If there is one country that manifests the great and warm welcome of people to the game casino, it would be the United States of America or USA. In some of its states particularly in Las Vegas, this game serves as one of the things that people in there would like to do whenever they are free. For them, playing casino is not gambling at all but a good source of fun and enjoyment. Today, this is even made better because of the invention of one concept of playing and that is the online one. If before, in order to play casino, people should travel outside their houses just to go to playing centers, now, all they have to do is to sit in front of their computer, browse the web and play online casino usa. This is such a great development.

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The exciting part in the up-coming 2010 election is the prospect of unscrupulous candidates starting to rely on geeks, aside from their goons, to affect the vote. Like a friend said, cheating attempts may actually give more people throughout the country more incentive to learn techie stuff like programming, network management, etc.

Of course, no one wants to see fraudulent elections. But what if Filipinos in the most remote areas of the Philippines suddenly learn computer programming? That’s a possibility, especially if candidates are willing to pay good money for results. But with all of the positive things that have been said about the automation of the election, there are still risk factors that we have to consider. Such risk factors might include:

1. Software – The software used all throughout the process, from ballot reading all the way to returns tallying, must be open for public scrutiny. It may not be proprietary and secret.
2. Devices – Ballots and computers used throughout may fail. Backup/contingency plan must exist and be robust. Sabotage could be the way cheating will be introduced, in order to force reverting to manual process.
3. Architecture – Transmittal and reporting of results could be susceptible to hacking. Instant public visibility of results as counted at source and as transmitted at receipt will mitigate threats of hacking.
4. User – Voting needs to be simple and straightforward. Many Filipinos are not computer literate, and barely literate. PEBKAC errors can lead to many spoiled ballots, which may either be invalidated like in the US, or can be used as a pretense to revert to manual.

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With the advent of the modern technology we are using today, we are given the chance to prove that we can bring this modern technology into one of the most important events that will take place on our country. It will make the election in our country be automated for the first time. That means to say that from voting until counting, we will be aided by computers with special programs intended to fulfill this specific purpose. But what do this automation mean for our country?

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Hackers wanted; P100-million reward

Courtesy of Philstar.com

The issue on the automation of the 2010 national elections have reverted all ears as it creates noise. Billions of pesos will be spent for a strategy that is not proven to eliminate the problem of elections, and so, a test is about to be done.

Opposition Senator Allan Peter Cayetano said in a press conference that he is filling a resolution for COMELEC (Commission on Elections) to appropriate an amount of 100 million pesos out of the 11 billion pesos fund on the automation of elections as a reward for anyone who can show and convince the people that the automated elections is also susceptible to dirty tactics such as fraud and tampering of election paraphernalia. If this goes through (the resolution), this will be a test to the automation process’s invulnerability and probably will make the fear of people for any untoward act regarding the elections vanish.

This is why the Commission on Elections (Comelec) challenged hackers to try to hack into the voting and counting machines that will be used in next year’s elections, but expressed confidence that they would fail.

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After I featured in this site about The First Elevator That Can Ride to Outer Space, in which according to Michael Laine the real critical test was on making a string strong enough. He said that the cable they made was rock solid. This effort was considered a giant leap forward for scientists who are developing the world’s first space elevator.

But today scientists recently discovered that a new form of carbon ribbon that’s ultra-flexible and super-strong could become the infrastructure for the first working space elevator. Such a structure would usher in a new era in easy space travel.

Long-predicted by science fiction authors, and memorably portrayed in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Red Mars (where a space elevator crashes to the planet’s surface), a space elevator would pull people out of the atmosphere quickly – without wasting as much energy as rockets do as they escape Earth’s gravity. The elevator would begin at the Earth’s equator and could stretch up to an orbital platform or even a relocated asteroid. People who wanted to travel to space would ride the elevator far out of the atmosphere and catch a ship in orbit.

NASA holds regular competitions to inspire people to come up with materials that would make a space elevator possible, and the team behind the new ribbon material developed it for one of NASA’s competitions. According to the Times Online:

Spurred on by a $4m (2.7m) research prize from Nasa, a team at Cambridge University has created the world’s strongest ribbon: a cylindrical strand of carbon that combines lightweight flexibility with incredible strength and has the potential to stretch vast distances. The development has been seized upon by the space scientists, who believe the technology could allow astronauts to travel into space via a cable thousands of miles long – a space elevator . . .

The Cambridge team is making about 1 gram of the high-tech material per day, enough to stretch to 18 miles in length. “We have Nasa on the phone asking for 144,000 miles of the stuff, but there is a difference between what can be achieved in a lab and on an industrial level,” says Alan Windle, professor of materials science at Cambridge University, who is anxious not to let the work get ahead of itself.

The rest of the Times article is worth checking out – there’s a lot of cool information about space elevators and their potential development over the next few decades.

Gravity is not the same everywhere on Earth. It is influenced by geological formations and varying density of materials beneath the surface. To map these gravitational differences, the ESA (European Space Agency), has built GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer). To be launched in early 2009, this craft will circle 155 miles above the planet to measure the differences in gravitational pull. The technical aspects can be quite mind boggling, but what it will do is determine what lie’s under the Earth’s crust, give an accurate measurement as to how high mountains really are, and more specifically, determine how Earth will react to the melting ice sheets. You might not think this will affect you, but it will.

Description:

Over its lifetime of about 20 months, GOCE will map global variations in the gravity field with extreme detail and provide a unique model of the geoid, which is crucial for understanding ocean circulation, sea-level change and ice dynamics – all of which are affected by climate change.

It is quite possible to have your thoughts played out on the computer screen. It’s not a technology you can buy yet, as it in the research phase. However, a Japanese student has been able to walk in a virtual world, on a flat screen monitor, with the character controlled by his brain waves, in Yokohama, in 2007. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Reminds me of the Adventures of Johnny Quest. But now, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain. It’s just a simple affair of fairly simple dreams, but they hope to be able to play out dreams and secrets of the human mind in the coming future. To explain this a little technically, “When people look at an object, the eye’s retina recognizes an image that is converted into electrical signals which go into the brain’s visual cortex.” Yukiyasu Kamitani’s research team tapped into this and succeeded in catching the signals and then reconstructing what people see.

What they did was show people the six letters in the word “neuron” and then succeeded in reconstructing the letters on a computer screen by measuring their brain activity. It seems like it’s out of a bad sci-fi movie. But hey this is reality. They showed people 400 different still images and figured out their people’s individual brain patterns. Maybe eventually we can record our dreams and watch them later for entertainment value?

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This is unbelievable for me but this is true. According to Michael Laine the real critical test was on making a string strong enough. He said that the cable they made was rock solid.

This effort was considered a giant leap forward for scientists who are developing the world’s first space elevator.

According to the studies done by the United States based National Aeronautics space administration(NHSA), a space elevator would reduced the costs of sending cargo up into space from US$2,000 per pound down to $400 per pound. This cost reduction would have a great effect based on research, such a telecommunication, energy and pharmaceutical.

Using an outer space elevator instead of rockets would also be safer, easier, and gentler on fragile cargos such as electronics. Having a platform up in space can also provide room for large solar panels, more communication, cameras and hopefully, even people.

A space elevator would need a fixed lined, or cord that stretches from an anchor on Earth to station out in space, the station acts like a counter weight forever held above the planet by the antifungal force from the earth’s rotation.

The cord or shaft will be a carbon nano tube composite ribbon stretching around 99,779 kilometers up into space. The ground floor (anchor) will be a platform anchor in the sea, the elevator itself will be made up of robotic lifters that can climb up and down the ribbon at dizzying speeds without jarring its load, and the top floor will be space platform that also serves as a counter weight that will hold the whole thing upright. Gravity at one end and centripetal acceleration at the other end, will keep the space elevator from falling down on it.

So far so good the physics was the easy part. Science fiction writers had known all along that a space elevator would be possible in theory. The problem was the making of a string using a material strong enough to resist he incredible forces that the space elevator will go through.

But, their problem was solved in the 1990′s.When Carbon were discovered. Carbon nano tubes are many times stronger than steel. And now that carbon nano tubes are out of the lab and commercially manufactured, the few pieces of the space elevator are finally falling into place.