A SUV Like No Other
Move over Hummer! Look out Chevy Suburban! Here comes the KNIGHT XV. And it dethrones almost everything that you would find in the vehicular market today. Manufactured in Toronto, Canada by Conquest Vehicles, Inc., the KNIGHT XV is touted as one of the world’s most luxurious vehicles. Clad in military grade armor with bulletproof windows, The KNIGHT XV is twice as high (8′ tall) and three times heavier (six tons) than your average car. This massive vehicle (truly an understatement) is 20′ long and sits on a Freightliner platform chassis with almost two feet of ground clearance. The engine, a GM V8-6.0 L, is by itself a specimen of beauty, providing 325 HP and 400 ft lbs. torque. An eco-friendly E-85 ethanol Flex Fuel conversion package is also available.
Never mind being surrounded by Wilton Wool carpeting and hand crafted Andrew Muirhead leather, this ‘extreme vehicle’ is outfitted with technological gadgertry that would make even the NSA and CIA jealous. As denoted in the company’s brochure, the KNIGHT XV includes a Hutchinson Ballistic run flat system on all tires and FLIR night vision cameras mounted front and rear as ‘standard security appointments’. Should the owner want to communicate with individuals outside the vehicle without opening a window, an external listening device is available as part of the upgrade package. For those who require only the best in entertainment, upgrade options may also include an Alpine Entertainment Media System, a TracVision Satellite Dish System and a XBox 360. MSRP starts at only US $489,000.
References and Acknowledgments:
“KNIGHT XV featured on Discovery HD World’s Most Expensive Rides.” ConquestVehicles1. 11 May 2010. YouTube. 27 March 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfS8b8stb0I>
Solar Powered Water
Water covers three-quarters of the earth’s surface, yet more than a billion people lack access to drinking water. Despite the fact that most of our water is found in the world’s oceans, about three percent is available for humans to drink:
If a large bucket were to represent all the seawater on the planet, and a coffee cup the amount of freshwater frozen in glaciers, only a teaspoon would remain for us to drink. (M. Specter)
Even more disheartening is that countless lives are lost each year due to preventable water-related diseases that taint this proverbial teaspoon. Imagine the lives that could be saved by simply providing access to potable water.
To be sure, companies and municipalities across the globe are employing technologies, such as distillation and reverse osmosis, to purify water by separating freshwater from salty seawater. One company that is at the forefront of water treatment and purification is Innovative Water Technologies. Based in Colorado, Innovative Water Technologies has developed a unique product called Sunspring ™ ((invented by Jack E. Barker). According to their website, Sunspring ™ is a “solar powered, portable, self-contained water purification system” that provides clean water for orphanages, schools, clinics and hospitals in developing nations like India, Haiti, Congo, Nigeria and Pakistan. Sunspring ™ can also be used for disaster preparedness, emergency response, military applications and campgrounds.
Cylindrically shaped and clad in aluminum diamond tread plate, Sunspring ™ resembles a futuristic phone booth with a solar panel on top. The innards include a GE Homespring™ Central Water Filtration System. Innovative Water Technologies claims that their product can remove 99.999% of microbiological pathogens from virtually any water source, including lakes, waters, rivers, shallow wells and rainwater. One interesting statistic is that Sunspring ™ will treat up to 5000 gallons per day, or 40,000 500 ml bottles a day. Please view the YouTube video below to learn how Sunspring ™ helped bring microbiologically safe drinking water to 140,000 people in Haiti after their earthquake on January 12, 2010.
References and Acknowledgments:
“IWT delivers water to the world.” Lincolnelectrictv. 17 August 2010. YouTube. 15 March 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahkMAH3gSD8>.
Specter, Michael. “The Last Drop – Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe.” The New Yorker. 23 October 2006: 60-71,
<http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/23/061023fa_fact1>
Musical Roboticism
Music has always been a passion of mine ever since I was a child. Often times, I would find myself seeking out new forms of music, experimental in nature, just to satisfy my curiosity for something new and different. Having just bought a Bose Soundock for my iPod Touch, I have been exploring music from all over the world and in many different genres and forms. My passion for music has currently led me to musical roboticism, or the intersection of music, art, technology, robotics and electronics, wherein I recently discovered The League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR). LEMUR is a society of artists and technologists who develop robotic musical instruments that play themselves with the goal of creating innovative music. According to their website, LEMUR was founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer who has a BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon; a Diploma in Music Synthesis (Magna Cum Laude) from Berklee College of Music; and an MS in Computer Science from New York University. One of the more interesting instruments to have been created by LEMUR is the GuitarBot; a four-stringed robot that plucks strings – the pitch can be altered by moving sliders up and down the strings.
GuitarBot
Reinventing the Book with Sophie
Recently I had stumbled across the website, futureofthebook.org, “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.” It was at this website that I had discovered “Sophie“. According to Holly Willis, a Professor at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, Sophie is software (invented by Bob Stein of the Institute For The Future of the Book) that enables one to read and write in an entirely new way that extends itself beyond the traditional, one-dimensional book with black text set on a white page. More specifically, Sophie is an open source authoring tool that provides individuals with the ability to create interactive books that combine text, images, audio and video into an integrated medium. The benefits of Sophie are many. In addition to being free, Sophie does not require programming or advanced technical skills to become proficient. Bringing dissimilar elements together, a journalist, for example, can tell a vivid story that immerses a reader within a media rich and dynamic environment. So, in effect, the reader becomes a viewer wherein he or she can exploit his or her senses and obtain a more meaningful perspective of the subject matter at hand, no matter how complex.
References and Acknowledgments:
Willis, Holly “Sophie Presented by Holly Willis”, (Showcase Project presented at the National Summit on Arts Journalism at the Annenberg School Auditorium on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles, 2 October 2007) <http://www.uscannenberg.org/index.php/najpsummit/page/sophie_presented_by_holly_willis/>.
Georgiev, Kalin; Sredkov, Miloslav (2010) Sophie 2.0 – a platform for reading and writing of interactive multimedia books in a networked environment , ELPUB2010. Publishing in the networked world: Transforming the Nature of Communication, 14th International Conference on Electronic Publishing 16-18 June 2010, Helsinki, Finland/ Edited by: Turid Hedlund and Yasar Tonta. ISBN 978-952-232-086-5, URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10227/599 pp. 437 – 443 http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?133_elpub2010
A Safer Way to Inspect and Maintain High Voltage Transmission Lines.
Imagine yourself working for National Grid in upstate New York and you get a call from your supervisor that there has been a power outage in Niagara County and you’ve been asked to inspect a downed transmission line. Now imagine that the suspect area covers a widespread area and all you have is your Ford F-150 utility vehicle and a pair of binoculars. What might you think? A daunting task? Not for LineScout!
LineScout is a small, sloth-like robot on roller skates that was developed by the Hydro-Quebec Research Institute to inspect high-voltage (735 kilovolt) transmission lines and perform maintenance actvities. This remote-controlled robot is battery powered, waterproof, and equipped with cameras and sensors to detect corrosion, ice build-up and overgrown vegetation that could potentially short out lines. An obviously safer and less expensive way to inspect and maintain power lines, LineScout can operate in harsh environments, cold temperatures (-13 °C), travel 3-4 kilometres an hour, and perform tasks on a battery charge lasting 6-7 hours. The next generation LineScout will have the ability to conduct live-line inspection, beam high quality digital images and data to an engineer on the ground, and eventually perform intervention and manipulation tasks.
References and Acknowledgments:
Hamilton, Tyler. ”A high-wire act for robots.” The Toronto Star 1 August 2010 <http://www.thestar.com/article/841939–a-high-wire-act-for-robots>.
S. Montambault and N. Pouliot, “Design and Validation of a Mobile Robot for Power Line Inspection and Maintenance”, (Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, FSR 2007, 9 – 12 July 2007) <http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/47/17/PDF/fsr_15.pdf>.
Blog Content: Quality vs. Popularity
Having recently visted Rush Rhees library at the University of Rochester, I recently discovered the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. For those who don’t know, IEEE, otherwise known as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is a large professional association for the advancement of technology. Being an ardent fan of the Blogosphere, I initiated a search for articles related to blogging and came across a paper entitled, “Toward Content Quality Oriented Blog Ranking“. The authors of this paper, Anestis A. Toptsis and Adam Russell, propose a method of evaluating blogs and their ranking biased toward a blog’s quality of content as opposed to it’s popularity. Their research indicates that blogs ranked by popularity and not necessarily quality, may even be less relevant for blogs that don’t appear on a ‘top-100′ list. A more obscure blog, or lesser known one, may have an opportunity to become recognized solely on content based on the authors’ proposed method of evaluation and ranking. This is especially true then, and reflective of the authors’ method, if the ranking is based on the out-links from the respective blog and not in-links and self-links. At stake are the traditional blog ranking methods popularized by Google’s PageRank, Technorati and the Alexa that stress incoming links to a specific blog and self-links (According to Wikipedia, a self-link is a link to the page itself).
References and Acknowledgments:
(2010) Anestis A. Toptsis, and Adam Russell, “Toward Content Quality Oriented Blog Ranking”, Proc. 4th International Conference on New Trends in Information Science and Service Science (NISS 2010), Gyeongju, Korea, May 11-13, 2010, IEEE-Computer Society Press, pp. 418-423.
Who or What is ALICE?
Last week one of my colleagues introduced me to Alice. I really wasn’t sure who Alice was until I got a demonstration. According to Wikipedia, “A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human’s input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum’s classical ELIZA program”. In brief, the chatterbot is an intelligent software program that takes the persona of a human being and allows for a user to converse with it. E-commerce sites, for example, use chatterbots as virtual customer service agents to greet visitors, engage in chat and address frequently asked questions. Other chatterbots may be used as an interactive guide to deliver an online demo of a website’s particular features and functionality, offer online training or provide entertainment. For more information, check out alicebot.blogspot.com/ and www.chatbots.org/.
The word, ‘Iterate’
William Safire, one of my favorite New York Times columnists, had passed away in September of 2009. His column, On Language, was one that I enjoyed immensely. William Safire was an authority on the written word and the history and meaning behind its use in everyday application. William’s legacy continues with the continuation of On Language. A column written by Ben Zimmer on June 11, 2011, is an exploration of the word, ‘Iterate‘. According to Dictionary.com, iterate is a verb that is defined as: to utter again or repeatedly; as is used with an object. Ben Zimmer reports that iterate comes “from the Latin verb iterare (“to repeat”) formed from iterum (“again’)”. Whether it’s a new software version or the development of a new product (or technology) such as a video game, there always seems to be a new iteration (noun). To iterate then, means to continuously improve and innovate beyond its present form. Who knows. Maybe I will shadow Google and Facebook and follow in their footsteps when it comes to being iterative (adjective) in nature and redesign the look and feel of my blog every now and then.
My first post!
After countless hours of trying to create a name for my blog, I randomly thought of “Tech This Way” and knew immediately what I wanted to name my blog and write about. My tagline, “Ruminations of a Technophile”, is comprised of two interesting words. According to dictionary.com, ‘ruminate’ means to meditate on; to ponder. A technophile is one who is a technology enthusiast. Tech This Way will reference , cite and discuss technology and technology-related information from such sources as newspapers, journals, whitepapers, theses, magazines, books, podcasts, videos, television, radio, and any other media that I find of interest and that I would like to share with whomever is interested. The focus is on technology and its influence on society, education, business, politics and the individual.
