[Thoughts on life]Ayn Rand on the Purpose of Life

For more open science community - In tech

One main hard part as I'm doing inpendent research is a lack of access for journals to read. Even though there are some articles that I can read, but most of them are out of date. Science and technology are one of the rapidly changing field every year, and reading an article that is written in 2001 is not much helpful. Though it is still far better than having nothing.

Here I found a website that is aiming for more open communiy science by sharing their ideas, papers through the world.

InTech

I'm super glad to find this website because I can see more improvments from closed community about science by limiting access to the public. Mostly textbook thesedays is not as helpful as reading current articles and think through by one self. At least for me, I would like to contribute once I think I'm ready to write about biosensor system in the future.

For anyone of you who want to keep up with what's going on in science communiy, or who want to contribute as an author. Check it out! :)

A Shared Culture

[Thoughts on life]Build my own databse

Information. After industrial revolution, now it is so-called information revolution.
I haven't had time to contemplate about what exactly information is about. As computer science studying is going on, firstly it is interestingly clear the difference between raw data and information.
I need to internalize of the raw data that is all surrounding me in order to make information. Data is anything, anywhere - it can be a list of restaurants, a bunch of random numbers from the car plate, the titles of books and so on. Whereas information is needed to have efforts. Information is something that I process myself using my own energy to activate my brain.

When a person is young, data and information usually don't have a specific boundary. As the person grows up, the person is getting formed with all data that have been collected consciously or uncounsciously.
I think that is pretty critical to be aware of that what kind of data is being processed as an information in one's mind.
Without monitoring of this processing, it is quite easy to get lost in this complicated and complex so called 'life'.
Though I don't think that to have a solid awareness of this process is easy, it is certainly not a rocket science. It just all the time start with a simple question 'why' and trying to answer on one's own.

I guess so far I've collected so much data, yet I did not know how to use them properly. But now I feel like I'm processing all the data that I've got, and adding new data each day to process for making the most useful information for myself.
I'm pretty sure one day all this data whether it is processed or not will come in handy. :)

[Journal for independent biosensor research] Overview of current biosensor technology

An overview of current biosensor technology

-Introduction to biosensor

Biosensor sounds quite familiar even to those who do not have special technical background because it is just natural for people to want to know what is going on with inside the body, especially when there is any noticeable abnormality or some symptom.

When technology was not developed enough, it was future technology. However since first commercialized glucose biosensor has come out, so much improvements have been taken place.

So I will write about overview to glimpse at what has been going on for developing biosensor, and where the current technology stands now. Since this article is aiming for covering broadly, I might not be able to cover all different types of biosensors and characteristics in depth which I plan to do for next two months(April, May). However, I will try to cover as much as possible in general.

Biosensors are sensors that transduce bio-recognition processes into measurable signals via a physico-chemical transducer, with electronic and optical techniques as two major transducer(Fan et al 2005)

Simply put, it is a sensor to detect/monitor biological analytes for various purposes. Roughly it is divided into three sections. First, the materials that are actually analyzed and monitored by the sensor such as tissue, microorganisms, organelles, cell receptors, enzymes, antibodies, nucleic acids. Then biosensor, obviously, needs physical hardware and software(system and application).

Also biosensor can be classified by transducing mechanism – resonant biosensors, optical-detection biosensors, thermal-detection biosensors, ion-sensitive FET biosensors, electrochemical biosensors.

1. Hardware

According to Moore’s law, more transistors are on a single chip, and it increases performances. Now nanotechnology is rapidly on the way to develop a smaller chip and higher functions, and biosensor chip field seems hugely favored of the nano technology.

For the materials of hardware could be divided into 4 categories – sillicon, compound semiconductors, organic semiconductors and nano materials.

Not only what kind of materials are used is concerned, but also how to generate power more efficiently is another big factor to consider when design a biosensor.

So far, there are photovoltaic, thermovoltaic, micro fuel cells, electrostatic, electromagnetic and piezoelectric.

Unlikely in the past when only individual biosensor is available, it is now shifting to a network. Like above there are quite many different types of biosensors, and it seems quite obvious to integrate those sensors into one chip for more efficiency.

It is now called body sensor network which implies two types of networks – small(on body) and big one(information network between user, physician, and server). In order to make this network, mote which is a sensor node takes place to connect all information from each different sensors. One of the most commonly used mote is telos.

2. Software 

As far as I understand, the most important role of the software for biosensor is how to make more efficient and robust one. The reason is when we think about how much volume of data are generated by each sensors, it can make a huge delay or error when processing data. Especially, it needs to be real-time monitoring system, the data keeps coming in and needs to be analyzed in a certain speed.
Though there are numerous different software needed for not only system but also application, the outline that I had in my mind was quite simple – operating system for user, physician and sever managers, devices software for requiring all different data from sensors, processing the data program for physician and server and monitoring system.
As I’ve been studying more about it, I’ve discovered more about operating systems, framework, other application softwares.
For operating system, it seems TinyOS is the most commonly used one and there are Mantis OS, Contiki, MANTIS and so on. SPINE(Signal Processing In Node Environment) is developed as an open source framework at UC Berkely, and it is a part of Dexternet which is an open platform for heterogeneous body sensor network and applications.

3. Review and conclusion

Since it is my first attempt to summarize what I’ve learned this month, I don’t expect it to be perfect. Yet, I was able to understand about not only about basic structure of biosensor but also a direction of where biosensor technologies are going to. 

From what I learned, besides all major challanges in detail, the main point to make biosensor more accessible is firstly miniaturization of the chip and secondly efficient system infrastructure to support a vast flow of information. 

In the next two months, I'm planning to study more about each biosensors that are used to comprise heterogeneous biosensor. The reason is that I believe in order to build such a robust system for body sensor network, it will be quite beneficial to learn about each biosensors characteristics. 

Developing software of biosensor has a unique characteristics in which the input is not comprehensible to anybody, and I think it is critical to understand what kind of input the system is dealing with.

Therefore I'd like to maximize my biology background while I'm studying each sensors, and use those knowledges back to when I build such a biosensor system.

4. Reference

- Saraju P. Mohanty, Biosensors: A Survey Report, Nov 24 2001

- David P. Klemer, MD, PhD, Microelectronic Biosensors: Materials and Devices

- Joseph Polastre, The Mote Revolution: Low Power Wireless Sensor Network Devices

- Jonathan Lueke and Wailed A. Moussa, MEMS-Based Power Generation Techniques for Implantable Biosensing Applications

- Shiping Song, Hui Xu, Chunhai Fan, Potential diagnostic applications of biosensors: current and future directions

Another good web site for cs self learner

Udacity
While I was searching for how to design a computer program, I came up with this website. It has a few courses that are taught by experts, and it is easy to just sign up and take the course! Maybe I can consider after this project! ;)

[Thoughts on life]Self learning and independent thinking

It's been almost 2 month since I started to study my 1st term. One of the things that I learned in my bottom heart is not only mere knowledge in mathematics or circuits, but also a great change of the way of thinking.

Since it is a self education, it is inevitable that it all depends on me to find any resources, to set up the time frame and how much I learned and how well I understand. Then one day I realized that it is the best way to practice to think more indepently and act independently.
I'm a teacher, a student at the same time. Just like a teacher, I'm thinking how I can give an easier and practical way to teach myself for any difficult subject or contents. Also as a student, I'm trying to absorb what I prepared myself for me.

This way of thinking led me to percieve the world in a quite different way in which I used to do. If there is no question, then there is no action for finding an answer.
Though it seems there are abundunt data, it doesn't seem like not many people ask a very fundumental question about 'why'. It coudl be a pain in the nect if one is trying to ask about almost everything that looks just obvious.
However, as far as I discovered there is no such thing that is "fixed".
All the rules, any objects or even the way we are thinking is just made through out the time, and somehow people claims that something is right because it has this long history or just because so.
Numbers - invented, letters - invented, cars - invented, computer - invented.
It is quite amazing how many things we tend to forget how we are using such a system and take for granted.

On the other side of indepedent thinking, it is possible to make some conflicts with a majority of society. I guess that's because in order to form a civilzed society, it is required to have a system which we live in now, and it somehow nees a conformity. Maybe it is an unavoidable feature of a modern civlized society.
Would it be possible to have a parrell line between independent thinking and conformity?