fabric | rblg

By fabric | ch

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As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 09.2023), via all its tags!

FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:

(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)

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Note that we had to hit the "pause" button on our reblogging activities a while ago (mainly because we ran out of time, but also because we received complaints from a major image stock company about some images that were displayed on | rblg, an activity that we felt was still "fair use" - we've never made any money or advertised on this site).

Nevertheless, we continue to publish from time to time information on the activities of fabric | ch, or content directly related to its work (documentation).

Via MIT technology Review

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Forget robotic product delivery. As usual for Google, I suspect it’s all about the data.

Google-bot: The M1 Mobile Manipulator from Meka, one of several robot companies acquired recently by Google.

Google has quietly bought seven robotics companies, and has given Andy Rubin, the man who originally led the Android project, the job of developing Google’s first robot army. And so, the New York Times suggests it might only be a few years before a Google robot driving in a Google car is delivering products to your door.

I somehow doubt Google has anything quite so futuristic in mind. I think the effort is quite similar to both Google’s self-driving car endeavor and its Android project. In other words, it’s all about gaining a dominant position in markets where data is about to explode.

Take Google’s self-driving cars. Contrary to common perception, the company didn’t “invent” this technology; most carmakers were already working on autonomous system when Google got involved, and academic researchers had made dramatic recent progress—propelled in large part by several DARPA challenges (see “Driverless Cars are Further Away than You Think”). Google just saw that this was where the automotive industry was headed, and realized that the advent of automation, telematics, and communication would mean a tsunami of data that it could both supply and profit from. Given that many of us spend several hours a day in automobiles, this data could help Google learn more about users and tailor its products accordingly.

Similarly, I suspect Google has recognized that a new generation of smarter, safer, industrial robots is rapidly emerging (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing” and “Why This Might be the Model-T of Workplace Robots”), and it’s realized that these bots could have a huge impact both at work and at home. Whoever provides the software that controls and manages these robots not only stands to make a fortune by selling that software; they will have access to a vast new repository of data about how we live and work.

In this sense, I think Google is being true to its stated mission: “to organize the world’s information”—although it’s worth noting that in an increasingly connected and data-rich world that could mean seeking to organize just about every aspect of our lives. Luckily for Google, it may soon have a robot army to help it keep everything in order.

Personal comment:

And the problem here is of course that Pachube has been sold to a private company (LogMeIn), that states they subscribe to the open approach (the "bill of rights") of Pachube... until they won't. We are now all getting too used to these endlessly rewritten "terms of use".

Via Treehugger

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Crowds gather at Guangzhou Railway Station for the New Year exodus in 'Last Train Home.' Image: Zeitgeist Films

Every year, 130 million people throng China's railway stations, frantically trying to obtain a seat on a train that will take them home for the lunar New Year -- a trip that is for many rural people living and working in the country's industrial cities their only chance to see the families, and even the children, they have left behind. In addition to the human drama, the trek, believed to constitute the largest human migration in the world, taxes the country's transportation systems to the limit.

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When someone in the States buys shoes that were made in China, the carbon emitted in their production gets added to China's tally, despite the fact that the shoes get exported. What would it look like if carbon emissions traveled with products and services as they moved from country to country? Check out the map above. Those arrows show the megatons of carbon and the direction of export. You can think of them as arrows of guilt. China, for example, emits 395 megatons of carbon making things for consumers in the States. The countries in red are the net importers of carbon and the countries in blue are the net exporters. From CBC News:

Reserachers at the Carnegie Institution used trade data from 2004 to create a model of the global flow of products in 113 countries and regions. They then associated those products with carbon emissions to determine which countries are net "importers" of emissions and which are net "exporters." "Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China," said the study's lead author Steven Davis of Carnegie, in a statement.

In Copenhagen it was hard getting counties to agree to domestic emissions limits. But as this map shows, looking at domestic emissions is a simplistic way of accounting for the responsibility of carbon. In our entangled global economy, we need a more holistic approach.

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Via GOOD