Technology – Page 8 – artdiamondblog.com

Federal Regulations Restrict Concrete Innovation

(p. B1) Chris Tuan, a professor of civil engineering for the University of Nebraska at the Peter Kiewit Institute, has been perfecting an electrically semiconductive concrete over the past 20 years.
The mixture includes a 20 percent mix of steel fibers, shavings and carbon added to a traditional concrete mix. Steel reinforcing bars serve as the conductor, and once electricity is added, the concrete heats to 35 to 40 degrees — just enough to melt the ice and snow.
. . .
For now, the concrete can’t be used in public spaces. Anything exposed and electrified above 48 volts — much less than the 208 volts used in Tuan’s concrete — is considered high voltage and is not allowed. Federal law will have to be rewritten to change that.
. . .
Tuan said traditional concrete needs to be replaced every five years or so. Without chemical use, the electric concrete lasts much longer, with fewer potholes. His concrete is also maintenance-free, because the power cords and conductive rods are encased in the concrete and not exposed to the elements.
. . .
In 2013 Tuan also implemented his concrete on ramps in China. He recently installed a private driveway in Regency using the legally allowed 48-volt limit, which is less energy efficient.
“If the government or if insurance agencies approve this technology, then everybody can use it,” Tuan said. “But right now, it’s almost cost prohibitive.”

For the full story, see:
Reece Ristau. “In Concrete World, This Is Hot Stuff.” Omaha World-Herald (Tues., JAN. 15, 2016): B1 & B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Special Concrete Mix Can Melt Snow and Ice All by Itself — Just Add Electricity.”)

The Use of Virtual Reality (VR) in Education and Training

(p. B5) The thing that’s especially difficult to convey about “room-scale” VR–the kind enabled by the HTC Vive, where you can actually walk around with a headset on, exploring a virtual environment in exactly the same way you would experience a real one–is just how compelling it is. “Any VR experience is so much more engrossing than any you’d have on a flat screen,” says Patrick Hackett, senior user interface designer at Google for the Google Cardboard VR headset.
That has potentially huge implications for education.
Amir Rubin, head of VR software company Sixense, is working with a client on a system to train thousands of technicians to decommission nuclear-power plants. “Any application that has high liability, where teaching students has a high cost of insurance, and is high risk, we’re seeing people ask for VR training,” says Mr. Rubin. At Stanford, Dr. Bailenson is taking students on virtual tours of the world’s great works of art–letting them clamber over and deeply experience, for example, Michelangelo’s “David.”

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER MIMS. “Virtual Reality Isn’t Just About Games.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Aug. 3, 2015): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 2, 2015.)

Old Photographic Technology Makes a Limited Comeback

(p. C1) The Phoenix artist Annie Lopez wanted to stand out among her contemporary peers. Instead of trying to invent something utterly new, she has been turning to a 174-year-old photographic printing process — cyanotypes, once used for copying architectural drawings — and giving it her own distinctive twist.
Ms. Lopez created a dress pattern cut from tamale wrapping paper and printed all over with cyanotypes, which have a distinctly cyan-blue color. She printed the cyanotypes herself, in a process that took about 25 minutes per sheet of images. No darkroom was needed.
That ease has brought cyanotypes roaring back to relevance, attracting a surprising number of true-blue adherents showing their work in galleries.
, , ,
(p. C2) Anna Atkins, considered by many to be the first female photographer and the first person to create a book of photo-based images, blended science and art in botanical cyanotypes, starting in the 1840s. Atkins’s “Honey Locust Leaf and Pod” (circa 1854) is featured in the Worcester show.
The fine-art application was scarce for more than a century after Atkins’s day — rare enough that Steichen once called his use of cyanotypes a “secret” in a letter to his friend and mentor Alfred Stieglitz. For fine artists, it was often considered an “ugly stepchild” of the larger medium, Ms. Burns said, “because it was too easy.”
Amateurs embraced cyanotypes more easily. “In terms of popular usage they were big until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and women’s periodicals were giving people instructions on how to make them,” Ms. Burns said. “But then they fell off the map of photography.”
Well into the 20th century, the long-dormant medium was awakened by artists looking for something different.
“As of the 1960s, people started to be interested in reviving old photo processes,” said Dusan Stulik, a former senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute who has studied cyanotypes for decades. “Cyanotypes handle subtle light well, and they are fairly sturdy.”
On a gut level, cyanotypes produce a result that is universal. “The color blue strikes some chord in us that goes beyond words,” said the San Francisco photography dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel. “It’s that simple.”

For the full story, see:
TED LOOS. “Photography’s Stepchild Snaps Back.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016, and has the title “Cyanotype, Photography’s Blue Period, Is Making a Comeback.”)

New Middle-Skill Jobs Combine Technical and Social Skills

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below, based on Deming paper cited further below.

(p. 4) For all the jobs that machines can now do — whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food — they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.

Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.
The findings help explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: the slowdown in the growth even of high-skill jobs. The jobs hit hardest seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.
“As I’m speaking with you, I need to think about what’s going on in your head — ‘Is she bored? Am I giving her too much information?’ — and I have to adjust my behavior all the time,” said David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University and author of a new study. “That’s a really hard thing to program, so it’s growing as a share of jobs.”
. . .
“If it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”
Mr. Deming’s conclusions are supported by previous research, including that of Mr. Autor. Mr. Autor has written that traditional middle-skill jobs, like clerical or factory work, have been hollowed out by technology. The new middle-skill jobs combine technical and interpersonal expertise, like physical therapy or general contracting.
James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

For the full commentary, see:
Claire Cain Miller. “The Upshot; The Best Jobs Require Social Skills.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 18, 2015): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 16, 2015, and has the title “The Upshot; Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work.”)

The Deming paper referred to above, is:
Deming, David J. “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., NBER Working Paper # 21473, Aug. 2015.

The Autor paper referred to above, is:
Autor, David. “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., NBER Working Paper # 20485, Sept. 2014.

The Heckman paper referred to above, is:
Heckman, James J., Jora Stixrud, and Sergio Urzua. “The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities on Labor Market Outcomes and Social Behavior.” Journal of Labor Economics 24, no. 3 (July 2006): 411-82.

Those on the Scene Matter for Outcome of Crisis

Amanda Ripley has argued that in many disasters, it is not the well-trained “first responders” who matter most for the outcome, but those who happen to be close to the scene. The problem is that often the “first responders” do not arrive soon enough to save lives or head off the crisis. The story sketched in the passages quoted below, seems to be another example for her thesis.

(p. B1) “We had a one-minute warning,” recalled Dr. Lax, a mathematician who was the director of the university’s computer center at the time. “The son of a friend ran in” and shouted that the demonstrators were coming for the computer, he said. “It was too late to call the police and fortify.”
. . .
Jürgen Moser, a mathematician who was the director of the Courant Institute, the university’s prestigious math research center, tried to stop the demonstrators when they swarmed into Warren Weaver Hall. According to a chapter in a biography of Dr. Lax by Reuben Hersh, Dr. Moser, who died in 1999, said he was “pushed and shoved around, and was unable to deter them.”
. . .
After a two-day occupation, the protesters decided to end the takeover. But they did not carry out everything they had taken in, as two assistant professors, Frederick P. Greenleaf and Emile C. Chi, discovered when they ran in.
“We thought, ‘Let’s go take a look before the place gets locked down,’ ” Dr. Greenleaf recalled last week. “They had knocked the doorknobs off the door so you couldn’t open it.”
But there was a small window, high up in the door, and they peered in. “We could see there was an improvised toilet paper fuse,” he said. “It was slowly burning its way to a bunch of containers, bigger than gallon jugs. They were sitting on the top of the computer.”
. . .
Already, he said, smoke was curling under the door.
He and Professor Chi grabbed a fire extinguisher in the stairwell.
The only way to douse the fuse was to aim the fire extinguisher under the door. The only way to know where to aim it was to look through the window in the door, which was too high for whoever was operating the fire extinguisher to look through and aim at the same time.
So one functioned as the eyes for the pair, sighting through the window and directing the other to point the fire extinguisher up or down or left or right. “In a minute, we had managed to spritz the fuse,” Dr. Greenleaf said.

For the full story, see:
JAMES BARRON. “Grace Notes; The Mathematicians Who Saved a Kidnapped N.Y.U. Computer.” The New York Times (Mon., DEC. 7, 2015): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 6, 2015, and has the title “Grace Notes; The Mathematicians Who Ended the Kidnapping of an N.Y.U. Computer.”)

The Ripley book mentioned above, is:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Parents Set Up For-Profit Companies for Quicker Cures

(p. B1) Karen Aiach was working as a management consultant when she learned that her first daughter, Ornella, had Sanfilippo syndrome, a rare disease in which a missing enzyme causes toxic substances to build up in the body.

Ornella was 6 months old, and the prognosis was grim: She would develop mentally and physically to between ages 2 and 4, plateau and then lose whatever she had learned. She would become extremely hyperactive and develop sleeping disorders. Most likely she would not live past 15.
Within two years of the diagnosis, Ms. Aiach, who lives in a Paris suburb, had quit her consulting job to learn everything she could about the disease. She hired a neurobiologist to guide her in the world of medical research. And when she learned that few treatments were in the works, she founded a company called Lysogene to focus on genetic therapy.
Instead of raising money and awareness by setting up a nonprofit foundation, a more typical route, she opted to start a for-profit company to seek treatments, if not a cure. Far from common, what Ms. Aiach and other parents like her are trying is to leverage their wealth, contacts and the hope of sophisticated investors to jump-start research into rare diseases.
. . .
(p. B4) . . . with some rare diseases, where minimal research has been done, a little effort goes a long way.
Nicole Boice, who founded Global Genes, one of the leading rare-disease patient advocacy organizations, said even small investments can have meaningful impacts.
“You can start moving the needle with $3,500,” she said. “That leads you to the next $25,000, and then to innovation grants and funding at $100,000. That starts the interest from biotech.”
Gradually, parents like Matt Wilsey, a technology entrepreneur, have made headway. First, his family spent the better part of four years trying to figure out what afflicted his daughter, Grace, now 6. Even after her genome was sequenced, the first diagnosis turned out to be wrong. Grace, it finally was determined, was the second person in the world known to have a deficiency in the gene known as NGLY1.
“We went around the country,” Mr. Wilsey said. “We were just trying to find one doctor who had seen another patient with these symptoms.” After years of efforts, several dozen children have been found to have the same deficiency.
“Our goal is to find a cure,” said Mr. Wilsey, who lives in the San Francisco area.
“A lot of people in science dismiss that because cures are rare. But when I say cures, they’re not going to be astronauts. They’re going to be leading some sort of independent life. They’re going to be able to eat without choking. They’re going to be able to take a bath without drowning. They’re going to be able to communicate, whether with some assistive device or not.”
These parents also had a successful model to follow. In 1998, John Crowley left his job at Bristol-Myers Squibb to start a biotechnology company to search for a treatment for Pompe disease, a neuromuscular disorder that two of his children had. Within four years, the company, Novazyme Pharmaceuticals, had devised a treatment that he credits with saving their lives. His story was immortalized in the 2010 film “Extraordinary Measures,” starring Harrison Ford. And his company was bought by the pharmaceutical giant Genzyme for $137.5 million in 2001.

For the full story, see:
PAUL SULLIVAN. “Wealth Matters; Parents of Children With Rare Diseases Find Hope in For-Profit Companies.” The New York Times (Sat., DEC. 26, 2015): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 25, 2015, and has the title “Wealth Matters; Building a Company to Treat a Rare Disease.”)

How to Monopolize a Dead Technology

(p. C3) LOS ANGELES — When Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is released in a special roadshow version (with overture, intermission and additional footage) on Dec. 25, it will represent a feat worthy of the heist in the director’s “Jackie Brown.”
The film is scheduled to open on 96 screens in the United States and four in Canada, all in 70-millimeter projection, a premium format associated with extravaganzas of the 1950s and 1960s.
Yet from a theatrical standpoint, the technology is nearly obsolete. Last year, “Interstellar” opened in 70 millimeter at only 11 comparable locations. There were only 16 in 2012 for “The Master,” which renewed interested in the format. No film has opened with 100 70-millimeter prints since 1992. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, 97 percent of the 40,000 screens in the United States now use digital projection.

. . .
“We looked around for anybody who was selling them,” said Erik Lomis, Weinstein’s president of theatrical distribution and home entertainment. “We tried to keep it as quiet as possible as to why. Eventually word leaked out why we were looking for them, and then the price went up.”
. . .
“We’ve been accused of actually cornering the market on 70-millimeter projectors,” Mr. Cutler said. “It’s probably pretty true. There probably aren’t too many out there that we didn’t find.” Most of them were destroyed, he added, during the conversion to digital projection.
. . .
Ultra Panavision also produces subtle aesthetic effects, unusual even to viewers familiar with 70 millimeter. The lens “for lack of a better word is a softer lens,” Mr. Sasaki said. During a screening of test footage for the film, he pointed out the impressionistic qualities of the focus and explained how the image catered to our eyes’ natural depth cues.
With projectors found and lenses made, the next hurdle is labor: Most theaters no longer have projectionists with a working knowledge of these machines. Mr. Cutler’s company will provide training for each site. “One way or the other, we will fulfill this need,” he said. “It will be a combination of house staff that we can train, professional projectionists that we can bring in, projectionists that we can find locally, and potentially some technical staff that we’ll bring in.” Every theater showing the film will get a spare set of belts, fuses and light bulbs, and instructions. Mr. Cutler’s staff will also be standing by for calls.

For the full story, see:
BEN KENIGSBERG. “In a World Gone Digital, Room for a Lost Format.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 12, 2015): C3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 11, 2015, and has the title “Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ Resurrects Nearly Obsolete Technology.”)

Those Who Try Japanese Toilets, Praise Them with “Cultish Devotion”

(p. D12) Last year, Bennett Friedman, who owns a plumbing showroom in Manhattan called AF New York, took a business trip to Milan. On the morning of his return he faced a choice: stop in the bathroom there or wait until he got home. The flight was nine hours. He waited.
The move seems almost masochistic. But in his home and office bathrooms, Mr. Friedman had installed a Toto washlet. To sit upon a standard commode, he said, would be like “going back to the Stone Age.”
“It feels very uncivilized,” he said.
For those who own Japanese toilets, there is a cultish devotion. They boast heated seats, a bidet function for a rear cleanse and an air-purifying system that deodorizes during use. The need for toilet paper is virtually eliminated (there is an air dryer) and “you left the lid up” squabbles need never take place (the seat lifts and closes automatically in many models).
. . .
Most washlet owners, then, are converted after trying one out in the world. At a boutique hotel, say, or on a trip to Asia.
Such was the case with Robert Aboulache. Before he and his family went on a vacation to Japan, he said, friends who had visited the country told him he would love the toilets. “I thought, ‘How great can the toilets be?'” Mr. Aboulache said. “They were amazing. Some have noisemakers to cover up the sound. You can pivot that little sprayer. The water can be heated or not. We got home, and I thought, ‘This is not the same.'”
Three days later, Mr. Aboulache went online and bought a Toto washlet, which he installed in the shared upstairs bathroom of his home in Los Angeles as a surprise for his wife and son.
“We’ve been delighted,” he said. “It’s our favorite toilet.”
. . .
Mr. Friedman, too, is an enthusiastic proselytizer for washlets, in his showroom and out in social situations, something you gather he would do even if he didn’t sell them.
Whenever he talks about their virtues, he said, “I feel like one of the Apostles passing the word of God.”

For the full story, see:
STEVEN KURUTZ. “For Its Devotees, the Seat of Luxury.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 19, 2015): D12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 18, 2015, and has the title “The Cult of the Toto Toilet.”)

Spontaneous Mummification in San Bernardo Is Unexplained

Some claim that science has gone about as far as it can go. The claim is often a step in an argument for pessimism on the future of technological progress. But that claim has been made many times in the past, and so far has always proven wrong. There’s plenty of phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation, implying that there is plenty of room for the advance of science. Mostly we ignore or forget these phenomena, because it causes cognitive dissonance for us to carry around facts that do not fit into our current theories. Add spontaneous mummification in San Bernardo to the list.

(p. A14) Locals and mummification experts agree San Bernardo is a somewhat unlikely place for what’s known as spontaneous mummification, a phenomenon that occurs naturally, without embalming fluids and other techniques. The climate here is neither excessively dry, like in Northern Africa, nor freezing, like the Alpine environment that preserved Otzi the Iceman, a prehistoric body found in 1991.
San Bernardo’s temperature hovers around 70 degrees during the day, with enough rainfall to support crops like corn, onions, and green beans.
Cemetery workers here began noticing the mummification phenomenon in the mid-1960s, after a new graveyard was built. In Colombia, due to both tradition and earth that is often too soggy for proper burial, it is typical to inter loved ones in aboveground cement vaults, called bovedas. The bodies are generally removed after about five years because of space constraints and regulations.
Bodies in such vaults usually deteriorate significantly after a year or two, but that hasn’t been the case in San Bernardo–where it is believed that most of those buried in vaults are at least partially mummified.
“Hmmm,” said Ronn Wade, a member of the World Congress on Mummy Studies, an international organization, when asked about San Bernardo’s spontaneous mummification. “It could be dietary, environmental, or even the concrete of the vaults where they are stored.”
“It would be nice to have an explanation,” added Mr. Wade, who directs the anatomical services department of the University of Maryland.
. . .
“Whatever it is, it’s very local,” said Gonzalo Correal, a professor at Bogota’s Academy of Natural Sciences, who has studied San Bernardo’s mummies.

For the full story, see:
SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ. “In Small Colombian Town, People Love Their Mummies; Preserved bodies attract tourists, but remain a mystery; something in the diet?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 1, 2015): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated on Sept. 30, 2015, and has the title “In This Small Colombian Town, People Love Their Mummies; Preserved bodies of people born in roughly the last hundred years become tourist attraction.”)

Transistors Did Not Completely Destroy the Vacuum Tube

(p. D11) . . . , just as nothing quite matches the ambience created by an incandescent bulb dimmed low, nothing quite sounds like a good tube amp. Audiophiles will argue about whether a solid-state or tube amp is superior. However, it’s best to think of tubes as an aesthetic choice–akin to applying a vintage filter to a pristine snapshot.
Tubes are well suited for musical passages that can sound grating over modern equipment–for example, a classical violinist digging into her instrument during a dramatic passage. Although its overall sound may not be as crisp, a good tube amp will take that shrill edge off.
More and more music lovers are downsizing their sound systems these days, and some tube-amp makers are following suit. Miniature models, like the ones shown here, use a combination of tubes and solid-state technology to minimize bulk. A few are also surprisingly affordable and versatile. You can hook them up to pretty much any audio source, like a smartphone, computer or CD player. Then just add a pair of headphones or speakers.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL HSU. “Groove Tube.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 24, 2015): D11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated Oct. 21, 2015, and has the title “The Miracle of a $150 (or Less) Tube Amplifier.”)