Tag: economy

The UPS Store Will 3-D Print Stuff For You

mpicpp writes with news that UPS will be expanding their 3D printing services. UPS announced plans Monday to bring in-store 3-D-printing services to nearly 100 stores across the country, billing itself as the first national retailer to do so. With the UPS system, customers can submit their own designs for objects like product prototypes, engineering parts and architectural models that are then printed on a professional-quality 3-D printer made by Stratasys. Prices vary depending on the complexity of the object; an iPhone case would be about $60, while a replica femur bone would be around $325. UPS can also connect customers with outside professionals who charge an hourly rate to help produce a design file for the printer. It generally takes about four or five hours to print a simple object, with more complex items taking a day or more. The program started as a pilot at six locations last year, and UPS says those stores “saw demand for 3-D print continuing to increase across a broad spectrum of customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The UPS Store Will 3-D Print Stuff For You

Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces

theodp (442580) writes “Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city’s 22, 519 public school teachers on “begfunding” site DonorsChoose.org. “Everything that you asked for…every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded, ” Mayor Emanuel said. “Chicago’s hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help, ” said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. “We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago’s local classroom wishes come true.” So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago’s Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12, 531, or about 6.5% of the $190, 091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5, 931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5, 552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for “Mindfulness Education”). In addition to similar “flash-funding” projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400, 000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google’s $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google’s $5 million AP STEM Access grant).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces

Idiot Leaves Driver’s Seat In Self-Driving Infiniti, On the Highway

cartechboy writes Self-driving cars are coming, that’s nothing new. People are somewhat nervous about this technology, and that’s also not news. But it appears self-driving cars are already hear, and one idiot was dumb enough to climb out of the driver’s seat while his car cruised down the highway. The car in question is a new Infiniti Q50 which has Active Lane Control and adaptive cruise control. Both of which essentially turn the Q50 into an autonomous vehicle while at highway speeds. While impressive, taking yourself out of a position where you can quickly and safely regain control of the car if needed is simply dumb. After watching the video, it’s abundantly clear why people should be nervous about autonomous vehicles. It’s not the cars and tech we need to worry about, it’s idiots like this guy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Idiot Leaves Driver’s Seat In Self-Driving Infiniti, On the Highway

AMD FirePro W9100 16GB Workstation GPU Put To the Test

Dputiger (561114) writes “It has been almost two years since AMD launched the FirePro W9000 and kicked off a heated battle in the workstation GPU wars with NVIDIA. AMD recently released the powerful FirePro W9100, however, a new card based on the same Hawaii-class GPU as the desktop R9 290X, but aimed at the professional workstation market. The W9100’s GPU features 2, 816 stream processors, and the card boasts 320GB/s of memory bandwidth, and six mini-DisplayPorts, all of which support DP1.2 and 4K output. The W9100 carries more RAM than any other AMD GPU as well, a whopping 16GB of GDDR5 on a single card. Even NVIDIA’s top-end Quadro K6000 tops out at 12GB, which means AMD sits in a class by itself in this area. In terms of performance, this review shows that the FirePro W9100 doesn’t always outshine its competition, but its price/performance ratio keep it firmly in the running. But if AMD continues to improve its product mix and overall software support, it should close the gap even more in the pro GPU market in the next 18-24 months.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD FirePro W9100 16GB Workstation GPU Put To the Test

Rocket Scientist Designs "Flare" Pot That Cooks Food 40% Faster

An anonymous reader writes Oxford University engineering professor Dr Thomas Povey just invented a new cooking pot that heats food 40% faster. The pot is made from cast aluminum, and it features fins that direct flames across the bottom and up the sides, capturing energy that would otherwise be wasted. The pot is set to hit the market next month in the UK. “Povey specializes in the design of high-efficiency cooling systems for next-generation jet engines. He is also an avid mountaineer and says that this invention was spurred by the long time it takes for water to reach a boil at high altitudes. He and a group of his students worked three years experimenting with different designs before they came up with one being marketed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rocket Scientist Designs "Flare" Pot That Cooks Food 40% Faster

The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong’s Subway Engineers

Taco Cowboy writes The subway system in Hong Kong has one of the best uptime, 99.9%, which beats London’s tube or NYC’s sub hands down. In an average week as many as 10, 000 people would be carrying out 2, 600 engineering works across the system — from grinding down rough rails to replacing tracks to checking for damages. While human workers might be the one carrying out the work, the one deciding which task is to be worked on, however, isn’t a human being at all. Each and every engineering task to be worked on and the scheduling of all those tasks is being handled by an algorithm. Andy Chan of Hong Kong’s City University, who designed the AI system, says, “Before AI, they would have a planning session with experts from five or six different areas. It was pretty chaotic. Now they just reveal the plan on a huge screen.” Chan’s AI program works with a simulated model of the entire system to find the best schedule for necessary engineering works. From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could. However, in order to provide an added layer of security, the schedule generated by the AI is still subject to human approval — Urgent, unexpected repairs can be added manually, and the system would reschedules less important tasks. It also checks the maintenance it plans for compliance with local regulations. Chan’s team encoded into machine readable language 200 rules that the engineers must follow when working at night, such as keeping noise below a certain level in residential areas. The main difference between normal software and Hong Kong’s AI is that it contains human knowledge that takes years to acquire through experience, says Chan. “We asked the experts what they consider when making a decision, then formulated that into rules – we basically extracted expertise from different areas about engineering works, ” he says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong’s Subway Engineers

Chinese Company ‘3D-Prints 10 Buildings In One Day

Lucas123 writes: A company in China has used additive manufacturing to print 10 single-room buildings out of recycled construction materials in under a day as offices for a Shanghai industrial park. The cost: about $5, 000 each. The company, Suzhou-based Yingchuang New Materials, used four massive 3D printers supplied by the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. Each printer is 20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long. Like their desktop counterparts, the construction-grade 3D printers use fused deposition modeling (FDM), where instead of thermoplastics layer after layer of cement is deposited atop one another. The cement contains hardeners that make each layer firm enough for the next. Yingchuang’s technique builds structures off site in a factory one wall at a time. The structures are then assembled onsite. The technique is unlike U.S.-based Contour Crafting, a company whose 3D printing technology to form the entire outer structure of buildings at once, The Yingchuang factory and research center, a 33, 000 square foot building, was also constructed using the 3D printing manufacturing technique. It only took one month to construct. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Company ‘3D-Prints 10 Buildings In One Day

In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions

The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700, 000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion, ” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it. At least they showed their work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions

What gives paper money its actual value?

Money is just tinted paper printed with different numbers on it. So what gives the ol’ greenbacks its value? The bills used to be tied to the gold standard but now, it’s up to The Fed to control how many bills there are. So why can’t they just decide to print out ridiculous amounts of bill to make everyone rich? Read more…

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What gives paper money its actual value?

After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out

Tekla Perry (3034735) writes “Former Sun executives and employees gathered in Mountain View, Calif., in May, and out came the ‘real’ stories. Andy Bechtolsheim reports that Steve Jobs wasn’t the only one who set out to copy the Xerox Parc Alto; John Gage wonders why so many smart engineers couldn’t figure out that it would have been better to buy tables instead of kneepads for the folks doing computer assembly; Vinod Khosla recalls the plan to ‘rip-off Sun technology, ‘ and more.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out