Group items tagged

For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement

companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or p

urchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator

Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and peace.

Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well.

1925-1926   Introduction of lightweight, air-cooled radial engines The introduction of a new generation of lightweight, air-cooled radial engines revolutionizes aeronautics, making bigger, faster planes possible.

  1917   The Junkers J4, an all-metal airplane, introduced Hugo Junkers, a German professor of mechanics introduces the Junkers J4, an all-metal airplane built largely of a relatively lightweight aluminum alloy called duralumin.

1904   Concept of a fixed "boundary layer" described in paper by Ludwig Prandtl German professor Ludwig Prandtl presents one of the most important papers in the history of aerodynamics, an eight-page document describing the concept of a fixed "boundary layer," the molecular layer of air on the surface of an aircraft wing. Over the next 20 years Prandtl and his graduate students pioneer theoretical aerodynamics.

1933   First modern commercial airliner In February, Boeing introduces the 247, a twin-engine 10-passenger monoplane that is the first modern commercial airliner. With variable-pitch propellers, it has an economical cruising speed and excellent takeoff. Retractable landing gear reduces drag during flight.

935   First practical radar British scientist Sir Robert Watson-Watt patents the first practical radar (for radio detection and ranging) system for meteorological applications. During World War II radar is successfully used in Great Britain to detect incoming aircraft and provide information to intercept bombers.

1937   Jet engines designed Jet engines designed independently by Britain’s Frank Whittle and Germany’s Hans von Ohain make their first test runs. (Seven years earlier, Whittle, a young Royal Air Force officer, filed a patent for a gas turbine engine to power an aircraft, but the Royal Air Ministry was not interested in developing the idea at the time. Meanwhile, German doctoral student Von Ohain was developing his own design.) Two years later, on August 27, the first jet aircraft, the Heinkel HE 178, takes off, powered by von Ohain’s HE S-3 engine.

  1939   First practical singlerotor helicopters Russian emigre Igor Sikorsky develops the VS-300 helicopter for the U.S. Army, one of the first practical singlerotor helicopters.

horrors of the recent World War

s the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbor and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure [of energy]

civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration

instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests.

commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself -- a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man

liverance from our evil

The communists believe they have found  the path to de

Since everyone's needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.

but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property

If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow at there.

We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier

n this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts;

find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois

s Civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man's sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization.

primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct.  To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying this happiness for any length of time were very slender.

Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security.

But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods.

was the preparation of firing and bombing tables for the Army which at that time, of course, included the Army Air Corps.

The analyzer installed at Aberdeen had ten integrating units and provisions for two input and two output tables as well. But, despite its value as an important mechanical aid to computation, it had several severe limitations.

It was, of course, known that the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania had a Bush differential analyzer of somewhat larger capacity than the one installed at Aberdeen. As a matter of fact, the one at the Moore School had fourteen integrating units. Therefore one of the first steps taken was the award to the University of Pennsylvania of a contract by the Ordnance Department for the utilization of this device.

he original agreement between the United States of America and the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, dated June 5, 1943, called for six months of "research and development of an electronic numerical integrator and computer and delivery of a report thereon." This initial contract committed $61,700 in U.S. Army Ordnance funds

The ENIAC was placed in operation at the Moore School, component by component, beginning with the cycling unit and an accumulator in June 1944. This was followed in rapid succession by the initiating unit and function tables in September 1945 and the divider and square-root unit in October 1945. Final assembly took place during the fall of 1945. By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become standard circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and used a modified Eccles-Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-speed storage-and-control device.

The ENIAC was not originally designed as an internally programmed computer. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections. However, means for altering the program and repeating its iterative steps were built into the master programmer

The ENIAC led the computer field during the period 1949 through 1952 when it served as the main computation workhorse for the solution of the scientific problems of the Nation. It surpassed all other existing computers put together whenever it came to problems involving a large number of arithmetic operations. It was the major instrument for the computation of all ballistic tables for the U.S. Army and Air Force.

the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards

Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority.

It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.

This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has

we always tried to design each new protocol to be both useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold.