Cruising News February

Bruno Brunning

Commodores Comments

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and a very merry new year wherever you celebrated it. At the club we enjoyed two parties, a slightly more formal one upstairs with dinner and a disco plus a rather more relaxed one downstairs. Although I hear there was some intermingling between the two in the early hours of the morning.

The bar in the Solent Room has been refurbished and upgraded, it looks fantastic. We are all very happy indeed with the work our own Monday Club has done, especially Consuelo. Many thanks to Nick, Mark and all the team!

The front door project is still awaiting approval from the NFDC, but the contractors are waiting ready to commence manufacture once this has at long last been received.

May I please remind you that both the Club’s Q&A and AGM are being held in March. The closing date therefore for nominations and resolutions is 15th.Feb.

I am away for the next two weeks visiting amongst other places the Falkland Islands, so see you soon if I manage to avoid the mines on a yomp to Goose Green!

Have yourselves a happy CHINESE NEW YEAR on the 6th.February

GONG HAI FAT CHOI

Chris Barr

Commodore

Toasting the lads’ in the tower !

Silence is Golden !

Global Electric Vehicle Patenting Reaches 7,500 in 2018

Patsnap, a provider of R&D analytics, has recently launched its EV IP Report 2018, which analyses Patsnap’s global dataset related to innovation in EVs.

Looking at the IP data of modern innovators in the EV industry reveals signals about how this market, its players, and their technologies, are evolving. Nearly two thirds of EV patent families have a first-filing in USA 44%, or China 19%. Based on this activity, China and USA could strategically be key geographic locations for organisations to establish their patent footprint.

Excluding filings with the European Patent Office 9.3%, the UK is Europe’s top destination for EV patenting.

The top five EV patenting companies include Hyundai, Toyota, Kia Motors, Hitachi and General Motors. Experienced automotive companies are remaining diverse in their patenting activity whilst electronic companies tend to focus on fuel cells, batteries and power transfer technologies.

Top technology areas for EV related patents are: - Electric propulsion with power supplied with the vehicle (14.92%), Manufacturing of secondary cells (9.52%). Arrangements for charging/depolarising batteries (9.15%), Diverse prime movers for propulsion (7.38%) and Conjoint control of different vehicle sub-units (6.93%).

Looking specifically at unexpected key players in EV innovation, Bosch, Samsung, and Sony hold nearly 900 relative patents between them, meaning that each of these companies hold relevant intangible assets that put them in a strong position to enter the EV market in future. Qualcomm owns the most valuable patent in this area – “Wireless power transfer for appliances and equipment’s”. US20130300358A1– which relates to wireless charging. Due to the far-reaching scope of this technology, this patent is estimated to be worth over $43.4 million, up $6 million in estimated value since December 2017.

www. Patsnap.com

Ashlett Creek SC Fishguard

Cumulous

The first Digital Photos The story behind image-sensing technology begins with George Smith. In 1959 after graduating from the Chicago University with a PhD in physics, he joined a department of Bell Telephone Laboratories headed by Canadian physicist Willard Boyle (deceased). In line with the topic of his PhD thesis, he continued to study semimetals such as arsenic, antimony and bismuth. He subsequently moved to another department at Bell titled Device Concepts. In 1969, it was here that he and Boyle invented the CCD (charge coupled device).

Boyle and Smith’s intention was to exploit the capacity of semiconducting materials to transfer charge along their surface from one storage site to the next. They reasoned that patterns of charge, created electronically on the surface of a CCD, could be used to store and transfer information of the kind required by computer memories. In fact, the CCD was soon to find its major use in a quite different sphere, but the importance of Boyle and Smiths invention was self-evident, and celebrated in 2009 when the pair received the Nobel Prize for Physics.

The real value of the CCD began to emerge with its change of role from memory storage to image sensing, which is attributable to the second of the 2017 QE Prize winners, Michael Thompsett. Born in the UK, he studied physics at the University of Cambridge and followed it up with a PhD in engineering. By the time he came to work on CCDs, he had already demonstrated his inventiveness. While employed by the then English Electric Valve Company, he devised the uncooled thermal-imaging television camera tube. However, by then the focus of his interests had already begun to change. “Ideas were being floated about solid state imagers, he recalls.” and that was something I wanted to work on. In 1969 his fascination took him to the best place to be for anyone with such an interest: Bell Telephone Laboratories. He quickly realised how Boyle and Smith’s CCDs could be exploited for their capacity to capture images, and embarked on a quest to develop imaging systems that were much smaller than those in use at the time.

Image capturing by CCD’s is a product of their response to light, when photons impinge on the light-sensitive surface of an array of pixels on a silicon chip, they trigger the formation of electrons. These are captured by the electrostatic forces in the pixel and accumulate. The brighter the light, the greater the number of electrons generated within any one-pixel site. In an image brought to focus on the surface of a CCD, the location and number of electrons form an analogue representation of that image.

Besides acting as a photodetector, the pixel structure of a CCD also serves as a readout system. Charge generated in the pixels is transported, step by step, from one site to the next, across the array to one corner of the chip. Here, Thompsett added to the original CCD design with an analogue-to-digital converter to turn the amount of charge generated within each pixel into a digital value to be memorised. The digital readout so compiled forms a numerical description of the image. “I led the group that developed CCD images, and made the first colour camera”. Thompsett says. “And I took the first colour pictures”, The first person to have a digital image taken of her, was my wife.

Ingenia

Solent Playground

Rise or Set ?

PHOTO QUIZ. Where are we now ?

Last month…..

Tree artistry, at the miniature

golf course in Walhampton

View from the masthead….…Newtown Creek

Breakfast in France……………..Back home for supper!

Grecian Delights….. Sally & Trevor Doran on ‘Dreamcatcher’

In Grecian waters……………Methoni and Poros

An artwork contribution from a very bright young lady.

Fun and games on Hi-tec

“Full and Fair”

Toasts and Trivia May your glass be ever full

May the roof over your head be strong

May you be in Heaven half an hour

before the Devil knows you are gone.

May you live as long as you want

and never want as long as you live.

May your troubles be less and your blessings be more

and nothing but happiness come in through your door.

May you be poor in misfortune, but rich in blessings

slow to make enemies and quick to make friends.

May your right hand always be stretched out

in friendships, but never in want.

May there be a generation of children

from the children of your children.

May your home always be too small to hold all your friends.

May the Leprechauns be near you,

spreading luck along the way.

And may the Irish angels smile on you, this very day.

May you have warm words on a cold evening

a full moon on a dark night

and the road be downhill all the way to your door.

May you have the hindsight to know where you have been,

the foresight to know where you are going

and the insight to know when you are going too far

May the good lord take a liking to you.

but not too soon! Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Wednesday Meanderings……come and join us!

Once upon a time, when going places was once a year, and not too

far away, remembering choice words and sayings spoken by the locals would bring to life many a silent ‘snap’.

The language we use to communicate is continually changing. The active life of words and sayings is today seemingly determined by a constant compulsion for change, fuelled by multi-culturalism and TV in a world described by Marshall McLuhan in his book, “The Guttenberg Way” as a ‘global village’.

Idioms, buzz words and clichés are all too easily swept aside by our younger society’s insatiable appetite for what’s new, even to the extent of using five words when one will do. For example, when will ‘at this moment in time’ be superseded by a single word such as ‘now’, and ‘cool’ be replaced by another word meaning ‘OK.?

Nothing breathes more realism and vitality into recalling the past than by using the words and sayings of yesterday. As such they deserve to be cherished and preserved as icons of one’s never to be forgotten youth.

Was it merely a consequence of being brought up to be seen and not heard that gave me an ever-listening ear and a remarkable memory bank of voices, that so frequently appear in the mind simply as words and sayings?

Hopefully may this preamble tickle the fancy of my many contemporaries and indeed for everyone in promoting an ongoing interest, by probing into the recent past of our word usage.

‘Tham un keep ya ees open toneet, tha canny see we em shut !’

Dennis Boxall

Manufacturing time…. Never do today what you can do tomorrow !?!

Channel Island delights Les Ecrehou and Havelot Bay

Worry not…….. soon be summer !