New Florence. New Renaissance.

State Farm’s Mash-up

of GM’s OnStar FMV and Progressive’s Snapshot

“However, if In-Drive ( a joint offering from State Farm Insurance and Hughes Telematics) subscribers opt-in to link the service to State Farm's Drive Safe & Save vehicle insurance program, they may save roughly 10 percent on liability, medical payments, collision, and comprehensive coverages. And according to State Farm's press release, "the discount may increase up to 50 percent." The catch: State Farm accesses In-Drive data—vehicle mileage, speed, and braking performance—to determine when and how policy holders drive.”

Consumer Reports

Adobe + EchoSign = end of fax and Fedex and printer ink?

Are we truly nearing - finally - a paperless state?

From Adobe's announcement of EchoSign (the electronic signature company) acquisition

"EchoSign's solution, which currently supports more than three million users worldwide, will be offered as part of Adobe's online document exchange services platform. The EchoSign solution will be integrated with other Adobe(R) document services including SendNow for managed file transfer, FormsCentral for form creation and CreatePDF for online PDF creation. By reducing the time and costs of having documents signed with traditional methods, such as fax and overnight envelopes, the EchoSign solution can enable customers to significantly accelerate sales cycles, improve tracking and centralize the management of signed agreements through a simple to use cloud service."

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National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators 2010

The NSF report here has a bunch of tables including the top 20 cities in the United States by the percentage of workers with jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Forbes put that into a gallery of "geeky cities" including Hunstville, AL (in photo) which ranks 4th.

The report goes into plenty of  global trends

"Science and technology are no longer the province of developed nations; they have, in a sense, become "democratized." Governments of many countries have firmly built S&T aspects into their development policies as they vie to make their economies more knowledge- and technology-intensive and, thereby, ensure their competitiveness in a globalizing world. These policies include long-term investments in higher education to develop human talent, infrastructure development, support for research and development, attraction of foreign direct investment and technologically advanced multinational firms, and the eventual development of indigenous high-technology capabilities."

 

The amazing range of 3D Printing

"Though a simple concept, 3D printing has blossomed into a pursuit that spans myriad fields, from giant crane-mounted nozzles oozing concrete, to printers for the kitchen that squeeze molten chocolate into shapely treats.

Prices for the rigs can be in the stratosphere, but the cheapest models (likt the Thing-O-Matic in video) have come down to around $1000, making 3D printing accessible to hobbyists. There are also agencies like Shapeways who will print your designs for you."

New Scientist

 

 

The Most “Wired” Hospitals

Among other key findings of this year's survey by Hospitals & Health Networks:

• Sixty-seven percent of Most Wired hospitals ordered medications electronically, in comparison to 46 percent of the total responders. Fifty-eight percent of all organizations reported that they have implemented computerized standing orders based on treatment protocols that have been scientifically proven to be effective; in the Most Wired group, 86 percent have implemented such standing orders.
• A greater reliance on digital records puts pressure on chief information officers (CIOs) to ensure data can be restored quickly in the event that systems go down. Eighty-two percent of the Most Wired hospitals and 57 percent of all surveyed hospitals can restore clinical data within 24 hours after a power loss.
• Most Wired hospitals are leading in the use of encryption on movable devices to safeguard information. All Most Wired hospitals encrypt data for laptops and 76 percent encrypt smartphones,  in comparison to 85 percent of total responders that use encryption on laptops and 57 percent on smartphones.

Rain Bird: the art of irrigation

I was at Home Depot and saw a Rain Bird (the sprinkler folks) brochure which allows you to sketch out your property and write in things like your water pressure, water meter size and mail it in and Rain Bird mails back a detailed computer drawn plan with suggested components such as valves and sprinklers. Nice, but I thought the process could be digitized and sure enough they have here complete with a Youtube instructional video below

But driving back in the middle of a rainstorm, I saw a few sprinklers continue to go, and I said surely they could be made smarter. Well, Rain Bird has several innovations. Its ESP-SMT irrigation controller utilizes historical and real-time weather data (you input your zip code, allowed watering days and a few other data points) to determine optimum watering needs of the landscape based on the on-site current weather conditions.  About the size of a shoebox, the controller mounts in a garage or on an outside wall, and uses temperature and rainfall data as recorded by its weather sensor to calculate the site’s evapotranspiration (ET) rate each day. The controller then deducts effective rainfall amounts from the ET rate to determine how much water is needed to maintain the optimum level of moisture in the soil. Its Soil Moisture Sensor Kit (SMRT-Y) connects to an existing irrigation controller to better manage the watering needs of a lawn and garden by providing instantaneous access to current soil moisture levels. Its WR2 Wireless Rain and Freeze Sensor measures rainfall and the onset of frigid temperatures to prevent unnecessary watering, saving water and improving overall sprinkler system efficiency. The WR2 Wireless Rain and Freeze Sensor transmits weather data back to the irrigation controller every 45 seconds, enabling real-time responsiveness to changing environmental conditions.

The timers themselves allow for controls on individual zones – some up to 48 zones, and some come with remote controls. All in all, pretty impressive.

Cop-Sourcing

"The latest smartphones bristle with sensors such as GPS receivers, accelerometers and gyroscopes, and researchers are making the most of this by enrolling people with these handsets in crowdsourcing projects, effectively handing the job of data collection to the public. In Boston, for example, drivers will soon be able to download an app called Street Bump that uses their phone's accelerometer and GPS to record the location of a pothole whenever their car bounces over one. Street Bump will then send this data to the city council.

Yet smartphones, along with other wireless gadgets, are also set to become powerful new tools for detecting law-breakers. In university labs and government agencies, engineers are linking our gadgets into novel surveillance networks designed to help catch criminals red-handed, or spot threats to public safety. In future, your cellphone or vehicle satnav, along with thousands of other devices like them, could work together to find stolen electronics, gather vehicle licence plates for the police in real time, sniff out banned drugs or gas leaks - and even help foil chemical attacks. These networks won't eliminate the need for a police force, of course, but they will give the government eyes and ears in a thousand places at once, creating what amounts to a 21st century neighbourhood watch - iWatch, perhaps - that criminals will have every reason to dread."

New Scientist (sub required)

 

Wireless Power in the Battlefield

"Too much gadget and not enough battery. It’s a problem any early adopter of a smartphone has faced (and, to some degree, is still facing) and can be a particular hassle when you’re traveling. Lots of gadgets means lots of charging cords or spare batteries. So imagine what it’s like for the average soldier who is routinely on the go and increasingly weighed down with gadgetry and power sources. It’s no wonder, then, that DARPA announced yesterday that it wants to deploy wireless charging hubs in the battlefield.

Specifically, DARPA wants a way for troops to be able to charge up their various gadgets--GPS units, voice and data comms, illumination devices, you name it--from a single, physically separated source that can charge several devices simultaneously. Spare batteries are simply too heavy (DARPA estimates troops lug five to ten pounds of battery weight around already) and the technology burden is only increasing as grunts grow more and more wired."

Popular Science

This drone is also a hacker and a poser

“Richard Perkins and Mike Tassey, who were told that an in-flight hacking platform was impossible. In response, the pair plan on showing off their off their Wi-Fi hacking, phone-snooping, home-made UAV at the Black Hat and Defcon hackerfests in Las Vegas. They call their creation the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP.

Built from an old Air Force target drone, the WASP packs a lot of technological power into a flying high-endurance package. A tiny on-board computer (Linux powered, natch) is bristling with hacking tools, along with a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-forcing passwords, the BackTrack suite, a 4G T-Mobile card, an HD camera, and 32 GB onboard storage.

Just what does WASP do with those gigabytes? Originally, it was designed for Wi-Fi penetration — cracking network passwords while loitering above a target area. But the newly upgraded WASP can now trick GSM phones into connecting with its 4G card as if it were a standard cellphone tower. Once connected, the WASP quietly records any phone conversations or text messages while connecting the call via VOIP, thus giving the mark the impression that the call went through normally.”

Geekosystem

Both have defense backgrounds. Perkins, “an Air Force contractor focused on cybersecurity who once owned a airplane hobby shop, and Tassey, an ex-Air Force consultant”

“We wanted to bring to light how far the consumer industry has progressed, to the point where public has access to technologies that put companies, and even governments at risk from this new threat vector that they’re not aware of,” says Perkins.

Forbes

@WalmartLabs

In 1999 WalMart sued then fledgling Amazon for hiring several of its technology and logistics executives.

Now, in a turnaround, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman (in photo) who founded Junglee that Amazon acquired in 1998 and were influential in those formative days at Amazon are running @Walmartlabs "to speed with innovations such as smartphone payment technology, mobile shopping applications, and Twitter-influenced product selection for stores"

Their biggest challenge may be change management.

"Wal-Mart’s lackluster online history has deep cultural roots. The organization has long been dominated by store managers who feared e-commerce could cannibalize in-store sales, and thus their bonuses, according to a former Walmart.com senior executive. In Walmart.com’s first few years, store managers fought against putting the site’s Web address on shopping bags."

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