Final session- the memories.

The Final session for TWC was bittersweet, I know that I will see my team in school but still there is a tinge of sadness that sticks in me-we are not having class together anymore. My group have been with spending a lot of time together and will miss those funny moments when we made our video and had our discussions.

This Blog Post is dedicated to my team- Lin Yi, Joe and Hannah.

Firstly I must say that it has been one of the most fun team in SMU. I still remember when I was forming our group in class and had to form my gourp with the last few people remaining because we had some conflict with the other people. Who was left to choose from? Joe, Shawn and Hannah. Joe was new and just arrived from America, I wanted to befriend a foreign student although what we hear about foreign students in SMU is not really positive. So we invited this guy with curly hari speaking in a funny korean accent, he is JOE SHIN and was a decision that me and lin yi didnt regret. Hannah, an IS studnet was seated next to me in class so we decided to form a group with her. She was a good team player and we realised that she watches a lot of cartoons like phineas and ferb. Picture below.

What have I learnt through making the website?

QR CODE
We tried to embrace this technology and have done it successfully. By scannign the code in the Iphone, andriod phone, you will be automatically de directed to the website (mobile version) This is quite fascinating given the ease of access. The downside was that we could not get the mobile version up to satisfaction, for us the mobile version was hard to programme.

Video
We decided to create a conclusion video to showcase the history of telecommunication. It was extremely entertaining to do so. I wonder how the people in the past feel when operating such systems. The interesting part of creating a video was that it was solely done on a Iphone. the video recording function was good enough for us not to use any big chunky phones.

Group Presentation 1

Group Web Report

Building a website is something new to me. I’ve never created nor even considered building one. Building a website can be a daunting task, however thanks to technology; the presets are all in place. Going to wix or a free and easy start up makes life so much easier. If I don’t know how to manipulate certain functions, I can always look up the internet or Youtube.

This week we had our first batch of group presentations.

-Social media and us

The group presenting on social media did a good job in terms of presenting their information. They did use a fair bit of timelines and comparisons. This instead of just presenting facts helps human beings like us to be better interested. Somehow we as humans are comparative. Our eye detects change very well and loves contrast, a change in smell and sound is noticed, but fades away after a while if it is constant. What I'm trying to get at is that this group has presented us with contrast.

-Technology and the arts

Yu Han stunned me today with her way of presentation. It was both great and queer. The transition from the other speaker to her managed to catch my attention. There were a few reasons for this and I think as SMU students we should try to learn the good points of the presentation and integrate it in our learning.

First off, her voice is loud. She has a better variance in pitch and tone. Albert Mehrabian talks about the 7-38-55 liking rule. The way she talks already captured 38% of the liking.

It is also interesting to mention that because of her knowledge in this area of the arts, being a piano instructor and probably an art enthusiast, she has managed to bring out interesting facts about the various art pieces and does so confidently.

-Technology for the physically disabled.

The group who made this presentation chose to start off by connecting with us emotionally. Though I have watched that video clip, I still felt that this was a good reminder for me. This use of emotional means to connect to the listeners has a more lasting impact, and as I studied in psychology, you will probably remember it for a longer period of time.

In their website, they used the heading problems and solutions separately, I can only partially agree with their method. Many of these solutions can be linked to their problems. Unfortunately it is not.

Session 10- Technology Assessment and forecasting, predicting what comes next

This session is the most important session of all (in my opinion). That is, once student actually reads the readings and not focus too much on the all important topical reviews, they will realise it. Learning from the readings from school usually leads us to have knowledge and understanding, they tell us facts about society. This session talks about the skill sets that can be used to crack open the mystery of future of future technologies. It furthers the first objective of the TWC which is to equip us with a conceptual framework for intelligent thinking.

If we were to compare the usefulness of the concepts that we learn during TWC in this applicability into the future 10 years down the road, we will know that most of what we learn might be obsolete (I must clarify that these information we are learning is very useful indeed) but in the future most will have evolved into something bigger, something greater. The method of thinking, tools provided for us will still apply for generations to come. That is what I hope that I can drill into my system for this term. SKILLS SETS and TOOLS.

In today’s lesson, we had a special guest, another professor sitting in the class. Let me talk more about him first before talking about the lesson. From what I can gather, he is a job hopper, a slight pessimist and sometimes scare of technology, he fears his privacy and will clearly not support giving too much information out to the public. What I like about him is his openness and curiosity. I says a lot about the professor who is willing to humble himself and sit in another professor’s lecture. It also says a lot about the professor conducting the lecture.  In today’s lesson, we had many videos and a few very interesting quotes, we also talked about many interesting foresight methodology.

 The interesting thing about this lesson, I will classify it under quotes, videos and methodologies

Quotes:

“The empires of the future are the empires are in our mind.” By Winston Churchill does remind me of another quote: “Whatever you can conceive you can achieve” It all starts by dreaming. It is also interesting that the day actually starts in the evening. Going back into history, I know that evening begins the day. Then the night comes thats when you dream. When the sky breaks, you start your work. The idea I’m trying to get at is that you dream first before creating.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” by AlanKay. Another very inspirational quote for entrepreneurs of the future.

Videos:

I like the parody because it’s funny and I found Siemen’s video very interesting because it is so vague. It seems to suggest that Siemen is the solution for everything, a good video to wathc when your high cause you’ll imagine about everything.

Methodologies:

I particularly find the Delphi analysis interesting, asking different people question then piecing it together. It is a form of qualitative research. I shall go read up on it.

Quick takeaways from today’s lesson will be to focus on the future cause that’s where you are going to spend your life. Consider people’s emotions. The biggest take away: You need a lightning approach to innovation. The lightning comes from the sky and from the ground, they the 2 bolts meet, boom… innovation is created.

I will rate this class a 9/10. It excited me once again about the future technologies and gave me interesting tools to use.

Session 9- Ideas that will change the world

People just love new technologies. Just take a look at the long queues of the Iphone even before the opening of its stores. Looking at the technologies of the future and attending TWC lesson, I must say that I’m pretty excited for the future. Those who love it will embrace it, and those who embrace it will love it even more. I find that those who hates technology are just suckers, because of their pessimism, they miss out on the good stuff...  Of course these people have a role to play for society, being the devil’s advocate, even group new business group should have one, they give an important perspective. There was a survey conducted by Prof Donaldson form SMU, when he went to China he asked people who live there whether they prefer the present or prefer the past (eg 30 years ago). He whenever he met someone new he would ask that question. The results are interesting, Although knowing that that are many people who are pessimistic, all(except for one) said that they preferred the present. The one who preferred the past had just been hit a land takeover. What we can learn from this: Whether you hate or love change now, you will soon learn to love it.

In today’s lesson, we had 2 special guest, the lawyer and his daughter. Firstly I must say that it seemed like the lawyer’s perspective was challenged and that he did have some important takeaways. For example the difference between a leader and a manager.  Besides the guests, this lesson was important for me because my hard work from doing all the research for the presentation paid off. Besides my presentation, I was excited to come for the lesson because from the first paragraph, you will know that I have learnt to love technology and world change. This lesson apart from slide 8 and the student presentation felt like having a lesson using  the Facebook group.

 The interesting lessons that I really like was when we talked and viewed videos of technology. 2 technologies especially interest me: Augmented reality and flexible plastics. Both have a tremendous area for profit. Augmented reality will be everywhere in the future as a mean of information gathering. Money could be made from skewing information to consumers, companies would likely “advertise” through this means. Flexible plastics when compared to glass might be cheaper, more durable, flexible, safer for children. Thinking of these advantages flexible plastics might just be everywhere in the future, will it shape the manufacturing industry? Certainly.

Quick takeaways from today’s lesson:
-Whatever you can conceive, someone probably can achieve.
-Leaders and mangers have to work together to achieve. Vision and reality have to meet
-Media and advertising can change the peoples’ wants into needs.
-For entrepreneurs, it is good to go for market driven products
-Technology is not improving freaking fast, it’s improving ultra freaking fast
-With each passing innovator, more are inspired to become. E.g. Steve Jobs.
-Perfect woman? Maybe one day technology can help us fulfill our biological needs
-The exams and tests of tomorrow will likely shift far away from knowledge recall

What I hope to see being discussed in the future for technology would be how to find niche markets for students to take advantage of. For example, augmented reality can be programmed, when technology comes out, students can set up programming companies.

I will rate this class a 9/10. It excited me once again about the future technologies and my long research for my presentation finally paid off.

Individual Tropical Review Paper draft

The Unstoppable Peer to Peer Sharing

Executive Summary

On the online community and in the ethical arena peer-to-peer (P2P) have attracted great attention the last few years. The original pioneering P2P internet service was Napster that focused on sharing of MP3 format audio files. Companies such as Gnutella, Madster, Freenet carried on with the idea. Currently there are more than a 100 million users and Bittorrent has a greater number of users than YouTube and Facebook combined. With the world is becoming flatter in term of hierarchical structure and internet, P2P flourishes. Tweeter and Facebook have already taken upon themselves to switch to P2P technology and we can expected more companies to follow suit. Some likely future uses of the technology will be in places like broadcasting, games,  games and Cloud computing.

Historical Perspective

In the past before P2P was widespread, people who wanted music, videos, softwares and other digital files had to either download it from a central server or buy compact discs(CD) and upload to their digital devises. It is not uncommon to see pirated CD shop along the streets selling cheap CDs of popular music, games and softwares.

People who downloaded from the internet have to bear with the long waiting time and hope for the best with their unstable internet connection where a cut in the connection might mean an hour of wasted time attempting to download a video.

P2P dynamite ignited

In May 1999, 18 year old college dropout named Shawn Fanning changed the music industry forever in the dormitory of Boston’s Northeastern University with his file-sharing program called Napster. During that period, his roommates who were music lovers were unhappy with the reliability of MP3 sites. These sites were frequently dead and indexes were usually out dated. His idea to their problem was to write a source code for a program which gives opportunity for users to share their music files through the internet and for students to download them through multiple peers. After a straight 60 hours of writing source code, Napster was born.

Napster instantly became music-fan’s utopia:  A dreamland where almost every song was instantly available for free. Some 60 million users around the world were freely exchanging their songs at its peak.

A year later in July 2001 Napster Shutdown its system after having multiple lawsuits filed against them. Some like Metallica have been alleging that the company encourages piracy by enabling and allowing its users to trade copyrighted songs through its servers.

Even with this short duration, Napster have shown the power of p2p sharing, in the year 2003, P2P sharing traffic has surpassed web traffic and became the single largest traffic type by volume on ISP networks. Despite causing much controversy, Napster had started a revolution which cannot be stopped despites much efforts from the artist and the media industry.

Brief explanation on how P2P works

A P2P protocol creates transmission control protocol connections with multiple hosts and makes many small data requests to each. The P2P client then combines the chunks to recreate the file. A single file host will usually have limited upload capacity, but connecting to many servers simultaneously allows for higher file transfers, and disperses the costs associated with data transfers amongst many peers. Moreover, a client mid-way through downloading the file also acts as a server, hosting the bits to others which they have already downloaded. These differences from traditional HTTP GET requests allow for lower costs and higher redundancy since many people are sharing the files.

Current Situation

The growth in the number of P2P technology users has been exponential since the birth of Napster. The vacuum left by Napster's demise has been filled by numerous other companies/applications, with Kazaa and Gnutella dominating the market. It has been reported that these two account for between 40% and 60% of all traffic on the Internet. The massive growth has been accompanied by massive strides in the development and understanding of P2P technologies. Unlike the centralised techniques of Napster, the new applications are adopting a decentralised approach, making them harder to police. This has led to a lot of concern about the lack of central leadership and control.

In recent years we have seen P2P technologies being embraced by large companies trying to tap its vast potential. Two of the more notable examples of this are Deloitte & Touche, and Intel. Central databases are no longer required when using P2P. This means it can be less expensive and far easier to scale. Intel has been using P2P since 1992, thus avoiding the need for a large server. Traditional databases are still commonplace today, but as increasing numbers of companies follow the example of organisations like Intel, such databases could be overtaken and replaced by P2P.

A significant turn in the development of P2P occurred recently when Microsoft announced plans to invest $51m in a company called Groove Networks. At the forefront of this company is Ray Ozzie, the inventor of 'Lotus Notes'. Groove Networks is implementing a hybrid technique in its development of P2P. This means it utilises both centralised and decentralised techniques in order to get the best of both worlds.

The development of P2P technologies has been hindered by a number of legal issues. The newer companies, such as Morpheus, are seeking to learn from Napster's mistakes and get legal protection. They are arguing that they are not responsible for any illegal activity perpetrated using their software. There are clearly a number of legitimate legal uses for P2P and this should safeguard its future. The only problem is how to stop illegal file sharing (movies, music etc.). At the moment no one has the answer, but the search is ongoing.

Since they are most at risk, record companies are currently looking at ways of deterring people from using copyright-busting file-sharing networks. The open nature of these systems allows record companies to attack them from within - creating their own fake users who provide bad quality or confusingly-named data, or overloading the network with queries of their own. This technique was put forward by two students from Washington University, who outlined it in a white paper. However, the legality of this process is itself being questioned. The students also suggested that users be randomly sued, or that heavy users, P2Ps equivalent of dealers, be targeted. It seems, at present, this would be the best way to deter people from illegally sharing files.

As of January 2011 BitTorrent has 100 million users and a greater share of network bandwidth than Netflix and Hulu combined.

At any given instant of time BitTorrent has, on average, more active users thanYouTube and Facebook combined. (This refers to the number of active users at any instant and not to the total number of unique users.)

With their BitTorrent-powered distribution system Facebook is now able to send a few hundred MB to tens of thousands of machines in just one minute. The internal Facebook swarm turns every server into a peer that helps in distributing the new code, which gets it updated as quickly as possible. Without BitTorrent this process could take several hours to complete.

Facebook is not the only large web-service that uses BitTorrent to keep its servers updated. Earlier this year we reported that Twitter is doing the same. Twitter’s implementation, codenamed ‘Murder’, is based on the BitTornado BitTorrent client. The code is open to the public and licensed under the free software Apache License.

Besides these social networking sites, several universities have been successfully using BitTorrent-powered systems to update their computers for quite some time already. A Dutch university reported that it retired 20 of the 22 servers it used to send out updates to workstations, saving not only time but also money.

Future Expectations

A growing number of individuals and organizations are using BitTorrent to distribute their own or licensed material. Independent adopters report that without using BitTorrent technology and its dramatically reduced demands on their private networking hardware and bandwidth, they could not afford to distribute their files.

Future

Already we have seen the origins of the peer to peer explosion in the area of music files and we know the position against piracy that organizations are taking. In future developments we should be able to see either more free to download music where artist are being forced distribute freely or lose market audience. Another alternative would be Itunes pay per download method, where artist are charging minimal fee for their music.

Broadcasting for prime time news to a global audience might face the problem of slow streaming. However with P2P sharing broadcasting companies might follow the trend and join companies like CBC to broadcast material using Bittorrent clients.

Many software games, especially those whose large size makes them difficult to host due to bandwidth limits, extremely frequent downloads, and unpredictable changes in network traffic, will distribute instead a specialized, stripped down bittorrent client with enough functionality to download the game from the other running clients and the primary server (which is maintained in case not enough peers are available).

Governmental organisations like in the UK have used Bittorrent to distribute information about how tax money of UK citizens was spent. More such free information might be shared in this manner.

Before Steve Jobs passed away, he spark brilliance in people’s minds by introducing the concept of cloud computing in their vocabulary. Possibly, we can integrate cloud computing with P2P sharing  

Session 8- The changing world of­­ Energy

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is the conversion of energy is what we are all interested in. The big question is how and from what form?

In today’s lesson, we spent the bulk of our time talking about the shift between renewable and non-renewable energy. The rising cost of energy and the pollution it has created has caused us to re think our current strategy of spamming non renewable resources such as coal, oil and natural gases.

Prof talked about the timeline of renewable, and very interestingly, with so much talk about non-renewable energy, I had for some strange reason always assumes that we have been using them forever. I have forgotten the days of using pure non renewable energy. It is also a good reminder that sustainable renewable energy such as from trees can one day become unsustainable when the usage outdoes the growth of trees.

One of the interesting points that I really like was in slide 14: Biomass, wind and photovoltaics. What is most efficient? There are so many sources of renewable energy but some are much less efficient. This brings the question of why people are using somewhat useless (comparison) ways of generating energy. If using sunlight produces 170GWh of energy and biomass produces 2GWh of energy, that’s 70times more energy in a given space. Before condemning people for their efforts I’m sure I haven’t taken into account the other factors like infrastructural cost,  labour cost etc.

Quick takeaways from today’s lesson:
-Renewable energy is important for the sustainability of the earth. Judging from how the earth is currently being destroyed, I can guess that humans are selfish being not caring much for future generations.

-The point of transition from renewable to non renewable energy occurred during the 1800s.

-The start of using non renewable energy might have resulted in the stopping of slave trade.

-Almost all energy was deriving from the sun.

-photovoltaic produces 70 times more energy than form biomass in a given plot of land.

-China, Brazil and Italy have dramatically increased their expenditure in renewable energy.

-It is possible to reach the usage of 100 sustainable energy by 2050 but highly unlikely.

-Turning our everyday waste into energy is possible at 95% efficiency.

-With Energy Grid System, maximizing the efficiency by allocating energy sources will lead to a lot of cost savings.

What I hope to see being discussed in the future for renewable energy will be what goes deep into our earth-magma. I’m sure some of the energy we can use can be from deep beneath the earth surface, whereby it probably takes less than a second to vaporize the droplets of water into steam energy.

I will rate this class a 7/10. It is the same topic which everyone talks about, from primary school to now, but since it gives me insights, I’ve upped my rating.

Session 7- BioBusiness?! The Revolution part 2

Food for us is meant to be savoured. Food for the poor is meant for survival. The Green revolution has brought forth life for people all around the world. That is in my opinion, however at different periods during the class, people have questioned this notion that the green revolution did really help the poor. Before talking this notion, I would like to first talk about what we learn during the lesson. In today’s session, Prof talked about 3 main areas, Agribiology, Environmental life sciences and industrial life sciences. We dwelled quite a bit on food, and the green revolution, feeding the poor etc, before moving into what we do with our waste, and using biotechonology to increase sustainability. One interesting innovation we talked about it was bioplastics.

The one thing I found most interesting in this lesson is about Monsanto’s GM food and the poor. Many things about it which those from India debated about, one such thing were them producing self-terminating grains. An interesting idea from the US government to stop cross contamination of the GM grains with other grains. However it seems like with such bad PR from Monsanto, the bad sigma of them doing this to earn money from the poor is on them. The strange thing about it is the idea of earning from the poor?! Is it worth it to earn from the poor? Like developing tropical drugs, it will take a long long time to cover R and D cost.

Quick takeaways from today’s lesson:
-BioBusiness is a huge industry.
-World’s population will stabilize at about 10 billion.
-Need Rural to get food, about 20 percent.
-Technology to turn desert ground to farming ground is out there.
-Fisheries and aquaculture combined with genetically modified fishes will get us cheaper sashimi, probably lead to the reduction of hunter gathering of wild fishes.
-Waste management has potential especially our current unsustainable usage of resources.
-Plastics made of algae may be coming to your homes as furniture.

What I hope to see being discussed in the future is the potential to convert waste products into business opportunities. Where is the tipping point where using recycled materials is actually cheaper? If technology already exists, what infrastructure is needed to execute?

I will rate this class a 7/10. It reminds me not to be so wasteful to the earth.