Category Archives: Technology

Bringing Eye Care to Thousands in India

New wireless networking system brings eye care to thousands in India

With high-speed links to the hospital, three of the clinics, also known as vision centers, screen about 1,500 patients each month. (Numbers are not yet available for the two other centers, which came online in May 2006.) Centers are run by a nurse trained in eye care. Patients first see the nurse, then spend about five minutes on a web camera consulting with an Aravind doctor. If the doctor determines that a closer examination or an operation is necessary, the patient is given a hospital appointment.

Another great example of applying technology to improve people’s lives. More on appropriate technology projects. It is great to see the focus on improving people’s lives, and using technology to do so.

Related: $100 Laptops for the World – Safe Water Through Play

Open Course Ware from Japan

Soccer Robots from Osaka University

A number of Japanese Universities are creating open courseware, in cooperation with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative (which has spawned the OCW Consortium).

Osaka University OpenCourseWare offers courses in English including: Theory in Materials Science | Fluid-Solid Multiphase Flow

Kyoto University OpenCourseWare aims to:

share information in consideration of the fact that sixty percent of visitors to MIT’s OCW project come from Asia. We will make active use of Japanese in building OpenCourseWare, to recruit talented students from all over Asia as well as to promote the Kyoto University education, with Kyoto’s culture and traditions, to the world at large.

Many of the courses are available in Japanese, some are available in English, including: Applied Pharmacology

Tokyo Tech OpenCourseWare courses include: Advanced Signal Processing – Guided Wave Circuit Theory and Mixed Signal systems and Integrated Circuits.

The Nagoya University OpenCourseWare brings free courseware to the Internet. Currently several courses are available in English including, Basics of Bioagricultural Sciences. They aim to post 25 courses initially.
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Research Career in Industry or Academia

In, Working in Industry vs Working in Academia, a computer scientist (software engineering) shares their experience and opinion on research career options. He discusses 4 areas: freedom (to pursue your research), funding, time and scale, products (papers, patents, products).

In academia, you’re under a huge amount of pressure to publish publish publish!
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In industry, the common saying is that research can produce three things: products, patents, and papers (in that order). To be successful you need to produce at least two of those three; and the first two are preferred to the last one. Publishing papers is nice, and you definitely get credit for it, but it just doesn’t compare to the value of products and patents.

Related: post on science and engineering careers – Google: engineers given 20% time to pursue their ideas

Google Tech Webcasts

Google provides video webcasts of speakers (engineers, scientists, software programmers, professors…) that present at Google. These videos offer a great way to take part in one aspect of work at Googleplexs.

Recent additions include:

The rate at which they add excellent videos is amazing. You might find yourself wanting to work at Google.

Previous post: Google Tech Talks also see Google related posts on our management improvement blog

Engineering at Home

Home made air conditioner

Kevin Kelly has started a new blog: Street Use. Street Use highlights home engineered technology solutions. Interesting stuff, and given the Kevin Kelly’s great ideas this blog should be interesting.

Photo: Fan Hack:

A guy takes copper tubing wrapped in a spiral around both sides of an electric fan. The tubing is connected (via cable ties) to an aquarium pump which circulates ice water held in a plastic storage bin beneath the fan. The fan then dispenses the cold into the room. A full set of pictures can be seen on the guy’s Flickr set.

Similar posts:

The Make blog (and magazine) would be of interest to those that like Street Use.

Electrical Engineering Student

I ran across Christian Montoya’s web site today, he is:

a 20 year old Electrical Engineering student at Cornell University. I will graduate in May of 2007 with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. My main focus is digital circuit design and I am also interested in networks and statistical analysis.
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I am currently looking for a job, preferably in Europe. I am studying in the U.S. and I am a U.S. citizen so finding overseas employment isn’t easy.

I like the use of the blog to aid in finding employment. We see many warnings about how internet posting is going to harm students careers – but blogging can help your career. He also has a series of posts on life at Cornell, including:

Interview of Steve Wozniak

Excellent interview of Steve Wozniak from Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston, to be published in a few months.

I said, “No, I’m never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It’s my job for life. It’s the best company because it’s so good to engineers.” It really treated us like we were a community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers—bottom of the org chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion and innovation. So I would never leave Hewlett-Packard. I was going to be an engineer for life there.

Sounds like Google today, see: How Google Works focused on engineering and Enginners at Google Make Decisions.
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The Web is 15 Years Old

How the web went world wide

Many users know that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva.
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One key date is 6 August 1991 – the day on which links to the fledgling computer code for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it.

So, in 1991, the web protocol was added to the internet which was created by the United States ARPA and DARPA starting in 1968, or so depending on what is counted as the start.

Additional articles exploring the history of the internet and the world wide web:

How Google Earth Is Changing Science

How Google Earth Is Changing Science (broken link removed) by Manfred Dworschak:

Google Earth wasn’t really intended for scientists….
But now the scientific community is discovering how useful the software is for their own work.

With a single keystroke, biologist Born superimposes colored maps over the Arctic. The maps show him where the ice sheet is getting thinner and the direction in which the pieces of floating ice on which walruses like to catch a ride are drifting. All of the ice data, which comes from satellites and measuring buoys, is available on the Internet. By loading the data into the program, Born can detect how global warming is affecting the migratory behavior of his giant walruses.

The way simple to use tools will be used is hard to predict. By making tools (and ideas – open access research) readily available (and customizable – Google Map API) allows the community to build upon the tool in wonderful and unanticipated ways.

Tools, that may indeed be technically superior, may languish while simple to use, widely available, tools can flourish and create great benefits (from the network effect).