New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Democratic Convention build out

I posted about the GOP convention build out here. Here comes the DNC, which will have more Hollywood and Music City flash. From the convention website

“After seven weeks of non-stop construction, Time Warner Cable Arena has transformed into a state-of-the-art convention hall for the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Normally the home of the Charlotte Bobcats, the arena will soon host convention proceedings and seat 15,000 spectators including nearly 6,000 delegates from across the country. On this stage, First Lady Michelle Obama, Keynote Speaker and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, on Tuesday, September 4 and former President Bill Clinton will re-nominate President Obama and Vice President Biden on Wednesday, September 5.

The convention stage is oriented in an end-zone configuration, a first for modern conventions. This maximizes seating in the convention hall and will require fewer modifications to the arena than to previous convention venues.

Approximately 400 seats were removed from the arena to make room for the stage, podium, and television cameras. Suites in the arena were converted into broadcast hubs for major television networks. Twenty miles of cable was installed throughout the arena to deliver power, data, video, and audio for the convention.

Take a look at the evolution of Time Warner Cable Arena over the last month.”

Smart Textbook

“At first glance, the system just looks like an electronic version of Campbell Biology, the tome that forms the bedrock of biology classes for first-year university and advanced high school students in the US. But behind the scenes is a machine-readable concept map of the 5000 or so ideas covered in the book, along with information on how they are all related.

When a student asks a question - "what does a protein do?", for instance - the system first converts it into a more structured query, such as "what is the function of a protein?", and then uses this to search and find results from the concept map.”

New Scientist (sub required)

The Robotic “Hurricane Hunters”

As I described in my case study on the National Hurricane  Center (see attachment below), the brave Hurricane Hunters make periodic forays into storms to collect moisture, speed and other data to supplement data from satellites, sensors on buoys and other sources away from the storm.  Enter Popular Science with some newer technologies which can get closer to the actual storms.

“As the 2012 hurricane season reaches full tilt, researchers at NOAA are hard at work hacking two different maritime robots that the agency hopes will become critical storm forecasting tools of the future. The first, Liquid Robotics’ Wave Glider, is envisioned as a persistent surveillance platform, an army of mobile monitoring stations that will remain at sea for the duration of a hurricane season, waiting to swarm into the path of a developing storm. The second--Hydronalix’s Emergency Integrated Life Saving Lanyard, or EMILY (a 2010 PopSci Best of What’s New award winner)--will be capable of tracking the storm itself for days at a time, streaming continuous data directly from the center of the storm to researchers ashore.”

BTW I profiled the Wave Glider during the BP Gulf spill clean up effort

Download National Hurricane Center case study

Getty Images: The Google of the visual web

“Before Getty bought iStockphoto, it had some 150,000 customers a year. Now it has 1.3 million. “About 900,000 of them are small and medium-sized businesses, many of whom weren’t using images legally or at all,” Klein says. Fifteen years ago, Getty uploaded a few hundred photos a day; now it uploads tens of thousands. Getty used to license or sell 100,000 images a year; today it’s 30 million to 40 million.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Photo Credit Getty Images

SlamTracker at the US Open

“US Open SlamTracker, a real-time stats and analytics visualization platform, is leveraging IBM's predictive analytics technology to pinpoint three "Keys to the Match" that each player needs to come out ahead. Advanced algorithms analyze more than 39 million data points from five years of Grand Slam tournaments. Served with this historical data, each competitor's performance styles and patterns are then indexed across the pair's head-to-head record to generate the top three "Keys" each competitor needs to win.”

US Open website

Airport Avatars

Travelers flying out of Boston’s Logan International Airport may have met its newest assistant, Carla. She’s upbeat, informative – but not human.This hologramlike virtual assistant stands by one of Logan’s checkpoints, explaining the rules for passing through security. As she bops through each regulation, pictures of cellphones and toiletries (neatly packed into plastic bags) appear above her hands (like at 0.43 in video below) After the two-minute spiel, Carla repeats the message in Spanish.

Christian Science Monitor

Cities of the Future

Any city planning for the future must take into account that populations are getting older. Over 20-25 percent of the population will be over the age of 65. You’ve got to think about transportation alternatives and housing alternatives and choices. You need many more functional spaces for an older population and smaller households.

You also must be attractive to the creative class. To do that, you’ve got to reconfigure the city away from very large commercial centers surrounded by large housing centers toward smaller, more numerous commercial centers surrounded by local housing with everything connected by mass transit.

Of course there are a number of cities around the world that are soberly planning for the future. Sydney, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are two that stick out. I think the most creative project in the world is Masdar City, in Abu Dhabi (U.A.E.). It’s trying to be the most sustainable city in the world. It’s a small project, but it’s the prototype city of the future—like a live version of Epcot. They say some day all cities will be like it. They are doing a lot of stuff orienting the city for much less need for external energy inputs.

Txchnologist

Happy Valley

no not in PA, in Malaysia. My wife pointed me to this MindValley presentation – the CEO’s philosophy is “(Employee) Happiness is the new productivity”.

Listen to the unusual ways he motivates his multi-national team

The Department of PreCrime - at the Republican Convention

Shades of the movie Minority Report: Cameras which look for behavior patterns, not individual profiles from BRS, whose President John Frazzini quoted below is a former special agent with the US Secret Service.

“The Houston-based company’s AISight software has the ability to capture and process video images over a long period of time, and use a form of artificial intelligence to “learn” what activities are deemed normal and what atypical activities should be considered abnormal. For example, said Frazzini, a truck backing into the loading dock of a venue at the GOP convention at an unusual hour might be considered abnormal. Similarly, a group of people accessing a building, where they’ve never appeared before, might be deemed abnormal, he noted.

The AISight 3.0 software has been deployed on cameras in Tampa for more than a month, said Frazzini, so they are already beginning to “learn” which activities in and around the convention venues should be considered routine.'”

Government Security News

Fighting Fire with - Sound

Performers on DARPA's Instant Fire Suppression program evaluated an acoustic approach to suppressing flames. In this video, a flame is extinguished by an acoustic field generated by speakers on either side of the pool of fuel.