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Arquivo para May, 2015

How technology helps Nepal

15 May

NepalThe technology was effective in initial help of the first earthquake in Nepal, but the second earthquake two weeks seems to be more cruel, as if the first killed more than 8000 people, the earthquake this time was in regions distances near the town Namche Baazar, which is close to Mount Everest, one of the highest in the world.

What is claimed now is the lack of more comprehensive high-quality maps, especially in remote areas, which means it is necessary to coordinate a series of medical efforts, food and shelter, in more complicated remote areas.

One of the efforts is the Kathmandu Living Labs, that uses many volunteers to create digital maps of the country, signaling the roads, hospitals and other facilities to the aid get faster, the advantage is that now there are these rescue forces in the country, they need access to this information.

You can find coverage of trabalos the KLL (acronym of Living Labs) in various organs of the international press The NY TimesBBC,Nepali TimesMy Republica, and Setopati  attesting to the validity of laboratory

The site explains that the emphasis of this laboratory is “in is on cutting-edge Web 2.0 and participatory technologies que empower and engage citizens in working with government and development”.

 

 

 

 

 

Understand the case SwissLeaks

14 May

The name was created in association with the website that denounced the US secret data on a site that the net-activist AssangeSwissLeaks built to disclose secret information, revealing little moral actions of many governments around the world, he was pursued and was arrested.

 

The SwissLeaks case actually began long before when in 2007 a list of 106 000 high-profile customers (read: a lot of money) have been identified in the bank’s accounts, involving politicians, people from the showbiz world, athletes, drug dealers and weapons, Herve Falciani was a former employee of the IT field who denounced the subsidiary HSBC Bank Switzerland.

 

At the time the British government and the French also identified several evaders and the names became known as the “Lagarde List” due to arrests and attempts to recover the funds in Greece, Spain, United States, Belgium and Argentina.

 

The French newspaper Le Monde had access to recent documents list and transferred to a consortium of journalists called ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) which released the data, and impressed the number of Brazilians involved.

 

Brazilian data included 5,500 secret accounts Brazilians, between individuals and companies, with a total balance of $ 7 billion (about US $ 20 billion Reais), with Brazilian companies participating in government projects, getting the famous Galvão Brazilian company.

 

A book that explains the investigative journalism was written by Paul Bradshaw “Scraping for Journalists” and is available in online acquis.

 

Emojis in defense of animals

13 May

Those emoticons representing animals, will now be using the animal rights NGO World WideEmojis Fund for Nature (WWF), which launched yesterday (12/05) a new campaign to collect using emojis, animal emoticons.
With the campaign the entity will receive a few cents every time interested in helping issuing tweets with emojis of endangered animals.
We handle 17 animals (photo) endangered: Asian elephant, giant panda, the Green Turtle, Dolphin of Maui, the Dog-African Wilderness’, the Whale-gray, the Tiger of Sumatra, the Galapagos penguin, the Perereca -lêmure, the Blue Whale, the Cobra Santa Lucia, the Spidermonkey, the Asian camel, the Leopard-Amur, the Tiger, the Siamese Crocodile and the Tuna Blue.
Research shows that by 2050 will be extinct one million species, which are divided into: 12% will be of birds, 23% of mammals, 52% of insects, 32% of amphibians, 51% of reptiles, 25% of sharks and 20% Streaks.
Those who wish to help the campaign should be to use the WWF site to retweet the post of WWF (#endanjeredEmoji) and donors agree to donate ten cents (about 30 cents) with one of emojis of endangered animals.

 

Social network provides UK election

12 May

Tracking the number of tweets in English election shows the oscillation of the partiesEleicoesUK and the big news of opinions that networks offer, for example, the surprise variation that was the Scottish National Party (SNP yellow) that reached the peak on 22 April with 22.69% of vote intentions was appointed only by the tweets and the reaction has only dropped to 13%, but continued pointing to the big surprise in the elections.
The newly created UKIP party (in purple, the new UK Independence Party) represented the trend of much of the English nationalists who paradoxically do not want the separation of Scottish SNP, you can watch the changing of their position in April.
The work was done by Computer scientists from the University of Warwick are using Twitter, the working in collaboration with partners in the Department of Journalism at City University London and the Information Technologies Institute (ITI-CERTH, Greece), and is registered in the News from site of the University of Warwick.

About the prevision registered in site ElectionsUK2015, the Warwick´s  researcher Adam Tsakalidis said: “We are trying to define and extract meaningful features out of the noisy, user-generated content published in Twitter”.

He completed explaining: “This includes the number of users mentioning a political party and the number of users who have expressed a negative opinion about this party on a certain day. We then put all this information into our forecasting model, along with the parties’ share of the vote as measured by opinion polls. Predicting elections using social media data has been tried in the past, with varying results. We have evidence from our previous work that our approach is very effective.”

 

Mystery, particles and cosmos

11 May

The objectivist pragmatism that sees being separated into subject and object, can not see beyondDoisExperimentos the navel of the self, although browse by categories such as “individualism”, “ethics”, “consciousness” (or disposal which is the same) is himself unaware of their lack of beyond, the meta-physical, as the physical (physis) basis of their objectivity, alienated being trans- formed into subject (subjectivity) or canceled it completely in a homo sacer (Agamben).

Looking to infinity and the mystery, but not solve the problem, it helps to think we do not know everything that cynical reason (Sloterdijk) did not explain everything, or rather explained almost nothing and that life and still be there in the Dasein of the crisis of modernity.

Two events help us to look at this mystery, if only in comfortable field of objectivity, look for the infinite universe where even the man does not see and the interior of the particle where the man sees but does not understand the mystery was laid ( by Being).

Look particles is possible from Large Hadron Collider  (LHC) returned to work on the first Sunday in April (05/04), and now with an energy greater than earlier before 7 eV and 13 eV now, the particles will travel to 99 , 999999% the speed of light, and we can produce in the laboratory, similar to a micro black hole, this mystery in the universe.

After Hubble, a new laboratory will be present in the cosmos expanding our vision, named after the astronomer James Webb, he called James Webb Space Telescope, or just JWST, and unlike the previous one which saw images obtained by the visible solar spectrum, the JWST use infrared, and so you can see beyond the normal vision, and obersar the formation of the first galaxies and stars by studying their evolution to form galaxies, how is the production of elements and particles by the stars and see how to give their processes of its formation.

Look deeply in and out deeply, can help the man who broke up in modernity and to rediscover your being, or subject or object, but Being.

 

Personalities and Mother’s Day

08 May

Several people tell the story of his life as a possibility and thank the choice of their mothers they have chosen BocelliEngthe life of their children, if not they would not have been born, of course there are millions of anonymous mothers choices, poor and suffering who decided to give birth to her children often without any condition or in disrepair.

One of these illustrious stories that came to all is the extraordinary actor Jack Nicholson, born in 1936, says that his mother was a teenager when she became pregnant and offered her the opportunity to abort it, but she opted for his life, grew up believing that her grandmother was his mother, and his real mother his brother, only in 1974 discovered the truth.

The singer Andrea Bocelli also tells his story his mother was pregnant and was hospitalized for a “simple attack of appendicitis,” but to examine the baby because she was pregnant, and seeing that treatment could have affected the child suggested you abort him as born with disabilities, but the mother decided to have it, blindness come at a football game at 12, and he says in a video his “little story” as the flame.

Edgar Morin says in his book My demons (published in 1997 by Bertrand of Brazil) account that was born under the sign of death, your mother should abort it came to trying it but they survived, wrote: “I should die for her to live, she had to die for me to live (…) I was born in death and was snatched from death, “the mother still live up to 9 years of the French educator.

My parents had 12 children, had a pact of love that receive the children that God might give them, I am grateful for my family, 11 are alive, love them each, Happy Mothers Day to all these courageous creatures, specially to my … really special was my mother.

 

Company announces clean energy

07 May

The Tesla company had already announced last year the construction in the US state of Nevada a super lithium-ion Teslabattery capable of supplying power to several cities, the investment of 5 billion dollars (about 15 billion real) in partnership with Japanese Panasonic, now announces a new step in clean energy, Powerwall which is already being developed in a warehouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles, announced last week.

The Tesla Powerwall equipment is to supply home residences from solar panels, and can operate at night, in addition to providing a secure backup in case of a power outage, as news on Business Insider.

In theory the device can be mounted to a garage wall can make completely independent houses of traditional electricity, using only solar energy.

The idea of ​​solar energy can change the energy pattern around the globe, eliminating the anti-ecological (and often antissocial in Brazil) energy from hydroelectric and dangerous nuclear energy, and the announcement on first May, the company’s founder the American Elon Musk said the goal is to turn all worldwide energy infrastructure until we get the ‘zero-carbon’ sustainable, left to governments and energy companies will leave.

Later this year takes place in Paris the prestigious UNFCCC – or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that promises an effective and real pressure presence in governments and businesses.

 

Manuscripts reading platform

06 May

A digital platform was launched by the library at the University of Uppsala offering works database scanned fromUppsalaLibrarycultural heritage collections, with handwritten works with surveys from handwriting recognition software.

The initiative was made from the competition with other software worldwide for applications become feasible to search for text, making available collections of enormous value not only historical but also economic, as noted by researcher Anders Brun of the University of Uppsala, as the site of this university.

The decoding of the manuscripts was made by a method that enables a computer to interpret a digital image of text using expertise, which uses a small portion of the material to identify the form and style of writing a small piece of text, then reading It is automated using standard experimental sample.

An interdisciplinary collaborative focus due to the relevance of the project to various humanities was needed, for example, the research done in the Vatican Library manuscripts, which if done without this digital process would cost a small fortune, explained Anders Brun on the website news University of Uppsala.

 

What is being learned online?

05 May

A new report on the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) was published in late April andComputerOnline can show progress and setbacks in these new means of mass education.
The report, again funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates (the first was also and did a post), was coordinated by George Siemens, a technology-academic expert at the University of Texas at Arlington, and states that the initial frenzied enthusiasm seems now a little milder: “It’s almost like now we passed by a shameful period in which we forget we were researching and how were scientists, hurried to make decisions and proclaim things that were not scientific whole,” he told the publication of Wired Campus .
The goal then this new report is to offer research topics: student engagement and learning success in a process of self-regulation and social learning, network analysis and network learning, including: motivation, attitude and criteria success.
Siemens understood the basics of networks, this might be embarrassing said that without the involvement of the students. “Now the subject of particular interest,” it is just a distraction from a distance and is “is literally just a click away” as the published report (download).
Five key research themes were identified in the report: student engagement and success of learning, Mooc´s design and curriculum, self-regulated learning and social learning, social network analysis and network learning, and motivation, attitude, and success criteria.

The names of student engagement reports as a prominent issue. Many students enrolled in MOOCs non-traditional, to make sure that they are involved and able to succeed in such a course is even more important.
The Siemens teacher said he hopes the report will help colleges to tomaem r intelligent decisions based on research and evidence, to create their digital campuses.

 

Technology, science and rebirth

04 May

The architecture of cirterciense monks, was followed by the Gothic cathedrals of medievalTetoStrahov and technical advances arc usage (support span roofs and even bridges) was a product of the Middle Ages, the invention of the printing press (the Chinese movable type already there) and later internalized understanding (silent reading was new) was important as the first step towards the democratization of writing and learning “scholar” whose word has a Latin root “scholastic”.
Among the most beautiful libraries in the world (see the list of top 10) is the Admont Abbey Admont founded in Austria in 1074 and 1776 embellished with golden tones, and the library and the library of the Strahov monastery in the Czech Republic beyond 1143, and indeed just cited, the monks built 3,500 libraries in the medieval world, knowing it was not popular was true, but it was a period of construction that culminated in the written press.

The dissemination of written culture through books, will start a learning process of democratization, which was not possible without the reproduction of books and even the invention of spectacles as much of the population was shortsighted, and allowed a faster propagation of ideas which paves the way for the expansion of reason, ideas and culture.
technology of great voyages allow not only the European maritime and commercial expansion, but will be the scientific advances that will discover an extraordinary number of new species of animals and plants, and new geological and climatic formations.
All this is in check including the technology itself, should I switch to a complex thought and look at the planet as a homeland for all, but you can not throw away the progress and advancement that rebirth gave rise, perhaps a new re-rebirth .
In the ceiling fresco of Strahov (pictured) made in the eighteenth century was called The humanity’s efforts for true wisdom, I think this is our effort.