Semantic Web Talk

Life Extension

2009-11-26T15:39:00.001-08:00

I was reading predictions and forecasts made about the medical field. It looks like a lot of great things will be coming in the near future to improve overall health and life span. The prediction mentioned that the human life will go beyond 120 years (Halal, 2008). I think it is great because prediction is not only about the increased life span but also projects that these people will be in good health. I wonder how it will impact the world population in the coming years. In the past, several people have told me that they chose to be non-vegetarian because they want to participate in controlling the chicken population. If they won’t eat chickens, chickens will be everywhere. I wonder how those people will react to the increasing human population because of the increased life spans.

Reference:

Halal, W. (2008). Technology's Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society. Palgrave Macmillan.

Future Web Trends

2009-11-22T05:50:00.000-08:00

Biometric Identification

2009-11-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

Biometrics are automated methods of recognizing a person based on a behavioral or physiological characteristic. Some of the characteristics that are measured as part of biometrics include face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice. As the level of security breaches and transaction fraud increases, the need for highly secure identification and personal verification technologies is becoming apparent. Biometrics based identification provide a very high level of identification and verification. The need for biometrics can be found in federal, state and local governments, in the military, and in commercial applications. Enterprise-wide network security infrastructures, government IDs, secure electronic banking, investing and other financial transactions, retail sales, law enforcement, and health and social services are already benefiting from these technologies to some degree.

Biometric-based authentication applications include workstation, network, and domain access, single sign-on, application logon, data protection, remote access to resources, transaction security and Web security. As the biometric identification technology matures, utilizing biometrics for personal authentication will become convenient and considerably more accurate than current methods such as utilization of passwords or PINS.

Free PDF Converter

2009-11-01T17:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.freepdfconvert.com/

This seems to be a great tool to convert all sorts of documents and images to PDF. It can take a file from your local computer or it can convert the contents of any URL to PDF.

Anticipating Alternative Futures in Energy Efficiency

2009-11-01T16:44:00.000-08:00

Christakis presented the case study about Anticipating Alternative Futures in Energy Efficiency at Pacific Northwest where thirty five stakeholder representatives and six observers from thirty organizations participated in this case study. They identified and described 168 national and regional trends extending to the year 2015 impacting energy efficiency and they proposed more than ninety actions to address these trends at the regional level.

By incorporating SDP dialogue, the participants drove conclusions of the relationships among the trends and produced a pattern displaying how some trends impact the other trends. Only one trend “reducing the gap of energy consumption per capita among countries will increase the national need to save energy in whatever way there is” on the plausibility map is positioned at the deepest level. Christakis suggested that future collaborative regional action to promote the adoption of energy efficiency in the Pacific Northwest should give serious consideration to the eight consensus actions belonging to the six categories – Price and Taxes, Education and Marketing, Regulatory Action, Metering, Distributed Generation Infrastructure and Tools (Christakis, 2006).

Reference:
Christakis, A. N., Bausch, K. C. (2006). How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power. Information Age Publishing.

Energy Prediction

2009-10-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

The futurists around the world believe that in the coming decade or even before that, the solar cells will produce electricity at the prices that will compete with oil. The consensus is that the cost will become very competitive with the other energy sources by year 2012 to 2015 and some experts also believe that by 2013 10% of US energy will produced by solar and wind power.

Mobile phones and unprecedented innovation

2009-10-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Mobile phones will continue to be a trend in the coming months or may be in the coming years. As the mobile technology improves and more and more applications and innovations are introduced for the mobile phones, the usage of the mobile phones will increase exponentially and it will remain one of the hottest trends in the market.

Wireless Power Transmission

2009-10-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

I cannot believe that Wireless Power Transmission technology has already been developed. I thought about this a few years ago and we were just talking about it a few months ago during one of our residencies at school. Intel researchers demonstrated a method to throw electricity a few feet without wires. This method is based on MIT’s research. This method can light up a 60-watt bulb with 70 percent efficiency. Read more about is here
http://www.pcworld.com/article/152683-3/15_hot_new_technologies_that_will_change_everything.html

Create Family Tree

2009-10-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

Family Tree is a great site to create your family tree. Although we need to be careful about putting our personal information on the Internet but if you feel comfortable with putting minimum information, then this is a great tool.

http://www.familytree.com/

- It provides a graphical view that shows all the relationships and these relationships can be further explored
- It provides each person in the relationship to add, delete or modify its relationships
- It provides several search functions to search for individuals in out of the relationship

Optical Illusions

2009-10-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

This video discuses something that we all have experienced at some time in life, and that is Optical Illusions. Beau Lotto discuses optical illusions created by colors and patterns and how brain interprets them.

1. Colors enable us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces
2. Brain finds patterns and relationships in information and associates them with the behavioral meaning

http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html