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By The Numbers |
The mobile teledensity in India has crossed 500 million users mark by end of Dec 2009.
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Exams alert |
Joint Entrance Screening Test (JEST – 2010) for admission to IISc- Bangalore, ARIES- Nainital and IISER- Mohali for Ph.D. programs in Physics and Theoretical Computer Science will be held on 17th January, 2010. |
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Thus Spake |
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. |
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Interesting Facts |
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Hitler was voted Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.
In the movie "The Matrix Reloaded" a 17 minute battle scene cost over $40 million to produce.
The American Automobile association was formed in 1905 for the sole purpose of warning motorists of police speed traps. |
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Did you know |
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The Ice King: In 1833, most of the city's people had never seen the ice. So, when Frederick Tudor's ship arrived in Calcutta harbor with a shipment of ice from the ponds of New England, it caused a great deal of excitement. The ice sold as fast as it could be unloaded from the ship. People thought Tudor was crazy when he first began sending ice to different parts of the world, but he was actually very smart. The first place he sent ice was the West Indies. That was in 1805. The sailors on the ship that carried the ice thought the ice would all melt, fill the ship with water, and sink it. |
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Wireless sensor network |
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A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants. The development of wireless sensor networks was motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance. They are now used in many industrial and civilian application areas, including industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare |
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Smile Please..! |
Discover |
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German scientists dug 50 meters underground and discovered small pieces of copper. After studying these pieces for a long time, Germany announced that the ancient Germans 25,000 years ago had a nation-wide telephone network.
Naturally, the British government was not that easily impressed. They ordered their own scientists to dig even deeper. 100 meters down, they found small pieces of glass, and they soon announced that the ancient Brits 35,000 years ago already had a nation-wide fibre net.
Israeli scientists were outraged. They dug 50, 100 and 200 meters underground, but found absolutely nothing...
They concluded that the ancient Hebrews 55,000 years ago had cellular telephones.
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The Professor Of Economics
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An economics professor at school had a strict policy that the hourly examinations were to be completed at the bell and anyone who kept writing on their exam after the bell would take a zero on the exam.
Well, one guy kept writing on his exam for a while after the bell and then confidently strode up to turn it in. The professor looked at him and said, "Don't bother to hand that paper in... you get a zero for continuing after the bell."
The guy looked at him and said, "Professor, do you know who I am!"
The professor replied, "No, and I don't care if your dad is president of the United States...you get a zero on this exam"
The guy, with a enraged look on his face, shouted, "You mean you have no idea who I am?"
The professor responded, "No, I've no idea who you think you are."
With that, the guy said "Good!" plunged his exam into the middle of the stack of other student's exams, and did a hasty retreat from the examination room!
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From The Editors Desk |
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Heartiest Greetings!
In this issue of Youniverse, we have presented an article on "Wireless Sensor Network" the article provides detail on various aspects of this new frontier in the field of engineering.
Our regular section on "Exam Alerts" informs you of the important dates of the upcoming entrance examinations. The section on "Complex simplicities" provides an introduction to the concepts of Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), Small Computer System Interface SCSI.
More >>
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Complex Simplicities |
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SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model)
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Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is an XML-based framework used to define and access information about learning objects so they can be easily shared among different learning management systems (LMSs). SCORM is a specification of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, which comes out of the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. SCORM was developed in response to a United States Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to promote standardization in e-learning.
ADL created the first version of SCORM, which originally stood for Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model. It was designed to facilitate moving course content and related information (such as student records) from one platform to another, to make course content into modular objects that can be reused in other courses, and to enable any LMS to search others for usable course content.
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SCSI - Small Computer System Interface |
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Small Computer System Interface , or SCSI, is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives. SCSI is an intelligent, peripheral, buffered, peer to peer interface. It hides the complexity of physical format. Every device attaches to the SCSI bus in a similar manner. Up to 8 or 16 devices can be attached to a single bus. There can be any number of hosts and peripheral devices but there should be at least one host. SCSI uses hand shake signals between devices, SCSI-1, SCSI-2 have the option of parity error checking. |
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Interesting Facts |
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Hitler was voted Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938. |
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In the movie "The Matrix Reloaded" a 17 minute battle scene cost over $40 million to produce. |
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The American Automobile association was formed in 1905 for the sole purpose of warning motorists of police speed traps. |
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Buckingham Palace has over six hundred rooms. |
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The only flying saucer launch pad in the world is located in St. Paul, Alberta, Canada. |
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The largest ketchup bottle in the world is a 170 feet tall and is located in Collinsville, Illinois, USA. It was built in 1949 by the W.E. Caldwell Company as a water tower. |
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The Library of Congress, located in Washington D.C., is the largest library in the world. |
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In Japan, the number four is considered to be unlucky because the Japanese word for four sounds very similar to the word death. |
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The titan arum flower is the largest flower in the world and gives off a horrible odor that smells like rotting flesh when it blooms. |
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The Hubble telescope is so powerful that it is like pointing a beam of light at a dime that is two hundred miles away. |
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Did you know |
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The Ice King: In 1833, most of the city's people had never seen the ice. So, when Frederick Tudor's ship arrived in Calcutta harbor with a shipment of ice from the ponds of New England, it caused a great deal of excitement. The ice sold as fast as it could be unloaded from the ship. People thought Tudor was crazy when he first began sending ice to different parts of the world, but he was actually very smart. The first place he sent ice was the West Indies. That was in 1805. The sailors on the ship that carried the ice thought the ice would all melt, fill the ship with water, and sink it. The ice did melt, but the ship did not sink. On the next voyage, Tudor had the ice packed in sawdust as an insulator. This time the ice didn't melt, and a whole new business was started. It was big business; too, because |
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there was no way to make ice in those days, ice-making machines weren't invented until the 1850's. People prized ice because it kept food from spoiling. Without it, they either had to preserve food with salt and spices or eat it right away. Frederic Tudor was known as Boston's "Ice King", and started the Tudor Ice Company. Much money was made selling ice to Europe and East Asia. |
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Long Fingernails: During the late 1800s and even during the early 1900s, it was the custom among the ruling classes and the very wealthy of China for men to allow one fingernail to grow to a length of four or five inches. Because such a fingernail could not possibly remain on the hand of someone who worked with his or her hands, it was a symbol of wealth. Of course, even if its owner didn't dig ditches, such a long fingernail could easily become split or broken. In order to protect it, a thin case, or sheath, was worn over the nail. Because the owners of these nails were rich, the cases were often made of gold. During the same period, long pigtails were important for the wealthy boys of China. |
Some pigtails were so long that they had to be pinned up to an article of clothing to keep them from dragging on the floor.If a young man cut his pigtail without permission, he would be severely punished. |
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American Jeweler Harry Winston: The man who sells more big diamonds than any other dealer in the world is forbidden to have a picture taken of his face. His name is Harry Winston, and because the police and insurance companies are afraid he will be kidnapped or robbed, what he looks like remains a mystery. In a picture, his face is always in shadow so he can't be recognized. Some of the diamonds Harry Winston sells are worth more than $4 million each. |
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Spray Oil: In many parts of the world, man is losing his battle against the desert. Iran is one place where he is winning. Iran's desert is twice the size of the state of Vermont. Parts of it are being sprayed with oil. The oil dries to a gray crust that works like a mulch, protecting the seeds of trees and shrubs buried beneath it. The mulch holds whatever water there is in the ground. It keeps the heat of the sun from killing the young seedlings. As a result of this oil, forests of tamarisk trees now grow where there were only sand dunes a few years before. The trees not only provide much-needed wood but stop the blowing sands that each year turn more land into desert. Guards on motorcycles |
patrol these forests, chasing off goats and sheep. The animals would soon eat all the leaves if left unchecked and the trees would die. This method encourages Perm culture and Desert re-forestation which would support agriculture growth providing food for the local people. |
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Wireless sensor network |
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| Introduction |
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A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants. The development of wireless sensor networks was motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance. They are now used in many industrial and civilian application areas, including industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control. |
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A sensor network normally constitutes a wireless ad-hoc network, meaning that each sensor supports a multi-hop routing algorithm (several nodes may forward data packets to the base station). In computer science and telecommunications, wireless sensor networks are an active research area with numerous workshops and conferences arranged each year.
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| Benefits of wireless |
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Ease of deployment– Without extensive cabling between sensors and data acquisition systems |
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Low costs of deployment– Savings on cabling costs; wireless sensors also possess computation capability |
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Fine grain of monitoring– Ease and low costs |
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Limited power they can harvest or store |
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Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions |
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Ability to cope with node failures |
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Mobility of nodes |
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Dynamic network topology |
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Communication failures |
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Heterogeneity of nodes |
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Large scale of deployment |
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Unattended operation |
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Node capacity is scalable, only limited by bandwidth of gateway node |
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Sensor nodes can be imagined as small computers, extremely basic in terms of their interfaces and their components. They usually consist of a processing unit with limited computational power and limited memory, sensors (including specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually radio transceivers or alternatively optical), and a power source usually in the form of a battery. Other possible inclusions are energy harvesting modules, secondary ASICs, and possibly secondary communication devices (e.g. RS-232 or USB). |
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The base stations are one or more distinguished components of the WSN with much more computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a gateway between sensor nodes and the end user. |
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| Data visualization |
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The data gathered from wireless sensor networks is usually saved in the form of numerical data in a central base station. Additionally, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is specifying standards for interoperability interfaces and metadata encodings that enable real time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs into the Internet, allowing any individual to monitor or control Wireless Sensor Networks through a Web Browser. There are several techniques to retrieve data from the nodes, some of the protocols rely on flooding mechanisms, other map the data to nodes by applying the concept of DHT. |
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| Information Fusion |
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In wireless sensor networks, information fusion, also called data fusion, has been developed for processing sensor data by filtering, aggregating, and making inferences about the gathered data. Information fusion deals with the combination of multiple sources to obtain improved information: cheaper, greater quality or greater relevance. Within the wireless sensor networks domain, simple aggregation techniques such as maximum, minimum, and average, have been developed for reducing the overall data traffic to save energy. |
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| Applications |
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The applications for WSNs are varied, typically involving some kind of monitoring, tracking, or controlling. Specific applications include habitat monitoring, object tracking, nuclear reactor control, fire detection, and traffic monitoring. In a typical application, a WSN is scattered in a region where it is meant to collect data through its sensor nodes. |
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| Monitoring |
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Scientific, ecological applications |
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Non-intrusiveness |
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Real-time, high spatial-temporal resolution |
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Remote, hard-to-access areas |
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| Surveillance and tracking |
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Reconnaissance |
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Perimeter control |
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Agriculture |
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Manufacturing/industrial processes |
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Security Requirements in the Networks |
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Wireless Sensor Networks, actuators, embedded processing and wireless become ubiquitous, we need ways to network, organize, query, and program them. Ensuring security and privacy is one of the highest priorities for sensor network system. Whether they are designed for commercial applications such as vehicle to vehicle safety related communication or for military battlefield monitoring applications, one must authenticate the source of data to prevent the malicious injection of duplicate data. |
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SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) |
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Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is an XML-based framework used to define and access information about learning objects so they can be easily shared among different learning management systems (LMSs). SCORM is a specification of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, which comes out of the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. SCORM was developed in response to a United States Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to promote standardization in e-learning.
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ADL created the first version of SCORM, which originally stood for Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model. It was designed to facilitate moving course content and related information (such as student records) from one platform to another, to make course content into modular objects that can be reused in other courses, and to enable any LMS to search others for usable course content.
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SCORM 2004 introduces a complex idea called sequencing, which is a set of rules that specifies the order in which a learner may experience content objects. In simple terms, they constrain a learner to a fixed set of paths through the training material, permit the learner to "bookmark" their progress when taking breaks, and assure the acceptability of test scores achieved by the learner. |
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SCSI - Small Computer System Interface |
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Small Computer System Interface, or SCSI, is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives. SCSI is an intelligent, peripheral, buffered, peer to peer interface. It hides the complexity of physical format. Every device attaches to the SCSI bus in a similar manner. Up to 8 or 16 devices can be attached to a single bus. There can be any number of hosts and peripheral devices but there should be at least one host. SCSI uses hand shake signals between devices, SCSI-1, SCSI-2 have the option of parity error checking. |
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SCSI is popular on high-performance workstations and servers. RAIDs on servers almost always use SCSI hard disks, though a number of manufacturers offer SATA-based RAID systems as a cheaper option. Desktop computers and notebooks more typically use the ATA / IDE or the newer SATA interfaces for hard disks, and USB, eSATA, and FireWire connections for external devices. |
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From The Editors Desk |
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| Kayalvizhi M.S |
| Email - kayal@mindlogicx.com |
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| Heartiest Greetings! |
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In this issue of Youniverse, we have presented an article on "Wireless Sensor Network" the article provides detail on various aspects of this new frontier in the field of engineering.
Our regular section on "Exam Alerts" informs you of the important dates of the upcoming entrance examinations. The section on "Complex simplicities" provides an introduction to the concepts of Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), Small Computer System Interface SCSI.
We hope you would find the information presented in this issue of Youniverse interesting and useful. |
We welcome your thought, views, comments & suggestions to share information as knowledge. |
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| Editor |
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Feedback |
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Please provide us with your feedback on how you feel about the Youniverse newsletter.You can also send us your queries on the VEDAS services. |
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