Monthly Archives: July 2017

Business, Government, Society, Technology

Empowering humanity comes through technological advance

TECHNOLOGY & HUMANITY

Technology Empowerment

Technology firms must adapt by making people’s goals their own priorities. Only then will they significantly add to the growth of society and to the economy.

The empowerment of the individual has radically changed through how we access and utilise technology. Consider, for instance, just the way and how we now watch television. The broader picture of technological development is no longer a take-it-or-leave-it template, but a bespoke service tailored to the individual.

Earlier television broadcasts were carefully scripted and delivered to present a highly curated programme, forcing us not to only share the same worldview, but also to watch on the terms being offered by the programme makers’.

The evolution of video fundamentally changed both our view of the world and how we interact with it. In less than a century, we’ve moved to an online and digital world with billions of viewpoints, coming from governments and businesses and more importantly from people. Everyone offers a unique perspective; and, we now have a truly live culture where technologies like Periscope and Facebook Live mean that anyone can broadcast what they want and tune in when they want – on their own terms.

This illustrates that the way we use technology today is to bend it to our own needs. Change may be endemic, but the key point is that the individual is now in control. It’s no longer the case that people are adapting to technology – rather, the technology is continuing to evolve and adapt to us.

The situation now is that every time an experience is personalised, or where technology anticipates our needs and wants, we are being thrusted forefront to realise or satisfy those needs. In terms of digital evolution, this is the age of human empowerment and it matters to business. With technology that truly responds to people, based on what they want, firms can evolve from being a supplier to one of being their customers’ partner.

IntelligentX, a London-based Brewing Company, has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system to continuously collect and incorporate customer feedback. It utilises this information by incorporating it into its thinking to brew new versions of the company’s beers. The firm provides feedback into its algorithms: with people’s tastes changing faster than ever before, AI seems a logical and perfect way to respond.

This is how businesses will grow their role in people’s lives, and by establishing a place in the future of society. They need to become more than just a provider of products and services.

We might like to refer to it as the hyper-personalisation of technology. It is likely to drive commercial success at the scale of entire industries, not just at the individual or micro level. The digital leaders of the world, proactive as always, are making big calls in response.

Consider Electronics giant Philips. It is looking to transform healthcare into one that becomes connected, with a comprehensive experience that’s both intertwined and accessible throughout people’s lives. Through the development of new apps and connected devices that integrate into our lives, it will become possible for health professionals to live alongside each patient. This will allow them to build a closer, more personal relationship, and an opportunity to provide comprehensive – not just reactive – care packages.

Paradoxically, for patients, connected healthcare isn’t an improvement because of the technology itself. The draw is the empowerment it gives individuals over their own health – you only need to consider how wearable technologies are driving a tailored approach to personal fitness programmes.

Company conglomerates like Philips have the leading edge because their technological strategies focuses on the needs of the individual patient, and on their terms.

If any business is to become a true partner to people that process must start with technology. No doubt, the path ahead will have its challenges. But the foundations are built on matters of trust.

Yet, barely one in two members of the public say they trust businesses to do what’s right. Even fewer look on business leaders as credible sources of information. If people are to value these new partnerships, companies must work hard to gain and by keeping that trust.

One of the best ways of doing this is by putting the power in the hands of the customers. That can be achieved by designing technology that works for them. This will mean an end to technology tools whose power is only unleashed when customers adapt to or in learning how to use them.

Technology’s great new strength lies in its growing humanity. Tools that interact with people – structured in such a way that they learn from those exchanges – should be able to adapt for any future interaction that makes the experience of using them all the more human.

To put these new adaptive technologies to use, businesses must adopt people’s goals as their own. Technology is now crucially the agent of change and it should be enabled to empower people in an interactive and collaborative way.

When companies are aligned to people’s individual goals and aspirations, only then will they be contributing to the growth of society and the economy.

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Education, Environment, Science

Questions of Science: Against the grain

SAND PARTICLE DEPOSITION

Sand particles on a beach or dunes seem to reach a certain grain size and then reduce no further. After millions of years, shouldn’t most sand have become dust?

THE GRAINS that we see in desert sand dunes have been deposited mainly by wind action. These will generally have originated in other parts of the desert where there are bare rock surfaces that are constantly being weathered by exposure to the sun, wind and water – the last of which is a surprisingly powerful weathering agent in deserts.

The result is a build-up of fragments of various sizes: boulders, pebbles, sand grains and dust. The last two, being smaller, can be removed by the wind and transported hundreds of kilometres, either in suspension high in the atmosphere, or by saltation – the process of bouncing along the ground.

The maximum grain size that can be transported by the wind is proportional to the wind speed – faster winds will move larger particles. This means that the large particles are deposited when and where the wind speed drops, which is often in low or flat terrain. So sand grains of around a certain size can accumulate in great masses in lowland basins, while the smaller fragments can be carried further; dust from the Sahara Desert quite frequently falls on the UK, for example. The result is that dunes are made up of grains mainly of the same size.

Similar principles apply on beaches, although the movement of particles is also affected by a variety of additional processes such as wave action, tides, offshore currents and long-shore drift – sand creep caused by waves approaching the beach obliquely. How effective each mechanism is at moving particles depends on its energy, so each will deposit particles in a different location. For example, wave action can sought beach material so that shingle will accumulate as a ridge high up the beach, while sand will only be exposed at low tide. Or long-shore drift may carry sand to one end of a beach, leaving shingle at the other.

Of course, all these fragments – boulders pebbles and sand – may gradually be broken down into finer particles, so that we might suppose all of the world’s rocks should by now have been reduced to a mass of dust blanketing the continents. But this does not happen because deposits of sand and dust gradually get compressed and cemented together to form new rock – the sandstones and mudstones. Nor does the planet run out of sand and dust, because bare rock surfaces are constantly exposed to weathering processes, and there will always be new rock exposed as a result of tectonic movement.

National Geographic

IF the sand in a coastal system is too fine relative to the energy of the waves then it will stay in suspension in the water and will not be deposited. So for a beach of dust to exist, the environment would have to be profoundly calm, and the dust-like sand would have to be kept wet in order to prevent the wind from claiming it. Most beaches are not like this.

Dunes are deposits of wind-blown sand, and for the sand to be deposited the size of the grains must exceed the carrying capacity of the wind. Sand dunes are innately dry places and there is no way that dust-sized particles could hope to stay put in these areas, however weak the wind may be.

Desert dunes exist in gigantic systems, whereas beach dunes form only a narrow band running along the back of some sea beaches, and are created by gusts from the sea that transport sand up from the beach. Yet both systems result from the same key processes of wind-borne matter being deposited when the wind becomes too weak to keep it aloft. Of course, even the tiniest sand grains will be deposited somewhere, but they will be highly dispersed and will not form dunes.

. You may also like  Skimming pebbles on water. But how does it happen?

 

. Appendage:

Sand

 

Science in motion

Science-in-motion: a series of short articles following topics in science.

. Newtonian gravity

Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation, published in 1687, was the first clear mathematical description of how bodies such as planets and stars attract each other under their mutual gravitational pull.

Newton’s inspiration for the theory came from watching an apple falling from a tree. A falling apple accelerates towards the ground, so Newton reasoned from his laws of motion that there must be a force, which he called gravity, acting on the apple. This force might have a huge range and could also be responsible for the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, if the Moon had just the right speed to remain in orbit despite constantly ‘falling’ towards the Earth.

He went on to show that the gravitational force between two massive objects is directly proportional to the product of their masses and weakens with the square of the distance between them. But troubling, the theory didn’t explain why the force was transmitted across empty space. This problem is resolved in Einstein’s general relativity theory.

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Happy Heart

. Similar Proper Sowing…

Arts

A Happy Heart

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