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Spiders and Quality

July 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
SANDS OF SAMAR, ISRAEL - JANUARY 12: This rece...

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There are spiders crawling all over the Internet as you read this. While these spiders won’t bite you, they will check out anything you put up sooner or later. These are the kinds of spiders the search engines put out to check out everything. Between links and keywords, they trawl all over the Net in search of anything and everything.

The problem arises when a spider can’t judge anything. Being a simple piece of code, a spider can’t judge what is good quality in a website and what is just a well linked, very keyword filled site with virtual gibberish all over it. For a site to be of high quality, it has to do a whole lot more. One problem with spiders is that unlike human beings, their sense of grammar and what makes a site interesting isn’t developed at all. This is the main problem that may one day be fixed.

For a spider, quality is irrelevant. The spiders just want to find what exists, and they travel along on the webs that connect the different websites together. When these webs connect the sites to one another, they allow the spiders to navigate along them easily. This ease comes about because of the spiders’ programming. These bits of code tend to not understand what they’re looking at, since their entire purpose is to find sites and chronicle them based on the keywords and the links leading that way. The quality of the sites still escapes the spiders’ grasp, though.

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Recording History Before it Occurs

May 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The future has been a mystery for as long as mankind has been able to question it. Psychics and fortunetellers have made money predicting future events for thousands of years. In fact, predicting the future has been a major profession since the earliest humans. Whether you believe that spirits, gods, or some other force can reveal the future or not, you might be interested to know that at least one group is attempting to predict the future with math.

Recorded Future is a Boston area company that attempts to predict the future using patterns, statistics, and probability. Their team is made up of people from various fields, such as Computer Science, Linguistics, Engineering, and Technical Business. Many team members have PhD’s and are recipients of many prestigious awards, such as MIT’s TR100.

Using events that have occured in the past, along with probabilities and calculations, Recorded Future attempts to give an educated guess as to what will occur in the future regarding almost any subject. The theory is that future events are, to large extent, the end effect of past events leading up to them. By observing and evaluating these events, Recorded Future predicts probable future events. And, according to members of Recorded Future, they have a solid record of success.

Recorded Future offers plans for companies for specific information and regular updates, but you can also get general information about topics for free by e-mail. Maybe the future is less of a mystery than it has been built up to be. Now it might even be available to be sent to your e-mail, free of charge!

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Explanation of the Thin Film Sputtering Process

April 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Illustration of particle dynamics in a gas and...

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Many semiconductors, solar panels, and other technological devices make use of thin films, which are integral components of semiconductor design.  Thin films are simply thin layers of a material upon a substrate base, and they are usually created through physical vapor deposition processes such as sputtering.

Most sputtering processes begin in a vacuum chamber inside a sputtering system, a large machine designed to create thin films.  A gas plasma–usually made from argon or another noble gas–is brought into the chamber, then a current source is introduced.  Direct current (DC) and radio frequency (RF) are both sources used in various processes.  These sources create electrons in the chamber, which bombard the atoms of the gas plasma, knocking away the electrons from the outer orbitals of these atoms.  The result is a large amount of positively charged gas cations.

These cations are then directed toward the target material, which will ultimately become the thin film.  Since the molecules are traveling at high speeds, when they contact the target material inside the chamber, they are able to knock away small particles of it, breaking the target into a thin spray.  The particles then travel through the chamber to the substrate, the base which holds the developing thin film, and deposit themselves evenly across its surface.

Thin films created in this manner are used in a wide range of technologies.  Currently, ferromagnetic compounds are being tested as thin films for memory storage in computer systems, while other thin films are being used for medications.

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Stop Using Paper Surveys and Transition to Online Versions

April 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Technology has brought so many improvements to the world at large. Tasks that were once tedious are now completed with a simple click of the mouse. Surveys have most certainly benefited from the modern era, so why are companies still using the paper version? Users have adapted quite nicely to entering their answers and information online. The same should apply to those who are still using analog tools.

There are so many convenient ways to deliver online surveys to users. Use an email list and send out notifications to those who have expressed an interest. Send them the survey directly to their inbox so they can fill it out and return. Or supply a link to a website. Be sure to let the user know that it’s a safe, non-spam and no-spyware link. Maybe use social networking to get the news out to people that there is a survey for anyone to take. Use whatever is at hand to spread as wide of a net to catch as many responses as possible. The more people that fill out the survey translates into more useable data.

The superiority of using the Internet to get respondents cannot be overstated. It is way too easy for someone to forget to mail a paper survey. When it’s online, all the user has to do is hit submit and it’s all finished, eliminating having to wait and wonder if the paperwork is in the mail. The information is presented almost instantaneously, which is a good thing for the entity providing the survey. Information received can be acted upon quickly and efficiently to provide a better experience for the end user.

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Easing into Technology Advances

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Technology has made our lives easier. Things that used to involve telephone calls and actual trips to a location can all be done via the Internet. Looking for a job, promoting your business, looking for investors for a business or obtaining financial aid for schooling—and even the schooling itself–can now be done from your computer. This technology is free and available to everyone with computer access; all it takes is the willingness to learn how to utilize it.

For your education, the Internet has made it easier to attain a distance learning degree by allowing easy access to online colleges, which cost less and are more flexible than a regular college. A student can communicate with their professor and engage in the course learning material from anywhere they normally use their computer. It’s easier than ever to earn a degree online, and the lowered cost is an added benefit of that experience.

For your business, learn how to actively engage your customer base via social media, which can help you retain and attract new customers. The success of Facebook and Twitter alone prove the viability of these as far reaching, attractive marketing successes. It’s never been easier to stay in contact with your businesses’ customer base.

When looking for a job, it is now commonplace for businesses to both send out and receive online notices regarding employment opportunities. It’s no longer unusual for a prospective hire to have made it through the first round of the employment selection process without ever having come face to face with a single company employee. This is a real timesaver for both the hiring managers and prospective hires.

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