Tech news
at TheJemReport.com
Software reviews
at SoftwareinReview.com
Hardware reviews
at HardwareinReview.com
Discuss technology
at TJRForum.com

October 31, 2008

Risk of Heart Attack Falls After Daylight Savings Time

Filed under: News Stories — @ 2:52 pm

Researchers in Sweden have found the day after we set our clocks back we reduce our risk of death or hospitalization from a hear attack by 5%. A description of the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute and Dr. Rickard Ljung of Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare.

The study, based on 20 years of records, also found that moving clocks forward in spring causes the opposite. There are more heart attacks the week after the start of daylight saving time.

Dr. Janszky describes the idea for studying this stemming from his own problems adjusting to the spring time change. “I was on the bus, quite sleepy, and I thought of this,” said Janszky. Mondays are the worst days for heart attacks. Changing the time to increase a person’s sleep likely reduces stress at the start of the workweek. The first three days of the week had the most noticeable changes in the study

For more information you can visit the New England Journal: www.nejm.com

October 23, 2008

Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects: A Popular Technical Book

Filed under: Tech Book Reviews — @ 11:47 pm

There are plenty of technical books that have come up in the market recently, but few as entertaining at this one. Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects walks us through the process of building electronic gadgets that can interact with other devices as well as with the various physical objects of the world. Have you ever wanted to make your pet‚Äôs bed send you an email? The author, Tom Igoe and Dan O’Sullivan, provide us a series of simple projects that teach the gadgets you create to communicate with one another through the formation of networks of smart devices. In this technical book, everything is well explained as to how to create an electronic device that can easily talk to you as well as interact with its environment.

Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects is written in a reader-friendly language. It contains step by step instructions about how to create such a unique object that is not only fun to play with but also brings praise and recognition. In this technical book, you’ll be trained on a host of small projects.

People who have lot of interest in these ventures but lack subject matter will largely benefit from this book. This technical book is just apt for the beginners who want to experiment with things and come up with innovative ideas of creating gadgets that can interact with the physical objects. If you are a science teacher and want to tell your students as to how to trace the weather condition at different places at a particular point of time, this technical book can be of good help to you.

All you need to know is that how to make the object talk; be it an email program, microcontroller-powered device or a network database program. You will be able to learn effectively by going through this technical book “Making Things Talk” thoroughly. You’ll be surprised to know that with the help of this book, you can do things like making the bed of your pet, send you a mail, and making your Bluetooth radio to pass on sensor data through wireless mode and many more. Before this, have you ever thought that it would be possible to create a working project for you that could virtually communicate with the physical objects of the world?

‘Making Things Talk’ will also tell you how to create your own game controller that can interact online. You can even set up a communication network between your personal computer, microcontroller and internet server. You can write up programs and send them across the internet.

With a bit of technical know-how, you can create several microcontroller kits and a couple of network modules and make them interact with the physical objects using different technologies such as Ethernet, Bluetooth and Zigbee. There are endless options in this technical book and the best part is that they are not so complicated and the outcome is worth trying.

To conclude, Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects is a wonderful book to learn about some easy to make electronic devices that can very well interact with the physical objects. It is 428 pages and is published by Make Books (September 28, 2007).

October 8, 2008

Major Advancement in Solar Power

Filed under: News Stories — @ 10:01 pm

On Oct 7, 2008, Solyndra Inc, after three years of silence, just announced landing $1.2 billion in contracts on their new thin-film solar power modules. According to their press release, “Solyndra’s photovoltaic (PV) system is designed to generate significantly more solar electricity on an annual basis from typical low-slope commercial rooftops with lower installation costs than conventional PV flat panel technologies.” Solyndra has claimed significan advances in solar technology: their technology uses rows of cylindrical cells, which absorb more light, have less wind resistance, and are much easier to install than conventional systems.

Headquartered in Fremont, California, Solyndra has been extremely well funded with over $600 million dollars from investors that include Virgin Green Fund, Madrone Capital Partners, Rockport Capital Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The two largest clients are Solar Power Inc. of Arizona (with a deal over $300 million) and Phoenix Solar AG out of Germany (with a deal over $680 million). Solynda’s facilities are state-of-the-art with over 300,000 square feet and a fully-automated manufacturing floor with heavy use of robotics.

Manfred Bachler, Chief Technical Officer at Phoenix Solar AG comments, “By eliminating the need for roof-penetrating mounts and wind ballasts, PV arrays with Solyndra panels can be installed with one-third the labor, in one-third of the time, at one-half the cost.” Learn more at www.solyndra.com.

| Contact Us | About Us | RSS FAQ |
Copyright 2008. All content items belong to their respective authors.