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By Michele Alperin
One defining characteristic of the 21st century is the speed at which technological advances are making their way into people's daily lives. At the same time, awareness of new technologies has expanded with the huge quantity of information coming in day and night, from the Internet, PDFs, radios, televisions, cell phones, and newspapers.
Three New Jerseyans - an academic, and two businessmen - have a few ideas about what will happen next, based on their own work and its implications. They, along with leaders in other areas of technology, will offer 10 predictions about where technology is going in 2008 on Monday, February 25, at 5:10 p.m. at the Green Trends and Predictions Conference at the Rutgers University EcoComplex in Columbus.
The predictions include:
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Imaging will crank it up a notch. From Shreekanth Mandayam, chair of electrical and computer engineering at Rowan University, who also runs an imaging lab at Rowan: Imaging technology is going to become dramatically cheaper this year and is going to be more ubiquitous and visible for the consumer, the technologist, and the scientist.
"For the consumer, better imaging display technology offers the potential for cheaper HDTVs with more brightness and durability," says Mandayam. To thank for these improvements are advances in digital light processing technology, as well as digital signal and image processing. Mathematics done in real time is offering the best possible display for a viewer, using the least amount of memory at the highest speeds, he explains.
Mandayam also mentions one related product that will not be in the consumer market this year, but is in development - a three-dimensional holographic TV that can be viewed "without wearing those silly glasses."
Developments in imaging technology also mean big changes in how doctors are able to monitor the human body. Although we already have three-dimensional representations of the body's internal structures of the human body, there's more to come. "There will be a dramatic improvement in the functional aspects," explains Mandayam, "how an organ is behaving and what are the biochemical processes and biophysical processes that are going on."
General Electric makes much of this technology, he says, so far mostly for high-end laboratories and research facilities, but Mandayam believes it is ready to move into the physician's office. "This year imaging will become ubiquitous because of a confluence of technology - both hardware and software - algorithms, and marketing," he says. "The ability to get high-tech images and display will become like power in a wall socket - you don't think about; you just expect to have electric power."
We also expect to have Internet access anywhere - and even consider it a right, Mandayam continues. Similarly three-dimensional imaging will soon be so easy and so ubiquitous that we won't give it a second thought, and this will mean changes in many fields.
Beyond the power of imaging technology to help physicians make more informed diagnoses, it is also showing up in virtual reality systems that are far cheaper. Their prices have fallen from several hundred thousand dollars to about ten thousand.
A company called Fakespace Systems manufactures systems that allow a person to be fully immersed in a virtual synthesized reality and navigate inside it. The systems are applicable to any area where scientists need to visualize lots of data, and they are economical enough that they can be used widely. "Any lab can acquire a virtual reality system and can do very powerful scientific visualizations of data," says Mandayam.
In weather forecasting, for example, meteorologists need to visualize large, complex data sets that include temperature, pressure, and velocity and then look for patterns. Another area is protein synthesis, where scientists have to visualize the very long sequences in protein molecules.
E-waste will clean up its act. From Charlie McFadden, vice president of business development at SAMR, Supreme Asset Management and Recovery, which does asset management and recycling, handling e-waste in particular: Public awareness of electronic waste, or e-waste, is growing in corporations and among consumers; they are realizing that if old electronics are not recycled, they will be dumped in landfills or incinerated, and that even when computers are recycled, the information on the hard drives is being cultivated and sold.
E-waste includes computers, laptops, servers, monitors, cell phones, telephones - these days, pretty much anything with a plug. "It is the fastest component of solid waste generated by consumers and businesses," says McFadden. "Most people store e-waste, and when they are ready, they throw it out."
But throwing it out likely means it will either be put in a land dump or incinerated, which are at the bottom of the Environmental Protection Agency's hierarchy for recycling e-waste. The EPA's list begins with reuse of a device, reuse of its components, and recycling its component materials, typically plastic, metal, and glass. It ends with putting electronics in a landfill or, at absolute worst, incinerating them. And of course the last two are the most widely used, says McFadden.
SAMR, based in Lakewood, is trying to reduce dangerous e-waste that enters the environment in these last two cases. Monitors, for example, contain three to five pounds of lead, and if you multiply that by 10,000 old monitors from a large corporation, that can mean a huge amount of hazardous waste. Similarly the circuitry in laptops and computers uses lead solder. When devices like these are incinerated, they end first in the atmosphere and the remainder falling to earth as acid rain. Incineration also uses a lot of energy, as does manufacturing to create new items to replace the incinerated ones.
By promoting the recycling of electronic components, SAMR reduces energy use and, by doing so, is hoping to diminish the greenhouse effect.
Believing that much of the huge volume of e-waste thrown out daily by corporations can be reused, SAMR focuses on recycling older equipment. Often corporations want to keep the same printer, explains McFadden, even though several have broken. SAMR maintains an inventory of different types of electronics that it will swap out to corporations. It will provide working printers in exchange for broken ones and then work with resellers who repair them. SAMR destroys any old data remaining on this equipment.
SAMR may also sell older laptops, computers, and servers to companies with locations overseas where these devices still have value. A reseller who works with Lexmark, for example, came to SAMR because he needed 1,000 phasers for a location in central Europe. Because phasers are so expensive to make, he did not want to pay to have them manufactured in China and Malaysia. McFadden emphasized that there are lots of people who do not need brand-new equipment, for example, startup businesses, and he thinks SAMR can help out. "Think of us as an eBay for old equipment," he says.
McFadden has been in this business for 15 years, working previously for Verizon and MCI. About SAMR he says, "We are growing a great deal because of continued awareness, and corporations that are finding it more advantageous to advertise themselves as green."
Food will get the third degree. From Wai Tak Law, chief executive officer of PortaScience Inc. in Moorestown, a company specializing in simple diagnostic testing at home or in the field: Consumers will demand more food-safety testing, in light of the increased incidence of food poisoning from eating vegetables and fruit, and home health testing will become increasingly popular.
The migration of diagnostic testing from complex laboratory testing in hospitals and laboratories to one-step tests at home is a result of the miniaturization of electronics as well as the ability to control tiny volumes of solution.
The drive behind diagnostics produced by PortaScience is in part the increased pickiness of consumers in the types of food they are buying and the choice of more organic sources. One of its products that was developed for cancer patients also works well testing cow milk for infection, and dairy farmers are using it to minimize the amount of antibiotics they use in feeding cows and treating infections.
Another issue is how to test all the food coming into the United States from south of the border and other areas. "If you test everything in the lab, there is not enough capacity and only a small percentage will be tested," says Law. With simpler diagnostics, we should be able to monitor more of the food coming from outside the United States.
Home health tests are making things a lot easier for patients who otherwise have to show up at a doctor's office on a regular basis. People who are on blood thinners have had to go to the doctor monthly, but now with a home test, they can prick their finger, produce a single drop of blood, and do the test at home. Another test is for cancer patients who can monitor their white blood cell count after chemotherapy. PortaScience is now developing a test that will enable AIDS patients who are HIV positive to monitor their blood counts.
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