The Technology Inventory
Also check out the Telecom Inventory and the Resources Inventory
As science and technology developed, medicine became more reliant upon medications, or pharmaceutical drugs, which can be loosely defined as chemical substances intended for use in the medical diagnosis, cure, treatment, or prevention of disease. Throughout history and in Europe right until the late 18th century, not only animal and plant products were used as medicine, but also human body parts and fluids.
Pharmacology is the branch of medicine and biology with the study of drug action, where a drug can be broadly defined as any man-made natural, or endogenous (within cell) molecule which exerts a biochemical and/or physiological effect on the cell, tissue, organ, or organism; developed from herbalism (“herbal medicine”), the study and use of medicinal properties of plants. Today, many drugs are still derived from plants (atropine, ephedrine, warfarin, aspirin (also known as “Acetylsalicylic acid, a salicylate drug, often used as an analgesic to relieve minor aches and pains, as an antipyretic to reduce fever, and as an anti-inflammatory medication), digoxin, vinca alkaloids, taxol, hyoscine, etc.)
Vaccines were discovered by Edward Jenner, an English physician and scientist from Berkeley, Gloucestershire, who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine; and Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology.
The first antibiotic was arsphenamine/Salvarsan, also known as “compound 606,” is a drug that was introduced at the beginning in the 1910s as the first effective treatment for syphilis, and was also used to treat trypanosomiasis, discovered in 1908 by Paul Ehrlich, a German physician and scientist who worked in the field of hematology, immunology, and chemotherapy, after he observed that bacteria took up toxic dyes that human cells did not. The first major class of antibiotics, a compound or substance that kills or slows the growth of bacteria, was the sulfa drugs (“sulfonamide”), the basis of several groups of drugs, derived by German chemists originally from azo dyes—”azo compounds” are compounds bearing the functional group R-N=N-R’, in which R and R’ can be either aryl or alkyl.
Pharmacology has become increasingly sophisticated; modern biotechnology (“biotech”), generally accepted as the use of living systems and organisms to develop or make useful products, allows drugs targeted towards specific physiological processes to be developed, sometimes designed for compatibility with the body to reduce side-effects; in medicine, a side effect is an effect, whether therapeutic or advertise, that is secondary to the one intended; although the term is predominantly employed to describe adverse effects, it can also apply to beneficial, but intended, consequences of the use of a drug.
Genomics, a discipline in genetics concerned with the study of the genomes of organisms, and knowledge of human genetics, the study of inheritance as it occurs in human beings, is having some influence on medicine. The causative genes, molecular unit of hereditary of a living organism, of most monogenic genetic disorders, illnesses caused by abnormalities in genes or chromosomes, especially a condition that is present from before birth, have now been identified. The development of techniques in molecular biology, the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity, and genetics are influencing medical technology, practice, and decision-making.
Evidence-based medicine (“EBM”), sometimes called evidence-based health care or “EHBC” to broaden its application to allied healthcare professionals, defined as “the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients,” is a contemporary movement to establish the most effective algorithms, which in mathematics and computer science, is a step-by-step procedure for calculations, of practice (ways of doing things). It is through the use of systematic reviews, a literature review focused on a research question that tries to identify, appraise, select and synthesize high quality research evidence relevant to that question, and meta-analysis, which in statistics, refers to methods on contrasting and combining results from different studies, in the hope of identifying patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies.
The movement is facilitated by modern global information science/studies, an interdisciplinary field primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information, which allows as much as the available evidence as possible to be collected and analyzed according to standard protocols that are then disseminated to healthcare providers. The Cochrane Collaboration, an independent nonprofit organization consisting of a group of over 28,000 volunteers in more than 100 countries, leads this movement. A 2001 review of 160 Cochrane systematic reviews revealed that, according to tow readers, 21.3% of the reviews concluded insufficient evidence, 20% concluded evidence of no effect, and 22.5% concluded positive effect.
See: What are computers?
A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed—a “computer program (also “software,” or just a “program”) is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer—to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations. Since a sequence of operations can be readily changed, the computer can solve more than one kind of problem.
Conventionally, a computer consists of at least one processing element and some form of memory, which in computing, refers to the physical devices used to store programs or sequences of instructions) or data (e.g. program state information) on a temporary or permanent basis for use on a computer or other digital electronic device.
The processing element carries out arithmetic and logic operations and a sequencing and control unit that can change the order of operations based on stored information. Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, and the result of operations saved and retrieved.
The first electronic digital (data technology that uses discrete (discontinuous) values) computers were developed between 1940 and 1945 in the United Kingdom and United States. Originally, they were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several modern personal computers (PCs). In this era, mechanical analog computers, a form of computer that uses the continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved, were used for military applications.
Modern computers based on integrated circuits, or “monolithic integrated circuit” (also referred to as “IC,” “chip,” or “microchip”) is an electronic circuit manufactured by lithography, or the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material, are millions to billions of times more capable than the early machines. And also, occupy a fraction of the space.
Simple computers are small enough to fit into: mobile devices (also known as “handheld device,” handheld computer” or simply “handheld”), a small, hand-held computing device, typically having a display screen with touch input and/or a miniature keyboard and weighing less than two pounds (0.91 kg); and mobile computers, human-computer interaction by which a computer is expected to be transported during normal; usage. Both of them can be powered by small batteries, which in electricity, is a device consisting of one or more electrochemical cells that convert stored chemical energy into electrical energy.
Personal computers in their various forms are icons, or the “religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Early christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches, of the Information Age, a period that will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. They are what most people think of as “computers.” However, the embedded computers, or computer systems designed for specific control functions within a larger system, often with real-time computing constraints, found in many devices from: mp3 players (“portable media players (“PMP”), or “digital audio player” (“DAP”), a consumer electronics device that is capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, video, documents, etc. the data is typically stored on a hard drive, microdrive, or flash memory; to fighter aircraft, a military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat against other aircraft, as opposed to bombers and attack aircraft, whose main mission is to attack ground targets; and from toys to industrial robots, defined by ISO, as an “automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes,” are the most numerous.
Intel’s trusted execution technology (TXT) will be protecting users of the newest VMware’s vSphere cloud platform from security threats like BIOS attacks and malware.
“Intel TXT provides hardware enforcement to help overcome some of the most challenging aspects of cloud security,” said Intel cloud infrastructure group general manager Jason Waxman.
TXT is a Xeon server feature that adds a new layer of hardware-based security to cloud platforms. It detects and prevents BIOS attacks and malware from corrupting systems.
TXT-equipped servers running vSphere 5.1 can fulfill compliance requirements more easily, according to Intel. Further improvements can be made by allowing IT departments to swap VMs among “known good” groups of trusted servers, which would expand the “experience” of the swapped VMs by exposing them to different scenarios.
For companies who want to secure their cloud-based infrastructure during automation and improvement, Intel announced that that sample and reference architectures can now be found on the Intel Cloud Builders program.
Security remains a key concern as IT departments transition to a more cloud-dependent model. Intel said that it held a recent survey of IT professionals regarding the issue of cloud platform security, and it reported that 61 percent were indeed concerned.
Despite having one of the most known brands, and one of the largest Internet audiences, Yahoo’s financial problems has continued. The company posted a 4% decrease in their 2nd Quarter financial results from last year, and their stock closed at $15.60 on Tuesday. The lackluster financial results presents a problem to newly appointed CEO, Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive taken in by the company as it returns back to its Silicon Valley roots.
But what are the other challenges that the 37 year old Mayer face as she tries to steer Yahoo away from its financial malaise?
Here are the Top 3 Challenges to the new Yahoo CEO
Tech Inventory recommends
by Gregg Keizer | COMPUTER WORLD
On Monday, Microsoft announced a record low price for the upcoming Windows 8, telling customers that they could upgrade their PCs — even aged machines running Windows XP — for just $39.99 later this year.
Tech Inventory recommends:
By Mary Jo Foley for All About Microsoft via ZDNet
Microsoft has shared with select partners some specifics about what those upgrading to Windows 8 can expect when moving from Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Check out this feature from the Sydney Morning Herald on how the recent unveiling of Microsoft Surface is showing the “Applefication” of Microsoft.
To quote,
“Yes, Microsoft is getting into the iPad space; after sitting on the sidelines for years, it has now started running after the fastest-growing sector of the computing market with its Surface.”
