Who Do You Want to Be When You Die?

Have you ever asked yourself this question? I think this is the most important question a human being can ask himself. If you never did, it's high time you do. And you should ask yourself several times a day: "Is what I am doing right now congruent with who I want to be when I die?" If the answer is yes, then fine. If the answer is no then you shouldn't be doing it.

Everytime you ask this question you are actually checking that you are on the right path to reach your ultimate goal. You might already be the person you want to be when you die, and this is great. It's great because you never know when you will die. So whatever happens you'll always be remembered as that person that you wanted to be remembered as since you already are.

Most people don't have a clear answer to the question. And this is fine. When you think about it, a lot of people died without even asking themselves the question once. So you already are further than a lot of people in the process of reaching that goal. Getting a clear answer, though, is very important. It is like setting your ultimate life goal. Obviously if you don't know where you're shooting at, the odds of shooting on target are against you. Hence the importance of knowing in which direction to take your life.

The key to getting a clear answer is .
Have you ever asked yourself this question? I think this is the most important question a human being can ask himself. If you never did, it's high time you do. And you should ask yourself several times a day: "Is what I am doing right now congruent with who I want to be when I die?" If the answer is yes, then fine. If the answer is no then you shouldn't be doing it.Everytime you ask this question you are actually checking that you are on the right path to reach your ultimate goal. You might already be the person you want to be when you die, and this is great. It's great because you never know when you will die. So whatever happens you'll always be remembered as that person that you wanted to be remembered as since you already are.

Most people don't have a clear answer to the question. And this is fine. When you think about it, a lot of people died without even asking themselves the question once. So you already are further than a lot of people in the process of reaching that goal. Getting a clear answer, though, is very important. It is like setting your ultimate life goal. Obviously if you don't know where you're shooting at, the odds of shooting on target are against you. Hence the importance of knowing in which direction to take your life.

The key to getting a clear answer is to identify your values. Once you know your values and which ones are most important, instead of asking "is what I am doing right now congruent with who I want to be when I die?" you will ask yourself "is what I am doing right now [insert value here]?"

My personal values, in order of most important to least important, are :

Health
Honesty
Intelligence
Love
Happiness
Personal Growth
Success
Be the best
Passion
Contribution

Knowing this and deciding to stick to it is extremely empowering. Whenever I find myself unable to decide what to do, or if I'm in a situation which doesn't feel right, I just start asking myself a series of questions: "is what I am doing right now healthy?", "is what I am doing right now honest?", etc … If it doesn't balance out, then it is not me, nor is it who I want to be when I die. So I either don't do what I was about to do, or I try to get out of the situation. My values define me, they define who I want to be and who I will be.

We've already talked about beliefs. We've seen that they can help us get tangible results. Now asking the question of who we want to be when we die brings up the topic of values. Values act deeper than beliefs. Changing your values, knowing your values and sticking to them will help you feel good about yourself, it will help in any decision-making process and in goal setting. So the next question is "how do I identify and define my values?" This will be the topic of another article. Stay tuned.

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Ambient Intelligence: Snowboarding To The New Frontier

Think how many lives could be saved if emergency services were alerted the moment a pedestrian is run over. Think how much more fun snowboarding could be if you could emote your feelings electronically to ski-buddies. Breakthroughs in capturing and transmitting ambient intelligence could make these scenarios a reality.
The My Space/Facebook phenomenon has shown how we love to share personal information. But will we take the next step and share our feelings and emotions across the ether?

Whether it is sensors on our skin, in our clothing or embedded in the environment, research into ambient intelligence is advancing in leaps and bounds. We could soon be using technology in a whole new, human-centric way.

But before we can fully interact in a responsive electronic environment, a number of obstacles need to be overcome. For example, the development of miniaturised, unobtrusive hardware, clever interfaces, data-secure systems, autonomous and flexible network protocols, and more efficient wireless infrastructures.

There are already diverse applications using ambient technology on the market, but one crucial sticking point is that few of them are fully integrated into wireless communication systems. European researchers have been addressing this outstanding issue.

"The idea is to integrate sensor networks into wireless communication systems and to 'capture' the user's environment, perhaps using a mobile phone as a gateway, and then transmit this context to a service platform to deliver a personalised service and act on situations," says Laurent Herault, project coordinator of a research scheme developing new ways of capturing ambient intelligence in post-3G mobile communication systems through wireless sensor networks.

Remote emoting

The context captured can be an environmental one, such as location, but also the subject's emotional context - what is known as the "physiological state".

"We capture physiological parameters, such as temperature, heart rate and skin conductance levels [measuring sweat gland activity]," says Herault who heads the e-Sense project. "We analyse the evolution of these signals and the function of emotional input. For instance, we show [people] films and we analyse their reaction via sensors. We can determine if a person is afraid, happy, sad…"

The potential for applications is vast: it goes from entertainment, to e-health and safety, and industrial applications, such as remote asset monitoring. The consortium behind this, which includes a number of European universities, research institutes and companies, such as Telefonica, IBM, Fujitsu, Thales, Nokia Siemens Networks, EADS and Mitsubishi, has developed 26 scenarios and 16 audiovisual showcases demonstrating the use of sensor networks to capture ambient intelligence and use it in mobile communications.

Perhaps the most obvious scenarios focus on emergency situations, with systems contributing to improving the response of emergency services to car crashes and other accidents. Other applications also include leisure and sport.

"We can measure the feelings you experience while skiing, such as acceleration, speed and happiness. This can be useful if you want to share your experiences with friends," says Herault.

The EU-funded e-Sense also carried out studies on the acceptance of such technologies and their societal impact. Most of these were positive, with the best results coming from Nordic countries on healthcare, sport and entertainment applications.

Breakthrough science

The project has also achieved a number of technical breakthroughs with wider impact on the development of ambient intelligence. E-Sense focused on developing radio components, which are known to be the power consumption bottleneck in wireless sensor networks. So it has developed very small sensor nodes that consume up to ten times less power than the current state-of-the-art systems.

"We have developed an ultra-low-powered implementation of the ZigBee system and achieved our aim of 20 nanojoules per transmitted bit, which is significantly better than the energy efficiency of any chip on the market today," says Herault.

E-Sense has also defined an architecture which is adaptable to every module and every scenario, increasing the versatility and efficiency of communications. "We have developed an end-to-end system architecture which we call 'e-Stack', a very generic protocol stack with different subsystems: a connectivity subsystem, a middleware subsystem, an application subsystem and a management subsystem," says Herault.

"All subsystems are compatible and e-Stack is effectively a bit like Lego. It is a toolbox of protocol elements which can easily be connected to other elements, in order to have the most efficient protocol stack for your specific application, in terms of energy consumption and bit rate. The defined architecture also extends to beyond-3G systems and platforms, specifying an innovative interface and middleware solution."

New horizons

The e-Sense project, backed by the EU's FP6 funding programme, concluded at the end of 2007. But a new project under FP7, called Sensei, will take research a step further by integrating the powerful network islands made up of different protocol elements into the web.

"We believe that, in the future, most requests on the internet will be to obtain information originating from sensors," says Herault.

The consortium of 20 new partners behind Sensei, which includes Nokia, Ericsson and SAP, also intends to create a new Industrial Standardisation Group, under the guidance of the European telecommunications Standards Institute, with the aim of creating a European standard for wireless sensor networks.

All this could mean that in the not-so-distant future, you could use the internet to keep in touch with friends and family 24/7, detecting where they are, what they are doing and, crucially, how they feel. So, no need to rack your brains to come up with original Facebook status updates anymore

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Oliver Stone's Presidential Ambition

US film director Oliver Stone arrives at Apiay military base in Villavicencio Dec. 31, 2007

Oliver Stone isn't a fan of the decision to invade Iraq, but in his next film he wants to render "a fair, true portrait" of President Bush, Variety reported. "How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?" Mr. Stone asked. "It's like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I'll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own, with the stunning, pre-emptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors." If financing materializes, "Bush," starring Josh Brolin, above, as the president in a screenplay written by Stanley Weiser, who wrote "Wall Street" with Mr. Stone, will go before the cameras in April and could be in theaters by Election Day or by the inauguration of the next president. "I'm a dramatist who is interested in people," Mr. Stone said, "and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison and Alexander the Great."

Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Center' Opens at No. 3

Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," the 9/11 rescue drama from Paramount starring Nicolas Cage, placed an underwhelming No. 3 at the box office over the weekend, but its $19 million gross far exceeded the opening weekend of last spring's "United 93," the first Hollywood movie to tackle the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Everyone was wondering what the effect of the Heathrow incident would have on the grosses," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Company, which tracks box-office results. "I think it may have helped, by making the movie that more relevant."

"Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," the Columbia Pictures comedy starring Will Ferrell as a Nascar racer, held on as the nation's most popular movie through its second weekend, grossing $23 million, while the teenage dance romance "Step Up," from Buena Vista Pictures, opened to $21.1 million.

Paramount executives said they had positioned "World Trade Center," which opened on Wednesday, to benefit from strong word of mouth and a paucity of serious movies on the late-summer release schedule.

"Next week you have 'Snakes on a Plane,' which has a very targeted, specific audience, and other than that, you don't have anything else vying for the attention of adults," said Rob Moore, president for worldwide marketing, distribution and home entertainment at Paramount. "This is a very different, unique movie - the issues it deals with, how emotional it is - and when you play to an older audience, you really do have the luxury of time. I'd never tell you that with 'Nacho Libre' we had the luxury of time. That is why we picked the August release date, and why we picked the Wednesday opening."

The $19 million total was Mr. Stone's best three-day opening weekend, according to Exhibitor Relations. For the five-day period "World Trade Center" took in $26.8 million. By comparison, "United 93," from Universal, which opened on April 28, took in $11.5 million on its opening weekend and grossed only $31.5 million domestically.

In New York, where Paramount treaded gingerly in marketing the film for obvious reasons, "World Trade Center" performed particularly well, Mr. Moore said: grosses from the New York metropolitan area exceeded the Los Angeles box office by 10 percent. By contrast, he said, Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" took in 52 percent more in Los Angeles than New York on its opening weekend, and "Talladega Nights" took in 40 percent more in Los Angeles.

"Everything that we hoped about the movie has started to happen, and now it's about 'Can you still in this day and age have a movie that can be propelled by word of mouth?' " Mr. Moore said. "You take the movie Oliver made, the initial turnout, the response of the audience and critics, and all of that feels, to us, that we should be able to play and not have a movie that falls 65 percent from Week 1 to 2 and then does all of its business in two weekends. This to us was always a movie that should have exceptional hold. We think it should play for a very long time."

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