English Premier League

The Premier League (officially known as the Barclays Premier League for sponsorship reasons,colloquially known as The Premiership), is an English professional league for football clubs. At the top of the English football league system, it is the country's primary football competition. The Premier League is currently contested by 20 clubs, operating a system of promotion and relegation with The Football League, English football's governing body. Seasons run from August to May, with teams playing 38 games each.

The competition formed as the FA Premier League on 20 February 1992 and the first games were played on 15 August that year, following the decision of clubs in the Football League First Division to break away from The Football League to take advantage of a lucrative television rights deal; The Football League had served as England and Wales' primary football competition since 1888. Since then, the Premier League has become the world's most watched sporting league and the most lucrative football league, with cumulative club revenues of around £1.4 billion. The league is
a corporation with the 20 clubs acting as shareholders.

A total of 40 clubs have competed in the Premier League, but only four have won the title:Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers, Arsenal, and Chelsea. The current Premier League champions are Manchester United, who won their ninth title in the 2006–07 season, the most of any Premier League team.


History:

The 1980s had marked a low point for English football. Stadiums were crumbling, supporters endured poor facilities, hooliganism was rife, and English clubs were banned from European competition following the events at Heysel in 1985. The Football League First Division, which had been the top level of English football since 1888, was well behind leagues such as Italy's Serie A and Spain's La Liga in attendances and revenues, and several top English players had moved abroad. However, by the turn of the 1990s the downward trend was starting to reverse; England had been successful in the 1990 FIFA World Cup, reaching the semi-finals. UEFA, European football's governing body, lifted the five-year ban on English clubs playing in European competitions in 1990 and the Taylor Report on stadium safety standards, which proposed expensive upgrades to create all-seater stadiums, was published in January of that year.

Television money had also become much more important; the Football League received
£6.3million for a two-year agreement in 1986, but when that deal was renewed in 1988, the price rose to £44m over four years. The 1988 negotiations were the first signs of a breakaway league; ten clubs threatened to leave and form a "super league", but were eventually persuaded to stay. As stadiums improved and match attendance and revenues rose, the country's top teams again considered leaving the Football League in order to capitalise on the growing influx of money being pumped into the sport.

Formula One

    Formula One, abbreviated to F1, is the highest class of auto racing defined by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), motor sport's world governing body. The "formula" in the name is a set of rules which all participants and cars must meet. The F1 world championship season consists of a series of races, known as Grands Prix, held usually on purpose-built circuits, and in a few cases on closed city streets. The results of each race are combined to determine two annual World Championships, one for drivers and one for constructors.

It is a massive television event, with millions of people watching each race in two hundred countries. The cars race at high speeds, often greater than 320 km/h (200 mph) and are capable of pulling up to 4 g in some corners. The performance of the cars is highly dependent on electronics, aerodynamics, suspension and tyres. The formula has seen many evolutions and changes through the history of the sport.

Europe is Formula One's traditional centre and remains its leading market. However, Grands Prix are held all over the world and, with new races in Bahrain, China, Malaysia, Turkey and the United States since 1999, its scope continues to expand with Singapore scheduled to hold the first night race in 2008 and India being added to the schedule starting in 2010. Of the seventeen races in 2007, nine are outside Europe. As the world's most expensive sport, its economic effect is significant, and its financial and political battles are widely observed. Its high profile and popularity makes it an obvious merchandising environment, which leads to very high investments from sponsors, translating into extremely high budgets for the constructor teams. In recent years several teams have gone bankrupt or been bought out by other companies. The current F1 champion was Kimi Raikkonen of Finnland who had drive the car of Ferrari.

The sport is regulated by the FIA. Formula One's commercial rights are vested in the Formula One Group.


History:

    The Formula One series has its roots in the European Grand Prix Motor Racing (q.v. for pre-1947 history) of the 1920s and 1930s. The "formula" is a set of rules which all participants and cars must meet. Formula One was a new formula agreed after World War II in 1946, with the first non-championship races being held that year. A number of Grand Prix racing organisations had laid out rules for a World Championship before the war, but due to the suspension of racing during the conflict, the World Drivers' Championship was not formalised until 1947. The first world championship race was held at Silverstone, United Kingdom in 1950. A championship for constructors followed in 1958. National championships existed in South Africa and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. Non-championship Formula One races were held for many years but due to the rising cost of competition, the last of these occurred in 1983.

The sport's title, Formula One, indicates that it is intended to be the most advanced and most competitive of the many racing formulae.

Mobile Phone

    The mobile phone, cellular phone, or simply cell phone is a long-range, portable electronic device used for mobile communication that uses a network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. In addition to the standard voice function of a telephone, current mobile phones can support many additional services such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) (the exception is satellite phones).


History:

    There is one U.S. patent, Patent Number 887357 for a wireless telephone, issued 1908 to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as we know it today. However, the introduction of cells for mobile phone base stations, invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T, was further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held cellular radio devices have been available since 1973. Due to their low establishment costs and rapid deployment, mobile phone networks have since spread rapidly throughout the world, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.[citation needed]

In 1945, the zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced. 0G mobile telephones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not officially categorized as mobile phones, since they did not support the automatic change of channel frequency during calls, which allows the user to move from one cell (the base station coverage area) to another cell, a feature called "handover".[citation needed]

In 1984, Bell Labs invented such a "call handoff" feature, which allowed mobile-phone users to travel through several cells during the same conversation. Motorola is widely considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Motorola manager Martin Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973.

The first commercial cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation) with the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in 1981. This was followed by a boom in mobile telephone usage, particularly in Northern Europe.[citation needed]

The first "modern" network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was launched by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard which also marked the introduction of competition in mobile telecoms when Radiolinja challenged incumbent Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) who ran a 1G NMT network. A decade later, the first commercial launch of 3G (Third Generation) was again in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. Until the early 1990s, most mobile phones were too large to be carried in a jacket pocket, so they were typically installed in vehicles as car phones. With the miniaturization of digital components, mobile phones have become increasingly handy over the years.

Today, video and TV services are driving forward third generation (3G) deployment. And in the future, low cost, high speed data will driveforward the fourth generation (4G) as short-range communication emerges.Service and application ubiquity, with a high degree of personalization and synchronization between various user appliances,will be another driver. At the same time, it is probable that the radio access network will evolve from a centralized architecture to a distributed one.

SIM

    A Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) is part of a removable smart card ICC (Integrated Circuit Card), also known as SIM Cards, for mobile cellular telephony devices such as mobile computers and mobile phones. SIM cards securely store the service-subscriber key (IMSI) used to identify a subscriber. The SIM card allows users to change phones by simply removing the SIM card from one mobile phone and inserting it into another mobile phone or broadband telephony device.

SIM cards are available in two standard sizes. The first is the size of a credit card (85.60 mm × 53.98 mm x 0.76 mm). The newer, more popular miniature-version has a width of 25 mm, a height of 15 mm, and a thickness of 0.76 mm. However most SIM cards are supplied as a full-sized card with the smaller card held in place by a few plastic links and can be easily broken off to be used in a phone that uses the smaller SIM.

The first SIM Card was made in 1991, with Munich smart card maker Giesecke & Devrient selling the first 300 SIM cards to Finnish wireless network operator Elisa Oyj (formerly Radiolinja). W-SIM is a SIM card which also integrates core cellular technology into the card itself.


Uses:

    The use of SIM cards is mandatory in GSM devices. The equivalent of a SIM in UMTS is called the Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM), whereas the Removable User Identity Module (RUIM) is more popular in CDMA-based devices. Many CDMA-based standards do not include any such card, and the service is bound to a unique identifier contained in the handset itself.

The Satellite phone networks Iridium (satellite), Thuraya and Inmarsat's BGAN also use SIM cards. Sometimes these SIM cards work in regular GSM phones and also allows GSM customers to roam in satellite networks by using their own SIM card in a satellite phone.

EDGE Technology

    Enhanced Data rates for GSM Environment (EDGE) or Enhanced GPRS (EGPRS), is a digital mobile phone technology that allows increased data transmission rates and improved data transmission reliability. Although technically a 3G network technology, it is generally classified as the unofficial standard 2.75G, due to its slower network speed. EDGE has been introduced into GSM networks around the world since 2003, initially in North America.

EDGE can be used for any packet switched application, such as an Internet connection. High-speed data applications such as video services and other multimedia benefit from EGPRS' increased data capacity. EDGE Circuit Switched is a possible future development.

EDGE Evolution continues in Release 7 of the 3GPP standard providing doubled performance e.g. to complement High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA).


Technology:

    EDGE/EGPRS is implemented as a bolt-on enhancement 2G and 2.5G GSM and GPRS networks, making it easier for existing GSM carriers to upgrade to it. EDGE/EGPRS is a superset to GPRS and can function on any network with GPRS deployed on it, provided the carrier implements the necessary upgrade.

Although EDGE requires no hardware or software changes to be made in GSM core networks, base stations must be modified. EDGE compatible transceiver units must be installed and the base station subsystem (BSS) needs to be upgraded to support EDGE. New mobile terminal hardware and software is also required to decode/encode the new modulation and coding schemes and carry the higher user data rates to implement new services.

In addition to Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK), EDGE uses higher-order PSK/8 phase shift keying (8PSK) for the upper five of its nine modulation and coding schemes. EDGE produces a 3-bit word for every change in carrier phase. This effectively triples the gross data rate offered by GSM. EDGE, like GPRS, uses a rate adaptation algorithm that adapts the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) according to the quality of the radio channel, and thus the bit rate and robustness of data transmission. It introduces a new technology not found in GPRS, Incremental Redundancy, which, instead of retransmitting disturbed packets, sends more redundancy information to be combined in the receiver. This increases the probability of correct decoding.

EDGE can carry data speeds up to 236.8 kbit/s for 4 timeslots (theoretical maximum is 473.6 kbit/s for 8 timeslots) in packet mode and will therefore meet the International Telecommunications Union's requirement for a 3G network, and has been accepted by the ITU as part of the IMT-2000 family of 3G standards. It also enhances the circuit data mode called HSCSD, increasing the data rate of this service.

GSM Technology

    Global System for Mobile communications (GSM: originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. Its promoter, the GSM Association, estimates that 82% of the global mobile market uses the standard . GSM is used by over 2 billion people across more than 212 countries and territories. Its ubiquity makes international roaming very common between mobile phone operators, enabling subscribers to use their phones in many parts of the world. GSM differs from its predecessors in that both signaling and speech channels are digital call quality, and so is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system. This has also meant that data communication were built into the system using the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).

The key advantage of GSM systems to consumers has been better voice quality and low-cost alternatives to making calls, such as the Short message service (SMS, also called "text messaging"). The advantage for network operators has been the ease of deploying equipment from any vendors that implement the standard. Like other cellular standards, GSM allows network operators to offer roaming services so that subscribers can use their phones on GSM networks all over the world.

Newer versions of the standard were backward-compatible with the original GSM phones. For example, Release '97 of the standard added packet data capabilities, by means of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). Release '99 introduced higher speed data transmission using Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE).


History:

    In 1982, the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) created the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) to develop a standard for a mobile telephone system that could be used across Europe. In 1987, a memorandum of understanding was signed by 13 countries to develop a common cellular telephone system across Europe.

In 1989, GSM responsibility was transferred to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and phase I of the GSM specifications were published in 1990. The first GSM network was launched in 1991 by Radiolinja in Finland with joint technical infrastructure maintenance from Ericsson. By the end of 1993, over a million subscribers were using GSM phone networks being operated by 70 carriers across 48 countries.

GPRS Technology

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a Mobile Data Service available to users of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and IS-136 mobile phones. GPRS data transfer is typically charged per kilobyte of transferred data, while data communication via traditional circuit switching is billed per minute of connection time, independent of whether the user has actually transferred data or has been in an idle state. GPRS can be used for services such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) access, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and for Internet communication services such as email and World Wide Web access.

2G cellular systems combined with GPRS is often described as "2.5G", that is, a technology between the second (2G) and third (3G) generations of mobile telephony. It provides moderate speed data transfer, by using unused Time division multiple access (TDMA) channels in, for example, the GSM system. Originally there was some thought to extend GPRS to cover other standards, but instead those networks are being converted to use the GSM standard, so that GSM is the only kind of network where GPRS is in use. GPRS is integrated into GSM Release 97 and newer releases. It was originally standardized by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), but now by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).


Basics:

WAP is just a gateway which is used to access Internet via mobilephone and vice-versa. Usually, GPRS data are billed per kilobyte of information transceived, while circuit-switched data connections are billed per second. The latter is inefficient because even when no data are being transferred, the bandwidth is unavailable to other potential users.

The multiple access methods used in GSM with GPRS are based on frequency division duplex (FDD) and FDMA. During a session, a user is assigned to one pair of up-link and down-link frequency channels. This is combined with time domain statistical multiplexing, i.e. packet mode communication, which makes it possible for several users to share the same frequency channel. The packets have constant length, corresponding to a GSM time slot. The down-link uses first-come first-served packet scheduling, while the up-link uses a scheme very similar to reservation ALOHA. This means that slotted Aloha (S-ALOHA) is used for reservation inquiries during a contention phase, and then the actual data is transferred using dynamic TDMA with first-come first-served scheduling.

GPRS originally supported (in theory) Internet Protocol (IP), Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) and X.25 connections. The last has been typically used for applications like wireless payment terminals, although it has been removed from the standard. X.25 can still be supported over PPP, or even over IP, but doing this requires either a router to perform encapsulation or intelligence built in to the end-device/terminal e.g. UE(User Equipment). In practice, when the mobile built-in browser is used, IPv4 is being utilized. In this mode PPP is often not supported by the mobile phone operator, while IPv6 is not yet popular. But if the mobile is used as a modem to the connected computer, PPP is used to tunnel IP to the phone. This allows DHCP to assign an IP Address and then the use of IPv4 since IP addresses used by mobile equipment tend to be dynamic.

TDMA Technology

Time division multiple access (TDMA) is a channel access method for shared medium (usually radio) networks. It allows several users to share the same frequency channel by dividing the signal into different timeslots. The users transmit in rapid succession, one after the other, each using his own timeslot. This allows multiple stations to share the same transmission medium (e.g. radio frequency channel) while using only the part of its bandwidth they require. TDMA is used in the digital 2G cellular systems such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), IS-136, Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) and iDEN, and in the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard for portable phones. It is also used extensively in satellite systems, and combat-net radio systems.

TDMA is a type of Time-division multiplexing, with the special point that instead of having one transmitter connected to one receiver, there are multiple transmitters. In the case of the uplink from a mobile phone to a base station this becomes particularly difficult because the mobile phone can move around and vary the timing advance required to make its transmission match the gap in transmission from its peers.

Features:

Shares single carrier frequency with multiple users
Non-continuous transmission makes handoff simpler
Slots can be assigned on demand in dynamic TDMA
Less stringent power control than CDMA due to reduced intra cell interference
Higher synchronization overhead than CDMA
Advanced equalization is necessary for high data rates
Cell breathing (borrowing resources from adjacent cells) is more complicated than in CDMA
Frequency/slot allocation complexity
Pulsating power envelop: Interference with other devices

CDMA Technology

    Code division multiple access (CDMA) describes a communication channel access principle that employs spread-spectrum technology and a special coding scheme (where each transmitter is assigned a code). In communications technology, there are only three domains that can allow multiplexing to be implemented for more efficient use of the available channel bandwidth and these domains are known as time, frequency and space. CDMA divides the access in signal space. By contrast, time division multiple access (TDMA) divides access by time, while frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) divides it by frequency. CDMA is a form of "spread-spectrum" signaling, since the modulated coded signal has a much higher bandwidth than the data being communicated.

An analogy to the problem of multiple access is a room (channel) in which people wish to communicate with each other. To avoid confusion, people could take turns speaking (time division), speak at different pitches (frequency division), or speak in different directions (spatial division). In CDMA, they would speak different languages. People speaking the same language can understand each other, but not other people. Similarly, in radio CDMA, each group of users is given a shared code. Many codes occupy the same channel, but only users associated with a particular code can understand each other.

Interestingly, CDMA is based on a patent granted in 1942 to two people-one of which was world famous actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr, probably best known for doing one of the first nude scenes in a major motion picture, worked with a partner-composer George Antheil-on a system that would make radio controlled torpedoes more difficult to detect through an early version of frequency hopping. Their system was inspired by the mechanical rolls that make self playing pianos work.

CDMA is also the current name for the cellular technology originally known as IS-95. Developed by Qualcomm and enhanced by Ericsson, CDMA is characterized by high capacity and small cell radius.

CDMA also refers to digital cellular telephony systems that use this multiple access scheme, as pioneered by QUALCOMM, and W-CDMA by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is used in GSM’s UMTS.

CDMA has been used in many communications and navigation systems, including the Global Positioning System and the OmniTRACS satellite system for transportation logistics.

In India, Reliance Telecommunication and Tata Indicom were providing mobile service through CDMA technology.

3G - Mobile Technology

    3G is the third generation of mobile phone standards and technology, after 2G. It is based on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) family of standards under the International Mobile Telecommunications programme, "IMT-2000". 3G technologies enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Typically, they provide service at 5-10 Mb per second.

Unlike IEEE 802.11 networks, 3G networks are wide area cellular telephone networks which evolved to incorporate high-speed internet access and video telephony. IEEE 802.11 (common home Wi-Fi) networks are short range, high-bandwidth networks primarily developed for data.

In December 2005, 100 3G networks were operating in 40 countries, according to the Global mobile Suppliers Association. In Asia, Europe, Canada and the USA, telecommunication companies use W-CDMA technology with the support of around 100 terminal designs to operate 3G mobile networks.


History:

    In Europe, 3G services were introduced starting in March 2003 in the UK and Italy. The European Union Council suggested that the 3G operators should cover 80% of the European national populations by the end of 2005.

Roll-out of 3G networks was delayed in some countries by the enormous costs of additional spectrum licensing fees. See Telecoms crash. In many countries, 3G networks do not use the same radio frequencies as 2G, so mobile operators must build entirely new networks and license entirely new frequencies; an exception is the United States where carriers operate 3G service in the same frequencies as other services. The license fees in some European countries were particularly high, bolstered by government auctions of a limited number of licenses and sealed bid auctions, and initial excitement over 3G's potential. Other delays were due to the expenses of upgrading equipment for the new systems.

By June 2007 the 200 millionth 3G subscriber had been connected. Out of 3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide this is only 6.7%. In the countries where 3G was launched first - Japan and South Korea over half of all subscribers use 3G. In Europe the leading country is Italy with a third of its subscribers migrated to 3G. Other leading countries by 3G migration include UK, Austria and Singapore at the 20% migration level. A confusing statistic is counting CDMA 2000 1x RTT customers as if they were 3G customers. If using this oft-disputed definition, then the total 3G subscriber base would be 475 million at June 2007 and 15.8% of all subscribers worldwide.

EMTEL Ltd, the second largest mobile telecommunications company in Mauritius (next to state owned Cellplus), has established the first commercial Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standard (UMTS) 3G network in Africa (the first test call was made on 16 October 2004). Full commercial services began in November 2004, making this the first commercial African 3G network. In north Africa, the first born baby was sleeping silently in the crib..Morocco in late March 2006, provided by the new company Wana. The other operator in the country should start its network in mid-2007. Vodafone Egypt (also known as CLICK GSM) was to provide the service in Egypt in mid-2006. In early 2007, Vodacom Tanzania switched on its 3G High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) in Dar Es Salaam. It is the second country in Africa with such technology, after South Africa. In March 2007, Nigeria awarded 3G telecommunication licenses to its three major GSM companies and a relatively unknown operator, Alheri Engineering Co. Ltd, to allow them to expand their scope of operation in the industry.Rogers Wireless began implementing 3G HSDPA services in eastern Canada early 2007 in the form of Rogers Vision; expansion into western Canada is expected soon.

Smart Card

    A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC), is defined as any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits which can process information. This implies that it can receive input which is processed - by way of the ICC applications - and delivered as an output. There are two broad categories of ICCs. Memory cards contain only non-volatile memory storage components, and perhaps some specific security logic. Microprocessor cards contain volatile memory and microprocessor components. The card is made of plastic, generally PVC, but sometimes ABS. The card may embed a hologram to avoid counterfeiting.


History:

    The chip card was invented by German rocket scientist Helmut Gröttrup and his colleague Jürgen Dethloff in 1968; the patent was finally approved in 1982. The first mass use of the cards was for payment in French pay phones, starting in 1983 (Télécarte).

Roland Moreno actually patented his first concept of the memory card in 1974. In 1977, Michel Ugon from Honeywell Bull invented the first microprocessor smart card. In 1978, Bull patented the SPOM (Self Programmable One-chip Microcomputer) that defines the necessary architecture to auto-program the chip. Three years later, the very first "CP8" based on this patent was produced by Motorola. Today, Bull has 1200 patents related to smart cards.

The second use was with the integration of microchips into all French debit cards (Carte Bleue) completed in 1992. When paying in France with a Carte Bleue, one inserts the card into the merchant's terminal, then types the PIN, before the transaction is accepted. Only very limited transactions (such as paying small autoroute tolls) are accepted without PIN.

Smart-card-based electronic purse systems (in which value is stored on the card chip, not in an externally recorded account, so that machines accepting the card need no network connectivity) were tried throughout Europe from the mid-1990s, most notably in Germany (Geldkarte), Austria (Quick), Belgium (Proton), the Netherlands (Chipknip and Chipper), Switzerland ("Cash"), Sweden ("Cash"), Finland ("Avant"), UK ("Mondex"), Denmark ("Danmønt") and Portugal ("Porta-moedas Multibanco").

The major boom in smart card use came in the 1990s, with the introduction of the smart-card-based SIM used in GSM mobile phone equipment in Europe. With the ubiquity of mobile phones in Europe, smart cards have become very common.

The international payment brands MasterCard, Visa, and Europay agreed in 1993 to work together to develop the specifications for the use of smart cards in payment cards used as either a debit or a credit card. The first version of the EMV system was released in 1994. In 1998 a stable release of the specifications was available. EMVco, the company responsible for the long-term maintenance of the system, upgraded the specification in 2000 and most recently in 2004. The goal of EMVco is to assure the various financial institutions and retailers that the specifications retain backward compatibility with the 1998 version.

With the exception of countries such as the United States of America and Australia there has been significant progress in the deployment of EMV-compliant point of sale equipment and the issuance of debit and or credit cards adhering the EMV specifications. Typically, a country's national payment association, in coordination with MasterCard International, Visa International, American Express and JCB, develop detailed implementation plans assuring a coordinated effort by the various stakeholders involved.

The backers of EMV claim it is a paradigm shift in the way one looks at payment systems. In countries where banks do not currently offer a single card capable of supporting multiple account types, there may be merit to this statement. Though some banks in these countries are considering issuing one card that will serve as both a debit card and as a credit card, the business justification for this is still quite elusive. Within EMV a concept called Application Selection defines how the consumer selects which means of payment to employ for that purchase at the point of sale.

For the banks interested in introducing smart cards the only quantifiable benefit is the ability to forecast a significant reduction in fraud, in particular counterfeit, lost and stolen. The current level of fraud a country is experiencing, coupled with whether that country's laws assign the risk of fraud to the consumer or the bank, determines if there is a business case for the financial institutions. For example, in Australia the consumer bears the risk of credit card fraud, possibly explaining the lack of progress the banks have made in rolling out smartcards. Some critics claim that the savings are far less than the cost of implementing EMV, and thus many believe that the USA payments industry will opt to wait out the current EMV life cycle in order to implement new, contactless technology.

Smart cards with contactless interfaces are becoming increasingly popular for payment and ticketing applications such as mass transit. Visa and MasterCard have agreed to an easy-to-implement version currently being deployed (2004-2006) in the USA. Across the globe, contactless fare collection systems are being implemented to drive efficiencies in public transit. The various standards emerging are local in focus and are not compatible, though the MIFARE card from Philips has a considerable market share in the US and Europe.

Smart cards are also being introduced in personal identification and entitlement schemes at regional, national, and international levels. Citizen cards, drivers’ licenses, and patient card schemes are becoming more prevalent, and contactless smart cards are being integrated into ICAO biometric passports to enhance security for international travel.

Hyper Text Markup Language

HTML, an initialism of Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of labels (known as tags), surrounded by angle brackets. HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded scripting language code which can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.

HTML is also often used to refer to content of the MIME type text/html or even more broadly as a generic term for HTML whether in its XML-descended form (such as XHTML 1.0 and later) or its form descended directly from SGML (such as HTML 4.01 and earlier).


History:

In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was an independent contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a hypertext system for CERN researchers to use to share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau each submitted separate proposals for an Internet-based hypertext system providing similar functionality. The following year, they collaborated on a joint proposal, the WorldWideWeb (W3) project, which was accepted by CERN.

The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called HTML Tags, first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 22 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Thirteen of these elements still exist in HTML 4.

Berners-Lee considered HTML to be, at the time, an application of SGML, but it was not formally defined as such until the mid-1993 publication, by the IETF, of the first proposal for an HTML specification: Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" Internet-Draft, which included an SGML Document Type Definition to define the grammar. The draft expired after six months, but was notable for its acknowledgment of the NCSA Mosaic browser's custom tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the IETF's philosophy of basing standards on successful prototypes. Similarly, Dave Raggett's competing Internet-Draft, "HTML+ (Hypertext Markup Format)", from late 1993, suggested standardizing already-implemented features like tables and fill-out forms.

After the HTML and HTML+ drafts expired in early 1994, the IETF created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed "HTML 2.0", the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based. Published as Request for Comments 1866, HTML 2.0 included ideas from the HTML and HTML+ drafts. There was no "HTML 1.0"; the 2.0 designation was intended to distinguish the new edition from previous drafts.

Further development under the auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing interests. Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, in 2000, HTML also became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). The last HTML specification published by the W3C is the HTML 4.01 Recommendation, published in late 1999. Its issues and errors were last acknowledged by errata published in 2001.

Sustainable Technology

Sustainable design (also referred to as "green design", "eco-design", or "design for environment") is the art of designing physical objects and the built environment to comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability. It ranges from the microcosm of designing small objects for everyday use, through to the macrocosm of designing buildings, cities, and the earth's physical surface. It is a growing trend within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, graphic design, industrial design, interior design and fashion design.

The essential aim of sustainable design is to produce places, products and services in a way that reduces use of non-renewable resources, minimizes environmental impact, and relates people with the natural environment. Sustainable design is often viewed as a necessary tool for achieving sustainability. It is related to the more heavy-industry-focused fields of industrial ecology and green chemistry, sharing tools such as life cycle assessment and life cycle energy analysis to judge the environmental impact or "greenness" of various design choices.

Sustainable design is a reaction to the global "environmental crisis", i.e., rapid growth of economic activity and human population, depletion of natural resources, damage to ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. Proponents of sustainable design believe that the crisis is in large part caused by conventional design and industrial practices, which disregard the risks and environmental impacts associated with goods and services. Green design is considered a means of reducing or eliminating these impacts while maintaining quality of life by using careful assessment and clever design to substitute less harmful products and processes for conventional ones.

The motivation for sustainable design was articulated famously in E.F.Schumacher's 1973 book Small is Beautiful. Finally, green design is not the attachment or supplement of architectural design, but an integrated design process within architectural design.


Principles:

While the practical application varies among disciplines, some common principles are as follows:

Low-impact materials: choose non-toxic, sustainably-produced or recycled materials which require little energy to process.
Energy efficiency: use manufacturing processes and produce products which require less energy.
Quality and durability: longer-lasting and better-functioning products will have to be replaced less frequently, reducing the impacts of producing replacements.
Design for reuse and recycling: "Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial 'afterlife'.".
Biomimicry: "redesigning industrial systems on biological lines ... enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles...".
Service substitution: shifting the mode of consumption from personal ownership of products to provision of services which provide similar functions, e.g. from a private automobile to a carsharing service. Such a system promotes minimal resource use per unit of consumption (e.g., per trip driven).
Renewability: materials should come from nearby (local or bioregional), sustainably-managed renewable sources that can be composted (or fed to livestock) when their usefulness has been exhausted.

Nano Robotics

Nanorobotics is the technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a nanometres (10-9 metres). More specifically, nanorobotics refers to the still largely hypothetical nanotechnology engineering discipline of designing and building nanorobots. Nanorobots (nanobots, nanoids or nanites) would be typically devices ranging in size from 0.1-10 micrometers and constructed of nanoscale or molecular components. As no artificial non-biological nanorobots have so far been created, they remain a hypothetical concept at this time.

Another definition sometimes used is a robot which allows precision interactions with nanoscale objects, or can manipulate with nanoscale resolution. Following this definition even a large apparatus such as an atomic force microscope can be considered a nanorobotic instrument when configured to perform nanomanipulation. Also, macroscale robots or microrobots which can move with nanoscale precision can also be considered nanorobots.

Nanomachines are largely in the research-and-development phase, but some primitive molecular machines have been tested. An example is a sensor having a switch approximately 1.5 nanometers across, capable of counting specific molecules in a chemical sample. The first useful applications of nanomachines, if such are ever built, might be in medical technology, where they might be used to identify cancer cells and destroy them. Another potential application is the detection of toxic chemicals, and the measurement of their concentrations, in the environment. Recently, Rice University has demonstrated a single-molecule car which is developed by a chemical process and includes buckyballs for wheels. It is actuated by controlling the environmental temperature and by positioning a scanning tunneling microscope tip. Basic nanomachines are also in use in other areas. Nanotechnology coatings are already being used to make clothing with stain-resistant fibers and are used on swim suits to repel water, reduce friction with the water, and allow swimmers to go faster. Nanotech powders are being used to create high-performance sun-screen lotions and nanoparticles are helping to deliver drugs to targeted tissues in the body.

Artifical Intelligence

The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality.

The term artificial intelligence is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: the intelligence that the system demonstrates. Among the traits that researchers hope machines will exhibit are reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence (or "strong AI") has not yet been achieved and is a long-term goal of AI research.

AI research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, economics, control theory, probability, optimization and logic. AI research also overlaps with tasks such as robotics, control systems, scheduling, data mining, logistics, speech recognition, facial recognition and many others.


History:

Samuel Butler first raised the possibility of "mechanical consciousness" in an article signed with the nom de plume Cellarius and headed "Darwin among the Machines", which appeared in the Christchurch, New Zealand, newspaper The Press on 13 June 1863. Butler envisioned mechanical consciousness emerging by means of Darwinian Evolution, specifically by Natural selection, as a form of natural, not artificial, intelligence.

McCorduck (2004), however, writes "Artificial intelligence in one form or another is an idea that has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized." She continues:

"Work toward that end has been a splendid effort, the variety of its form as wondrous as anything humans have conceived; its practitioners as lively a group of poets, dreamers, holy men, rascals, and assorted eccentrics as one could hope to find—not a dullard among them. Its visionaries have lifted our spirits and made us transcend our own species, its poets have told us things about ourselves we never suspected, and its fast talkers have set everybody's teeth on edge."

Beginning with the myth of Pygmalian and Galatea, we have imagined making copies of ourselves, with sacred statues, alchemical beings and charming clockwork automatons. Yet we also have a fear that our creations may turn on us, as in The Golem of Prague and Frankenstein.

In the middle of the 20th century, a handful of scientists explored a new approach to an ancient dream, based on their discoveries in neurology, a new mathematical theory of information, an understanding of control and stability called cybernetics, and above all, by the invention of the digital computer, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning.

In the summer of 1956, at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College, the field of AI research was born. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for many decades, especially John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who founded AI laboratories at MIT, CMU and Stanford. They and their students wrote programs that were, to most people, simply astonishing: computers were solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems and speaking English. By the middle 60s their research was heavily funded by DARPA and they were optimistic about the future of the new field:

1965, H. A. Simon: "[M]achines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do"
1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."
These predictions, and many like them, would not come true. They had failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the problems they faced. In 1974, in response to the criticism of England's Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from Congress to fund more productive projects, DARPA cut off all undirected, exploratory research in AI. This was the first AI Winter.

In the early 80s, the field was revived by the commercial success of expert systems and by 1985 the market for AI had reached more than a billion dollars. Minsky and others warned the community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control and that disappointment was sure to follow. Minsky was right. Beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, more lasting AI Winter began.

In the 90s and early 21st century AI achieved its greatest successes, albeit somewhat behind the scenes. Artificial intelligence was adopted throughout the technology industry, providing the heavy lifting for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and many other areas. The success was due to several factors: the incredible power of computers today (see Moore's law), a greater emphasis on solving specific subproblems, the creation of new ties between AI and other fields working on similar problems, and above all a new commitment by researchers to solid mathematical methods and rigorous scientific standards.

Bio-Technologys

Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science,and medicine. Biotechnology is often used to refer to genetic engineering technology of the 21st century, however the term encompasses a wider range and history of procedures for modifying biological organisms according to the needs of humanity, going back to the initial modifications of native plants into improved food crops through artificial selection and hybridization.

Bioengineering is the science upon which all Biotechnological applications are based. With the development of new approaches and modern techniques, traditional biotechnology industries are also acquiring new horizons enabling them to improve the quality of their products and increase the productivity of their systems.

Before 1971, the term, biotechnology, was primarily used in the food processing and agriculture industries. Since the 1970s, it began to be used by the Western scientific establishment to refer to laboratory-based techniques being developed in biological research, such as recombinant DNA or tissue culture-based processes, or horizontal gene transfer in living plants, using vectors such as the Agrobacterium bacteria to transfer DNA into a host organism. In fact, the term should be used in a much broader sense to describe the whole range of methods, both ancient and modern, used to manipulate organic materials to reach the demands of food production. So the term could be defined as, "The application of indigenous and/or scientific knowledge to the management of (parts of) microorganisms, or of cells and tissues of higher organisms, so that these supply goods and services of use to the food industry and its consumers.

Biotechnology combines disciplines like genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology and cell biology, which are in turn linked to practical disciplines like chemical engineering, information technology, and robotics.


History:

The most practical use of biotechnology, which is still present today, is the cultivation of plants to produce food suitable to humans. Agriculture has been theorized to have become the dominant way of producing food since the Neolithic Revolution. The processes and methods of agriculture have been refined by other mechanical and biological sciences since its inception. Through early biotechnology farmers were able to select the best suited and highest-yield crops to produce enough food to support a growing population. Other uses of biotechnology were required as crops and fields became increasingly large and difficult to maintain. Specific organisms and organism byproducts were used to fertilize, restore nitrogen, and control pests. Throughout the use of agriculture farmers have inadvertently altered the genetics of their crops through introducing them to new environments and breeding them with other plants--one of the first forms of biotechnology.

Cultures such as those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Iran developed the process of brewing beer. It is still done by the same basic method of using malted grains (containing enzymes) to convert starch from grains into sugar and then adding specific yeasts to produce beer. In this process the carbohydrates in the grains were broken down into alcohols such as ethanol. Later other cultures produced the process of Lactic acid fermentation which allowed the fermentation and preservation of other forms of food. Fermentation was also used in this time period to produce leavened bread. Although the process of fermentation was not fully understood until Louis
Pasteur’s work in 1857, it is still the first use of biotechnology to convert a food source into another form. Combinations of plants and other organisms were used as medications in many early civilizations. Since as early as 200 BC, people began to use disabled or minute amounts of infectious agents to immunize themselves against infections. These and similar processes have been refined in modern medicine and have lead to many developments such as antibiotics, vaccines, and other methods of fighting sickness.

In the early twentieth century scientists gained a greater understanding of microbiology and explored ways of manufacturing specific products. In 1917, Chaim Weizmann first used a pure microbiological culture in an industrial process, that of manufacturing corn starch using Clostridium acetobutylicum to produce acetone, which the United Kingdom desperately needed to manufacture explosives during World War I.

The field of modern biotechnology is thought to have largely begun on June 16, 1980, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that a genetically-modified microorganism could be patented in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty. Indian-born Ananda hakrabarty, working for General Electric, had developed a bacterium (derived from the Pseudomonas genus) capable of breaking down crude oil, which he proposed to use in treating oil spills. A university in Florida is now studying ways to prevent tooth decay. They altered the bacteria in the tooth called Streptococcus mutans by stripping it down so it could not produce lactic acid.

Information Technology

Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve information, securely.

Recently it has become popular[citation needed] to broaden the term to explicitly include the field of electronic communication so that people tend to use the abbreviation ICT (Information and Communications Technology), it is common for this to be referred to as IT & T in the Australasia region, standing for Information Technology and Telecommunications.

Today, the term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term is more recognizable than ever before. The information technology umbrella can be quite large, covering many fields. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems.




Professional Organisations :

The Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) is the largest professional body for computing in Canada.
NASSCOM is an association of Indian IT companies.
AITech-Assinform, Information Technology Association is an association of Italian IT companies.
The Computer Society of India (CSI) is the national body representing computer professionals.
The British Computer Society (BCS) is a UK body that represents those working in IT. It is the largest United Kingdom based professional body for computing, with a world-wide membership of over 58,000 members in over 100 countries.
ACM
The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) is an industry trade group for several U.S. information technology companies.
The Australian Computer Society (ACS) is the recognised association for Information & Communications Technology (ICT) professionals in Australia.
The Australian Information Industry Association is the national organisation representing the ICT companies in Australia.
The Philippine Software Industry Association is an association of Philippine IT companies.

Micro Technology

    Microtechnology is technology with features near one micrometre (one millionth of a metre, or 10-6 metre, or 1µm).


History:

    In the 1960s, scientists learned that by arraying large numbers of microscopic transistors on a single chip, microelectronic circuits could be built that dramatically improved performance, functionality, and reliability, all while reducing cost and decreasing volume. This development led to the Information Revolution.

     More recently, scientists have learned that not only electrical devices, but also mechanical devices, may be miniaturized and batch-fabricated, promising the same benefits to the mechanical world as integrated circuit technology has given to the electrical world. While electronics now provide the ‘brains’ for today’s advanced systems and products, micromechanical devices can provide the sensors and actuators — the eyes and ears, hands and feet — which interface to the outside world.

     Today, micromechanical devices are the key components in a wide range of products such as automobile airbags, ink-jet printers, blood pressure monitors, and projection display systems. It seems clear that in the not-too-distant future these devices will be as pervasive as electronics.

Nano Technology

Nanotechnology refers broadly to a field of applied science and technology whose unifying theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, normally 1 to 100 nanometers, and the fabrication of devices within that size range. It is a highly multidisciplinary field, drawing from fields such as applied physics, materials science, interface and colloid science, device physics, supramolecular chemistry (which refers to the area of chemistry that focuses on the noncovalent bonding interactions of molecules), chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering. Much speculation exists as to what may result from these lines of research.

Nanotechnology can be seen as an extension of existing sciences into the nanoscale, or as are casting of existing sciences using a newer, more modern term.

History:

The first use of the concepts in 'nano-technology' (but predating use of that name) was in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and Van der Waals attraction would become more important, etc. This basic idea appears feasible, and exponential assembly enhances it with parallelism to produce a useful quantity of end products. The term "nanotechnology" was defined by Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi in a 1974 paper (N. Taniguchi, "On the Basic Concept of 'Nano-Technology'," Proc. Intl. Conf. Prod. Eng. Tokyo, Part II, Japan Society of Precision Engineering, 1974.) as follows: "'Nano-technology' mainly consists of the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or by one molecule." In the 1980s the basic idea of this definition was explored in much more depth by Dr. K. Eric Drexler, who promoted the technological significance of nano-scale phenomena and devices through speeches and the books Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986) and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, and so the term acquired its current sense. Nanotechnology and nanoscience got started in the early 1980s with two major developments; the birth of cluster science and the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). This development led to the discovery of fullerenes in 1986 and carbon nanotubes a few years later. In another development, the synthesis and properties of semiconductor nanocrystals was studied. This led to a fast increasing number of metal oxide nanoparticles of quantum dots. The atomic force microscope was invented five years after the STM was invented.

Nuclear Technology

    Nuclear technology is technology that involves the reactions of atomic nuclei. It has found applications from smoke detectors to nuclear reactors, and from gun sights to nuclear weapons. There is a great deal of public concern about its possible implications, and every application of nuclear technology is reviewed with care.

History:

    
In 1896, Henri Becquerel was investigating phosphorescence in uranium salts when he discovered a new phenomenon which came to be called radioactivity. He, Pierre Curie and Maria Sklodowska-Curie began investigating the phenomenon. In the process they isolated the element radium, which is highly radioactive. They discovered that radioactive materials produce intense, penetrating rays of several distinct sorts, which they called alpha rays, beta rays and gamma rays. Some of these kinds of radiation could pass through ordinary matter, and all of them could cause damage in large amounts - all the early researchers received various radiation burns, much like sunburn, and thought little of it.

The new phenomenon of radioactivity was seized upon by the manufacturers of quack medicine (as had the discoveries of electricity and magnetism, earlier), and any number of patent medicines and treatments involving radioactivity were put forward. Gradually it came to be realized that the radiation produced by radioactive decay was ionizing radiation, and that quantities too small to burn presented a severe long-term hazard. Many of the scientists working on radioactivity died of cancer as a result of their exposure. Radioactive patent medicines mostly disappeared, but other applications of radioactive materials persisted, such as the use of radium salts to produce glowing dials on meters.

As the atom came to be better understood, the nature of radioactivity became clearer: some atomic nuclei are unstable, and they can decay, releasing energy (in the form of gamma rays, high-energy photons) and nuclear fragments (alpha particles, a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons, and beta particles, high-energy electrons).