Adventure Ausrama Blog

Have you ever seen a nurse cussing because she cannot find a suitable vein to insert a drip in the arm of a patient? These are daily problems that the medical fraternity must face. However, technology has come to the fore. There is a new scanner that pinpoints veins that are large enough to insert a cannula. The new device beams light just out of the infrared light range into the arm. It is absorbed by  deoxygenated haemoglobin in the veins. Thus, the veins light up and show the way. It makes life much easier for medical staff and is quicker. There are a lot of things just waiting to be applied to human activity. Technology is already available and it is a case of thinking of new procedures and making them real. Get a move on developers. The public is waiting! ✴ Technology by Ty Buchanan ✴ http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://adventure--australia.blogspot.com/atom.xml . . . . . . . . . . . .

Culture changes steadily with technological development. Some values have their own inertia which means that they stay around for much longer. Legal adaptation to a new environment is very slow. We are living with laws suited to a pre-internet era. The Uber app took the world by storm. It spread through many countries and clashed with legal restrictions which were made for the benefit of taxi drivers and the public. Unfortunately, people do not like rapid change to the legal system. It upsets the way they live. Like the Chinese, Australians embrace new technology, much to the frustration of government. Whether it is legal or not we adopt new things. They "get in" because their is some legal framework that benefits some participants in the market place. New systems get under the barrier, so to speak. Australians seems to lead the world on illegal movie downloads. This is because the market is distorted. We pay over the odds for the latest films due to overpricing

Much has been said about the adoption of biomass technology to replace wind and solar energy production. Biomass involves the burning of sugars, starches and oils from crops to make biodiesel and ethanol. The cost of gathering this waste has not been factored in. Wind and solar need maintenance but for the most part they just sit there and do their job. Farmers have simply left waste in the fields - ultimately burning or plowing them in. They do not see money in gathering up the left overs from crops. Environmentally, biomass looks good. However, financially they are a no-go. Who will pay a higher price for electricity? Charges are already extremely high using coal which is just dug from the ground. The biggest problem is that biomass involves burning while wind and solar do not. Just substituting biomass for widely available conventional fossil fuels is not a an ideal move forward. This is like electric cars which are only substitutes for petrol motor vehicles - a poor and

IBM is leaving the hardware computer market. Maturity in the market has meant demand for PCs has levelled off. Businesses still need them, but the ordinary consumer already has an old version gathering dust. When a person needs to search the Internet he/she uses his, now large, mobile phone or tablet. It should be noted that the tablet market has tapered off as well. Just about anyone who wants one already has it. Cheap clones on sale in supermarkets has reduced profit margins significantly. Even the giant mobile phone maker Samsung has announced that it has had a bad year. Apple is losing out to Android and its days of premium pricing are coming to an end. Unless it comes out with useful new ideas its sales will fall. It definitely needs to look into the crystal ball. Unfortunately, a crystal ball cannot be found. Giants of recent decades have been bought out by rivals and shut down. Making what was in demand in the past is a losers game. Let's face it -

Toll roads just do not pay. At least in Australia they don't. Councils and states have praised projects before they begin construction, boasting of the benefits of new toll roads. At best such schemes can only expect to break even. Drivers use it for a while with low introductory tolls. When the tolls are raised people change back to the old route. A toll is a dinner for a truck driver. Ordinary people just do not calculate the extra cost of petrol to avoid a toll road. AECOM Technology did a feasibility study for a toll road. It grossly overestimated traffic flow. In short, it knew the numbers were inflated and knew the report was full of lies.  The company said if the court challenge to them is upheld it will bankrupt the business. The claimants are seeking three times the whole yearly earnings of the company which is based in the U.S. This is gross earnings, before depreciation, tax and amortization. This amount is based on the bankruptcy of the RiverCi

Was the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) set up to improve business or just be a nuisance to operations. Its job should be to police the industry and make things run smoothly. However, putting one's nose in when it is not needed is not the best thing to do. The mining boom is coming to an end as the Chinese economy pulls back from high growth due to wages rising thus demand falling. Companies are looking to move to other Asian countries where labor is cheaper. Australian mining companies are looking to become producers of other things such as technology. With this move comes threats from ASIC for the miners to keep their noses clean. Apparently they must inform shareholders before they buy tech companies. We have not reached a point yet where shareholders manage companies. Surely, it is up to the CEO and the board to set future company developments and intentions. ASIC is making accusations that mining companies are "cooking the book

Will people buy wearable technology? Looking back on computers, purchases were out of curiosity and it eventually became a "must have" when games began to be cracked. Some even enjoyed the long tedious entering of code to produce a "useful" program that was painfully slow when you ran it. It took three whole days to do a spell check on a five page paper. Then there was the verbal war everywhere with the majority advising to buy a Mac when universities only used Microsoft PCs. If you wanted to further your education a Mac was useless. I believe this state of affairs is split now but most colleges still favor Microsoft. The iPad is still not a device one uses to improve knowledge, though some still soldier on in the fruity Apple world. There isn't much doubt that an Apple product is a prestige item. All Apple devices are grossly overpriced and owners know the ordinary Joe will never afford one. In regard to wearables they are just curiosities

There isn't much doubt that all future purchasing and banking will done with a smart phone. New tech being tested like no pin number or signature payments are just "fill ins" until the final technology is perfected An old idea that has fallen by the wayside is having a picture of a card holder on the card itself. Just why this concept was dropped is unknown. The only card now with your photo is your driving licence. Paying with a finger print is also something thought about, tested but never marketed. Retail at the moment is a mishmash of different methods of payment including the old fashioned cash payment. Older people still like to draw cash from an ATM. They like the idea of having cash on them so they can pay immediately. Immediacy will be even quicker using a smart phone. Bendigo Bank has developed a system where a phone app generates a random code to finalize a transaction. They have been using such a system in the UK for many years now.

Apparently the U.S. National Security Agency is not listening in to people in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Seeing that these countries are America's closest allies this seems rational. However, terrorists are quietly leaving the shores of these countries and fighting for Islam of one color or another. It seems to me that the United States would be involved with local authorities in these English speaking nations to keep an eye on what suspected terrorists are doing, probably at the request of these governments. Note, that the United States had secret agreements with Russia that the UK found out about during WWII. Churchill was totally in the dark about them for quite some time. He too had secret talks with Stalin. If the NSA is watching the IMF, World Bank, the Atomic Energy Agency and European countries why not "nose in" on what people in allied countries are doing? Germany is supposed to be an ally and snooping on Chancellor Merkel did