Sunday 21 December 2014
Thursday 9 October 2014
Sunday 28 September 2014
Substation Fire Incident/Accidents
The 1512 series for use by emergency management centers goal is to support efficient communication for the real-time, interagency management of transportation-related events. Those events include incidents, emergencies, accidents, planned roadway closures, special events, and disasters caused by humans or natural events. Those events include any such event that impacts transportation systems or that causes a report to be received by an emergency management system, whether or not the event actually affects a transportation system and whether or not a response is required. This bundle includes: IEEE Std 1512-2006; IEEE std 1512.1-2006, IEEE Std 1512.2-2004; IEEE Std 1512.3-2006
The electricity travels from the generator to the electrical switchyard, across a series of transmission lines and substation transformers until it is delivered into consumers' homes and businesses.
Fire Accident at one of the substations in the country - source: bintjbeil TV
Monday 25 August 2014
Friday 15 August 2014
Smart Irrigation System Edyn Aims to Simplify Growing
Edyn won’t just read soil and optimize irrigation – it will tell you what’s growing successfully around the region. Now there’s no excuse for a poor green thumb!
Last fall, I came across some really interesting reads regarding in-ground technology that viticulturists were utilizing in order to optimize the growth of their grapes while also minimizing wasted water and energy. Different variations of smart watering technology have been adopted by the agriculture industry, but like many innovations, they have been limited to large businesses. However, the development of Edyn, a wi-fi based sensor and valve that reads the soil like a psychic reads palms (but more reliably than most psychics), aims to bring affordable "smart plant growing sensors" to the masses. Edyn makes two products, the Edyn garden sensor and Edyn smart valve. The garden sensor assesses soil nutrition via sensors that are powered by a small solar panel, which pumps back a variety of critical growing information, including humidity, ambient temperature, light intensity and soil electrical properties, right to an app on your smartphone. The Edyn garden sensor communicates wirelessly with the Edyn smart valve which can be plugged directly into sprinkler systems to efficiently control waterings. (The EPA cites that some experts suggest as much as 50% of water used for irrigation is wasted due to evaporation, wind and runoff!).
This technology is combined with Photovoltaic Cells as a renewable source of energy to enhance efficiency and ensure in the same time the reliability of smart watering technology.
The innovative thing about this product is the availability of different forms of information returned to the user. Instead of only Quantitative readings, the data sent will include additional information about plant optimization growth such as: When to grow it, what to grow nearby it, and whether the soil itself needs to be adjusted through assets like time and compost products and quantities.
The uniqueness of this innovation is in the real-time data sent to the user on crop success and the incorporation with LEED projects concerning outdoor water use reduction.
Saturday 9 August 2014
Border to Border ride
نظم الاتحاد اللبناني للدراجات برعاية قائد الجيش اللبناني العماد جان قهوجي ودعم اللجنة الاولمبية اللبنانية طواف درّاجات "من الحدود الى الحدود" بتاريخ (3-8- 2014) (مسافته 220 كيلومتر) من أقصى الشمال (عند نقطة العريضة) الى اقصى الجنوب (الناقورة).
 |
| نقطة الوصول من بيروت (الواجهة البحريّة) الى النّاقورة |
يتابع الجيش اللبناني نشاطاته الرياضيّة والبطولات العسكريّة بمشاركة العديد من الشخصيّات العسكريّة والمدنيّة والاتحادات الرياضيّة، في وقت يواجه فيه الارهاب والتطرّف على جميع المستويات.
للمزيد من الأخبار: www.lebarmy.gov.lb
Friday 11 July 2014
Euphormia: a new Algorithm uniting Europe's Electrical Fiefdoms
Some six decades since Europe began to trade certain goods freely across its borders, electricity is finally joining the common market. In May, 16 countries, accounting for three-quarters of Europe’s power consumption, completed the adoption of a common system for cross-border trading that is now setting wholesale electricity prices from Spain to Finland and from the United Kingdom to Austria.
Integrating the world’s largest synchronized power grid is possible because of a sophisticated optimization algorithm for Europe’s day-ahead power markets—the Pan-European Hybrid Electricity Market Integration Algorithm, or Euphemia. This algorithm crunches every buy and sell bid submitted to the participating national and regional power markets. It simultaneously allocates rights to transborder transmission and sets the power prices for each market, outputting a selection of trades for the following day.
Euphemia’s goal is to maximize what economists call the “social welfare” of the region by maximizing the use of its most efficient power supplies and thus minimizing overall costs to consumers. “Where there are price differentials in neighboring markets, the process is designed to make sure there’s full use of the transmission paths between them,” says Mark Bartholomew, an energy market specialist with the Birmingham, England–based law firm SGH Martineau, which helped bring U.K. transmission operator National Grid into the scheme.
A consortium of power exchanges and transmission operators began building Euphemia in 2011. The optimization scheme is based on one implemented in 2010 to link the markets of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Features were added to meet the unique requirements of new markets such as Spain, the U.K., and the Nordic countries. For example, Euphemia can enforce limits on how quickly power levels change on Scandinavian grids, in order to moderate frequency variation there.
Euphemia was built to meet the European Commission’s goal of unifying all of Europe’s power markets by 2015, and that unified market has huge growth potential. Just 11.5 percent of the 3,355 terawatt-hours of energy consumed in Europe last year crossed borders.
Europe has started trading electricity across its borders in a day-ahead market
Euphemia should help boost trading volume. Under the old system, parties wishing to trade internationally had to seek out exchanges. And executing trades required separate transactions for energy and for transmission, so traders had to bid for power before securing the means to move it (or vice versa). Euphemia cuts through the complexity by pairing bids with international counterparts as its software sees fit. “The traders just buy and sell on their national exchanges in the regular way, and all of the cross-border things happen automatically,” says Bartholomew.
The EC’s vision is for this common system to absorb more markets until it covers all of Europe’s cross-border trading. However, some countries concerned about the efficiency and safety of the system are holding out for upgrades that take better account of the physics of the transmission grid.
The problem is that real power flows pay no heed to markets and national borders. Consider Poland’s dilemma. North-south flows within Germany and between Germany and Austria loop out across the Polish border and overload Poland’s lines. The problem can extend onto other grids such as the Czech Republic’s, and it’s especially severe when Germany’s northern wind farms are running full tilt.
Germany is planning internal high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines whose controllability will help keep its flows on course [see “Germany Jump-starts the Supergrid,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2013]. Regional transmission operators have also collaborated to use existing HVDC lines to combat the flows. Danish and Swedish operators help by using a pair of HVDC lines to push power clockwise around the Baltic Sea, an electrical twist that has the effect of pulling German power away from the Polish frontier.
Robert Poprocki, deputy director at the Warsaw-based PSE Operator, says this Baltic HVDC redispatching scheme pushed more than 120 gigawatt-hours of electricity around the Baltic last year, but it has not completely solved the problem. Still, the trick consumes no power and the benefits are cost-effective, says Poprocki.
PSE postponed the linking of its market with Germany and Austria over concerns that this would exacerbate the flows. But in April, the eastern European countries relented after gaining assurances from Germany and Austria that commercial power exchanges would be limited in some way to safeguard PSE’s grid.
Transmission experts say a more radical reengineering of power markets will ultimately be needed, one that pays less heed to national borders. “Today the borders are drawn at the wrong places,” says Alexander Wirth, a transmission expert with Swissgrid and operational manager of the Transmission System Operator Security Cooperation initiative.
Rather than trading between countries, Wirth and other experts say, optimization schemes such as Euphemia should manage trading across the system’s real transmission constraints. “Only 2 percent of congestion is located at borders,” says Wirth.
Such a system implemented today would likely cut Germany in half and merge its halves with neighboring countries. It is also beyond what European states are ready to consider, Wirth says. That could take another decade. In the meantime, grid operators can look forward to same-day trades. Those will likely start testing by October.
This article originally appeared in print as “An Algorithm Unites Europe’s Electrical Fiefdoms.”
Saturday 5 July 2014
Monday 16 June 2014
Being a Photographer is no more on the "to be" list ..
Sunday 1 June 2014
Friday 30 May 2014
Monday 26 May 2014
Secular Club @ AUB Outdoors
Source: AUB Facebook Official Page
تميّز النادي العلماني في الجامعة الأميركيّة في بيروت هذه السّنة بالصبغة الصينيّة - AUB Outdoors 2014
Monday 19 May 2014
Saturday 17 May 2014
Wednesday 7 May 2014
Thursday 17 April 2014
Wednesday 16 April 2014
Wednesday 9 April 2014
Friday 4 April 2014
Electronic Skin Patch With Memory and Drug Delivery Capability Could Treat Parkinson’s
Photo: Donghee Son and Jongha Lee
Researchers have made an electronic skin patch that can monitor muscle movement, store the data it collects, and use stored data patterns to decide when to deliver medicine through the skin. The patch could be useful for monitoring and treating Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, its creators say.
Wearable devices that continuously monitor physiological cues can help doctors understand and treat diseases such as epilepsy, heart failure, and Parkinson’s. A few research groups have been trying to develop discreet health monitoring devices based on flexible, stretchable electronics that can be plastered on the skin, heart or brain.
But the new system is the first that can store data and deliver drugs, says Dae-Hyeong Kim, a chemical and biological engineering professor at Seoul National University and one of the device’s creators. In the "closed-loop feedback system," says Kim, the stored data is used for statistical pattern analysis, which helps to track symptoms and drug response. "For more quantitative tracking of progression of symptoms and responses to medications, wearable healthcare devices that monitor important cues, store recorded data, and deliver feedback therapeutic agents via the human skin in a controlled way are highly required," he says.
Kim and his collaborators at the University of Texas at Austin and wearable health-monitoring device-maker MC10 integrated the sensors, memory, and drug-delivery components, all made of nanomaterials, onto a stretchable polymer substrate that is soft and flexible like human skin. They reported their design in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
On the topside of the skin-like polymer patch, the research team printed three things: silicon nanomembrane strain sensor arrays; serpentine chromium-and-gold nanowires that act as both heaters and temperature sensors; and drug-loaded porous silica nanoparticles. The strain sensors detect motion such as Parkinson’s tremors. The heater controls the temperature of the polymer, which in turn controls the diffusion of the drugs into the skin (heat degrades the physical bonding between the nanoparticles and the drugs). The temperature sensors monitor skin temperature during drug delivery to prevent burns.
What’s most unique about the new electronic patch is the stretchable memory. Researchers have previously made resistive random access memory, an up-and-coming class of nonvolatile memory, using metal oxide nanomembranes. Those devices were stiff and brittle. Here, the researchers have made stretchable memory devices by sandwiching three layers of gold nanoparticles between ultra-thin titanium oxide nanomembranes printed on aluminum electrodes.
The memory device can be bent and twisted, it works when stretched to 125 percent of its original length, and works well even after 1000 stretching cycles.
As a simple demonstration, the researchers placed the wearable patch on the wrist. The motion sensors measured frequency of simulated tremors by sensing tension and compression of the muscle. The frequency was recorded and fed through a control circuit that recognizes characteristic patterns of Parkinson’s disease. This, in turn, triggered drug release.
Right now, the memory element requires a power supply and a data transmitter. The researchers say that they will need batteries or wireless power transmission and wireless communication in stretchable formats to make a truly wearable and wireless patch.
Photo: Donghee Son and Jongha Lee
Wednesday 2 April 2014
Sunday 23 March 2014
Monday 3 March 2014
Solar Water Pumps Wean India Farmers From Grid
NEW DELHI -- India has a novel idea: Wean farmers from archaic power lines and expensive diesel fuel to run their water pumps with solar energy.
The government is looking to swap 26 million groundwater pumps for more efficient irrigation models powered by the sun. If successful, crop production could rise in India, where farms suffer from blackouts and volatile fuel costs. It would also save about $6 billion a year in power and diesel subsidies.
Companies targeting the market include BlackRock Inc.- backed SunEdison Inc., Asia’s top irrigation-equipment maker Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd., Claro Energy Pvt., whose investors include Standard Chartered Plc Managing Director Arun Singhal, and the solar unit of the Tata group, India’s biggest conglomerate.
“The potential is huge,” Tarun Kapoor, joint secretary at India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said in an interview. “Irrigation pumps may be the single largest application for solar in the country.”
Asia’s second-most populous nation will draw 100 billion rupees ($1.6 billion) of investment in the next five years as the first 200,000 most easily replaceable pumps are switched to solar, the government estimates. That will relieve an overburdened power-transmission grid built mostly in the 1960s that’s prone to failures.
A risk in converting to solar pumps is that farmers may use excessive amounts of water because the devices have almost no operating costs. To avoid that, farmers must use water-saving drip irrigation in exchange for accepting subsidies to buy solar water pumps.
One who has already seen the benefits of switching over is O.V.R. Somasundaram, a 67-year-old who grows coconuts, nutmeg and cocoa in southern India. He invested two years ago in a solar pump from St. Peters, Missouri-based SunEdison.
Snake-Bite Risk
Somasundaram’s 75 acres of farmland in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, used to be dependent on electricity from the state, sometimes only available four hours a day from an antiquated grid. When the power came on, it was often at night, meaning workers risked snake bites as they wandered into dark fields.
“Crops need water,” he said in an interview in Chennai. “My crops would have failed if I hadn’t opted for a solar pump.”
Somasundaram now gets water when he needs it, throughout the year when the sun is out, and without the fuel costs of a diesel generator. He irrigates a third of his holdings with the system, which cost 400,000 rupees after 60 percent was subsidized.
‘Break Link’
The new water reliability from a technology that moves away from older energy sources will allow him to plant an extra crop, black peppers. About 3,000 saplings are to be sowed by March.
Using fossil fuel-based power to pump well, canal and farm water also contributes to climate change, said Aaron Mandell, chairman of WaterFX, which sells solar desalination technology.
Let’s “break the link between carbon-based fuels and additional water production,” Mandell said. “The best way to do this is for the water industry to begin to take advantage of the cost reductions that have already occurred in renewable energy.”
The cost of photovoltaic panels that have slumped by half since 2010 and government subsidies mean the payback period of a solar pump system is one to four years, said Ajay Goel, chief executive officer of Tata Power Solar Systems Ltd., a panel maker and contractor that belongs to the $100 billion Tata group, which has businesses including steel, software services and vehicles.
Eliminate Subsidies
The government funds in some states as much as 86 percent of the cost of solar pump systems that in the long run save money because they eliminate $6 billion in annual farm diesel and electricity subsidies, according to Kapoor. That aid helped nudge India’s current-account deficit to a record last year.
The economics will only get better as diesel prices rise and scale brings more efficiencies, eliminating the need for state support, said Stephan Grinzinger, head of sales for Lorentz Vertriebs GmbH, a German maker of solar water pumps.
“Because of the drop in photovoltaic prices, globally we’re selling more solar pumps without subsidies than with,” Grinzinger said. Lorentz operates in 130 countries, he said.
The change comes as production of mainstay crops like wheat, corn and rice stagnate in India, according to a 2012 study of nearly five decades of yield data published by the journal Nature Communications. The reasons included water scarcity and falling groundwater tables.
Farmers needing cash for diesel will often promise their harvest upfront to pay for the fuel, agreeing to low prices for their crops. As water demand rises during the growing season, diesel prices spike on the black market.
Largest Blackout
In 2012, farmers were forced to run electric pumps after a bad monsoon contributed to the world’s biggest blackout that left almost 360 million people in the dark for days, according to the World Resources Institute.
About 8 million diesel pumps already in use could be replaced economically now, said Pashupathy Gopalan, SunEdison’s regional head. The ministry’s Kapoor estimates another 700,000 diesel pumps are bought every year in India that could be displaced with solar.
“It’s a phenomenally strong growth market for solar energy,” said Gopalan of SunEdison, the world’s second-biggest contractor of photovoltaic plants, according to IHS Inc. The company introduced a solar water pump in India in November.
Revenue growth from the solar business at Jain Irrigation has outpaced its food and irrigation products by more than double since 2009, according to its annual report. Jain spokesmen didn’t respond to two e-mails and a phone call seeking comment. Jain climbed as much as 2.5 percent to a two-week high today and closed up 0.8 percent to 63.50 rupees in Mumbai. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex advanced 0.3 percent.
Funding Growth
Claro Energy plans to raise additional funding this year as it quadruples installations to more than 1,300 pumps, Director Soumitra Mishra said by e-mail.
Solar pumping may have far-reaching impacts on agriculture in India, where monsoon rains dictate sowing cycles of crops such as rice, soybeans and peanuts, said Avinash Kishore, an associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi.
In the fertile east, solar pumping could reduce floods and boost rice and wheat harvests, said Tushaar Shah, a senior fellow at Colombo, Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute.
‘A Godsend’
In water-stressed regions including Rajasthan, home to the biggest state solar-pump program, the project is unique in scale, with larger private farmers looking to exchange grid and diesel systems.
“For a single country, a single program, this is the largest project in the world for solar pumps,” Grinzinger of Lorentz said.
Yet it may also encourage farmers to overdraw water because the cost of running the sun-powered machines is negligible.
“You have to be careful. All sorts of possibilities come up as costs come down,” Shah said. “For water-abundant, especially flood-prone areas of eastern India, solar pumps can be a godsend.”
Copyright 2014 Bloomberg
Lead image: Taj Mahal via Shutterstock
Ref. Engineering For Change
The government is looking to swap 26 million groundwater pumps for more efficient irrigation models powered by the sun. If successful, crop production could rise in India, where farms suffer from blackouts and volatile fuel costs. It would also save about $6 billion a year in power and diesel subsidies.
Companies targeting the market include BlackRock Inc.- backed SunEdison Inc., Asia’s top irrigation-equipment maker Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd., Claro Energy Pvt., whose investors include Standard Chartered Plc Managing Director Arun Singhal, and the solar unit of the Tata group, India’s biggest conglomerate.
“The potential is huge,” Tarun Kapoor, joint secretary at India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said in an interview. “Irrigation pumps may be the single largest application for solar in the country.”
Asia’s second-most populous nation will draw 100 billion rupees ($1.6 billion) of investment in the next five years as the first 200,000 most easily replaceable pumps are switched to solar, the government estimates. That will relieve an overburdened power-transmission grid built mostly in the 1960s that’s prone to failures.
A risk in converting to solar pumps is that farmers may use excessive amounts of water because the devices have almost no operating costs. To avoid that, farmers must use water-saving drip irrigation in exchange for accepting subsidies to buy solar water pumps.
One who has already seen the benefits of switching over is O.V.R. Somasundaram, a 67-year-old who grows coconuts, nutmeg and cocoa in southern India. He invested two years ago in a solar pump from St. Peters, Missouri-based SunEdison.
Snake-Bite Risk
Somasundaram’s 75 acres of farmland in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, used to be dependent on electricity from the state, sometimes only available four hours a day from an antiquated grid. When the power came on, it was often at night, meaning workers risked snake bites as they wandered into dark fields.
“Crops need water,” he said in an interview in Chennai. “My crops would have failed if I hadn’t opted for a solar pump.”
Somasundaram now gets water when he needs it, throughout the year when the sun is out, and without the fuel costs of a diesel generator. He irrigates a third of his holdings with the system, which cost 400,000 rupees after 60 percent was subsidized.
‘Break Link’
The new water reliability from a technology that moves away from older energy sources will allow him to plant an extra crop, black peppers. About 3,000 saplings are to be sowed by March.
Using fossil fuel-based power to pump well, canal and farm water also contributes to climate change, said Aaron Mandell, chairman of WaterFX, which sells solar desalination technology.
Let’s “break the link between carbon-based fuels and additional water production,” Mandell said. “The best way to do this is for the water industry to begin to take advantage of the cost reductions that have already occurred in renewable energy.”
The cost of photovoltaic panels that have slumped by half since 2010 and government subsidies mean the payback period of a solar pump system is one to four years, said Ajay Goel, chief executive officer of Tata Power Solar Systems Ltd., a panel maker and contractor that belongs to the $100 billion Tata group, which has businesses including steel, software services and vehicles.
Eliminate Subsidies
The government funds in some states as much as 86 percent of the cost of solar pump systems that in the long run save money because they eliminate $6 billion in annual farm diesel and electricity subsidies, according to Kapoor. That aid helped nudge India’s current-account deficit to a record last year.
The economics will only get better as diesel prices rise and scale brings more efficiencies, eliminating the need for state support, said Stephan Grinzinger, head of sales for Lorentz Vertriebs GmbH, a German maker of solar water pumps.
“Because of the drop in photovoltaic prices, globally we’re selling more solar pumps without subsidies than with,” Grinzinger said. Lorentz operates in 130 countries, he said.
The change comes as production of mainstay crops like wheat, corn and rice stagnate in India, according to a 2012 study of nearly five decades of yield data published by the journal Nature Communications. The reasons included water scarcity and falling groundwater tables.
Farmers needing cash for diesel will often promise their harvest upfront to pay for the fuel, agreeing to low prices for their crops. As water demand rises during the growing season, diesel prices spike on the black market.
Largest Blackout
In 2012, farmers were forced to run electric pumps after a bad monsoon contributed to the world’s biggest blackout that left almost 360 million people in the dark for days, according to the World Resources Institute.
About 8 million diesel pumps already in use could be replaced economically now, said Pashupathy Gopalan, SunEdison’s regional head. The ministry’s Kapoor estimates another 700,000 diesel pumps are bought every year in India that could be displaced with solar.
“It’s a phenomenally strong growth market for solar energy,” said Gopalan of SunEdison, the world’s second-biggest contractor of photovoltaic plants, according to IHS Inc. The company introduced a solar water pump in India in November.
Revenue growth from the solar business at Jain Irrigation has outpaced its food and irrigation products by more than double since 2009, according to its annual report. Jain spokesmen didn’t respond to two e-mails and a phone call seeking comment. Jain climbed as much as 2.5 percent to a two-week high today and closed up 0.8 percent to 63.50 rupees in Mumbai. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex advanced 0.3 percent.
Funding Growth
Claro Energy plans to raise additional funding this year as it quadruples installations to more than 1,300 pumps, Director Soumitra Mishra said by e-mail.
Solar pumping may have far-reaching impacts on agriculture in India, where monsoon rains dictate sowing cycles of crops such as rice, soybeans and peanuts, said Avinash Kishore, an associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi.
In the fertile east, solar pumping could reduce floods and boost rice and wheat harvests, said Tushaar Shah, a senior fellow at Colombo, Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute.
‘A Godsend’
In water-stressed regions including Rajasthan, home to the biggest state solar-pump program, the project is unique in scale, with larger private farmers looking to exchange grid and diesel systems.
“For a single country, a single program, this is the largest project in the world for solar pumps,” Grinzinger of Lorentz said.
Yet it may also encourage farmers to overdraw water because the cost of running the sun-powered machines is negligible.
“You have to be careful. All sorts of possibilities come up as costs come down,” Shah said. “For water-abundant, especially flood-prone areas of eastern India, solar pumps can be a godsend.”
Copyright 2014 Bloomberg
Lead image: Taj Mahal via Shutterstock
Ref. Engineering For Change
Sunday 16 February 2014
"شو بيصدمك أكتر ؟"
بالرغم من انشغالنا في الآونة الأخيرة بمحاسبة شخصيّة لبنانيّة تشارك حاليّا في مباريات الأولمبياد التي تجري في سوتشي (روسيا)، نسينا أنّ نعاني من أزمات على كافّة الأصعدة السياسيّة، الاجتماعيّة والاقتصاديّة.. والحقيقة أنّنا أصبحنا شعب انفعالي يفضّل تغليب العواطف على أيّ شيء آخر. نسينا أنّ نعمة العقل هي أفضل ما وجد في الانسان وأنّ علاقة الانسان بالانسان يحكمها عوامل تفوق تلك التي يحدّدها دين أو عرق أو منطقة أو نسب .. فأصبحنا عند كلّ حدث نفتح كعادتنا كتيب التعليمات الصادر عن الزعيم أو رجل الدين أو قائد العشيرة أو رئيس الجماعة أو العائلة أو الحزب ... لنحكم عليه أو نحدّد طريقة تجاوبنا مع هذا الحدث أو ذاك. وبهذا نكون قد تجاهلنا قواعد الحياة السليمة والصحيّة و تركنا الطبيعة الحيوانيّة تسيطر على معظم جوانب الحياة (بشكل ارادي أو لا ارادي) .
تعليقا على هذه الأحداث ومجرياتها، انتشرت صورة على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي تختصر الحالة التي وصلنا لها، وتكفي لتعبّر عن مدى غرقنا بأزمات كان من الأجدر أن تعالج بعيدا عن وسائل الاعلام أو مواقع الانترنت لأنّها باختصار أحداث تخصّ الاشخاص المعنيين بها فقط لا غير.
هذه الصورة تعبّر عن التناقض الذي يعيشه شعب لبنان "العظيم" الذي ضيّع البوصلة، ليجد نفسه عالق بدوامّة هو بغنى عنها. الصورة من صفحة STOP CULTURAL TERRORISM على موقع الفايسبوك.
Sunday 9 February 2014
طريق من ذهب - جزء 2
وما عادت تنفع الكلمات ..
فكتابات العاشق ما زالت تتمايل مع النّسمات،
تبحث عن أوّل الكلام،
تجد رفات قصيدة نثرت أبياتها بين الوديان،
ذهبت مع الريح .. خطفها النسيان ..
تجاوزت حدود الأرض والسماء
تزهر في كلّ يوم .. معان جديدة للحبّ والبهاء
تنشر عطرها على الطرقات ..
وما هي الّا لحظات،
تصبح رسائل عشق على الشرفات ..
© م.ز.
Thursday 23 January 2014
Les panneaux PV sur les Parcmètres
Les modules solaires photovoltaïques se sont d'abord développés dans des applications très variées non connectées au réseau électrique, soit parce qu'il n'y a aucun réseau disponible (satellites, mer, montagne, désert…), soit parce que le raccordement reviendrait trop cher par rapport à la puissance nécessaire (balises, horodateur (ou Parcmètre), abris-bus, téléphone mobile…); dans ce cas, on utilise des appareils électriques adaptés au courant continu livrés par les modules. De nombreux constructeurs ont également développé des lampadaires solaires fonctionnant à partir de modules solaires photovoltaïques.
Parcmètre à Beirut
Il reste à trouver si ces panneaux sont justement orientés au soleil (e.g. Orientation of the street, Solar Azimuth, Solar Elevation from horizon, Azimuth of PV, and Tilt angle of PV)
Sunday 12 January 2014
Monday 6 January 2014
CUT BEFORE WASHING OR WEARING .. OR CROSSING SECURITY CHECKPOINTS !!! [LB]
This evening while ironing, I found this piece of white label (JG) inside my sweater:
I did a very quick search on Google and found that this is an anti-theft sensor that is sewn into the garment made to set off alarms when you walk through them (Askville by Amazon)
Another site posted something about RFID security tags or Radio-Frequency Identification in old army clothes.
In fact, this electronic label security tag passed all checkpoints without any alarm notification. I think this should not be acceptable especially that the number of security checkpoints is increasing in our country due to the current unstable situations !
At the end, I wish my country a Happy and Safe New Year, and ask God to protect us all.
However, what really came to my attention - as an electrical engineer - is the electronic circuit that was hidden inside!
Another site posted something about RFID security tags or Radio-Frequency Identification in old army clothes.
In fact, this electronic label security tag passed all checkpoints without any alarm notification. I think this should not be acceptable especially that the number of security checkpoints is increasing in our country due to the current unstable situations !
At the end, I wish my country a Happy and Safe New Year, and ask God to protect us all.
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