Green Technology : What it is?

Lately we have been hearing about "green technology" in news, business community, and political agenda. What exactly is green technology? It sound  really exciting and new idea when somebody mention "green technology" especially in this global warming. Last week I was talking  with my boss and he bring this idea of green technology that our company might use. Immediately I asked him what is green technology?  He could not answer to what green technology is? Its funny sometime we don't understand what something will do but we just  need to have it because someone is having same thing.
Before we get into something we need to understand how and why we need it. After Google search for some time here is what I find: "Basically, green technology is that in which the technology is environmentally friendly and is created and used in a way that conserves natural resources and the environment."  After all it sound to be really useful technology but how will we be using it?

The robot that reads your mind to train itself

When I first read this article on BBC news, I think this could be real good  instrument to teach person based on their brain ability. Let say robot read a mind of a person and based on their brain capability teacher can develop a learning material that suit  to this person.  E learning has been so popular now  a day because of its advance technology, flexibility and easy to access. Now with technology like this integrated on e- learning , it  make learning more easy and custom based ones skill set.

Skype-Facebook: Like peanut butter and chocolate?

So Google coming up with Google voice chat and IPhone with real time face chatting , Facebook and skype merged to  provide  more social feature to its user. We have used both Facebook and Skype in the past to chat be incontact with our social circle and both applications has huge number of user. Now  Facebook acquire Skype, not only its adding new user it also beat competition from Google and Apple. A genuine move!
With Facebook integration, you can:

• see your Facebook News Feed in Skype
• post status updates that can be synced with your Skype mood message
• comment and like friends’ updates and wall posts
• call and SMS your Facebook friends on their mobile phones and landlines
• make a free Skype-to-Skype call if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact

Will physical books be gone in five years?

In one interview with cnn, author Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, said the physical book's days are numbered. "It will be in five years," said Negroponte. "The physical medium cannot be distributed to enough people. When you go to Africa, half a million people want books ... you can't send the physical thing."

It is sad to see the end of paper books  but with ebook it is easy to access anyway from the world and it will be lot cheaper compare to printing  a book.

CNN lntroduce "Tech Check" Podcast

Every friday CNN will broadcast podcast on various topics related to techology.Topics regularly covered by the Tech Check team include social networking, technology innovation, mobile phones and other gadgets, video gaming and the internet at large.
I usually listen TED  and MSDN podcast  for techology news. I have been saying podcast is the tool  for learning  while at work . If you have internet services in  your mobile device  then you can  do you work  while listening to podcast

Learning Cooking Through Technology



Spicy Potato snack

Last weekend I was trying to make my favourite snack, aloo dum but did not have clue on how to make it. When I was kid and back in Nepal my mom used to make it but its hard to get every instruction  from phone ( and long distance call are expensive too). I tried my luck on youtube and no wonder found 4-7 cooking videos that show how to make this dish. I was really suprised by numbers of video because I was not expecting people will post that many videos on this dish especially people from  USA ( nepali origin).
Out of 5-7 ,I found one really good one because instructions were easy to follow and she showed each step to cook it. I was able to make this dish without too many difficulties.
In wikinomics we learned so much about collaboration and open sharing. We find these things on our day to day life and we appreciate how another person  collaboration and sharing provide so much joy and help to another person. I thank Youtube for providing  platform for people to collaborate and share their ideas.

How good software makes us stupid

Sometime we think that technology will take care of everything and  become careless or totally depend on techology. For example before spell checking functionality on MS Word application we try our best to remember spelling of every word so that we don't misspelled it. But after spell check functionality we totally depend on it and does not bother to practice remembering spelling of words.So most of us cannot spell some of word correctly because we depend so much on MS word tools that we loose that capability.
BBC published this article which describe how we are loosing some of capabilities because we depend so much on software. One example author mention how we are becoming more "stupid" is GPS. GPS helps us to navigate direction and we rely on it to find direction. Before GPS we used to remember on ways to get direction such as remembering street address based on south, north. But since we rely on GPS we forget to understand on how to remember street address.
But if we use these type of tools fewer and when needed , we can still be smart.

The child-driven education

Sometime its important how children learn and  how we can teach them?  A session on TED fromSugata Mitra highlight why its important for children to let them learn them self and be creative. He perfrom an experiement on various children from asia to south africa and europe. He gave  group of children  one laptop and told them to come of something and  they did without any help from other.
Its amazing how human brain can be creative and can adjust with situations. Sometime we figure out some problem that might need other assistance with our creativity and thinking. You can check whole TED Session from Sugata Mitra on how children educated themselves with one computer and their own creative. Here is a link

"Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong."
Linux Journal

Who said new techology totally displace old techology?

Most often we see that old techology  dies down because  new technology totally replace it. Its hard to see that some of the techology that you work with at the begining does not exist any more, it extinct . But sometimes these old techology help to educate student and provides excellent tool to work with in new techological surrounding.
One lucky flock of BBC Micros is getting another lease of life by helping to educate students in the art of rigorous programming. Student work with Micros to understand  how computer functions and understand to steps that take place from converting our text into electronic signal and back to the text.
You can read the whole article  here.

"The movie that defines our generation": Social network

Sorry, I don't mean to blog about movie  to provide entertainment . But this movie  talks about copy right,  collaboration and sharing of ideas that helps many people . Movie is about face book cofounder Mark whose vision and hard working led to one of the best creation ( interms of people using )  in web.  This movie is also about sharing ideas and collaborating   as two friends collaborate  to create an application that helps everyone.