Austin+John

Welcome to my Wikispace  My top 5 UN goals are: 1) Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure * This is my most important goal as I think with better infrastructure comes the other goals. With an appropriate environment for innovation and efficient exchange of goods, transfer of information and movement of people I believe the following goals will fall into place much quicker or come as part of it.   2) Affordable & Clean Energy  * This works in tandem with my previous goal, with the development of new (better) infrastructure comes the necessity of new, greener energy sources to support it. Whether those be nuclear, solar, wind or hydroelectric based would be based on the efficiency of each of the systems. By the time we reach the point of restructuring, this information should be established. 3) Water & Sanitation  4) Responsible Consumption & Production   5) Climate Action

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
I initially saw the idea labeled “Technological Mind Control”, which sounds both amazing and terrifying. But in reality it is a viable treatment for disorders that affect the balance of a person's brain (ie depression).The neurons and neural pathways in our brains use electrochemical voltage potentials to generate very low-amperage electrical current inside the brain. These currents form the basis of brain activity and are how neurons communicate with and stimulate other neurons. The idea is if you subject the brain to a properly calibrated and variable electromagnetic field, you can induce electrical currents in the brain involuntarily. These currents can induce physical sensations, perceptions, evoke emotions and memories.

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 * Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture**

With the emergence of more advanced AI and more feasible robots, there are plans to implement them into our agriculture. These are primarily divided into the four groups: surveillance, weed control, harvesting, and planting. There are various designs for each application, primary drones for surveillance, and "fleets" for the other three. The drones are extremely useful at monitoring the large areas of farmland from a bird's eye view and offers farmers the ability to track and record activity within their land. The other categories require the use of robots that can go out and recognize the stages of the plant, or the unwanted plants. These are normally fleets of robots that are not very large, that can cover lots of ground quickly, using images and supplementing itself with surrounding data to make decisions. Examples of these technologies can be seen below: (and this [|website]). These new applications pertain to various things we talked about during the week such as water conservation and even local systems to an extent. Primarily to water, due to the fact that with more efficient farms come less waste of water, less pollution of water, and more yield for the water used. Water being such a precious resource is extremely important in agriculture, and if agricultural systems can be streamlined through the use of AI and robots, it benefits not only the farmers, and consumers from the produce, but also the impact on the conservation of usable water. As far as local systems go, this tech can be used to help maintain or push an ecosystem in a direction. Say an invasive species is found in Robins Park, a system similar to drone one below could be implemented to detect it optically and remove it, thus removing the threat. It could even aid in the succession of a previously wiped ecosystem, these tools can give us the ability to shape systems to an extent.

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Blockchain in Agriculture
Blockchain is a technology that has been gaining popularity in the recent past, with the rise of Bitcoin, other uses for the technology are being explored.

**What is Blockchain?**
It is essentailly a massive ledger of all actions, or records. These records are what are referred to as blocks. By allowing digital information to be distributed but not copied, blockchain technology created the backbone of a new type of internet. Originally devised for the digital currency, Bitcoin, (Buy Bitcoin) the tech community is now finding other potential uses for the technology.

This technology is extremely useful in applications associated with agriculture. The uses could range from Transparent transactions, data monitoring, reducing human error, and identifying contamination. With the use of blockchain, the entire history if products can be followed easily, reducing the possibility for unfair pricing, as well as locating sources of contamination. If these problems are solved early on within the "chain" then the resources that would have been allocated to deflecting the damage can be diverted somewhere else. This [|website] and this [|website] are great for understanding the applications of blockchain in agriculture. Below are some videos to help understand blockchain: media type="youtube" key="r43LhSUUGTQ" width="338" height="192"media type="youtube" key="nUAQSVyBaKg" width="302" height="183"
 * In the Agricultural Industry**

Pyroelectrical Materials
During class we talked about how much energy we produce, use and reject. This was my primary focus this week and found an article from UC Berkley about a new technology that would use some of the "waste" energy (from heat) to create more electricity. The [|article] details how the engineers at UC Berkely figured out how to use materials known as pyroelectric materials can be sued to regain some of the energy we lose. Pyroelectric energy conversion, like many systems that turn heat into energy, works best using thermodynamic cycles, kind of like how a car engine works. But unlike the engine in your car, pyroelectric energy conversion can be realized entirely in the solid state with no moving parts as it turns waste heat into electricity. Thermodynamic cycles refer to the cycling of heat to cool within a material. This material would use these cycles to create movement within the crystals in the material, creating an electrical current. These crystals are naturally polarized and the movement due to the heat cycling would create a current that could be harvested. These have been used before but the creation of extremely thin films make it a viable way of squeezing as much energy out of our current energy sources as possible. The video below helps explain the exact working of the tech. The application of these films and the harvesting of this energy could result in an unprecedented influx of electrcity. media type="youtube" key="6VgY8AXy52A" width="560" height="315"