Session 9

This week’s lesson is basically about energy and technology to advance towards a sustainable society. The quote I like the most this week is “ IF EVERYONE CONSUMED AS MUCH ENERGY AS THE AVERAGE SINGAPOREAN AND U.S. RESIDENT, THE WORLD’S OIL RESERVES WOULD BE DEPLETED IN 9 YEARS”.

In China and India, they use about 50 – 60% less amount of resources than Singapore and U.S. Hence, there is a need for renewable energy sources to work towards sustainability. There also exist a need for development of new technologies and approaches of energy conserving technologies and pollution prevention.

What is energy security?

Energy security is to obtain a constant and sufficient fuel and source diversity and increasing efficiency. There are 2 types of people who use energy differently. Energy could be used as a source of national income as the country could sell of resources for income. For the poor countries, energy would be biomass stoves and solar refrigerators to save electricity.

The current transportation is very dependent on the liquid fossil fuels to create electricity and facilitate the transportation of people. Hence, maybe people could think of more ways to use the energy from above the ground rather than below the ground. The use of other energy such as Renewable energy comprises of about 19% of the total amount of energy in this world, while fossil fuels are 78% and Nuclear 2 %. It is surprising to know that the total energy used by people in 1 year is actually less than 1 hour of energy that the sun provides to the Earth. Hence, human could actually derive energy from the sun for 1 hour to be able to sustain for 1 year.

Before the 1950s, the US uses mainly renewable resources to drive energy. However, after 1950s, the usage of the fossil fuels such as coal and oil allowed the renewable energy such as trees to grow. Technology sometimes comes from the necessity for some technology instead of invented for a single need. An example would be the invention of steam engine to pump the water out from coal mines, but was later used for other uses.

We do not see the costs of non-renewable, but we see the costs of the renewable. In fact, the non-renewable energy which is being consumed will emit carbon gases which may cause green house effect and hurt the environment. It is a lot cheaper to built coal and gas pipes and harder to build machines and instruments to utilize renewable resources as a driver for energy. However, the effects of using non-renewable resources are slowly surfacing and will definitely affect human activity.

China is currently the biggest investor in clean energy. However, the most successful investor of renewable energy is actually Europe. Germany is the top investor in Solar, although it has four seasons. It could even reach 30% renewable energy in 2020. The government gave cash incentives to people who put up solar panels, getting more people to install solar panels to earn a profit. Is it possible for the world to achieve 100% renewable energy by year 2050? In technical terms, it is entirely feasible and saving a lot of resources and economically.  However, there are Social, Economic and Political factors that will affect or stop people from using renewable resources. Social factors would be values and people are unwilling to change to renewable resources. Economic factors also affect the usage of non-renewable energy as non-renewable energy is cheaper than renewable resources and the structure for renewable resources are very expensive to build and takes a long time to earn back the money. Political factors apply as many countries do not want to buy energy from other countries for the country’s economy and do not want the currency to flow out of the country as there is a fixed demand for electricity in the country and if that happens, a fixed amount of money will flow out of the country.

The presentations this week consists of offshore wind farm, hybrid solar energy and anti-matter. I think the most interesting to me would be offshore wind farm as it is the most feasible technology that could solve the problem of low non-renewable energy. Offshore wind farms are construction of wind farms in bodies of water. The benefits are tremendous as it is able to produce enough electricity to power 400,000 homes and reduce dependence on foreign oil. Although there are opposition to wind farms such as damage to migrating birds, high Cost, detrimental effect on property values, superstitions, I believe that human would have no choice in the future but to rely on renewable resources if they want to maintain their current state of life.

The rating that I would give for this week would be 9/10 as it is interesting to discover many different ways to reduce energy consumption in the world.

Session 7

This week's lesson covers the BioBusiness Revolution: Agribiology, Environmental Life Sciences and Industrial Biotechnology (Past, Present and Future) 

We talked about the cases of poeple exploiting and consuming a lot of non-renewable resources. Hence, we have to try to create and grow the resources that we need, then we will finally be on the road to sustainability. If not in the near future, there will be a scarcity of food supply and people will starve. Moreover, we have to think about how to grow the natural resources now to find solutions as it would be too late if the resources are depleted.

Prior to year 2008, most of the parts of the world are rural environment. Strategies were to deal with rural and lack of space. However, with the increasing of the Urban environment, countries are more dependant on the resources and goods being supplied by rural areas. It is very attractive to stay in the urban area as there is high level of resources, safety, other benefits. However, there are also dsadvantages which are overcrowding and higher competition for resources and food.

People need to have self-ustainability of the food and ecosystem and grow our own food. Some ways of solving the problem of food scarcity in the future is the applying the tools of biotechnology on food and create better food with higher yields and benefits. The food will be also resistance to pest and diseases and Drought resistance crops will ensure higher harvest even with lower water supply.

For Biobased materials, people will also create sustainable use of non-renewable resources such as using corn to make oil as well as to be consumed as food. Farmer of the future who will be very knowledgeable and skills to grow crops and rear animals with high harvest and food supply.

Some people may or may not like to eat genetically modified food, but GM will definitely become a solution to the shortage of food. Genetic Modification has already been applied to a lot of food especially tomato ketchup. Another way would be Organic plants to grow plants using chemical fertilizers or naturally.

For this week's presentation, the topics being discussed were green technology for sustainable development, test tube burgers, the next green revolution and monsanto company but i will only touch on the green technology and the monsanto company. 

For Green technology for sustainable development, the belief of technology to become more efficient or not once possible. However, with the improvement of technology, alot of things have been made possible and with the selection of technology such as system Independence, Image of modernity, Individual technology vs collective technology, cost, risk, evolutionary capacity and single and multi-purpose technology.

The situation analysis has Interesting Observation that there has been poverty reduction and gender divide in these countries. In Nepal, Biogas reduced air borne diseases and health and sanitation problems while in India, Biofuel reduced global warming, reduce fear of energy crisis and provide new market for farmers. The Key Takeaways are:

1.       More factors besides costs that affect the integration of GT

2.      Solutions can also create new problems

3.      Chain effect of GT aside from sustainable development

For the next green revolution, GMO Genetically modified organisms is one of the solution to consistent crop harvest and feeding a growing population. However, there are safety risks and environmental risks. Nonetheless, GMO is becoming a fact of life for the world as there is a need to sustain growing population. GMO’s Allure harder to resist as the plants grew from the seeds that monsanto supplied are resistant to pesticides and herbicides, new qualities such as drought resistance, beneficial to consumers with enhanced taste and better nutritional benefits. Although Monsanto force farmers to purchase seeds from them every year, feeding people should take precedence over profits for producing food and i think Monsanto should allow farmers to reuse the seeds every year to lower the cost of the farmers.

Overall, i would rate this week's session a 9/10 as it covered most aspects of the biobusiness in the agribiology but there weren't any presentations on the industrial biotechnology, hence it lacks some information for this week.

Session 6

Time flies and this week is already week 6, and projects and mid-terms are around the corner!

This week's TWC lesson was about the BioBusiness Revolution: Healthcare and the Biomedical Sciences: Past, Present, Future.

So what is BioBusiness? Biobusiness is actually the commercial activity based on an understanding of life sciences and life science processes which consists of biomedical, agri-veterinary, environment/Industrial and other areas.

Biobusiness has been on the rise and the main sectors that contributed to it are agriculture, healthcare and food sector which made up approximately 1/3 of the total bio-business each.  As can be seen from the diagram below,

It can be seen that Biobusiness has changed people's lives over the years. In the past, death and disability was mainly due to the communicable diseases in the 1990s probably because of the lack of proper healthcare. However, it was projected that in 2020, the global number 1 killer is actually heart diseases and even road traffic accidents become the top 10 killer of the world. Communicable diseases would be lesser while chronic diseases such as HIVs and heart diseases will increase. How would this happen? Due to the advancement of technology and biobusiness, improvement of sanitation and quality of life, people are living longer and healthier, hence chronic diseases are only discovered after they went through the stage of surviving the communicable diseases.

For the readings, perhaps most of us were held up with mid terms, reports and presentation deadlines, not many of us really went to read through the readings. Hence, the discussions were not very fruitful and prof basically skipped the readings that nobody actually read. Nonetheless, we still talked about a few readings.

For the presentation this week, there were 5 people presenting, consisting of counterfeit drugs, toilets, organ trading, biotech drugs and pacemaker but I’ll just touch on the topic that I presented on which is the pacemaker and its impact on the society.

Pacemakers are devices that consist of a pulse generator, electrodes and a lead and deliver electrical impulses to the heart so as to regulate the heartbeat to ensure that blood is circulated to the brain and the body.   

Its advantages are that it kept patients alive in complete heart block whose prognosis without pacing would have been extremely poor, and beginning in the mid-1960s it enabled many of them to enjoy moderately active lives.

The doctor could noninvasively and repeatedly change pacing rate, pulse duration and amplitude, sensitivity of the electrodes to spontaneous electrical activity within the heart, and other parameters.

However, there are also drawbacks to the internal pacemaker which is the battery of the pacemaker may run low in the future, hence requiring further surgical procedures.        

Nonetheless, Pacemaker brought about a lot of advantages in the medical history and saved a lot of lives and was constantly refined to suit to new heart disease which resulted in prolonged mortality rate. Hence, I think it was a great invention!

For this week’s session I would give it a 7.5/10 as I think there is room for more discussion on the other biobusiness sectors and we didn’t talk much due to time constraints.

TWC Individual Topic Review Paper Outline II

Hello to all those who have came to peer review on my paper outline or other people interested in my topic. :) I apologize for the difference in format of the outline because i posted this quite early without knowing prof's required structure. Below is my edited structure:

i. Specific Innovation of Interest:

Light has already changed people's lives from the past to the present, where people need to work in the dark, to unconstant light supply of candles, fire, oil lamps to the present of lightbulbs and even LED light.

 

ii. Rationale for selecting this innovation:

I think that light has really brought about huge impacts onto lives of people. With light, people are able to work 24 hours everyday and fully utilize their time to do work and spend time with their families due to the constant supply of light. LED light in specific, it has changed the lives of people and organizations who depend heavily on lights. Replacing the normal fluorescent, incandescent light bulbs with LED lightbulbs will generate cost savings as light bulbs rarely get replaced and it consumes less energy. In the future, if LED light bulb is able to be self-sustainable and everybody is to use the LED light bulb to replace incandescent lightbulbs, it could create a solution to the scarcity of natural resources.

 

Technology and Revolution of Lighting

Executive Summary

Introduction/Background

 

- Brief History of light and light bulb to LED lights

- How life is like before the introduction of light and LED lights

 

Current Situation

 

- What gave rise to the popularity of LED lights?

- White colour LED became popular – originated from Japan

- Desired Colour of LED Lights

- Increased prolonged lifespan of light.

- Energy Saving

- Indirectly affects the consumption of the fuel

- Modern uses of LED and its advantages and disadvantages (vs Light Bulb)

 

Discussion and AnalysisWith Reference to (Jared Diamond)

Application of Necessity’s Mother

1.1 Inventions as mother to necessities

- technology cumulative

- finds its uses after it’s inventions

1.2 Factors influencing Acceptance

1.3 Autocalytic Process

Issues/Challenges/Opportunities

Good and Downsides of LED and its possible revolution

Taking Things Forward

Future Invention of Unlimited power supply of LED lights

LED lightning can mood lighting, change the light according to a person's mood

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs)

Conclusion    

References

Session 5

This week's lesson covers ICT and World Change (Mass Media, the Internet, Wireless,
Interactive Telecommunications) - Past, Present and Future 

Virtual and avatars that we create may be good and bad things. During Traditional days, human and just the tribe and the village. Now everybody are considered human although there are difference such as skin colour, language.

Mass Media is a way of communicating with people out there such as through Newspaper, internet, film, tv, radio with realtime information updates. There is both advantages and disadvantages of increasing ways of mass media due to technology. The good ones may be that more people can disseminate information rather than only a few, and information can be passed down faster. However, it may create problems as censorship become harder with more information being communicated through mediums like internet.

The class discussed about the evolution of internet, the static 1.0 web, interactive 2.0 as well as intelligent Omniperson 3.0 web. It can be clearly seen that internet has evolved tremendously with the static human using computer functions to interactive chats such as facebook blogging, tagging and social bookmarking to the Intelligent omnipresent of a Semantic Web, which can receive and analyze things given information. Examples would be GPS and EPN.

We also discussed about gaming, software and hardware, wireless technology, ICT, information systems, cloud computing and knowledge management. 

Project natal, where human can interact with a virtual human inside the computer. Wireless Technologies such as WIFI (personal hotspot), MIFI and Wi-Max enabled convenience to people as they could access to internet anywhere, anytime, communicate and share information with people using interactive Telecommunications. Interactive Telecommunications includes Radio Communication, Audio, Video and Skype. However, there are also disadvantages of ICT such as

-          Security concerns

-          Espionage – tap into internet system, stalking

-          Invasion of privacy

-          Identity theft

-          Exposure to corrupting influences (cons, pornography, predators, etc)

Information Systems are systems designed to solve problems and how to manage knowledge within a particular area. Cloud Computing is to use information outside your personal storage such as Google, and Dropbox, where we store our information in a database not in our computer hardware or software.

Knowledge Management CKO (Chief Knowledge Officer)

data à information à knowledge à wisdom (Insight)

The CKO in an organisation must be able to infer from the knowledge to know how things are changing beyond the environment and apply the steps above.

The readings basically told us about using technologies to change the ways people interact and bond. Moreover, with ICT, it improves the bonding of people within families and friends. Here are some advantages of ICT:

 

-          ICT to solve some of the problems in society

-     Achieve elearning platforms and reducing child mortality

Creating greener society and making them to happen. To improve ICT technologies, introduce new intellectual contributions and encouraging innovation for great solutions.

For the presentations this week, they presented on the times of unrest, advertisement decline in mass media, Bridging the Gender Divide and E-Book.

Times of Unrest, Social Networks

Basically the presentation provided us with information about Social Media, how it affected the country during times of Unrest and how would life be without Social Networks. The unrest implicated many apolitical citizens and cut the social networks from the outside world.

The questions discussed are:

Whether Government should have the right to shut down internet and cellphone service? I think that we should safeguard the interest of the general public but also strike a balance between National Interest and the privacy of the public.

Are we growing too dependent on our cellphones and social media outlets?

Yes. I think we are growing too dependent on our cellphones and social media outlets as people are so used to communicating with people through these mediums such as facebook, messages and emails. Once these technology are being forced to shutdown, people can only resolve back to the ancient letter-writing by post and face-to-face communication. The world will be in a mess basically as everybody will be scrambling to find their family and friends.

Ad Decline in Mass Media: More than just economic

The presentation describes to us the Advertising and sales in the mass media and its impacts. The media company advertising revenue has been declining, but emerges stronger from recession and

invested in digital media assets but has not yet seen the returns yet. There is a shift in display advertising to search advertising. The Mass marketing declining lead to the Customization of each person or company who wants to advertise. When there is abundance of Choice, the company's will compete for people’s time and create User Generated content sites.

The questions asked are:

Should Business to focus on social Media?

I think that potential customers are not on social medium yet, so need to be on newspaper and commercials and i think when people look for information for business, it is more formal to be on hardcopy that softcopy.

Ad sales have contributed largely to google’s success. What about Yahoo and MSN?

I think that Analytics Search engines are very subjective. It will become popular at times only if they are the rising star and provide the best service for people. While the others must constantly upgarde themselves and try to become a rising star again.

Bridging the Gender Divide

This presentation basically tells us about the gender division in the society and how to narrow the gap. The Low & Middle Income countries both developed and developing countries suggested that there is 40-60% gap between men and women. However, nowadays there are successful technologies such as the ICT Educational Academies to train women to compete in high skilled ICT workforce.

The questions asked are:

What barriers including social norms have prevented women from previously accessing technology solutions and how might those be addressed?

Literacy Rate – Most women are more illiterate than men in some countries. In some societies, women tend to do better than men hence there is no proof to that. However, looking at this question in a Classic Situation, Female more practically oriented and Males more playful and less attentive to small details.

E-Book

This presentation is basivally about Electronic Books and their pros and cons. E-Books are in book-length publications in digital forms. The advantages are that readers do not need to carry thick and heavy books around anymore. Readers could just read more than 1 book from that E-Book. Readers can choose to purchase a single chapter instead of the entire book and there are different types of reading experience as compared to when you read the entire book. However, there are also drawbacks of the technology. Readers may have shorter attention spans and have their reading experience compromised.

The questions asked are if E-books will replace printed books in future?

I think E-Books will definitely replace printed books in the future as the technology advances. People will just become more tech-savy and dependent on technology to bring ease and comfort to their lives.

Do you think e-readers will positively or negatively influence reading experiences?

I think that it may be both according to the person’s preference.

 I would rate this week's lesson as a 9/10 as i think it is quite interesting to know the facts about gender divides and social mediums which created impact in our lives.

Session 4

This week's Session was basically about drivers of world change and change Management and Leadership. The only thing that is constant is this world is change. If people do not adapt to changes, they will definitely face problems for survival in one way or another, ranging from the economic and social to environment well-being. Those who can survive are the strongest species in this world.

An example of change would be environmental change, with the recent discovery of the penetration of the ozone layer by the UV rays, global warming and climate change, and natural disasters happening around the world. Be it man-made or natural, human has to adapt to these changes and try to innovate and create equipments to help mankind survive.

For the readings, it talked about the green and blue revolution, climate change and the converging of new technologies, demographics and energy. People have to constantly think of ways to create more food supply to support the increasing population around the world and provide food security to the world. As changes are inevitable, people have to rethink their processes and construction to come up with better solutions and operate better.

The presentations were quite relevant to our everyday lives as it encompass the environmental change and mass media and its impacts.

Global warming will cause the rise in temperatures around the world and with increasing population, disasters, food shortage widespread in future. If global warming persists there will be dire consequences. Hence, we must learn to be environmental friendly. I believe human can actually curb the effects of climate change and bring about a better change, but it has to start with the actions of human and to go green and be more environmental friendly.

Global warming may be the effect of both man’s selfish actions of burning forest fires, releasing toxic chemicals, CFCs, and may be due natural phenomenon. Animals may also release toxic gases such as methane and also contribute to the global warming effects.Many changes are probably human generated, but it may be resolved if human starts to change the way of doing things and revolve around protecting the environment over self interest.

For media, it changed from the ancient radio broadcasting, newspaper to reaching people through the internet, television and even phones. It definitely has its advantages of reaching out to readers and broadcast their news through more mediums, but there are also downsides of the changes. People could abuse the internet and use for harassment and spam others for their own interest, intrude other people's privacy and tracking. It could also cause a rise in the illegal activities online such as illegal online gambling, and causing social problems as a result. Old media like newspapers and books may become obsolete one day since e-learning has been so prominent these days. However, i think some consumers are more comfortable with books and newspapers, hence they will prefer to read newspapers and books. Even journalists have been affected by the new media as the public can now reach the public journalist easier, but at the same time creating stress for the credibility of the report.

For Change management and leadership, it talked about how people manage change and lead people to change. In my opinion, a leader must have a vision as he needs a vision to lead people to fulfil its vision. A leader is a person who creates the vision, while the manager will act according to the framework. The change process is as follows: Uninformed optimismèInformed PessimismèInformed RealismèCompletion.

People tend to start to create a vision with uninformed optimism and think that their plan would succeed. However, when they start to venture towards the vision, they will discover things like informed pessimism, which are the problems that they face. If they could solve the issue and live with it, they will advance to a stage of informed realism and then towards completion of objective. However, if they can't get past the stage, their leadership will end at informed realism.

Basically, the readings talked about organizations do not adapt to change but people do, problems with managing change. People are only willing to change if they accept the reason behind the change and it is an ongoing process where it has to be monitored.

The presentations were interesting with the burning platform of managing employees, why apple beats microsoft and no nukes no problem.

Basically changes often occur in corporations and managers have to manage the employees well to adapt to the changes. Apple could beat microsoft partially because they are very innovative, but most likely because they have a very good leader with far vision. If the leader has a good vision, the managers could just create projects based on the vision and of course, creating profits. However, it may be unfair to compare as the size of microsoft and apple are unequal and bigger corporations tend to be more difficult to manage.

Many countries are Nuclear Energy dependant as it has enough power to drive all the industrials and electricity and save cost. However, there has been efforts from countries to prove that renewable energy is better as it would not cause harm to the environment and people. An example would be the Nuclear plant that exploded in Japan, it caused disaster to Japan causing economy, social and other damages. Germany was the first country to try out renewable energy and other Countries will follow Germany if they succeed.

I will rate this session 8/10 as it was quite relevant to our everyday lives and we have to adapt to change every now and then.

TWC Individual Topic Review Paper Outline

Technology and Evolution of Lighting

Executive Summary

Introduction/BackgroundBrief History of Light bulb to LED (Revolution?) increased prolonged lifespan of light. Energy Saving. Indirectly affects the consumption of the fuel

Modern uses of LED and its advantages (vs Light Bulb)

Key Observations    

What give rise to the popularity of LED lights?

White colour LED became popular – originated from Japan

Discussion and AnalysisWith Reference to (Jared Diamond)

Application of Necessity’s Mother

1.1 Inventions as mother to necessities

- technology cumulative

- finds its uses after it’s inventions

1.2 Factors influencing Acceptance

1.3 Autocalytic Process

Issues/Challenges/OpportunitiesGood and Downsides of LED and its possible revolution

Taking Things Forward

Future Invention of Unlimited power supply LED lights

Conclusion    

References