Free Burma!

Tomorrow is the Free Burma Day. Everyone is invited to send an email or to publish a post with the tag "Free Burma". To give your contribution, follow the indications at the www.free-burma.org
It's just a little drop in the ocean, but it is much better than doing nothing and seeing a proud population, with thousand-year history and a country full of natural richnesses, to be brought in a state of shameful poverty and oppression.
Here is the link for the UK Burma campaign: www.burmacampaign.org.uk
Here is the link for the US Burma campaign: www.uscampaignforburma.org
Here is the link for the French Burma campaign: www.birmanie.net
Here is the link for the Italian Burma campaign: www.birmaniademocratica.org
There are several national sites to support the protest against the repression in Burma, but it's clearly impossible to list them all.
By the way. The Wikipedia page about Burma has been "locked", and cannot be modified at the moment, due to acts of vandalism.

GOODBYE, LUCIANO!

I cannot help adding a post to remember Big Luciano. Every word is useless: media from all over the world reported facts and details on his extraordinary life.
Here is the video that CNN posted on its website the day of its death:
Here is his official website.
I prefer to remember him at one of his concerts that he held with Placido Domingo ad José Carreras, the unforgettable "Tree Tenors"... GOODBYE, LUCIANO!

BODO's POWER SYSTEMS September

Anyone working in the power semiconductors field knows very well Bodo Arlt, who founded in June 2006 Bodo’s Power Systems, which is maybe the most authoritative monthly magazine on power electronics. The topic of green technologies is covered almost in each issue. On the September issue, which can also be viewed in PDF format on his web site Bodo discusses about Electric Hybrid Vehicles, which can be very instrumental in reducing the air pollution.

BURNING GREECE

Now Greece is not any more on the spotlight for the catastrophic forest fires (fortunately), which caused 65 deaths, a number of hurt, intoxicated and more than 4,000 homeless, the destruction of the economy of entire villages, not to count the animals trapped in the blazing forests and acres of mediterranean maquis incinerated. The mountainous southern peninsula of Peloponnese has been by far the worst-affected region. The flames came at a few meters from the ancient city of Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games.
The fires were out of control for at least five days. The warm and dry weather and a strong wind whose direction was nearly impossible to predict, made the efforts of beating back the flames useless: several water-dropping planes and helicopters, more than 800 firefighters and 800 soldiers, the desperate struggle of the local population and the aid coming from other Countries.
Now the fire is tamed, but a deep scar will remain for long in those regions. Greece has declared a nationwide emergency and sought help from the European Union in order to undertake joint actions in order to prevent the fires.
Self combustions happen exceptionally, pyromaniacs are not so frequent: on 99 % of cases, fires are set by arsonists, in order to make way for new constructions for land speculation without any scruple, or for criminal intents, or simply by irresponsible persons. Sometimes just throwing a sigarette stub can cause a disaster.
I was very strucked by this tragedy, as anyone who just saw the hellish images of the fires.
In the past days, two technological solutions drew my attention. One of these is a new fire detector developed by the Italian scientist Antonino Zichichi, the president and co-founder of the World Federation of Scientists (WFS) , and the eader of a research group at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). In his lab in Geneva, Dr. Zichichi is studying a new sensor that it can detect even the smallest sparkle, giving the alarm to firefighters as soon as a minimal source of fire appears. If reliefs come too late, the efforts needed to tame the flames became enormous. Under the sunshine a sparkles can be very hardly seen. The detector developed at CERN can discover the presence of sparkles even in conditions of strong ambient light. It is one thousand times more efficient than detectors already present on the market, and it can react in a fraction of millisecond, ten million times faster than required by European safety norms. According to Dr. Zichichi, the new detectors can be produced on large scale at affordable prices. They can work well in a range of 30 meters, allowing to build a protective network. The detector is the result of years of research on subnuclear technologies, allowing to measure with increasing precision ever smaller quantities of of energy.

Another technology, already available. It has been developed by the Australian company Telepathx, and it consists in a mesh sensor network, based on an active RFID technology, providing advanced monitoring and notification of fire ignitions in less than two minutes with virtually no false alarms.
The company claims that a single monitor can support any number of thermo sensors in areas ranging from 40 to 50,000 square meters (125 to 150,000 square feet), and that it can be deployed also in remote rural areas, in forests and in natural parks. Also Australia is severely hit by fires: the company's site reports that just roadside fire ignitions cause an average of 2,500-3,500 incidents per year.

I told all this to you to mean that, if we can do very little against the uncivilization and the criminal intents of arsonists, at least we can use technology to limit the damages they bring about.

By the way: the Wikipedia definition of Dr. Zichichi has an error: he is the president of the World Federation of Scientists (WFS), and not of the World Scientist Organisation, which does not exist.

Until soon!

Angela

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is the first post of my blog. I thought a while on what to write, and how to write it. The first post should be a sort of breaking the ice.

The ambitious purpose of this blog is to try to inform, describe, explain, discuss about the numerous ways in which the semiconductor technology and IT can improve the quality of life for all people, an area that I am fascinated by. With the more ambitious aim to serve as a sort catalyser of ideas on this vast, demanding and urging topic, or at list to give a minuscule contribution to it.

The invention of the transistor, in December 1947, resulted in a giant revolution: the greatest period of technological advance in human history (according to Gordon Moore and not only to him), well beyond the rosiest expectations and visionaries’ imagination. Just consider that the modern integrated circuit is the most complex creation ever produced by mankind, in million of pieces, each day. It includes devices even smaller that a bacterium; the number of integrated circuits (most commonly known as “chips”) in use today nearly equals to the number of stars in the Milky Way. The degree of purity of the crystalline silicon needed for integrated circuits is higher than any other material in the World. The cleanness of a white clean room, in which chips are manufactured, expressed in number of dust particles per cubic foot, is orders of magnitude higher than the standard used in surgery.

This disruptive technology, once relegated to military, scientific and aerospace environments, has become pervasive, first with the IT revolution, and now with the big wave of consumer electronics, which is now the first driver of the semiconductor and IT industry. The crossover happened in 2005. The videogame consoles sell in tens of million of units every years, catalysing the attention of both the generalist and the specialised media.

The PCs in past years and consumer equipments (cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, set-top-boxes, just to name a few) nowadays had the merit to bring the most advanced technologies to everyone.

But we should not forget that the semiconductor and IT technology are instrumental in improving the quality of our lives, on many fronts. I have chosen three of them: health, environment and development.

Communication, sensor and imaging technologies improve the health of people around the world with more effective diagnosis and therapies, avoiding tragic errors and providing patient-friendly systems. With the ageing of the World population, especially in developed Countries, the need to improve the healthcare has increased, as well as the requirement to manage ever tighter budgets, which mandate to better exploit the existing infrastructures, also with fewer resources.

The environment is one of the biggest priorities of the new Millennium. Also for the attention, the worries and anxieties that it is arising on the public opinion. And, above all, for its consequence on the quality of our lives. In fact, as the economy faces unprecedented challenges from high energy prices, resource shortages, and global environmental and security threats, clean technologies, designed to provide superior performance at a lower cost while creating significantly less waste than conventional offerings, promise to be the next driver for economic growth. Developing clean technologies is no longer a social issue championed by environmentalists; it’s also a great opportunity for the industry. Industry giants, as well as investment firms, are making multi-billion dollar investments in clean technologies.

Above all, semiconductor and IT technologies can help facing the challenges that the irreversible process of globalisation poses to every Country. Globalization involves both the most industrialized countries, the emerging ones and those, which are unfortunately numerous, especially in Africa, that are still in scandalous conditions of backwardness and poverty. In our society, every action, taken by a government, an organization, a company or an individual, has to take into account for globalization. As clearly pointed out by the 2001 Ocse report “The world economy. A millennial perspective”, globalization has brought an improvement of richness, degree of literacy and life expectation all through the World, even if in a defective and unequal way. Developed countries have the responsibility to export the economical and civic development in the most unlucky countries in the World, as well as filling the digital divide and transfer cleaner technologies. Those countries must also fight against internal inequality and digital divide. And the semiconductor and ITC technologies, the most globalized ones by definition, are instrumental in extending the advantages of globalization in the most equal way.

I’ll try to update this blog regularly, also following and “collecting” what the press and other media report on this topic. I hope to engage in a dialog with whomever would like to discuss on one of these topics and share point of views and information.

Until soon!

Angela

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