IT Globalization

IT has improved health care through the prevention of infectious diseases, patient to healthcare interaction, rapid dissemination of information, and improved responses of outbreaks. Health officials use technology to study the impact of health interventions and disease prevention programs through mobile technology to seek treatment that is unattainable due to many lack of resources. This is to provide care to people who are not located near hospitals. Countries that have small communities in very remote areas are able to benefit from distance learning the most because they do not have education provided to them in those small countries, and it is most likely that many of the children in those countries cannot attend school due to other responsibilities of their families.

In Thailand, IT is being used in the fields of medicine and education through the use of skype in education systems and awareness to others to increase the education of their schools. They use IT in medicine by reaching out to other countries, and having them provide resources that they are not able to get themselves. 

Technology helps!

One app that Google has developed to help visually-impaired users use smartphones is the Simpleye app that allows tapping gestures to be transferred into text. When the user touches the screen using tapping or swiping gestures, it is also imitated as Braille. The app gives audio feedback, and reads our words that are created through the gestures. Currently, the app is only available in the English setting, but the creator is working on making it multilingual for other non-English speakers. This app controls all uses such as calling, text messaging, calculations, and settings. Still being designed are the applications in the phone such as navigation and music use.

Products that are reducing the digital divide is a product that develops free software to enable people to use it like social media. This product is called Ushahidi. It empowers people to make a serious impact with open source technologies.One "green" initiative that promotes sustainability and reduce the amount of e-waste is the recycling of old laptops and even ink cartridges.

The 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show

The 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show featured more than 3,200 exhibitors touting the latest technological creations. Of those technological creations, the three that I found most interesting were LaserDisc's, Ultrabook's, and MiniDisc's. LaserDiscs are a video format formed in the 1970s, by Philips.  The surface of the disc contains one long spiral track of data. Along the track, there are flat reflective areas and non-reflective areas. A reflective area represents a binary 1, while a non-reflective area represents a binary 0. The drive shines a laser at the surface and can detect the reflective areas by the amount of laser light they reflect back. When you record the writing laser changes its transparency and the reflectivity of the disc. When this information is mirrored back it is 1's and zero’s are decoded back into the original data, processed and sent out.  Laserdiscs were huge because they are based on CD technology and data density, so it had to be huge and two sided to hold all the video and audio data. They were originally the first discs that played movies before DVDs and VHS tapes came out. An Ultrabook is a laptop that meets Ultra requirements. It's ultra-thin, ultra-light, and ultra-powerful. Due to the limited size and space that they have available, they typically do not have the common laptop features such as disc drives and ports. Students, due to the convenience of weight and space use many Ultrabooks. Minidiscs were used as data storage devices of audio or select data. A minidisc has the shape of a cd but smaller, and is used to record sound or data as well as play that data back. Many of these inventions are very interesting to me because I am very inspired by the way, they started out, and made better throughout the years.