New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Ultimate Airport

Wired develops a “best of breed” airport taking features from terminals around the world.

Below is a partial extract

Axe-handle baseball bat

Some of Major League Baseball’s best hitters have tossed aside their old sluggers for something called the Axe Bat. As the name implies, it’s part axe—thanks to a contoured oval handle and an angled knob—and promises players a more natural grip, better bat control, more-powerful swings, and a reduced risk of hand injuries.

Chili Davis, the Boston Red Sox hitting coach—whose own 18-year MLB career netted 350 homers and three World Series rings—set the shift in motion when he brought one to spring training last year. When Chili swings, players take note, and two Sox are now swatting full-time with the Axe.

Popular Science

 

adidas Future Lab

Wired on 3D printing, robotic kicker and more as adidas perfects the laceless soccer boot of the future in its Lab

“To this end, the Future Lab developed a material it calls Primeknit - a yarn that's digitally printed in a single unit. Traditionally, boots are made from pieces of leather that are stitched together; the new technique means that a boot fits an individual's foot while remaining rigid at specific points - like a hardened piece of leather - by means of fusing the yarn. "Boots used to consist of a base material over which further layers were packed; now we are working with only a single layer," Müller says.”

“Next to the climate chamber is a 22-metre-long stretch of artificial turf. At one end is what adidas describes as the best football player at the facility: a flywheel with an artificial foot at the end, known as Roboleg. Its shots travel at 160kph - 40kph more than the average speed of travel of a ball from a professional player. Not only is Roboleg more powerful than a human, it can reproduce each of its shots exactly. Sixteen cameras in the ceiling of the lab record the trajectory of every ball, taking 3,000 pictures per second, analysing its flight using Hawk-Eye - the tracking technology used at Wimbledon for line calls and in the Premier League for goal-line decisions - which offers real-time data.”

Virtual Singapore

In 2014, the population of Singapore was estimated to be 5.47 million, inhabiting a land area of 718 square kilometres. As one of the most densely populated cities in the world, Singapore faces complex urban challenges, and careful urban planning is crucial to maintain efficiency and sustainability. For the coming decades, Virtual Singapore will provide a collaborative platform and rich data environment to help make long-term decisions on areas such as infrastructure and resource management, environmental and disaster management, public services, urban planning, community services and homeland security.

Enterprise Innovation

 

Beyond “Flash Boys”

Bloomberg Markets profile of Brad Katsuyama, a key figure in Michael Lewis’s last book

“Moneyball was a hugely influential book for me. Starting at RBC back in 2002, we needed to find ways to be different without the same resources as the biggest banks. So I read Moneyball, and I felt like that had a pretty big influence on the way we thought. The discussion with Michael really started with helping him write a story about somebody else. He had stumbled upon the story of Sergey Aleynikov, who was thrown in prison for taking computer code. Michael went to a couple characters in The Big Short, whom I know. The first few months was really just giving him background. He’d ask, “What is this?” And we’d try our best to answer. That evolved into him getting to know and understand our story. In many ways, we just interacted with him as if he were a buy-side firm or broker who came in and started asking questions. I tried not to think about the fact that we were talking to Michael Lewis.”

The AWS Snowmobile

As (AWS CEO) Jassy noted during his keynote at re:Invent, one of the biggest hurdles with moving workloads to the public cloud has been data transport. So why not create a truck that'll suck in your corporate data and move it to AWS?

ZDNet

 

Your car as RV

Rooftop tents are great, unless you're also traveling with bikes, skis, or boats. The two-person, rack-friendly Tepui White Lightning lets you bring them all. The hardtop's mounts attach to most popular racks to carry up to 60 additional pounds on top of the tent. Even when it's fully loaded, the fiberglass-platform tent pops open with enough room to sleep two. Climb up the included telescoping ladder, and through an oversize mesh door you'll find a 2.5-inch-thick foam mattress that guarantees a good night's sleep wherever you park.

Men’s Journal

 

Your fellow passengers in the future

Crying babies, loud music, smelly feet – look where you can look forward to those in the future

Wired lists our future commutes

Tower of Babel

Skype Translator, for example, is able to translate both spoken word and text, and uses machine learning to become more advanced the more it is used. After recording the speaker, Skype Translator uses a speech recognition system to convert that file into text, and relays it through a robotic voice.

Similarly, Google Translate offers speech-to-speech translation, as well as translation via images. Users simply point the camera in their phone at a piece of text, and get an instant translation in return.

The advantage speech-to-speech tools have over image translators is their capacity to handle instant speech translation, not just written text. For global businesses, the reality is that decisions will be made over the phone or in person, rather than by messenger. Skype and Google’s ability to process conversations in real time has the potential to help businesses make more accurate and effective decisions on a global scale more quickly.

ExchangeWire

 

 

Not so smart home

Popular Science lists some of the handy and not so handy devices entering our homes