30 October 2014

MegaBots ~ Giant Robot Live Combat Kickin!

Yes! Check out MegaBots! This live-action giant exoskeleton combat arena game is Kickstarting NOW!
"The mad scientists at MegaBots have been zealously working on the prototypes and final design of 15-foot-tall, 15,000-pound, walking humanoid combat robots with giant, modular pneumatic cannons for arms. A driver-and-gunner team pilot each MegaBot in a battle against other MegaBots, vehicles, and a variety of other defenses and obstacles in live-action combat -- the likes of which the world has only dreamed of through video games and movies."

28 October 2014

Makr Shakr ~ Quantum's Bionic Bartenders!-)

gCaptain spots Quantum of the Seas latest additional feature, the Makr Shakr bionic bartenders!

Ebola Ward ~ BBC on Treatment Facilities...

BBC shows How Ebola is being treated on the ground...
"The treatment centre is designed to separate confirmed Ebola patients from probable or likely cases. Upon entry, patients are examined by medical staff in full protective gear. Following the initial diagnosis, they are then split into low or high probability wards until the laboratory results come in, which could take anything from a few hours to days, depending on the facility. There is little that medical workers can do for their patients, as there is no cure for Ebola. All they can help with is to care for the patients and treat symptoms like dehydration, as well as wash and comfort them. According to MSF, good care increases the chances of survival from a disease that has a 50% fatality rate and whose symptoms include vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding, sometimes from the eyes and mouth. However, overcrowded facilities and a shortage of staff on the ground have made this difficult so far."
The treatment centre is designed to separate confirmed Ebola patients from probable or likely cases.  Upon entry, patients are examined by medical staff in full protective gear.  Following the initial diagnosis, they are then split into low or high probability wards until the laboratory results come in, which could take anything from a few hours to days, depending on the facility.  There is little that medical workers can do for their patients, as there is no cure for Ebola. All they can help with is to care for the patients and treat symptoms like dehydration, as well as wash and comfort them.  According to MSF, good care increases the chances of survival from a disease that has a 50% fatality rate and whose symptoms include vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding, sometimes from the eyes and mouth. However, overcrowded facilities and a shortage of staff on the ground have made this difficult so far. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29537156

27 October 2014

New Startup Math ~ Analyzing Kauffman Survey...

MIT Changing Cities participant Barry Beagen spots the New Startup Math by Inc's Kris Frieswick and Kristin Lenz building upon Kauffman Foundation's Firm Survey and analysis by Carmen Cotei and Susan Coleman of the University of Hartford and Joseph Farhat of Central Connecticut State University... http://www.inc.com/magazine/201410/kris-frieswick-kristin-lenz/kauffman-foundation-firm-survey-what-drives-success.html

26 October 2014

McLaren F1 ~ Owner's Manual as Work-of-Art!

BBC's Matthew Phenix spotlights the Owner's manual as work of art...
"In this five-minute film, McLaren’s Design Operations Manager, Mark Roberts, discusses his first job with the company: illustrating the owner’s handbook for the F1 road car back in 1992. As he did with the car itself, McLaren chief Gordon Murray oversaw every aspect of the handbook’s creation. No surprise, the book was a clothbound work of art, every bit as meticulously crafted as the car it described. The illustration style -- pencil drawings with colour washes that highlight relevant areas -- is one that, with a modest smirk, Roberts calls “almost Leonardo-like.”

25 October 2014

13 October 2014

Endless City ~ SURE's London Greenscraper...

Julian Robinson in the DailyMail spots SURE's Endless City...
"A giant skyscraper as tall as The Shard in London, built with its own complete ecosystem featuring offices, shops and 'huge' parks. London is the proposed city for the mixed-use tower, which would include interlinking ramps connecting different sections of the structure to create a 'vertical city' housing thousands. [...] different areas of the building would be linked by a series of bridges and walkways helping to 'increase exchanges, communications and interactions. It would include a raft of public spaces, entertainment zones and shopping areas to create a 'vertical city'. Residents would be able to walk up a series of interlinked ramps through vibrant streets, plazas, technological spaces and 'huge' parks in a 'complex and rich system like a real city'."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2735522/City-sky-Ambitious-tower-block-house-thousands-people-schools-offices-shops-parks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2735522/City-sky-Ambitious-tower-block-house-thousands-people-schools-offices-shops-parks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2735522/City-sky-Ambitious-tower-block-house-thousands-people-schools-offices-shops-parks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2735522/City-sky-Ambitious-tower-block-house-thousands-people-schools-offices-shops-parks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2735522/City-sky-Ambitious-tower-block-house-thousands-people-schools-offices-shops-parks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2735522/City-sky-Ambitious-tower-block-house-thousands-people-schools-offices-shops-parks.html

Bullet Train @ 50 ~ Japan's Stunning Speed Lead

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/japan/11096405/Japan-50-years-of-the-bullet-train.htmlJoanna Symons from the Telegraph spotlights 50 Years of the Bullet Train in Japan!
"Fifty years ago this October [...] Japan’s first Shinkansen, or bullet train, slid out of Tokyo station and gathered speeds of up to 130mph en route for Osaka, heralding a new age of high-speed rail. The Japanese were well ahead of the game. It was 13 years before Italy followed suit, then France with the TGV. But although high-speed trains now glide across hills and plains from Spain to China, Japan’s futuristic-looking bullet train retains an aura that our grime-caked intercity expresses can never capture. [...] Unlike Concorde, the trains have an almost unblemished safety record. Despite Japan’s vulnerability to typhoons and earthquakes, not one of the 10 billion passengers who have used the service since its launch has died as a result of a derailment or collision. [...] Thank you to the bullet train pioneers. They may have been motivated by a need to link Japan’s cities, just as the champions of HS2 are now. But they should be given an award for tourism: these great train routes provide the best possible way to explore this extraordinary country."

Fowl Factories? ~ Yes, Amazing Food Production!

It's fantastic to see the efficiency and scale of chicken-related agribusiness, from hatching to slaughtering, egg sorting through consumption. First, an overview of industrial farming in the German context, including the perspective of both producer and protestor... Hatching Chicks... Processing Eggs... The amazing "Long Egg" process!-) Slaughtering Chickens... Processing Chickens... Serving it up at KFC... Next, check out this piece from Westgate Integrity in Kenya showing how that market is beginning the process of modernizing towards the global state-of-the-art in chicken care and egg production... Finally, be aware that there's a counter-movement to all this efficiency-orientation. Generously speaking, the "free-ranger" assert greater quality of overall product and spin the benefits of so-called "organic" production. And it's certainly believable that factors such as stress and feed indeed make a difference to ultimate meat-taste, so there's room for improvement in the factory approach. On the other end of the spectrum, however, we have criminal "animal liberators" run amok as revealed in this Australian 60 Minutes piece...

12 October 2014

Sea Change ~ Oceans Affecting King Crabs...

Craig Welch of the Seattle Times writes of the Sea Change in the lucrative King Crab industry...
"New research earlier this year shows that Bristol Bay red king crab -- the supersized monster that has come to symbolize the fortunes of Alaska’s crab fleet -- could fall victim to the changing chemistry of the oceans. [...] There’s no evidence that souring seas have yet altered wild populations -- the most corrosive seas now occur at times when red king crab aren’t as susceptible. But Alaska’s crab industry has followed the science closely."

Capitalist Cure ~ De Soto on Unlikely Heroes...

Peruvian economist and founder of ILD Hernando de Soto writes in the WSJournal about The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism...
"Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment. [...] Today we hear the same economic and cultural pessimism about the Arab world that we did about Peru in the 1980s. But we know better. Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru, so can terrorists be defeated by reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East and North Africa. To make this agenda a reality, the only requirements are a little imagination, a hefty dose of capital (injected from the bottom up) and government leadership to build, streamline and fortify the laws and structures that let capitalism flourish. As anyone who’s walked the streets of Lima, Tunis and Cairo knows, capital isn’t the problem -- it is the solution. [...] The people of the “Arab street” want to find a place in the modern capitalist economy. But hundreds of millions of them have been unable to do so because of legal constraints to which both local leaders and Western elites are often blind. They have ended up as economic refugees in their own countries. To survive, they have cobbled together hundreds of discrete, anarchic arrangements, often called the “informal economy.” Unfortunately, that sector is viewed with contempt by many Arabs and by Western development experts, who prefer well-intended charity projects [...] All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction."

08 October 2014

Mega-Block Shipbuilding ~ Meyer Werft Yards...

Thanks to gCaptain's Mike Schuler for spotting Mega-Block Construction at Meyer Werft using innovative shipbuilding techniques as seen in this Royal Caribbean semi-timelapse video...

Giants Speak ~ MIT Founders of Silicon Valley...

A bit of Silicon Valley history as told by the creators (all MIT alums)!