New Florence. New Renaissance.

Reinventing the alarm clock

It’s hard to believe that an alarm clock—the cruel, clunky gadget that jolts you awake and ruins your morning—could not only be beautiful but also improve your sleep. That it could gauge the temperature, humidity, light and even air quality in your bedroom to help you engineer a perfect sleep environment. That it could monitor your sleep cycles and wake you when you’re least likely to feel groggy—all thanks to simple voice commands. Indeed, Sense (and its companion pillow sensor) is no ordinary alarm clock.

Time

 

HPE’s “Machine”

‘The Machine’ could mark a significant turning point for HPE or the ultimate in lost causes – and it could be argued the company has a bit of a track record there – viz its commitment to Intel’s Itanium processor. But the in-memory architecture does hold out the potential of being the next big step that IT takes.

And if HP’s developments in non-volatile memory devices prove to give the lead Chalmers feels sure they will, and they get licensed out in a timely fashion together with the licensing of a reference system architecture, there could soon be available a wide range of machines at price points that make fast, high-throughput systems the next obvious choice. The interest of the company in edge services also suggests the coming of distributed, virtualised, logical in-memory systems comprised of multiple edge devices and core systems ‘blocks’.

Diginomica

 

Amazon: Redefining the grocery store

At Amazon Go, just swipe a code on your mobile phone on your way into the store to get started. Every item you remove from the shelf is automatically added to your virtual shopping cart. This requires some impressive technology, which Amazon teases in the video released today as a mix of "computer vision" along with "deep learning algorithms" and "sensor fusion much like you'd find in self-driving cars." The result is that once you've grabbed your groceries and put them into your bag, you simply walk out of the place—no lines, no cash registers, the bill goes straight to your Amazon account.

FastCompany

 

Advanced Manufacturing in the Golden Triangle

If you have heard of the Golden Triangle, it might be because of this: Mississippi State football.  Around here, everybody loves the Bulldogs.  And “bulldog” is an apt description of the man who runs economic development for the area: Joe Max Higgins.  He considers job creation a full contact sport.

At 6.0 percent, unemployment is now just above the national average and a lot of people here credit Joe Max Higgins. He has attracted $6 billion of advanced industry including this mill run by Steel Dynamics.  It’s one of the most hi-tech steel mills in the country.  He got this helicopter factory up and running. Truck maker PACCAR used to build engines only in Europe.  It opened its first U.S. plant in the Triangle.

CBS News

See the 60 minutes story starting at 17.25 below

 

Silicon Collar excerpt: Automation and the Garbage Collector

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.

Our county has 95-gallon garbage bin with sensors which allow for easy verification if a street has not been serviced. They are emptied into garbage trucks equipped with McNeilus AutoReach robotic arms.

Amaury, the driver operates a Republic Services truck, and he visits our street twice a week. He operates the robotic arm from the cab of his truck. In a full day he can gather over 1,200 bins, twice as many as he previously did with a human partner. Amaury no longer needs the associate dangling at the back of the truck doing a dangerous and stinky job. The contribution of the robotic arm: half the human resources, twice the production, and a much less tiring job.

The Volvo Group is planning to take such garbage collection into narrower streets and to places where the weather is not as pleasant as in my Florida county. Its Robot-based Autonomous Refuse (ROAR) project entails much more than a truck with a robotic arm. A robot carried at the back of the truck will zip around the streets and bring the garbage bins to the truck. A drone launched from the truck’s roof will scan the area and guide the robot to the bins.

The garbage bin itself is evolving and will further change the collection of garbage. BigBelly makes solar powered trash compactors, which can hold eight times more garbage than a standard bin. Volume sensors trigger the compacting mechanism and the bin communicates with a cloud-based management system which coordinates collections.

Photo Credit

Designed by Apple in California

The book, conceived of and published by Apple, is a glossy $300 (that’s for the plus size; it’s $200 for a smaller version) tribute to the last 20 years of the company’s industrial design legacy, and to its progenitor, Steve Jobs. Photographer Andrew Zuckerman shot the 450 pages of products in Apple’s signature stark style—white background, high saturation—even turning the messy act of prototyping into minimalist glamour shots.

Wired

 

A shock absorber for artificial turf

Viconic Sporting developed an underlayer for synthetic turf systems that will make fields safer for those who play on them. Viconic’s technology is widely used for impact management in the automotive and sporting industries and in the U.S. Military. Viconic will further explore the relationship between optimized head impact protection and the frequency of lower limb injuries in an effort to provide the synthetic turf industry a tool to specify systems that maximize player safety and minimize safety costs.

 

The Revenge of Analog

Sales of objects like vinyl records, paper notebooks and even board games have consistently grown over the past decade, as has their cultural relevance. Meanwhile, big brands in e-commerce, including Warby Parker and Amazon, are rushing to open the very brick-and-mortar stores they promised to supplant.

What’s driving this switch? Many assume it’s nostalgia, led by the wistful romance of aging Luddites. But in fact, many of analog’s newest fans are millennials drawn to its raw utility—the designer who uses a Moleskine notebook, for example, to sketch out a website’s early look.

Time (sub required)

The US Manufacturing Boom

Aerospace giant Boeing (BA), the country's largest exporter, started delivering 787 Dreamliners from its new plant in South Carolina in 2012. Both that factory and the company's plants in Washington state are running at record production. Boeing delivered 768 airliners in 2015, up 163% in 10 years. Archrival Airbus delivered its first U.S.-assembled airliner from its new Alabama factory in April, and Brazilian plane maker Embraer (ERJ) recently moved assembly of its smallest private jets to Florida.

U.S. auto production and employment has also been growing steadily since bottoming out in 2009 with the bankruptcies at GM and Chrysler.The industry is operating within 7% of record levels, making 12 million cars and trucks a year. Not only have GM (GM), Ford (F) and Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) all been hiring and investing in U.S. plants, but foreign automakers are expanding operations here as well. The largest BMW plant in the world is now in South Carolina, and the plant exports most of the cars it builds there (see video below)

And the boom isn't just about big-ticket items. Chemical production hit a record $797 billion last year, up 30% in the last 10 years. The chemical boom has been fueled by the record U.S. energy boom, which has made oil and natural gas particularly cheap. Petroleum is a key raw material for many chemicals, most of which are produced using energy from natural gas.

CNN