What You Experience Could Impact Your Offspring

Based on this article in Nature: In 1864, nearing the end of the US Civil War, conditions in the Confederate prisoner of war camps were at their worst, with overcrowding in some camps that Union Army soldier (prisoner) death rates soared. For survivors, the harrowing experiences marked many of them for life -- returning to society with impaired health, worse job prospects, and shorter life expectancy. Such hardships also had an effect on the prisoners’ children and grandchildren, which appeared to be passed down the male line of families. While their sons and grandsons had not suffered the hardships of the PoW camps -- they suffered higher rates of mortality than the wider population. It appeared the PoWs had passed on some element of their trauma to their children.

Your experiences during your lifetime – particularly traumatic ones – would have a very real impact on your family for generations to come. There are a growing number of studies that support the idea that the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics. For the PoWs in the Confederate camps, these epigenetic changes were a result of the extreme overcrowding, poor sanitation and malnutrition. The men had to survive on small rations of corn, and many died from diarrhoea and scurvy. “There is this period of intense starvation,” says study author Dora Costa, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

For a long while we have understood that child abuse, for example, is very often passed from one generation to another. And as to how far back some of these cycles of abuse go is hard to determine. There are many cases of a person who was abused themselves -- and they also know what it feels like -- yet, they repeat to another what was done to them. This suggests in some cases a human being appears to have no control over their actions.

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Did Your Espresso Machine Just Tweet You?

When asked, I like to explain the "Internet of Things" as an ecosystem of technologies monitoring the status of physical objects IRL (in real life, in "meatspace", as opposed to cyberspace), capturing meaningful data, and communicating through the great internet IP network to our software apps. For Bluedog, the Internet of Things means smart objects, machine to machine communication, RF technologies, and a central hub of information.

As a proponent of service oriented architecture, I find the idea of the Internet of Things to be compelling. With devices of all kinds reporting data in real-time, people have the ability to make quicker, more accurate decisions. In the supply chain, managers could monitor the status of shipments like a crate filled with expiring pharmaceuticals or spoiling veggies. With sensors, RFID tags, and RFID readers, supply chain participants view in real-time the exact location of the cargo inside the warehouse, its point of origin, time until expiration, and factors in the environment like temperature that might impact the process.

This transparent process improves efficiency, reduces waste, and allows traceability. If a shipment is determined to be unsuitable for consumption due to spoilage or other unforeseen circumstance, the root cause will quickly be discovered from the plethora of information available.

Kevin Ashton likely first coined the phrase in 1999, but the idea has evolved in the intervening time. Initially, it was used to describe the limitations in the relationship between the internet, computers, and the physical world. Ashton was describing how nearly all the data available on the internet originates from a human. With available and emerging technologies, Ashton believed information about things need not be dependent on a manual interaction; it could be an automated process.

At Bluedog, we see the adoption of such supporting technologies as a means of spurring innovation. IP networks are commonplace throughout homes, offices, warehouses, even city streets. Industry need and government mandates are regulating technologies leading to accepted standards across boundaries, allowing for interoperability among devices. The cost and size of devices continues decreasing which allows companies to embed smaller, common items with GPS, Q-codes or bar codes, RFID, and low-cost sensors.

Contemplate the future, on this, the close of 2013. Drones and other autonomous vehicles, more mobile computing, the Cloud, the frontiers of space being pushed back, new genetics, physics, materials science and other advancements! The future is so bright, I've gotta wear shades.

Cellular capacity expanded... or not?

Of course, as soon as I put a stake in the sand, one of my associates comes up with a different perspective. Vince D'Onofrio made some excellent points, so I am re-posting here what he wrote to me directly -- I think his commentary warrants a wider audience...

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I have seen all kinds of distributed radio technologies and do not believe result of DIDO technology is really possible the way it has been reported in this article. Except for the bit about overcoming Shannon's Law. I believe it is possible for DIDO to add additional capacity in the right environment, but it still must follow mother natures laws. So it has to have some limitations. Each person getting full cell capacity regardless of the number of users is never going to happen. There are always choke points in the network unless there is unlimited money to spend on infrastructure and unlimited radio spectrum available. Undesired signals from other in-band users will be perceived as noise by the radio receiver and noise chokes throughput, thus limiting data rates. There is no easy way to test the impact of unrestrained capacity without a fully loaded network. Nether Steve Perlman or his cohorts have the capital to do that. Anything can be proven on paper with enough math. But there are reasons why most theoretical patents never get implemented in the real world.

Even if we were able fix radio link capacity problems by distributing the transfer nodes, the switching centers are going to hit a wall. The only way I see this technology working is if all of the content comes from other local mobiles are being used as relay stations. This also means distributing backhaul data traffic (PSTN and Internet traffic) to local fixed connection points or miniature base stations. Otherwise no real-time transmissions will be possible due to interconnection delays in the network.

Though, it is possible that new technology could address the needs of certain high bandwidth users better that what is out on the street today. Since 99% of users would be happy with only 1% of what a base station has to offer, there might be enough surplus capacity for the bandwidth hungry gamer after all, despite the lack of high throughput for all users. We may approach this capacity anyway with LTE Advanced technology which is well on its way to being implemented globally.

Today, most users are not actually annoyed with the speed of their wireless networks. What they perceive as a slow network is the delay associated with provisioning and setup time, which can be horribly long (one minute or more when the network is congested). This delay is not a radio link problem. You can experience these delays even when there is enough channel capacity. LTE takes care of this problem with new protocols that create an Instant On mobile Internet experience. Users will perceive faster network speeds because the overhead delays will be greatly minimized.

My guess is that DIDO is best used for small local networks like college campuses where everyone is talking or gaming with their neighbors and there are relatively few high bandwidth consumers. In a dense urban environment, with 1,000+ simultaneous users possible in a few city blocks, the technology will likely fail to deliver enough throughput for all because of the combination of excessive load and noise.

Though, hats off to Steve Pearlman if he can prove me wrong. I would love to see something truly disruptive change the industry landscape.

-Vince D'Onofrio
Wireless Telecom Consultant
www.radiofrontier.com