Saturday, October 24, 2009

IC temperature sensors

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Semiconductor temperature sensors are produced in the form of ICs. Their fundamental design results from the fact that semiconductor diodes have temperature-sensitive voltage vs. current characteristics.

The use of IC temperature sensors is limited to applications where the temperature is within a –55° to 150°C range. The measurement range of IC temperature sensors may be small compared to that of thermocouples and RTDs, but they have several advantages: they are small, accurate, and inexpensive, and are easy to interface with other devices such as amplifiers, regulators, DSPs, and microcontrollers.

IC temperature sensors continue to evolve, providing a varied array of functions, features, and interfaces. With the higher level of integration now feasible, digital IC temperature sensors can report both local and remote temperatures, monitor other system parameters, control fans, or warn when a specific temperature is exceeded.

There are two main types of IC temperature sensors?analog and digital?and several variations of each type. Analog sensors can produce a voltage or current proportional to temperature. Digital sensors may monitor local and/or remote temperatures, and can also include features such as voltage monitoring, fan control, and over- or under-limit alarms.

The earliest type of IC temperature sensor improved on the existing thermistor solutions whose resistance varied with temperature in a nonlinear fashion. Analog temperature sensors eliminated the need for additional linearization circuitry to correct for thermistor nonlinearity.

While newer digital output temperature sensors have supplanted analog output temperature sensors in many applications, analog temperature sensors continue to find a home in applications that do not require a digitized output. For example, the AD590 sensor is still a viable product in many applications more than 25 years after its release. Often used in remote applications as its high-impedance current makes it insensitive to voltage drops over long lines, it can be used in a wide variety of temperature-sensing applications not only because it operates up to 150°C, but also because of its wide +4 to +30-V operating voltage range.

Many applications require temperature data ultimately in a digital format, which can be achieved by feeding the output of an analog output temperature sensor into an A/D converter. With advances in IC production technology, however, it has become cost effective to integrate the A/D conversion?and indeed many other functions?onto the temperature sensor die, leading to cost, space, and power savings while simplifying the system designer's task.

Digital temperature sensors are similar to analog temperature sensors, but instead of outputting the data in current or voltage, it is converted into a digital format of 1's and 0's. Digital-output temperature sensors are therefore particularly useful when interfacing to a microcontroller. Such interfaces include single-wire PWM, two-wire I2C and SMBus, and three-/four-wire SPI protocols.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Why Babies Can (and Should) Learn to Read




Contrary to the popular view, children are ready to learn to read while they are still babies. In fact, the best time is before age 5. Several scientific studies show that this is not only true, but also that early learning is highly beneficial for many aspects of life. This article explains the reasons why a children’s best time to learn is at infancy.

Early Learning and Baby Brain Development

A baby’s body develops at an incredible pace during the first few years of life, but one of the most amazing aspects of this process is how the brain grows and develops. Between birth and age 3, the human brain goes from a very undeveloped form, weighing only a quarter of its final size to an incredibly complex state through a dramatic growth and development of billions of neurons and hundreds of trillions of connections, or synapses, between these neural cells. This period of active neural growth is when parents and caregivers can better help their children to get off to a great start and establish strong foundations for life-long learning.

The basic neural connections are created before birth

The basic structure of the brain is formed still during pregnancy. Here, the principal components of the brain develop and take form and the most basic cerebral functions start to organize. However, the vast majority of synapses are not yet formed, so the brain is not capable of the higher complexity that characterizes human cognition, learning and reasoning. These connections arise during the first three to four years, and the architecture of the complex networks of synapses depends in some degree on the child’s interactions with his/her environment and experiences.

The ability to learn languages is hardwired in the baby’s brain

Language is a basic human feature, and the brain of a baby is ready to develop language since the beginning. Studies showed that babies can be stimulated with the sound of their mother’s voices. As soon as they are born and start to interact with their family, the first patterns of the mother tongue are being set by the establishment of million of synaptic connections between specific groups of neurons. At the same time, the brains keeps growing, and the greatest density of neural connections is reached by the age 3. This is very important, since after this age, many of these synapses start to disappear though a process of elimination that brings the density of synapses down to the level we found in a typical adult brain. Considering all this, the conclusion is that the first three to four years after birth are the most critical times for brain development, and in consequence, the period during which the brain has the greatest power to acquire and fix abilities, especially those related to language.

Now, in our society, the process of language acquisition is clearly separated between speech development (learning to talk) and literacy (learning to read and write). The first one arises naturally, almost spontaneously between the first and the third year, but the second is relegated to after the age of five, when most children go to kindergarten or elementary school. Being the ability to talk and read both sides of the same process (language), the natural way to develop it would be at the same time, when the brain is naturally shaped to acquire language.

The consequence of this is that for decades, billions of children have not taken advantage of their best time to learn to read. Children are in fact able to learn to read since infancy, and the benefits of this stay forever. Children who read before entering Kinder perform better in virtually every aspect, both from the academic and social point of view and are more likely to succeed in life than their peers who were illiterate by age five.

Psychologists and early childhood education experts have developed effective methods for parents and caregivers to train their children into reading while they are still babies. These programs are usually based on books, word cards and also multimedia components such as DVDs and songs, and parents should look for those endorsed by professionals with expertise Early Education and Child Development.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

How can you close the gaps between your teeth?

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One of my patients' most commonly asked questions is what is the best way to close a gap between your teeth? This depends on different factors and is different for each individual. Factors affecting the type of treatment that would be suitable are:

  • How large is the gap?
  • Is the gap a space between 2 adjacent teeth or due to missing teeth?
  • What is the desired cosmetic outcome for the patient?
  • What time frame does the patient want the treatment to be completed in?
  • How is the overall health of the mouth and adjacent teeth?

Cosmetic bonding or composite veneers
If the gap between the two teeth is very small, closing the gap with composite bonding provides a quick solution to the problem. Bonding provides a minimally invasive solution to closing the gap. However, the drawbacks with bonding are that it does not last very long and will eventually need to be redone. Boning material is also susceptible to staining and may show up after some time.

Porcelain veneers
Veneers are commonly used to close a gap between two front teeth (diastema), but if the gap is too large, the veneers used to the close the gap will be disproportionately wide compared to the rest of the natural teeth. This could leave the smile looking unnatural, whereas one of the aims of cosmetic dentistry is to create a beautiful and natural look. Veneers offer a more robust solution than composite bonding; however, the teeth need to be prepared, which means that healthy tooth structure must be removed to allow the veneers to be fitted over the front surfaces of the teeth.

Orthodontics/braces/Invisalign
The most conservative and minimally invasive way to close a small gap is orthodontic treatment, either using conventional fixed braces, or invisible braces such as the Invisalign system. There are many different types of braces available, such as lingual braces, the Inman aligner, Damon braces etc. They all serve one purpose: to apply pressure to the teeth to encourage them to move closer together to close the gap. The main drawback to this method is that it takes time and you could be undergoing treatment for many months, versus veneers or bonding where the solution is instantaneous.

Gaps due to missing teeth
If the gap is due to a missing tooth, veneers or orthodontic treatment would be inappropriate. The missing tooth needs to be replaced, both for aesthetic and functional reasons – a restoration would prevent the teeth on either side of the gap from “shifting” towards the gap. Solutions to replace a gap due to missing teeth could be a partial denture, a dental bridge or a dental implant.

Partial denture
This is a false tooth that is mounted on a plate and sits in your mouth to fill the gap. The main drawback to dentures is that they can come loose, which can be embarrassing, as well as making chewing tough foods and eating more difficult.

Dental bridge
A fixed bridge relies on the structure of the neighbouring teeth adjacent to the gap to act as anchors for crowns to "bridge" the gap. This requires the reduction of healthy tooth tissue. The bridge is only as strong as the supporting teeth, and if one of the supporting teeth were to be damaged in the future or undergo decay, the integrity and strength of the bridge would also be lost.

Dental implants
A dental implant is a replacement for the root portion of your tooth and it provides a long-term solution for the replacement of a missing tooth that does not rely on the adjacent teeth. The treatment is usually carried out in two stages, with the implant first placed into a hole drilled into the jawbone and then left to heal for a period of up to six months. The second stage involves placing a crown or bridge on the implant once it has fully integrated with the bone.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Why the Evidence of Water on the Moon is Bad News







The big science story this week was the confirmation that the moon is covered in water. And not just in the shadowed, polar craters where scientists suspected it, but all over. Water on the moon--that has to be great news, right?

Not really. While unexpected discoveries are always interesting scientifically, this one is actually bad news for space exploration. It would have been better if lunar water wasn't quite so ubiquitous.

When I previewed NASA's LCROSS mission last March, I noted that its purpose was not really in determining whether the moon had water, but in determining how the water was distributed. Even though LCROSS is still scheduled to smash into the Moon's surface in a couple weeks, it now seems likely that it will only confirm this week's findings: that there are trace amounts of water everywhere on the moon.

For human exploration, highly concentrated deposits of ice would be a much more useful distribution. The possibility of mining water on the moon has often been cited as both the means and the end for sending people back to the moon (Bill Stone, for example, has been a big proponent). Even with the possibility of big deposits, though, I was always skeptical that mining lunar water ice could ever be efficient enough to be worthwhile. Now, it seems unlikely that any usable amount of water can be extracted from the surface. Geologist Robert Clark estimated that one ton of lunar soil might yield "as much as 32 ounces of water" (a little less than a liter). That means it will take a lot of work to get a little liquid, even with the help of innovative suction robots.

I'm now interested to see how this finding is used as political spin. Back in the Bush years, NASA's Constellation program promised a fully-functioning moon base within two decades (the program continues to move forward, but its future remains in limbo). Constellation's ultimate destination, at least in theory, was Mars. But, in practice, the moon quickly became the primary target. The agency then needed to come up with a bunch of justifications for going there, after the fact. The prospect of mining lunar water, always seemed l one of these. Regardless of the impracticality of collecting it, the water finding may energize Moon proponents. A Space.com article declared that "Water Makes Moon Suddenly a More Attractive Destination." The New Scientist similarly raised hopes:

Newly confirmed water on the moon could help sustain lunar astronauts and even propel missions to Mars, if harvesting it can be made practical.

In this summer's Mars special report, we examined whether going back to the moon before Mars is even necessary. While a moon program may make us better prepared for the longer and difficult journey, it could easily turn into a wasteful disatrction that eats up valuable time and resources. Frankly, the chance of finding evidence of life on Mars will always make it a more attractive destination than our close, but definitely dead, satellite.

NASA Spacecraft Sees Ice on Mars Exposed by Meteor Impacts


PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that range in depth from approximately half a meter to 2.5 meters (1.5 feet to 8 feet). The craters did not exist in earlier images of the same sites. Some of the craters show a thin layer of bright ice atop darker underlying material. The bright patches darkened in the weeks following initial observations, as the freshly exposed ice vaporized into the thin Martian atmosphere. One of the new craters had a bright patch of material large enough for one of the orbiter's instruments to confirm it is water-ice.

The finds indicate water-ice occurs beneath Mars' surface halfway between the north pole and the equator, a lower latitude than expected in the Martian climate.

"This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago," said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Byrne is a member of the team operating the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, which captured the unprecedented images. Byrne and 17 co-authors report the findings in the Sept. 25 edition of the journal Science.

"We now know we can use new impact sites as probes to look for ice in the shallow subsurface," said Megan Kennedy of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, a co-author of the paper and member of the team operating the orbiter's Context Camera.

During a typical week, the Context Camera returns more than 200 images of Mars that cover a total area greater than California. The camera team examines each image, sometimes finding dark spots that fresh, small craters make in terrain covered with dust. Checking earlier photos of the same areas can confirm a feature is new. The team has found more than 100 fresh impact sites, mostly closer to the equator than the ones that revealed ice.

An image from the camera on Aug. 10, 2008, showed apparent cratering that occurred after an image of the same ground was taken 67 days earlier. The opportunity to study such a fresh impact site prompted a look by the orbiter's higher resolution camera on Sept. 12, 2008, confirming a cluster of small craters.

"Something unusual jumped out," Byrne said. "We observed bright material at the bottoms of the craters with a very distinct color. It looked a lot like ice."

The bright material at that site did not cover enough area for a spectrometer instrument on the orbiter to determine its composition. However, a Sept. 18, 2008, image of a different mid-latitude site showed a crater that had not existed eight months earlier. This crater had a larger area of bright material.

"We were excited about it, so we did a quick-turnaround observation," said co-author Kim Seelos of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "Everyone thought it was water-ice, but it was important to get the spectrum for confirmation."

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said, "This mission is designed to facilitate coordination and quick response by the science teams. That makes it possible to detect and understand rapidly changing features."

The ice exposed by fresh impacts suggests that NASA's Viking Lander 2, digging into mid-latitude Mars in 1976, might have struck ice if it had dug 10 centimeters (4 inches) deeper. The Viking 2 mission, which consisted of an orbiter and a lander, launched in September 1975 and became one of the first two space probes to land successfully on the Martian surface. The Viking 1 and 2 landers characterized the structure and composition of the atmosphere and surface. They also conducted on-the-spot biological tests for life on another planet.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. The Context Camera was built and is operated by Malin Space Science Systems. The University of Arizona operates the HiRISE camera, which Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo., built. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory led the effort to build the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer and operates it in coordination with an international team of researchers.

To view images of the craters and learn more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, http://www.nasa.gov/mro or http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/

How to Beat Information Overload







Information, the very thing that makes it possible to be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, or any other kind of modern information worker, is threatening our ability to do our work. How's that for irony?

The global economy may run on countless streams, waves, and pools of information, but unrestrained, that tidal wave of data is drowning us. It washes away our productivity and creativity, swamps our social lives, and can even shipwreck our relationships.

Some of us actually call it "quality time" when we sit on the sofa with our kids scrolling through e-mail on our BlackBerries. Take a few days of well-earned vacation and you spend them dreading the thousand e-mails that await your return—e-mails you'll spend a day clearing while putting off real work. On your next trip, you try to head off that problem by taking your computer along so you can chip away at the inflow late at night in your hotel room. The result? Thoughts of work cloud your enjoyment of what should be a respite from office life.

But information overload isn't just about having too much e-mail, voice mail, and text messages. It's a much more complex problem, and its effects take a toll on companies' bottom lines and on their employees' well-being. The time that information workers invest in coping with this overload is significant; at Intel, where I was until recently a principal engineer, we assessed the loss due to unnecessary e-mails and unproductive interruptions at 8 hours a week. In a 1996 Reuters survey of 1300 managers worldwide, two out of three respondents associated information overload with loss of job satisfaction and tension with colleagues, and 42 percent attributed ill health to this stress. Today, more than 10 years later, the numbers would likely be even higher.

Academic researchers have been studying the problem for years, and now at last organizations are beginning to wake up and take action to mitigate it. Some are deploying training and behavioral change programs, trying their hands at setting up quotas and encouraging alternatives to e-mail, and experimenting with interruption-free "quiet time" blocks. Change is in the air.

Whatever you want to call it—infomania? infoglut?—it's a combination of two elements: queued messaging overload and interruptions or distractions. Queued messaging overload can happen anywhere you have a queue of incoming messages, most notably your e-mail in-box. Some of the messages are critical, most are not, but they all accumulate until you deal with them. Information workers typically receive 50 to 200 work-related e-mails daily. Surveys at Intel showed that people spend some 20 hours a week processing work-related e-mail messages, of which about a third are unnecessary. Processing this third took workers about 2 hours a week.

Interruptions and distractions take many forms. They include ringing phones, text messages, instant messages, the chime that alerts you to incoming e-mail, and, of course, a colleague dropping by your office to chat. Any of these will break your chain of thought and may make you drop your current task to start another. The myth that this is okay because people can multitask is just that; ample research proves that the brain simply doesn't work that way.

Even when the interrupting task is related to work, you still waste time as your brain switches from one task to another and back again. Field research by Gloria Mark and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, shows that information workers are interrupted on average every 3 minutes. Even if it takes the brain only a minute to get back in gear, that's a lot of wasted time.

Constant distractions also make us stupid. Research clearly demonstrates that interruptions degrade accuracy, judgment, creativity, and effective management. The psychiatrist Edward Hallowell coined the term attention deficit trait to describe this phenomenon and found that it makes people perform far below their full potential.

Creative thinking, essential to many engineering jobs, requires long stretches of uninterrupted time. Programmers are known for working odd hours, when they can have the quiet they need to concentrate. Other professionals find that their best thinking takes place on airplanes and in hotels during business trips, when they're somewhat disconnected. But even this time is shrinking fast as remote access becomes ubiquitous. At one company, researchers found that recipients read 70 percent of e-mails within 6 seconds of arrival. In the battle between creative thought and distractions, creativity is losing.

Hybrid Chips of Gallium Nitride and Silicon



Compound semiconductors, made of two or more elements—gallium nitride (GaN) or indium phosphide, for example—have attractive properties that silicon lacks. They can make faster transistors than silicon, handle more power, and emit or collect light more easily. For its part, silicon is inexpensive and plentiful, and decades of development have led to processes for making complex, nanoscopic circuits in silicon. It would be useful to mix devices made out of different materials on the same chip, but differing physical characteristics make it difficult to grow compound semiconductors on top of silicon.

Rather than try to grow another semiconductor on silicon, Tomás Palacios, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, opted to make a separate wafer of GaN and bond it to the silicon. He then uses standard photolithography to create circuits in both the silicon and the GaN. "It basically for the first time allows circuit and system designers to choose the best semiconductor material for each device they want in the chip," Palacios says. "They don't have to compromise anymore."

The basic problem with growing any nitride on the kind of silicon used in ICs is that the crystal lattices in each material are oriented differently, which causes defects to spread through the nitride that would render it useless. Palacios and his team grew a wafer of aluminum gallium nitride/gallium nitride on a different type of silicon, one cut along a crystal lattice that renders it useless for ICs but good for growing GaN. They coated the top of the nitride with a thin layer of an oxide called hydrogen silsesquioxane, then pressed a wafer of electronics-grade silicon wafer down on top of that and heated the wafer sandwich to 400 °C for an hour, gluing them together. Next, they etched away the unusable silicon at the bottom, then used standard processes to inscribe circuits on the good silicon on top, being careful to leave some of the wafer blank. After that, they removed silicon from the blank areas of the wafer, exposing the nitride, and inscribed circuits in that. The result was a fast-switching GaN device called a high electron mobility transistor, right next to an ordinary field-effect transistor made of silicon.

Making Electric and Hybrid Cars Audible


here were a couple of news stories this week concerning the efforts of auto manufacturers seeking to add artificial sound to electric and hybrid cars. The reason is that blind persons, pedestrians and others (for instance bicyclers like me) can't hear electric or hybrid cars approaching at low speeds. There is a bill making its way through the US Congress, called H.R.5734 - Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008, which ...

"... directs the Secretary of Transportation to study and report to Congress on the minimum level of sound that is necessary to be emitted from a motor vehicle, or some other method, to alert blind and other pedestrians of the presence of operating motor vehicles while traveling."

Once the bill passes, the results/recommendations need to be reported back to Congress within two years.

The US is slow in comparison to Japan in addressing this issue. The Japanese Federation of the Blind, the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, and Japan’s transportation ministry have already met twice to discuss the issue, and are going to present recommendations by the end of the year on how sounds should be emitted by electric, hybrid and other vehicles that are becoming "too quiet." The only constraint is that the sound can't be too close to a car horn.

Bloomberg News ran this article earlier this week about Nissan engineers coming up with for its hybrid/electric cars "a high-pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in (the 1982 movie) 'Blade Runner.' "

The car's sound system would turn on automatically when the car starts and shut off when it reaches 20 kilometers per hour (12 mph), Nissan says. At higher speeds, tire noise provides enough audible clues.

The Washington Post published a story today on the subject as well. This story has an informative graph showing just how quiet a hybrid is in comparison to a conventional car.

At zero miles per hour (mph), a conventional car emits about 50 decibels of noise - the hybrid basically zero. At 6.2 mph, the conventional car emits about 58 decibels, the hybrid 50. They are virtually identical (61 vs. 60 decibels) at 12.4 mph.

The Post story quotes Robert Strassburger, vice president for vehicle safety at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, as saying, "Frankly, we've been working for 30 years to make cars quiet -- never thinking they could become too quiet." This point was also made by Nissan engineers in the Bloomberg story.

The Post story also says that Nissan engineers are concerned about driver reactions to the artificial sound generated by a hybrid or electric car. Some drivers, for instance, complained that the generated sounds made them sleepy or irritated.

Just what we need - noise induced driver rage.

The Bloomberg article says that Tokyo-based Datasystem Co. now makes a device selling for 12,800 yen ($140) that emits 16 different sounds including a cat’s meow, a cartoon-like "boing" and a human voice saying, "Excuse me." The article didn't say whether the "excuse me" was in a polite or aggressive tone of voice. I suppose you can tune it.

I don't think I would be all that happy, though, with a hybrid car creeping up behind me while I am riding my bike blaring "Excuse me, Excuse me, Excuse me" or "Boing, Boing, Boing."

As the Post story notes, the proliferation of different sounds could quickly get out of hand without some sort of regulation, although Nissan engineers think that a hybrid or electric car's sound could add to its sales/marketing allure. I am sure all other car manufacturers are thinking the same thing.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Flexible Paper Speakers on the Way


30 September 2009—Scientists in Taiwan say that industrial production of an ultrathin, flexible loudspeaker made mostly out of paper could begin by the end of 2010.

”Aside from use in family, stereo, or automobile hi-fi equipment, it can also be used in earphones or for industrial antinoise purposes,” says Johnsee Lee, president of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), where the technology has been under development since 2006.

The device, named fleXpeaker, is basically a sandwich of paper and metal filled with an electroactive polymer that contracts and expands with an audio signal’s electric field.

”It’s soft [and can] easily fit in different curves,” says Ming-Daw Chen, division director of ITRI’s Electronics and Optoelectronics Research Laboratories. ”Therefore, the product customization can be done in diverse fields, such as art for public facilities, interior design,...costume accessories, and others.”

Chen says the flexible paper speaker consumes less electricity than a conventional speaker with the same sound performance. However, due to the thinness of the speaker, improving the performance of very low-pitched sounds with frequencies below 200 hertz remains a challenge.

The paper speakers have caught the attention of a number of firms outside Taiwan, according to Chen, but ITRI has decided to work with domestic car-audio system producers first. ”We’ve been fixing the production process, and the commercialization is likely to be launched in late 2010,” he says, adding that an innovative audio amplifier module will also be invented for the thin-speaker system.

Meanwhile, ITRI is demonstrating the malleability of the high-fidelity speaker. Chen says a wall made up of fleXpeaker units will be displayed for the first time at the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo.

Taiwan’s ITRI is not alone in inventing paper-thin flexible speakers. Last year, a research team led by Shoushan Fan and Kaili Jiang at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, announced the invention of a paper-thin speaker made from carbon nanotubes, or CNTs.

According to the Foxconn Enterprise Group, which backs the Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Center, commercializing the nanotube speaker might take more than three years. ”We’ve been working hard to design the production process with full confidence in the CNT speaker,” says Shaoming Fu, who’s in charge of Foxconn’s intellectual property management department. According to Fu, the team has made the needed nanotubes on 4-inch wafers, and each 4-inch wafer can produce 6 square meters of the thin film.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

How to increase your AdSense earnings

If you hear about people achieving high payments per click with AdSense, remember that's only part of the story. for high total earnings, you also need lots of page views and a high click-through rate.

Here are some ideas on how to achieve those three things:

If you're starting afresh designing a site specifically for AdSense revenue, you'll want a simple design that makes it easy to paste Google's code into a horizontal or vertical space on the site. For experienced webmasters, that's easy.

To increase your click-throughs, design a simple, uncluttered page with the AdSense ads displayed prominently.

Use white space, so that the AdSense panel catches the eye.

Where possible, use ads high on the page. They catch visitors' attention.

Experiment with borderless ads high on the page. (You can create borderless ads by setting the border color to the same as the background color. Look in your AdSense control panel under "Ad settings".)

Try placing AdSense high in the left-hand column. That works well for super affiliate James Martell.

On very simple, one-column pages, making your article wrap around AdSense ads near the top-right of the page works remarkably well for me on a non-Internet marketing site.

Stick to only one topic per page - that makes it easier for Google to serve up highly relevant ads on your pages.

Plain, bland pages with few competing links result in higher click-through rates on the AdSense ads.

If you want to target certain high-priced keywords, use them in the file name, in the heading on the page, and in the first paragraph - in other words, use search engine optimization techniques.

If you change those keywords, Google will change the ads that appear on your page.

If you have trouble getting AdSense to serve relevant pages, check your anchor text - the words used in links on your page. Try changing some of those words.

Watch out for cases where Google has guessed wrong, and is displaying ads that won't interest your visitors. Figure out which words are involved, and rewrite those words. Help Google by sticking closely to the topic.

Don't worry about losing traffic via those clicks. If you can earn maybe 30 or 50 cents or more per click, you WANT to lose visitors!

You'll also want keyword-rich pages, optimized to rank highly in search engines, so you can serve lots of pages.

Try using ads at the top of the page and again at the bottom. At first, this wasn't allowed but AdSense changed the rules and it's now OK.

One of the beautiful things about AdSense is that you can generate revenue from informational sites even if there are no obvious related affiliate programs. With more than 100,000 advertisers, there's a good chance that Google will find ads that match your pages, better than the big ad networks can.

Don't be tempted into trying to create thousands of spammy computer-generated articles. Human beings review sites for AdSense. Build useful, interesting sites. Google likes them.

One way to create articles quickly is use Gary Antosh's approach. He pays people to write articles for him - by the truckload. So far he has bought hundreds of them and paid only $5 per article. See How to buy articles for $5 - the details

Another way is to use works that are copyright-free. Here's a book that describes how to find such articles: The Public Domain: How to Find and Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More

However, that technique isn't likely to be useful for long. At the very least, it would be wise to add your own introduction and conclusions to make your pages different from everyone else's.

Several websites now sell packages of articles on a wide variety of topics. I belong to several of these membership sites. It's an excellent way of saving time. It's so much easier to rewrite an article you've bought than do all the research and writing yourself.

These articles are often referred to as PLR articles or private label rights articles because you own the right to alter them in any way you wish. Here are some good sources of PLR articles.

You can use PLR articles to quickly add lots of keyword-rich articles to your site for the search engines to find.

For long-term success, write your own original articles on a topic you're passionate about. That way, you're writing for humans AND search engines.

iStock launches high-end collection Vetta and projects gross revenue of $200MM for 2009

The leading micro-stock web-site, Getty’s iStockphoto, has announced the launch of a new premium collection of imagery that will command higher prices than their regular collection. Prices for images from the new collection, called Vetta(TM), will range up to 70 credits, the equivalent of $96.25. iStock has also announced it projects gross
revenue to reach US$200MM this year.

According to Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto’s COO, the company recently completed a survey among 28,000 customers which indicated that image quality is the most important factor in customer satisfaction. The survey results also showed that customers are willing to spend more money on higher quality imagery. “It is now more expensive to find an image than to buy it,” Thompson says. The Vetta(TM) collection (the name means “peak” in Italian) will open with approximately 35,000 images all of which come from iStock-exclusive contributors only.

iStock also announced that the company projects total revenue of US$200MM in 2009. Thompson says iStock is currently tracking a contributor pay-out rate $1.2MM per week. That amounts to $62.4MM per year meaning the company pays out about 31% of its revenue to 78,000 contributors for an annual average of US$800 per contributor per year. When asked how the projected US$200MM will compare to revenue for 2008, Thompson replies, “This is the first year we won’t have doubled in size. But we are aren’t that far off.”

iStock also made public improvements it has made to its default search algorithms called ‘Best Match.”. The iStock search system has collected historical data from millions of searches such as which keywords were used and which images the customer then opened and ultimately purchased. The system can use this historical data to create Best Match 2.0 by ranking keywords accordingly and return more accurate results. A second phase of this search enhancement feature will entail matching the customer’s location with the search results. “We’ve found that a customer from Germany searching for ‘beer’ is looking for a completely different image from a customer from Mexico searching for ‘beer’,” says Thompson. The default search feature can be turned off if a customer simply wants to brain-storm and not be so literal.

Thompson feels that for the sake of iStock’s contributors, it’s important to make these changes public despite the possibility of giving away company advantages. “Changes of this magnitude make contributors jumpy,” he says. We’re dealing with significant amounts of money, and in some cases, their sole livelihood. There is no way for us to say, "This is going to affect your best-selling file in this way," because, honestly, we can’t tell. What we can do is produce great results that they can see are fair and relevant. They know in the end they’ll sell more images, if iStock gets the right images in front of people.”

Keyword,adwords keyword tool,keyword tools

Keyword,adwords keyword tool,keyword tools



Top Paying Keywords Optimization (TPWO) It is now common thing and many webmasters know it very well,that they can earn well if they use top paying keywords and phrases in their websites.This can helps you make more money for the same clickthrough rate or CTR.

For the persons who don’t have a specific topic in mind, the top Keywords lists will definitely help you find a niche market that is perfect for you.

Some of the tools which will help you in finding the high paying keywords are discussed below:

1)Spyfu.com — a alone website which can help you to know the best keywords solution which are high revenue generating keyword as well as they are updated with the competitors and shows beautifully with graphs.

They show the market value which goes on for a specific keyword and it doesn’t provide just a list but any keywords which you want to know.

2)Tool at my websites index page in the box at right hand side contains the various tools now for searching a keyword you have to just go to google tab >>> now Google Traffic Estimator >>> and put the term in it. And click go it will provide you Average CPC,keywords’ performance history along with Search Volume Estimated Avg. CPC Estimated Ad Positions Estimated Clicks / Day Estimated Cost / Day you can also download it as csv format.

it becomes easy for the persons to see and do things if he/she is a member of adwords family.

3)Keyword Group Detection >>This tool can help you make the groups of words from the pool of online queries which are interrelated or similar to keywords that you enter. To detect the complete group, please type a keyword.

Just go there

http://adlab.microsoft.com/Keyword-Group-Detection/Default.aspx

4)Keyword Mutation Detection: if you want to grab the market then you should know even the small holes which your competitors forgotten to cover.There is a tool from msn which can help you get through this whole tag.This tool displays the common misspellings or alternative spellings which the user’s input keywords that are frequently found in search query logs. Type a correctly spelled keyword.

http://adlab.microsoft.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection/

5)If you want to know about keywords for your website there are some of the free tool which you can use i generally use the google tools which is here it helps webmasters a lot just go here

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can know your potential or desired search query with the help of this there are two methods either you put in the term and google will find out using synonymous technique or you can use the website content tab which suggests keyword according to your website pages.

6)yahoo overture tool is dead and is not responding at all it had changed its theme.

7)Keyword tracker tool from wordtracker >> this tool is a nice functioning tool and can help you to get about 100 auto generated keywords along with the estimated of their daily search volume.
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

8)Free Search Term Suggestion Tool: this tool provides you the 100 results and it is quite good for easy looking of search items and phrase.

Find it here
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

9)Tool from seobook.com This tool is powered by the wordtracker and i don’t see anything new in it however you can give it a try just find out it here

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Some of the keyword which can help you earn more are as following.

Max CPC ($) Avg CPC ($) Keyword
520.52 97.44 domains yahoo
418.63 79.81 domain name yahoo
145.71 68.91 dc hair laser removal washington
119.63 66.15 law lemon wisconsin
135.94 51.14 hair removal washington dc
493.73 41.97 domain registration yahoo
262.02 40.36 benchmark lending
438.23 38.05 domain yahoo
330.50 37.86 yahoo web hosting
121.86 37.29 hair laser removal virginia
121.27 36.59 peritoneal mesothelioma
46.38 36.55 ca lemon law
81.58 34.13 best buy gift card
96.87 31.10 adverse credit remortgage
234.33 30.98 mesothelioma information
48.68 29.77 law lemon ohio
54.31 29.34 att call conference
83.22 29.10 insurance medical temporary
82.33 28.95 illinois law lemon
82.33 28.78 mesothelioma symptoms
60.86 28.51 angeles drug los rehab
36.88 28.26 personal injury solicitor
101.30 28.23 att go
61.47 28.03 accident car florida lawyer
159.00 27.11 google affiliate
90.48 27.11 at t wireless
172.60 26.31 100 home equity loan
46.72 26.28 mcsa boot camp
40.18 26.19 anti spam appliance
93.12 26.17 adverse remortgage
37.33 26.00 chicago hair laser removal
53.70 25.98 att conference
101.26 25.84 at and t
102.52 25.45 laser hair removal maryland
123.04 25.15 mesothelioma
74.66 24.88 buy gift card
114.88 24.80 mesotheloma
41.70 24.52 student loan consolidation program
58.70 24.45 california law lemon
112.22 24.30 event management security
129.13 24.15 canada personals yahoo
62.11 24.15 orlando criminal attorney
41.59 23.78 uk homeowner loans
48.65 23.71 vioxx lawsuit
27.80 23.55 compare life assurance
73.41 23.34 criminal defense federal lawyer
141.00 23.29 american singles
73.70 23.09 federal criminal defense attorney
34.61 23.07 laser hair removal manhattan
102.69 23.03 att prepaid wireless
170.89 23.00 fortis health insurance temporary
39.31 22.93 miami personal injury lawyer
37.79 22.75 hair removal chicago
69.09 22.74 at and t cell phones
37.59 22.61 refinance with bad credit
103.19 22.47 malignant mesothelioma
63.95 22.45 lease management software
169.05 22.34 primary pulmonary hypertension
37.77 22.27 miami personal injury attorney
53.88 22.24 anti spam lotus notes
31.56 22.23 life insurance quotes
105.05 21.91 egg credit
39.25 21.80 anti spam exchange server
65.98 21.77 lemon law
193.39 21.67 google adsense
33.09 21.67 best consolidation loan student
34.22 21.63 refinance with poor credit
77.44 21.49 employee leasing
34.61 21.36 student loan consolidation center
40.45 21.35 buyer mortgage note
57.49 21.34 federal student loan consolidation
55.24 21.33 symptoms of mesothelioma
30.51 21.31 city hair laser new removal york
133.02 21.20 att wireless com
30.03 21.15 san diego dui lawyer
66.79 21.14 indiana law lemon
58.27 21.10 law lemon michigan
70.76 20.80 angeles criminal defense los
27.42 20.80 refinancing with poor credit
106.26 20.64 home equity loan
41.31 20.64 action class lawsuit vioxx
32.65 20.49 term life assurance
42.74 20.47 e loan
63.54 20.46 celebrex lawyer
71.38 20.37 vasectomy reversal
56.24 20.36 mortgage rates refinancing
47.61 20.28 attorney law lemon
36.13 20.28 consolidate student loans
36.88 20.17 home equity loans
50.75 20.11 mesothilioma
43.02 19.99 new york personal injury lawyer
27.42 19.98 home equity loan rates
32.22 19.97 auto insurance quotes
64.02 19.93 georgia law lemon
37.31 19.90 homeowner loans
27.03 19.73 equity loan rates
61.52 19.68 administration lease software
100.26 19.63 egg credit card
31.75 19.58 student consolidation loans
65.83 19.55 microsoft anti spam
Max CPC ($) Avg CPC ($) Keyword
46.34 19.41 mesothelioma prognosis
53.36 19.29 second mortgages
31.54 19.26 21 auto century insurance
64.73 19.25 employee florida leasing
52.18 19.21 federal consolidation loan
101.30 19.17 equity loan
27.88 19.14 personal injury attorney colorado
52.56 19.03 accident lawyer michigan
30.22 19.02 refinancing with bad credit
28.78 19.02 home equity line of credit rates
45.11 19.01 federal consolidation
62.95 18.96 non profit debt consolidation
61.58 18.95 pay per click affiliate
47.84 18.86 city hair new removal york
107.72 18.85 acid reflux disease diet
52.63 18.77 refinance poor credit
36.45 18.75 equity loans
36.00 18.73 student loan consolidate
32.77 18.60 consolidate loans
33.40 18.51 secured loans
30.78 18.49 criminal lawyer new york
51.00 18.43 affiliate per click
33.06 18.29 chicago personal injury lawyer
25.19 18.29 los angeles dui lawyer
110.73 18.19 att prepaid
63.95 18.10 angeles criminal defense lawyer los
27.37 18.04 critical illness insurance life
40.00 18.03 irs lawyer tax
33.77 18.03 laser hair removal new york
66.00 18.02 comcast high speed
240.78 17.98 personal yahoo
57.77 17.78 san diego dui attorney
60.49 17.77 michigan personal injury
36.93 17.73 automobile law lemon
33.22 17.66 cheap insurance life term
45.38 17.52 home loans refinancing
30.44 17.51 consolidate college loans
39.22 17.45 cheap life insurance
32.06 17.38 vioxx law suit
38.36 17.32 student loan refinance
62.47 17.30 car hire alicante spain
57.56 17.28 tax attorney
31.37 17.28 refinancing my home
51.18 17.24 criminal dallas lawyer
31.46 17.24 line of credit home equity
26.44 17.23 litigation vioxx
56.43 17.20 at and t phones
44.22 17.15 criminal defense attorney los angeles
25.86 17.14 commodity online trading
26.48 17.13 home equity rates
190.41 17.12 adsense
36.81 17.12 law lemon mass
65.76 17.11 equity home
39.70 17.10 arizona law lemon
40.84 17.09 child molestation attorney
31.40 17.09 home line of credit
54.56 17.06 alicante car rental spain
70.37 17.03 attorney defense federal
53.29 17.02 san diego criminal attorney
42.50 16.79 injury lawyer new york
37.52 16.78 attorney injury new personal york
89.97 16.77 at and t mobile
104.55 16.72 pleural mesothelioma
80.62 16.61 augmentation breast diego san
56.20 16.61 home equity poor credit
83.55 16.60 health insurance temporary
62.43 16.60 compensation mesothelioma
33.00 16.60 21st century insurance
47.65 16.52 cheap insurance medical
53.95 16.51 angeles criminal lawyer los
31.65 16.49 low cost term life insurance
37.43 16.48 home refinance loans
48.20 16.45 eloan
33.93 16.44 life insurance quote
25.06 16.39 cheap life assurance
46.13 16.33 125 equity loan
32.22 16.32 anti spam exchange
32.09 16.31 credit equity home line
103.44 16.30 att go phone
46.72 16.30 dui florida lawyer
37.97 16.27 hair removal new york
20.14 16.22 vioxx class action suit
31.32 16.14 merchant account international
25.98 16.11 vioxx class action
48.31 16.10 125 home equity loan
44.40 16.10 life insurance quote online
47.36 16.09 consolidation loan
32.15 16.04 equity line of credit
26.31 16.02 carolina law lemon north
25.97 16.02 equity rates
52.70 15.87 direct home insurance line
30.84 15.86 angeles attorney los tax
35.29 15.85 credit home line
35.04 15.81 term insurance
34.93 15.81 auto insurances
61.54 15.80 debtfreedirect
27.77 15.80 refinance comparison
49.97 15.77 acid reflux treatment
46.72 15.77 bad credit mortgage refinance
42.56 15.73 college loan refinance

136.53 15.66 mesothelioma lawsuits
50.97 15.66 criminal diego lawyer san
35.86 15.58 equity line
37.11 15.54 credit equity home line rate
44.22 15.53 attorney criminal miami
35.93 15.52 equity home line
35.31 15.51 florida medical malpractice lawyer
26.04 15.51 california car cheap insurance
103.88 15.49 law lemon virginia
36.36 15.46 injury law new personal york
34.45 15.46 auto law lemon
34.25 15.44 refinancing rates
32.72 15.43 cheap insurance term
61.61 15.40 houston criminal attorney
51.27 15.40 lexington law
37.54 15.40 best equity home loan rate
27.14 15.40 mortgage life assurance
23.32 15.36 online help desk software
70.97 15.35 phoenix criminal attorney
73.47 15.34 federal criminal defense
44.13 15.33 student loan refinancing
20.86 15.33 angeles attorney dui los
38.50 15.32 level term life insurance
60.04 15.31 criminal lawyer phoenix
30.69 15.31 critical illness insurance
25.02 15.24 fx online trading
92.95 15.23 att cingular
35.40 15.20 equity credit line
37.77 15.19 criminal dallas defense
18.90 15.13 hair island laser long removal
33.40 15.08 health insurance international
30.25 15.04 refinance rates
20.44 15.03 debt cosolidation
47.25 14.99 www eloan com
35.49 14.99 law lemon pa
43.88 14.95 2nd mortgage
23.12 14.93 consolidate private student loans
48.81 14.90 angeles attorney criminal los
30.45 14.88 accident car lawyer new york
27.80 14.81 student loans refinancing
20.20 14.81 debt consolidation leads
43.00 14.80 fortis health insurance
22.23 14.80 hair laser nyc removal
42.59 14.76 direct insurance life
64.08 14.73 comcast broadband
29.52 14.73 domain name availability
57.63 14.69 cancer mesothelioma
31.37 14.65 refinancing equity loans
115.01 14.64 distance education degree online
52.52 14.63 criminal attorneys
31.80 14.63 consolidations loan student
60.59 14.57 celebrex attorney
41.00 14.57 refinance bad credit
44.97 14.55 cancer asbestos
36.34 14.50 car century insurance
37.95 14.49 1031 tic
44.22 14.47 adult merchant account
25.78 14.47 arizona criminal lawyer
20.60 14.47 home equity line of credit rate
38.84 14.46 vioxx lawyer
24.87 14.46 consolidation loans
127.16 14.44 com personals yahoo
48.22 14.44 at t com
39.65 14.42 litigation funding
27.56 14.38 commercial credit counseling
40.41 14.34 no cost refinancing
37.70 14.33 student consolidation
62.02 14.25 insurance medical short term
28.50 14.25 line of credit rates
27.71 14.18 american relief tax
23.80 14.18 currency online trading
53.13 14.17 best home equity loan
51.72 14.15 fortis insurance short term
27.85 14.13 life assurance online
24.86 14.12 consolidate my debt
29.61 14.11 life insurance uk
53.52 14.09 affordable term life insurance
39.86 14.08 life assurance quote
26.54 14.08 christian credit counseling
22.82 14.08 hair jersey laser new removal
46.70 14.06 accident attorney michigan
49.61 14.03 att store wireless
32.54 14.02 interest rate refinance
29.54 14.01 company health insurance life mega
31.23 14.00 arizona criminal attorney
34.86 13.98 term life insurance
25.35 13.98 home loans poor credit
29.47 13.92 private loan consolidation
27.37 13.92 cover critical illness insurance
37.97 13.90 home equity credit
38.00 13.85 student loan consolidation
26.09 13.83 ca health in insurance
59.29 13.82 criminal houston lawyer
34.70 13.82 attorney california tax
21.35 13.81 car insurance philadelphia
29.88 13.80 recall vioxx
42.66 13.79 alicante car in rental
50.18 13.78 dallas criminal attorney
59.11 13.77 attorney irs tax
26.70 13.77 equity home line rate

Max CPC ($) Avg CPC ($) Keyword

22.69 13.74 mortgage rates refinance
36.65 13.73 lombard direct
35.00 13.73 law lemon state
35.74 13.72 low interest refinance
33.38 13.71 mega life and health insurance company
26.62 13.70 insurance quote term
64.58 13.69 at and t cellular
39.11 13.69 wells fargo home equity
28.89 13.69 consumer credit consolidation
47.29 13.68 ca insurance medical
36.11 13.66 car law lemon
35.52 13.65 21 car century insurance
31.97 13.57 refinance student loans
46.81 13.48 click affiliate
81.23 13.47 hyip investment
48.65 13.46 law lemon missouri
35.70 13.44 christian counseling debt
38.27 13.42 insurance online term
19.25 13.41 home equity lines of credit
19.60 13.40 equity lines of credit
51.95 13.38 law lemon maryland
28.39 13.38 law lemon ma
68.70 13.37 care ge insurance long term
68.11 13.36 comcast high speed internet
28.09 13.36 critical illness cover
45.56 13.35 discount term life insurance
43.77 13.31 what is mesothelioma
25.39 13.28 california dui attorney
19.94 13.26 home equity line of credit loans
47.04 13.23 criminal federal lawyer
34.54 13.23 compare equity home loan
29.72 13.23 online forex trading
26.82 13.21 law lemon new york
18.79 13.21 debit consolidation
52.70 13.20 arizona divorce lawyer
28.77 13.20 health life mega
51.34 13.17 cal vet
29.73 13.17 attack heart vioxx
53.13 13.15 non profit debt
37.31 13.15 home refinance rates
23.51 13.14 desk help it software
24.46 13.13 low interest home loans
22.47 13.09 drug florida in rehab
33.93 13.08 software anti spam
21.51 13.08 litigation finance
44.41 13.07 consolidating student loan
218.38 13.05 yahoo personal ads
35.31 13.05 vioxx attorney
51.06 13.04 eloan com
25.87 13.03 vioxx stroke
18.85 13.02 debt consolidation programs
84.91 13.01 masters degree education online
53.56 12.99 law lemon new state york
22.26 12.99 hair ny removal
25.18 12.97 fixed home equity loan
23.05 12.97 low interest refinancing
63.77 12.96 personal injury solicitors
42.54 12.95 harvard business review magazine
40.43 12.95 new york personal injury
29.05 12.95 125 home equity
39.86 12.94 minnesota mortgage refinance
25.88 12.94 law lemon rv
65.87 12.93 florida law lemon
41.43 12.93 homeowner loan
86.48 12.91 acid reflux syndrome
36.11 12.91 ford law lemon
25.26 12.91 no closing cost refinancing
25.64 12.90 car diego insurance san
60.40 12.89 back hair laser removal
74.91 12.88 attorney dui florida
32.24 12.88 computer hire uk
21.54 12.88 home equity lines
49.36 12.87 anti spam lotus
65.66 12.86 loan settlement
29.60 12.86 high internet minnesota speed
47.22 12.85 facial laser hair removal
26.55 12.84 antispam exchange
93.90 12.83 florida criminal defense attorney
31.85 12.83 insurance online quote term
55.68 12.82 careone
46.58 12.82 life insurance online
46.13 12.82 home refinance
24.93 12.81 purchase domain name
35.06 12.80 anti spam solutions
36.29 12.79 refinancing loans
41.75 12.78 dedicated windows hosting
18.61 12.78 mortgages for people with bad credit
93.02 12.77 comcast cable modem
19.29 12.76 hair laser ny removal
40.25 12.75 dedicated server hosting
27.56 12.75 vioxx claim
21.93 12.73 refinance interest rates
110.18 12.71 mesothelioma treatment
38.02 12.71 debt irs tax
21.95 12.71 colorado hair laser removal
25.22 12.68 term life insurance quote
22.53 12.68 anti spam exchange 5.5
53.56 12.67 tampa criminal attorney
79.48 12.64 at and t cell
42.72 12.62 dedicated hosting linux