FUTURE EDUCATION

The Future

"The pace of change is mandating that we produce a faster, smarter, better grade of human being. Current systems are preventing that from happening. Future education system will be unleashed with the advent of a standardized rapid courseware-builder and a single point global distribution system." Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, February 2007.
The Change Is Coming

Thomas Frey, founder of the DaVinci Institute, has a vision. He sees a radical shift beginning in the world of education within two years--which would be 2009. While many are debating vouchers, No Child Left Behind, teacher shortages, grading systems, teacher certification, parental involvement, truancy and dropouts, Frey is thinking out of the box..."Star Trek type" out of the box. Frey believes that in two years private funding will cause disruptive education systems to emerge. And, in 5 years, there will be dramatic changes...dramatic.
Courseware-Builder

This is a $100 word that can be confusing. What is it? Frey believes that technology will drive the future and that items like iTunes and Amazon will determine the vehicle for education. Courseware-Builder will be the software that makes education possible on any conceivable topic. Frey believes that many companies will compete for the market but that one will come out the winner. Then, the consumer will select an education that suits personal needs.
Blast From The Past

Mathematics is a critical component in a successful society. Greek civilization was famous for math--Archimedes, Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus, Posidonius and Ptolemy all furthered math concepts. When the Romans became the dominant force on earth, they did not focus on mathematics. The Romans had the Roman numerals system which made little sense. It prevented the Romans from furthering the mathematics that the Greeks built. Unfortunately, the Romans were not aware that their "system" was holding back progress.
Fast Forward To Today

Frey points out systems that we have today that prevent our society from achieving great things. Like the Romans, we have systems today that are holding us back

Read more at Suite101: The Future of Education: What Will Education Look Like in 2 or 5 or 10 years? http://educationalissues.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_future_of_education#ixzz0nozUn8oh

New Technology 2010

Western Digital is back with a brand new hard drive known as the WD VelociRaptor, where it will be available in 450GB and 600GB capacities. These are the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA family of hard drives, where it was specially designed to cater fro blade servers, high-performance PCs, Mac computers, professional workstations, in addition to 1U and 2U rack servers – basically any situation that calls for a balance of high performance and capacity. It also holds the distinction of being the only 10,000 RPM SATA hard drive on the market, and has been a firm favorite in the past amongst enthusiast and enterprise groups. Nice to know this latest iteration of the VelociRaptor brand now features double the capacity and up to 15% performance increase.

The WD VelociRaptor hard drive comes with enterprise-class mechanics that provide round the clock durability under high-performance demands, where up to 600GB of data can be crammed into a 2.5″ enterprise form factor. Apart from that, you can pick up the WD VelociRaptor drive in the IcePack enclosure, which is essentially a 3.5″ mounting frame that comes complete with a built-in heat sink. This factory customization will be able to fit the drive into a standard 3.5″ system bay while keeping it extra cool even when it is installed in a high-performance desktop chassis and 3.5″ hard drive form factor enterprise chassis.

Among the features that are found on the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include :-

* Killer speed – SATA 6 Gb/s interface and 32 MB cache enhance the next generation 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor making it up to 15% faster than the award-winning previous generation.
* Monstrous capacity – WD VelociRaptor SATA drives are available in capacities up to 600 GB, double the capacity of the previous generation.
* Rock-solid reliability – Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. With 1.4 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high capacity SATA drive.
* Ultra-cool operation – Consumes no more power than the previous generation WD VelociRaptor while offering double the capacity and higher performance.
* IcePack mounting frame – The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor is enclosed in a backplane-ready 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed in high-performance desktop chassis.
* Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) – Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.
* NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
* Environmentally conscious – In addition to being ROHS compliant, this generation of WD VelociRaptor is also a halogen-free design.

Nanotechnology Computer

Next generation nanotechnology computer memory made of graphene
(Nanowerk Spotlight) Carbon comes in many different forms, from the graphite found in pencils to the world's most expensive diamonds. In 1980, we knew of only three basic forms of carbon, namely diamond, graphite, and amorphous carbon. Then, fullerenes and carbon nanotubes were discovered and more recently there has been a lot of buzz about graphene. Discovered only in 2004, graphene is a flat one-atom thick sheet of carbon. Existing forms of carbon basically consist of sheets of graphene, either bonded on top of each other to form a solid material like graphite, rolled up into carbon nanotubes (think of a single-walled carbon nanotube as a graphene cylinder), or folded into soccer ball shaped fullerenes.
Experiments with graphene have revealed some fascinating phenomena that excite nanotechnology researchers who are working towards molecular electronics. It was found that graphene remains capable of conducting electricity even at the limit of nominally zero carrier concentration because the electrons don't seem to slow down or localize. This has to do with the fact that the electrons moving around carbon atoms interact with the periodic potential of graphene’s honeycomb lattice, which gives rise to new quasi particles that have lost their mass, or 'rest mass' (so-called massless Dirac fermions). This means that graphene never stops conducting.
Taking advantage of the conducting properties of graphene, James M. Tour at Rice University and his team have described how graphene memory could potentially be used as a new type of memory that could significantly exceed the performance of current state-of-the-art flash memory technology.
"What distinguishes graphene from other next-generation memories, in particular phase-change materials, is its vastly higher on/off power ratio – the amount of current a circuit holds when it's on, as opposed to off," Tour explains to Nanowerk. "While the on/off ratios of phase-change materials are generally in the 10-100 region, with graphene it can be as high as a whopping million-to-one or even more – we have seen as high as 10 million-to-one."
The transistors currently used in computer chips have on/off ratios of 10,000 - 100,000, but they are three-terminal devices (in a three terminal device the electric current or voltage between two of the terminals is controlled by applying an electric current or voltage to the third terminal). Two-terminal memories based for instance on nanowires or carbon nanotubes are actively researched for future computer applications. Their structure makes three-dimensional memory practical as the materials can be stacked, multiplying a chip’s capacity with every layer. The main challenges so far have been a requirement for large-scale fabrication and reliable and large on/off ratios.
The recent research results coming out of Tour's lab show the possibility of building next-generation memory devices with vast amounts of memory using nanocables with a silicon dioxide core and a shell of stacked sheets of graphene (the team experimented with three different nanocable configurations: two layer graphite/silicon dioxide and three-layer graphite/silicon dioxide/silicon and graphite/silicon dioxide/ silicon carbide). Tour points out that graphene memory would increase the amount of storage in a two-dimensional array by a factor of five, as individual graphitic thin film sheets could be made as thin as 5-10 nanometers, compared to the 45-nanometer circuitry in today's flash memory chips.
Tour, together with postdoctoral researchers Yubao Li and Alexander Sinitskii, describes a solid-state device that takes advantage of the conducting properties of graphene in the November 16, 2008 online edition of Nature Materials ("Electronic two-terminal bistable graphitic memories").
SEM image of a G–SiO2 nanocable two-terminal device
SEM image of a G–SiO2 nanocable two-terminal device. Scale bar = 250 nm (Reprinted with permission from Nature Publishing Group)
When the scientists tested their nanocable devices in the lab, they observed not only excellent endurance – the nanocables showed no degradation after more than 1,000 write–read–erase–read cycles – but also no discernable data loss even after weeks of testing, sometimes under harsh temperature conditions that ranged from minus 70°C to plus 200°C.
"Interestingly, the devices were also stable to ionizing radiation," says Tour. "In our experiments, we irradiated the unbiased devices with a high dose (>20 Mrad) of 8 keV X-rays, which was significantly higher than the typical failure level for memory devices relying on charge storage, such as flash memories. Thus, nanocable memories demonstrate exceptional stability and are promising for radiation-stable electronics."
The Rice team claims that the new switches are faster than their lab's current testing systems can measure (1 microsecond), although they observed that the write/erase time affected the on/off ratio: "The longer the time, the higher the on/off ratio" says Tour. "When decreasing the pulse time from 100 microseconds to 1 microsecond, the on/off ratio in graphite/silicon dioxide nanocable devices decreases to about 100."
Tour's lab is already working on developing scalable manufacturing techniques for their nanocable device. According to Tour, it is possible to deposit a layer of graphene on silicon or another substrate by chemical vapor deposition. "This means that currently used industrial device fabrication processes could be used to grow this type of graphitic thin film in place."
An important aspect that Tour describes in his paper is the fabrication atop a silicon wafer in a manufacturable-looking structure. This is essential because nanowires are hard to scale into manufacturable structures since they are tough to place where you want them. Tour's technique shows a way of how to build these future device structures.

by : http://www.nanowerk.com

SIX THINKING HAT BY EDWARD DE BONO

Six Thinking Hats® is a simple, effective parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. And once learned, the tools can be applied immediately!
You and your team members can learn how to separate thinking into six clear functions and roles. Each thinking role is identified with a colored symbolic "thinking hat." By mentally wearing and switching "hats," you can easily focus or redirect thoughts, the conversation, or the meeting.


The White Hat calls for information known or needed. "The facts, just the facts."

The Yellow Hat symbolizes brightness and optimism. Under this hat you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit.

The Black Hat is judgment - the devil's advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; where things might go wrong. Probably the most powerful and useful of the Hats but a problem if overused.

The Red Hat signifies feelings, hunches and intuition. When using this hat you can express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves, and hates.

The Green Hat focuses on creativity; the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It's an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.

The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking process. It's the control mechanism that ensures the Six Thinking Hats® guidelines are observed.

GURU INOVATIF

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GURU INOVATIF

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are a great way to enable teamwork in situations where people are not sitting in the same physical office at the same time.

Such teams are used more and more by companies and other organizations to cut travel, relocation, real estate, and other business costs. This is particularly so for businesses that use virtual organizations to build global presence, outsource their operations, or need less common expertise or skills from people who are reluctant to travel or relocate from their home locations.

Virtual teams are governed essentially the by same fundamental principles as traditional teams. Yet, there is one critical difference. This difference is the way the team members communicate. Instead of using the full spectrum and dynamics of in-office face-to-face exchange, they now rely on special communication channels enabled by modern technologies, such as e-mails, faxes, phone calls and teleconferences, virtual meetings, and alike.

Due to more limited communication channels, the success and effectiveness of virtual teams is much more sensitive to the type of project the group works on, what people are selected, and how the team is managed.

Not every type of project is suitable for a virtual organization. One challenging case is projects that rely heavily on sequential or integrated work, as often the case in manufacturing. In particular, when each person’s work depends much on what someone else is doing at the same moment (like in a sports team), there is an ongoing heavy exchange of information in real time, and/or the tasks has to go through a strict sequence of workers within a short time.

Not everyone can perform well in a virtual team environment. The members should be self motivated and able to work independently. They need to be able to keep working effectively without much of external control or structure. The next important quality is strong result-orientation. Unless the person shows clear results, there is nobody around to see how intense his or her work activities are. Another critical factor is communication skills. The team member should be able to communicate clearly, constructively, and positively even through the more limited channels of technology, in spite of the loss of many nonverbal cues of face-to-face communications.

Managers of virtual teams also need to pay much more attentions to maintaining clear goals, performance standards, and communication rules. People have varying assumptions on what to expect from each other. To avoid build-ups of misunderstandings, in a virtual organization it is critical to replace those implicit assumptions with clear rules and protocols that everyone understands and agrees upon, especially for communication.

One of the biggest challenges of virtual teams is building and maintaining trust between the team members. Trust is critical for unblocking communication between members and sustaining motivation of each person involved. The issue of trust needs special attention at any stage of team existence.

By : time-management-guide.com/virtual-team

VIRTUAL TEAM

I’m now intresting in VIRTUAL TEAM.

Benefits and Challenges ?

Can we share your knowledge about VIRTUAL TEAM !

2010

May the coming new year be filed with thriling JOY OF LIFE, LOVE, FUN, HAPPINES, SUCCESS AND BEAUTIFUL DELIGHTS to tresure for a lifetime.