Thursday, 13 May 2010

The First Question - 4 May 2010

This week's panel

Andrew Hughes, August Lusch, Jay Ackroyd, Paley Westinghouse

Quotes

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
-Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
-Buddha

Word-UP of the week -
Scrutz - the dirt and worse that accumulates on a computer screen
- Jay Ackroyd -
Telequila - The shot you should take when your client crashes mid teleport. The Telequila game can be deadly on Sundays.
- August Lusch -


Questions

For the answers go to The 1st Question blog at treet.tv

1) He is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science. He defended realism about science, on pragmatic grounds: the electron is real because human beings use it to make things happen. From 1990, his focus shifted to psychology, aware of the modern schism that affects probability with personality which is of course subjective. He penned Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Who is this Canadian?

2) They are among the best-understood prehistoric vertebrates known to science in terms of anatomy, one has the feeling they would be welcome in any zoo. They had lots of hair which helped them in the freezing temperatures they favored – & something else. - A form of "anti-freeze" blood to keep their bodies supplied with oxygen. Nature Genetics reports that scientists "resurrected" their blood protein to come to this finding and found special kind of hemoglobin their modern ancestors don’t have. What animals was it?”

3) He started off “working on the problem of making boats go faster”. It is not only the anniversary of the post it note but of the Hovercraft- which was invented by this man whilst he owned and worked at Ripplecraft. He was attempting to make boat propulsion more energy efficient and one of his experiments was to inject air under the hull of his launch. He got it in front of Lord Mountbatten and the National R & D backed the project, Sir Christopher Cockerell the inventor saw it cross the English Channel in what year to widespread acclaim?

4) In 1973, the first phone call from a handheld cellular phone was made in New York City. The call connected with a base station that in turn connected to the land-line telephone system. The man who invented it stated that he was personally inspired by watching Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise use communicators on Star Trek in the late 1960's. Although Robert Heinlein wrote about a pocket-sized portable telephone 1948 ‘s Space Cadet. The inventor of the Dyna-Tac made a new prediction and I don’t think he saw this on Battlestar Gallactica - Who just said this-"The cellphone in the long range is going to be embedded under your skin behind your ear along with a very powerful computer who is in effect your slave."

5) This new garment by Vanessa Sorenson. is a wearable that visually displays the moods of your twitter stream If you've been sending out angry tweets, the LEDs on your sleeve will radiate red. If your spirits suddenly brighten, the colors will shift to a "happy" green. The project was intended as an exploration on "how social networking, more specifically Twitter, can demonstrate personalities in the real world via the virtual world." What is the name of this garment that broadcasts your mood?

6) Last week we mentioned Stephen Hawkins suggesting we not put out the cosmic welcome mat for ET & his Teeny weeny band. Now this former Defense minister fired back at Hawkins. In what could evolve into nasty twitter war this man basically said that it was too late. They are among us and that aliens probably brought humans technology such as LCDs and fiber-optics. That wasn’t enough, he went in for the smack – down with this comment "Hawking is indulging in some pretty scary talk there that I would have hoped would not come from someone with such an established stature'' Who believes that alien craft leftovers have seemingly triggered the IT and microchip revolution of today?

7) You think you are being watched, don’t we all? So, you look up and you don’t see anything but a flock of small, UAV’s have flown quietly into your city, maneuvering among the buildings. They communicate as they search for places to land, not on streets or flat rooftops but on the sides of buildings and under the eaves, where they can cling, bat or insect-like, in safety and obscurity , creeping along to get a better view. When finished, they launch themselves with a jump and become airborne again, ready for their next mission. What project from Stanford do you hope doesn’t have a drone with your name on it?

8) A new table-top card battle game designed by two physicians’ combines’ sorcery and creatures with a real-world knowledge of infectious diseases and therapeutics. As you and your opponent seek domination through conquest, you must vie not only with brute force, but astute understanding of microbiology and medical therapeutics. This card game – think Pokemon, let’s you Summon living manifestations of diseases, or counter-attack with antibiotics in the form of powerful warriors. Two doctors invented it struck by the complex nature of gaming and decisions to proscribe certain anti-biotics. What is this new card game for aspiring doctors called?

9) I know you don’t want to hear this but we just might have to clean up our atmosphere of debris so visiting aliens don’t think we are complete slobs. A space-flight engineer from Japan has a suggestion- how about A laser thruster firing pulses into a mass of solid propellant attached to space junk. The resulting force could push the object, altering its orbit and plunging it into the Earth's atmosphere, burning it up. This is reminiscent of the 1977 TV series describing the activities of the United Galaxies Sanitation Patrol Cruiser. Richard Benjamin and the Doublemint Twins starred in this series called what?

10) Traffic tickets issued, not in outer space, well not yet anyway, are a way to deter reckless driving. Car confiscation laws are now in place in many countries raising the price of a speeding ticket. From a $200,000 Lamborghini in Australia to a Bugatti Veyron worth 1.8 million euros that a 20-year old borrowed from his dad. The previously most expensive speeding ticket on record was handed out earlier this year in this country and cost $290,000. In what country was this ticket given where speeding fines are calculated on your net worth?

11) I love magnets, I think that the use of magnets in new ways will be a hallmark for the future. So did this man, but he died in the year 2000. He was a French physicist and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his pioneering studies of the magnetic properties of solids. His contributions to solid state physics have found numerous useful applications, particularly in the development of improved computer memory. About 1930 he suggested that a new form of magnetic behavior might exist above a certain temperature (named after him) He also made possible the study of the history of Earth's magnetic field. Who was he?

12) You want to talk to someone who speaks a foreign language but you aren’t in Second Life and you don’t have your translator on. What can help you outworld in a situation like this? This is the name of a new app that will soon become available which is claimed to turn your iPhone into a double ended language translator. It's one of the most innovative uses of the iPhone's form factor, with both people able to type on a keyboard in their own language at the same time and have the words translated and displayed for the other to see.. With 51 different languages and keyboards what is this called which will indeed make the world easier to understand?

13) A team at this school has developed a new thin film technology that can convert infrared light into visible light. Current night vision devices use huge amounts of electricity and heavy glass lenses. Adapted from flat screen television technology, the new film uses energy-efficient, organic LEDs. This keeps weight down, with a full scale device potentially weighing as little as 10 grams it may revolutionize night vision goggles and other military applications, not to mention eye-glasses and cars, think windshields . What school is behind this ground breaking tech which could even be adapted to measure heat?

14) The Marshmallow Challenge is a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons . The task is simple: in eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. The man who invented it is passionate about fostering design thinking, visual collaboration and team creativity. Who is he?

15) It costs 30$ a month and has of course, others doing things for you – You send an email of what you need done and an algorithm will assign your task to the best team member carrying out 15 personal administration tasks for you with efficiency and discretion. Started by a man in the R & D dept. of the New York Times, this is his side project. He has about 100 retired lawyers, between-job actors and others. They won’t pick up or even do your laundry but they can help with writing tasks and content creation. If you have to think about it twice, as the founder, Ted Roden says – just put it here? Into what?

16) You need to get into town, but the traffic is so bad, that last few miles, will take you an hour. Yes traveling at the speed of snail is not a future kind of thing. So the concept of “last few mile mobility” is one which we will all see grow. In the last year alone we've seen Toyota's Winglet, Honda's U3-X, Nissan's electric skis, and now Volkswagen has shown a micro mobility concept an electric bike with one of the most ingenious folding mechanisms ever – It has a range of 12 and half miles, can charge from the car its driving in on – & a top speed of 20 kmh because this means it can be ridden in Germany without a helmet- What will the new vehicle within from Volkswagen be called?

17) Nature has developed extremely efficient water-splitting enzymes – called hydrogenases – for use by plants during photosynthesis; however, these enzymes are for plants not humans. Our activities demand a stable metal catalyst that can operate under non-biological settings. Researchers have discovered an inexpensive new one- seventy times cheaper than the platinum commonly used at $2,000 an ounce.. This can significantly reduce the costs of producing hydrogen using electrolysis to split water. Metal catalysts are commercially available, but their high costs make widespread use prohibitive. In what state did this research occur?

18:) Nanopatches are fingernail-sized dermal patches that use microscopic projections to cells just below the surface of the skin. The influenza vaccine was dry coated onto some of these and applied to the skin of mice for two minutes. Transdermal drug patches were not commercially available until 1979. When compared to a needle and syringe a nanopatch is cheap to produce and it is easy to imagine a situation in which a government might provide vaccinations for a pandemic such as swine flu to be collected from a chemist or sent in the mail. In what country has the naonopatch been developing? (Australia) Not to be confused with the cabbage patch.

P:19) Swiss researchers have reported laser-powered cloud seeding success, both inside and outside the laboratory. Inside the lab, the powerful infrared laser caused visible clouds of vapor to follow in its wake when fired into a water-saturated chamber and sensitive weather apparatus recorded spikes in water droplet density when it was fired into the skies of Berlin. The pulses stripped electrons from atoms in the air, encouraging the formation of water droplets. It might not mean rain on demand, at least not yet but this actor was arrested in a 1985 video in the Kate Bush video for 1985's Cloudbusting. Who was he?

20) Detecting rust before it’s too late has been an ongoing challenge for engineers and scientists. Experts at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed an early-warning system for rust. By installing this in the concrete to measure the extent of corrosion, a magnetic field is used. This means it does not need to be replaced and can remain within the concrete structure permanently,” It may seem a little primitive, but until now the most effective tests to determine how deep the ions have penetrated the concrete and what damage they have caused is conducted by construction workers hammering on the reinforced concrete in search of cavities, which are conclusive signs of corrosion damage. What is being tested to see if it can really wirelessly transmit data on the condition of the bridges internal structure?

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