New Florence. New Renaissance.

50 Smartest Companies

according to MIT Technology Review

Some are large companies that seem to be growing ever larger, like Amazon and Apple. Others, like IBM, or General Electric are old-guard giants betting on technology renewal. And the list is full of ambitious startups like SpaceX, which is changing the economics of space travel with reusable rockets; Face ++, a pioneer in face recognition technology; and additive-manufacturing firms Carbon and Desktop Metal.

Renewable Energy economics platform

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and its Business Renewables Center (BRC) have developed a platform which “is aimed at helping large-scale buyers and developers of renewable energy, better understand market economics and price trends by location – helping users discover grid-connection locations where wind and solar have competitive value in the wholesale power markets.

The platform is built using publicly-available data from market operators, a levelised cost of energy calculation, and a proprietary algorithm to model hypothetical project revenue. This unique market analysis produces an estimated value calculation for approximately 4,300 nodes – or grid connection points – across all seven US independent system operators covering 39 states.”

Virgin

 

Flexible Architecture

Norman Foster, the famed architect, whose firm spent the last eight years perfecting plans for Apple’s glassy Campus 2 talks about the need for flexible architecture in this Wired interview

‘Make the floor-to-floor of a car park that much bigger, so if you’re not going to be filling it with cars in the future you could more easily retrofit it for more habitable space.”

Photo Credit

Infor and “Hidden Figures”

At Inforum last week, Infor announced Coleman, its AI platform. The name is a tribute to Katherine Coleman Johnson, a NASA pioneer depicted in the movie “Hidden Figures” that I had written about here. She was honored in 2015 with the National Medal of Freedom by President Obama and with a standing ovation at this year’s Academy Awards.

CEO Charles Phillips also told us of another initiative he had participated in to promote the movie. His previous efforts to publicize the movie “Selma” had led to a request from studio execs to do similar with “Hidden Figures”. He pulled a coalition of NYC execs together as Shadow and Act describes:

“New York City African American business leaders, in partnership with 20th Century Fox, Google, Facebook, Infor and AT&T, have launched an initiative to offer free admission to the critically-acclaimed feature, "Hidden Figures," for over 25,000 students in New York. New York schools are the first to benefit from the project. Like the 2015 project to screen Oscar-winner "Selma" - which reached 300,000 students across the country - the expectation is that other cities will join this significant program as it rolls out in theaters nationwide this weekend. In addition, the screening program will educate students about the many contributions made by African Americans to science, technology, engineering, and math, and inspire more students to enter those fields.”

Here is the tribute video (with narration from Charles) that was played at Inforum. And yes, it got another standing ovation. 

Geeky media: Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Part of series on journalists, STEM specialists, authors who explain technology in sports, autos, healthcare and other aspects of life and work. I look forward to watching/reading/hearing their stuff. Many in this list have come recommended by readers – so please nominate others.

This time it is Dr. Sanjay Gupta. From his bio

“is the multiple Emmy® award winning chief medical correspondent for CNN. Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon, plays an integral role in CNN's reporting on health and medical news for all of CNN's shows domestically and internationally.”

Here is one of his episodes on heart disease

Virtual Museums

The 5-year-old Mob Museum is just one of 10 museums that have adopted the Beam Pro robot to give people a chance to view an exhibit virtually. Other museums include the San Diego Museum of Art and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. As Forth and Sprong found, that's a massive boon to people with physical disabilities, opening a pipeline into an array of cultural experiences.

CNET.com

 

Swiss army knife sensor

Ubiquitous sensors seem almost synonymous with the internet of things (IoT), but some Carnegie Mellon University researchers say ubiquitous sensing — with a single, general purpose sensor for each room — may be better.

The plug-in sensor package they have developed monitors multiple phenomena — sounds, vibration, light, heat, electromagnetic noise, temperature, etc. — in a room. With some help from machine-learning techniques, this suite of sensors can determine whether a faucet's left or right spigot is running, if the microwave door is open or how many paper towels have been dispensed.

CMU

 

Aboard an aircraft carrier

From Bill Wohl

LHD-3 was my “home” for most of one amazing morning, at the invitation of the US Navy to join a variety of VIPs to experience the New York City Fleet Week processional parade from the waters off Long Island, into New York Harbor and all the way to docking on Manhattan’s West Side on the Hudson River.

I was with the men and women crew of the USS Kearsarge for about seven hours.  During that time period, I saw first-hand how they live their motto – no doubt I experienced their pride during my visit. Yes, I sensed I was in good hands (they were totally trustworthy), and I’ve never seen a Navy man or woman that wasn’t bold in the true sense of the word.

Read more on his blog. Also, this report by Jason Blessing on his visit to the USS John C. Stennis two years ago.

The botanist’s last stand

As the top botanist at Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program (PEPP), Perlman deals exclusively in plants with 50 or fewer individuals left—in many cases, much fewer, maybe two or three. Of the 238 species currently on that list, 82 are on Kauai; Perlman literally hangs off cliffs and jumps from helicopters to reach them.

Without him, rare Hawaiian plants die out forever. With him, they at least have a shot. Though now, due to forces beyond Perlman’s control, even that slim hope of survival is in jeopardy. Looming budget cuts threaten to make this the final chapter not only in the history of many native Hawaiian species, but in the program designed to keep them alive.

Quartz

The video below follows another botanist in Hawaii

Precision Medicine and Cancers

It took thirteen years and cost $2.7 billion to sequence the first genome, which was completed in 2003. Today, it costs $1,000 and takes less than a week. Over the last two decades, as researchers like Newman have uncovered more and more of the individual genetic malfunctions that cause cancer, teams of researchers have begun to tinker with those mutations, trying to reverse the chaos they cause. (The first big success in precision medicine was Gleevec, a drug that treats leukemias that are positive for a common structural rearrangement called the Philadelphia chromosome. Its launch in 2001 was revolutionary.) Today, there are eleven genes that can be targeted with hyperspecific cancer therapies, and at least thirty more being studied. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, 30 to 40 percent of incoming patients now qualify for precision medicine studies.

Popular Mechanics