Read my previous article about UNICEF Tap Project? Tried it yet? If you did, you can assess how tough it could be to stay away from your favourite gadget. So, if this one is tough, I’ll give you another way to contribute to society. Find the cure to cancer. Ha! Didn’t expect that, did you? Watch video after the fold.
In case you aren’t able to watch videos right now, this is the long and short of it. A smartphone application called Power Sleep is developed by Samsung. Power Sleep is in fact the least customisable alarm clock application I’ve ever seen. But it is definitely the first one to do good deeds even if you do not wake up or keep hitting the snooze button all the time.
This application harnesses the computational power of the devices to crunch data at a time when they’re not in use. This data crunching process promises not to touch your phone in any other way and provides an alarm clock to wake you up from your power sleep. You are basically donating your phone’s processing power. Why do you need to do this?
Cancer and Alzheimer’s researchers at the University of Vienna have masses of protein data that needs a lot of processing. This processing cannot be completely performed by all the computers in the university. Therefore, they decided to ask other people to aid them. Users simply set the alarm and the phone then begins to collect packets of data containing protein sequences from the university, compares them, and sends the results back to the lab. Currently available only for Android, the app is free to download from Google Play.
How does this application work?
Power Sleep uses BOINC which is a technology for distributed computing. This technology works by requesting data packages from Similarity Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP) server from the university. Once you wake up from your power sleep, the process terminates and the package is recorded and sent to the university. Remember to put your phone in charge through your sleep and switch on WiFi to enable the application.
Even if these ideas do not do any significant goodness to the mankind, you might actually be doing good to yourself by giving your eyes and fingers some rest. Maybe all these people are your parents’ friends in disguise after all.
