New Florence. New Renaissance.

Geeky media: Frank Markus

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 Frank Marcus, who writes the regular Technologue feature for Motor Trend magazine,

As his bio says

“I started critiquing cars at age 5 by bumming rides home from Sunday school in other parishioners' new cars..Ten long years later my folks let me buy a banged-up '66 Mustang (six-cylinder, three-on-the-floor coupe) for $125 and even let me drive it home solo on my learner's permit…Since 16 I've been getting paid to drive new cars I don't own, and I still love it. That first job was running parts for an Olds dealership in Memphis, Tennessee….I knew I'd only find joy in an automotive career, and engineering seemed the most likely way to achieve that. So I went after a couple of Big Ten degrees in mechanical engineering and landed in Lee Iacocca's "New Chrysler Corporation." While there, I helped lay the foundations for the original Neon, LH cars, and second-gen minivans…when a friend told me about an opening for a technical editor at another car magazine, I jumped at what was the car-biz equivalent of running off to join the circus….I loved that job, too, until the phone rang again with an even better opportunity: the chance to drive other people's new and old cars for money, with Motor Trend and Motor Trend Classic magazines.”

Wall Street competes with Silicon Valley for tech talent

The financial services industry is going high-tech, and so the behemoth corporate organizations behind the big-name banks, asset managers and insurance companies are facing a fundamental challenge: how to attract, train and retain a very different sort of talent. “We are a tech company,” Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has said on a number of occasions — admittedly, Wall Street execs have been saying this for years — but it’s finally beginning to ring true. Goldman now employs around “9,000 individuals in various engineering roles,” according to a recent company report, out of the company’s 33,000 or so employees. More than one in three new recruits are STEM majors.

Gone are the days when salespeople, traders, bankers and managers ruled Wall Street — in 2000 Goldman had 600 equity traders; now it has two. The technological shift is forcing finance companies to reexamine their recruiting practices and reinvent their corporate culture to bring a little Silicon Valley style to Wall Street.

Oxy

Video on Harvard’s CS50 fair which attracts a number of recruiters

 

Smart suitcases

Wired has a gallery of next-gen suitcases including the Bluesmart Series 2.

Like its first generation, Bluesmart’s Series 2 line comes packed with tech like GPS location tracking, Bluetooth locking and unlocking, an integrated smart scale, and USB charging, all controllable through an app. The polycarbonate shells come in two sizes—22 inches (carry on) and 29 inch (checked)—which pair directly with Bluesmart’s new line of connected laptop bags and passport holders. 

 

 

Mobile, Robotic Grocery Store

one Swedish startup and a Chinese university are taking the concept further: they've designed and autonomous shop that's designed to travel to customers. The Moby Mart, created by Wheelys, Hefei University of Technology and tech firm Himalafy, has been dubbed 'the supermarket that comes to you'.

The prototype, which the organisations have beta testing on the streets of Shanghai, is currently moved around by humans but the creators say future versions will use computer vision to navigate the streets and come to customers.

Wired UK

IBM’s Z mainframes

IBM says it has a way to encrypt every level of a network, from applications to local databases and cloud services, thanks to a new mainframe that can power 12 billion encrypted transactions per day.

The processing burden that comes with all that constant encrypting and decrypting has prevented that sort of comprehensive data encryption at scale in the past. Thanks to advances in both hardware and software encryption processing, though, IBM says that its IBM Z mainframe can pull off the previously impossible. If that holds up in practice, it will offer a system that's both accessible for users, and offers far greater data security than currently possible.

Wired

 

AgTech Startups

Agricultural tech startups have raised over $800M in the last 5 years.  Deals to startups using robotics and machine learning to solve problems in agriculture started gaining momentum in 2014, in line with the rising interest in artificial intelligence across multiple industries like healthcare, finance, and commerce.

Smart money VCs like Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, and Data Collective have invested in general-purpose drone and computer vision companies with a focus on agricultural applications, like DJI and Orbital Insight, as well as ag tech startups like Blue River Technology. Big corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which are active ag tech investors, have also backed companies like Resson and previously mentioned Blue River Technology.

CB Insights

AI applications proliferate

Couple of perspectives in this McKinsey article

Gary Bradski, chief technology officer, Arraiy: AI will be used for big, high-impact applications. It is a big enabler for robotics, so autonomous vehicles is a big one. Speech recognition is really starting to work—it’s a very useful interface—that’s big. It’s going now to natural language, you see that showing up with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s products. I call that ambient AI, where you can just ask questions and things happen.

Medicine’s a big one. You’re diagnosing problems, and you can already see these things can often do better than a doctor, in certain circumstances. They don’t get distracted, and they can ferret out very subtle patterns.

Mohak Shah, lead expert, data science, Bosch Research and Technology Center, North America: Broadly, the advancements will come into what we like to call the Internet of Things. That would mean things like developing your service efficiencies, advancing your manufacturing capabilities, reducing scraps, and looking into your operation of the fleet. And that can happen all the way from small devices to very large devices, like aviation aircraft.

Also listen to 5 super smart ladies at various parts of Alphabet/Google talk past, present and future of AI and Machine Learning

 

Geeky media: Jeff Foust

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 Jeff Foust. From a Wikipedia entry about him

Jeff Foust is an aerospace analyst, journalist and publisher. A senior aerospace analyst with the Futron Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland, he is the editor and publisher of The Space Review and has written for Astronomy Now and The New Atlantis. In addition he is the writer of the blog Space Politics.

He has a bachelor's degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Here he is presenting about Mars

Tiny Satellites and the new Space Revolution

At 9:28 a.m. on Feb. 15, these animals watched anxiously as an Indian rocket lifted off, roaring through the hot, sticky air. Its payload consisted of 104 satellites, dwarfing the previous world record of 37 set by Russia in 2014. The largest of them weighed 1,500 pounds and was designed to map India’s infrastructure and monitor urban and rural development. Nestled alongside were around a dozen smaller satellites from universities, startups, and research groups. What made the launch a record were the 88 shoebox-size “Dove” satellites built by Planet Labs Inc., a startup in San Francisco.

For the past few years, Planet has been sending batches of its Doves into orbit, each carrying a high-powered telescope and camera programmed to photograph a different swath of Earth. The 88 launched from Sriharikota would join 61 others to become the largest fleet ever put in orbit. Images beamed back by the 61 have been used far and wide: Hedge funds scour Walmart parking lots to measure traffic flows during back-to-school seasons. Farmers assess crop health and estimate optimal harvest times. Activists track Amazonian deforestation and Syrian refugee camps. Spies monitor military buildups and trafficking operations. With all 149 satellites in place, Planet will be able to photograph every inch of Earth’s surface every day—something even the U.S. government can’t do.

BusinessWeek

 

A history of stadiums

National Geographic has a gallery of stadiums from ancient Greek and Roman Times to modern ones with retractable roofs

Below is the Astrodome which in the 1960s was the first fully enclosed and air-conditioned stadium. It was also the first to use artificial turf, or, as it came to be known, AstroTurf. Ramp towers were added in 1989 in anticipation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.