Maker Updates contd...

Maker Updates contd...:

Continuing our focus on the burgeoning world of makers and making,firstly the inimitable Phil Torrone on "Why the Arduino Won and Why It's Here to Stay ":

The Arduino is simple, but not too simple. It’s built around the idea that students will be using these to “do” something: get sensor data in, have a bit of code, do something with that. Maybe they didn’t even write the code, they cut and pasted it to get started. It’s hot glue, not precision welding. No one is going to cut a hand off or burn down the studio experimenting. One of the Arduino team members teaches designers and artists — everyday, the platform is being built and improved for step-by-learning, building on lessons and sharing code — these designers and artists are using Macs and tinkering in Processing (Arduino’s older sibling)...The barrier to entry isn’t a monetary one, it’s a philosophical one. This requires boldness and getting out of committee-think. A chip company needs to show off chips — they don’t care about Mac support, or writing tons of software, libraries, and IDEs. Chip companies are (historically) the ones who usually make the platforms. We’ll see some of the big players flood the market with subsidized hardware to beat the $30 price point of the Arduino, but that doesn’t matter if the Arduino support and quality stay high.

Arduino board

Why else is it here to stay? The community. How can you get 100,000+ people to jump ship? You can’t. To get close, you’ll need to develop something just like the Arduino, support its shields and accessories, and write a lot of code (something chip companies hate to do.) Great software for multiple systems, lots of libraries, drivers that work, simple, low cost, and open source. And you know what? I think that’s what the Arduino team really wants. They’re techno-hippies — they want to see other platforms with the same ideals — that’s the game they’re actually playing. And I think it’s what we all want, whether it’s called an Arduino or not...[continue reading]

For those seeking a primer they may want to take a peek at The Open Source Way Creating and nurturing communities of contributors If however you are looking for Arduino tutorials covering a wide array of concepts and techniques go no further than John Boxall's treasure trove of tutorials For more college hackerspace news take a look at the MIT MITERS crew

For your micro milling workshop you might want to assemble an MTM Snap: A snap-together Arduino-powered desktop CNC milling machine.

MTM Snap milling machine

We are increasingly aware of how digital fabrication is democratizing product design consequently this is prompting vertical integration and moore’s law for atoms

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Furthermore we marveled at the hidden Workshops of the former Libyan rebels wondering what the future holds for their tinkerers.The OScar Project hopes to develop a car according to open source principles.

Adafruit's Limor Fried discussed D.I.Y. Revolution with Bloomberg. Over at P2P they bring to our attention the Free Technology Community Portal.





Meanwhile Emily Smith speaks to the importance of Crafters, Hackers, and Hackerspaces:

Where visions of crafting often conjure up images of glue guns, popsicle sticks, fabric and looms, hacking evokes soldering irons, microprocessors, and software. Truth is, there’s a lot of similarities between hacking and crafting, and even more to be gained from a dialogue between both groups of makers. Both hackers and crafters feel the same need to create things and manipulate materials, and have very similar basic requirements: access to equipment, space to work, and a supportive community within which to grow and share projects and ideas.

Image courtesy of Make magazine

As an avid crafter, when I first visited a hackerspace, I immediately felt inspired to bring my projects there. There were some hints of crafting in the space the first time I set foot there, but it was hugely dominated by hardware and software hacking. Some may have felt alienated by that, but I felt like it was a wonderful opportunity to learn and engage with a medium that I’d never worked with before – and to also bring in the softer side of hacking — and yarn bomb some of those cold-looking surfaces!

In relation to this Openwear founders Zoe Romano + Bertram Niessen discuss DIY Craft and Fashion Microproductions with Massimo Menichinelli:

Image courtesy of Open Wear

Massimo Menichinelli: The phenomena of Open Hardware, DIY and Makers have reached a remarkable level of development, fame and reputation. Perhaps less famous but equally important is the phenomenon of DIY craft and craft / fashion micro enterprises that are often visible on platforms such as Etsy. What are the differences and similarities between these phenomena and how do they relate to each other?

Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen: All these new scenes have in common a desire to empower understanding what they have in their hands, how it was made and improved. This desire blurs the distinction between producers and consumers, not in the sense that everyone will make everything they need, but that everyone more and more often will able to produce or design something and make it available in a flux of exchange out of which everyone could benefit.
Both phenomena are related with crucial changes that are undergoing in our social and economical environment. The Peak Oil calls to 0 Km chains of production. The rise of 2.0 social networks, mixed with the spreading of p2p communities, encourages new forms of global/local communities of producers and consumers. New technologies in communication and material production foster distributed manufacturing.
The difference is that DIY crafters sometimes have the tendency to perceive themselves more far away from technology because of their handmade pledge. It’s more a problem of cultural background. But as long as they envision the possibilities of new on-demand machines, they realize how craftsmanship could be revolutionized without loosing its soul.

Image credit: The Urban Farming Guys

Furthermore Treehugger profiled the methods for 'DIY Aquaponics: And building a Vortex Filter'(see image above). And lastly Fabaloo highlights a story of 3dprinting in South Africa:

Courtesy of Design Indaba Campaign 2009

There's a great story in Design Magazine describing how Kenneth van Rensburg came to create a 3D printing business (Protoform) in South Africa. After seeing the technology by accident during a Jaguar factory tour in the UK, van Rensburg created Protoform in 2008 to "bridge the gap between design and manufacture", initially focusing on boat design. Later, Protoform would reach out to other markets and now produces 3D models for a variety of industries, including medical models and artistic works.

More to come...

2012 global award winners RISE to the top

2012 global award winners RISE to the top: Our business at Google is rooted in STEM and CS, so we’re passionate about supporting organizations that are expanding access to these fields, especially for students who might not have the opportunity otherwise. The annual Google Roots in Science and Engineering (RISE) program supports organizations running innovative STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and CS (computer science) enrichment programs for K-12 and university students around the world.

This year, the Google in Education group received a record number of inspiring applications for RISE. We expanded the awards to include Sub-Saharan Africa, and in total, we’re awarding more than $340,000 in funding to 13 U.S., eight European and five African organizations.



Our recipients are diverse, ranging from girls robotics teams building high-tech machinery in Nairobi to after-school programs that have students configuring cluster computers in Salt Lake City. Below are just a few of the outstanding organizations receiving RISE awards this year for their efforts in advancing CS and STEM education:



United States

• Santa Clara Valley Society of Women Engineers, San Jose, California. GetSET is a program created for underrepresented ethnic minority girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to expose them to engineering while building self confidence through leadership workshops, tours of technology companies and participation in team-building exercises.


• Saturday Academy, Portland, Oregon. Saturday Academy serves 2nd-12th grade students from Oregon and SW Washington with high quality and creative learning opportunities taught by STEM experts, including hands-on, real world activities that create meaningful connections between academic content and practical application.

Europe

• Frauennetzwerk Informatik at Universität Passau, Passau, Germany. University students from Passau act as ambassadors for computer science, engineering and math by reaching out to juniors and seniors at their former high schools and running workshops on topics like robotics and mobile app development. Ambassadors go on to serve as mentors to the students throughout their high school and college careers.


• The Centre for Academic Achievement, Dublin, Ireland. This center runs free after school educational classes in a university setting for bright primary school students from disadvantaged areas. Each term, students from 32 local primary schools have the opportunity to study science, math and engineering subjects and are encouraged to pursue college degrees in the future.

Sub Saharan Africa

• Savana Signatures, Tamale, Ghana. Savana Signatures educates youth and women, building their capacity to access information for the benefit of Ghana’s social and economic development.


• Fundi Bots, Kampala, Uganda. Fundi Bots is a technology outreach program for students in high school and university that uses robotics to introduce young children to the endless possibilities of technology in both their day-to-day lives and potential careers.

Organizations interested in applying for 2013 funding can sign up for more information here. We look forward to hearing about all the great work being done in CS and STEM education.



Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K-12 Education Outreach

The Problem of Shot Selection in Basketball

The Problem of Shot Selection in Basketball:

by Brian Skinner

In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this article, I explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up the shot by considering a simple theoretical model of the shot selection process, in which the quality of shot opportunities generated by the offense is assumed to fall randomly within a uniform distribution. Within this model I derive an answer to the question “how likely must the shot be to go in before the player should take it?” and I show that this lower cutoff for shot quality depends crucially on the number of shot opportunities remaining (say, before the shot clock expires), with larger demanding that only higher-quality shots should be taken. The function is also derived in the presence of a finite turnover rate and used to predict the shooting rate of an optimal-shooting team as a function of time. The theoretical prediction for the optimal shooting rate is compared to data from the National Basketball Association (NBA). The comparison highlights some limitations of the theoretical model, while also suggesting that NBA teams may be overly reluctant to shoot the ball early in the shot clock.

Ecological Footprint Model Using the Support Vector Machine Technique

Ecological Footprint Model Using the Support Vector Machine Technique:

by Haibo Ma, Wenjuan Chang, Guangbai Cui

The per capita ecological footprint (EF) is one of the most widely recognized measures of environmental sustainability. It aims to quantify the Earth's biological resources required to support human activity. In this paper, we summarize relevant previous literature, and present five factors that influence per capita EF. These factors are: National gross domestic product (GDP), urbanization (independent of economic development), distribution of income (measured by the Gini coefficient), export dependence (measured by the percentage of exports to total GDP), and service intensity (measured by the percentage of service to total GDP). A new ecological footprint model based on a support vector machine (SVM), which is a machine-learning method based on the structural risk minimization principle from statistical learning theory was conducted to calculate the per capita EF of 24 nations using data from 123 nations. The calculation accuracy was measured by average absolute error and average relative error. They were 0.004883 and 0.351078% respectively. Our results demonstrate that the EF model based on SVM has good calculation performance.

ST to launch GreenNet Wireless Sensor Networking platform

ST to launch GreenNet Wireless Sensor Networking platform:

Semiconductor maker STMicroelectronics will unveil an application for mobiles or set-top boxes, taking utility of an open platform for buildings. The GreenNet Wireless Sensor Networking technology platform comprises self-powered nodes that can be positioned around the home for tasks such as temperature, CO (carbon monoxide) or movement sensing, relaying data wirelessly to a GreenNet dongle installed in a PC or set-top box. The data could then be communicated to a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet via a wireless router to enable monitoring and control. The building block of this GreenNet Wireless Sensor Networking platform is the GreenNet node, which utilises core ST technologies in energy management, silicon-based sensors and embedded wireless to create the network node free of wires or any need to change batteries. The node combines a rechargeable battery and solar cell with an on-chip sensor and STM32W 32-bit wireless microcontroller in a compact 3D system-in-package that consumes minimal power and can operate autonomously powered only by ambient light energy. By using open standards, such as IPv6 1, the platform allows independent developers to create downloadable applications for tasks such as home monitoring, security or fire safety. The GreenNet wireless node utilises an industry-standard IEEE 802.15.4 radio operating in the license-free 2.4GHz frequency band. ST is demonstrating the system using a sample node that features an on-chip temperature sensor, a USB dongle, and a service platform including sample application store. It can relay one temperature measurement every five minutes. It can still operate autonomously for up to six weeks in the da rk. Samples for customers are available.

More info here.

SENSEable Shoes

SENSEable Shoes:

Created by Huaishu Peng and Yen-Chia Hsu at the Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon comes the SENSEable shoes project.

The shoes can identity and transmit information for 10 different gait patterns (standing, sitting, turning left, turning right, walking left, walking right, walking forward, walking backward, going upstairs, and downstairs). Suggested applications for the shoes include being used in gaming platforms (think Wii Fitness) or detecting abnormal gaits in health care patient monitoring.

Project Description:

"The goal of this project is to build a foot-computer interface: a newly hand-free and eye-free interactive technology designed for the growing pervasive computing environments. By embedding multiple sensors into shoes, people are allowed to control ambient digital devices with their foot gestures as well as toe gestures."

Created with:

• Twelve Force-Sensing Resistors(FSR)
• two Arduino UNO microcontroller boards with ATmega168 microprocessors
• two Xbee wireless transmission devices

Similar Projects:

FootIO

GaitShoe

Additional Details:

Based on the MIT licence (code here)

More information on the project can be found at http://code.arc.cmu.edu/projects/senseable-shoes/.

Image credits: Huaishu Peng and Yen-Chia Hsu

Printed Sensors Could Help Save You From Spoiled Food

Printed Sensors Could Help Save You From Spoiled Food:

From Wired:

Whenever I pick up a package of frozen raw meat from the grocery store, I wonder, “Has this been frozen the whole time? How many times did it thaw and re-freeze?” It’s a disquieting thought, especially because there’s currently no easy way to tell.

But it looks like the ambiguity is about to end. In partnership with PST Sensor, Thinfilm, which produces printed re-writable memory, will begin making the first fully printed temperature sensor systems to monitor perishable items like food and pharmaceuticals.

“It’s a smart object that’s entirely self-contained,” Jennifer Ernst, Thinfilm’s North American VP told Wired.

That may sound familiar. It’s a key element of a concept called “The Internet of Things,” which basically refers to an imagined future where nearly every object will include embedded chips that can store data and interact with networks.

Thinfilm’s first-gen sensors will be able to cache data about the object itself, on the item itself. In this case, the sensors will record data concerning the object’s temperature history, tracking precise time, temperature and exposure information, and also displaying it in a low-power readout. The data within can be accessed as needed, insomuch it doesn’t need to be retrieved from the cloud, or require a constant wireless connection.

In the past, we’ve seen thin food sensors that change color as food begins to spoil. But this type of technology doesn’t retain data, and thus doesn’t provide information about the history of a product as it shipped.

More info here.

Connected Plaza - San Jose Plug-In-Play

Connected Plaza - San Jose Plug-In-Play:

James and Joshua over at the Rockwell Group labs are getting some recognition in this years IxDAwards for their Plug-In-Play project installed in late 2010 at Richard Meier's San Jose City Hall.

The project functioned via "stations" placed throughout the plaza function where visitors could sing into a megaphone, skip on a hopscotch court, or connect to the projection via typically social networks like Twitter. Each of these areas of interactions prompts a reaction on the buildings projected facade in hopes of suggesting a "new type of environment wherein social interactions, citizenship, and personal activities are more dynamically reflected"

Project Background:

"The conceptual origins for Plug-in-Play cover a broad span of architectural and technical innovation. The title of the piece is itself a direct reference to Peter Cook’s Plug-in-City (1964), a theoretical and all-encompassing urban framework that emphasized flexibility and impermanence through the application of a computer-directed “feedback loop.”

Today, Cook’s emphasis on cybernetic exchange in cyberspace as a method of “plugging in” to the physical world is reflected in computer encoding concepts such as the “Internet of Things,” wherein the networked connection of

everyday objects allows urban inhabitants to connect to or even correct their physical surroundings. Plug-in-Play seeks to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the people and things through play, social media, and human interaction."

Technologies used in the project:

• arduino
• processing
• after effects scripting
• openframework
• sxbee wireless transmiters
• glsl
• c++

"The LAB wrote custom software in openFrameworks, C++, and GLSL for the projected content, and used Processing to develop software for interfacing with the sensor network. The sensors were created using funnel.cc’s Arduino Fio, XBee wireless transmiters, and an Arduino shield that the LAB developed based on Adafruit’s Wave Shield."

Image Credits: Rockwell Group Labs

More Info:

Core 77 Interview

Rockwell Group Page

Project Homepage

Are Expensive Batteries Worth the Extra Cost? | Wired Science | Wired.com

Are Expensive Batteries Worth the Extra Cost? | Wired Science | Wired.com

f you have kids, you probably know this already, but lots of stuff needs batteries. Remote control toys, Wii remotes, laser pointers (well, that is for me), flash lights, even Nerf guns. For me, I have found the best place to pick up batteries is at one of these “dollar” stores. Sure the batteries are cheaper, but are they any good? Who knows. Let’s find out.

Energy

The first way to look at the quality of a battery is to see how much stored energy is in it. How could you measure this? Well, here is how I did it. I took a battery and connected to a light bulb and let it run for as long as it could. Like this:

With this setup, I can measure both the current ( I ) from the battery and the electric potential ( ΔV ) across the battery. At any given instant in time, the power from the battery will be:

Power tells me how fast the energy is changing, but not the total energy in the battery. In order to find the total energy, I can write the power like this:

If the current and the change in potential were constant for the whole time interval (Δt), this would be a fairly straightforward calculation. Alas, these are not constant. So what do I do? I cheat. If I instead look at a very short time interval, the current and potential do not really change too much. This means that I can reasonably calculate the energy during this short time. Then I just need to do this a whole bunch of times to get the total energy.

Adding up a whole bunch of small pieces is called “an integral”. In this case, I won’t use calculus to evaluate an integral since I don’t know a mathematical function for the power. Instead I will do it numerically with the following formula (by “I will do” I really mean “make a computer do”):

And that is it. The total energy that the battery produced.

Measuring Energy

Vernier makes both a current and voltage probe for the LabQuest system. Collecting data was fairly simple (even though each battery would take quite some time). Here is the data from LoggerPro (Vernier’s software):

This software can calculate both the power as well as integrate to find the total energy. But I am not going to do this. Why? Because I prefer to do things myself with python and matplotlib. That’s just me.

Here is a plot of the voltage vs. time for three different AA batteries. I used an Energizer, Duracell, and DG (the one from the Dollar Store).

I will talk about the significance of this voltage curve in a bit, but for now I am concerned with the power. Here is a plot of the current for these three batteries.

It looks like something happened to the data for the current with the Energizer battery. I tried re-running the experiment with this battery, but again the current data didn’t look pretty. The current probably shouldn’t jump up like that. I guess it could have been a lose connection or something. Either way, the Duracell and the Energizer batteries seem to have similar curves, but the DG is significantly lower.

Now, I can multiply the current and potential to get the power. Here is that plot for all three batteries.

I can already see that I was wrong. Clearly, these cheaper batteries are not nearly as good as the more expensive ones. Ok, but what about the total energy? If I integrate these three curves, I get the following stored energies:

• DG (Dollar Store) = 2983 Joules (0.829 Watt*hours).
• Energizer = 10,798 Joules (3.00 Watt*hours)
• Duracell = 9,398 Joules (2.61 Watt*hours)

It seems that maybe the Duracell and Energizer are essentially the same. Yes, the Energizer has a higher stored energy, but it also has that small jump in the current that may or may not be real. Other than that current hiccup, the curves for those two batteries look quite similar.

Are They Worth It?

Yes, the better batteries have more energy. But how much do they cost? First, for the DG batteries. I thought these were a great deal since they cost $4 for a pack of twenty. That is 20 cents per battery. You can’t beat that with a stick. What about the energy per dollar? Really, you are paying for energy – right? Let me call this the money-energy density. I will use the symbol u to represent this. So, for DG:

What about the Energizer batteries? Well, since I am cheap I only purchased two of these. Really, to be fair I should look at the price of a twenty-pack. Here is a 16-pack from Walmart. This sells online for a price of $10.97, so the price for one AA would be $0.685. Oh, and yes – I know you could get a better deal on batteries at Amazon, but I am trying to compare going to the store to buy batteries. This would give an money-energy density of:

And now for the Duracell batteries. Here is a 20 pack for $12.97. This would put the price of one AA at $0.649. The money-energy density would be:

Interesting. Very interesting. So it seems that all three of these batteries have about the same money-energy density. How does this answer the question? Well, there is a bit more to batteries than just the energy stored in it. It depends on what you are using it for. Suppose that I was using these batteries for a flashlight. In this case, it wouldn’t matter too much which battery I used. If I used the cheaper DG, I would just have to replace the batteries more often. However, suppose that I am using the batteries for my Wii remote or my awesome Syma indoor RC helicopter (these really do fly nice). For these electronic devices, if the voltage drops too low they might not work properly. Yes, the battery will still have energy in it, but if it won’t run the device correctly who cares?

Let include a quick note while I am thinking of it. If you look at the above voltage plots, you can see that the voltage for all batteries drops quite quickly below the 1.2 volt mark. This does not mean they are “dead”. This is voltage of the battery while it is being used. If you unplugged it, you would get a much higher voltage. Yes, I will write a later post about this voltage drop.

I hate it when I don’t give a definite answer to the question “which battery should I buy?” Maybe this advice will work: if you have Amazon Prime, buy batteries from Amazon. If you wait until you need batteries right NOW (like I do) for your kids toys, just go to the Dollar Store.

Some Other Stuff

I can’t help myself. I was curious. If the better batteries have more energy, do they also have a greater mass? Let me find out. It is probably a silly idea to make a plot of just three data points, but I did it anyway.

Maybe I should just compare the mass-energy density for these three batteries:

• DG = 1.98 x 10⁵ Joules/kg
• Energizer = 3.84 x 10⁵ Joules/kg
• Duracell = 4.53 x 10⁵ Joules/kg

Ok. What does this mean? I guess it means if you are worried about the total mass of your portable electronics AND you are worried about battery life – go with the Duracell or Energizer. Oh, and these energy densities seem to be in agreement with the data posted on Wikipedia. I love that Wikipedia page on energy density. Not only is it useful, it shows you just how terrible alkaline batteries are. Alkalines have an energy density around 590 kiloJoules per kg. Burning wood has about 16 MEGA Joules per kg (yes, difficult to use all that energy unless you are trying to heat up a room or something). Oh, and look at gasoline, 47 MegaJoules per kg. This is why we don’t make battery powered cars that run on AA batteries.

Buying a Pack of Batteries

Help me. I can’t stop. Looking at the prices of Duracell and Energizer AA’s on several online stores, I can make this plot. (Walmart, Walgreens, KMart)

The Durcell data is in blue and the Energizer is in red. I think some of the data would fit better, but there are a couple of cases where 10 batteries cost more than 14 (or something like that). If I assume a linear model fits this data (and it isn’t a terrible fit), then the function would tell you the price for one battery. Like this:

Just for fun, this says that if I purchased a zero-pack of batteries (you know, just the packaging or something) it would cost $2 for the Duracell and $5 for the Energizer. The slope tells you how much one battery would cost (without the packaging – I guess you would have to bring your own box to the store). For Duracell, this is $0.378 per battery and for Energizer it is $0.755.

I admit, I need more data. Although I am sort of surprised the linear function works as well as it does. It seems like you would get a discount for buying a whole bunch of batteries. Well, in a sense you do – you only pay for the packaging (the y-intercept) once.

One last warning. There will be more battery related posts in the future. I can’t help myself.

On-line multi-stage sorting algorithm for agriculture products

On-line multi-stage sorting algorithm for agriculture products: Publication year: 2012
Source: Pattern Recognition, Available online 12 January 2012
Shahar Laykin, Victor Alchanatis, Yael Edan
This paper presents an on-line multi-stage sorting algorithm capable of adapting to different populations. The sorting algorithm selects on-line the most appropriate classifier and feature subsets for the incoming population. The sorting algorithm includes two levels, a low level for population detection and a high level for classifier selection which incorporates feature selection. Population detection is achieved by an on-line unsupervised clustering algorithm that analyzes product variability. The classifier selection usesnfuzzy kNN classifiers, each trained with different feature combinations that function as input to a fuzzy rule-based decision system. Re-training of thenfuzzy kNN classifiers occurs when the rule based system cannot assign an existing classifier with high confidence level. Classification results for synthetic and real world databases are presented.

Highlights

► On-line multi-stage sorting algorithm capable of adapting to different populations. ► One level for population detection and another level for classifier selection. ► Population detection is achieved by an on-line unsupervised clustering algorithm. ► Classifier selection using fuzzy kNN classifiers, trained with different features. ► The fuzzy kNN classifiers are retrained when an existing classifier is not assigned.

Top Ten Business Ideas for 2012 to Inspire Entrepreneurs

Top Ten Business Ideas for 2012 to Inspire Entrepreneurs:

Image by M. Gifford

We’re already making inroads into 2012 but the predictions for the year ahead are still coming in thick and fast. Springwise, that bible of the most promising business ideas, ventures and concepts has been honing its soothsaying powers to highlight what it considers to be the top ten business ideas for 2012.

The aim of compiling the list is to provide rocket fuel for the mind for entrepreneurs and innovators: “We hope that you’ll find these concepts as inspiring as we do, and that they spark even more innovation in the year to come!”

Springwise’s global network of trendspotters has left no stone unturned as they’ve searched for ideas from countries all round the world. Nestled among the top ten are:

Thermodynamic ‘stones’ to keep coffee at the right temperature – do you find that coffee is rarely at the right temperature for you? Either so hot that you burn your mouth or too cold that you have to make another brew. Coffee joulies are stone-like devices that are immersed in hot drinks to keep them cool when they are too hot and heat them up when they cool down.

A Mexican soccer team managed by its fans – every armchair soccer fan worth their tinned beer and salted peanuts reckons they can do it better than their favourite team’s manager. Well now fans of Mexico’s second division Murcielagos FC have their chance as the side has no manager or coach. Instead all key decisions are outsourced to fans who vote online and via text on such issues as player selection, key tactics, in-game substitutions and more.

A new font for readers with dyslexia – Dutch design firm StudioStudio has come up with a typeface that can be read more easily by dyslexics and with fewer errors.

You can see the full list of business ideas here. It is an absorbing read and may help you to create your next big idea.

Top Ten Business Ideas for 2012 to Inspire Entrepreneurs

Top Ten Business Ideas for 2012 to Inspire Entrepreneurs:

Image by M. Gifford

We’re already making inroads into 2012 but the predictions for the year ahead are still coming in thick and fast. Springwise, that bible of the most promising business ideas, ventures and concepts has been honing its soothsaying powers to highlight what it considers to be the top ten business ideas for 2012.

The aim of compiling the list is to provide rocket fuel for the mind for entrepreneurs and innovators: “We hope that you’ll find these concepts as inspiring as we do, and that they spark even more innovation in the year to come!”

Springwise’s global network of trendspotters has left no stone unturned as they’ve searched for ideas from countries all round the world. Nestled among the top ten are:

Thermodynamic ‘stones’ to keep coffee at the right temperature – do you find that coffee is rarely at the right temperature for you? Either so hot that you burn your mouth or too cold that you have to make another brew. Coffee joulies are stone-like devices that are immersed in hot drinks to keep them cool when they are too hot and heat them up when they cool down.

A Mexican soccer team managed by its fans – every armchair soccer fan worth their tinned beer and salted peanuts reckons they can do it better than their favourite team’s manager. Well now fans of Mexico’s second division Murcielagos FC have their chance as the side has no manager or coach. Instead all key decisions are outsourced to fans who vote online and via text on such issues as player selection, key tactics, in-game substitutions and more.

A new font for readers with dyslexia – Dutch design firm StudioStudio has come up with a typeface that can be read more easily by dyslexics and with fewer errors.

You can see the full list of business ideas here. It is an absorbing read and may help you to create your next big idea.

Wearable Computing: It Can Help Us Understand–and Improve–Ourselves

Wearable Computing: It Can Help Us Understand–and Improve–Ourselves:

For decades, scientists, engineers and designers have been attaching all manner of digital devices to human beings. Their quest is called wearable computing. Today, the smartphone makes computers essentially wearable and soon-to-be ubiquitous, but there are still plenty of uses for specialized wearable devices, especially in the healthcare field, and there’s one class of device that seems to be on its way to mass acceptance: the fitness monitor. It’s a handy tool for millions of people who made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.

One of the pioneers in the field, BodyMedia Inc. in Pittsburgh, has just introduced an update of its BodyMedia FIT system that not only tracks physical activity but also provides personalized feedback. The system includes software from IBM that is most often used by businesses–but in this case helps individuals improve their well being. “This is a big step for us,” says Ivo Stivoric, the chief technology officer at BodyMedia and one of its founders. “This helps consumers connect the dots. They don’t just see the data. They get recommendations on what they can do to get back on track.”

The system demonstrates the potential for a combination of sensor technology, analytics software and easy-to-use interfaces to unlock the mysteries of the human body and produce insights that people can immediately put to use to make themselves healthier and happier.

BodyMedia got its back in the late 1990s, after Stivoric and Astro Teller met on the soccer fields at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Teller was working on a PhD in artificial intelligence and Stivoric, an industrial designer, was running the university’s wearable computing lab. Their initial idea, which they conceived along with co-founders Chris Pacione and Chris Kasabach, was to create sensor-packed garments for use in healthcare monitoring. While that’s still one of the company’s markets, the main focus is now on consumers.

The company is one of the leaders in the market for fitness monitors, both with its own brands and with devices and software that it provides to other companies, including 24 Hour Fitness, Jenny Craig and Jillian Michaels. One of its devices was featured on The Biggest Loser TV show. BodyMedia FIT consists of an armband monitor, online activity manager, wristband display and downloadable applications for mobile devices. The system tracks key metrics that affect a person’s health, including the number of steps taken, the intensity of physical activity, calorie burn, sleep duration and sleep quality. Rather than just using a pedometer, which measures activity on a single axis, the system uses a 3-axis accelerometer, which tracks motion in any direction.

The feedback function is an important advance because it turns data gathered by the sensors into useful insights and advice. The feature was developed by Summa, a technology services company in Pittsburgh, using IBM Decision Management software. The software sizes up a person’s data, determines whether they’re meeting their goals and suggests things they can do to meet them before the end of the day. The system can be customized to reflect the fitness philosophy of BodyMedia partners. Over time, BodyMedia expects the system to become more and more personalized.

For Stivoric, this is just the beginning. BodyMedia is working on new designs that will turn the wearable devices into fashion statements. “We want it to be so cool that you’ll wear it as a badge of honor. You’ll want to show people that you’re taking care of yourself,” he says. Stivoric also sees a great potential for using the data BodyMedia collects to classify people according to their “lifestyle signatures” and make wellness and disease prevention recommendations based on the health outcomes for people who are like them. “We’re helping to kick off a revolution,” he says. “We’re revolutionizing healthcare by giving people the tools they need to take care of themselves.”

This is a payoff from all those years of tinkering by the pioneers of wearable computers.

Technorati Tags: BodyMedia, IBM

Urban Information Networks, Part 2: Information for Resource Management

Urban Information Networks, Part 2: Information for Resource Management:

By Colin Harrison

IBM Distinguished Engineer

This is the second of three posts that explore the concept of urban information networks, that is, the flows of information in cities about what is going on. I am not thinking here of social networks, which deal with personal information, but rather of information concerning the how the city is working, both in the supply and the demand for services. Please click here for the first post and return tomorrow for the third.

It’s vital for the managers of cities to understand what the systems they manage consume in resources. Yet, for conservation to happen, it’s also crucial for the end users of services to understand how much they’re consuming.

A basic principle from Management Science is: if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. So a Smart City must have a rich set of sources or instrumentation that provides the information necessary for this operational management. In many cases that information is already available, but generally unused.

A disturbing example of waste resulting from a lack of information comes from the construction industry. A large city such as New York has of the order of a million buildings. Since a building – depending on its purpose and how it was built and maintained – has a lifetime of 50 to 100 years, it follows that on average in New York some 10-20,000 buildings are torn down and re-built every year. Imagine how much that represents in thousands of tons of old materials that are carted away and dumped at some growing distance in a landfill or in the ocean and in new materials that have to be created and transported to the building site. How many hundreds of thousands of truck journeys on already crowded streets! Such waste could be eliminated by creating a market for used building materials that are sold by the owners of the building being torn down, instead of paying for transportation and for landfill fees, and bought by the developers of new buildings, instead of paying for production and transportation fees. What prevents this market being established are the lack of detailed information about what materials will be recovered from the building being torn down and a way of communicating this information to property developers and construction companies.

For the 2012 Summer Olympics in east London a different approach was adopted. When the London Olympic Committee issued a contract for the preparation of the site for the Olympic village, it contained a requirement that 90% of the materials in the existing buildings should be re-used. The management of this work went to consortium including an American engineering consultancy, CH2M Hill. The consortium hired 2,000 unemployed people in east London, taught them construction Health and Safety and how to deconstruct the existing buildings. Bricks and stone were cleaned up and prepared for use in the new construction on the Olympic site. Steel was shipped to China – at a peak of 300 tons per day – to be recycled. Wood and other combustible materials were converted to energy.

The result was cheaper – CH2 completed the project on time and well under budget – than dumping the old materials and buying new and resulted in 94% of the old materials being re-used as well as a further 4% being used to produce energy. Why could not New York implement such a system? Because today there is no information available on supply and demand of such materials and hence no market for them. A lack of information again leads to waste.

In many cases, however, full participation by the general public is needed to restrain consumption and waste.

In Zurich, Switzerland, city leaders recognize this truth and designed a program to make people aware of their role in consumption. For the eco-district development in Zurich known as Green City Zurich, they adopted a set of principles called One Planet Living (OPL). OPL seeks to define and encourage the adoption of a set of resource consumptions that will enable 9 billion people to fairly share the resources – water, food, energy, land among others – of the one planet we have available. For energy, this results in an annual consumption of 2,000 kW-hours per person, or an average of roughly 250 Watts per person.

Achieving such a goal requires that the individual is aware of his or her own energy consumption, just as modern cars give us feedback on fuel consumption, and also careful management of the balance between demand and various sources of electrical energy. When aiming to live within such constraints, it becomes very clear that careful management of personal consumption will be required.

If we now think of actual individual consumptions in existing cities, how close is each individual to this goal? The question in most cases is unanswerable, because such information is not available unless the city or the utility has installed smart meters to measure consumption of electricity and water and so forth.

Information cannot produce new energy or other resources, but it can be a powerful mechanism for enabling cities to reduce their dependencies on many external resources such as water, energy, and food. This is especially true when that information flows freely and is visible to many potential consumers of that information who can incorporate it in their own operational decisions.

Technorati Tags: Colin Harrison, Urban information systems

Urban Information Networks, Part 1: The Invisible Rendered Visible

Urban Information Networks, Part 1: The Invisible Rendered Visible:

By Colin Harrison

IBM Distinguished Engineer

This is the first of three posts that explore the concept of urban information networks, that is, the flows of information in cities about what is going on. I am not thinking here of social networks, which deal with personal information, but rather of information concerning how the city is working, both in the supply and the demand for services. Please return tomorrow for the second post and Thursday for the third.

Information networks have existed since the beginnings of cities. Indeed they are one of the basic reasons for the existence of city: to enable the sharing of information among the inhabitants so that they may learn from one another. This is the same principle that enables millions of termites to federate their little intelligences and thereby create such amazing structures. Information networks are thus a basic element of life in a city.

Historically much of this information was hidden and circulated only among a small, spatially- or socially-limited group of people. It was in forms that did not easily permit wider transmission, integration with other information or mathematical analysis. But today more and more of such information is available in digital form that does enable easy transmission, integration, and analysis. So now we can begin to ask questions about the immediate needs of individual inhabitants and about the problems they face in exploiting the city’s services. Equally we can ask questions about the real-time performance of the city’s services, their immediate capacities and the operational problems that exist.

Digital systems play a vital role in making information more widely and immediately visible. This is central to enabling the inhabitants to benefit easily from the services and resources of the city. It is also central to enabling city managers to make the best use of the capacities and resources that are immediately available. A recurring problem we encounter in urban system management is that decisions by both providers and consumers are made based on information that is minimal or incomplete or stale.

A common example is the sharing of water among multiple cities within a single water basin. Local city or utility water managers generally have no current information about how much water is available upstream in the system and about how much water their neighbors are drawing from it. As a result, they will sometimes withdraw too much water, resulting in environmental problems or they will draw less water than they could, resulting in local supply limits or, in exceptional cases, increased risk of flooding.

An example of how information enables the inhabitants to most effectively use the immediately available capacity of the total, multi-modal transportation system comes from our work with CalTrans in the San Francisco bay area. Here inhabitants with smart mobile telephones can subscribe to a service that permits CalTrans to observe their journeys based on the GPS reading from the telephone. From these observations CalTrans can determine the individual user’s common journeys. When the system sees the user beginning a familiar journey, for example commuting from home to the workplace, it looks at the multi-modal choices available to the traveller and the operational status of each of those systems along the required paths, and then makes a recommendation to the traveller for the optimal way to make this journey at this time. The traveller thus makes the journey with the minimum delays and disruptions and the transportation systems’ loads can be balanced.

So a basic role for technology here is to make information about what the city is doing visible and accessible in a timely fashion to the public and private service providers in the city and also to citizens and other enterprises. In the next post I will write about how these stakeholders can exploit such information.

Technorati Tags: Colin Harrison, IBM, urban information networks