What We're Reading

For a nifty $5,000, this too can be yours. Ouch!  OK clearly it's not luxury construction but for temporary housing, sturdy weather-resistance storage, camping (?) and housing the poor, quite the innovation. One can only imagine the long term implications for both housing..............and the construction worker.

A private company in east China recently used a giant printer set to print out ten full-sized houses within just one day.

The stand-alone one-story houses in the Shanghai Hi-Tech Industrial Park look just like ordinary buildings. They were created using an intelligent printing array in east China's city of Suzhou.

The array consists of four printers that are 10 meters wide and 6.6 meters high and use multi-directional automated sprays. The sprays emit a combination of cement and construction waste that is used to print building walls layer-by-layer.

Ma Yihe, the inventor of the printers, said he and his team are especially proud of their core technology of quick-drying cem

At least they're calling the URB-E a "car" but the big question for me is the basket optional for my beer?  LOL

"I keep calling it the Woodstock of television," Seibert tells Mashable. "It is the biggest audience of mass television viewing in the history of moving pictures."

Seibert isn't joking. With over 1 billion unique users watching over 6 billion hours of video each month, YouTube's reach is stunning. According to Neilsen, the site reaches more U.S. adults aged 18 to 34 than any cable network.

It's easy to see why cartoon creators would forego the red tape and high pressure of cable television in favor of the Internet. Taking a cartoon from concept to production is grueling work, requiring a huge commitment from the creators and a huge paycheck from the network. More often than not, pitches never see the light of day.

Simon's Cat is hand-drawn, frame by frame. Tofield himself storyboards the episodes.

On YouTube, that process is accelerated tenfold. Operating on a smaller scale with smaller risks, cartoonists can take a chance with more niche ideas and experiment

Amazon.com has reshaped American commerce in just two decades. But how much of the online shopping empire’s success owes to innovation and entrepreneurial genius, and how much of it stems from cheating the system?

Without the loopholes it uses to avoid state sales taxes, new research shows, Amazon loses a substantial portion of its customers’ spending to alternative retailers. In five states that closed the sales tax loopholes that make Amazon’s prices more competitive than what in-state retailers can charge, the site’s sales fell by 9.5 percent.

For large purchases where the sales tax advantage would be most pronounced, the researchers found an even steeper drop in Amazon spending. When states close their online sales tax loopholes, “consumers decrease their spending by 15.5% on purchases larger than $150, and by 23.8% on purchases equal to or larger than $300.” These findings come from a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper which examined data on millions of shop

Eerie or creeped out is a good way to explain how you'll feel watching this video on how much robots have replaced the worker but it's estimated that nearly 50% of jobs out there could be replaced by automation over the next few decades.  50% MORE!  Bottom line:  Force your kid to stay in school, no matter what it takes.

I still remember being kept after class and having to clean the erasers, clouds of white dust billowing through the air leaving a film across my skin and causing me to cough like a three-pack-a-day smoker.  The smell is imbedded in my memory as if it as yesterday.   Boy are those days gone.

Fast forward to 2013 and not only are tablets and ipads becoming more prevalent in the classroom, but phones can share files with merely a touch and "the cloud" is only beginning to penetrate the education system, but what lies ahead for technology in the classroom?

For over a decade, the New Media Consortium (NMC) has been charting the landscape of emerging technologies in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry on a global scale.  Here are some quick insights....ALL within the next 4-5 years: (comments in italics mine)

• By the end of this year, the mobile market is expected to consist of over 7 billion accounts
• Mobile users will have downloaded 70 billion apps across smartphones and ta

I see education in the future being done exclusively in the home Via the Web and Biometric ID or as I like to call em the "digital truancy officers." Also consisting of virtual hologram technology. Both on the lower and higher levels meaning pre-k on up to collegiate. Not only driven by advancements in technology, but combined with the vast data resources/info present NOW that would allow us to do so. And for sure within 10 years time. It's a shame that MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's XO-Laptop or the "$100 Laptop for Every Child in the World Program" was just a little early. But not wasted nor in vain. Yet one of the Bush Family members is capitalising on the revamping of the computer aided education system not only in this country, but in the bombed out countries we invaded and destroyed their school systems in. A story for another time. The power that be were just too stacked against it along with where we were development and market release wise.. Also with the added catalyst o