A completely surreal Chinese news item on American Airlines’s bankruptcy filing by NMAWorldEdition. Beware the panda of death.
CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.
With Apps, Wealth Management Goes Mobile
“The PricewaterhouseCoopers Asia Pacific Private Banking Survey 2011 found that 35 percent of private bankers expected to interact more with their clients through social media in the next two years, and that nearly 50 percent of private banks expected to use mobile technologies over the same period.”
Full Story: New York Times
Saw this at the Perseus Awards in Fort Lauderdale a couple weeks ago: excellent cinematography. I’ve been to Tahiti, and this was as close to getting back as I’ve ever been.
A model presents a creation with recycled materials during Ecofashion 2011, on March 26, 2011, in Cali, Colombia. (Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images)
From: The Atlantic’s brilliant In Focus photo essay series.
From The Guardian books blog, posted by Allison Flood.
Self-publishing websites are attracting more than 40% of all China’s internet users every month? I didn’t, and I am reeling, a little, from the statistic.
These aren’t Authonomy-esque, publish-and-be-encouraged-by-fellow-writers sorts of sites, though, or even collections of self-published novels. The websites host what is being dubbed “freemium” publishing. Publishing Perspectives has more details: a growing number of self-publishing websites host thousands of free-to-read web serials – anything from historical epics to sci-fi – posted by their authors. As a serial gathers critical mass, the author is invited to become a “VIP”, and readers have to pay for the new instalments – only a few yuan, but these micropayments from readers can number in the millions: China Daily reports that one author, the 26-year-old Huang Wei, makes more than more than Y1m a year (£100,000).
“It’s pure entertainment, written, downloaded, read and deleted all at top speed,” says Beijing-based literary translator and publishing consultant Eric Abrahamsen, who also writes for the Chinese publishing industry newsletter Paper Republic. “Basically all of this writing is genre fiction. It is produced by young writers and aimed at young readers.”
Honda: off in robotic directions. The level of technical complexity here is astonishing. But the pick-up, in terms of deployment in Europe or North America, is still virtually zero. I think everyone but the Japanese are freaked out by these guys. It’s like we can’t wrap our heads around the idea of a real humanoid robot. It’s all too Asimov for us, perhaps.
“All-new ASIMO”, Honda’s humanoid robot - The Next Web
At just 4′ 3”, the newest ASIMO can run at 9kph forwards, also run backwards, jump up and down and even jump on one foot. IEEE Spectrum points out that ASIMO’s hands are dexterous enough to perform sign language and by combining tactile and visual sensors, he can recognize objects and handle them appropriately, such as taking caps off of bottles and pouring liquid into paper cups without crushing them.
In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has “turned the corner” and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”OK, now magazines like The Economist are stating this fact that we futurists have been talking about for many years, well maybe most early by Alvin Toffler… Is it time to leave these issues to the politicians and change our focus to things more far ahead into the future…?
(via emergentfutures)
UTOPIA project launched at Monaco Yacht Show. High luxury affords the room to experiment, and here James Roy and co have come up with a remarkable project… And these guys are serious naval architects. interesting ideas…
Their press release:
BMT Nigel Gee, a subsidiary of the BMT Group, has announced its latest design, developed in partnership with Yacht Island Design. Project Utopia, an avant?garde vision of a future concept breaks the traditional naval architectural mould which the market has come to expect and offers a truly unique outlook free from any conventional design constraints.
James Roy, Yacht Design Director at BMT Nigel Gee explains: “Visions of the future are often constrained by familiarity with the present or reflection on the past. Much is made in today’s design community of starting with a blank sheet of paper yet many, if not all yacht concepts revert back to the traditional form - the perception that a yacht should be a form of transport becomes an immediate constraint. Utopia is not an object to travel in, it is a place to be, an island established for anyone who has the vision to create such a place.”
Measuring 100m in length and breadth, and spanning over 11 decks with the equivalent volume of a present?day cruise liner, there is enough space to create an entire micronation. The design is based on a four legged platform employing the same principals of any small waterplane area design for minimum motions in even the most extreme sea conditions. Each leg supports a fully azimuthing thruster and with four such units, the design can redeploy between desired locations at slow speeds. A large central structure bisects the water surface acting as the conduit for the mooring system which is a critical element of the design, as well as housing a wet dock for access by tenders. In addition to tender access the design features multiple helicopter pads.
The main accommodation and service spaces span some 11 decks with the uppermost deck covered by a retractable canopy. On the “13
th Floor” there is an observatory with 360 degree views, at which point the occupants would be 65m above the water surface.
James Roy concludes: “Pioneering design ideas such as Utopia are exactly the types of projects that our team excel in. Our forward thinking approach and unrivalled state of the art engineering experience allows us to work closely with designers, stylists and shipyards, to bring these ideas to life and lead the market into the next generation of naval architecture.”
Sis-in-law gets the pick of the uncorrected proofs at Penguin and brought me the latest from Paul Davies and Michio Kaku, respectively. Some good reading ahead.
Canada’s Devastated Cod Fishery Begins To Recover
After being fished to the brink of extinction, the once abundant (and delicious) cod is coming back due to smart management of the fisheries. But that doesn’t mean the species will ever be the same.Full Story: FastCompany
