Capping Greenhouse Gases Could Cost $1 Trillion

The continued emission of harmful gases by industrialized countries, combined with the growth of emissions by developing economies, will double the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2050. Reducing these emissions and their environmental consequences is possible, but it would come with a price: $1 trillion over the next several decades.

The estimate, by PricewaterhouseCoopers, considers the cost of helping to convert world economies to cleaner fuels, as well as aggressive overall energy reduction, without inhibiting the growth of emerging economies.

One trillion dollars is a lot of money... but it is minimal compared with the environmental catastrophe that would ensue if carbon emissions were left unchecked. "It is implicit from our findings that a trillion dollars certainly is a cost worth incurring," said John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC and author of the report.

Source: The Independent

"Speaking Books" Promote Health in South Africa

Long a favorite of children learning how to read, "talking books" are being used to help disseminate important health information to populations of varying reading skills.

In South Africa, the South African Depression and Anxiety Group has developed a series of such books through Books of Hope. These short books are produced in multiple languages and address such topics as HIV, malaria, diabetes and suicide prevention, and are being distributed to that country's rural and disadvantaged communities. By pushing buttons, the reader can listen to the content as well as read it.

Source: Springwise

Mimio Interactive

Mimio Interactive is truly a revolutionary piece of hardware that can really transform the the way teachers instruct in the classroom. The mimio Xi, is a small bar that is affixed to a standard whiteboard. In conjunction with a computer, projector and the mimioStudio software that comes with the mimio Interactive you can turn any standard whiteboard into an interactive whiteboard with all of the functionality that one would expect from a dedicated interactive whiteboard. Using state of the art technology you are able to bring in digital pictures, control your PowerPoint presentation, and design activites in front of the class using the very intuitive mimioStudio software. Using the stylus as a mouse teachers can digitally write their notes within the mimio Studio notebook and save them for future use. At the end of the class period it is easy to print out the notes and distribute them to the students that need them. Better yet you can bring in picture backgrounds and clip art from the gallery's within mimioStudio to build exciting and rich lessons. Imagine being able to project on the screen the Periodic Table and then have students come up and highlight all of the noble gases with the mimio Mouse stylus. With mimioStudio, teachers can annotate the web site by highlighting and using the digital pens which are automatically saved to the Markup file within mimioStudio. It is a great way to save the information and review it for another time. All of the individual pages within mimioStudio are saved and teachers can quickly jump around the pages by going into the Thumbnail view. Simply double clicking on the thumbnail will bring you to the page. mimio Mimio Interactive allows teacher to create highly interactive lessons to engage students in the learning process. Teachers can also link websites from within the Mimio Studio notebook and be out on the web in seconds. mimio Interactive is available for Windows and Mac OS X. If you are looking for a way to transform your teaching in the classroom then you owe it to yourself to take a look at mimio Interactive-you will be amazed by its features, price and functionality.

Here comes the Cheetah!

There has been a lot of controversy in the newsgroup comp.databases.informix about some press release/interview from IBM, talking about the next release of IBM Informix Dynamic Server.

The news popped up at CRN, and the discussion talked about a mysterious new feature called "record level locking". No one could understand what this is... It seems to be row level locking, but we all know IDS has this since its beginning. Some insiders, like Madison Pruet and Christine Normille said that this could be one of several features:

1. Last commited concurrency
2. Label based access control (LBAC)
3. Optimistic concurrency

And what are these anyway, we may wonder...? Well, apparently all these are new features of the upcoming version or versions. As we all understand, even if some features are planned for a specific release, as the project deadline arrives some of them may have to be postponed, due to issues in the developing/testing cycle. But let's analyze these three features...

Last committed concurrency:
- As we know, we have four isolation levels currently in IDS. Dirty read, Committed read, Cursor stability and Repeatable read. The most uses are probably Dirty read and Committed read (the default for logging databases). We also know the implications of both of these levels. In dirty read mode we won't block or get errors when reading a row that it's being updated by other session, but the payback is that we will read "uncommitted data", that may well be rolled back or may be inconsistent.
In committed read we only access committed and consistent data but we will stop or wait whenever we need to read a row that is being updated.
So, the "last committed concurrency" will be another isolation level with the following behavior: Whenever we hit a locked row, we will read (without blocking) the previous image. A perfectly committed and consistent image, although possibly this data will change immediately. As many may know this is apparently very similar to what Oracle and Postgres do (the well known "writers don't block readers"). Nice... to use it we'll probably only have to issue some SET ISOLATION LEVEL TO LAST COMMITTED.... command

Label based access control (LBAC):
- This seems another interesting feature... but there isn't much info about it for now. Currently we can GRANT/REVOKE privileges to allow users to access certain columns. What this will provide is a mechanism of allowing access based on certain conditions. e.g.: we might restrict access to data from the user department, or for users of a specific region. The way to do this seems a bit complex, and I don't have any information on how IDS will implement it. If you're curious you can check a tutorial for DB2. I'd say the IDS implementation should be very similar.

Optimistic concurrency:
- This is another feature without much info around it. By definition optimistic concurrency is a method of controlling concurrent access to data based on the idea that most accesses (transactions) don't conflict with each other. As such, a session that wants to update a row won't lock it. At commit time the system will check that the row hasn't changed from the beginning of the transaction. If it has, the commit can't be done... This will work, and will be much more efficient that the normal lock mechanism if the assumption (the transactions won't conflict) is true. If it's false, it will perform worse than the locking mechanism, and will cause much more applications problems


Given this brief explanation about the talked about new features we can wonder if and when this will appear on the product, and what more is yet to come. There are no answers, or put in another way, no one can give any answers at this time, although the answers exist. Like any other software vendor, IBM can't and obviously won't compromise on new functionalities that may have to be delayed. But whether these and many other planned features will appear on the next version (code name cheetah) or only in the second yet to come version, or in some intermediate releases, one think is clear: IBM is putting a lot of developing resources behind IDS, and I can't see any reasons to fear about the future of the product. Ever since acquisition, customers have been worried (mainly because of FUD coming from the competitors), and watching every move from IBM. And one thing is obvious: Every IDS version that came out from IBM included significant improvements and a bunch of new features (9.4 and 10.00). By "significant" I mean features that implicate some structural changes and big code changes.

If you want to take a look at the discussion on the comp.databases.informix newsgroup and you don't have easy access to a news server/software you can check the posts on Google groups.

I really hope to get back to this subject on Cheetah new features. And by the way, "cheetah" is the fastest running animal on earth... It's fast, because every part of its body is adapted in some way to help it run faster... That's how an RDBMS should be built :)

eLearning Event Calendar

Tom King, formerly with Macromedia, has created a Google Calendar for Elearning Events which he says he will keep up to date by emailing him at: events@mobilemind.net.

You can see the calendar for October Elearning Events. And Tom was nice enough to post my event in September.

Virtual Meeting - What's Next in eLearning - Wed, Sept 27, 4PM Pacific

I had mentioned this briefly, but someone reading my blog had just said they had not seen the announcement, so sorry for the late notice. I'm doing a virtual presentation tomorrow at 4PM Pacific (3:30 PM set up) on:

What's Next in eLearning

You can get information at:

http://home.vftraining.net/vft/astd/el092706.htm

It is being done for ASTD Los Angeles, but they said that its okay for others to register.

I will try to post a recording of the session (assuming its not horrible) in the next few days.

Why did I create this?

Why did I create this?

Well, there are several reasons... None of them is good enough alone, but here they are:

1. The only blog I've found about Informix seems empty
2. I've been involved with Informix technology for several years and I think the Informix community although enthusiastic is a bit invisible
3. I have some subjects about which I'd like to write a bit...
4. ...

So, I hope to be able to create some interesting content here. I will obviously avoid repeating content that you can find in several resources like tech articles, DeveloperWorks etc.