New Florence. New Renaissance.

“Clutter” startups

Twice is one of many startups attempting to make the environmentally sound choice preferable and easy for consumers while making a profit in the process. The statistics driving these efforts are shocking: In the U.S., 90% of mobile devices are thrown away rather than recycled. Up to 40% of the food produced gets trashed. Americans junk some 12 million tons of textiles each year. “There’s no way we can continue to produce waste at the level that we are and survive on this planet,” says Adam Werbach, a co-founder of Yerdle, a site where people trade things they might otherwise throw out. “It really is much easier to click a button than it is to knock on your neighbor’s door.” And that is the convenience gap these enviro-preneurs hope to close.

Time (sub required)

Chief Resilience Officer

“Cities tend to operate in silos,” says Judith Rodin, Rockefeller’s president. “And resilience is very much about building a systems approach. The idea is having a single post that really is integrating across systems--both within city government, but also between city government and other elements of the fabric of the community.”

The new CROs will think about how to prepare for natural disasters, but will also consider aspects of social and economic resilience. Rodin shares the example of New York after the recession; when Mayor Bloomberg realized the city was too reliant on the financial sector, he started working to bring in more tech companies. On the opposite coast, San Francisco is thinking about how to add more non-tech jobs so the city can try to stay strong if technology companies start to falter.

After running a global challenge last year, the Rockefeller Foundation narrowed down a list of 400 applicants to 100 winning cities across seven continents, and will start the program with a smaller group of 33. Some, like Ramallah, or Byblos, Lebanon, were very much at the beginning of their resilience planning, says Rodin. Others, like San Francisco and Rotterdam, have spent more time planning for disasters, and are well positioned to help create and test new technology that they can later share with other cities in the program.

Fast Company

Big Data at Small Budgets

Companies ranging from established giants such as IBM, SAS, and Microsoft to startups such as Tranzlogic and Kaggle offer affordable, cloud-based data-crunching services-which can help you get nondigitized data into data-crunchable form-and today virtually anyone can get his or her hands dirty in the great Big Data mud pile.

Businesses successfully mining Big Data are cross-referencing their internal information-pricing histories, customer traffic patterns-with multiple outside sources to increase revenue by understanding customers' behavior better, reducing costs by eliminating inefficiencies and human bias, strengthening client bonds by anticipating clients' needs, enriching service offerings with new knowledge, and giving employees new tools to perform their jobs better.

Inc

Not your dad’s insurance salesman

Metlife has been piloting insurance kiosks at Walmarts in a few states

“The initial screen requires the user to select from three options based on whom they are buying coverage for – themselves, a family member or as a gift. The next screen offers policies for four age groups – 18-44, 45-54, 55-59 and 60-65. Once the user selects the appropriate age group, the following screen presents two coverage amount options. Based on their inputs, the system notifies the user of the annual rate for their term policy and which color policy package to grab from the kiosk display.

The user then locates their designated colored box on the kiosk display, which contains a prepaid $5 card for the policy amount, and scans it at the store checkout. Once paid, the individual must call the firm to answer six health questions, with no medical exam required. If approved, individuals can activate the term life policy for a full year. Those who don't qualify can get a refund at Walmart."

Vacation Tagalongs

August is one of America’s biggest travel months—when vacationers hit the road, the airport, or the beach—but getting away doesn’t necessarily mean getting away from it all. Consumer Reports’ 2014 survey of 1,044 American adults finds that 94 percent of travelers bring electronic devices on vacation. In many cases, that tagalong is a smart phone: Two out of three Americans take one on vacation. But that’s not all they carry. These days Americans take three devices along for the ride, on average, according to our survey.

What should be on your packing list? It depends on where you’re going and what you’re doing. If memorable vacation photos are important, for instance, you should consider toting a dedicated camera with a decent optical zoom and image stabilizer, features you’re not likely to get with a smart phone. If you need to keep kids in the backseat occupied, a tablet loaded with videos and games could provide a little peace and quiet. And if you’re contemplating lazy beach reads, a dedicated e-book reader that’s easy to read in the sun will serve you much better than a do-everything tablet.

Consumer Reports

Technology and my Passion: Simon Griffiths and Meteorology

This is one in a 2014 guest column series which builds on the one in 2009 where 50+ had written about how science/tech has evolved their hobby/interest.

This time it is Simon Griffiths. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa he has been in the enterprise software industry for 20 years. He works on global product marketing for international ERP vendor, SYSPRO. And on his gauge at home where he has recorded daily rainfall just almost as long.

To most people the word "meteorology" conjures up images of a TV presenter talking about current weather conditions and the forecast for the next few days. That portrays the wrong image of meteorology, it’s meteorology as entertainment rather than the science that it is.

Human societies have tried to forecast the weather probably since they started cultivating crops. The subject of meteorology was begun as far back as 350 BC when Aristotle gave it its name. The history of meteorology is an intriguing subject and .">.">summarized well. There are different branches of the subject – e.g., maritime, agricultural.

My introduction to meteorology was as a subject a university, but it was never something I considered too interesting. My views began to change in my final year when one of my lecturers suggested that there was a research job for a company that was seeding clouds in eastern South Africa. As I had no other employment lined up, I applied for the job, and shortly afterwards, got it. That was in 1979.

The job brought me closer to meteorology than ever before – it was a case of academic discussions becoming practical. I launched weather balloons, tracked and recorded the soundings from the transmitter on the balloons, and got to understand the process of forecasting from the company meteorologist. During the summer rainy season I worked on the weather radar and watched how clouds moved and developed in real-time. I even found it interesting to learn about the intricacies of cloud physics, which had been too theoretical for me before. Within 18 months, I could act like an expert and gauge the distance of a storm just by looking at it.

While I was there, and afterwards, the company was featured in several media reports about its cloud seeding work, unfortunately the only website that still has a valid link is to a BBC TV program called The Rainmaker. The Economist also wrote an article called "Cloudbusting", published on 21st August 1999. There were later academic articles about it, such as a report in the American Meteorological Society journal in September 1996.

It was also where I got my first exposure to computing. The company was very data-oriented – as much as it could be then. Its weather radar was linked to a Data General mini-computer where we could record and store the profile of thunderstorms. A particle-measuring laser probe was added to the wingtip of one of the aircraft to get detailed data on atmospheric particles. From one of the particle scans we could clearly see a snow crystal, which lead me to joke that I had seen snow in summer. I learnt to program there, writing programs in Basic and FORTRAN, as a kind of apprentice to the technical director, an ex-US Navy and NASA engineer. During my time the computer was upgraded, and we got new removable disk drives that could hold a whopping five megabytes of data – a lot in those days.

While I was working there in 1980, I was told about one of the great technological marvels of meteorology, the Cray super-computer at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder, Colorado. This was a machine that cost millions of dollars and could compute calculations at a then incredible rate; and it was housed in a special super-cooled environment. These days, the average smartphone has more computing power than that Cray.

The fact that I was introduced to computers while doing meteorological work should not come as a great surprise. Meteorology and technology have been closely linked in recent decades. Computing power is what it takes to do the mass of complex calculations required for a forecast. The two main elements of forecasting are data from observed measurements (wind, temperature, pressure), and the application of physical laws of the atmosphere. A further complication is that while the atmosphere is governed by the laws of physics, the Earth’s weather is a chaotic, non-linear system – in simple English that means it is highly sensitive to initial conditions, and the output is not proportional to the input. That is why a major challenge has always been making accurate weather forecasts for a reasonable period into the future.

Until the advent of computers, it was practically impossible to do this to any great scale. These days we take it for granted that major weather forecasting services use computers to do their numerical forecasting.

Another revolution has been the use of satellite imagery to back up weather forecasting. Until the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) satellites of the 1970s, we could only observe the atmosphere via land- or sea-based weather stations, and then create synoptic charts as a guide to what the weather was doing. Now we can use both to show what the weather is like. This was recently born out to me when there was a warning of a major cold front approaching South Africa.

Only a few years ago, we got our weather news from the radio, TV or newspapers. Now people have apps on their smartphones like AccuWeather and can get hourly information geo-located to their position.

Despite all the incredible technological advances in the last fifty years, meteorologists can still only forecast with any accuracy for a few days into the future, and are known to get even that wrong. I wonder what advances will happen in the next fifty years.

 

Quite a haul!

During my visit to Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores this past week I wondered how they had managed to get the America’s Cup boat all the way from the docks to the lake in the campus. How did it manage the traffic on Hwy 101 for one? :)

Sergio Segal, a resident of the city and with even more curiosity than I have had spent hours watching and photographing the helicopter transporting the boat, the mantling and dismantling of the massive crane which hoisted it in place and the end result.

He told me he thought Sheedy Dryage was the contractor. I can believe it. Its website says it is “capable of performing almost any hoisting, rigging, or hauling task efficiently and safely”

Thanks Sergio!

 

 

Cloud Music Player

Part Wi-Fi router, part living-room music player, Gramofon connects old-school home stereo equipment to Spotify and other streaming music services that can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet.

BusinessWeek

The Machine from HP Labs

John Sontag has seen the future—or at least Hewlett-Packard’s version of it. Sontag, vice president and director of Systems Research at HP Labs, has been in charge of the team developing “The Machine,” an experimental piece of computing hardware that HP executives hope will be the template upon which the future of networked computing is built. In an interview with Ars, Sontag explained how the core technologies of The Machine—memristor-based memory and low-cost silicon-to-optic interfaces—will change the shape of computing.

The Machine is a hyper-dense collection of computing hardware that could be used in anything from a data center to a mobile device. It has terabytes of storage and a much smaller power draw than today’s computing devices—all because of memristor-based memory and optical interconnects.

ARS Technica

 

The Graphene Race

Thinner, stronger, and more flexible than materials now on the market, graphene is ideal for wearable devices like smartwatches and for tablets that can fold into the size of a smartphone.

“We will someday see an era where mobile devices will truly become flexible—easily folded and unfolded—and that’s when we’ll need graphene,” says Claire Kim, a Seoul-based analyst at Daishin Securities.

The first companies to commercialize graphene technology in mobile devices will have an advantage over the rest of the industry, she says.

Bloomberg