"Now there's another option, one that combats excessive ink consumption at the font level: Ecofont, a free typeface that promises to reduce ink use by up to 20 percent.
Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, Ecofont looks a lot like regular old Arial, but with one key difference: holes. Each letter has lots of little holes punched out of it, meaning it requires less ink to print.“
$ 45 billion in pet-car a year leads to better lives for pets and some zany products as Fast Company lists
“She was far from the only centenarian using technology for more than just medical monitoring and protection against falls. Contrary to stereotypes, computers, social networks, e-mail and even video games are becoming essential parts of older peoples’ lives.
Some of the highest growth rates in broadband use are happening among the elderly.”
New York Times which highlights products like PawPawMail, Big Screen Live, Presto (in photo which helps print email without requiring them to get on a PC) , Peek, Jitterbug and iChat which are helping the elderly.
See also a previous post on aging workforces
"The (GPS and other sensor)technology, dubbed Komtrax, lets Komatsu track where its heavy machinery is anywhere in the world. It also records how much fuel every vehicle consumes and the amount of strain on the most heavily used weight-bearing parts.
Komatsu originally wanted to monitor its leased equipment and prevent theft, but the data proved useful in unexpected ways. These days the company relies on Komtrax to figure out how much wear and tear its machinery is getting and when it should dispatch staff to perform maintenance for customers. That record is good to have when calculating the resale value of vehicles that get traded in. But Komtrax's biggest benefit is the real-time snapshot it provides of construction activity in every country where Komatsu does business. “
MIT Technology Review interviews National Co-ordinator for Health Information Technology, David Blumenthal
“With robust health-information exchange, there can be improved quality of care and improved care co-ordination. Today, the average 65-year-old with five chronic conditions has 14 doctors and is on multiple medications.”
“We transmitted the ‘L’ … and the ‘O’ — and then the other computer crashed,” says UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock, who helped send that first message on the university's campus on Oct. 29, 1969. He was trying to type the word "login."
"We knew and we didn't know that it was going to be a big deal," he says..
Image below of log file entered by the student/programmer Charley Kline (CSK) Leonard was supervising that evening
“Working with Auckland University of Technology's Business Innovation Centre, Govorko created the Somnus-Neu to be a media-rich oasis. A freestanding unit with motorized curtains and a retractable video screen, the bed has Wi-Fi, a docking station for electronics, a five-point audio system, and three zones of LED lighting -- reading, ambient, and floor -- all of which can be controlled by dual 17-inch touch-screen panels on either side of the bed….
…Govorko says he's in discussions with Yotel, the U.K.-based pod hotel chain, and expects the first beds will welcome weary travelers by the second half of 2010. Once production is under way, he also plans to target less conventional markets, such as hospitals. "Having been a patient, on and off, from silly motorcycle accidents over the years, I know that the hospital experience is lacking," he says. "Staring at the ceiling is not the greatest way to spend your time."
Think of things you have never thought of using the following for (courtesy of TechNutters) and Tom Baynham and Ben Tyers who both went to Cambridge University found a use for them in this contraption.
Just don’t try to calculate an ROI for it:)
FastCompany has a detailed profile of Hulu and all the players vying with it for the 158 million on-line video audience
“Otellini has been subtly remaking the company: aligning with Apple, in a step away from the company's PC-only heritage; pushing the Atom mobile chip, in a dogleg pivot from Moore's Law, the founding axiom behind Intel, that chips get exponentially faster; and embracing new territory, new markets, and new ways of playing with others. The goal is to better compete in a world in which computing is everywhere, from laptops to tractors.”
Photo Credit for Atom chip
“By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit's treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services…. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans, unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit, the unemployment rate is 28.9%. That's worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.”
The city which already has a Renaissance Center, needs a much bigger one to rejuvenate it as the US auto industry goes through another round of problems.
So, it is good to see GE move into Visteon Village in Van Buren Township just south of the city
“The scientists and engineers at the Michigan site will develop next generation manufacturing technologies in areas such as renewable energy, jet engines, gas turbines and other high-technology products. …The site will also house GE experts in software development, data architecture, networking, business intelligence and program management. They’ll develop software to support GE’s business operations for several advanced technologies, like the smart grid. The site also will serve as a training hub for GE information technology professionals.” Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE makes announcement in video below
Just as interesting is a different kind of “plant” coming to Detroit – Urban Farming
“Driving around the city, you can see everything that will make up your dinner – chickens, goats, mushrooms, plum trees, honeybee hives. I passed a whole block growing shoulder-high corn. A horse grazes outside a barn behind a high school. Edith Floyd parks her tractor behind her house – 12 kilometers from city hall, where bureaucrats are scrambling to catch up with the collard greens sprouting on street corners.”
“It wasn't all that long ago when it seemed everyone knew that a jack and a tire iron were the tools you needed to change a flat. Not anymore. Experts say a growing number of drivers have no clue how to change a tire, instead relying on cell phones to call for help or high-tech tires that can run while flat.”
Look at the “jack and tire iron” we now have access to
I recently had lunch with Roger Stewart of McGraw-Hill and he pulled out a device and I thought he was reading a text message. Turns out he is diabetic and it was a OneTouch Ping (from Animas, a Johnson and Johnson company) glucose meter transmitting data wirelessly to the insulin pump at belt level. So very discreet - if he had not mentioned it I would not have known he had used it.
The system also works with the ezManager MAX Diabetes management software for logging of pump and meter data for review by healthcare professionals.
“As an electronics mega-retailer, Best Buy isn't normally interested in anything but moving huge quantities of TVs, computers and appliances out of its gaping doors. But the Houston St. location in Manhattan did something unexpected last night: it approvingly looked the other way while video artist Borna Sammak took over every single HDTV in the store for to display his latest work.
Borna Sammak's video paintings are meant for high-def televisions; the work mixes original processed footage and heavily treated rips from HD films--Planet Earth being a frequent source--all layered into a quick barrage of color and abstraction. So what better place to show it than on every available TV in our country's largest HDTV supplier?”
New Scientist lists some of its favorite green projects including:
“Iceland has been busying itself laying fibre optic cables to connect the country with North America and Europe.
The cables coming in provide a capacity of more than five terabits/sec - all with server farms in mind.
Travelling down this pipe, data sited in Iceland is just 17 milliseconds from London. Sitting at home on YouTube you would never know, but even that is too slow for some. “
The Economist on Nobel prizes for Physics and Chemistry.
“The Wii balance board is part of a $20 million Homeland Security-funded project called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST). Researchers hope that using sensors to detect passenger heart rate, breathing, shifty eyes, body temperature and yes, fidgeting, could help security figure out who might have something to hide.
Some sensors take the temperature profile of people's faces for signs of stress. Others track eye movement, pupil size, and blinking.”
Software developer Nuance Communications, for instance, invented voice command technology to help people who are unable to type on a computer. Today, the company's algorithms are used in products ranging from Amazon.com's latest Kindle e-reader to cars from Ford Motor . Meantime, Mattel is incorporating technology, initially intended to help paraplegics, into a soon-to-be-released game controlled by players' brainwaves.
“Via is a combination of dried coffee and “micro-ground” coffee. According to Linnemann the dried part follows what is recognizable as industry procedure. Starbucks takes its beans and makes a liquid coffee extract, which gets reduced to dried form. But whereas your typical instant coffee maker is focused on yield and output, the Starbucks gang focused on taste, Linnemann says. Start with better beans, brew the coffee, and then break the coffee drying process down into smaller sub-steps to preserve the flavor. All with no chemicals. “We use the same equipment as the other guys, but how we use the equipment is much different,” Linnemann says. What that likely means is that the yield in the Starbucks process is much lower (the extraction level is lower). That is by far a more expensive way to go but one that preserves more of the flavor. It may also explain why Starbucks is charging around $1 per packet of the stuff.
So far so good. “But it is the micro-grinding technology where we really cracked the code,” Linnemann says. “
“Vextec's software predicts with scary accuracy how and when products will fail--even before they're made. The simulations, which took only three months to run and required the crunching power of a mere laptop computer, estimated where and when the cracking in the titanium would start--within a quarter of an inch (on a 3-foot-long by 6-inch-wide blade) and within 1% of the number of physical testing cycles. With Vextec's help, "maybe by the fourth [project], the FAA won't make [EB] run any physical tests at all," says Dominick DaCosta, chief operating officer of ders Group Services, an engineering consultancy that advises the FAA on parts testing.”
Companies are creating solar tiles and shingles in colors and shapes that fit in, for example, with the terra cotta tile roofing popular in the Southwest, or with the gray shingles of coastal saltbox cottages.
Photo Credit - Springwise
Iranian photographer Babak Tafreshi has won the 2009 Lennart Nilsson scientific photography prize. According to the award panel, his images "reclaim a night sky that most modern people have lost"
NewScientist has a gallery including this of the Milky Way above the Sahara Desert.
…the shed, which can house up to 120 alpinists, is designed to obtain 90 percent of power needs from the sun. The remaining 10 percent would be mainly gas used for cooking and would be delivered by helicopter regularly.
Water will also be completely sourced from the surroundings. In the summer, water from melting glaciers will be collected and stored in a reservoir, and heated mainly by solar energy…
Built by 35 workers over two summers, the hut was constructed at a cost of 6.5 million Swiss francs (4.3 million euros, 6.3 million dollars) with some 3,000 helicopter trips required to ferry workers and materials up to the alpine location.”
“One e-nose just came back from six months in space, where it sniffed the air on the International Space Station every few seconds. Various gases that provide lighting and help cool the station, like mercury, freon and ammonia, can be harmful to astronauts' health, so NASA wants to monitor for leaks. The shoebox-sized e-nose has 32 sensors that can detect a wide variety of chemicals; in the latest experiment, it sniffed for 10 contaminants, said Amy Ryan, the project's principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The e-nose consists of several polymers, which react differently to various substances. When exposed to a chemical, the polymers change size, which affects the resistance of an electrical current running through them. The changes become a pattern interpreted by a complex algorithm -- our brains use similar pattern-recognition to decipher smells. “
Below on electronic tongue from Washington Post
“For Macintosh users, iChat is everything you would expect of Apple—slick, simple and with stunning graphics. Its voice quality is even better than Skype’s. The video chat feature lets you set up multi-person conferences on the fly. And it is less of a bandwidth hog than Skype. All you need is an internet connection and a video camera, plus an account with one of the more popular instant-messaging services, such as AIM, Google Talk, Jabber or MobileMe—and, of course, a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X.
The choice for Windows users is wider, though few of the products are as polished as iChat. SightSpeed comes close. It is delightfully simple to set up and use, and provides excellent 30 frames-a-second video with crisp audio and little delay. You can also send video e-mail and text chat with its built in instant-messaging service. And it works on Macs as well as PCs.
If making “SkypeOut” calls to landline and mobile phones—as well as making free voice and video calls from computer to computer—is important to you, then look no further than Gizmo5. This is identical to Skype in most respects save one: it uses open standards for managing calls, though its compression algorithms and client software are as proprietary as Skype’s. However, by embracing the popular internet-signalling standard called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Gizmo5’s free software can work seamlessly with other SIP-based networks, including the phone companies’.”
Leading geneticists called the information too preliminary to be relevant to individuals, while some worried that it might frighten patients who tested positive for a given disease and didn't understand that these tests provided risk factors, not a definitive yes or no. Ethicists and the American Civil Liberties Union fretted about the privacy questions inherent in companies holding this data.”
“Other major consumer genetics sites include deCODEme of Iceland; Navigenics of Foster City, Calif.; and newcomer Pathway Genomics in San Diego.”
“Beijing-based MAD Ltd. unveiled its solar eco-skin design for the Taichung Convention Center in Taiwan.
The landmark building design aims to meld future tech with natural shapes that evoke mountains dotted with crater-like openings.”
Check out the gallery at Popular Science
“Oxo’s kitchen and household products are winners with consumers, from its rubber-gripped potato peelers to its no-leak travel cups. The eye-catching designs have been featured in museum exhibitions and, despite premium prices, have continued selling well during the recession.
Having exhausted much of its original market, OXO is now branching out to office supplies, medical devices, and baby products.”
“I think one of the most interesting things is that we can turn a feature on. Going from zero users to 300 million users in an afternoon for a brand-new feature is pretty crazy. And we can do that because, generally speaking, we share all of the infrastructure. You can turn it on and have it go from 1 percent adoption to 100 percent adoption in a day without much or any perceived downtime.”
“Many uses exist for infrared cameras, around since the 1960s. They convert tiny differences in heat radiation into electronic signals that can then be portrayed as a still or moving image. Even so, infrared camera systems are still expensive playthings for pros, costing between $3,000 and $1.2 million.
Someday, however, they will be cheap enough for every car or home. That prospect thrills Earl Lewis, the chief executive of Flir Systems, the world's biggest stand-alone maker of infrared cameras. If you pointed a heat-sensing camera at him and asked about his mass-market opportunity, the sensor would light up like crazy.”
“By 1958, the leading idea was to put a fleet of satellites in Earth orbit at an altitude between 200 and 1,200 miles. A ground station would link to one satellite as it came up over the horizon, then switch to another when the first one was gone. (Even the first active commercial communications satellite, Telstar, which was launched into an elliptical orbit in 1962, was supposed to have been part of a fleet.) A second way was to boost a satellite 22,000 miles above the equator, where it would be in geosynchronous orbit, moving at a speed that constantly kept it over the same spot on Earth. Whoever could put three of these in orbit equidistant from one another could receive, relay, and transmit signals to and from almost anywhere on the planet.
In a 1945 issue of Wireless World magazine, British scientist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had first outlined for a popular audience how such a system might work. While he wrote of a three-satellite network operating in geosynchronous orbit, he also described an orbiting space station manned by astronauts whose chief job was to change burned-out vacuum tubes. The arrival of the Space Age made Clarke’s orbital concept seem achievable.”
Air and Space Magazine on the history of satellites. Hat Tip Werner Vogels.
Today, we supposedly have 12,000+ objects in space – satellites and junk from them. Credit Brisbane Times.
Not.
New Apple commercial making fun of “PC Innovation Lab”
This time it is Debbie Brown who is a Senior Sales Executive in the IT Services sector. Here she shares her memories via her scrapbooks.
“Don’t let the word scrap fool you. Though they may seem casual, scrapbooks have been around for a long time and require serious commitment. Mark Twain is said to have devoted his Sunday mornings to updating his.
Modern scrapbooks owe their credit to Alex Haley whose book and subsequent TV series Roots in the 70s caused a spike in interest in tracing genealogy. Then a lady named Marielen Christensen showed off 50 of her volumes at the World Conference on Records in Utah in 1980 and really got the hobby going.
I give credit to my interest in scrapbooks more to Eastman Kodak. From an early age I was our family photographer and I always loved to sit and hear stories about the people in the pictures and look at albums.
When I first found out I was having a baby (my son Kevin, some of you may now know as Carlos Santana - his Spanish name in 7th grade), a friend invited me to a Creative Memories party in Minneapolis, where we lived at the time. I thought I was going to watch her buy everything, and we both ended up with all the fixings.
Of course, I only took 8 weeks off, and had delusions of grandeur that I was going to work full time, and simultaneously compete with Marielen’s huge collection!
I did keep up the baby book up until age 3 with the some basic technology - scissors! It was a labor of love and I hope Carlos Santana appreciates it.
My mom turned 75 this past year and we decided to do a family trip and give her a “your life” scrapbook. I encouraged all family members to send pictures, and write stories on Facebook. I also emailed her high school friends. I started off wondering if many of them even have email accounts. At the end of 3 months, I had an overwhelming amount of stories, pictures, and embellishments! Timely investments in a MacBook Pro with iPhoto and a Canon printer/scanner helped me considerably.
We used the web for layout ideas – many great sites, though my favorite is archivers.com. Michaels also has plenty of merchandise and books. The look on my mom’s face when she went through the pages of her life (like the photo below of her 14th birthday -friends, Cokes and smiles were gift enough back then) and all the stories people wrote was truly priceless- the best gift we could have given her.
I am now on my next project. My in-laws 64th wedding anniversary is this fall. They are de-cluttering their house and were going to throw away their pictures!!! (I asked them for all of them) . We went through some of them together and I wrote down their comments. I am using their comments as subtitles in my new project I hope to give them for their anniversary
This time I am using the Cricut – check out the video below. With this tool, you can cut letters and shapes out of any kind of paper or vellum. The shapes and letters come in different cartridges including ones with Sponge Bob Square Pants and Hello Kitty fonts.
My father-in-law proudly showed off a few photos which inspired the “that’s my bride” page above. My mother in law kept telling me how much she loved a few photos of them tucked away in an envelope. I asked why? She said she wanted her grandchildren and great grandchildren to know that they were young once!-So those two pages are going to be framed for their kitchen wall. I am also working on picking out all their vacation pictures for a scrapbook for their trips they went on since my father-in-law retired (he was a lifer with GE).
Watch out Marielen, I may still beat you!
Everyone who knows me well, knows I love pictures! They tell wonderful stories, and everyone who knows me knows I love stories !! I have enjoyed the pictures and stories in this hobby series and glad I can contribute with my own way of preserving pictures and stories”
This time it is Sameer Patel who consults to companies on performance acceleration via social computing technologies (also known as Enterprise 2.0) and muses on the Pretzel Logic blog. Here he writes about his love for cooking.
“I’ve been cooking for 18 years ever since I left Bombay (Mumbai). I’ve always been a food fanatic and have fond memories filled with visions and aromas of tantalizing stuff from the streets of Bombay to Lama Island in Hong Kong to the Kopitiams of Singapore and the floating market in Thailand (photo below). As a competitive swimmer and subsequently squash player growing up, 5-6 hours of training a day resulted in a voracious appetite. Thankfully, somewhere along the way my interest in sheer quantity evolved to curiosity around what went into creating the very best that I had eaten.
My style of cooking had two influences: my grandmother who lived with us when I was young and my multiple stays in Hong Kong during my teens.
Most of my grandmother’s recipes were from her childhood on a farm, which now makes them 120+ years old. No zip drives back then to share recipes with others:) Cooking then involved taking whatever the land gave you and making one hell of a dish with it. Along with my own mother’s creations, many of these gems remained in our home in commercial Bombay where I grew up. Like good BBQ or original French cooking, you got amazing end-products from what we might refer to today as “tough cuts” or seemingly obscure ingredients.
I entered the working world at a young age with stints in the Far East, Australia, the UK and Australia that included multiple longish stays in Hong Kong. And that brought a strong Cantonese influence.
Both these influences means lots of traditional Indian (read: not curry powder from a package) and Cantonese cooking, still prevalent at the Patel household today.
When I use a new vegetable or a cut of meat, I often sauté a small amount with just salt and pepper to really understand what the meat or vegetable is trying to tell you (corny and low-tech, but true). Then I work my way up using the right cooking method and a few of over 150+ spices, seasonings and acids in my pantry. In my opinion, that’s how you respect the original version whilst still adding dimensions, where needed. Looking forward, I hope to migrate my techniques and skills to Spanish and Creole cooking. Had this been a technology engagement, I am sure some privacy advocate would be warning me about the risks of that data portability:)
I try to be a minimalist in the use of technology. My toolkit includes Global Knives only (touch them and you’re dead meat), a well seasoned cast iron skillet, a pressure cooker, a wok, a grill and a braising pot. One thing that gets my goat in a kitchen is a spinning blender and so one of these will be my next purchase.
My time in the kitchen and on my workbench complement each other. To me, cooking, much like the pursuit of business acceleration via social computing constructs, is more craft than art. No canned recipe (or in business terms, a case study) ever produces the same results twice. No two ounces of coriander or legs of lamb are the same. Likewise, no two customer environments, circumstances, opportunity and appetite for transformation are the same. On one hand you need to embrace and feed off of inbuilt characteristics. And on the other, you need to know how to use additional flavors to enhance the experience. Oh and both require the presence of mind and objectivity to change course and rescue the final product should that perfect plan unravel.
Talking of social networks, I think this is an area where technology has been helpful. I far prefer Chowhound to Yelp when looking for restaurants. And my new favorite ways to discovering food related content are LazyFeed for blog posts and MicroPlaza for hottest links on Twitter, by ingredient.
If teleporting was a more mature technology, I'd love to have readers try out the establishments in Silicon Valley that make all of this happen for me. I procure most of my meats, seafood and spices and cheese and produce from Dittmer’s, 99Ranch, Madras Groceries and The Milk Pail, respectively. My butcher and friend, Mark and I put aside a small portion of anything new we might create, for the other to enjoy.
I’ll leave you with 2 tips. First, on the issue of chicken. With a few exceptions, I generally consider chicken to be God’s version 0.5 of a flavorful duck. For me, chicken brings little flavor to the party on its own. So, when using ground chicken (or turkey for that matter), use powdered spices and grated onion instead of chopped/whole seasoning. This gets the flavors into the meat giving you more control over the end product. Second: A little acid lifts the blandest of dishes. If you like making a curry that uses coconut milk or dairy, consider using tamarind instead of lemon or lime for acid. This brings the needed acid and a slight sweetness adding another dimension to the end product. More importantly tamarind, unlike lime, will not curdle the milk. In technology terms, a pretty impressive mashup!
Some folks prefer to do business on the golf course. Me? I'd do it over Pho or Daeji Bulgogi any day of the week!”
Photo Credit: Pixdaus
“In Alison Lewis’s girlish, pale-blue living room here, pillows light up when you sit on them and the sofa fabric has a dimmer switch; teacups moved along acrylic coffee tables will play videos on the giant flat-screen television, and a mechanical bluebird nestled in the white plastic boxwood surrounding the television trills erratically when its eye detects movement in the room.
Ms. Lewis, 35, is part of a wave of young product designers intent on embedding electronics into “soft” areas like fashion or home furnishings. She has the can-do spirit that defines the modern crafter and hopes to engage other young women in her blinking, D.I.Y. world. Threading LEDs, she claims, is akin to knitting. (LED beads are like tiny glowing sequins; Ms. Lewis uses conductive thread to sew them onto fabric.) “I do it to relax,” she said.”
A gallery of courses out in the field instead of lecture halls, focused on sci-tech such as:
“200,000 Danish households can expect to get their electricity supply from the offshore wind farm Horns Rev II officially opening today. The park, situated in the North Sea 30 kilometers from the shore, will produce 2.2 percent of the kingdom's total power.”
also Denmark will get even more attention about its wind and other sustainability initiatives as it hosts the UN Climate Change conference in December.
I caught up with MR who used to run a number of tech events, and now runs the Corporate EcoForum. I asked him if his events were adopting the “green spirit” of his agenda. They sure are including:
Color Trend Forecasting
As she began to notice it in multiple places and in different contexts around the world, Eiseman and her team at the Pantone Color Institute -- the forecasting and consulting division of Pantone Inc., which is part of the $261 million company X-Rite -- decided to put it at the top of their 2003 forecast.
Since then, orange has gone mainstream, blanketing such unlikely products as videocameras, KitchenAid blenders, and Ford's new F-150 SVT Raptor, now available in "molten orange."
Fortune
October 21, 2009 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)