Body organs can send status updates to your cellphone

For cardiac patients, too much excitement can be a shocking experience. If heart rate gets too high the implanted defibrillator in chest can think one having a heart attack and give a friendly remedial shock. But such nasty surprises could soon become less of a concern for people – by giving our hearts their very own IP addresses.

Dutch research organisation IMEC, based in Eindhoven, this week demonstrated a new type of wireless body area network (BAN). Dubbed the Human++ BAN platform, the system converts IMEC's ultra-low-power electrocardiogram sensors into wireless nodes in a short-range network, transmitting physiological data to a hub – the patient's cellphone. From there, the readings can be forwarded to doctors via a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. They can also be displayed on the phone or sound an alarm when things are about to go wrong, giving patients like me a chance to try to slow our heart rates and avoid an unnecessary shock.

Julien Penders, who developed the system, says it can also work with other low-power medical sensors, such as electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor neurological conditions or electromyograms to detect neuromuscular diseases. Besides helping those already diagnosed with chronic conditions, BANs could be used by people at risk of developing medical problems – the so-called "worried well" – or by fitness enthusiasts and athletes who want to keep tabs on their physiological processes during training.

Tied to an Android

IMEC's technology is not the first BAN, but integrates better than earlier versions with the gadgets that many people carry around with them. IMEC has created a dongle that plugs into the standard SD memory card interface of a cellphone to stream data from the sensors in real time and allow the phone to reconfigure the sampling frequency of sensors on the fly. The associated software runs on Google's Android cellphone operating system.

However, IMEC has eschewed common short-range wireless standards such as Bluetooth in favour of the so-called nRF24L01+ radio designed by Nordic Semiconductor in Oslo, Norway. "The problem with Bluetooth is that it will increase the power consumption on the sensor side," says Penders. Using the Nordic system, IMEC's sensors can run continuously, transmitting every 100 milliseconds, for up to seven days between recharges – a Bluetooth system would barely last a day, Penders says.

In the current design, the ECG electrodes are connected to a small necklace that contains the transmitter and battery. The next step will be to use an ultra-low-power radio transmitter, still in development at IMEC, to improve the stamina and portability of the sensors.

With around 18 million people in the UK living with chronic disease, "telehealth" monitoring like this is the way things are going, says Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation. Devices already exist that allow people with pacemakers and defibrillators to send telemetry from their implants via a landline to doctors. But using mobile phones would be the natural next step, he says.

Selecting Photos

Tip - select only the best of your pictures to show to others and leave the rest in the drawer. Showing someone every picture you have taken dilutes the effect of the best pictures and gets very boring.

You may want to show twenty pictures of little Johnny at the park because they are all quite good and you can't decide which are the best but, trust me, you will be better off making that decision and showing only the few good ones.

Presentation is an essential part of photography and what you don't present is an essential part of presentation. Follow the advice above and you will immediately be promoted from 'photo bore' to someone who looks like they know what they are doing.
Your friends and relatives will beg you to see the rest of the pictures, resist at all costs. If you give in to their demands, you can regret at leisure as you watch their initial enthusiasm lessen with each photo they turn over. You've already shown them the best, what do you expect?
This advice is not just for beginners, although old hands will probably have learned the hard way already. I have taken many tens of thousands of pictures over the years but, if I was asked to mount an exhibition of my best 100 photos, I would be thrown into a blind panic. As each new 'great shot' comes along, it moves the goalposts, and last year's great shots don't look so great any more. That's why this is such a great hobby, there is no finish line, even the best photographer in the world can still aspire to produce a better picture next time. Having said that, some of the shots I took over twenty years ago are still in my pile of favorites. Learning and improvement are not always linear.

People Watching - A Hobby For Everyone

At the end of a long day, sometimes what you want in a hobby isn’t necessarily something that will keep your hands and body busy, but more something to relax to, something to lay back and stir the mind. You’re not always ready to come home and throw down on the chess board or jump head on into a knitting project. This is how the majority of Americans and others around the world end up squashed in front of the TV on weekend afternoons or in the early evenings.
But what happens when you’ve seen all the shows? When you really just want to get out of the house and do something, but you can’t quite think of what?
Over the years, I’ve found one of my favorite ‘inactive’ hobbies is the sport of people watching.
Yeah, it really is a sport.
The great thing about people watching is that you can do it most anywhere there’s people! I’ll go to a bookstore, a park, a coffee shop, anywhere there are people just milling around. Find a nice comfy place to sit, maybe get something to drink, and station yourself in a part where you can maybe overhear people talking. It really never ceases to blow my mind, the kind of stuff you can overhear or witness just in a half hour span of sitting, plus it’s nice to feel the sun on your back, maybe there’s a little breeze.
Parks are usually the best, as there’s always people moving around, but you’ll be surprised how easy it is to find great people watching places. In high school one of our favorite things to do on a boring night would be drive down to the airport and walk around the terminals seeing who got off, maybe even striking up a conversation (this is better to do if you’re with a group, as alone it could be a little creepy. We would even go so far as to bring harmonicas and kazoos and start playing songs for people getting off their plane (yeah, we were a little weird, what can I say?), and some of those days are among my best memories of hanging out. Obviously the higher security these years makes airports a little less feasible, but try the mall! Try a busy part of downtown!
Sitting and relaxing and paying attention to your surroundings can be a hobby in and of itself. And not just a lazy TV-style act, either.
I’ve found people watching not only to be a great form of free entertainment, but a source of inspiration and creativity-waking for my work. I’ve always believed that truth is stranger than fiction, and the characters you will run into on any given day out in the light can often far surpass what you might dream up. People are just too unusual in their own worlds. Get a free piece of the fun! Take those ideas home and work them into a story or a screenplay, maybe try to paint from memory the strangest folks you saw. Overall, I’ll take the strange local talking aloud to a dog that isn’t there, or the group of muscle heads on an outing to buy new workout clothes, or just any of the strange array of individuals our human world has to offer over a rerun of Friends or the new episode of Lost any day.
The possibilities really are endless, and you can’t beat free!

Relationship between virtualization and cloud computing

Virtualization is the ability to run “virtual machines” on top of a “hypervisor.” A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e., a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. Each VM includes its own kernel, operating system, supporting libraries and applications. A hypervisor provides a uniform abstraction of the underlying physical machine. Multiple VMs can execute simultaneously on a single hypervisor. The decoupling of the VM from the underlying physical hardware allows the same VM to be started on different physical machines. Thus virtualization is seen as an enabler for cloud computing, allowing the cloud computing provider the necessary flexibility to move and allocate the computing resources requested by the user wherever the physical resources are available.

What is a private cloud?

Private cloud (also called internal cloud or corporate cloud) is a marketing term for a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall.

Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.

Marketing media that uses the words "private cloud" is designed to appeal to an organization that needs or wants more control over their data than they can get by using a third-party hosted service such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Service (S3).

How compatible is Eucalyptus with Amazon's EC2!!!!!!!!!!!!

Eucalyptus is a private cloud-computing platform that implements the Amazon specification for EC2, S3, and EBS. Eucalyptus conforms to both the syntax and the semantic definition of the Amazon API and tool suite, with few exceptions. Along with providing a REST and SOAP interface compatible with Amazon AWS, Eucalyptus also exposes administrative functionalities (e.g., user management, storage configuration, network management, hypervisor configuration, etc.) for managing and maintaining the cloud. Eucalyptus implementation of the specification, however, is undoubtedly different than Amazon's implementations. These differences are related to several engineering design decisions. Eucalyptus primary goal is to provide an open-source software tool for community distribution that is highly scalable and extensible, as well as easy to install and maintain.

Tour to space....... Dream come true by 2015

Boeing has announced plans to add space tourism to its CST-100 -- or Crew Space Transportation-100-- low orbit flights by 2015. Operated by a partnership with Space Adventures, the flights will be able to carry up to seven passengers about 62 miles above Earth's surface, and the craft are currently being developed with the help of NASA.The vehicles could also be used as a ferry to get people to and from the various space habitats companies are working away at. There's no word on what the pricing of one of these journeys will look like, but trust us: Jared Leto will be able to afford one, while you probably will not.

Mumbai's 'King-size' Ganpati

As kings always deal in superlatives, Mumbai's most famous Ganpati -- Lalbaugcha Raja -- is no exception. Be it his overbearing personality standing tall at 12 feet or the record number of devotees that come to seek his blessings or the record donations being collected -- everything is 'king size.' Lalbaugcha Raja reigns over Mumbai during these ten days of festivity

Honey! it's sweet, yet comes with a sting

That spoonful of “guaranteed pure” sweetness may be hiding a bitter secret. Branded honey sold in India is likely to be contaminated with harmful antibiotics, according to a new study by the Centre for Science and Environment. CSE's Pollution Monitoring Laboratory tested 12 leading brands of honey sold in Delhi, Scientists found high levels of six harmful antibiotics in 11 samples. The contamination is the end result of a murky chain, which begins when antibiotics are fed to bees to prevent disease, promote growth and increase honey production to meet commercial targets. When they make their way into your daily spoonful of honey, these substances could damage the blood, kidneys, liver, bones and teeth. More importantly, they create resistance in the body to prescribed antibiotics when you really do fall ill, says the CSE report.
Most developed countries have banned or strictly regulated antibiotics in honey, and Indian companies must meet those standards when they export their products. However, in a stinging example of double standards, most Indian companies are dumping their contaminated honey on the domestic market, since there are no regulations here, says the CSE.
Interestingly, companies were recently involved in a controversy in Nepal, where leading newspapers claimed that its honey was substandard and used harmful chemicals. The company dismissed it as part of a “smear campaign” against Indian products, but the sticky claim has now come from an Indian source.
One Switzerland company, had the largest number — five — of the six antibiotics that it was tested for, including the highest levels of ampicillin and erythromycin, both of which are not permitted for beekeeping in any country. It would be illegal to sell it even in Switzerland itself. Similarly, Australian brand, sold in 40 countries, violated standards set in its home country.
“It is clear that foreign companies are taking advantage of the lack of regulations in India. After all, if our government does not care about the health of its people, why should these companies care?” said CSE director Sunita Narain, at the release of the study on Wednesday.
“We have standards for antibiotic contamination in the honey we export. The government even tests and certifies that exported honey meets health and safety regulations. But we do not have any standards for domestic honey. This is clearly unacceptable,” she said.

Smart Grid

How aware are we about the electricity consumption apart from monthly electric bills? How many times haven’t we cribbed about the unplanned power cuts and black outs? As “gadget Gurus” we always keep our electronic gadgets updated. Is the power grid giving the required quality of power to these gadgets? Well, a solution to these may not be prevalent today but is a vision of tomorrow. The Electricity system of future has to produce and deliver electricity that is reliable, affordable and clean. To accomplish these goals, both electricity grid and existing regulatory system needs to get smarter. “SMART Grid” is an intelligent step to evolve from our era of power grid towards a brighter future.

Existing Grid System / Power Grid

The existing grid system delivers electricity from point of generation to consumers. This Electricity delivery system functions via two systems

• 1. Transmission System
  The Transmission system delivers electricity from power plant to distribution Substations. Here the transmission voltage will be very high (110kV or above), to reduce the energy lost in long distance transmission
  
• 2. Distribution system
  The distribution system delivers electricity form substations to consumers. Typically the network includes medium voltage (less than 50 kV) power lines, pole mounted transformers, low voltage (less than 1kV) distribution wiring.

In this existing system the focus is more on protection of asset when a system failure happens rather than automatically detecting the emerging transmission and distribution problems. The customer is uninformed and they are not a part of the existing power system. Moreover the focus is on power shutdown / outages rather than power quality problems.

What is Smart Grid ?

The basic concept of Smart Grid is to add monitoring, analysis, control and communication capabilities to the national electric grid in order to improve reliability, maximize throughput, increase energy efficiency, provide consumer participation and allow diverse generation and storage options.

Building a smart grid means adding computer and communication technology to the existing electricity grid. With an overlay of digital technology, the grid promises to operate more efficiently and reliably. It can also accommodate more solar and wind power, which are inconsistent sources of energy that can become more reliable with better controls. Much like computers and routers manage the flow of bits on the Internet, smart-grid technologies use information to optimize the flow of electricity.

How smart grid differs from the existing grid system /Power grid ?

Right now, if there is a breakdown at your local substation, it is not rectified until the customers call to complain. This can be avoided by placing a networked sensor inside a transformer or along wires which would locate and report a problem, or prevent it from happening.

Despite living in the age of information, most of us only get a glimpse of our energy consumption when the utility bills come once a month. With smart grid, it should mean more detailed information on usage of electricity through home energy-monitoring tools. These can be small displays or Web-based programs that give a real-time view of how much energy you are using, which appliances consume the most, and how your home compares to others.

What is needed to start is a smart meter with two-way communication or some other kind of gateway. Once that conduit is put in place, consumers can get more detailed energy data and start taking advantage of efficiency incentives, such as charging your plug-in electric vehicle in the middle of the night to get off-peak rates.

The next step towards efficiency is what is called demand response. The goal here is to dial back energy consumption at peak times. This is very important to utilities because it's costly and polluting to bring on auxiliary power plants to meet a spike in demand, say, from an air conditioning load on a hot summer day. Consumers and businesses have financial incentives to participate, such as a discounted rate. "Shedding load" could mean turning the gas heat off of the clothes drier for a few minutes or dimming the lights in a supermarket in the middle of the day.

A smarter grid also makes distributed energy, such as home solar systems, more viable and user-friendly. With a smart meter and monitoring software, a home owner can see how much solar panels are producing and their carbon footprint is being reduced. A utility, too, is keenly interested in how much distributed energy is available so it can calibrate its own daily power generation.

Smart Grid Characteristics

The functionality of smart grid can be defined by the following characteristics

• • It will enable active participation of consumers, ie., it will give consumers information, control and options that enable them to engage in new “electricity markets”. Well informed consumers will modify consumption based on the balancing of their demands and resources.
• • It will accommodate all generation and storage options. It will seamlessly integrate all types and sizes of electrical generation and storage systems using simplified interconnection process and universal interoperability standards to support a “plug-and-play” level of convenience.
• • It will enable new products, services and markets. Support the creation of new electricity market from the home energy management system at the consumer’s premises to technologies that allow consumers and third parties to bid their energy resources into the electricity market.
• • It will provide power quality for the digital economy. It will monitor, diagnose and respond to the power quality deficiencies resulting in dramatic reduction in the business losses currently experienced by consumers due to insufficient power quality.
• • It will anticipate and respond to system disturbance. It will heal itself by performing continuous self-assessment to detect and analyze issues, take corrective action to mitigate them. It will also handle problems too large or too fast-moving for human intervention.
• • It will operate resiliently against attack and natural disaster. The smart grid will incorporate a system-wide solution that reduces physical and cyber vulnerabilities and enables a rapid recovery from disruptions.

Thus the transformation to Smart Grid would give all the features that would have once been impossible with Power Grid. Let us move to the grid technology which is of good quality, reliable and smarter.

Want more Mobile applications!!!!!!

Hey Guys..... I found many interesting mobile games and applications in http://www.noeman.org/gsm/ 

Found very interesting stuff.....

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.