Lifelogging App Talks to Your Doctor | MIT Technology Review -
Here’s the smartphone technology that alerts a doctor when patients are headed for trouble.
(Source: emergentfutures)
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Check out Smarter Planet on Flipboard
(Source: ibmblr)
Application development using IBM’s Smart Water SDK | SmarterWater
Apple revolutionized the consumer world with their iPhone/iPad app store providing developers with access to the iOS platform and allowed them to build their own applications. Apple also provided an App Store where application developer could advertise and sell the applications. The Smarter Water platform now follows this model but instead of targeting customers, it targets a range of 3rd party water applications developers from research groups (including universities), services provider and partners, to developer their own smarter water applications.
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![Collaborative Platforms Empower Citizens To Shape Their Communities [My Ideal City] - PSFK
Participatory online platforms and visual tools are lowering the barriers to participation and empowering citizens to design their communities. These crowd planning systems facilitate an open dialogue between city agencies and the people they serve, establishing a structured process for collaboration and encouraging a higher level of participation at the civic level. By seeking input throughout the development process, these crowd-planned systems help ensure greater transparency and buy-in that ultimately results in an end solution that meets the actual needs of the population.
Winka Dubbeldam, celebrated architect and principal of Archi-Tectonics, has most recently lent her expertise to a crowdsourced plan to revitalize Bogota, Colombia called MyIdealCity. She told PSFK.com that the future of urban planning is in crowd planning:
Initiatives of governing institutions that tap into the local intelligence will greatly enhance the public’s participation, and will help get a much more direct , real-time response that can adjust to the new directions of peoples’ needs. This demands an understanding of the word intelligence in the wider sense and a real commitment of the governing bodies in actually giving immediate feedback, and executing all.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d3f79b388cd745425b6fc044875c382f/tumblr_mn5g69YDWu1qzs4rbo1_500.jpg)
Collaborative Platforms Empower Citizens To Shape Their Communities [My Ideal City] - PSFK
Participatory online platforms and visual tools are lowering the barriers to participation and empowering citizens to design their communities. These crowd planning systems facilitate an open dialogue between city agencies and the people they serve, establishing a structured process for collaboration and encouraging a higher level of participation at the civic level. By seeking input throughout the development process, these crowd-planned systems help ensure greater transparency and buy-in that ultimately results in an end solution that meets the actual needs of the population.
Winka Dubbeldam, celebrated architect and principal of Archi-Tectonics, has most recently lent her expertise to a crowdsourced plan to revitalize Bogota, Colombia called MyIdealCity. She told PSFK.com that the future of urban planning is in crowd planning:
Initiatives of governing institutions that tap into the local intelligence will greatly enhance the public’s participation, and will help get a much more direct , real-time response that can adjust to the new directions of peoples’ needs. This demands an understanding of the word intelligence in the wider sense and a real commitment of the governing bodies in actually giving immediate feedback, and executing all.
IBM's Watson Now A Customer Service Agent, Coming To Smartphones Soon - Forbes -
IBM’s question-answering Watson supercomputer is building quite the résumé. First it won a much-publicized showdown against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, then it went to medical school and emerged as a budding oncologist. Now Watson has a new job–as a customer-service agent with the mostest. The help desk is a bit of a step down from fighting cancer, but IBM is nothing if not pragmatic. U.S. organizations spend $112 billion on call center labor and software, yet half of the 270 billion customer-service calls go unresolved each year, presenting a fairly sizable opening for an enhanced cognitive computer. Let’s face it: Rare is the occasion when you a) reach a live person and b) they know what they’re talking about. Why not give silicon a chance?
Starting in the next few months, IBM will be rolling out with several key customers an “Ask Watson” feature that will greet and offer help through various channels: Web chats, email, smartphone apps and SMS. Some customers will eventually equip the service with voice recognition from a partner such as Siri or Nuance. The guinea pigs include Australia’s ANZ Bank, Nielsen, Celcom, IHS, and Royal Bank of Canada.
3-D Printed Food Vs World Hunger - Business Insider
Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.
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It may seem strange that a site bringing together strangers from points around the globe can create a space for interactions that feel more real than those with people at school and at home, but that’s how it actually is.
Tumblr is so much more than a website at this point. It has grown into such a huge community, one that could be easily destroyed by the sort of reckless marketing that Yahoo must be about to unleash.
” — 14-year-old Leah Goodman in “My Fear That Tumblr As We Know It Is Ending” on HuffPost Tech (via huffposttech)[video]
The endless aisle. The outdoor gear and apparel retailer Moosejaw Mountaineer has 11 retail stores in the U.S., with 80% of sales (70% of in-store) coming from online and mobile commerce . Store associates use iPod touch and mini-iPads to check competitive prices and extend a price match. If a store does not carry what a shopper is looking for, store associates order the item online if it is in the warehouse and ship it to the customer for free.
(via Mobile Commerce Daily - Payments)
(via ibmsocialbiz)
Human Clone Embryonic Stem Cell Lines - Business Insider
Researchers announced Wednesday, May 15, in the journal Cell that they’ve been able to make stable colonies of embryonic stem cells by injecting the DNA from ‘adult’ human cells into a human egg cell emptied out of its genetic material.
“Our finding offers new ways of generating stem cells for patients with dysfunctional or damaged tissues and organs,” study researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University, said in a press release. “Such stem cells can regenerate and replace those damaged cells and tissues and alleviate diseases that affect millions of people.”
This technique they used to make these stem cells is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and is the same technique used to clone animals, like Dolly the sheep.
To put it in very simplified terms: the researchers first harvest a human egg from a woman’s ovaries and completely remove her genetic material from the egg. Then, they take a human skin cell and insert it into the egg using an inactivated virus which fuses the two cells. The embryo that grows from this would be a genetic copy of the person that donated the cell.