Media and Global Warming

Is global warming a sign of destruction? Well scientists and other scholars predict that this could well be the end of mankind from the face of this earth. Some say that this would destroy a major part of the earth, which could erase a part of human’s extinction. We would soon be an untraceable element in this planet. They say that global warming is the term used to describe a gradual increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, a change that is believed to be permanently changing the Earth’s climate forever. This is why we experience sever climatic conditions like never before. It has never been so hot in the month of March itself. We are heading towards terrible days ahead of us. Given the current scenario, I think that the heat waves have not yet started though we feel the heat creeping up our head.

Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate carrying out global warming research have recently predicted that average global temperatures could increase between 1.4 and 5.8 °C by the year 2100. Changes resulting from global warming may include rising sea levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps, as well as an increase in occurrence and severity of storms and other severe weather events. These series of climatic changes would lead to several issues concerning climate, food, destruction and economic breakdown.

Media’s role in global warming:

Media is the only tool through which people can learn more about this serious problem and could take necessary steps to control these changes and prolong man’s life on this planet. Much of what people learn about global warming comes from news sources like television, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, films and radio. In today’s age, most people get their view of the world from mainstream media. It is, therefore, important that mainstream media be objective and present accurate and diverse representations of what goes on around the world.

Accurate media representation of world issues is crucial. Media has to show the fact as what it is. Whenever media reports are censored or biased, the people’s basic rights are systematically undermined. In these situations, violations and unaccountability often go unnoticed and suppressed viewpoints become commonplace. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

57th anniversary of Bar Codes

It was on this day on October 7, 1952, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver first invented the bar code. They were granted the first patent for their invention. The only difference between the bar code we know today and the one Woodland and Silver invented was that it was comprised of a series of concentric circles and not the 59 black-and-white vertical lines synonymous with the current design. This is the 57th anniversary of the first bar code patent.

In 1974, a scanner in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, met the simple black-and-white striped bar code design tacked onto a 10-piece pack of Juicy fruit gum. Now, more than 10 billion bar codes are scanned in 25 industries and in places including airports, hospitals, and shipping centers.

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, barcodes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacing’s of parallel lines, and was referred to as linear or 1 dimensional barcodes or symbologies. They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2 dimensional matrix codes or symbologies. Although 2D systems use symbols other than bars, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well.

The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task in which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread too many other roles as well, tasks that are generically referred to as Auto ID Data Capture . Other systems are attempting to make inroads in the AIDC market, but the simplicity, universality and low cost of barcodes has limited the role of these other systems. It costs about half a United States cent (US$0.005) to implement a barcode while passive RFID still costs about $0.07 to $0.30 per tag.

Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers, or scanned from an image by special software. Scanning software for 2D codes is built-in to or available for many mobile phones, and is especially popular in Japan, India, and Europe.

Explore the web world

With a million web sites uploaded every second, we find it difficult to search for the information we want. I personally came across this problem one day when I wanted to get some information about a particular topic. This is when I decided to gather some of the websites which we often use and pile it up as a document. This made things easier for me to search for the sites I want. I have given a link below for you to explore the world of web with ease. Have fun folks.
Link to the document