New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Beyond Burger

This post is courtesy of my wife who has been trying out Beyond burgers as part of her vegan diet.

“The availability of Beyond Meat’s vegan Beyond Burger, which looks, cooks, and tastes like a beef patty, is growing at a rapid rate in Singapore. Just eight weeks after its initial launch at the Grand Hyatt Singapore hotel, the burger is outselling beef at a rate of three to one. The vegan burger is now also available in a further nine locations.

Founded in 2009, US-based Beyond Meat aims to transform the food system and help to eliminate the need for animal agriculture; an industry that is not just harmful to animals, but one that is also currently suffocating the planet. Around the world, consumers are becoming more open to plant-based meats like the Beyond Burger for their health, the animals, and for the environment, and Singaporeans are no exception.”

LiveKindly

The rebirth of Pinball Machines

What draws folks to play these seemingly antiquated games, especially when free ones are just a button-push away in our pockets? Zach Sharpe, director of marketing at pinball manufacturer Stern (and Josh’s brother), credits phones and video games with driving people to seek out a more tangible, mechanical pastime. “It’s an entertainment device that can’t be replicated,” Zach tells Newsweek. “While video games are fun, you don’t get that same tactile action that you experience with a pinball machine.” Josh says the analog nature of pinball wasn’t special during the rise of video games in the ‘90s, but it brings a wow factor in today’s digital world. A major reason for the rise in the number of tournaments, as well as machine sales, is the increase in Barcade-style drinking establishments featuring arcade games and pinball, says Zach, noting that Stern just saw two years of 40 percent

Newsweek

Here is a “barcade” in New York City

More digital prisons

On Sept. 5, Pennsylvania became the first state in the U.S. to eliminate personal mail in its prison system. The policy means that its prisoners can no longer receive birthday cards, handwritten notes from Grandma, or drawings from their children. Instead, their families send mail to the offices of Smart Communications U.S. Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla., where, says Chief Executive Officer Jon Logan, employees inspect each piece of correspondence before converting it into a searchable electronic document. The company sends the digital files to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, where prison officials can review the contents before delivering them as black-and-white printouts to their intended recipients. Each piece of correspondence becomes part of a searchable database, guaranteeing prison officials perpetual access, even years after the recipients have been released.

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit

Work, play, stay

It’s easier than ever to get away without clocking out, now that more hotels are opening their own dedicated coworking spaces. Here are the places leading the pack.

Afar

Vid below of Roam hotels which offers coworking in several locations around the world

Fortune's Future 50

Congrats to Workday for leading this 2018 Fortune list

The Future 50 ranks the global companies with the best prospects for long-term growth. Some are mining narrowly defined niches to produce phenomenal growth. Others are migrating into multiple industries with viral speed. Still others are inventing new business models as they go. But each of these companies won its spot by demonstrating both steady execution and forward-looking strategic nimbleness.

 

Automating Investment Banking

Yet it’s inevitable that much of the job would become automated, says Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. That’s because deals require so much routine paperwork for legal and regulatory issues. Adrian Crockett, a former Credit Suisse Group AG banker who now advises finance companies on technology, estimates that automating such tasks would allow investment banks to cut head count by 30 percent. Here are some of the ways technology is changing investment bankers’ jobs.

BusinessWeek

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25 ways A.I is changing business

A.I. will be used by companies and consumers for countless practical purposes, most of them modest, and the cumulative effect can’t be foreseen. As we try to guess A.I.’s future, the key will be to think like self-interested people (including both good and bad guys) in the real world.

No bad guys here, though. These 25 examples of A.I. at work are beneficial, even inspiring—and they’re real.

Fortune

also here is a vid from its Brainstorm conference

 

 

Airport of the (near) future

Airports, airlines, and, yes, even the Transportation Security Administration want your journey to be as stress-free as possible. That’s why modern airports are quick to adopt new amenities and test new technology. From sleeping pods to spaceports, here’s what’s in store.

Afar

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Small-town America is booming

Money magazine’s best places to live are all small towns or suburbs of big towns like Frisco, north of Dallas and Ft. Worth.

 

 

China's "Supergrid"

The transmission line will be capable of delivering the output of 12 large power plants over nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers), sending 50% more electricity 600 miles further than anything that’s ever been built. (Higher-voltage lines can carry electricity over longer distances with lower transmission losses.) As one foreign equipment provider for the project boasts, the line could ship electricity from Beijing to Bangkok—which, as it happens, only hints at State Grid’s rising global ambitions.

The company initially developed and built ultra-high-voltage lines to meet the swelling energy appetites across the sprawling nation, where high mountains and vast distances separate population centers from coal, hydroelectric, wind, and solar resources. But now State Grid is pursuing a far more ambitious goal: to stitch together the electricity systems of neighboring nations into transcontinental “supergrids” capable of swapping energy across borders and oceans.

MIT Technology Review

Here's China's contribution to the large Belo Monte project in Brazil

 

 

Computational Photography

Every digital camera is flawed. Image sensors can't capture light perfectly, lenses distort scenery, and photos so often seem blah compared with what you remember seeing.

But Google, with its Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones, has found new ways to use software and hardware to overcome those flaws and get you better pictures. Its Pixel and Pixel 2 phones had already advanced the state of the art for smartphone photography, but the Pixel 3 goes even further.

It's all possible because of a field called computational photography, a term invented in 2004 by Google distinguished engineer Marc Levoy while he was at Stanford, before he moved full-time to Google Research. Long gone are the days when photography was all about glass lenses and film chemistry. Fast receding are first-generation digital cameras that closely mirror the analog approach.

Now our cameras rely as much on computers as optics. And what we've seen so far is only the beginning.

CNET

 

EV Battery Swapping

But ever since the downfall of Better Place in 2012, battery swapping has been widely regarded as a technological dead end. Nonetheless, a number of innovative companies, including Tesla, are still quietly developing battery swap ecosystems. That’s because as EV ranges get longer and batteries get bigger, fast-charge technology is fighting physics. Each of Tesla’s newest Super Chargers provides up to 135 Kilowatts of power—twenty-seven thousand times more than an ordinary iPhone charger. (Some EV companies are already testing “ultra-fast” chargers that will provide up to 350 Kilowatts.) These power levels are so high that powerful cooling systems are required to keep vehicles from overheating. Tesla has even experimented with liquid-cooled cables. That’s because systems aren’t 100 percent efficient and the remaining percentage points of lost energy are converted into heat. For a 95 percent efficient 135 kilowatt system, that energy loss is like having half a dozen industrial-grade heat guns on full blast.

Wired

 

 

The massive Longyangxia Hybrid Hydro-Solar Project

That includes the massive 850-MW Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, part of the Longyangxia Hybrid Hydro-Solar Project in Qinghai Province that includes the 1,280-MW Longyangxia Dam on the Yellow River. Construction of the solar park began in 2013; today, it features more than 4 million solar panels, spread across more than 10 square miles of high desert on the Tibetan Plateau in eastern China (Figure 1). It has been built at a cost of 6 billion yuan ($911 million), with a continual expansion over the past few years that, at least for a brief period, made it the world’s largest solar farm, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Power Magazine

The future of insurance

One of the most profitable in the world, the insurance industry exceeded $1.2 trillion in annual revenue since 2011 in the U.S. alone.

But risk is becoming predictable. And insurance is getting disrupted fast.

By 2025, we’ll be living in a trillion-sensor economy, projected to generate bronto-bytes (1000 trillion trillion) of data, as explained by TSensors Summit co-founder Janusz Bryzek. And as we enter a world where everything is measured all the time, we’ll start to transition from protecting against damages to preventing them in the first place.

But what happens to health insurance when Big Brother is always watching? Do rates go up when you sneak a cigarette? Do they go down when you eat your vegetables?

And what happens to auto insurance when most cars are autonomous? Or life insurance when the human lifespan doubles?

For that matter, what happens to insurance brokers when blockchain makes them irrelevant?

Read about in in Peter Diamandis’ blog post

Video below has another perspective on the industry

 

The science behind Coke at McDonalds

Cokes taste better at that chain. It’s not a myth. MyRecipes goes into excruciating detail why.

While most restaurants have their soda syrup delivered to them in plastic bags, McDonald’s Coca-Cola syrup is stored in stainless steel tanks. This preserves the syrup’s flavor and protects it from temperature, light, and air, all things that can degrade the flavor quickly. The stuff in the bags doesn’t stand a chance.

McDonald’s filters their water many times over to maintain consistent flavor and quality. They have to do this because different municipalities have different water sources.

McDonald’s also mixes their syrup-to-water ratio to account for ice melt. That means the drink has a slightly higher ratio at sip number one to make sure that sips four, five, and six are supremely refreshing too. This is also why you should never order your McDonald’s Coca-Cola without ice. You’d be totally messing with the carefully designed soda experience.

The temperature of the water is also optimized for peak carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Indeed, CO2 doesn’t escape as easily from really cold liquids, so this temperature is designed to be both more refreshing and to keep your pop bubbly and crisp longer.

Compare a McDonald’s straw to that of any other fast-food chain, and you’ll see a size difference: McDonald’s is wider.

More in vid below

Wolves for Yellowstone

The reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park is the most celebrated ecological experiment in history. As predicted by population models, the rapid recovery of a wolf population caused both temporal and spatial variability in wolf–ungulate interactions that likewise generated temporal and spatial variation in the expression of trophic cascades. This has amplified spatial variation in vegetation in Yellowstone, particularly with willow (Salix spp.) and cottonwood (Populus spp.) in riparian areas, with associated changes in food webs. Increasing influences of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), cougars (Puma concolor), and bison (Bison bison) are making what initially was predominantly an elk–wolf interaction into an increasingly complex system. Outside Yellowstone, however, humans have a dominant influence in western North America that overwhelms trophic cascades resulting in what appear to be bottom-up influences on community structure and function. Complex and unexpected ecosystem responses to wolf recovery in Yellowstone reinforce the value of national parks and other protected areas as ecological baseline reserves.

Journal of Mammalogy

 

"Attribution Studies" around Climate Change

Reed isn’t the first one to calculate how modern-­day hurricanes would have developed without the greenhouse gases from industrial activity that we’ve emitted over the years. Scientists have done similar work for other tropical storms, with similar results. This is an emerging field in climate science called “attribution” because it is an effort to isolate specific effects of climate change. It borrows ideas from epidemiologists, who study risk factors associated with diseases—lead poisoning’s impact on cognitive skills or the effects of air pollution on lung cancer. But climate attribution assigns risks to specific weather events.

Climate scientists started attribution studies after the 2003 European heat wave, which killed 35,000 people by some estimates, many of them elderly people confined to apartments with no air conditioning. Scientists found that climate change made the heat wave twice as likely to occur that year than in preindustrial times. Studies of Hurricane Harvey showed that precipitation in the Greater Houston area was elevated by nearly 40 percent because of climate change.

Newsweek

Robotic Restaurant Kitchen

What makes Spyce different from any other counter service establishment is the automated system that assembles your meal. Meats, veggies, and grains are dropped automatically from hoppers into a spinning wok in the proper amounts. (Ingredients have been chopped and pre-cooked in an off-site commissary overnight.) A bright orange robot shuttles back and forth between the seven woks, dispensing the right sauce for your dish. A screen above each wok displays your name as the meal is being prepared. When things have been mixed sufficiently, the wok tilts down and dumps its contents into a compostable bowl. Human workers then add garnishes and additional sauces, such as avocado crema.

Boston Globe

 

Convene: a WeWork for larger companies

I was at an event recently at a Convene facility in NYC and was impressed. TechCrunch writes about them

“Started by co-founders Ryan Simonetti (CEO) and Chris Kelly (president), 500-person strong Convene has distinguished itself as a top-tier provider of meeting, event and flexible workspace offerings in its 21 locations.

But unlike freelance-heavy WeWork and other co-working companies that cater to 1-10 person companies, Convene puts owners of Class A office buildings at the center of its business model. The goal is to help these landlords provide tenants with the high-end of amenities of, say a unicorn tech startup.”

Delta fights turbulence with technology

Since the days of Wilbur and Orville Wright, pilots have done an admirable job trying to keep each other posted on weather conditions based on their actual experiences in the sky. The Pilot Report, or PIREP, works as such: pilot experiences turbulence, pilot reports turbulence, other pilots do their darnedest to translate that report into something useful. The problem with that, of course, is that no two pilots can be in the same place at the same time, with the same aircraft type, at the same altitude. So while it’s not useless data, it’s not highly accurate. It’s also tough to act on. You have to overcompensate, which can lead one report to close down entire lanes of flight when a pocket of turbulence is only in a very narrow slice of air.

Delta Flight Weather Viewer has made the PIREP obsolete by collecting and analyzing “hundreds of thousands of data points,” with a plan to boost that to “millions,” creating a model that forecasts turbulence with a level of confidence heretofore unseen.

The airline’s approach to modeling turbulence, leveraging data from as many places as it can find, has consistently improved. We’re still in the first inning of outsmarting bumps, but if the trajectory continues, it’s not difficult to envision a world where more airlines jump onboard. This is a rare case of a rising tide truly raising all boats.

The Points Guy – thanks to Nick Hortovayni for pointer

If you want a career in meteorology in aviation world, Emery-Riddle Aeronautical U should be on your radar

 

Robocop

In NYC last week I stayed at a hotel near the Knightscope store and encountered one of their security robots at LaGuardia airport. The Daily Mail explains what they can do

The robots, which can reach speeds of up to 3mph, are equipped with five cameras and feed captured patrol data to an internet-based portal which security teams can then use.

Among the robots' capabilities are the ability to record license plates, detect people, capture thermal imaging, provide 360 degree video, make broadcasts, provide intercom activity and find mobile devices within a set perimeter. 

The conical, self-propelled security robots were created by Silicon Valley company Knightscope and are being used in select cities around the US at venues including malls, hospitals, stadiums and warehouses, according to the company's website. 

More jobs - even in an increasingly automated world

Last year, Cognizant published its report on 21 jobs of the future. Like my book, Silicon Collar, it was a refreshing antidote to all the doom and gloom that machines are taking away all our jobs. Last week, in NYC I saw leaders from their Center for the Future of Work present on 21 new jobs. While the titles may sound cute, they reflect the state of growing automation and ethical issues they are spawning.  So an Algorithm Bias Auditor is a reaction to concerns that we may be transferring human biases in what we are teaching machines. Some of the job titles like Vertical Farm Consultant and Flying Car Developer reflect innovations this blog has been cataloging for years – as they become reality, related jobs are following. Their 64 page report should be required reading as you encounter yet another dystopian perspective on machines taking away jobs.  

Cognizant also announced a Dow Jones type jobs index

“This quarterly index measures the changes in demand for a set of 50 jobs of the future: 45 actual and 5 proxy jobs. It also includes eight additional sub-indices that represent families of similar jobs. The CJoF Index score represents the sum of the current quarterly total of U.S. job openings divided by the quarterly total of U.S. job openings in the 3rd quarter of 2016 (the base year for the Index).”

At 10 am on November 8, Cognizant is hosting a webinar on the 21 jobs and the index.  Register here – should be really interesting.

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NASA’s digital publication

Each issue of our digital publication Technology Innovation features space technology innovators and project developments across NASA, highlighting the American inventors, entrepreneurs, and application engineers who have transformed space exploration technologies into products that benefit the Nation.

The newest edition of the digital publication is now available in the iTunes store as an iPhone or iPad app as well as in the Google Play store as an Android app. A desktop viewer is also available.

NASA

 

The Zagat journey

The Zagat guide was more than a cultural phenomenon, however. It represented the analog birth of a disruptive idea—user-generated content—that has transformed the business landscape and continues to power such juggernauts as Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter (not to mention upstarts like Glossier, Target’s kid-inspired Studio Connect, and health companies like WebMD and Iodine). But Zagat is also a symbol of resilience. It has weathered the transition from print to digital and then mobile, the dotcom bust of 2000, the rise of blog culture, and a $151 million acquisition by Google in 2011, followed by a purchase, for an undisclosed price last March, by The Infatuation, a restaurant-review site with its own snark and social-media-based recipe for success. Recently, The Infatuation announced a $30 million investment from WndrCo, a holding company founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ann Daly, and Sujay Jaswa. As this new chapter begins, insiders reflect on the early challenges, happy accidents, and surprising endurance of the brand, along with a moment that former Google executive Marissa Mayer calls “one of my biggest heartaches.”

FastCompany

The NASA iTech Challenge

NASA has selected 10 competition finalists to present their ideas at the iTech forum in Hartford, Connecticut, on Oct. 25-26, 2018. Chief technologists from various NASA centers, other federal agencies and industry will listen to presentations and meet with participants. NASA judges will ultimately determine three winners of the 2018 NASA iTech Cycle III competition.

The competition challenges entrepreneurs to consider how their biomedical, software and other technology ideas could be adapted and used for future space exploration missions. Among the finalists are artificial intelligence, big data, advanced materials and other unique innovations.

NASA

Yves Béhar : a life in design

When Béhar launched his studio almost 20 years ago, he was trying to get the business world to understand the value of design. He advocated that enterprises should empower designers to be involved in every aspect of their operations. Indeed, design has since been embraced by all corners of the corporate world, so much so that global strategy firms are gobbling up design shops, including Fuse, as Béhar and his employees call the firm: The Chinese conglomerate BlueFocus bought 75% of Fuse in 2014 for a reported $46.7 million and as of December 2017 owns it outright. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has gestated a generation of user-experience-focused unicorns. Airbnb (two cofounders attended RISD), Pinterest, and WeWork, to name just a few, are on the verge of going public, proving that design has become a crucial component in creating status quo–shattering private enterprises. Béhar, despite both his evangelism and his fame—he’s arguably the best-known working designer with the exception of Apple’s Jony Ive—has been associated with few success stories with this kind of cultural oomph. There’s August, which was acquired for an estimated $150 million last year, and 3-D printer Desktop Metal, which has been valued at $1 billion. Fuse has also done notable corporate work for SodaStream, Movado, Nivea, and Western Digital. He touts his work on the Snoo, a bassinet using AI and robotics. But Béhar has also contributed to some of tech’s notorious flops, from Juicero to Jawbone; he even designed the sheet-metal casing of Theranos’s Edison.

FastCompany

Here’s his TED talk from a decade ago

 

The storage gold mine

The iPhone uses Nand flash memory to store photos, video clips, and most of its software. The market price of this component is about half what it was a year ago, according to InSpectrum Tech data. But Apple isn’t passing the savings on to consumers: The 78¢-per-gig charge hasn’t budged since last year. Of course, Apple uses contracts to lock in the price of such components as Nand flash, so it may not be benefiting yet from recent price declines. So far, though, storage costs customers more on an iPhone than on, say, a Samsung Note 9. Samsung Electronics Co. charges 65¢ a gig to move from the 128GB Note 9 phone to the 512GB model.

Ponying up for extra storage could lead iPhone users to spend more in other ways, too. People who’ve become accustomed to having what seems like a bottomless pit in their phones are likelier to cram the devices with more music, apps, movies, and subscriptions, boosting Apple’s services revenue. And Apple is charging anyone who wants an iCloud plan to back up their entire 512GB phone an extra $9.99 a month for 2 terabytes (2,000GB) of remote storage.

BusinessWeek

Snow exports from Dubai?

Dubai-based retail giant Majid Al Futtaim -- the company behind Ski Dubai, the Middle East's first indoor ski slope -- has announced it is helping develop what it claims will be the world's largest indoor snow and ski resort for Shanghai.

The company says the snow park, called Wintastar Shanghai, will be 90,000 square meters (nearly 1 million square feet) -- or more than three times the size of Ski Dubai, the largest indoor ski resort in the world when it opened in 2005.

CNN

Here is a video on Ski Dubai

 

City Unseen

Seeing cities around the globe in their larger environmental contexts, we begin to understand how the world shapes urban landscapes and how urban landscapes shape the world. Authors Karen Seto and Meredith Reba provide these views to enhance readers’ understanding of the shape, growth, and life of urban settlements of all sizes — from the remote town of Namche Bazaar in Nepal to the vast metropolitan prefecture of Tokyo, Japan.

Using satellite data, the authors show urban landscapes in new perspectives. The book’s images highlight the growth of cities over time, the symbiosis between urban form and natural landscapes, and the vulnerabilities of cities to the effects of climate change. We see the growth of Las Vegas and Lagos, the importance of rivers to both connecting and dividing cities like Seoul and London, and the vulnerability of Fukushima and San Juan to floods from tsunami or hurricanes.

Yale News

Growing new knees

Vericel’s procedure may seem a little weird. First, doctors perform a biopsy to remove a Tic Tac-size piece of the patient’s healthy knee cartilage. Next, technicians in the company’s Cambridge, Mass., lab extract cartilage cells called chondrocytes and bathe them for about 10 days in proteins and nutrients to grow more. Over two days, the techs then seed millions of chondrocytes onto a sheet of biodegradable collagen, creating a living mesh scaffold a little more than an inch across and about 2 inches high. A doctor cuts the scaffold down to the size of the damage in the patient’s knee and through a small incision inserts it back into the knee to cover the damage. It’s glued in place, making stitches unnecessary. The whole process is called matrix-induced autologous chondrocyte implantation, or MACI (pronounced like Stacy).

Bloomberg

 

Reebok’s Sports Bra

The creation of the bra was spearheaded by Danielle Witek, a Reebok designer, who stumbled upon the technology while thumbing through a science journal (something she does for fun). In 2005, chemical engineers at the University of Delaware had invented a new substance called Shear Thickening Fluid, a gel-like solution that takes liquid form when in a still or slow-moving state, and stiffens into a solid when moving at high velocities. It was originally designed to be a modern form of armor technology, since you can incorporate it into a protective garment to defend the wearer from items flying at their body at a high speed–it’s since been used in everything from Kelvar bulletproof vests to NASA spacesuits that protect astronauts from shrapnel.

Fast Company

 

Reverse Wireless Charging

Once upon a time, wireless charging was a rarity in phones. As of today, though, not only do we have fast wireless charging in the iPhone and many Android flagships, there’s even reverse wireless charging, courtesy of the freshly announced Huawei Mate 20 Pro. I tried this out in London ahead of the new super flagship phone’s launch today, and it works beautifully. You just enable the option on the Mate 20 Pro, and any time the device is pressed against another that supports Qi wireless charging, it automatically starts transferring power. That’s all there is to it. It’s obviously not going to be fast, and it’s probably not going to be super practical, but the Mate 20 Pro does have a sizable 4,200mAh battery, and the ability to share that out in an emergency still counts as a pretty cool feature.

The Verge

Making cities more livable

Bloomberg profiles several cities which are tackling urban annoyances from public brawls to garbage piles.

An example In Stratumseind, a street in the Dutch city of Eindhoven known for its nightlife, cylinders on lampposts and balconies dispense aromatherapy to deter brawls. After an experiment showed that citrus helped calm prisoners at police stations, Eindhoven is trying it out in an area where police break up fights an average 400 times a year.

Another is waste management in Cascais in Portugal

 

More autonomous grocery deliveries

Udelv, a San Francisco-based startup that has already used its autonomous vans to make more than 700 driverless deliveries in the San Francisco Bay area, recently inked what it claims is the world’s largest deal for a grocery delivery service using self-driving vehicles.

The service is set to begin in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma next year, and will use 10 autonomous vans to transport orders to customers from local supermarkets that include Buy For Less, Uptown Grocery, and Smart Saver.

Digital Trends

Home of the Future – in 2068?

We’ve finished building our Home of the Future. But now it’s starting to feel more and more like the home of the present. Grant Imahara of The Verge looks at how the tech in our home can change in the next 50 years.

 

Better job matches for Veterans

“Through Grow with Google, our initiative to help create opportunities for all Americans, we hope to use our technology to help veterans understand the full range of opportunities open to them across many different fields. Right now those opportunities are getting lost in translation. There isn’t a common language that helps recruiters match a veteran’s experience with the need for their skills and leadership in civilian jobs. As a result, 1 in 3 veterans—of the roughly 250,000 service members who transition out of the military each year—end up taking jobs well below their skill level.

Starting today, service members can search 'jobs for veterans' on Google and then enter their specific military job codes (MOS, AFSC, NEC, etc.) to see relevant civilian jobs that require similar skills to those used in their military roles. We’re also making this capability available to any employer or job board to use on their own property through our Cloud Talent Solution. As of today, service members can enter their military job codes on any career site using Talent Solution, including FedEx Careers, Encompass Health Careers, Siemens Careers, CareerBuilder and Getting Hired.”

Google Blog

Google has also been highlighting small businesses which it has helped grow like Moment Skis

Artificial Glaciers

High in Ladakh, India, in a stretch of the Himalayas bordering Pakistan and China, subsistence farmers and tourists experience something akin to an alpine desert. Less than 4 inches of rain fall in an average year, making it tough for farmers to irrigate their barley and potatoes. Yet, thanks to Sonam Wangchuk’s novel system of pipes, glaciers are growing there. Each of Wangchuk’s 90-foot-high ice stupas, named for the moundlike Tibetan structures that dot the region, slowly provides the area with 2.6 million gallons of freshwater runoff, drawn from moisture in the air. He’s setting up more across the Himalayas and in the Swiss Alps.

BusinessWeek

Fending off GPS spoofing

Vehicles that rely on GPS navigation are vulnerable to spoofing, the sending of phony signals to lead them off their intended course. The palm-size Pyramid GPS SP from Regulus Cyber Ltd. uses a bundle of antennas and receivers to make sure the signals it’s reading are legit.

Bloomberg

iPhones: Bigger, Brighter, Better

From ZDNet review

With the iPhone XS Max, Apple kept the same overall design as the iPhone X. A stainless steel housing band wraps the sides, broken up only by a new antenna band along the bottom. The front and back of the phone are covered in glass, once again allowing for Qi-standard wireless charging. The iPhone XS and XS Max come in three colors this year: Space gray, silver, and a new gold color.

The iPhone now carries an IP68 water and dust resistance rating, meaning it can withstand a dip in up to 2m of water for 30 minutes

The XS Max's OLED display is a massive 6.5 inches, with a resolution of 2688x1242 and a pixel density of 458ppi.

The iPhone XS Max supports HDR, both Dolby Vision and HDR10. To sum up the display in a word: Stunning. Watching HDR-enabled YouTube videos, I was mesmerized by the saturation and clarity.

On the bottom of the XS Max, you'll find a Lightning port to charge, sync, and listen to audio via Lightning compatible headphones.

Along the right side of the phone is where you'll find the SIM card tray and the side button

The back of the phone features a dual-camera system, complete with a camera bump. Both cameras are 12 megapixels and dual optical image stabilization.

Powering the iPhone XS Max is Apple's latest processor, the A12 Bionic. The 7-nanometer chip has six cores, two performance cores that are only used for resource-intensive tasks like gaming.

Another benefit of the new processor is the ability to handle storage of up to 512GB.

 

Modernizing your old laptop

The last few years it seems like we keep pampering our mobile devices with accessories but we have ignoring our laptops and PCs. Popular Science has a nice selection of doodads to pamper your laptops. 

They include the Sensel Morph (in video below), a touch-sensitive, pressurized pad that has over 20,000 sensors with 32,000 levels of touch sensitivity, The Kingston Bolt USB 3.0 memory stick which allows you transfer photos and videos from iPhone or iPad’s lightning port to a PC, without degrading the resolution of your media as happens when you upload to the cloud and the Lexar card reader which can read 25 formats of memory cards and uses USB 3.0 for transferring files at up to 500MBs per second.

 

Costco’s rotisserie chicken supply chain

Costco broke ground on its Fremont, Neb.-based Lincoln Premium Poultry facility in 2016. The project is scheduled for completion in September 2019. The complex will include a 250,000-square-foot processing plant, a 75,000-square-foot hatchery and a feed mill and comes with a $300 million price tag. Lincoln Premium represents the first time a retailer has assumed the risks associated with meat production — from farm to fork.

Costco’s rotisserie chickens have a become a major driver of customer traffic at its warehouse stores, CoBank said, and in-house production is expected to save the company 10 to 35c per bird. Costco’s sales of rotisserie chicken have experienced 8% growth annually since 2010, which is three times the growth rate of total poultry consumption in the U.S. During this time, the company has maintained a $4.99-per-chicken price point, according to CoBank.

Food Business News

Tech for Vegas crowds

Vegas gets over 40 million visitors a year. To manage and entertain those streams of people technology certainly helps. I saw a few examples this week.

At the Mandalay Bay, guests used kiosks to check in. They scanned a QR code they got by email, scanned their drivers license or passport and got their room keys that way.

During a keynote at Workday Rising we all got PixMob LED wristbands. They glowed every time a Workday exec played the Wheel of Fortune on the main stage. 

At SAP’s TechEd, we got a tour using Sennheiser headsets. The one-piece, cable free design was comfortable and has a range of 200 feet, and a battery life of 8 hours. 20 of them can be carried in a specially designed case which also charges them. 

BMW’s voice-controlled assistant

It can pick up on routines and habits, allowing users to simply say "Hey BMW, take me home" when they want to navigate back to their house, for example. Additionally, simple statements like "Hey BMW, I'm cold" or "Hey BMW, I'm tired" will lead the assistant to adjust settings like the temperature, lighting and music, accordingly.

Users can also ask the assistant about various aspects of their vehicle, such as how the automatic high beams work, if the oil level is sufficient or whether there are any current warnings. Drivers can also give it access to their calendars in order to receive updates about when they should leave for a scheduled appointment. In the future, BMW says the assistant will also be able to alert drivers to potential issues, like the tire pressure being low, share fuel-saving tips and arrange appointments with a service center. It will also be compatible with other digital assistants, like Alexa, and will be accessible from smart speakers and phones.

Engadget

Underwater lawn mower

Cleantec Infra is using aquatic weed harvesters and "trash skimmers" to clean up lakes and rivers in India. Both these platforms can pick up tonnes of weeds and trash per day to make the bodies of water in India healthier for the ecosystem.

Mashable

Artificial Surf Pool

The Kelly Slater Wave Co. purchased the 20-acre property in Lemoore in 2014. According to a report in Bloomberg, Slater chose Lemoore, a small city with a population of around 25,000, primarily because it was inexpensive. The property cost around $575,000, roughly half the price of a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco. The fact that two lakes already existed on the property also made it appealing. But if Slater was hoping for discretion when he chose Lemoore, which is located more than 100 miles from the California coastline, that part didn’t quite pan out: The internet has been in a frenzy about this man-made wave since Slater first started filing patent applications.

By 2015 the first version of the wave pool was operational. It is not open to the public for surfing, and may never be—although if you’re a Slater buddy, like Eddie Vedder or Tony Hawk, or a philanthropic organization, or an LA-based venture capitalist or tech executive with deep pockets, you can arrange an outing there.

Wired

Space mining maps

Since its establishment in the 1870s, the USGS has focused pretty much solely on Earth. But now it's also investigating what benefits may or may not exist in tapping extraterrestrial water, minerals and metals.

The agency seeks to portray accurately how humanity could exploit off-Earth assets — a no-nonsense approach that contrasts with the pie-in-the-sky estimates of trillions of dollars of profit proffered by some less scientifically minded space-mining advocates.

Space.com

Massive ocean clean up

The 2,000-foot-long unmanned structure was the product of about $20 million in funding from the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to trap up to 150,000 pounds of plastic during the boom’s first year at sea. Within five years, with the creation of dozens more booms, the organization hopes to clean half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The patch, a gyre of trash between California and Hawaii, comprises an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of scattered detritus, including at least 87,000 tons of plastic.

New York Times

Mixed reality at Chevron

Previously (Chevron) was required to fly in an inspector from Houston to a facility in Singapore once a month to inspect equipment. Now it has in-time inspection using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and can identify issues or provide approvals immediately.

In addition, remote collaboration and assistance have helped the company operate more safely in a better work environment, serving as a connection point between firstline workers and remote experts, as well as cutting down on travel and eliminating risks associated with employee travel.

Microsoft Blog

 

The history of ice cream

Thanks to Frank Scavo saw this

“Just 350 years ago, ice cream was a rare delicacy, reserved for kings and the richest of aristocrats. To enjoy it a person had to be able to afford refrigeration, which in the pre-industrial world was arduous and expensive.

Back then, to refrigerate foodstuffs, people needed the land to build an ice house (to store the ice), fresh water access, and servants to cut and hull the ice. The ice would have to be regularly restocked and was available only in some climates at some times. But thanks to technological and scientific progress, ice cream has become available to pretty much everyone.

The first recorded mention of ice cream was on the menu of a feast given in 1671 by King Charles II. The banquet was held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Charles’ ascendency to the British throne. The flavour remains unknown, but the dessert was exclusive to the King’s table and served with “one plate of white strawberries”.

The new treat quickly took off. Eating ice cream not only demonstrated very high social status, but flavours themselves were a means to show off. From cucumber to carnation, sherry to daffodil (even though daffodil is poisonous), the more outlandish the flavour, the more it was valued by aristocrats.”

Human Progress

And if that whets your appetite you may also enjoy this video

 

America’s Best Idea

National Parks have been called America’s Best Idea and I have to agree.  I certainly did when I was younger. I swore I would collect the iconic “Unigrid” design brochures for every park and get stamps on my park Passport. Then I gradually realized the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior did not just manage the 60 major parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but another 354 National Monuments, Battlefields, Seashores and other designations.

Then came family and the definition of parks changed. Disney, Anheuser-Busch and other corporations provided park destinations for a couple of decades.

Now that the kids have moved out, Margaret and I are back to visiting National Parks again.   I am not sure we will get to 414 brochures and stamps but it is good to see a growing number of digital resources on each park.

Matt Holly works as a Park ranger but on his own time he’s created a massive site with over 1,700 free high-res maps on the parks. National Geographic has a series of episodes on parks.  One way to appreciate many parks even if you cannot physically make it there. And when you get to one, there are plenty of digital resources to mine on your phone.

As for us, we enjoy a few minutes with rangers like Matt when we visit these parks. Some memorable conversations have been at bottom of a cave at Carlsbad, on a cruise boat on Glacier Bay in Alaska (only two cruise boats are allowed a day and rangers come aboard and provide commentary for several hours), with a Park Policeman at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.

Teddy Roosevelt has moved up in my list of favorite US Presidents for his pioneering support of Parks. And I am very grateful to visionaries like John Muir and Henry David Thoreau for inspiring the country to preserve millions of wild acres for generations to come.