com, I'd like to share with you some interesting bits of information on the world's most popular Internet and technology companies of today.

This is listed by global rank, company name, founder/s and the year their companies were founded/established:

• 1 Yahoo - David Filo and Jerry Yang, 1994
• 2 Youtube - Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, 2005
• 4 Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1995
• 5 Myspace - Brad Greenspan and Chris DeWolfe, 1999
• 7 Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum, 2004
• 8 Hi5 - Ramu Yalamanchi and Akash Garg, 2003
• 9 Wikipedia - Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, 2000
• 17 Friendster - Jonathan Abrams, 2002
• 18 Microsoft - Bill Gates and Paul Allen, 1975
• 23 Ebay - Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll, 1995
• 39 Amazon - Jeff Bezos, 1994
• 51 Wordpress - Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, 2003
• 89 Apple - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 1974
• 162 Digg - Kevin Rose, 2004
• 196 Dell - Michael Dell, 1984
• 217 Linkedin - Reid Hoffman, 2002
• 233 HP - William Hewlett and David Packard, 1939
• 240 DoubleClick - Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman, 1996
• 348 StumbleUpon - Gary Camp et. al, 2001
• 436 Skype - Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, 2003

Out of the list that I have compiled, we can see the following:

• 70% were founded by 2 persons
• 25% were founded by an individual
• 5% were founded by more than 3 persons
• 50% were established only from the year 2000 until 2005
• 30% were established from 1990 until 1999
• 5% were established in the 1980's
• 15% were established earlier than 1980
• 80% are Internet companies
• 40% are in the Global Top 20 Companies

Other interesting facts are:

• a handful of them started their companies in their early 20s
• a handful of them either started their companies in their garage or school dorm
• Youtube is one of the most successful startups in just less than 5 years of its existence
• Google is now the most dominant Internet company having more than 50% of the internet advertising market
• Myspace is the leading social networking site in the US, while Friendster is for the Filipinos
• Microsoft recently offered US $40B to buy Yahoo in its bid to compete with Google
• Apple made another wave because of its iPod line of products

How about our local technology companies? When can we see that we have some Filipino technology companies who will make it to the Global Top 500?

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Search > Google

In case you may be wondering how in the world did Google started, how it became one of the most success stories on the Internet and how will it continue to dominate the search technology, then check this brief history on how search technology evolved since the 1950s and the role Google played in it.

The history of document search dates back to the 1950s.

Search engines existed in those ancient times, but their primary use was to search a static collection of documents. In the early 60s, the research community gathered new data by digitizing abstracts of articles, enabling rapid progress in the field in the 60s and 70s. But by the late 80s, progress in this area had slowed down considerably.

In order to stimulate research in information retrieval, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 1992. TREC introduced new data in the form of full-text documents and used human judges to classify whether or not particular documents were relevant to a set of queries. They released a sample of this data to researchers, who used it to train and improve their systems to find the documents relevant to a new set of queries and compare their results to TREC's human judgments and other researchers' algorithms.

The TREC data revitalized research on information retrieval. Having a standard, widely available, and carefully constructed set of data laid the groundwork for further innovation in this field. The yearly TREC conference fostered collaboration, innovation, and a measured dose of competition (and bragging rights) that led to better information retrieval.

New ideas spread rapidly, and the algorithms improved. But with each new improvement, it became harder and harder to improve on last year's techniques, and progress eventually slowed down again.

And then came the web.

In its beginning stages, researchers used industry-standard algorithms based on the TREC research to find documents on the web. But the need for better search was apparent - now not just for researchers, but also for everyday users - and the web gave us lots of new data in the form of links that offered the possibility of new advances. There were developments on two fronts. On the commercial side, a few companies started offering web search engines, but no one was quite sure what business models would work. On the academic side, the National Science Foundation started a "Digital Library Project" which made grants to several universities.

Two Stanford grad students in computer science named Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on this project. Their insight was to recognize that existing search algorithms could be dramatically improved by using the special linking structure of web documents. Thus PageRank was born.

Larry and Sergey initially tried to license their algorithm to some of the newly formed web search engines, but none were interested. Since they couldn't sell their algorithm, they decided to start a search engine themselves. The rest of the story is well-known.

This is an excerpt from "Why Data Matters" by Hal Varian, Chief Economist of Google.

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