Officially been there.
Taking your Air Conditioning for Granted
This weekend, Friday to be exact, I counted on my A/C to just startup for the 12th year running… big mistake. House was open all day Friday and was 84 degrees at 6pm, balmy. Let’s just say nobody slept well that night. Left messages for HVAC repair peeps (I won’t name names) but received no responses.
So, the following photos are what any red-blooded technologist would do – tear into it and fix the damn thing. Works great now… pretty low-tech stuff.
Posted in General rants
What are QR Codes and what can they do for your business? | Small Business Buzz Blog – Vistage
What are QR Codes and what can they do for your business?
By: Nick Damoulakis
Despite recent research from Forrester that shows only a one percent adoption rate, there’s a rare consensus drawn from marketing executives at the mention of Quick Response (QR codes) that they are the harbinger of things to come for the industry. Originally created for tracking vehicle parts, QR codes were developed in Japan by Denso Wave Inc. (a Toyota subsidiary) and can now be found throughout the country, tagging everything from magazine ads to posters to fast food wrappers. QR codes provide these businesses with an opportunity to drive the use of mobile content and extend their product’s packaging with more information and deeper consumer engagement. If the success of QR codes in Japan is any indication of the potential market in the U.S., and it is, implementing a QR campaign now will give your clients and company a significant competitive advantage.
While a stalled rate of adopters stateside may make you hesitant to implement a QR campaign, now is actually the perfect time for your company to build a formal strategy using this technology – mainly because investing in QR codes is pigeon-holed as a risk for businesses, so vendors have undervalued their services. That said, in order to ensure the success of your campaign, keep in mind that additional considerations need to be taken in order to ensure its success.
The rise in use of QR codes in Japan can be largely attributed to two factors: the benefit to consumers is both unmatched and apparent, and smart phones are purchased with scanning tools already downloaded – thus bypassing the initial “adoption hurdle” for businesses. While increased supply and visibility will encourage smart phone users to download scanning tools, marketers need to focus on exciting consumers by creating meaningful and creative ways for consumers to benefit from this technology. In Japan, users of public transportation can download and read details of a train timetable via QR bar codes, thus providing them with an easier commute. While increase your brand’s awareness with flexible and extended packaging information may be your impetus for using QR codes, remember that concise messaging still resonates best, and that learning more about your company may not be enough to entice consumers. Rather than using QR codes to inundate consumers with jargon, create meaningful tools for your clients and for consumers. This can be achieved by first understanding who is using and likely to use this technology, and then through a careful consideration of how your business can use QR codes.
Who is using this technology today?
Only a small portion of mobile owners in the U.S. have the technology to use a QR code. These consumers are young adults – Gen Y (18 to 30) and Gen X (31 to 44) with high income. Starbucks has started to use QR codes for payments, and according to the company, 52% of their consumers report seeing QR codes before and 28% have scanned the codes. These figures are irregularly high compared to some other industry sectors, but indicative of how the company was able to mobilize the use of QR codes within an existing consumer base that is most likely to use this technology.
Similar success was seen among other top brands that serve to this demographic. Ford, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Best Buy and Ralph Lauren have all been noted for using QR codes in marketing and advertising initiatives. Overall, in 2010, QR code usage showed an increase of 1200% from July to December. Among social media users, nearly 57% of Facebook and Twitter members report having scanned a mobile bar code at least once in the past year. Therefore, if your company has an active social media presence, QR code campaigns are looking to be the next step in sustaining its brand awareness.
How can you use QR Codes?
My company has printed QR codes on the back of business cards. This gives my clients a way to quickly learn more about the company, while my contact information is being stored on their cell phone. As an innovative firm, we’ve worked with our clients use QR codes on print advertisements such as brochures, magazine and newspaper ads and posters. We are also looking to add QR codes to a campaign for a museum in order to create an interactive tour for those interested in visiting. Recently, we’ve also suggested a client use QR codes to attract tourists to visit a small town to participate in a scavenger hunt. When visiting with the Pentagon Memorial Fund they were considering putting QR codes on each memorial unit so visitors could learn more about each victim of the 9/11 attacks. Undoubtedly, the possibilities of attaching hyperlinks to your marketing materials will make this technology a great tool. For now, we just have to help consumers find their way toward adoption.
via blog.vistage.com
Posted in General rants
Total Immersion’s Augmented Reality Blog
Here we go! Larger screened tablets with cameras are going to change everything…
Posted in General rants
Society for Neuroscience – Neuroscience Core Concepts
via sfn.org
Amazing core principles that one should know about the brain and nervous system, the most complex living structure known in the universe.
Posted in General rants
Automaton, Know Thyself: Robots Become Self-Aware: Scientific American
BOTTY IMAGE: An artist’s depiction of a robot reflecting on itself. Image: Victor Zykov, Cornell University
Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking.
Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory.
“The greatest challenge for robots today is figuring out how to adapt to new situations,” he says. “There are millions of robots out there, mostly in factories, and if everything is in the right place at the right time for them, they are superhuman in their precision, in their power, in their speed, in their ability to work repetitively 24/7 in hazardous environments—but if a bolt falls out of place, game over.”
This lack of adaptability “is the reason we don’t have many robots in the home, which is much more unstructured than the factory,” Lipson adds. “The key is for robots to create a model of themselves to figure out what is working and not working in order to adapt.”
So, Lipson and his colleagues developed a robot shaped like a four-legged starfish whose brain, or controller, developed a model of what its body was like. The researchers started the droid off with an idea of what motors and other parts it had, but not how they were arranged, and gave it a directive to move. By trial and error, receiving feedback from its sensors with each motion, the machine used repeated simulations to figure out how its body was put together and evolved an ungainly but effective form of movement all on its own. Then “we removed a leg,” and over time the robot’s self-image changed and learned how to move without it, Lipson says.
Now, instead of having robots modeling their own bodies Lipson and Juan Zagal, now at the University of Chile in Santiago , have developed ones that essentially reflect on their own thoughts. They achieve such thinking about thinking, or metacognition, by placing two minds in one bot. One controller was rewarded for chasing dots of blue light moving in random circular patterns and avoiding red dots as if they were poison, whereas a second controller modeled how the first behaved and whether it was successful or not.
So why might two brains be better than one? The researchers changed the rules so that chasing red dots and avoiding blue dots were rewarded instead. By reflecting on the first controller’s actions, the second one could make changes to adapt to failures—for instance, it filtered sensory data to make red dots seem blue and blue dots seem red, Lipson says. In this way the robot could adapt after just four to 10 physical experiments instead of the thousands it would take using traditional evolutionary robotic techniques.
“This could lead to a way to identify dangerous situations, learning from them without having to physically go through them—that’s something that’s been missing in robotics,” says computer scientist Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont, a past collaborator of Lipson’s who did not take part in this study.
Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, Lipson and his colleagues are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking, a property that psychologists call “theory of mind”. For instance, the team had one robot observe another wheeling about in an erratic spiraling manner toward a light. Over time, the observer could predict the other’s movements well enough to know where to lay a “trap” for it on the ground. “It’s basically mind reading,” Lipson says.
“Our holy grail is to give machines the same kind of self-awareness capabilities that humans have,” Lipson says. “This research might also shed new light on the very difficult topic of our self-awareness from a new angle—how it works, why and how it developed.”
It’s starting!
Posted in General rants
Global Android Activations, Oct ’08 – Jan ’11
via youtube.com
Interesting data viz, thanks to Dan Grigsby for sharing.
Posted in General rants
AR.Drone in the shop
Well, my best Christmas present ever is officially broken. But wait! I can fix it!!
I was able disassemble without breaking it further and found a completely severed spine. I’ll have to let you all know how the surgery goes…
Posted in General rants
John Moberg's Blog 