Slashing water waste with smart software could save billions of dollars

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“Any industry that mislays 25-30% of its product in the process
of delivering it might reasonably be thought to have a problem.”


Between the water treatment plant and the tap in your kitchen, a lot can happen to water. Old pipes sometimes have slow leaks that are hard to detect, and sometimes there are bigger leaks that can waste a lot of potable water in a short time. According to a World Bank report published a few years ago, these leaks cost at least $14 billion a year.

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OK Go’s new music video is high-tech and awesome. Typical.

OK Go has done some neat stuff in the past 13 years, but this new music video makes “Here It Goes Again” look like amateur hour.
The guys that brought you music videos with Rube Goldbergs and trained dogs, OK Go has released a new music video that uses a glass stage and a whole bunch of unitards to create what can only be described as a human kaleidescope. A look behind the scenes shows how one glass pane captured all of the images which were then combined to create effects like a cascade of bodies or florid designs…

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US ISP/copyright deal: a one-sided private law for corporations, without public interest

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Screwing the public to help corporations is pretty standard procedure
these days for people like New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

Last month, the major American ISPs and entertainment industry lobbyists struck a deal to limit Internet access for alleged copyright infringers. This deal, negotiated in secret with the help of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo did not include any public interest groups or comment from the public. As a result, it’s as one-sided and stilted as you’d imagine. Corynne McSherry from the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzes the material that these cozy corporate negotiators left out, the stuff that public interest groups would have demanded. Here’s an abbreviated list…

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Technology is the new smoking

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Gotta have a hit of Twitter!

You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or whatever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever ‘gone to the bathroom’ in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?

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Wrongulator: a gag calculator that gives the wrong answers

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A great way to torture young and old alike.

The Wrongulator is a gag calculator that gives incorrect answers to calculations. I’m fascinated by the idea — I wonder if they’ve just got a standard calculator controller in there, and then a secondary system that scrambles the results, or whether it’s a pseudorandom number generator, or what. You’d want it to produce plausible outcomes (5 x 5 = 30; not 5 x 5 = 324527) but who knows if the manufacturer paid attention to this…

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Hotels use RFID chips to keep linens from travelling to new destinations

To keep robes and towels from checking out, a small but growing number of hotels are starting to use new radio frequency chips to keep track of their inventory.
The RFID technology — which stands for radio frequency identification and requires an installed chip that can be read by an electronic reader — has been used by various industries for several years to organize product storage and tally shipments…

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Facebook and Twitter help speed up response to national disasters and emergencies

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Could social media save you from a natural disaster?

Facebook and Twitter are helping to improve and speed up responses to natural disasters and health emergencies by involving members of the public, it has been claimed.

Social media allowed an ”unprecedented” two-way exchange of information between the public and those given the task of preparing for and responding to major events such as earthquakes, floods and infection pandemics, said researchers…

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Oliver and Olivia most popular baby names in 2010

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Do you want your baby name to be part of the popular crowd?

Oliver and Olivia are the most popular baby names in England and Wales for the second year running, it was revealed today.

Jack held on to second place in the boys’ name category after slipping from the top spot last year after a 14-year reign.

Sophie jumped three places up the rankings, making it the second most popular name for girls, according to figures published today by the Office for National Statistics on first names given to babies born in 2010…

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Pour a shot of Tequila-in your gas tank

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Agave can be a fuel?

It fuels your party, your buzz and your hangover the next day, but believe it or not tequila may soon be fueling your car. That’s because the agave plant extract used to make liquor can also be used to make an ethanol like alcohol which can serve as vehicle fuel, won’t interfere with food crops, and can even be grown in the desert…

Someday, our cars may hit the bottle more often than we do, but at least it won’t be hitting our wallets very hard.

Link

Image via Wikimedia Commons

iPhone 4 and a sensor tattoo creates diabetic blood monitor

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Another iPhone medical breakthrough!

Diabetics have a problem dealing with sugar because they don’t produce enough insulin (Type 1) or any insulin that is produced gets no reaction from the person’s cells (Type 2). Treatment is mainly through management of blood sugar levels which if done properly can stop many of the complications.

It’s the monitoring of those blood sugar levels that researchers are working towards making as simple and fast as possible, and the latest idea involves the use of a sensor tattoo and an iPhone 4…

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The looming content battle between TV Everywhere & online streaming

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What are you streaming and how?

The TV Everywhere movement got another win Wednesday, as Fox announced that it will limit next-day streaming access to some of its programs to cable, satellite and Hulu Plus customers. This news, which comes a week after CNN and HLN’s TV Everywhere push, is just the latest example of the complicated relationship between television networks and the burgeoning streaming services game.

TV Everywhere, which Netflix’s Reed Hastings has referred to as his company’s “biggest competitor,” is gaining favor with content producers, like broadcast and cable networks…

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.