"China announced Wednesday that its exports climbed 46 percent in February from a year earlier. Economists said the data signaled a rebound in consumer demand from the United States and other Western markets after the financial crisis last year. It was the third consecutive month of increases in Chinese exports and the fastest growth in three years. Orders from the United States, the European Union and Japan accounted for almost half the growth, following a pickup in demand from emerging markets in the previous two months.
Chinese imports also rose 45 percent over the previous year, led by crude oil as factories stepped up production..."
"A key member of the small team brought together four years ago to create the 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric car is unexpectedly leaving General Motors. Denise Gray, director of global battery systems engineering at General Motors, will leave the company on Friday, March 5, to take an unspecified position with an unidentified battery startup in California....
What led Gray to leave the only company she'd ever worked for? "The opportunity to create and build and plant seeds and mold and shape an organization," she said--just as she was able to do with the small Volt team.
And in a theme common to many professionals who've left solid jobs to join startups, she said simply, "I didn't want to look back and say, 'I could have, I should have ...' "
Her new position, a senior leadership role, will keep her squarely in advanced battery technology. She'll work with products that can be applied to electrified transport and to stationary applications, and her job will include profit-and-loss responsibility...."
"General Motors said on Wednesday that it would shut down Hummer, the brand of big sport utility vehicles that became synonymous with the term gas guzzler, after a deal to sell it to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart.The buyer, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines, said in a statement that it had withdrawn its bid because it was unable to receive approval from the Chinese government, which was trying to put a new emphasis on limiting China’s dependence on imported oil and protecting the environment.
Tight financial markets also hurt the deal. When the commerce ministry did not bless the transaction, the well-capitalized Chinese banks became reluctant to lend money to Tengzhong, even though it tried to set up an overseas subsidiary to buy Hummer. That left Tengzhong trying to borrow money from Western banks that have been curtailing their lending even to established borrowers, much less a little-known company from western China..."
"It's been predicted, and the CrunchPad-Joojoo fiasco almost pre-empted it, but the event is happening now: The first tablet PCs are dropping in, ahead of the stormfront that's expected in 2010. One is impressive, the other... not so much. Notion Ink's Android Smartpad
Due to be properly unveiled at CES, Notion Ink's unnamed tablet PC has not only got a pretty face--it's a damn capable machine.
It has a 10.1-inch 1024-by-600-pixel screen, an Nvidia Tegra T20 chipset for full 1080p video capability, WiFi, tri-band 3G, Bluetooth, A-GPS, accelerometer, proximity and ambient light sensors, USB and HDMI sockets, and a 3-megapixel autofocus camera. There's either a 32GB or 64GB solid state drive and an SD slot for augmented storage.
As if that weren't enough, with the tablet acting something like a super-sized, super-charged Android smartphone, that touchscreen is actually a PixelQi unit. If you don't know what that means, then you ought to: PixelQI's technology is a spin-off from the early inventions of electronic paper, and it's combined with an LCD. In other words, it's a dual-purpose screen that behaves pretty much like the e-ink display on an e-reader for daylight, long battery-life performance (and movies too, since it's faster than e-ink) or as a traditional full-color backlit LCD.
That's the device's real killer feature, placing it as a direct competitor for the growing numbers of e-readers, and a direct replacement for the netbook. Because why carry two devices around, each for a specialist purpose, when you can carry Notion Ink's machine in your bag? The all-important price is unknown, though over at SlashGear they're speculating on about $300 with carrier subsidy if you buy it with a 3G data contract...."
"You have certainly heard that buying local is "greener". You have probably also heard counter-arguments: a product made more efficiently but shipped some distance may beat out a local product. But all that talk is merely theoretical if you don't know where your stuff comes from anyhow. And in the new global economy, the "made in" tag on a product does not tell half the story. What is the discerning consumer to do? Imagine a future in which pointing a PDA at a product bar code returns an instant readout of product source and environmental footprint to inform the buyer's decision. This future could be reality with SourceMap. Designed as a "collective tool for transparency and sustainability," SourceMap aims to be the Wiki of visualizing supply chains.
SourceMap is a project of Media Labs, a division of MIT. Developers have adapted the Google Earth geotagging capabilities to the purpose of charting the components that go into products. After two years in develpment, the site is live in beta, and a SourceMap pilot project is underway in Scotland, where businesses can input data on sourcing and supply to share with customers. SourceMap hopes to show that a marketing and social networking advantage justifies the effort of businesses to create transparent reports..."
"Boobs. The Femme Den talks about them easily and often -- and about the challenges they present to designers. Backpack makers don't seem to have a clue what to do about boobs. Ditto designers of unisex hospital scrubs, famous for their gaping V-necks. "One surgeon told me there wasn't a woman at the hospital whose boobs he hadn't seen," says Femme Den member Whitney Hopkins. A design engineer at Smart Design, Hopkins is also one of four members of the Den, an internal collective at the firm that's devoted to thinking about the bodies and brains of women and how to design -- smartly -- for them. I ask the group, which consists of Hopkins, Agnete Enga, Erica Eden, and Yvonne Lin, if that means razors and sports bras or if it means rethinking everything. "Both," they answer in unison, from a nook of Smart's loftlike Chelsea offices. Women are not a niche market, they insist ("No one likes to be targeted," sniffs Eden), but companies should also be careful not to confuse equality with sameness.
"When most people think of designing for women, they automatically think of tampons and birth control," Lin says. (It doesn't help that in industrial design, females make up just 20% of the field.) "Even when a lot of companies think that a product is for both genders, in reality they're just designing for men. Design is male-biased. Designers are working with male procedurals, probably going back to the beginning of time." Now, the Femme Den is looking to inject some femininity into those procedurals, everywhere from U.S. Army bases to Target, BP, and Nike..."
"E.ON Climate and Renewables said on Thursday it has built the world's biggest wind farm by completing the final phase of its Roscoe, Texas wind farm, bringing the installed capacity to 781.5 megawatts. The more than $1 billion project, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) west of Fort Worth, surpasses the nearby 735.5 MW Horse Hollow wind farm, owned by FPL Group's NextEra Energy Resources, as the largest in the world.
"Completing the world's biggest wind farm took more than a $1 billion investment, coordination with more than 300 landowners and management of more than 500 workers," Steve Trenholm, chief executive of German-based E.ON AG's renewable unit in North America, said in a release..."
"The French government Thursday said it plans to spend €1.5 billion (about $2.2 billion) on creating a battery-charging network for electric vehicles as part of a broader state plan to encourage the development of clean vehicle technology and battery manufacturing. It also said it would seek financing of €900 million for its €1.5 billion plan from a state loan that's planned to be launched next year.
The government will make the installation of charging sockets obligatory in office parking lots by 2015, and new apartment blocks with parking lots will have to include charging stations starting in 2012..."
"...The IgNobel prizes - a play on the name of the Nobel prizes awarded every October from Stockholm and Oslo - are given out by the Harvard-based humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard Computer Society.
The Hippo Water Roller
"Debbie Millman is president of Sterling Brands, a New York-based branding agency where, for the last 15 years, she's worked on redesigning megabrands by Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Campbell’s, Colgate, Hershey and Hasbro, including the classic Tropicana packaging that was so beloved by consumers that the company scrapped a redesign earlier this year and reverted to Sterling's iconic straw-in-the-orange (New Yorkers can hear her talk about that tonight at AIGA NY's My Dog and Pony II). She has written two books, How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer and Essential Principles of Graphic Design. And this year, Debbie was named founding chair of a new program at the School of Visual Arts that will offer a masters in branding.Debbie is also the newest president of the AIGA, the professional association for designers, which will be holding its biennial conference in Memphis this October. She gave a rousing speech at the organization's recent gala about why exactly we should be celebrating design and designers, even in times like these. One reason: "No matter how bleak the situation into which we have been thrown by the global economy--it does offer opportunities. Designers need only invent them. By understanding our living and working context--we blow open avenues of opportunity and innovation not yet charted or explored.""...
IBM is betting that places like Kazakhstan will eventually see growth as vendors spread their wares around the globe and local businesses move onto the Internet. Linux is a perfect fit as far as encouraging low-cost technology in these areas. The center will be in Astana, Kazakhstan, the capital of the country.
The center’s mission is to drive the development and adoption of open standards and open source technologies in business and government organizations in Kazakhstan, the central Asian nation that spans territory larger than Western Europe. IBM recently launched a similar effort in Africa. Big Blue also has innovation centers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Moscow and other locations, such as the Cape Town, South Africa center, which opened last week.
Part of the continuing goal is to bridge the “digital divide” and fuel future economic growth. Inna Kuznetsova, vice president of systems software, marketing and sales enablement at IBM, says the center will support regional software vendors and IBM business partners as they localize their applications. It will develop prototypes of e-government services and work on e-learning solutions as well."
"Fluther, a startup that crowdsources answers for user questions, just raised $600,000 from some of Silicon Valley’s better-known investors. They include Netscape founder Marc Andreessen of newly-formed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway (who has invested in dozens of start-ups in Fluther’s space), Dave McClure and Naval Ravikant. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is also an advisor.
Although there are already many crowdsourced question-and-answer sites, including Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers and newer variants like Hunch and Aardvark, which digs through your social network for people to answer, Fluther says it’s different because it works in real-time and finds people across its entire network to answer your question.
The site is very intuitive. You type in a question and wait for people to respond. You can see live if someone is crafting a response, and they can see your reaction in return as you type it. Fluther says questions on the site average about 14 responses."...
"Similar-site.com is a new search engine that lets you find web sites akin to one you’re interested in by pulling up a list of sites with matching web tags. For example, if you input gigaom.com into the search box on similar-site.com, it will bring up a list of blogs including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and the O’Reilly Radar, all of which share the tags “blog,” “technology” and “Web 2.0.” You can also specify tags that you want the search engine to look for, as well as delete any that you feel may be unrelated. The UI, which mimicks Google’s plain home page, is simple and intuitive."...
The sorting algorithm and Sidewiki's ability to display notes about the same topic on various sites make Sidewiki somewhat unique. Google uses a quote from a speech by President Obama as an example here. Sidewiki will recognize the quote on multiple sites and aggregate them together, no matter whether somebody commented on this quote on Little Green Footballs or Daily Kos. You can also leave a comment about the entire page, of course.
For some popular sites that haven't been annotated yet, Google will also pop up a notification that comments exist, but the sidebar will actually be filled with related blog posts, which is another feature that makes Google stand out from the competition in this field."...
"As cold season approaches, many Americans stock up on their vitamin C and echinacea. But heeding the age-old advice about catching up on sleep might be more important. Studies have demonstrated that poor sleep and susceptibility to colds go hand in hand, and scientists think it could be a reflection of the role sleep plays in maintaining the body’s defenses.
In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.
Sleep and immunity, it seems, are tightly linked. Studies have found that mammals that require the most sleep also produce greater levels of disease-fighting white blood cells — but not red blood cells, even though both are produced in bone marrow and stem from the same precursor. And researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have shown that species that sleep more have greater resistance against pathogens.
“Species that have evolved longer sleep durations,” the Planck scientists wrote, “appear to be able to increase investment in their immune systems and be better protected.”
THE BOTTOM LINE Research suggests that poor sleep can increase susceptibility to colds."The vaccine — known as RV 144, a combination of two genetically engineered vaccines, neither of which had worked before in humans — was declared a qualified success after a six-year clinical trial on more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand. Those who were vaccinated became infected at a rate nearly one-third lower than the others, the sponsors said Thursday morning.
“I don’t want to use a word like ‘breakthrough,’ but I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a very important result,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial’s backers.
“For more than 20 years now, vaccine trials have essentially been failures,” Dr. Fauci said. “Now it’s like we were groping down an unlit path, and a door has been opened. We can start asking some very important questions.”
It will still, however, take years of work before a vaccine that could end the epidemic, which has killed about 25 million people, can even be contemplated.
“We often talk about whether a vaccine is even possible,” said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, or AVAC. “This is not the vaccine that ends the epidemic and says, ‘O.K., let’s move on to something else.’ But it’s a fabulous new step that takes us in a new direction.”"...
"Even before the age of Mad Men marketers were trying to tap into the human subconscious to influence consumers to buy their products. But over the last decade or so, as the fields of neuroscience and marketing science (as some like to call it) have evolved, the area of Neuromarketing has emerged. Today more companies are investing in the technology and studies. Neuromarketing blogs (Roger Dooley) and books (Buyology) are being accorded more attention and legitimacy. Nielsen's recent investment in researcher NeuroFocus has increased the influence and credibility of neuromarketing. However, the field is young and a bit like the wild west. And many in and out of marketing have raised concerns about the reliability and ethicality of neuromarketing.
What is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is the practice of using technology to measure brain activity in consumer subjects in order to inform the development of products and communications--really to inform the brand's 4Ps. The premise is that consumer buying decisions are made in split seconds in the subconscious, emotional part of the brain and that by understanding what we like, don't like, want, fear, are bored by, etc. as indicated by our brain's reactions to brand stimuli, marketers can design products and communications to better meet "unmet" market needs, connect and drive "the buy".
...
Techniques include:
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
SST (Steady State Topography)
EEG (Electroencephalography)
Eye Tracking
Galvanic Skin Response
So who is using neuromarketing (aside from consultants)?
Microsoft is now mining EEG data to understand users' interactions with computers including their feelings of "surprise, satisfaction and frustration."
Frito-Lay has been studying female brains to learn how to better appeal to women. Findings showed the company should avoid pitches related to "guilt" and guilt-free and play up "healthy" associations.
Google made some waves when it partnered with MediaVest on a "biometrics" study to measure the effectiveness of YouTube overlays versus pre-rolls. Result: Overlays were much more effective with subjects.
Daimler employed fMRI research to inform a campaign featuring car headlights to suggest human faces which tied to the reward center of the brain.
The Weather Channel used EEG, eye-tracking and skin response techniques to measure viewer reactions to three different promotional pitches for a popular series."
...
"Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one. The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.
The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group — a merger of teams — was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10 percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.
...
The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale predictive modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.
The way teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges.
That certainly seemed to be a principal lesson for the winners. The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques “only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently,” said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. “That’s why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently.”
Yet the sort of sophisticated teamwork deployed in the Netflix contest, it seems, is a tricky business. Over three years, thousands of teams from 186 countries made submissions. Yet only two could breach the 10-percent hurdle. “Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it’s very, very difficult,” said Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble. “Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don’t work.”
...
The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals’ “taste profiles,” the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.
The payoff for Netflix? “Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service,” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer.""Women are getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl.
“How can you tell?” he deadpanned. “It’s always been whine-whine-whine.”
Why are we sadder? I persisted.
“Because you care,” he replied with a mock sneer. “You have feelings.”
Oh, that.
In the early ’70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold.
But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.
As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
...
One area of extreme distraction is kids. “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”...
Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.
They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants.
...
Men can age in an attractive way while women are expected to replicate — and Restylane — their 20s into their 60s.
Buckingham says that greater prosperity has made men happier. And they are also relieved of bearing sole responsibility for their family finances, and no longer have the pressure of having women totally dependent on them.
Men also tend to fare better romantically as time wears on. There are more widows than widowers, and men have an easier time getting younger mates.
Stevenson looks on the bright side of the dark trend, suggesting that happiness is beside the point. We’re happy to have our newfound abundance of choices, she said, even if those choices end up making us unhappier.
A paradox, indeed."
"Games have long played a role in classrooms, but next month marks the launch of the first U.S. public school curriculum based entirely on game-inspired learning. Select sixth graders can look forward to playing video games such as "Little Big Planet" and "Civilization," as well as non-digital games ranging from role-playing scenarios to board games and card games. But this goes beyond guiding your virtual settlers in "Oregon Trail" during classroom free time. The Quest to Learn (Q2L) school, based in Manhattan, hopes its guided approach can help students take on the role of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers and evolutionary biologists.
...The 20 to 25 students in each class, each equipped with a laptop, attend four 90-minute periods each day, rather than study individual subjects.
In one sample curriculum, students create a graphic novel based on the epic Babylonian poem "Gilgamesh," record their understanding of ancient Mesopotamian culture though geographer and anthropologist journals, and play the strategic board game "Settlers of Catan." Google Earth comes into play as a tool to explore the regions of ancient Mesopotamia.
Students may also play the evolution-inspired video game "Spore," but they get equally serious time with digital tools ranging from Maya 3D modeling to Adobe Flash. If anything, Q2L students may emerge as some of the most digitally savvy pupils of their peer group..."
"Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey during a talk today at Webster University in St. Louis outlined his next venture, which he hinted may be focused on health care and financial services, according to the Wall Street Journal. Dorsey, who is now the chairman of Twitter’s board after stepping down as CEO last year, said the city of St. Louis would play a “very large part” in his next venture, according to a local paper.
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