New Florence. New Renaissance.

Transformation Furniture

Wall beds no longer simply hide away behind an unusable wall or sliding doors, but serve as a shelf, table or desk when tucked away. Engineered for stability and ease of use, there is no need to clear off the desk before setting up a wall bed. In just a few quick moves, a living room or office can transform into a guest bedroom.

Sofa beds that convert into bunk beds make for an easy way to sleep two without clearing away furniture to unfold a traditional sofa bed. It's a perfect solution for grandparents who occasionally watch children overnight, or for turning a one-bedroom apartment into a home for a family of four. 

Transforming furniture and space-saving design isn't just reserved for beds. Side tables and coffee tables that easily turn into dining tables allow a modest home to readily host large dinner parties or family gatherings. The square footage of a home should not limit the experiences and memories that can be had within its walls.

SF Globe

 

 

The Big Data of Guide Dogs

Currently, as few as 37% of puppies make it through the raising program to become successful service dogs for the blind. Given that it costs Guiding Eyes more than $40,000 to raise each dog, even a 5% increase in performance can yield the non-profit considerable savings.

The first step was to move all the data — which includes 30 years of structured genetic breeding data and thousands of unstructured questionnaire documents — to IBM Cloud.

Now, Professor Chris Tseng of San Jose State University and a group of his machine-learning students are using IBM Watson services on Bluemix to look for insight in all that data.

By combining the hard and soft data, the study will connect complex patterns, and yield useful insights that will help inform every stage of guide dog development.

Medium – thanks to Vijay Vijayasankar of IBM for sharing

 

 

Microsoft Machine Learning use cases

All kinds of companies and industries are already using Microsoft technology. Japanese farmers are tracking cows, which walk more when ready to conceive, so they can inseminate the cow at the optimal moment. An Australian wine company is using similar algorithms to predict grape yields. A hospital about an hour from Microsoft is using Azure tools to help figure out which cardiac patients are most likely to require re-admission. Norway’s eSmart Systems uses Azure Machine Learning to forecast energy grid usage and turn down home heating when demand is high.

Bloomberg

 

Light City

In 1816, the artist Rembrandt Peale gathered an audience at his museum in Baltimore, and wowed them by illuminating the room with gas lamps, instead of candles. Soon the city became the first in the US to light its streets with such lamps.

Two centuries later, the city is celebrating its pioneering work with light with a festival this week. The vid below talks about the artists and shows which reflect a much more contemporary view of light.

 

 

 

The STEM behind quantum computing

The environment in which the system operates is kept at a temperature that is near absolute zero. So you probably remember, –273 degrees centigrade is the lowest temperature, called a thermodynamic limit or the lowest temperature that’s physically possible in the universe. This machine runs at 0.01 degrees kelvin, or 10 degrees millikelvin, above that.

So unless there’s any other intelligent life in the universe, this is the coldest environment in the universe that this machine has to run in. For instance, interstellar space is about 4 degrees kelvin, which is much, much warmer than our operating temperature.

That’s not the only part of it. We have to create a magnetic vacuum and an air vacuum. So there’s this coffee-can-sized environment that has this incredibly low temperature and this magnetic vacuum that is probably among the purest environments in the universe. There are no naturally occurring environments like this.

From an interview with the CEO of D-Wave Systems, Vern Brownell.

 

 

The EV for the masses

The little EV may look like just another five-door compact, but two figures make it an engineering masterstroke: 200 and 30,000.

That first number is its range: 200 miles on a fully charged battery. That’s a number exceeded only by Tesla, whose cheapest model starts north of $70,000. And that brings us to the second number. Chevy promises the Bolt will cost less than $30,000 after the $7,500 federal tax credit. Together, they make the Bolt the first EV that delivers excellent range at a great price. It is the electric car for the masses.

Wired

 

One World Observatory “Screams Defiance”

As part of the Infor Analyst summit this week, dinner was at the top of the spectacular One World Observatory in New York. The sun set over the Statue of Liberty and the full moon later made for a memorable evening.

As the Telegraph said of the tower which opened last year

“What they have ended up with is a building that screams defiance and strength. It is 400 feet higher than the original Twin Towers; the walls and floors contain 14,000lbs of concrete per square inch, compared with 900lbs that is standard for skyscrapers; there is a waterproof fire lift, and the elevators and stairways are housed in a reinforced column "like a bunker".”

To me, one of the highlights was the technology. The Global Welcome lobby has a large video board which shows off a dynamically generated world map highlights the hometowns of visitors (they key in their zip codes).

The ThyssenKrupp “skypods” zip up 102 floors in 47 seconds – at nearly 25mph. In that ride, you have little time to scream, and even if you wanted to, you are in awe of the walls which show a time lapse of the Manhattan skyline from the 1500s to today.

The See Forever Theater at the top projects more images of New York in a multi-dimension setting and at the end the screens open up to the live view of the city today. You can then walk around and get a 360 degree view of the city, its famous rivers, bridges and other icons.

The video below gives some of the experience but well worth a visit next time you are in New York city.  And yes, you can quietly scream your defiance also while you are there.

 

 

 

The “Pixar of Comics”

Profile of First Second publishing which has made illustrated books an art form over the last decade

“We have a whole process to pair authors and illustrators together!  It's something that we do a lot -- and it generally involves a lot of research.  As an editor, I visit schools with comics programs throughout the year, meeting young cartoonists and generally keeping an eye on the talent pool.  In addition, our staff and I attend a lot of shows, and at the end of every show we bring home mini-comics from people we'd like to work with one day.  We also spend a lot of time on the internet, looking at cartoonists' work.  And we read extensively to make sure we're aware of amazing authors and artists who are out there.”

Interview below with Calista Brill, Senior Editor

 

A wearable charging cable

A new On The Go (OTG) wearable charging cable for smartphones, called Thino, is a portable charger, battery back-up, and data transfer all in one compact, durable and lightweight aluminium body! Thino has a dual side USB connector and is able to detect and switch between different USB charging methods such as charging downstream port (CDP), dedicated charging port (DCP) and standard downstream port (SDP). Thino is able to supply any Android and iOS device with the maximum current it can draw from the source. The built-in 480mAh Lithium Polymer battery can be used as a portable back-up battery to keep your device up and running for 2 hours.

Gadget Explained

Photo Credit

Digital Factories

You will see a highly automated manufacturing flow, like what the automotive industry uses. But what you see is sometimes the flow is like this [he moves one hand off to the side]. Sometimes the flow is like this [he shifts it again], and all of a sudden, the flow is like this [he moves both hands]. And you say, “What the hell is going on here?” Well, what happens is that there’s a customer request such as, “I want this product in that size, in that lot size, with that blue color, with that dot on the bottom.” So the software steers the manufacturing process into lots as small as one item. And then sometimes all of a sudden, you see that certain products are being sorted out into a queue, because the plant received information about a quality defect in that product. So the simulation fixes the defect and gets approval from quality management to put it into the production process. And then off we go.

Industrie 4.0 basically takes the cost of scale close to zero. The production process is being changed. It’s machines talking to machines in a self-optimizing manufacturing and engineering process. Using this approach, we have attained a production quality rate of 99.9988%. That is getting pretty close to Six Sigma. In the last five years, we have increased productivity eightfold. It’s really something.

From interview with Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser in Strategy+Business