Category: New Technology Papers

Paper: Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EV) were actually conceived in 19th century, before the invention of the combustion engine. However, with limited battery technology electricity did not become the means to power cars. Today we are seeing more and more EVs on the roads. Battery technologies are fast improving and becoming more practical as with the rise of oil prices.

New technology student Þuríður Björg Guðnadóttir wrote a paper titled Electric Vehicles where she looks at EVs from the early beginnings to the current status. In particular the paper examines why the EV did not take off until recently.

An interesting part of the paper is a survey on people’s views on EV. It turns out that 61% have considered buying an EV and 73% would pay more for EV than regular car.

Paper:  Electric Vehicles

 

Article: Social Networks: Survival of the fittest

My New Technology course versions 2011 finished in beginning April. Students turned in some 70 papers so I spent much of April reading about technology. As usual, I will publish some of the more interesting ones here on my site.

First one is a really interesting research done by Brynjar Örn Jensson. He did research in to how people use social networks. Some interesting findings are that most most people abandoned MySpace when they open a Facebook account. It seems that Facebook killed MySpace. Another interesting result is that over 70% of the participants use Facebook for communication with family and friends, while some 10% use the site to kill time.

Most people, almost 60% spend less than 3 hours a day on social networking while some 10% are online all day.

The abstract:

This paper covers the largest social networking sites available today. Facebook is currently the largest site. Twitter is growing fast and these two sites are the options that people choose when it comes to communicating and socialising online. MySpace is a social network that has completely crashed in popularity and has lost all of its former characteristics due to the downfall in their user base. They have decided to concentrate on promoting unknown music talents.

The survey that was carried out underlines Facebook ́s dominance and suggests that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The survey explaines why Facebook completely shattered MySpace when it comes to popularity and number of active users.

Facebook and Twitter are put head to head and their pros and cons are examined. Although Facebook dominates in number of users, Twitter definitely has some factors over and above Facebook.

Paper can be found here: Social Networks: Survival of the fittest

 

Paper: The possibilities of a virtual weather engine

Video games are getting more realistic. Long gone are the days of simple 16-color EGA graphics that made games like Sierra Online King’s Quest possible. Today computers have powerful graphics chips that allow processing for each pixel on the screen in real-time. As demands for virtual environments increase the challenge is to use this power to generate realistic scenes. One important feature is the weather in outdoor scenes.

Elvar Örn Unnþórsson, a student in my 2010 New technology course wrote a paper titled, The possibilities of a virtual weather engine that addresses this topic. This is the abstract:

Weather is an important feature in any virtual environment that strives to be realistic with outdoor scenes. This includes virtual environments created for computer games and 3d simulations or environments for motion pictures, music videos, advertisements, etc. So far developers have had to create their own solutions for each weather phenomenon that was desired in their environment which is time consuming and costly. By providing developers with a powerful and yet simple tool that can create different weather phenomena; much time, money and effort will be saved during the development of virtual environments. This paper takes a look at the possibilities that such a product has including features, potential market, users, impact and future. This paper will give the reader a good understanding of the possibilities that lie with such an engine.

The paper is here: The possibilities of a virtual weather engine (PDF).