Expanding Emergency Services Network

Our health is important to us because a healthy body allows us to do a lot of things. Not even money can save us from the brink of death because if it can, all the rich people will no longer die but they still do. Seconds to minutes matter when an emergency strikes. It’s all about the A-B-Cs – airway, breathing, and circulation. Unfortunately, not everyone has a medical background and can confidently act and respond during medical emergencies.

Emergency medical service networks come in handy during dire situations as they are instrumental in saving people’s lives. It is no longer a novel concept considering we have 911 for the longest time now. For those requiring emergency services, they can call certain numbers to ask for immediate assistance and people for which individuals with medical emergencies have benefited greatly from these types of services. This is especially more helpful as we become increasingly reliant on the use of modern contrivances in our daily lives.

Verizon Communications has unveiled plans to develop a first responder network that will compete with rival AT&T’s FirstNet.

The carrier claims to control around two-thirds of the police, fire, and other first responders market, according to US reports. It will run separate lanes of traffic to commercial line in order to prioritise public-safety services.

"We're serious about remaining extremely relevant in this space," Michael Maiorana, a Verizon senior vice president who oversees the effort, said in an interview with Urgent Communications.

"We believe our customers deserve a choice and that competition drives innovation and—ultimately—best price. Bottom line, we want to keep our customers, and we want them to have the best-in-class services that technology can provide."

(Via: http://www.capacitymedia.com/Article/3741819/News/Verizon-to-build-emergency-services-network-to-compete-with-AT-Ts-FirstNet)

The truth is, it’s actually no longer surprising to find out about such services being offered by private companies like Verizon since we can’t deny there is a need for it as the population increases and the technology needed to make these things work are now readily available. People use technology in their day-to-day now, so it is understandable if medical responders also use the same tools in reaching out to people in the provision of the services they offer.

A new system for alerting emergency services to the precise location of assault victims and incapacitated callers is to go live in the coming weeks.

Ireland will be among the first countries in Europe to activate the Advanced Mobile Location (AML) on android phones.

It works by automatically finding a phone's GPS co-ordinates and sending a text message to the call centre after a person rings 112/999.

Currently when an injured caller is unable to give a location the emergency services have to rely on the nearest phone mast, which could be up to 15km away.

Emergency call centres receive an average of 4,000 mobile phone calls a day.

(Via: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/new-system-will-locate-callers-in-an-emergency-36040425.html)

Time is of the essence during medical emergencies. These centralized systems are great and efficient means to respond to any health-related crisis. Lifesaving measures can be initiated at once and people no longer have to wait to get to the hospital to receive medical interventions that only trained professionals can do. Not only sick people can benefit from these services but those trauma victims that suffer from accidents and other mishaps that nobody has foreseen.

Well, that’s why they are called accidents in the first place. Contacting an emergency medical service provided by your network is the next best thing any person can have and can give them total peace of mind for whatever little surprises life has in store for you especially if it is a potentially life-threatening one like in sickness and in injuries that require medical assistance.

The following article Expanding Emergency Services Network was initially published to The HD Business Blog

source https://hdbizblog.com/blog/expanding-emergency-services-network/

Hate Music No More On Spotify

Many things may have changed in this world but some things still remain the same. Our passion for music remains a big part of our lives and a great way for people to bond and unwind. For those really talented individuals, they can use their musical talents to earn a living like most singers and performers do. And as technology progresses, the way we pursue our interests has also changed over the years as we have masterfully incorporated the use of tech gadgets in just about everything we do.

Online streaming is the trend these days and most people do it all from the comfort of their smartphones and other smart gadgets that are mostly WiFi-ready. It is easier to stream online now as Internet connections are faster and most establishments and homes have their own WiFi connections, so you can connect various devices to one router at once. No wonder the popularity of streaming has soared. Not only are movies and television shows are streamed but even music too. Spotify knows very well this market and has been one of the innovators in the online music streaming scene.

Spotify says it has removed an array of white-supremacist acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist "hate bands" by the Southern Poverty Law Center three years ago.

The move came after Digital Music News posted a story headlined "I Just Found 27 White Supremacist Hate bands On Spotify," bringing the content to Spotify's attention.

A Spotify spokeswoman told Billboard in a statement that while the music in its catalog comes from hundreds of thousands of record companies and aggregators all over the world, and those are "at first hand responsible" for the content they deliver, "illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us."

(Via: http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7905175/spotify-removes-hate-band-music-streaming)

And while these new technologies have their perks, they also do have their flaws. Most online portals are open platforms where everyone who has access to the web is free to post whatever they like. And that is a big issue, especially without regulation. For instance, racist songs were able to flourish all over Spotify from White Supremacist hate bands for quite some time now. Instead of allowing people to enjoy good music, they trigger conflict and incite violence among innocent Spotify subscribers and listeners.

"Spotify takes immediate action to remove any such material as soon as it has been brought to our attention," the service said in a statement (via Billboard). "We are glad to have been alerted to this content - and have already removed many of the bands identified today, whilst urgently reviewing the remainder."

A Spotify rep added that the music is provided by record companies and aggregators, and "that illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us."

In 2014, Apple's iTunes took similar action with the SPLC's list of 54 white power groups, banishing the bands from its music. The SPLC also condemned Spotify for its "slow" handling of the matter.

(Via: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/spotify-takes-steps-to-remove-hate-music-from-service-w498171)

Users of the app can also flag contents that are racist in nature to alert Spotify and have these songs reviewed before taking appropriate actions. The company should take this issue seriously considering they are a global brand and is used by people from all walks of life and from various cultural and religious backgrounds. Hence, it is a must to maintain neutrality at all costs or at least develop tolerance of each other’s differences especially in the world of music where people aren’t discouraged to express their opinions but somehow exercise some manner of understanding of one another. Music should be enjoyed and must not be used to make us hate each other, so Spotify should keep this up if they don’t want people to be swayed into not using their app anymore.

The following blog post Hate Music No More On Spotify was first published to HDBizBlog.com

source https://hdbizblog.com/blog/hate-music-no-more-on-spotify/

Raising Awareness To Save Mother Earth

By now, most of the people currently living on the planet are aware of the desperate state it is in because of negligent human activities that have hastened global warming and climate change among others. We can feel Mother Nature’s wrath now and then and lives are taken as well as properties are destroyed as natural weather systems have intensified due to our higher carbon footprint, abuse and misuse of the world’s resources and basically most of the things we do in our everyday lives.

Today, environmentalists are working double time to encourage everyone to make lifestyle modifications that will benefit the planet to ensure that future generations still have a livable world to live in in the years to come. Not only are these initiatives started by conservation and environmental groups but even by well-known personalities and public figures that show genuine interest in protecting the environment at all cost and using their position and influence to deliver their message to a wider audience.

After public attention towards climate change increased after Former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, it is Johan Rockstrom’s highly influential article in 2009 called ‘A safe operating space for humanity’ which has had a substantial influence on the discourse of sustainable development, as well as my narrative. Rockstrom and his colleagues enlist nine ‘planetary thresholds’ which are nine ecological balances, whose resilience and ‘carrying capacity’ should not be tampered with.

With humanity and the planet Earth having passed the Holocene stage, a stage where all ecological systems and the Earth’s regulatory capacity provided conducive conditions for uninterrupted human development (such as availability of freshwater, regular temperatures, biogeochemical flows etc.), we are now at a stage called Anthropocene, where the main catalyst for global environmental change is human activities. When we consider the nine planetary thresholds, the three thresholds which have already been crossed (climate change, biodiversity loss and nitrogen cycle), we can imagine an extrapolated rendering of the “tragedy of commons” as described by Hardin, where humanity’s unperturbed carelessness with production and consumption will exhaust an already depleted planet Earth, which is the ‘commons’ in this case. 

(Via: http://www.businessworld.in/article/Planetary-Thresholds-and-Why-Pro-Environment-Discourse-is-Necessary/17-08-2017-124249/)

Most of the time, the ordinary person will no longer bother himself/herself with issues like this one because they are busy making both ends meet that the simple act of surviving got them preoccupied all the time. It is why it helps to have prominent figures speak up about these sensitive and timely issues that can very well equate to the survival or the end of the human race to inform every one of our moral obligation to do our part in saving the world.

A group of 60 Canadian and Chinese scientists and students are meeting in Windsor this week to discuss common water issues faced by both nations, such as the effect of intensive agriculture on bodies of water.

Canada has much to learn during the talks, largely because China has advanced policies for water conservation and pollution reduction, according to University of Windsor professor Doug Haffner, one of the organizers of the conference.

"[China's] water research, water management program is larger than Canada's whole GDP. They have resources to do experiments that we are not capable of doing here in Canada," he said. "It's much to our benefit to work with China on these issues."

Canadians have room to improve when it comes to reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and consuming less water, explained Chang-Qun Duan, one of the scientists in Windsor for the conference. 

(Via: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/chinese-and-canadian-scientists-share-water-conservation-strategies-at-windsor-conference-1.4249985)

Saving the environment really takes the concerted effort of everyone. We should all set aside our individual differences and unite for a common goal – protect the planet with our lives because we only have one home that we can call our own in the vast realms of space. No matter what country you are from, we still breathe the same air and use the same resources, so it makes perfect sense that we work hand-in-hand in addressing the major environmental issues we are facing right now that are mostly actually our own doing too. After all, more hands are better than one. So, what are you waiting for? Stop being a passive observer and become an active participator in saving the planet from now on.

Raising Awareness To Save Mother Earth See more on: The HD Business Blog

source https://hdbizblog.com/blog/raising-awareness-to-save-mother-earth/

AIMatter: Google’s New Acquisition

Technology continues to progress. You can see it in the devices now made available to the masses. Their features and specifications increases and gets better over time. It’s no wonder why the public has openly embraced all these new technologies and make use of them in their daily lives. It is unheard for a person to not own a smart gadget these days. Almost everyone is connected to the web, one way or another.

Big companies like Google knows the trend very well and like most companies that make money from people’s online activities like Facebook and Amazon, they have long since expanded their search engine services and now recently acquired AIMatter, a start-up company from Belarus that works on detecting and processing mobile images and is the maker of the Fabby app and its neural network-based AI platform.

Computer vision — the branch of artificial intelligence that lets computers “see” and process images like humans do (and, actually, often better than us), and then use those images to help run programs — is at the heart of how the next generation of tech is developing, and this week Google made an acquisition this week to help it along with its own efforts in this area.

The search and Android giant has acquired AIMatter, a startup founded in Belarus that has built both a neural network-based AI platform and SDK to detect and process images quickly on mobile devices, and a photo and video editing app that has served as a proof-of-concept of the tech called Fabby.

(Via: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/google-acquires-aimatter-maker-of-the-fabby-computer-vision-app/)

The potential is endless when it comes to technology as long as you have the right tools and you act on them right away before anyone else does because sooner or later, someone else will. Some technologies may not always be the best as that of Fabby but with Google’s vast resources, it won’t take long before someone from their talented pool of employees discovers a really cool way to use their new acquisition to its fullest potential or possibly come up with something entirely new.

Google has been working on improving its own computer vision software for years, in hopes of better indexing the data hidden inside photos and video. This has a number of practical applications — for example, you might use computer vision to help search through hundreds of photos on your smartphone to find photos containing dogs, sunsets, or specific family members.

The goal is to eventually build computers capable of instantly and accurately identifying everything inside a photo, or a live video stream.

AIMatter raised an estimated $2 million in capital, and its apps, Fabby and Fabby Look, have been downloaded 2 million times.

(Via: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/17/google-acquires-aimatter-fabby-selfie-app-goog.html)

Google aims to take Fabby into something even better and not just an app in taking “designer selfies” that it is now known for. And while it is no Snapchat, it can really transform your photo by adding details to your appearance or change your background altogether. It wasn’t even disclosed how much Google spent to purchase the app or what the company intends to do with it but there is one thing for sure, AIMatter employees will not go looking for new jobs anytime soon as they will be absorbed by the merger. In reality, we are already using a few technologies that are inspired by artificial intelligence, so this move is expected from a tech giant like Google that wants to maintain its lead over the others.

Technology continues to surprise us as the years go by and it is no longer surprising why big companies like Google is pursuing artificial intelligence like many others when a few have already set the clock ticking and are hard at work in developing AI technology to make it a reality for all of us in the years to come.

AIMatter: Google’s New Acquisition was initially published to https://hdbizblog.com

source https://hdbizblog.com/blog/aimatter-googles-new-acquisition/