Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 78
September 21, 2017
Amazon to release Alexa-powered smartglasses, reports say
Amazon is planning to release a pair of Alexa-enabled smartglasses as the latest addition to its range of voice-controlled devices, according to reports.
Unlike most previous smartglasses, such as the ill-fated Google Glass experiment and Snapchat’s Spectacles, the Amazon glasses won’t feature a camera in any form, bypassing the privacy concerns that have plagued the form-factor in the past.
Instead, they will focus on providing a link to Alexa, Amazon’s voice-controlled personal assistant, through a bone-conduction audio system, which transmits sounds into the wearer’s head by vibrating their skull, rather than through headphones inserted in their ear.
According to a report by the Financial Times, the glasses could be revealed at a product launch event expected to be held soon alongside a home security camera, designed to tie in with its Echo Show video screen. Other reports have suggested the company will shortly release a new version of the Fire TV, its streaming media set-top box, with an Echo-style speaker system built-in.
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The leaks paint a picture of a company doubling down on its biggest tech success since the launch of the Kindle. The Amazon Echo now has a 76% share of the smart speaker market in the US, according to research firm CIRP, with 15m units in consumer’s homes. Google Home comes a distant second, with the remaining 24% of the market.
“Owners listen to music most on both Echo and Home, at least once a day or more often,” said Mike Levin, CIRPs co-founder. “They also use them frequently for information, like asking about the weather or sports scores, as well as setting timers and alarms.
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Proterra’s big electric bus can go 1,102 miles on one charge
With cities and countries about to put bans on internal combustion engines in the next couple of decades, electric bus technology needs to advance. Proterra thinks it just proved it’s already there.
On Tuesday, the California-based company said its Catalyst E2 Max went 1,102.2 miles on a single charge, a world record for the longest distance traveled by an electric vehicle without recharging. The test was performed at Navistar’s proving grounds in Indiana, and the results were confirmed by that company.
“For our heavy-duty electric bus to break the previous world record of 1,013.76 miles — which was set by a light-duty passenger EV 46 times lighter than the Catalyst E2 max — is a major feat,” Matt Horton, Proterra’s chief commercial officer, said in the news release.
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The E2 Max uses a 660kWh battery and hides it in the 40-foot-long bus body. By comparison, a Tesla Model S P100D has a 100kWh battery to achieve a 315-mile range. Hyundai recently announced the Elec City bus that has a 180-mile range from a 256kWh battery, but it can be fully charged in one hour.
No transit agencies are using an E2 Max, however, according to the Los Angeles Times. Proterra is selling a model with a 350-mile range, and last year, agreed to supply Foothill Transit in Southern California with a 35-foot model with a 35-mile range that can be recharged in 10 minutes.
“Early electric bus adopters like our first customer, Foothill Transit, have paved the way for future heavy-duty applications, like motor coaches and commercial truck,” Proterra CEO Ryan Popple said. “As we see incumbents and more companies enter the heavy-duty EV market, it has become very apparent that the future is all-electric, and the sun is setting on combustion engine technology.”
You may not own a car, but the bus you get on soon could be electric.
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Leonardo DiCaprio Commits $20 Million To Fight Climate Change
Leonardo DiCaprio is more than just a leading man in some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. Along with being a writer and producer, he’s also an outspoken activist ringing the alarm bells of the catastrophe to befall us, should we ignore our role in global warming. DiCaprio himself has been a long-time advocate for the environment, and sits on the board of many prominent organizations including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
He’s also traveled the world speaking on climate change and is currently a UN messenger of peace. He even brought up climate change in his acceptance speech, when he finally won an Oscar last year for his role in The Revenant. In addition, he’s made two speeches to the UN, one in 2014 and another earlier this year.
At a two-day conference that just wrapped up on Tuesday at Yale University, he announced The Leonardo DiCaprio foundation was committing $20 million dollars in grants to 100 nonprofits working to fight climate change. The foundation has six programs. They are: Wildlife and Landscape Conservation, Climate Change, Indigenous Rights, Innovative Solutions, Marine and Ocean Conservation, and Transforming California. Up until now, the foundation has had a direct financial impact of $80 million, which DiCaprio himself raised.
“These facts have been presented time and again, year after year, for decades,” DiCaprio said. “Quite simply, we are knowingly doing this to ourselves, to our entire planet, and we’re risking our very future.” He mentioned that the intense storms hitting the Caribbean and Gulf Coast, along with the horrendous flooding in Southern Asia, make the “results of our inaction even clearer.”
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And yet, “There is still an astounding level of willful ignorance and inaction from the people who should be doing the most to protect us and every other living thing on this planet.” Apparently, DiCaprio and his foundation head met with then President-elect Trump in December and offered a commonsense plan to address climate change, as well as to boost the economy through supporting green jobs. “We talked about how the United States has the potential to lead the world in clean energy manufacturing and research and development,” he said.
DiCaprio called R&D, green jobs, and green engineering “the largest domestic opportunity in all of American history.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration has backed away from the Paris Climate Agreement, which Kerry as Secretary of State helped broker in 2015. According to DiCaprio, the only thing we lack is the political will to tackle this ever-increasing problem.
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Switzerland Is Getting A Network Of Medical Delivery Drones
When a hospital needs to rush a delivery from a lab somewhere else in a densely populated city–for example, when a surgeon needs an urgent biopsy of a tumor in the middle of a surgery to determine how much tissue to remove, or a gunshot victim in the ER needs blood that the hospital doesn’t have in stock–that delivery can sometimes get stuck in traffic. Couriers are also expensive. In Switzerland, hospitals and labs will soon begin using drones to make those deliveries instead.
Permanent drone delivery networks are already in use in Africa, where drones send units of blood for transfusions to remote clinics in Rwanda, and will soon deliver other medical supplies such as antimalarial drugs and emergency vaccines in Tanzania. But Switzerland will be the first country in the developed world to have permanent drone networks, with drones flying through urban airspace near busy international airports.
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Matternet, a Silicon Valley-based tech company, designed the drones, along with a cloud system for sending and receiving platforms–and a newly launched system that can autonomously load, launch, and land the drones. “It allows us to have our drone system connecting facilities that don’t have any trained personnel on how to use the drone,” says Andreas Raptopoulos, founder and CEO of Matternet.
By the end of the year, the company will have small networks in place at labs and hospitals throughout Swiss cities. When a lab technician takes a sample that needs to be sent urgently, they’ll use an iPhone app to put a request in the system, and put the sample in a special container for biohazardous material. Then they’ll scan a QR code to load the container into the ground station outside, and then the system does the rest: pulling the sample inside, requesting a drone if one isn’t already on site, loading the drone with a freshly charged battery and the sample, and launching on a route generated by the cloud system. When the drone lands itself on another station at a hospital, someone inside is notified and retrieves the sample using the same app. When not in use, the drones will be stored in a secure room at a hospital.
Once the value of medical deliveries is proven, the company thinks that will serve as a bridge into other on-demand deliveries. “We share the enthusiasm of Amazon and Google and others that it has a potential to revolutionize on-demand e-commerce and on-demand transactions around goods,” says Raptopoulos. “The best way to start operating . . . is to start in places where first of all there’s a clear benefit, the margins are such that they can pay for this, and the economics work out for the customer, and you can easily make the argument that there’s public benefit behind it.”
Source:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40467761/switzerland-is-getting-a-network-of-medical-delivery-drones
Google signs agreement with HTC, continuing our big bet on hardware
Of the three most influential companies in smartphone design, Nokia fragmented into a million pieces after being bought out by Microsoft, Apple is still going strong, and Google just bought the third with its $1.1 billion deal with HTC. The reason why Google acquired what looks to be the majority of HTC’s phone design and engineering team is simple, and it’s been obvious for over a year: Google is serious about becoming a hardware company.
Early in 2016, Google created a new hardware division and re-hired Motorola chief Rick Osterloh to run that group. A brief few months after that, the company was plastering the streets of Europe and the US with billboards trumpeting the arrival of the first “Made by Google” Pixel devices. Why do we refuse to acknowledge what’s right in front of our eyes?
Google is going to war against the iPhone.
It sounds preposterous given the number and quality of apps that Google produces for Apple’s iOS ecosystem, but the iPhone is a direct threat and counter to Google’s overarching goal of being ubiquitous on every internet-connected device. Apple’s voice assistant Siri searches the web using Bing rather than Google, and Apple Maps was created explicitly to shake off Apple’s dependence on Google Maps.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/21/16343342/google-htc-deal-apple-iphone-war
Adult Coloring Book for Stress Relief: Gardens, Mandalas, Flowers, Butterflies, Animals and Owls
77 Mixed patterns to color. This adult coloring book has over 77 animal patterns and provides hours of stress relief through creative expression. It features small and big creatures from forests, oceans, birds, elephants, mandalas, owls. Designs range in complexity and detail from beginner to expert-level. Adidas Wilson public Facebook page.
https://www.amazon.com/Adult-Coloring-Book-Stress-Relief/dp/1544026307/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
33 Strategies of Kama Sutra: Make Her Scream – Last Longer, Come Harder, And Be The Best She’s Ever Had
Among the most vulnerable things that can wear out with time is intimacy. Most couples go through difficult times and commitments that take a toll on their intimacy. In most cases, when affection wears among lovers, one person is usually affected than the other. If any of the partners does not take the initiative to restore intimacy into the relationship, chances are your relationship will end up breaking as one or both of you seek intimacy from outside.
It is believed that the human body is a small atomic factory where chemical elements needed in the body are continually manufactured using low quantities of energy. Besides, there is also the production of energy sufficient for extraordinary phenomena. These include higher states of consciousness, paranormal abilities, sublimation of particular energies and higher intelligence. Others are elevated levels of happiness and euphoria, to mention just a few.
If you can move into lovemaking totally the ego disappears, because at the highest peak, at the highest climax of lovemaking, you are pure energy.
Osho
September 20, 2017
Nest Hello video doorbell rings for smart security
The smart home expanded this week as the Nest Hello was revealed as a new video doorbell from the company that made the smart thermostat. This doorbell includes a camera as part of the Nest Cams network. This camera can detect a person approaching or near the doorbell and send an alert and/or a photo to the device’s owner.
The Next Hello is certainly not the first smart doorbell on the block. Also appearing in the last half-decade were the Xchime, the August Doorbell Cam Pro, the SkyBell WiFi Doorbell, and perhaps most famous of all, the Ring. The Nest holds the distinction of being the only smart doorbell made by Nest, appearing as part of the Nest smart home ecosystem.
Nest Hello allows its user to engage with both friends and strangers (or dogs, or even a ghost!) using the device’s “HD Talk and Listen” system. This device’s talk and listen system has “echo suppression” as well as ambient noise cancellation for clean, sharp sounds. This system also rolls with its own collection of pre-recorded responses, this allowing the user to engage with the guest at the door without actually having to speak out loud.
The Nest Hello smart doorbell is the only one of the collection of devices introduced by Nest today to be without a specific release date or pricing. The folks at Nest suggest that this device will be available in the United States and Canada at around “the first quarter of 2018”, with a release set for later next year for Europe.
This is but one of a collection of Nest devices expanding the brand well beyond the living room. This week’s event brought about the Nest Secure Alarm System, with Nest Guard, Nest Detect, and Nest Tag. This week’s event also revealed the Nest Cam IQ outdoor security camera – all part of Nest’s new home security family.
Source:
https://www.slashgear.com/nest-hello-video-doorbell-rings-for-smart-security-20500853/
Lyft offers 400 scholarships for online self-driving car course
Online learning portal Udacity launched its first 36-week “nanodegree” course for self-driving car engineering last year. There’s a new, introductory course available now as well, focused on bringing students with minimal programming into the larger program. Even better, Udacity has partnered with Lyft (which has self-driving plans of its own) to provide scholarships to the intro course in order to increase diversity to the program. 400 scholarships are available to US-based students with “varying levels of experience;” the application window closes October 1st.
Lyft says that people “from all backgrounds and perspectives” should have the opportunity to contribute to the future of transportation in the form of self-driving cars. “Diversity is crucial for creating solutions that serve everyone, and ridesharing is for everyone,” the company writes on its website. “That’s why these scholarships will specifically target communities that are underrepresented in technology in the US.”
In addition, Lyft will provide mentorship opportunities through its lyf, which is where the company houses its self-driving division. The nanodegree itself will cover topics like “machine learning, object-oriented programming and probabilistic robotics.”
Of course, if self-driving cars aren’t your thing, you can always enroll in Udacity’s new Flying Car nanodegree (which really focuses more on drones than actual airborne autos).
Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/19/lyft-offers-400-scholarships-online-self-driving-car-course/
Amazon’s Kindle Fire 10 Tablet Gets A Major Upgrade, And A Price Cut
Amazon has been trying to get its tablets in front of everyone it can, for a simple reason: The tablets are there to sell you stuff. And now Amazon is sweetening the deal with an enormous upgrade, and a price cut to go with it.
The Fire 10 is getting a complete overhaul on October 11th, with a quad-core processor, a battery that now lasts 10 hours, doubled storage with 32GB now standard, and a 1080p display. It also will come with “hands-free” Alexa functionality, and can serve as an add-on screen for your Echo, tracking timers and the like. Most notable, though, is all this is a lot cheaper; the previous Fire 10 was $230, and this one will start at $150. Yes, the price dropped by nearly a third. That more or less makes this the best tablet in that price range.
That said, there are trade-offs. The $150 model comes with “special offers” (that is, there are ads) that you can remove with a one-time $15 fee. It also features Amazon’s version of Android, which locks you out from Google’s app ecosystem in favor of Amazon’s, so if you were buying your music via Google Play or iTunes, you’ll be out of luck, unless you want to install a tedious workaround. That said, if you’re heavily invested in Amazon, or just want a large screen for your Amazon media, the Kindle Fire 10 just became a lot more viable.
(via The Verge)
