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| William Kamkwamba - Inventor |
To power his family's home, young William Kamkwamba built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap - starting him on a surprising journey detailed in the new book, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind."
William Kamkwamba, from Malawi, is a born inventor. When he was 14, he built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap, working from rough plans he found in a library book called Using Energy and modifying them to fit his needs. The windmill he built powers four lights and two radios in his family home.
There was an outpouring of support for him and his promising work. Members of various community got together to help him improve his power system (by incorporating solar energy), and further his education through school and mentorships. Subsequent projects have included clean water, malaria prevention, solar power and lighting for the six homes in his family compound; a deep-water well with a solar-powered pump for clean water; and a drip irrigation system. Kamkwamba himself returned to school, and is now attending the African Leadership Academy, a new pan-African prep school outside Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kamkwamba's story is documented in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. A short documentary about Kamkwamba, called Moving Windmills, won several awards last year; Kamkwamba and friends are now working on a full-length film. |
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| Indian IT sector most trusted : Survey |
India-based companies have emerged as the most trusted ones, with the technology sector being ranked the highest in terms of transparency and credibility, said a survey.
According to global public relations firm Edelman's 'Trust Barometer' survey for 2010, India-headquartered companies are trusted by a majority of people in the country.
India-headquartered companies have been ranked as trustworthy by 78 per cent of people surveyed in India, 63 per cent of respondents in Mexico and 52 per cent in United Arab Emirates (UAE), the survey stated.
Technology is the most trusted sector in India at 88 per cent, followed by banks, automotive (79 per cent), pharma (75 percent), healthcare (73 percent), entertainment (70 percent). Interestingly, trust in media sector is relatively low 58 percent, the survey revealed. |
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| Reducing Carbon Footprint |
Autodesk makes software that can analyse the environment impact and energy requirements of buildings minutely. Its office in San Francisco has a museum of sorts that showcases all the wonderful things software can do to improve the environment. You can calculate the environmental impact of products — chairs, shoes, aircraft engines, farm equipment — at the design stage itself and also reduce it as much as possible. While this does impact the total carbon footprint of industries, green buildings make a substantial difference to the carbon emissions in the world. Buildings contribute to about 25 per cent of emissions globally, and 40 per cent in the US.
As we wait for the renewable energy industry to give us the perfect answer, information technology (IT) is doing its bit to introduce energy efficiency and reduce the carbon intensity of our lives. Software now let you make products taking into account their environmental impact. Virtualisation technologies reduce the need to use hardware, and thus help save energy in computing. Networks and sensors help you automate energy usage across enterprises, thus help reduce the carbon footprint. Smart grids help utilities regulate the flow of electricity. IT consumes a small portion of the energy in the world, but the IT industry has a big influence on the world’s energy consumption.” |
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| The future Of the Web turns out to be the Web alone. |
The new open standard of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for the web, HTML5 has come up to
dethrone Flash as the de facto standard for web videos.This in a short while has gathered enough
momentum to get over the top. The question is no longer whether HTML5 will or should do the job,
but when,When Microsoft confirmed that HTML5 video support would be included in the next version of
Internet Explorer, IE9 which is due later this year. That move will swing the percentage of
browsers supporting the nascent standard well above half, and will rapidly accelerate adoption by
publishers, despite the lingering technical and legal issues.The shift is already happening on the
mobile web, and eventually — in perhaps as soon as two years. HTML5 can be expected to serve most new video online.
However, despite the opportunities offered by HTML5, it remains a draft specification, and even though many publishers and vendors are supporting it already, it’s hard to reach its full maturity in a short span of time. Until then at least, Flash remains the dominant way to deliver audio, video and animation on the web. It’s been around far too long to simply be replaced overnight, no matter how severe of a public thrashing it’s currently enduring.
Adobe’s Flash Player browser plug-in is the reason so much rich media, audio, video and animation are playable on the web. Without Flash, you wouldn’t be able to view most of the videos posted online, and your life on the web would be pretty miserable. That’s the main reason it’s installed on more than 90 percent of web-connected PCs.
Roughly 40 percent of browsers on the web can deliver HTML5 audio, video and animation today. The big holdout is Microsoft Internet Explorer, It’s still the dominant browser on the web, and it still doesn’t support much of HTML5, because the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the web’s governing body, declined to specify a single video codec to go along with new video element, the choice of which codec to support lies with each web browser. Browser manufacturers are split into two camps, those that support the open source Ogg Theora (Chrome, FireFox and Opera) and those that support MPEG’s H.264 codec (Chrome, IE9, Safari and Safari Mobile).
If HTML5 is going to truly supplant Flash, either the browsers will need to pick a single codec, or the publishers will need to publish video in multiple formats. At the moment, YouTube’s HTML5 video support is limited to web browsers that support the H.264 video codec. That means the HTML5 version of YouTube will work on the iPod, but it won’t work in FireFox and Opera. Users often complain about Flash’s poor performance on PCs and its power-sucking behavior on portables. Web purists argue the point that, unlike HTML5 and other open standards, the Flash experience is owned and controlled by a single vendor, Adobe.A lot of people think it’s time for Flash to move on and give way to HTML5. Web pages written in HTML5 can play videos natively, meaning the browser can play a video without the need for plugins. Google’s betting on it: The company built a new version of You Tube that uses HTML5’s video tags instead of Flash to play clips. Other video sites like Vimeo and Daily Motion quickly followed suit.
It is the promise of HTML5 to make sure the web has built-in tools that don’t rely on vendor specific plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight. All of the major browser vendors.Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple and Opera — are committed to supporting HTML5 in some way.
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| Kirigami, The creative art of paper cutting |
The term Kirigami coined by Florence Temko is synonym to origami in that it is a form of paper art, except that here use of cuts or glues are not restricted. In Japan the word Kirigami had been in use for a long time because”Kiru” means to cut and “gami” means paper. So, Kirigami meant to cut paper.
Kirigami usually starts with a folded base, which is then cut to make a figurative or abstract form. The visual focus may be either the cut paper or the remaining negative space. Sometimes, folding is involved as in pop-up cards. For symmetric designs the paper is often folded before cutting and then unfolded, for example the well known paper snowflakes with 6-fold symmetry.
The term modular kirigami denotes symmetrical assemblage of cut paper, in which no folding, taping, or gluing is used only cutting. The form of modular Kirigami is related to many sculptures which are assembled from planner rigid components Paper models were designed before making actual sculptures from materials such as wood, metal etc.
The designs are also related to cut-and-assemble geometric constructions that are called “Slide-Togethers”. But the slide-togethers have regular polygon shapes for the components, e.g., pentagons or pentagrams with slots. In contrast, the modular kirigami has parts designed for an aesthetic impact. Of course, they also must satisfy many geometric constraints in order to fit together symmetrically. Another related type of geometric kirigami is what is called as sliceform, a slot-based construction, not necessarily symmetric, of non-identical parts. Mathematically, any type of spatial symmetry might be used as the foundation for modular kirigami.
The field of kirigami is wide open for others to develop further, as many other styles, symmetries, and joint designs are possible. There is a wide explosion of ideas in the future, as inexpensive cutting plotters remove the tedium from the medium. |
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