Today, I learned that:

The interest for solving riddles is big among my readers, and the first correct solution to The pill roulette was submitted by Barbara and her colleagues at Torpaskolan in Gothenburg, Sweden. Congratulations to all you clever people! And here comes the …

Solution to The pill roulette, posted on 2016-02-21

• Divide the eight pills into three different piles, two having three pills each and one with two pills.
• Place one pile with three pills on the left pan of the balance scale and the other pile of three pills on the right pan.
• If the weighing results in equality, then we know that all those six pills are also equal and none is poisonous. A second weighing of the remaining two pills indicates which pill is the poisonous one, since it is a little heavier.
• However, if the first weighing results in that the total mass (“weight”) of one pile with three pills is heavier than the other pile of three, then we know that both the lighter pile of three and the sided two pills are all normal pills without any poision. Thus concentrate on the heaviest pile of three, one of the pills in it is the poisonous one. Take any two of those three pills and place one each on either pan of the balance scale. If this second weighing results in equality, both of the two pills are OK, and the sided third pill is the poisonous one. But if one of the two pills on the scale is heavier than the other one, it is the poisionous one!

A new riddle can be found at the end of today’s blog.

The Internet of Things

Last week was a busy one in Barcelona, Spain, where the Mobile World Congress gathered many people to learn and spread the word about the current state of affairs. Today, I will restrict the field to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), which is the increasing number of appliances, gadgets, vehicles, etc. that connect and interchange information. Radio Sweden’s weekly financial update was entirely dedicated to IoT, giving specialists from Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, and Oracle a chance to share their thoughts. For the complete program, listen to reference # 1 below, but if you do not cope very well with the Swedish language, I will give you some of what was discussed here:

• IoT has been around for quite a while, although in a unorganized manner, through all the sensors that have reported various parameter values to centralized locations, which evolved to machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and now IoT.
• Built-in sensors in our homes will warn us when all is not the way it should be, e.g. if there are leaks of water, gas, etc., and instead of us having to call for someone to come and help us during normal business hours, we will receive a message telling us about the current situation and asking us about when that someone would be welcome to come to our home and solve the problem.
• The self-driving cars will be upon us soon.
• Provided that we can guarantee that the communications are resistant to hacker attacks, people are willing to share the biomedical data remotely. And the 5G networks that soon will be available are said to offer so much more security than today’s technologies, because already from the start 5G has been created to serve IoT well, and not be just another broadband communication technology.
• A test with connected garbage cans in Germany, where the garbage only was collected when the cans called and informed that they were full, showed a 50 % reduction in costs in relation to the traditional scheduled garbage collections.
• If we compare the development of applications for IoT between USA and Western Europe, then there is an interesting remark. Whereas the American development is more concentrated to big corporations, in Western Europe there are many small companies involved and their flexibility and speed can result in launches of new products well ahead of their American competitors. Furthermore, we can already see a trend where small European companies win over their Asian competitors in providing products in smaller volumes tailored to their customers’ needs.
• I already talked about 5G in my post on 2016-01-24, citing applications that demand the high speed of a 5G network to function adequately. Look at references #2 and #3 below, where it is explicitly shown in text, photos and videos from Barcelona.
• Our pets will inform us where they are, how they are, if they are hungry, etc.

Riddle # 3 (The fast mover)
What can go from there to here by disappearing and then go from here to there by appearing? A solution to this riddle will be published next Saturday, 2016-03-05. The first person that comes across the correct solution and sends it to medieborgaren@sjson.com will receive an honorary mention.

Slutligen, Ordalaget har gjort det igen! Igår gav de oss ett nyord för en falsk ID-handling, en s.k. legimitation.

… That’s what I learned in school ! … Slut för idag, tack för idag !

Refs.:

1: Sakernas internet och framtiden

2: 5G was the real star of Mobile World Congress

3: A true 5G demo

4: Legimitation

+: What did you learn in school today ?