Sosigenes is the website of Ivan Dimitrijević, an independent IT Business Analyst focused on the financial industry. Have a true partner, advisor and catalyst that you can trust to challenge your assumptions and change your stereotypy in order to ensure that you always stay one step ahead of the competition. Sosigenes' heuristics have been implemented with success in ventures past and present.
Physics case: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Flow, The God Particle, etc. The author Dan Brown has made a huge pop culture impact with the "Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Deamons". It seems that the scientific community is also branding its research activities. This in turn is producing something of an competition in the physics community to come up with the trendiest terms. Some acronyms are strangely akin to movie titles, such as RAMBO's (Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects), or stereotypical behaviour patterns like MACHO's (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) and WIMP's (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Financing machines that search the cosmos in order detect exotic forms of matter and energy is producing a gold rush for private and government funding.
IT case: Magnetic Tape. Tape is an overlooked and cost effectice older technology that can perform at factor of 10 cheaper than hard disk, and there are people out there who buy storage by the petabyte, so if you're buying disk drives, it is in the multiple millions of dollars. If you are going to store the data and not look at it very often -- you have to keep it because of regulatory requirements -- you don't keep it on spinning disks consuming power. You put it on tape and put it on the shelf. With energy costs rising, that consideration is gaining currency. Tape is hardly perfect, but it's still the best solution there is. A tape cartridge will soon hold a terabyte of data and cost you $100. You want another terabyte tomorrow, you put another tape on the shelf. That's another $100. It's a simple solution and it's scalable. If you want to do that with disk, you put in a very expensive RAID system. You want another terabyte, you've got to put in another system and integrate it into your network. Even the recording bit density of tape is better than that compared to the hard disk. Even though it's not as high as disk, the bit length is a fraction of the wavelength of light. The wavelength of green light is 500 nanometers. The bits on tape are down around the 100 nanometer range now.
Technology Case: Wireless Electricity. In the late 19th century, the realization that electricity could be coaxed to light up a bulb prompted a mad dash to determine the best way to distribute it. At the head of the pack was inventor Nikola Tesla, who had a grand scheme to beam electricity around the world. Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island. Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up. Instead of pursuing a long-distance scheme like Tesla's, the trend is to look for midrange power transmission methods that could charge--or even power--portable devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops. The choice fell on the phenomenon of resonant coupling, in which two objects tuned to the same frequency exchange energy strongly but interact only weakly with other objects. A classic example is a set of wine glasses, each filled to a different level so that it vibrates at a different sound frequency. If a singer hits a pitch that matches the frequency of one glass, the glass might absorb so much acoustic energy that it will shatter; the other glasses remain unaffected. Magnetic resonance is a promising means of electricity transfer because magnetic fields travel freely through air yet have little effect on the environment or, at the appropriate frequencies, on living beings. Researchers built two resonant copper coils and hung them from the ceiling, about two meters apart. When they plugged one coil into the wall, alternating current flowed through it, creating a magnetic field. The second coil, tuned to the same frequency and hooked to a light bulb, resonated with the magnetic field, generating an electric current that lit up the bulb--even with a thin wall between the coils. So far, the most effective setup consists of 60-centimeter copper coils and a 10-megahertz magnetic field; this transfers power over a distance of two meters with about 50 percent efficiency. Scientists are looking at silver and other materials to decrease coil size and boost efficiency. While ideally it would be nice to have efficiencies at 100 percent, realistically, 70 to 80 percent could be possible for a typical application. Other means of recharging batteries without cords are emerging. Startups such as Powercast, Fulton Innovation, and WildCharge have begun marketing adapters and pads that allow consumers to wirelessly recharge cell phones, MP3 players, and other devices at home or, in some cases, in the car. This technology might one day enable devices to recharge automatically, without the use of pads, whenever they come within range of a wireless transmitter. The U.S. Department of Defense, which is funding the research, hopes it will also give soldiers a way to automatically recharge batteries. In today's battery-operated world, there are so many potential applications where this might be useful.