DIGITAL ECONOMY

Weekender

Computing components in digital economy

By MICHAEL UGLO
THIS is the fourth in the series of articles on digital economy. We will look at the scientific and architectural components of the digital economy.
For a lay person’s understanding let’s liken digital economy to our social settings. For instance, I come from a village called Oiopongi in the Sinasina-Yongamugl electorate of Chimbu. I know the resources on my land that I own with my family members, including my coffee gardens.
Other things I know are the social and physical environment including the attitude of my people and this gives me an identity and a unique place on the planet earth rotating in the vastness of space.
Science looks at the basic ideas and building blocks of any matter whether solid, liquid or gas. We say something is a plant or an animal, a river flowing or wind blowing, sun shining or lightning striking. There are also metals, rocks sand, mercury which is a liquid metal and clouds up there in the sky. You can use electricity, a satellite taking pictures on the earth and you can make a telephone call.
The above vaguely is what science all about which we categorise into physics, chemistry, biology, geology, environmental sciences, to put order into chaos.
To have a digital economy it is the totality of the economy broken into the very basic components just like in the field of science. We just reduce that to a very basic structure we call primitive data or variable in digital language.
You have an identity in PNG and this is where you are going to be in order to develop your place so we are not seen to duplicate or overlook out of ignorance the resources we have to develop this nation and working towards accruing wealth (saving) and growing richer.
In our last lecture we have looked at how you would use the digital technology to know the price of your sweat and labour to get a directly proportional reward that is fair and just according to international pricing and after knowing that will be your motivating factor to flex your muscles and intellect to work harder and smarter to better your life and living.
When you deploy a von Neumann machine as we defined in the second article titled Modernisation of PNG Economy then this, as we say in computer science, the procedural abstraction, is the vital ingredient you need to computerise the information. So on the outskirts you can already envisage a digital information and therefore a digital economy.
Simply, when a computer programme is written using a modern computer programming language, it has reduced a workload of a manual record and file keeping compounded with an intelligent mind to interpret data and make a decision which we have already seen in our previous lecture that it will be mostly ambiguous and biased views and partiality of human views creep in from the view point of the modern technology.
This discussion is taking us to improve the power or exponents of our decisions by a hundred or thousand fold. This expresses the power of an integral calculus to place in between the points zero(0) and one(1). This is just like true or false, isn’t it?
Please compare this article with the first one which came out on Oct 18 to get the depth of accuracy we are talking about here.
This gives less time for humans to think and make ambiguous decisions but the computer does the thinking and makes the decisions that the human mind cannot reason and is falling short to do so.

Architectural components
For the start of this unit let me refer you to the output device of the terminal of your computing machine like a laptop, desktop, palm top or more simply a smart phone like an iphoneipad or tablet.
These devices’ computing capabilities on the graphical user interface like the graphics can aid you to do very fine scalable computer aided graphics.
These tools made from computer software that reduce bias down to just zero and one so we say it is almost perfect when your eyes try to see it in perspective.
Your eyes are also falling short to comprehend the level of accuracy given their very low power of resolution. Whatever your eyes see will appear as the best because.
The software will also try to make a picture complete like particularly in the early days of TV and video signal receptions on TV screens in which the eyes always add the missing data from the signal and tell the brain to say the information is complete.
This is briefly a picture one can get for the architecture of a digital economy.
In the design of a building when a builder or an architect designs it, the totality of information he needs really places him or her in an advantageous position to design the building.
Thus, working with the best economic ideas inundating this nation we can design our unique economic system.
Once blended with modern technology that will give us the recipe we need to determine our destination if we want to be a well-to-do countries in the world.
The careful outline and detail of an architectural drawing deriving information from the economics and the scientific technologof today is the interfacing protocol we need.
For its establishment key areas such as the distribution system on a local, metropolitan or global network has to be decided for the internet to feed us information.
Our challenge now is to seriously think about engaging in this discussion to make this nation become better than ever before.
Next week we will cover the computerised and engineering components of digital economy.

  • Michael Uglo is an Avioncis and Aircraft Engineering lecturer at the Asia Pacific Institute of Applied Social, Economic and Technical Studies, Port Moresby.

My first visit to Madang’s icon

The Coastwatchers Memorial Light House at Kalibobo, Madang. –Picture courtesy of cpsctech.org

By JONATHAN KO
AS WE eagerly disembarked the 25-seater Divine Word University bus, from across the road opposite the Coast Watchers Hotel, we were confronted with something extraordinary.
It stood boldly upright under the morning sun with its white coat of paint in the openning. Its head is pointy like a candle flame and contains a light bulb. The light bulb is special. It does not stand still and is guarded by a woven wire cage.
It shoots out long rays of orange light at night. Not only that, it also spins around like the light of an ambulance or a police vehicle.
From afar the tall structure appears cylindrical and straight. However, that is not the case. It has eight corners to it. It is like a long octagonal shape that narrows down towards the middle. From the middle towards the bottom, its shape changes as four fins like those of a fish stick out.
One can describe it like a rocket that is ready to be launched. In Papua New Guinea, it is famously known as the Kalibobo Light House.
The lighthouse stands on an octagonal concrete slab. Four concrete footpaths branch outwards equally around, the longest of which led right to us. Some meters out in the area between the footpaths, are four spotlights. Each one contained two lights which face the pointed head of the lighthouse in a worm’s eye view angle.
As I walked down the path towards the lighthouse with my left hand up across in front of my face to shield it from the sun light, I noticed that the grass within the vicinity of the lighthouse was pale brown to almost white. I then picked up the pace, when sweat started oozing from my body.
The scenery beyond the lighthouse made me forget the sun’s heat. The blue glistening sea was so calm and peaceful and inviting as it welcomed me with a blow of cool breeze. When I got closer to the lighthouse, I saw that the fins on the lighthouse have square see-through hollows from one side to the other and each of them contained light bulbs covered on both sides by a see-through glass.
On the side of the lighthouse facing the sea, there was a door. This door is the access to which the lights in the lighthouse are maintained. In the lighthouse, it is said that there is a ladder that leads right to the top. That is how the light at the top of the light house is taken care of.
The four two-feet-tall cement blocks on the left made me curious so I took the left path that led to them. A square metal plate was screwed onto each of them. Tok Pisin words were cut out on the plates to tell the story of the four people who took part in World War II. These were the monuments which acknowledged the work they have done.
I realised that the lighthouse was standing in an enclosed area. There are Y-shaped concrete barriers placed all around except the area towards the reef and the sea. Each is placed about two meters apart with their edges almost touching.
On the right hand corner from where we got off the bus, a gigantic ficus tree stood proudly as it provided a hanging spot for Madang’s iconic flying foxes.
I took a stroll there and waited under the shadow that the ficus had cast waiting for our trip back to the university.

  • The writer is a DWU Journalism student.