Archivos diarios: 5 de febrero de 2003

Una compañía sueca, Cypak, para montar un pequeño microprocesador en una hoja de papel, así como para imprimir sensores, interruptores y antenas de corto alcance:

The company, Cypak, has technology to mount a very small microprocessor, which it created, on paper (or inside a credit card), as well as a technique to print sensors, switches, and very short-range antennae on the same paper, using special conductive inks.

Drug trials need data about how and when subjects consume the drugs being tested. In this application, a pill pack registers when individual pills are popped out of their plastic bubbles; it then can beep and ask the user a question like, «Are you feeling better today? Press Yes or No.» (The answer buttons are on the pack itself.) When the patient visits the doctor, the package is placed on a Cypak reader and the data is downloaded to the physician’s computer.

Certus, a drug-testing company, has just begun testing Cypak’s technology. Compared with logging and «compliance» products that use more traditional computer parts and sensors, the Cypak technology is less expensive. The chips embedded in the paper drug packages cost only a buck or two, and the scanners that read the data from the used packages are inexpensive as well — less than $10, Cypak CEO Jakob Ehrensvärd says. Also, the data is more reliable than the logs that patients might keep.

(vía Smart Mobs)
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En Columbia, and the Dreams of Science Fiction Gary Westfahl argumenta que sí:

We must conquer space because science fiction has told us to.

We must conquer space because that is the way science fiction said it was going to be. After beginning with small steps into Earth orbit, we must build space stations, travel to the Moon, Mars, and other nearby planets, and set up human colonies wherever we go ? a process that science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s thought we would complete well before the year 2001. Then, we must ready ourselves for ventures into interstellar space, encounters with alien life, and the formation of a galaxy-spanning Federation of Planets. We must conquer space so that our children can be Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and so that our great-grandchildren can be Captain Kirk.

This is the dream that the people at NASA grew up with, the dream that has driven them and their supporters to keep plugging away at the conquest of space, in spite of mounting and persuasive evidence indicating that this quite possibly doesn’t really represent the very best use of their time and resources. This is the dream that will soon push our aging shuttle fleet back into orbit, fitted up with thousands of modifications and quick fixes, and this is the dream that will lead NASA to finance the construction of new alternatives to the shuttle, all bringing with them their own huge sets of impossible new technological challenges.

You’ve got to admire the astounding power of a form of literature that can keep inspiring people to do silly things.

But you’ve also got to wonder, especially on the days when those things go horribly wrong, whether this is necessarily an admirable quality.

Algo de razón tiene al afirmar que la ciencia ficción (aunque más bien la filmica y la televisiva, muy por delante de la escrita) ha modelado nuestra percepción de cómo debe ser el futuro humano en el espacio. Ciertamente, ¿a quién no le gustaría ser el capitán Kirk? ¿O uno de los comerciantes de Asimov?

Este ensayo se ha publicado en Locus y ha recibido las respuestas que cabía esperar. Por otra parte, el editor lo defiende argumentando que una literatura como la ciencia ficción debería cuestionarse todas las suposiciones.

A day at the office in 2013. Dan Farber cuenta la historia de Gregor Samson y la oficina en la que es posible que a todos nos toque vivir:

On this day, at 8:30 am, Gregor Samson will receive his first «referral,» an auto-generated, monthly employee report from the CSI. The report informs him that in the last 30 days he has spent 6 percent of his time browsing non-authorized Web locations, 23 percent in video conferences, 1.33 percent in the 4th floor lavatory, and 6 percent at the nearby Starbucks coincident with another 8x employee. He is also made aware that he is over budget in his application usage, which is metered by the minute.

In addition, Gregor is reminded that the corporate spamination system has groomed 42.3 GB of spam from his inbox but that 23 messages are still in an auto-deletion holding pattern pending his review. He also broke security policy by taking 11 classified documents, each with its own unique object tag, from his office to his home. All of this information is communicated to Gregor’s manager.

(vía Smart Mobs)
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