Technology And The Future

The book I read to research this post was Technology And The Future by Peter Von Stackelberg which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This book is around 90 pages so isn’t very long. It’s about the impact of technology in general rather than specific technologies. Science fiction is normally heavily influenced by the current political climate and people’s dreams and aspirations. It isn’t normally very accurate in what the future will actually. In the 40’s and 50’s it was heavily influenced by people like HG Wells and Arthur C Clarke. More recently it tends to be influenced by the various Star Trek series and films and the Star Wars films. A new invention isn’t automatically a good thing. There are almost certainly winners and losers. Losers for example might be people who work in a factory building products with the old technology who are now going to be made redundant. They might also be people who are going to be displaced from their homes with minimal compensation to make way for a factory building the product. These pros and cons have to be weighed up. We are currently in the Information Age but that is the developed world as many countries are still trying to catch and many are still in the Industrial Age. In time these countries will catch up. They are in most cases also catching up in things like healthcare and employment rights. Currently in many countries workers work in terrible conditions often with no set minimum wage. The author of this book is from Western canada and was born in the 50’s. He compares the world then when in 1962 they had 1 TV channel, newspapers had to be transported from a distant city and were invariably a day late. Compare that to the hundreds of TV stations we have now and the internet where people have instant access to the latest news and it isn’t confined to the print medium because we now have e-books. The world is changing at a very rapid pace and many people do risk being left behind especially older people. It is important people embrace change and the idea your education stops when you get a job is probably coming to an end. I did quite enjoy this book and I think would recommend it.

How To Get Free TV

The book I read to research this post was How To Get Free TV by JJ Riker which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Actually this book is available on kindle unlimited despite me buying it and is around 50 pages so is quite short. This book is on a topic that will have the cable channels quaking in their boots as it does do what the title implies. Most of these stations don’t even require a TV card on your computer if you choose to watch on it. Some aren’t broadcast in 720 p or High Definition Standard. For some of your viewing you can use a digital aerial and coax cable which is probably obvious. You can also search for Free Online TV in a search engine like Google. You can also often stream these signals say from a router to your TV with a Roku 3, Apple TV or Amazon Kindle Fire TV devices. The Fire TV will also let you stream games from a console. Often these streaming devices have official channels they work with but there are also unofficial ones and often they are free. There is a website at http://twitch.tv & http://playon.tv which work with the Roku 3 and are free. There is also a cut down version of the Roku LT which is obviously cheaper. You can stream free TV to your computer at http://www.netgate.sk/products/freeonline-tv/ and there is also http://itv-player.com which gives to the content broadcast on ITV including many TV series and films. This book is probably more aimed at people in America than other countries but most of it applies to other countries. I did thoroughly enjoy reading and I would recommend it. I think certainly in most countries it is quite legal to watch stuff on these channels and at the end of the day it is a free option. One thing I will mention is if you are streaming to a computer you might need a fast internet connection probably at least 3 MB.

Understanding Chernobyl

The book I read to research this post was Cause And Effect: Understanding Chernobyl by Marianne Barisonek which is an excellent book that I read on kindle unlimited. This book is around 100 pages so is a reasonable length. This book covers the causes of the disaster and its aftermath in a lot of detail. Chernobyl happened because an illegal experiment was carried out. They were trying to see how far they could reduce the power produced by reactor 4. To be safe they needed to keep 30 fuel rods inserted in the reactor but this was reduced to just 6. They turned off the water sprinklers by hand which was because they thought the reactor might crack if it over heated and the sprinklers came on. Compressed air blew in to put the fire out but just made it worse. The fuel rods due to the increased heat resulting from the small amount of rods used buckled and when they tried to insert more fuel rods because they had warped it was stuck. There was a fire and initially people like the fire brigade had no protective clothing. The fact there had been a partial meltdown they attempted to hush up. Nuclear power in Russia was classed as defense and was looked after by the communist party and KGB officials. This meant they weren’t always experts in nuclear power and often had there own agenda. There have been other accidents maybe not as serious as Chernobyl but hushed up. One was fairly near the Scandinavian border and for years they couldn’t understand the increased radioactivity of the area. Another was near the city of Minsk. In both these places there was no evacuation and doctors couldn’t even explain to patients they had radiation sickness. It would be deemed a security breach if they did. When they have these kind of accidents people don’t generally die straight away and it is many years later when people start having things like cancer and having disabled babies. In the case of Chernobyl they estimate it will take at least 300 years for the radiation to subside. There is a black market for selling produce from this area to countries where they don’t have stringent standards for checking radioactivity in food. I really enjoyed this book and would undoubtedly recommend it.

Accountable Care

The book I read to research this post was Accountable Care: Bridging The Information Technology Divide by Greg Miller et al which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This book has around 600 pages so is quite a substantial read. It is a textbook about applying modern technology to the world of healthcare. Most of it is from the perspective of the healthcare in the United States. Healthcare in America is being dragged kicking and screaming in to the 21st century. At one time it was more a matter of cutting costs than anything with the plethora of healthcare businesses. Now they are starting to look at things like quality of service and ways to reduce the number of surgical procedures and visits to the doctor being carried out. One way is of course preventative medicine and educating people to look after there selves. Sometimes surgery isn’t necessary and in certain a patients condition can be managed with drugs. There is also a huge amount of drugs being released every year. There are web services like Microsoft Health Vault which incidently is free being marketed for patients to say in what there medical files say about them. Anybody with any medical condition can invite health professionals and carers to fill in a kind of cloud computing site where they can then show it to anyone they wish to share information about their illness with. There are websites like Patients Like Us which operate as a kind of social media site for these activities. Another site is Sermo. Accountable care extends to things like fixing an air conditioning system where there are minimum standards that must be adhered to laid down. Companies like Microsoft do general software that can be used as part of an integrated healthcare process like Microsoft Office & SQL Server as well as specialist products. Currently they aren’t allowed to use cloud computing sites to store electronic health records as the legal standards are very strict and healthcare providers may leave themselves open to being sued if they are breached. Legal standards are much higher than for other industries and it is unlikely a cloud computing provider would have this level of security and be willing to spend much time explaing these procedures and policies to you. I did really enjoy which is well written and I would recommend it. It might be worth like me reading it on kindle unlimited as it is quite an expensive book and you are allowed to read unlimited books although can only download 10 at any one time. In Britain it costs $7.99.

 

Hybrid Reality

The book I read to research this post was Hybrid Reality by Parag Khanna et al which is an excellent book that I bought from kindle. This book is only around 80 pages but is rather interesting as it is about how the world will change in around the next 30 years. If you look at the world now you will see many of the problems like the proliferation of private armies, recession, unemployment and stock market slumps have always been with us in one form or another. In the cases of stock market slumps and recessions it follows cycles. A lot of what will happen in the future can be predicted. We can also see trends like things getting smaller to the extent in future they will probably be implanted in people like continous access to the internet and each other via this. There will be an emancipation of people in places like Africa for example currently workers are expected to work in poor and high risk conditions in cobalt mines which is a necessary element in technology. Conditions for people like this will improve. Countries like India and China will continue on their paths to super power status. More and more money in those countries will be ploughed in to technology research. Ultimately robots will gradually replace human workers. Currently in South Korea robots are being used instead of teachers to teach English to children in rural schools. Silicon chips will become a misnomer as biotechnology takes over in this regard and the transistors on chips are likely to get smaller and smaller until they reach atomic particle and sub-atomic level. Currently research is going on in this. Technology of the existing kind will get cheaper and cheaper and more and more plentiful. Everyone will have a tablet of one sort or another. America due to its multi culturalism and huge amount of resources will still play a major role on the world stage but it is likely to become more of a level playing field. One thing America because of its huge amount of different races is lots of ideas which can’t be replicated by other countries. I did thoroughly enjoy this book which I think as with any good technology book really makes you think. Naturally I recommend it.

 

Women in IT

The book I read to research this post was Women in IT that is published by the British Computer Society and that is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is more of a motivational and inspirational book than anything. Interestingly it is number 1 on the Kindle Computing E-Book Chart. Obviously a lot of people are concerned about this subject. In the coming years especially in Britain and particularly in specialist fields there is and is going to be a shortfall of trained people in this industry. This obviously those who are trained will command higher salaries. It also means if women can be got interested in working in these fields it would go a long way in addressing this shortage. This book has a kind of combined interviews and profiles of key women in the British IT Industry. It is certainly an interesting read and at least one of them left school with no qualifications and went to night school and then university. This book is only around 120 pages so is quite short. In one case a lady in the book said that her school tried to discourage her from studying all 3 sciences although her brother was allowed to do this. Actually if you look at the statistics for GCSE’s and A levels in Britain girls do slightly better than boys in exam results. Despite this women tend to get paid less than men even though by law they should get the same. When women do go into IT they tend to go into the lower level jobs like secretaries. The book does advise if girls are interested in IT a great opportunity in many schools is learning to program kit computers like the Raspberry Pi. There are also relatively easy languages like scratch that are targeted at this kind of thing. I did quite enjoy this book and would enjoy it.

Data Science

The book I read to research this post was A Simple Introduction To Data Science by Lars Nielsen et al which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is only short around 50 pages and is just an introduction to this subject. In the near future there is going to be a huge shortage in data scientists and data analysts. At the same time there is 1.9 zetabytes of data being produced on the internet by the end of 2011 with 95 % being less than 2 years old. In fact from 2009 to 2030 this data is set to grow by 44 times. To remain competitive companies have to analyze this data as it pertains to them. In the health field in particular there are set to be big discoveries made thanks to this big data as they call it being analyzed. There are open source like R which will analyze it but tend to be difficult to use or commercial products like SAS & SASS which typically charge high fees and are cloud computing products. Many companies use the Amazon products which work with Hadoop and Map Reduce. Much of the data comes from social media sites especially Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin which if you are wondering why membership is free, that is why. They charge fees to companies to analyze the data on their sites. Storing all this data is going to be relatively easy but the biggests challenge is going to be finding particular information quickly among all this huge amount of stored data. I did quite enjoy this book and noticed Lars has done a couple of books on a similar theme which I might check out. I do recommend this book.

 

Railways: Mechanical Engineering

The book I read to research this post was Railways: Mechanical Engineering by JB Snell which is a very good book that I bought at a local secondhand bookstore. This book is around 170 pages so is a reasonable length and was published in 1971 so is probably out of date publication wise. It is a carefully written guide to the workings and technologies of steam trains. The lathe apparently despite following simple principles was only developed in the 19th century and before that was turner which were about as precise as a potters wheel. In early steam trains the cylinders had to be arranged to balance the load from each other so that as one hit an idle stroke another would be at the power stroke. There was a simple remedy which was the weighted flywheel. Prior to this engines had to be well off the ground because cylinders would have to start below the camshaft. Another development was changing from a single boiler which got too hot to lots of pipes which conveyed the pressure more efficiently. Especially as engines got longer and more powerful the single boilers days were numbered although George Stephenson who built the first commercial steam train The Rocket was a firm stickler to this old technology. Heating in carriages took a long time to be able to be implemented economically. Queen Victoria had an early heated carriage as well as flushing toilet. Passengers were usually given a hot water bottle at the station on cold days and the trains were notorious for being cold to travel on. Very early trains had wooden wheels and even tracks that wore out quickly mostly on mining railways. Later on iron wheels, then flanged wheels and steel wheels were developed which wore out less frequently. Prior to flanged wheels they relied on weighted wheels providing traction and keeping them on the rails. The Rocket’s driven wheels weighed 2  1/4 tons each.  I did enjoy this book and it is certainly an interesting subject.