Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, our life has changed drastically in ways we’ve never thought about, and as it is more visible to the human eye, we are headed to an inflationary/stagflationary economy that does not help our spending habits. Tough 1 in 3 people in Poland are cutting costs when it comes to daily shopping, it is the same thing for citizens around the globe.
That is why Uber decided to plan ahead and disrupt their well-known and used business model. They are introducing a ride-sharing option called – “UberX Share”. It focuses on taking a ride with a stranger along the way to our destination while cutting costs for customers. In a market where oil prices have risen in a fashion that surprised every economist, especially adding the current war in Ukraine and political moves by Russia, cheaper individual transport is definitely needed, if Uber or their competitors want to stay in business in these extraordinary times.
UberX Share is already implemented in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and 6 other cities, and they are planning to expand to other cities in the summer of 2022.
From time immemorial, transport has evolved and turned away from its primary function, we can take the example of the boat which today is democratised as a particular holiday experience with the famous cruises. However, the aeroplane has never been outside its primary function: travel. However, recently a concept of aeroplane hotel was born.
The Sky Cruise concept is a “plane” the size of a residential area, piloted by artificial intelligence, a biplane equipped with 20 electric motors powered by a nuclear reactor, and capable of carrying some 5,000 guests – brought on board by a Boeing 747 strapped to its back, like the space shuttle of yesteryear. Passengers will have access to restaurants, a shopping centre, a gym, cinema and theatre facilities – and of course a swimming pool. Let’s dream a little of this nuclear-powered flying hotel that could carry 5,000 passengers without ever having to land… The “nuclear” autonomy of the Sky Cruise would allow it to land almost never, according to its designer Hashem Alghaili, who modestly sees it as “the future of transport”. We won’t even think about the mundane things like maintenance or the number of people on board who are supposed to cater for the passengers’ desires – or the possibility of a crash of this flying Titanic. But who knows, the concept might attract the cruiser.
Which begs the question, will air travel be the new unusual holiday activity, will companies invest in it? Will air cruising be the new unusual holiday activity in 20 – 30 years time?
Boating is without a doubt a very fun activity. Is there anything better than being on a boat during a sunny day, enjoying your life? I doubt it.
but like always, everything has it’s flaws. So does boating. One of those issues is sea sickness. Due to the fact that the boat is rocking it can cause sickness to some people. Also, during tough weather it can be unpleasant or dangerous. That is a very unwanted experience on a boat, especially on luxury boats, which are the main target of the Seakeeper company.
There is a solution to that problem. And no, it’s not magic, it’s simple physics.
So, how does it work?
the Seakeeper machine has a vacuum-enclosed capsule, in which a heavy steel flywheel spins at very high speeds (up to 10 000 rpm.) During the rocking of the boat, the machine is capable of tilting back and forth, left and right, which produces a very powerful gyroscopic torque that can almost fully counteract the bodyroll of the vessle. It’s very clear that luxury demands such convenience, thanks to what this piece of technology became popular very quickly.
Not only does this tool come in very handy, but it also looks spectacular, just take a look!
Electric cars – a huge boom and trend in the automotive industry. Everybody knows that. Everybody began hating internal combustion engines. Everybody wants to switch to EV.
But this whole trend has some flaws.
The first issue with electric cars are the batteries. an average lifespan of such a battery is more or less 10 years. After that time they need to be recycled. But unfortunately recycling of such equipment is far from perfect. Matter of fact, there is yet no perfect solution for recycling them so far. And as we know, battery decomposition is highly pollutive for earth’s environment.
Another issue connected to the batteries is the fabrication process – making of the battery is very pollutive as well. Study found that in order to compensate the use of a tradititional gas car with an electric car, the EV needs to be used for over 10 years. This is a big problem, because nowadays people are living a very consumable lifestyle. Also, most of the cars nowadays are not owned by it’s users, but they are leased – this leads to a car change of every 3 years. So every 3 years a new car has to be made for a customer that is already bored with his “old” 3 year old car and needs to get himself a new one. It’s not hard to figure out that manufacturing a new car is a very bad move in terms of being eco-friendly. And EV’s are all about being eco-friendly, aren’t they?
I’m not saying that electric transport is bad or has no future, without a doubt it is a good alternative, but the worlds is not ready for it yet. The infrastructure needed to run this business is not ready for it yet, so is the mindset of it’s users who are easily misled with whatever car makers feed them with.
These days car manufacturers are putting most of their attention to safety, especially when it comes to luxury models. These cars are stuffed with such a big amount of safety features that it’s becoming to be hard to keep the track on. And Audi’s new flagship model is no exception.
We’re talking about the Audi A8 in this case. Among many safety features that this car is fitted with, there is this one that stands out compared to it’s rivals, the BMW 7 series and Mercedes S-class. It is the advanced pre-collision system which purpose is to step up the game in the safety race with other car brands.
This particular system is responsible for improving safety during side impact accidents.
Due to the type of suspension that this model is fitted with, new possibilities in terms of safety are now open. thanks to that, Audi came up with an idea that during an event of the side impact the side of the car that is going to take the hit is going to raise with the blink of an eye. Why? because in case of cars that are of a regular height, unlike SUV’s, the passenger is going to be hit into his upper body zone. As we all know, human chest contains much more important organs than the lower partition of the body. So when the side of the car raises when being crashed into, the car minimizes the risk of health loss, because a human is rather going to survive with broken legs then with collapsed lungs or fractured chest.
Not Only does this feature improve safety, but also this is a very good marketing move, because such attribute is very catchy and surely will attract some clients due to the fact, that the competition has not come up with such a feature yet
The future exhibition, consisting of images, drawings and sculptures created by a humanoid robot, can be seen at ST. John’s College, University of Oxford.
The main star of the exhibition is a robot based on artificial intelligence and is resembling a woman. The concept was created by the director of the art gallery, Aidan Meller. The robot’s name Ai-Da, is a tribute to Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century British mathematician and innovator. it is known from publications on the so-called analytical machine, considered to be the first general-purpose programmable computer.
Scientists from Oxford, who are responsible for writing the algorythm used by him, helped to construct the robot artist. Thanks to the built-in camera and mechanical arms (constructed with the help of the university of Leeds), Ai-Da can recreate still life and posing models in real time.
a humanoid robot does not simply recreate previously photographed images. It’s works are created in a way unprecended in a machine, with the use of “sight” and other tools. The cameras in the eyes record objects in front of it and then create a virtual pattern embedded in the coordinate system. These coordinates are used by an advanced mechanical arm that holds a pencil or a brush. In the same way-based on the map it creates and using implemented algorithms-Ai-Da can also create abstract works of art.
The exhibition questions our relationship with technology and the natural world, showing how artificial intelligence and new technologies can be both a progressive and destructive force in our society. Ai-Da as a humanoid robot is itself a work of art that further raises questions related to biotechnology and transhumanism in the gallery statement
As we all know, drones became very popular in the recent year. they begun as one off custom builds, hand made by model freaks. Not long later, people realized that drone’s are really cool and can be used not only to fly around the garden.
As always, whenever something becomes trendy, big companies have to lay their hand on it as soon as possible – this is how drones entered mass production and started to be used for various purposes such as filming, shipping cargo, competition etc.
So, when something gets popular, a new law has to be created – a law that would regulate the use of a given product. Drones couldn’t dodge that and nowadays a regular drone user has to obey strict rules. For example, flying a drone is prohibited in most big cities. Of course, rules are made to be broken, so various cities come up with new solutions.
Japan, which is the topic of the article came up with a pretty spectacular solution – they invented the drone police.
The drone police unit is armed with big drones that are equipped with special nets made for catching other drones that are breaking the law. The way it works is very simple. Police drone simply approaches the criminal drone and attempts to catch it into its net, preventing it from further activities.
It may sound silly, but hey, if it looks stupid but it works – it works
Historic moment for Elon Musk: The Boring Company has received approval for a plan to build a network of tunnels under the streets of Las Vegas. The project will be an extended version of the nearly 3-kilometer long tunnel that already serves the visitors of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
-The Boring Company, the largest of its projects, enters a new phase
-Elon Musk’s company intends to build a 46 km long network of car tunnels under the Las Vegas Strip
-As part of the underground infrastructure, 51 stations serviced by Tesla vehicles will be built
Tunneling company Elon Muska has been given the green light to implement its largest project to date. Clark County government has approved a plan to build the Vegas Loop, a 46 km long network of tunnels located beneath the Las Vegas Strip. The basis for the project is the first 2.7 km long tunnel built by The Boring Company. It is currently used to transport visitors to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Elon Musk’s goal is to reduce traffic congestion in cities using a network of underground tunnels served by Tesla vehicles. Initially, it was assumed that autonomous Tesla the size of a van would move in the tunnels. Currently, the company plans to use human-controlled cars in its plans. According to critics, this project is nothing more than a less effective version of the metro.
The new version of Las Vegas Loop will consist of 51 stations, which will ultimately serve 57k passengers within an hour, the company said. Stops will be located near the most famous casinos and next to the new city stadium. The project aims to enable travel from station to station without stopping at intermediate stops, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal. The implementation of Musk’s project will not require any funding from the public fund. The Boring Company is expected to cover all construction costs, and once the tunnel network is operational, it will pay a quarterly toll to the city depending on how much it earns in tolls.
Tesla’s ad: The next step in the implementation of the project that has been going on for years is a breakthrough event for the company. The Boring Company initiatives to build a tunnel system in Los Angeles and Chicago were never realized. Tesla may also turn out to be the beneficiary of the investment, because a large fleet of vehicles will be needed to operate the Las Vegas Loop. Moreover, it is a great way to showcase the capabilities of Tesla cars to people potentially interested in purchasing an electric car. The Boring Company is currently talking about building a tunnel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
To all us gathered here it sounds like a silly question. But is it?
According to data from 2018, over 3,7 billion of people are using the internet. That’s almost half of the world’s population. We can obviously tell from the very beginning, that this internet thing is kind of a big deal. For example, Google has to process (answer) over 40 thousand questions per second, which is around 40 trillion bytes of data (yes, 40 000 000 000 000 bytes which is equivalent to 40 000 gigabytes). No wonder that Google is running over 3 million servers located mainly in the US, Asia and Europe.
Big Data is just big, variable data. Processing and analysing the data is hard and takes a lot of effort to be extracted, but companies who gather all this information are using very fast servers (computers) to manage and store such a big amount of evidence. Also, data, in general, is very valuable – it’s easy to say, that it’s the most valuable thing in the whole world because it leads to gaining a new collection of pieces of information about clients (internet users). The concept of Big Data was created or expanded with the rise of the internet because the speed and ability of processing of data have picked up very drastically.
The value of Big Data basically depends on how you manage them and not only by leaning on their amount. The data which are generated by various sources can be easily used in an IT trade company in order of lowering the costs, reducing time, producing a new commercial offer or creating new, better strategical decisions.
Mass data connected with highly advanced analysis in the company of new high tech tools also support business processes such as evaluating the causes of some errors, faulty work, generating various coupons in all kinds of web stores, calculating the risk of many transactions or detecting a behaviour which could bare the abuse of certain company/organization.
So, summarizing and generally speaking, big data is all the data which is available to gather by the usage of the internet about everything – people, companies, shares, transactions, conversations, preferences, any kind of goods, history etc.
Now on to the second part of the topic, what is 5V? This abbreviation stands for Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity and Value – these are the crucial keys which make big data such a big deal.
Volume – it is the general amount of all the gathered and stored data during the usage of the world wide web. The size of the data determines the value and potential insight, and whether it can be considered big data or not.
Variety – The type and personality of the data. This helps people who analyze it to effectively use the resulting insight. Big data draws from text, images, audio, video; plus it completes missing pieces through data fusion.
Velocity – this term stands for the speed of harvesting the data throughout the internet. As mentioned above, the velocity of data processing is painstaking but crucial. This forces the companies which are interested in collecting big data to invest bulk amounts of money into the hardware which is going to be able to extract all the demanded information on time. In order to increase the velocity, a process called sampling is widely used.
Veracity – this is sort of an extended definition for big data, which refers to both the quality and value of the data. The quality of data can is very variable, so it is very important to squeeze everything valuable from the product and store it in the correct order
Value – The value of the end product which is important specifically for the user himself. All the data itself has no value at all, but there are a lot of people, and especially companies/enterprises who are willing to pay unbelievable amounts of money for the final product. Take a look at Facebook, for example, just look around it and you’ll quickly realize, that there’s a suspiciously big amount of advertisements which are actually connected to what you are interested in, what you have recently talked about or what you just googled. All these ads are basing on big data which tells them who likes what kind of product
Big data seems to be a ground-breaking invention when speaking of technological progress, but in my opinion, this is too much to handle for such a simple creature, a human. The process of raising Big Data was like a domino, something that couldn’t be stopped once it was launched. The demand for this product became so high, that it couldn’t be undone at this point. In these days, Instagram knows nearly everything about its users. Study shows, that an average user of Instagram has his own profile which has over 900 pages of information gathered about them – this is how Big Data works. It’s something brilliant, but also the level of invigilation is simply scary. Big Data to me is just very controversial, it helps in many situations such as predicting terrorist acts, prevent environmental crisis or a crash of the market, but also can violate or privacy – because what else is important to us if not privacy?
“they” just know literally everything about us. A movie called “Snowden” is a great visualization of what I mean – because what else is important to us if not privacy?
…Or at least in California, they are. “Cruise”, an autonomous Taxi service/IT company got the green light to offer commercial autonomous rides to actual human passengers recently. Last week The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted that Cruise’s system can operate autonomous taxi rides in San Francisco on certain roads from 10 pm until 6 am. However, the limitations are specifically in place, so that Cruise will prove that their systems can handle this task and are safe enough, before enabling it on other streets and for longer hours.
source: Cruise
This is a monumental moment, as we now can actually get in a driverless Taxi which will take us to complete quite to our destination without any input from a human being. It’s something straight out of an SCI-FI or cyberpunk reality. If someone is following my post history, then you will know that I am a great fan of autonomous vehicles and cannot wait to get to know more about how it works out in San Francisco.
image source: Cruise
The first edition Cruise vehicle (which is the one that’s available now, in a few different updated formats) is working on a Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle. The 1st edition has logged “millions of miles” and more to come. However, once the Cruise’s system is checked and operational in more cities and countries, they plan to release the Cruise 2, called origin, which will be their own vehicle capable of different configurations and cool specifications. Here is a preview:
Source: Cruise
I cannot wait to hear your take on this new milestone for Autonomous vehicles. What do you think about this situation? Are you scared?
