El costo del sistema de iluminación con tecnología LED es entre 50 y 80% menos que la iluminación convencional.No necesita electricidad y consume poca energía.

Un grupo de investigación ha desarrollado este sistema que utiliza cables de red en lugar de cables eléctricos. Entonces la conexión transporta no sólo energía lumínica sino datos que pueden servir, por ejemplo, para controlar la temperatura de todo un edificio.

Con este método se mejora el manejo de los sistemas lumínicos y se aprovechan las ventajas de las luces LED, que son más duraderas y eficientes que las tradicionales.

Las encuestas eran anónimas para evitar que los participantes mintieran. Unos 70% reconoció haber copiado una vez por lo menos en su vida en algún examen, y más del 40% lo hacía de manera habitual. Mientras 23% de los que niegan haber copiado declaran que no lo hicieron por miedo a las represalias.Sólo el 11% rechazaba copiar por considerarlo un acto deshonroso.

Aquellos que copiaban habían obtenido puestos de trabajo mejores, tanto por la retribución económica (entre un 20 y un 30% más)como por la responsabilidad del cargo.

El primer lugar valoraron las habilidades necesarias para hacer trampas. La preparación de chuletas requiere una capacidad de síntesis de las materias y tienen que seleccionar los contenidos que consideran más importantes y adivinar las preguntas por las que finalmente el profesor se decantará, mediante el análisis de multitud de factores. Mientras que el resto de estudiantes se limitan a repetir con mayor o menor fidelidad los apuntes.

Many studies recent showed that MBAs cheat more than other graduate students in the U.S. and Canada.

Why does this happen? I believe the biggest issue is the get-it-done, damn-the-torpedoes, succeed-at-all costs mentality that many business students bring to the game. According to my research, the mindset of most MBAs–the bottom line–is to get the highest GPA possible, regardless of the means. After all, the students with the highest GPAs get the best shot at the six-figure jobs in pharmaceuticals, high tech, and, yes, finance.

These are the jobs most MBAs covet. The cheating seems to indicate that MBA students are simply emulating behaviors they think are necessary to succeed in the corporate world. In spite of some recent exceptions, most have been taught about the supremacy of the bottom line in their MBA programs. Hitting that bottom line and personal success seem to go hand in hand for many. They are merely fulfilling expectations.

In one of our studies, we found that, on average, 74% of undergraduate business students admit to relying on the Internet, crib notes, or peeking at their neighbors’ tests in order to gain some advantage over their equally competitive peers. A higher incidence of cheating among business students also seems to be associated with the prevalence of questions that have one “right” answer. It’s much easier to look over your neighbor’s shoulder in search of that “right” answer than to copy a thoughtful, well-argued, nuanced essay.

My studies have led me to believe two things:

1) Today’s generation of business students, if cheating in school is any indicator, find it easier to justify questionable behaviors, suggesting they may be more prone to ethical problems. Many may have a desire to tack to a moral “North Star” ,but they need help doing so.

2) Business schools do have a responsibility to teach ethics. And some schools, such as the Tuck School at Dartmouth, have shown that teaching and reinforcing ethics and honor codes works for many students individually, and for the community in general.

It seems to me that our business schools and their progeny–especially those with an inflated sense of self-worth–appear to lack a sense of disgrace. Bernard Madoff may now be in jail; too many others who have cheated or colluded in unethical behavior are walking away. In Japan, cultural mores embed a sense of shame in cheaters. Will MBAs who rise to the executive ranks, in the absence of such cultural shaming, continue to believe that they can get away with things, and if caught, that they will get off scot-free? As long as society accepts such behavior when it’s associated with strong stock performance, I’m afraid they may.

To using a mobile handset to remotely control some motor vehicle functions is already a reality, and represents a market set to boom in the coming years.

Worldwide shipments of cars equipped with systems capable of  remote control via a cell phone or other device are set to rise to 20.7 million units in 2016, up from 85,000 in 2010. In 2016, more than a quarter of all cars sold worldwide will support some type of remote operation.

Remote car operation features supported by these systems include door locks, lights, air-conditioning and heater control. Electric vehicles will make particular use of the remote operation of heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems to achieve a comfortable temperature in the car while it is still plugged in, which will save the battery for driving.

Big-name cellphone vendors such as HTC, Motorola and Samsung, along with a host of no-brand-name Asian OEMs and ODMs, are determined to exploit Android for consumer gadgets.

Portable Touchscreen
Last year iPhone developed touchscreen with self-serve kiosks and ATMs.The Microsoft also released its Windows 7 operating system.So the touchscreen seems to be even more popular. Now every smart phone maker hoping to one-up the iPhone’s wow factor has put a touchscreen at the top of its must-have list.

Touchscreens let you directly interact with the displayed. Varied touchscreen technologies, from resistive to infrared to capacitive to surface acoustic wave, can detect the location of a finger touch on a screen.

E-book readers
E-book readers gained color touchscreens and longer battery life.

Building smart grids
It will open the door to the broad use of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources while raising energy efficiency.

Plenty of regulatory, business and technical hurdles lie ahead. A hornet’s nest of state and local agencies regulates utilities today. Legislation that would promote use of alternative energy sources and accelerate smart grids has been stymied in Congress.

Spinning MEMS gyros
Three-axis MEMS-based gyroscopes will soon enable a new generation of even smarter smart phones, as well as smarter, more intuitive, more responsive game controllers and remotes. Today MEMS gyroscopes are used to stabilize digital images taken by cameras and high-end cell phones, but starting in 2010 they will be added to GPS navigational devices (for dead reckoning when the signal is lost indoors) and to a new breed of 3D peripherals, such as in-air mice.

The MEMS accelerometers used in such consumer platforms as the iPhone, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii opened a door to user interface enhancements that are now moving to full-fledged gyroscopes. An accelerometer, like the one that switches the iPhone’s display from portrait to landscape mode, depends on your motion working against gravity to establish its orientation. Instead of waiting for user to move, MEMS gyroscopes generate their own, internal motion, invoking the Coriolis effect to track angular momentum. Gyroscopes provide a real-time readout of their orientation—pitch, roll and yaw—which can be used to control the motion of a cursor with pinpoint accuracy, and to recognize human gestures such as pointing, tapping and scrolling.

Pocket picoprojector
The premise is simple. As the name suggests, the technology projects a small screen’s display image onto a larger viewing area, such as a wall. That can turn a smart phone, with its tiny screen, into a platform for comfortably viewing a downloaded movie or an updated PowerPoint presentation. No more lugging your laptop and a full-size projector to business meetings. No more squinting at your hand to watch the latest viral video.

Bringing hospital home
With as much as $2.5 trillion—18 percent of the GDP—spent on health care in the United States alone last year, everyone is looking for ways to lower costs. One promising avenue is to lessen the need for expensive doctor visits and hospital care by enabling home-based health monitoring, especially for chronic conditions and two of their underlying causes: stress and obesity.

Creating bionic human
As many as 2.5 million people today have medical implants, primarily pacemakers and defibrillators. The maturity of the technology and medicine behind these devices has inspired doctors and developers to look beyond the heart to the nervous system and a widening range of conditions that will be addressed by a broad array of future implants.

Nerve or brain stimulators are in the works to handle ailments ranging from Alzheimer’s and epilepsy to addiction, depression, obesity and incontinence. Some implants will deliver drugs to targeted organs, reducing side effects compared with drugs delivered into the stomach or blood stream.

3D in the living room
3D for the home, courtesy of a new-generation Blu-ray players and 3D TV sets, is coming soon to a store near you. Panasonic, Sony and their content-producing partners are hell-bent on providing it. The question is whether you’ll want it.

 The MIT has developed technology that could help fight blindness. It’s aimed at the millions of people impacted by two of the major causes of blindness: age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa.

 The MIT project is one of several that use a physical prosthesis — a chip implanted directly into or onto the eyeball, coupled with a pair of electronic glasses that provide assistance.

 Specs and a Power Pack

 This microchip is attached to a 10-micron thick electrode array that goes through the white of the eye and lies up against the retina from behind, Wyatt told TechNewsWorld. The array is one-seventh the thickness of a human hair.

 The implant consists of a 15-channel stimulator chip, a secondary power and data receiving coil, and discrete power supply components, all encapsulated in polydimethylsiloxane. Polydimethylsiloxane, also known as “PDMS,” is a widely used silicon-based organic polymer. Optically clear, inert, non-toxic and non-inflammable, it is used in contact lenses and medical devices, among other things.

 To work, the chips are assisted by a pair of glasses the patient wears and a device he or she carries in a pocket. A tiny camera is mounted on the hinge of one earpiece of the pair of spectacles. The earpiece will be on the same side as the patient’s affected eye. The spectacles contain the primary data coil.

 Images from the micro-camera are sent through a wire attached to a battery and a signal processor that are in the patient’s pocket. The processor translates the images into electromagnetic signals.

 These signals are sent to the primary data coil in the spectacles, which transmits them wirelessly to a secondary data coil that has been surgically implanted around the patient’s eyeball. The primary data coil also transmits power wirelessly to the secondary coil. The secondary power and data receiving coil consists of four gold wires. Two of the wires handle power and the other two handle data.

 The MIT team has conducted short-term trials on six people, lasting less than a day with the patient lying on a table. It plans to launch longer-term trials soon. “We didn’t want to do any more acute trials because the real question here is how the visual cortex adapts to abnormal data, which is data that’s not coming down the optic nerve,” Wyatt explained.

Entering a physical facility should be just as secure as logging onto a PC.Security professionals often find themselves hard-pressed to secure both physical and logical assets (as well as comply with stringent government mandates). So why are so many organizations behind the curve when it comes to managing physical and logical access?

There are dozens of excuses: “It’s too expensive.” “Securing electronic data is a greater concern.” “We wouldn’t even know where to start.” However, the reality is that a unified approach to physical and logical access actually saves money — not to mention time. While it’s true that cyberattacks are a mounting threat, physical/logical access control loopholes can be Achilles’ heels to sophisticated hackers who know how to exploit them.

High assurance identity credentials allow organizations to manage access to secure areas and systems. Just keep the following five tips in mind to ensure that your organization isn’t falling victim to common access control blunders.

Converge!

Do not treat physical and logical access control separately. Both are about controlling access to a resource — they share the same security goal. Whether that resource is a sensitive room or a sensitive piece of data, access rules will be defined in the same manner. Similarly, the same identity information about the requestor should be required to evaluate access requests.CISOs at many organizations struggle to justify the cost of high assurance identity credentials for use in their IT systems. CSOs have struggled with this same cost vs. benefit problem for high-assurance PACS capabilities, such as biometric readers. 

Today, enterprises creating successful business cases look at physical and logical access as the same problem that can — and should — leverage the same solution. Convergence saves money and improves security, a rarity in this space.  

Guard Physical Assets Closely

Do not allow physical security to lag behind logical security. Criminals attack the weakest link, and at many organizations today, that is likely to be the front door — literally.There have been many cases where data thefts occurred not online, but rather through lax physical security of the servers themselves. Remember Willie Sutton’s famous quote about why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” 

Don’t Stop at Your Front Door

If you have embraced the benefits of identity federation for your Web portal or cloud applications, don’t stop at your front door. Identity Federation is commonly accepted as the most effective way to gain assurance of the identity of persons external to your organization.

In other words, I accept my partner’s own corporate-issued credential for access into my applications. I receive the most up-to-date identity information about my partner, verification of their employment status, and I avoid having to provision and maintain credentials for these external users. The most mature identity federation organizations, though, still issue me a temporary badge when I show up in their building’s lobby, despite being able to accept my own corporate credentials at their Web site.

If you consider that visitors to your offices are there for a business purpose that is related to whom they work for and in what role, then this is critical to verify at the time access is requested. If their employment relationship no longer exists (e.g. they were fired), this would be critical to know before allowing access to the building. However, this vetting is rare, because it’s socially awkward and tedious to do manually. Interoperable credentials and a trust framework that backs them allow any organization to leverage their partners’ credentials for PACS and LACS simultaneously.  

PACS/LACS Convergence = Better Operational Intelligence

PACS/LACS convergence is about more than costs savings or increased assurance of identities; it is about better operational intelligence. 

CISOs and CSOs have not traditionally talked to one another (often the case even when it is the same person in both roles) given the silo-like nature of these areas. What opportunities are missed as a result? If a user logs in from home on their VPN, and the same person has just badged in at the office, isn’t that a problem? Even PACS talking to PACS in the same organization is unusual. What if a user badges into their home office in the morning and the branch office across the country an hour later? Attackers are looking for blind spots, and the “PACS/LACS barrier” represents tempting low-hanging fruit.  

Evaluate Options

Look to your industry or immediate customer base to determine if there are already others that have implemented converged PACS/LACS solutions with external partners in mind.In the United States, the Federal Government’s PIV and PIV-I are the dominant high-assurance credentials intended to be used for both PACS and LACS. Everything from desktop login to email can already take advantage of PIV or PIV-I based credential, but recently PACS vendors have released systems compatible with these credentials as well. Converged PACS/LACS solutions are now mainstream, and will be the focus of most major security conferences in 2010.