Formula E which is officially called ABB FIA Formula Championship is a class of auto racing that is based only on electric-powered cars. It first launched in September 2014 in Beijing. It is the future of electric car racing. Ten teams each with two drivers compete in the identically set-up cars powered by electric batteries.
Formula E races takes place in big agglomerations like Paris, New York, Zurich and Hong Kong. As they race in identical cars the races are more fierce and competitive than F1. Formula E is also more engaging as it is shorter, you are closer to action and you can even be involved by fanboost where you vote for your favorite driver and thanks to this they can get 5 seconds power boost.
Currently new innovation has been implemented inside this league in Envision Virgin Racing Team.EVR team hopes to wins thanks to its newest partnership with Genpact, a professional company that offers AI and analytical platform. The cooperation was presented in AI Summit in New York City. Thanks to this partnership team’s decision making at high speed is considered to be improved.
Nowadays team’s are equipped with informations from pre-track conditions to detailed data from every important system in car.The newly implemented technology is very complicated but extremely useful.
The technology identifies patterns, builds predictions, and makes recommendations about energy management, speed, or passing strategies using all available data—and does all of this aster than the team can, enhancing the work of the strategists and engineers.
This result in more accurate pre-race strategies. Through constantly changing conditions, AI aims to help in taking more accurate decisions. Envision Virgin Racing Team added genpact to become more engaged winner and thanks to AI it enables to connect people and processes to adapt better to each possible scenario. Thanks to this EVR team becomes first instinctively working racing team. AI is constantly developing and may become an important factor in improving abilities of high-performing teams which will enable them to compete better and win more effectively.
What are your thoughts about it? Do you think AI is the future of racing? Or maybe implementing this technology was a mistake that price will be to paid later? Let me know in comments.
Driving home for Christmas (using L1/L2 autonomous driving)
I have been driving from skying today using my father’s car, I used ICC (Intelligent Cruise Control) and for the first time did I use Lane Assistant (have a look at test of this technology by eGear TV – VW Lane Assist (Passat GTE) – POV Test Drive). The tool is very practical and impressively accurate, yet during the 100 km part of my travel during which I have used Lane Assistant I felt a bit insecure. It might have been caused by a couple of different reasons: I woke up early then I skied for a couple of hours and I was just very sleepy, also the weather was quite bad – rainy and slippery, but most of all I did not trust the technology enough not to take control over the wheel when another car was to close.
My first time…
Before I have experienced “autonomy” of a car myself I would have said that we should definitely use autonomous cars, but after today’s drive I did not feel like I was willing to put the safety of myself and my passengers in hands of a bunch of LIDAR’s, cameras, sensors, computers and hyper-deeply developed maps.
Yet, let’s just objectively look at it. Safety Regulators from the USA say that around 95% of road accidents are caused by human error. Those are very often a direct implication of eating, talking over the phone, looking back at one’s kids during travel, speeding, being high on alcohol or drugs and others listed above. Computer is not affected by those and unlike humans has 360 degree vision to oversee literally everything around itself.
Comparing apples and oranges
On the other hand – If anyone is trying to compare how many accidents are caused by human-drivers and machine-drivers, it is at least uneven and might even be unfair. Human statistics are collected on much bigger scale and in all kinds of environments, roads and weather, while most of the information about the autonomous cars comes from a few Western States in America with great weather (here is one company from Finland that contradicts it, but it is hard to find another example like that) and is collected on a much smaller scale.
We fear unknown
Taking into consideration today’s drive and what I have read later, I am not really sure whether I trust autonomous cars enough yet, but so did many people when first autopilots were introduced to airplanes and today it is completely normal to trust the computer to control the flight nearly fully. The technology depends on great innovators, intelligent regulators, but most of all on the acceptance of society, we should help our future selves and trust that autonomous driving is the future of safer road transportation.
Muzo – New Edition. Get away from bitter reality and let Muzo – New Edition take you on a journey far from the hardships of everyday life
What can it do?
Sleep with Customized Scene
It Edition acts as an ambient sound equalizer. It is fully adjustable via the dedicated APP. Over 1000 scenes available by mixing up realistic sound variations.
Turn Surface into a Speaker
It generates sound by vibrating attached surface. It transforms almost every surface into a crystal-clear quality sound speaker. The excited plate envelops the listener in immersive sound.
Dynamic Mask Disturbance
It detects the sleep disturbances nearby. Meanwhile, the white noise with smart volume leveling is generated to mask the disturbances immediately.
Compact and Portable
Perfect for baby nurseries, apartments, hotel rooms, or any environment where disruptive noises are a nagging problem.
Flexible Wall Mount Availability
With TPE sticky pad, Muzo – New Edition can be stuck firmly on any smooth surface. It is easy to stick, reposition and remove.
APP Intelligent Control
Muzo helps you to fall asleep. Auto-off feature let you enjoy the scene with no worries.
One of the biggest features of Muzo is a realistic sound mixing by smartphone app. It generates sound by vibrating attached surface. Sounds no longer come from a single source but come from every particle of the attached surface. This characteristic makes a huge difference in terms of the degree of sound’s simulation. It delivers an extreme vivid sound quality that you would not notice the sound source as it is blended into your background.
The dedicated case’s premium design beautifully complements Muzo – New Edition. Its fit-in design and strengthened structure help prevent scratches and bumps. Riding on the concept of vibration speaker, you can turn any surface or object into a sound box. Just put Muzo on the top of the case, you can transform it to a speaker box. It perfectly serves as a sound box to carry out a unique sound texture.
The minute I heard about this marvel, the decision to write an article regarding The June came to me by itself. It left me dazzled by a broad range of features that I can only hope will become standard in toaster ovens in the future. These functions all together make this “smart” toaster oven worth your look. At least, considering the ability to cook things ranging from eggs to popcorn there! June doesn’t act like a simple oven, it acts like Alton Brown, in the flesh, is in your kitchen, translating overwhelming instructions into quick, digestible steps for you so that you can concentrate on doing other important things.
So let’s move on to the deepened acquaintance of this classy looking appliance. Just to be clear, it’s designed by former Google, GoPro and Apple employees. The June oven has an Apple product vibe, which makes sense because June partnered with Quantum Computers, the manufacturer of Apple’s laptops and Watch. Both the oven and its interface are stunning. You can confirm that just by looking at the product!
The appliance constitutes an Internet-connected toaster oven that acts as a convection oven, toaster, air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, and finally…warming drawer! So you don’t need a lot of electronic devices in the kitchen, freeing up countertop and cabinet space. As you might have guessed, it’s aimed at busy folks who like homemade meals but don’t want to be chained to the kitchen. June is a helpful kitchen assistant that lets you go do your things without the risk of burning the house down. Maybe it doesn’t save you time, but at least offers peace of mind.
“In a short amount of time, it’s proved itself a reliable performer that I can use in more ways than I ever expected I could.”
The happy customer : )
You can operate the June from the touchscreen on the front, that is pretty beautiful and responsive, not worrying if your fingers are a bit greasy or wet from meal prep. Another way is to manage it from the June app (iOS and Android compatible), on which I would like to dwell on. For beginners to pair the June app with the toaster, it’s necessary to enter a security code generated by the app on the touchscreen of the toaster. The possibilities that open of using it impress. Let’s just watch together:
You are offered a lot of interesting updated recipes as well as step-by-step video instructions for meal prep
You can preheat the oven even when you’re far from it
You watch the temperature rise as the oven preheats
You get a notification when the June is ready to cook
There is countdown based on the time you set for your bake
Finishing a bake results in two notifications
It automatically turns off the heat after the food is done and keeps it warm
The app is very attractively laid out, but that’s not all. Most importantly, there’s the heat and fog resistant camera inside the oven that can identify up to 65 foods you put inside as well as offer a predetermined cook time to ensure the ideal meal. But the absolute best thing about this camera is that you can watch what you’re cooking as it cooks (and others can, too) simply clicking on “live video”. Enjoy how your meat caramelizes, cookies harden, or chocolate chips melt… You’ll definitely open the app more often than any other ones on your phone. The next logical step of the “live video” feature, of course, is to share the video with someone. It’s pretty hilarious, isn’t it?
At the same time, I have to be critical to this innovation, drawing on a range of not so pleasant comments. The first claim is for June’s price, that is higher than for the regular oven. Excuse me, but you’re buying nothing but benefits! The next one:
“Cleaning is a pain. With all the slick shiny metal surfaces, it is hard to keep the thing clean. When you use it a lot, like any oven, it builds up a stubborn layer of splatter that does not want to come off. To the top of that, the camera became to work worse…”
The pessimistic customer : (
Come on, any kitchen electronic devices become dirty with time. But unlike them, the June will remind you to clean it.
For the next complaints, I have no counterarguments.
“The app is beautiful but sometimes glitchy.”
“Kitchen gadgets often try to reimagine a single task. As the result, they poorly combine multiple tasks.”
“June isn’t going to replace your instant pot or rice cooker. The instant pot is insurmountable.”
What do you think? Whether the disadvantages really overweigh the advantages?
To my mind, the June Intelligent Oven is a beautiful piece of hardware that eliminates the excuses for making meals at home. I think smart devices such as these are our future. Maybe it’s crazy to imagine a world where all your smart appliances can talk to one another. For example, if the June oven could check my smart fridge for which ingredients I have and suggest something to make, then my smart fridge could automatically place an order to Amazon Fresh to restock anything that is missing. That would really be the ideal. For now, the June oven is a promising glimpse of that future, but it isn’t quite there yet.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to fly past the most distant space rock we have ever visited. Since zooming by Pluto in 2015, the probe has been heading ever further from home, towards a tiny world called 2014 MU69. It is set to arrive on New Year’s Day.
We do know that it is a mere 30 kilometres or so across – less than 2 per cent of Pluto’s diameter – which has made getting there incredibly difficult. “It’s a lot harder than Pluto,” says mission leader Alan Stern. “Instead of being the size of the continental US, it’s the size of Boston. Being 100 times smaller means it’s 10,000 times fainter.”
As happened at Pluto, New Horizons will not be communicating with Earth during closest approach, because it will be focused on gathering all the science it can during the high-speed flyby. Whenever it does turn back to point at Earth to transmit data it will take more than 6 hours for its data to traverse the distance between us. So when are we going to get to find out what MU69 looks like?
WHAT KINDS OF IMAGES OF 2014 MU69 WILL BE AVAILABLE WITHIN DAYS OF THE FLYBY?
The downlinks from New Horizons around its 1 January 2019 flyby of 2014 MU69 will not contain its highest-resolution images. Instead, they will be photos that the team is reasonably confident will contain an image of 2014 MU69. Two “failsafe” downlinks are planned for before the closest approach, and three “New York Times” downlinks are planned over the two days after closest approach. These are Rosetta OSIRIS images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, scaled to be approximately the same size that the New Horizons images of 67P are expected to be, with some processing to add blur and speckle noise (for a variety of reasons, New Horizons LORRI images of MU69 will not look as crisp as Rosetta OSIRIS images of 67P). They are at a phase angle of 10 degrees, similar to the 11-degree phase at which New Horizons will see MU69 from a distance.
Amazon, Google and Facebook will pay more taxes if EU implements new digital tax propolsals.
As we all know, currently tax system is not perfect, because it has lots of pitfalls and such big corporations as Google, Uber, Amazon, ect. use it without shame. For instance, Facebook, is the largest social networking service in the world, earned £1.3bn in UK and paid only £15.8m in tax in 2017. That is even less then 1% of their revenue. So that, to the opinion of EU commision the tax system must be revised.
They suggest implementing taxes based on not only staff presence, but also company’s “digital presence”. The Guardian says that “digital presence” means that a company has more than 100 000 users or more than £6m income per year, or it will have more than 3000 signed contracts. Moreover, thay want to take 3% out of selling of advertising space to companies that have more than €750m revenues worldwide and €50m in EU.
I think it is a good trend for two main reasons:
The taxes will generate €5bn for EU every year.
It will make things right, because traditional companies pay 23.2% from their revenue compared with avarege 9.5% of digital ones.
As for me, I totally agree with EU and think that it is not fair when such enterprises make thousands of millions dollars and pay less than traditional corporations. Despite the fact, that they don’t have physical presence, they still make signficant impact on it via huge communication flow. Digital space must be controlled, because it can influence people’s behaviour and purchase intent that can bring additional money to traditional corporations that are physically exist.
About 120 thousand passengers turned out to be blocked at the London Gatwick airport for more than one day. The only runway of the airfield was closed on the evening of December 19 after two unmanned aerial vehicles were noticed in the sky above it.
Police and military are trying to find the person who launches drones over the airport. The perpetrator of this incident will face up to 5 years in prison because UK laws prohibit unmanned aircraft from approaching the airport at a distance of less than one kilometer. Authorities fear that drones may collide with airplanes, for example, hitting a jet engine or windshield. The police believe that the aircraft invaded the territory of the airport to thwart flights during the peak period before Christmas and New Year.
In recent years, pilots have repeatedly reported close encounters with drones. In 2017, Gatwick Airport was closed for a short time due to a flying drone. In 2016, the Dubai International Airport was temporarily closed due to a drone.
Although the police still have no reason to assume that this accident is related to terrorism, it is already becoming clear that a new type of terrorism has been born – drone terrorism. Not in the sense of delivering explosives by a drone, but in the sense of disrupting the normal life of people, as in the case of telephone terrorism, when there are no victims, but concerts are frustrated, shopping centers or office buildings are evacuated. As in the case of telephone terrorism, prohibited items are not used, but the lives of many thousands of people are effectively disturbed: in the Gatwick incident, Christmas plans of many people were broken because of the little drone. I do not want to think about what example was given to many people who enjoy destroying the lives of others.
This idea for business, came from problems which we are facing as a human. First is rapid growth of human population from 7 billion today to 9,2 billion by 2050. Those people need a place to live in, especially when biggest growth is expected in biggest cities. Another very important factor is growing frequency of floods or hurricanes caused by global warming. Of course we have to prevent against climate changes but sometimes it is too late. In the countries touched by natural disaster, everyone wants to go back to normal live and house as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it is usually impossible to do it instantly because of lack of money and time to build new houses.
Contour crafting might be a good solution for those problems.
It is much cheaper than the traditional building process. Company didn’t declare concrete value. Reason why it really could be cheaper than traditional is that hole process Is manage by computer, and quantities of wasted materials are significantly smaller. Process is not totally human free, but still part where human is needed is small. This generates savings.
Here is an example of printing house process by company Apis Cor.
House from the movie was printed in 24 hours, in case of contour craf it would be around 45 minutes. Unfortunately, they have awful movies of construction process so, there are only pictures:
This process can be also implemented to building factories, buildings of public use, etc. this is especially important in developing countries. I am not sure about creating houses like that, for a big scale. In my opinion residentials made this method would be very tedious. However, I do really appreciate what they are doing, if it could help most needy people. For sure this also shows clearly, which way building sector will develop in future.
Tanmay Bakshi, 14 years old self-programmer who recently partnered with IBM Watson, came up with the idea of combining deep learning technology with neural networks and using it to save lives. Specifically lives of those who are crying out for help.
Neural network
Suicide and AI? Why he wanted to do make something like that? Simply because second cause of death among teenagers is suicide. These days, when all we see is perfect lives, perfect bodies, perfect relationships, suicide and mental health is a big problem for everyone, not only teenagers. But still, lets not forget about the fact that usually teenager will not be looking for a help of others.
That is why Tanmay wanted to help his peers and worked for over 3 years with his team to create an app that will track and analyse your browser history, social media accounts, exercise level, sleep, public interaction and look for changes in your lifestyle, trying to find patterns of abnormal behaviour. He used deep learning technology that allows computers to act in sort of natural way and artificial neural networks that is inspirited by our behaviour, not mimicking it. ANN in particular fits this job perfectly because it can detect patterns of irregular behaviour better then our own brain because of the ability mentioned earlier.
When the app caches the irregularity, it immediately warns parents. Then it helps you to find solutions such as online meditation or gives you advices about good clinic in your neighbourhood.
Even tho Tanmay has been working on this app for over 3 years, the app itself is not available yet and the data of its release has not been mentioned anywhere.
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a method of editing genomes, such as human genomes, that can be done in a lab. But how does it work? In order to modify a genome, you damage the DNA and then instead of letting the natural repair processes do their work, we trick the DNA in order to make an edit that we want – we squeeze a specific piece of DNA we want to add in the centre and our genome is modified.
The most controversial aspect of CRISPR is the fact that we can use it to edit human genomes – in fact, some scientists have already done it, sparking outrage all around the globe. Some argue that CRISPR is the next ‘natural’ step in evolution – we can now design people not to die of heart attacks or not to suffer from Alzheimer’s, wouldn’t we want that? A healthy, perfectly happy society? Well, as every great tool, it can be misused. CRISPR allows scientist to design a genome – imagine picking your future child’s height, hair colour and the shape of their eyes. Can we really interrupt the natural process of reproduction and modify human genomes in a lab? Most of the concerns are ethical, after all how can we justify e.g. wiping out a whole species because we feel like it? But what a lot of people do not realise is that we cannot be sure whether using CRISPR will bring unwanted consequences in the future. Can we really risk it?
There have been reports that scientist in Shenzhen under He Jiankui have already started experimenting – supposedly, they modified human embryos to eliminate a gene called CCR5, which would make the offspring resistant to HIV, smallpox and cholera. A clinical document was found containing those claims, but we are not sure whether the experiment has produced a living birth. He Jiankui declined to comment when asked. But what we do know for sure is that the birth of the first clinically modified human will be a breakthrough point in not only the history of science, but in the history of the human species.
