New Florence. New Renaissance.

Google’s Web Justice

Conversation AI represents just one of Jigsaw’s wildly ambitious projects. The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google’s massive infra­structure and engineer­ing muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship. The group sees its work, in part, as taking on the most intract­able jobs in Google’s larger mission to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.”

Wired

 

BMW Motorcycle of Future

The Motorrad Vision Next 100 concept does away with a traditional mechanical frame, replacing it with a flexible material that bends when the driver turns. It adjusts sensitivity based on speed; the effort required to turn increases as the bike goes faster, improving stability and safety at high speeds while adding an unprecedented sense of connection to the riding experience. The focus on connection, however, doesn’t stop there. An integrated “Digital Companion” suggests adjustments to improve performance, an augmented-reality visor tracks eye movement to provide constant real-time feedback, and self-balancing technology allows riders to remain in riding position, even at a complete stop.

Architectural Digest

 

Sweden: The pursuit of happiness

A Volvo executive gave me a quick tour of his hometown, Gothenburg from a 29th floor restaurant. He pointed to the area where ship builders dominated. It is mostly software and digital businesses today. A boat tour of the harbor showed the changing fortunes of the largest port in the Baltics – plenty of Norwegian oil and Volvo cars flow today. A taxi driver told me the success of the XC90 SUV is keeping the local Volvo plant extremely busy. The ownership today is Chinese and another Swede told me of Ericsson’s challenges over the last few decades. The well preserved section of Gamla stan, medieval Stockholm is in sharp contrast to the “train of the future” I had taken to it from the airport.

The economy keeps evolving, and Swedes continue to be rated as some of the happiest people on earth. That’s saying something given the harsh weather they endure most of the year and even with having to pay some of the highest taxes in the world.

It showed in small and large innovations I noticed throughout my trip to Sweden this week. The Arlanda airport express train is ergonomic, has cotton filled seating, soft LED lighting, glass luggage racks, biodegradable paper in restrooms - all make you wish it took longer than 20 minutes (in contrast a bus ride I took on way back took 45 minutes). The trains run on 100% green electricity from renewable sources, such as hydropower, wind power or biofuels. Only biking would emit less CO2 on the 25 mile stretch. BTW, only one per cent of solid waste goes to landfill in Sweden – with the rest recycled or used to produce heat, electricity or vehicle fuel in the form of biogas.

The SJ train from Stockholm to Gothenburg was a model of efficiency and friendliness with free wifi even at speeds of 125 mph. The attendant scanned my paper ticket with her mobile phone. My fellow passengers were pleasant and welcoming.

The airports have self-service kiosks to generate baggage tags and you scan them on your own onto conveyor belts which confirm your flight number on their displays and send the bags on their merry ways. The security lines have automated trays.

Sweden is sparsely populated – still recovering from the mass emigration in the late 1800s when a quarter of the population left for the US. So such automation is commonplace.

And yet the intellectual and design capital is first rate. ABBA, Steig Larsson and IKEA designers are just a few of such examples. This blog has cataloged Swedish leadership with cashless payments, telematics, voice over IP, next-gen bike helmets and countless other innovations.

And the citizens are mostly happy.

The New Science of Exercise

Tarnopolsky now thinks he knows why. In studies where blood is drawn immediately after people exercised, researchers have found that many positive changes occur throughout the body during and right after a workout. “Going for a run is going to improve your skin health, your eye health, your gonadal health,” he says. “It’s unbelievable.” If there were a drug that could do for human health everything that exercise can, it would likely be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed.

Time (sub required)

Virtual Care Centers

James Hoevelmann of Sullivan, Missouri, used to work in hospital construction. But these days, even though he suffers from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the retired carpenter, 74, doesn’t want to go anywhere near a medical facility. And he doesn’t need to, even though his COPD has been bad enough in the past to regularly land him in the emergency room and the intensive care unit. The reason: Hoevelmann now gets his care from Mercy Virtual Care Center some 50 miles away in Chesterfield.

Equipped with an iPad and devices such as a blood pressure monitor and scale that stream his vital signs and other data from his home to the Mercy Virtual “command center,” he and his providers have been able to detect subtle health shifts in time to avert the cascade of deterioration that put him in the ICU. “We can trend the data on a daily basis and intervene in many cases even before patients experience symptoms,” says Gavin Helton, Mercy’s medical director. Says Hoevelmann: “I feel safer knowing I have those people behind me.”

US News and World Report

 

 

 

Silicon Collar excerpt: School Teacher

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Tony Prophet, Corporate Vice President of Education Marketing at Microsoft (he has since moved to Salesforce) is tasked with bringing new digital education experiences to the 1.5 billion teachers and students in primary and secondary education around the world.

The goal is to evolve beyond the three "R"s of traditional school education—reading, writing and ‘rithmetic—to the modern five "C"s. The National Education Association has identified the first four Cs as part of its framework for 21^st century learning: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication. With Microsoft, they are also helping emphasize a 5^th C, which represents computational thinking.

The Torkinmäki School in Finland uses OneNote Class Notebook as a central collaboration space, a content library to store class materials (handwriting, text, web content, even audio and video) and an individual notebook for every student in the class that teachers can see in real time to provide feedback. Skype in the Classroom is allowing classrooms in California to connect with schools in New Zealand and elsewhere, and take students on virtual field trips. Sway is a storytelling app that makes it quick and easy to create polished, interactive lessons, assignments, reports, newsletters, and more—from any device.​​​

The BBC micro:bit, supported by Microsoft, is aimed at virtually every Year 7 student (ages 11-12) in the UK. It is a wearable computing device, smaller than a credit card, that students can use to explore the possibilities of computing.

A user manual for a magazine?!?

Kid you not…fittingly from Popular Mechanics for my iPad

Google Pixel: The iPhone challenger

The iPhone is the Default Phone, the one you buy when you want a phone, not a project.

The Google Pixel changes that. It offers the look and competence of an iPhone, with a truly great camera and loads of innovative software and services. It changes my answer to the question I hear most often: What phone should you get?

You should get a Pixel.

Wired

 

Your first autonomous vehicle: Your Luggage

“Travelmate is the first smart autonomous suitcase. It can move autonomously in both vertical and horizontal modes. Travelmate is smart enough to adjust to the speed that you’re going at and it can easily maneuver through obstacles like crowds and uneven terrain. It also has an inaudible engine that is nonetheless powerful enough to carry or nudge along an extra suitcase for you. And if you’re in a hurry, Travelmate can go up to 6.75 mph or 10.86 km/h.”

Huffington Post

 

High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program

Ever since the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program opened in 2003, people have been intrigued by the field of antennas off mile 11.3 of the Tok Cutoff Road.

The field of radio transmitters designed to heat portions of space has not operated since 2014. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute took it over from the U.S. Air Force in 2015. Despite that inactivity, 350 people were curious enough to travel to Gakona on Aug. 27 and explore the HAARP ­­facility during an open house held by faculty and staff members of the Geophysical Institute.

Long a conversation piece for people who questioned what Department of Defense scientists were doing in the Copper River Valley far from any town, HAARP will soon host its first campaigns under university ownership.

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