Daily Archives: March 4, 2015

Here is a fun plotting game (suggested by my colleague David Norwood).

We all know that in the past there were not as many humans on Earth as there are now. Right now we are around 7 billion humans on this planet but just 200 years ago the population was around 1 billion (or less). So, the further back in time you go the fewer humans are on Earth.

Ok, now what about your ancestors? Personally, I have two parents. Both of my parents had parents so that I had 4 grandparents. My grandparents had parents which gives me 8 great-grandparents and so on. The further back in time I go, the more ancestors I have.

Now lets merge these two sets of data. How far back in time do I have to go such that the number of my ancestors is the same as the human population? To answer this, I need two things. First, I need a plot of the Earths population. This isnt too difficult. Just check out this page on Wikipedia regarding World Population. There are plenty of graphs from which you can get population data. I used one of those along with plotlys web digitizer to get the data.

What about a plot of the number of ancestors? If I call myself the zeroth generation and my parents the 1st generation, then I can write the number of humans in a generation as:

Where Ng is the number of humans (just in that generation) and n is the generation number. But what is the time frame for a generation? If my ancestors have children at the age of 20 instead of 30, there will be a different number of ancestors 300 years from now. Of course the actual time between generations varies. For this calculation I will use 25 years for all generations.

Now for the plot.

According to this estimation, in the year 1280 I had 351 million ancestors and there were 351 million humans on Earth. But what does this really mean? Nothing.

When life gives you meaningless problems, make homework. I think that is an old saying. Well, here is some homework.

See original here:
Human Population and My Ancestors

Tourists need to be aware that they are visiting a post-conflict country with a 26-year history of civil war, crimes that remain unaccounted for, and an alarming human rights record," Angela Mattli, from the society, told Telegraph Travel. "They should also be aware of the fact that the military plays a significant role in the tourism sector as well.

Tour operators should not offer hotels or tourist attractions run by the armed forces if it cannot be proven that their ownership is not based on land grabbing or other human rights abuses, the report also suggested.

Passikudah

While recognising that some operators make the effort to improve their compliance with human rights provisions, STP said its report showed that these efforts are not enough to make up for the lack of consultation procedures, for land expropriation, forced resettlement and restricted access to the sea in Sri Lanka.

Tourism Concern, another ethical travel campaign group, said it too investigated tourism development in post-war Sri Lanka in 2011. It now backs the recommendations STP has made for tour operators to exercise due diligence regarding human rights in the country.

Abta, the Association of British Travel Agents, welcomed the report for highlighting what it said were important issues. It described Sri Lanka as a fast growing destination with lots to offer tourists but said that, as with all destinations, it is vital tourism develops in a way that protects environments, promotes long term economic benefit and respects human rights.

We will continue to work with our members to review issues and raise any matters with the Sri Lankan authorities, a spokesman added.

Kuoni, an operator with tours running in Sri Lanka, told Telegraph Travel it is committed to human rights due diligence. We will continue to engage with partners in Sri Lanka to discuss issues and solutions, its spokesman said.

Read the original here:
Sri Lankan tourist development 'the result of human rights abuse'

London, UK (PRWEB) March 03, 2015

The human augmentation market is mainly driven by the considerable growth of the augmentation market. The wearable augmentation sector is predicted to outpace the in-built augmentation sector in terms of size in the upcoming years.

The eye-wear sector dominates the North American human augmentation market owing to a big number of new products launches in the region. Furthermore, strong economy of the North American region, high technological advancements as well as the rising demand for advantageous products in the medical application segment are amid the main factors giving impetus to the growth of the human augmentation market in North America. This regional market is anticipated to post the highest CAGR during 2015-2020.

As for the global human augmentation market, it is projected to reach USD 1135 million in 2020, showing a 43.5% CAGR during 2015-2020.

New market research report Human Augmentation Market by Product (In-Built Augmentation and Wearable Augmentation), Application (Medical, Defense, Industrial), & Geography - Global Forecast to 2020 worked out by MarketsandMarkets has been recently published at MarketPublishers.com.

Report Details:

Title: Human Augmentation Market by Product (In-Built Augmentation and Wearable Augmentation), Application (Medical, Defense, Industrial), & Geography - Global Forecast to 2020 Date: February 16, 2015 Pages: 159 Price: US$ 4,650.00 http://marketpublishers.com/report/life_sciences/healthcare/human-augmentation-market-by-product-application-geography.html

This cutting-edge report provides a granular analysis of the global human augmentation market on the basis of products, applications, and geography. It gives a clear picture of the current market scenario as well as offers insights into the historical development of the market. The research report delves deep into the market trends, scrutinizes the competitive landscape of the market and also uncovers important information on the performance of the major market participants. The research study contains a whole set of important statistical data on the production, consumption and foreign trade; investigates the main market growth restraints, drivers, challenges and opportunities. Additionally, the new report offers an extensive future outlook for the worldwide human augmentation market till 2020.

More new market research publications by the publisher can be found at MarketsandMarkets page.

Read more:
Human Augmentation Market to Pose 43.5% CAGR Through 2020, States MarketsandMarkets in its New Research Study Now ...

Editors note: this post originally appeared on the authors blog, Solve for Interesting. This lightly edited version is reprinted here with permission.

In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything weve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And well look back at the time before our feed started before Year Zero as a huge, unknowable black hole.

This timeline beginning for newborns at Year Zero will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers now, every interaction has a history.

This isnt just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isnt about financial data, like Mint. It isnt just your social graph or photo feed. It isnt about commuting data like Waze or Maps. Its about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it.

Every decade or so, something from military or enterprise technology finds its way, bent and twisted, into the mass market. The client-server computer gave us the PC; wide-area networks gave us the consumer web; pagers and cell phones gave us mobile devices. In the next decade, Year Zero will be how big data reaches everyone.

The battle for our digital lifelog is already well underway. You probably buy into Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or a handful of others for your calendar, your email, and your media. Media was a gateway drug to a walled garden: your content is locked in, and the barriers to entry are simply too huge to leave.

The reality is that once inside the walled gardens of GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon], consumers will see the walls begin to rise. My music is in the cloud, but soon enough, courtesy of the gateway drug of the quantified self movement, my medical records will be in the cloud, my home security will be managed from the cloud, my banking and my energy needs too.

If a consumer subscribes to one cloud service, then they are very likely to continue with all the extensions of that cloud service platform rather than mix and match. It becomes increasingly inconvenient to remain service agnostic. The dominant players nurture their walled-gardens of creative content and other services tethered to their digital formats and devices. Jeremy Silver, Digital Medieval.

Alistair Crolls Strata + Hadoop World keynote on Year Zero.

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Year Zero: Our life timelines begin