Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
TED.com 6th sense soon to be real
This video was featured on the website TED, great site with tons of interesting clips.
New Micro-chip lets plants call home when they need water
In an effort to become more trim and efficient, everything in life has been given a miniature electronic brain. The car knows when its is not burning at the perfect air to fuel ratio, the thermostat knows when you go to bed so it can turn down the heat a bit, and now plants can send a text, notifying the gardener that it is thirsty. Farming is getting even more high-tech and now plants can be precision watered, conserving resources and helping the environment. Apologies to all the Lord of the Rings nerds out there, the text messages will not be in Old Entish.
There are reports aplenty buzzing around on the interwebs about a slip on water sensor that attaches directly to a plant leaf and sends a text message or e-mail when it is time to be watered. Many sources are attributed to be working on this, from the Israeli government whose number one concern is water conservation to NASA, which is looking to be able to conserve resources while cultivating plants in space. Regardless of who creates the product, the methodology is much the same. A sensor is slipped onto the plant leaf that connects a tiny electrical current through the water in the plant tissue. Once the water goes away, the current is broken and a signal is sent to a computer, which results in a message sent to the gardener indicating which plant is thirsty.
The Israeli government says that their product will cost about $250 to wire up a 5,000 tree orchard. This number is about 5 cents per plant which means the cost per plant could easily be recovered for a large farm that has high water and electricity bills associated with feeding their plants in a matter of minutes. Of course every plant would not need to be “chipped”. Perhaps only 1 in 100 plants would need this sensor to be sufficiently representative of the entire fleet of plants. There are still a few questions that have not been answered before farmers can allocate part of their water budget to a “new Porsche fund”.
China Block Facebook and Twitter for Tien An Men Square Massacre Anniversary
Click here for the full article.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre in Beijing. Tianaman Square was home of the Chinese student freedom movement, the “Goddess of Democracy” statue, and the location for the iconic photo of the student staring down
a row of Chinese People’s Army tanks. However, if you use the Internet
in China, you probably won’t see anything about this event this week -
unless you’re clever.
Starting Tuesday, the Chinese government shut down access to virtually all search engines and social networking sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger, and others. All YouTube videos are also being blocked, as are BBC World News reports on the anniversary. These actions should come as no surprise, because China has previously censored Skype and blocked access to iTunes when it offered a pro-Tibetan album last year during the Beijing Olympics.
The Techcrunch UK website reports that some users are bypassing China’s restrictions by using VPNs, and third-party apps that use the Twitter API (TweetDeck, Twhilr, and Seesmic Desktop) are working.
Have you encountered the ‘Great Firewall of China’ or other country-specific restrictions on Internet access?
100 Web Design Template Sources, Tools and Resources
Like most of my web design related links this one comes to you from Neal at Novachrom.com
