New Florence. New Renaissance.

The future of urban living

A century, plus or minus, after human beings started putting their minds toward designing cities as a whole, things are getting good. High tech materials, sensor networks, new science, and better data are all letting architects, designers, and planners work smarter and more precisely. Cities are getting more environmentally sound, more fun, and more beautiful. And just in time, because today more human beings live in cities than not.

In this year’s design issue, we’re telling the stories of some of those projects, from the detail of a new streetlight to a sacred city in flux, from masterful museums to infrastructure made for bikes (and the algorithms that run it all). The cities of tomorrow might still self-assemble haltingly, but done right, the process won’t be accidental. A city shouldn’t just happen anymore. Every block, every building, every brick represents innumerable decisions. Decide well, and cities are magic.

Wired

Artificial Intelligence at Facebook

Yann LeCun, who now serves as the director of FAIR, comes from a storied tenure of artificial intelligence research. He began his work in Bell Labs (founded by telephone father Alexander Graham Bell, and known for its experiments across myriad fields in telecommunications and technology) as a researcher starting in 1988, then moving to become a department head at AT&T Labs until developing 2003, when he began to teach at New York University. The modern convolutional neural network is a culmination of work throughout LeCun’s career. Ever wonder how an ATM can read your check? That was LeCun, whose early work included a neural network simulator called “SN” and deployed in 1996.

“When someone like Mark (Zuckerberg) comes to you and says ‘Oh, okay, you pretty much have carte blanche. You can put together a world-class research lab and I expect you to build the best research lab in AI in the world.’ I’ll say,’Hmm, interesting challenge.’”

PopSci

Self-healing tires

“Invented by Charles Goodyear, chemical cross-linking of rubbers by sulfur vulcanization is the only method by which modern automobile tires are manufactured,” write Amit Das and his colleagues in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. “The formation of these cross-linked network structures leads to highly elastic properties, which substantially reduces the viscous properties of these materials.”

Instead, they added a compound with carbon and nitrogen into rubber normally used for tires. Inside the new rubber, reversible ionic bonding lets the cut or torn material reconnect crosslinks when two pieces are brought back together. Over time, the number of reformed crosslinks grows and the rubber’s durability increases at room temperature. After eight days, the healed rubber could endure a force of 754 pounds per square inch, around 20 times the pressure a normal tire holds.

Txchnologist

 

 

A sea of red lights

Mr. Schwartz’s summary of road-building techniques and dissection of city grids explain historical developments that we live with today. Spiderweb grids with radiating spokes, for instance, replace inefficient right angles with nifty diagonals, but their routes become more indirect the further travelers are from the center, adding to traveling time. His account of President Eisenhower’s creation of the interstate highway system is riveting, as is his informed discussion of the rise and fall of streetcars.

WSJ

Cool HR Tools

From an annual top 10 list of tools by HR Executive

“Some key themes addressed by our winners this year include talent acquisition and management, relocation, performance management, employment screening and workforce analytics. Also, as is becoming increasingly common, many of the products selected below and on the next few pages reside in the cloud and work on mobile platforms. We expect this trend to only strengthen and grow going forward.

Also noticeable this year was what we might call an improving-on-the-past trend. Indeed, some winners have taken well-established processes, such as job-candidate scheduling, relocation management and performance management, and have dramatically improved upon them.”

The ones for 2015 are

• Workday Talent Insights
• BetterWorks
• Korn Ferry's Four Dimensional Executive Assessment (see video)
• CoPilot by NuCompass
• HireVue Coordinate
• Permiso
• I-9 Anywhere
• eQuest Gamification
• ADP Marketplace
• Yello (formerly Recsolu) Scheduling

 

Smarter shower?

“Nebia atomizes water into millions of tiny droplets with 10 times more surface area than your regular shower. With Nebia, more water comes into contact with your body, leaving your skin clean and hydrated all while using less water than a typical household showerhead. In fact, Nebia uses 70% less water than a typical household showerhead. For the average U.S. home, Nebia pays for itself in less than two years.”

Kickstarter Page

 

 

In the year of Hoverboards

This was the year when the movie “Back to the Future Part II” imagined widespread use of hoverboards.

New York, at least, is getting a bit closer as an increasing number of riders hop on new, albeit wheeled, personal transportation gadgets.

They stand on self-balancing scooters, which are often called hoverboards and resemble small Segways without handlebars. The gizmos come with their own safety risks and at least one other drawback:

“You’re going to get fat!” one passerby told Jeremy Epstein, 27 years old, while he rode his in Manhattan.

If two wheels are one too many, riders such as Keith Fridia, who turns 45 on Tuesday, opt for electric unicycles to buzz around. “One wheel—like the Jetsons,” said Mr. Fridia, a barber who lives in Brooklyn. “I do feel like I’m in the future.”

WSJ

 

 

Precision Farming

Since Dorn Cox began automating his 250-acre New Hampshire farm four years ago, he has installed dozens of sensors. Some measure moisture in soil around his squash. Some track temperatures in the greenhouse air around his cucumbers. Others track wind speed and rainfall in segments of field roughly a quarter-acre in size. When something is amiss—temperatures are too high or the soil is too dry—he receives an alert on his smartphone. He also sends out drones to survey his field crops for dryness, soil erosion, and plant health.

Popular Science

Org Chart made for frequent flyers

Businessweek has a story on Diebold’s virtual executive suite but the collaboration, telepresence and communication technology described below is becoming mainstream in most companies around the world.

The “China Button”

Casey is the guy because since 1996 he’s been facilitating hardware manufacturing for companies large and small in China, the world’s largest manufacturer of (and market for) electronics. The simplest way to explain PCH (named for California’s Pacific Coast Highway) is that it offers “end-to-end” services: from design to engineering, manufacturing to packaging, fulfillment to retail distribution. If you gave PCH a sketch on a napkin, the company could turn it into a product on a shelf—as it actually did recently with Drop, a connected kitchen scale. “Some people expect a ‘China button,’ ” Casey says. “But they’re looking for an end-to-end button.”

Fortune