Love: what is it in today’s world?

Love. They say that love is everywhere--may it be romantic, filial, or family love. Your tropa going to see a movie in the cinema, your whole family going outside to eat in the weekly family day, or a couple you see in the park holding hands, that you can say is love. But love has never been static; it always evolves as the lifestyle of people also changes. It gradually flowers in a different form as time unfolds. How was it different from several years ago? What is it that makes love so different now?

Well you can say that technology has brought a big change on love. Imagine the scenes in the movie where a man in the older century sends out a mail to his far-away lover. His lover then receives it from the mailbox after a week or so. That is not a common scene in our lives today. Being here in the Philippines, the texting capital of the world, you can communicate to your loved ones just one text away. “How are you?”, “Have you eaten already?”. or a simple “Good night” would be sent just seconds away to him/her from any point in the country in this case. Such trivial thing to say, only covering few characters, is entirely possible. A cell phone plus a SIM card and--TADA!-- you are part of a bigger community. No wonder there is one point in your life or more that you receive a random message saying roughly “pwde pOh banG texmeyt?” from a texter who might be very desperate to meet his love of his life.

This wide range of communication can still be extended in a global scale, thanks to the internet. Different kinds of social networking sites have bloomed out like--to name some of the few--FaceBook, and Twitter (though some have wilted, e.g. Friendster which became more like a gaming site now).

Let’s say you don’t access your Facebook account for a week. You miss updates of your group of friends about the gala this Friday. You are now anxious that maybe you will go to Trinoma but the plan is already cancelled. How about talking to your crush? (Maybe stalking) You missed your chance again to see him/her be online again. Friends. Is your 500+ “friends” actually your friends? It is very hard to consider if she is your friend. But, you saw you had a lot of mutual friends with her so you accepted her friend request. Now, do you know who are your friends? Intertwined is the cyber world to the real world, it gets more confusing.

What if you have your love of your life in a distant place, like in the opposite side of the world? If Facebook cannot suffice, there is Skype. Only take note of the time zone and you can freely video chat with your loved ones once in a while. You can connect to them and see them from one point to any point in the world.

Imagine today where people are “falling in love” in the Web, and it is in fact happening. There are relationships that stretches long distances, countries away. Their way of keeping their relationship intact? Internet. Actually, a friend of mine is now in a relationship with an American guy whom she never met physically. They knew each other in Facebook with some friend of friend and now, they are closely connected to each other. Now that is something.

Distances between each of us is becoming small since cellular phones and Internet has become available to us. Imagine this spherical (actually oblate spheroid) world meets at an “imaginary plane” which the present technology has created. All of us can interact there. Love, in today’s context, is more than “everywhere”.

However, the snail mail is still not-so-obsolete even in the presence of the computers, right? Personal letters are still very valuable to us. You can easily delete the history of your conversation in Facebook, but you cannot easily trash hand-written letters. Still, there are things that our technology cannot better. In fact, technology is just a way for us to be with our loved ones; to keep connected, to stay connected. :)

[Dominic Awa]

Kapekonomiya: Probing the UP Land Use

                There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the privatization of public land especially in the University of the Philippines. Areas such as Techno Hub and UP Town Centre have been in the middle of these debates. The question stands whether the commercial use of such land is justifiable.

                Some people argue that the use of the land has allowed an increase of money in the University which is grave need of more funding for facilities and salaries of staff. However, in order to properly answer this question, on must first realize what the purpose of the land is to begin with. This land was meant to develop the academic advancement of the country.

                Even though the land isn’t currently being used, it can already be seen that such land still is an asset to the entire campus. Areas like the science complex were only able to expand with the availability of land. Other areas, like the Asian Institute of Tourism, were built but their expansion has been hindered by the development of commercial complexes within campus property. This shows a grave misuse of public property. This land is meant to better the entire country by promoting education. Instead, it has been used for the further expansion of consumerism.

                Aside from this, there is also the large issue of the movement and demolition of the public high school of the University of the Philippines. The other cases previously stated have been cases wherein future expansion of educational facilities has been impeded on. However, this is case wherein education has taken a back seat to the expansion of commercial facilities. Up to this point, there has been no replacement for the facility demolished to build UP town centre.

                Personally, as a future tax paper, I am enraged by the misuse of public land. Aside from that as a current student of the university, I am also disappointed on the way the administration has been placing education as a secondary end compared to money.

[Raffy Tanpho]

Kapekonomiya: Probing the UP Land Use is a forum organized by the UP School of Economics Student Council and UP Economics Towards Consciousness last January 10, 2014 at the SE Auditorium, UP Diliman. 

iPad: A gadget to understand Science

The scale of the universe can be difficult to comprehend. Pretend you are going to make a scale model with a basketball representing Earth and a tennis ball as the Moon. How far would you hold the tennis ball "Moon" from the basketball "Earth?" Most people would hold them at arm's length from each other, but the answer may surprise you: at that scale the balls would need to be held almost 30 feet apart. A new study by Smithsonian researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that students grasp the unimaginable emptiness of space more effectively when they use iPads to explore 3-D simulations of the universe, compared to traditional classroom instruction.

This study comes at a time when educators are increasingly questioning whether devices such as iPads should play a greater role in education. It suggests that iPads can improve student understanding of challenging scientific concepts like astronomical scale.

"These devices offer students opportunities to do things that are otherwise impossible in traditional classroom environments," says study leader Matthew H. Schneps. "These devices let students manipulate virtual objects using natural hand gestures, and this appears to stimulate experiences that lead to stronger learning."

Schneps and his colleagues looked at gains in learning among 152 high-school students who used iPads to explore simulated space, and compared them to 1,184 students who used more traditional instructional approaches. The researchers focused on questions dominated by strong misconceptions that were especially difficult to correct via teaching. Many questions examined students' understanding of the scale of space.

They found that while the traditional approaches produced no evident gain in understanding, the iPad classrooms showed strong gains. Students similarly struggle with concepts of scale when learning ideas in biology, chemistry, physics, and geology, which suggests that iPad-based simulations also may be beneficial for teaching concepts in many other scientific fields beyond astronomy.

Moreover, student understanding improved with as little as 20 minutes of iPad use. Guided instruction could produce even more dramatic and rapid gains in student comprehension.

"While it may seem obvious that hands-on use of computer simulations that accurately portray scale would lead to better understanding," says Philip Sadler, a co-author of the study, "we don't generally teach that way." All too often, instruction makes use of models and drawings that distort the scale of the universe, "and this leads to misconceptions."

Participants in the iPad study came from Bedford High School, one of a number of school systems around the country that made the decision to equip all students with iPad devices. "Since we began using iPads, we have seen substantial gains in learning, especially in subjects like math and science," says Henry Turner, Principal.

"What is perhaps most remarkable is that we saw significant learning gains among students who used the simulations, in situations where little to no gains were observed in the traditional classrooms," says Mary Dussault, a member of the research team. This study thereby provides experimental evidence supporting national trends promoting the use of new technologies in the classroom.

[Princess Carla]

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (esciencenews.com)
Images: http://www.ipadcreative.com/blog/tag/ipad-mini

Relational Social Image Search: An algorithm that finds a person in untagged photos

The University of Toronto designed an algorithm which has the capability to profoundly change the way we find photos on social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr. This search tool developed by Parham Aarabi, a professor in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and his former Master's student Ron Appel, uses tag locations to quantify relationships between individuals, even those not tagged in any given photo.

Imagine you and your mother are pictured together, building a sandcastle at the beach. You're both tagged in the photo quite close together. In the next photo, you and your father are eating watermelon. You're both tagged. Because of your close 'tagging' relationship with both your mother in the first picture and your father in the second, the algorithm can determine that a relationship exists between those two and quantify how strong it may be.

In a third photo, you fly a kite with both parents, but only your mother is tagged. Given the strength of your 'tagging' relationship with your parents, when you search for photos of your father the algorithm can return the untagged photo because of the very high likelihood he's pictured.

"Two things are happening: we understand relationships, and we can search images better," says Professor Aarabi.

The nimble algorithm, called relational social image search, achieves high reliability without using computationally intensive object- or facial-recognition software. "If you want to search a trillion photos, normally that takes at least a trillion operations. It's based on the number of photos you have," says Aarabi. "Facebook has almost half a trillion photos, but a billion users -- it's almost a 500 order of magnitude difference. Our algorithm is simply based on the number of tags, not on the number of photos, which makes it more efficient to search than standard approaches."

Currently the algorithm's interface is primarily for research, but Aarabi aims to see it incorporated on the back-end of large image databases or social networks. "I envision the interface would be exactly like you use Facebook search -- for users, nothing would change. They would just get better results," says Aarabi.

[Princess Carla]

Source: University of Toronto (esciencenews.com)

Going Wireless: RF Energy Harvesting

                     The concept of wireless radio-frequency (RF) energy transmission dates back to the 1880s. With current trends on wireless technology, RF energy harvesting is a promising solution of the limitation of regular batteries.

                Energy harvesting is the process of using ambient energy, such as solar, wind, vibrational, and electromagnetic wave energy, then convert them into electrical energy. This kind of strategy makes use of environmental resources in order to replenish power. Examples of energy harvesting , in a large scale, are windmills that is used to provide power in some areas. With the continuing progress of wireless technology, there is a move to power up small devices, say mobile devices and sensor nodes, using these ambient energies.

                Some of the energies like solar and wind are weather-dependent solutions. Vibrational energy requires mechanical movements. RF, having the least power density, is a promising source of energy for low-voltage devices.  RF is a frequency portion on the electromagnetic spectrum that is usually in the ultra high frequency band. This can be from communication devices like TVs, cellphones, and Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) signals. These devices are almost in every corner of our lives.

                Now why bother find a way to replace regular batteries? Progress. Batteries are limitations to the overall area of devices, which is one of the metric to consider in designing things. Another reason is that there is limited amount of power in batteries for wireless devices. For sensor networks, each sensor node may need to have individual batteries. Replacing each and everyone of it makes it costly. In the medical field, battery-powered devices may not be accessible easily.

                 So how does RF energy harvesting works? The system involves the receiving antenna and the rectifier. An electromagnetic wave like RF wave induces electric current upon contact in a conductor such as the antenna. This will be the RF input power of the system. This signal is in alternating current (AC) form but devices uses direct current (DC) signal. In order to convert this AC signal into DC signal, a rectifier is used. The rectifier is made up of devices such as a diode or a transistor  which should allow only one way flow of current. An energy storage device such as a capacitor is then needed to store the charge for future use. The harvester includes a matching network before the antenna and rectifier in order to improve the efficiency of the power conversion. A voltage regulator that conditions the power before the  load, the device to be powered up, is also included.

                At present, RF energy harvesting is a solution for low-voltage devices but since technology is developing, who knows if in the near future it is already a solution for a larger scale power problems.      

               

 [Allen SHamir Clavio]

When Curiosity Landed

             2012 might be over. It’s the most controversial year people are referring to since it has been said that it is the end of the world. There are lots of speculations regarding this and in fact, there are also news saying that other people are extending their preparations by buying lands on other planet particularly Mars.

            What if this preparation really makes sense? What if there’s a basis on investing a land on Mars? What if life is really possible on that planet? What if there is really life a long time ago there?

            Many questions to be answered…What if? As Curiosity Rover landed on Mars last year, a tiny strike of hope hit us that these questions can finally be answered.  And recently, just this December, age of a Martian rock has been determined by the scientists from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) using some of the tools built into Mars Science Laboratory (MLS). They found out in their analysis that the rock is about 3.86 to 4.56 billion years old. Scientists also suggested that this kind of rock is possibly entrenched in what they consider as “ancient lake” which said to have flowed on Mars in about 3.6 million years ago. If this body of water has existed in Mars, it must have also been signalling a possibility of life in that planet.

            With all the calamities we are experiencing right now in different parts of the world – earthquakes, tsunami, storm surge, isn’t it this kind of discovery seems appealing to us? That maybe we can finally find an evacuation place to other planet. Can we finally consider Mars as a newfound home?

[Rachelle Macalino]