The complexity of digital streaming

         A lot has changed over the last three decades because of digital media, the way we access information, our dietary habits and even how we raise our children, but one change that isn't always acknowledged lies in the music industry. We seem to continuously overlook how drastically music has been affected by free and paid streaming. New music is always emerging, and because of the internet, it's more accessible than ever. 

          Some people believe that free streaming sites are the future, and that they will only become more prominent as time goes on. Most people counter this with examples of paid download and streaming services like iTunes, which appear to still be popular.  There has even been panic that all physical copies of music will disappear.  

           Music labels see a drop in music sales, followed by the rise of free streaming, and do what they can to make the same profits that they did before. The problem is that this often causes musicians to lose in the long run. 

Saving the Rainforest with Old Cell Phones

               Rainforests have some of the most complicated soundscapes on the planet. In this dense noise of insects, primates, birds, and everything else that moves in the forest. The old cell phone you have hanging around and collecting dust may have the answer.

                 After a visit to the rainforests of Borneo, physicist and engineer Topher White was struck by the sounds of the forest. In particular, the noises he couldn’t hear.While on a walk, White and others came across an illegal logger sawing down a tree just a few hundred meters away from a ranger station.This incident set White thinking that perhaps the best way to save the Earth’s precious rainforest is to listen to its loggers and poachers. And the innovation he came up with uses old cell phones to do this!

               To introduce us to the innovation he came up with, here is Topher White on the National Geographic Live stage. National Geographic is promoting some incredible things, so go check them out to see what they’ve been up to lately!. We all have a cell phone graveyard filled with the ghosts of technologies past.We need to feel empowered and the more we understand how our small actions can have an enormous impact, the more we engage others to do the same.

X-ray pills to detect bowel cancer

         Traditional colonoscopies that are used to screen patients for presence of colon cancer can be physically unpleasant, much too invasive, and require diets and laxatives that leave patients feeling empty and exhausted. A new option, in the form of a pill that emits X-rays to image the colon, has just been cleared by European regulators via a CE Mark. The C-Scan System from Check-Cap, an Israeli firm, features a swallow able pill that has an X-ray source, a positioning system, computing components, and a battery.

         
        The patient first swallows a contrast agent and then wears special sensors attached to the skin over where the colon is located, and as the capsule moves through, the sensors are able to pick up imaging and location data that it transmits. Laxatives and sedation are not necessary, nor does anyone have to stick anything up your shithole, to use the word of the day in its literal context. The pill works off of two separate X-ray phenomena. One involves shooting the X-rays into the swallowed contrast agent, which fluoresces its own X-rays in return. This makes it and the contents with which its mixed more readily visible.

         The other phenomenon is called Compton scattering, which is exhibited when X-rays interact with electrons in the tissues of the colon wall and which results in some of the X-rays coming back to the pill. Combining these two readings produces a novel view inside the colon that has the potential to identify lesions that would need a closer inspection.

Rising sea levels threaten Internet infrastructure

           In a talk to internet network researchers, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, an assistant professor in the computer and information science department at the University of Oregon, warned that most of the damage could come in the next 15 years. Strategies to reduce potential problems should be under consideration sooner rather than later, he says.“Our analysis is conservative in that we only looked at the static dataset of sea level rise and then overlapped that over the infrastructure to get an idea of risk,” Durairajan says.

      “Sea level rise can have other factors—a tsunami, a hurricane, coastal subduction zone earthquakes—all of which could provide additional stresses that could be catastrophic to infrastructure already at risk.”By 2033, the study also found, that more than 1,100 internet traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. New York City and Miami are the other two most susceptible cities, but the impacts could ripple out and potentially disrupt global communications.

          “Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” says the study’s senior author Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was Durairajan’s academic adviser while he completed the study as part of his doctoral work. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”

Soft skills will be the X-factor in the workplace

         “Technical skills have been the holy grail of hiring in years past, but these skills have rapidly declining shelf lives. The rise of A.I. and automation means employees are increasingly tasked with jobs that only humans can do: thinking creatively, using judgment, employing empathy, etc. Adaptability will be the most durable skill in the years to come, as the ability to learn and adjust becomes more important than any one skill. Companies, as well as education systems, will need to shift how they assess and train people accordingly.”

         While technical, hard skills get the job done, they don’t contribute to the corporate culture, morale, or team-building. There is little use to recruiting a team member with an outstanding list of technical skills if they aren’t around long enough for the business to reap the rewards of their hard work.Soft skills go both ways. While employees should be expected to act with integrity and professionalism, the business must as well. Employees feel valued and trust the business

         Job advertisements can attract dozens of candidates, all of whom may be equally qualified. Candidates may have the same degree, industry experience, or produce work of equal quality. Job interviews give candidates the ability to explicitly and implicitly demonstrate their very own “x-factor”. Research published in the Business Communication Quarterly found ten key soft skills identified as important by business executives: i) Integrity, ii) Communication, iii) Courtesy, iv) Responsibility, v) Social skills, vi) Positive attitude, vii) Professionalism, viii) Flexibility, ix) Teamwork, x) Work ethic

Printable Organs

            Today, we are already at a turning point in our ability to 3D “bioprint” organ tissues, a process that involves depositing a “bio-ink” made of cells precisely in layers, resulting in a functional living human tissue for use in the lab. These tissues should be better predictors of drug function than animal models in many cases. In the long-term, this has the potential to pave the way to “printing” human organs, such as kidneys, livers and hearts. 

       

             Achieving such an outcome would be truly remarkable. Despite advances in medicine and increased awareness of organ donation, the gap between supply and demand of organs continues to widen. Without an accurate digital model of your target organ, bioprinters have nothing to guide them. This necessity gets more evident when attempting to grow a large solid, organ with its complicated architecture involving blood vessels, different cell types and geometrical quirks.

         Though printable organs won’t come easily, there is reason for optimism: i) Regenerative medicine isn’t brand new, ii) Costs are decreasing, Research is focused on the whole body, iii) 3D printed tissues and organs show promise in the lab. By 2020, our goal is to have the technology be broadly used by pharmaceutical companies, resulting in the identification of safer and better drug candidates and fewer failures in clinical trials.

More self-service IT for business users

          2019 will be a year of IT innovation designed to build more trust and collaboration between IT and end users. One strategy that several companies tried out in 2018 was the idea of a self-service kiosk filled with IT tools, apps, and resources that users could choose from. Already vetted for proper access, clearances, and security, the self-service IT kiosk would enable users to log on and choose what they want for the apps that they build. Look for more companies to try self-service IT in 2019.

         Self-service BI is a trend with a somewhat vague definition. In the most general sense, self-service BI tasks are those that business users carry out themselves instead of passing them on to IT for fulfilment. The aim is to give the users of BI tools more freedom and responsibility at the same time. At its heart lies the notion of user independence and self-sufficiency when it comes to the use of corporate information, which leads to a decentralization of BI in the organization.

         For example, casual BI users often only need to be able to filter and group data. In the very same environment, power users or business analysts might have to integrate local data from different sources on their own so they can quickly build or enhance existing reports. Therefore, the need for self-service within a BI environment varies according to user requirements.