Jamey Stegmaier's Kickstarter Lessons

This is a compilation of all of Jamey’s posts on creating and running a successful Kickstarter campaign. These are roughly in the chronological order that you’ll need to reference them, starting 6-12 months before you plan on launching your project. If you’re just now discovering this resource, remember: you don’t need to launch today.

Manufacturing Cost Estimator

Panda Game Manufacturing produces games for many publishers and has some handy resources on their website to get an idea of costs for estimating landed costs as you prepare for publishing a game.

The Nickelodeon Cartoon That Taught a Generation to Hate Capitalism

In 1994, the Clinton administration introduced the Empowerment Zone program, an urban policy scheme that provided a few small grants or tax credits to communities deemed financially stressed, along with tax credits for big businesses to operate in poorer communities.

Citylab - A New Transit Map for Philadelphia Aims to Draw More Riders

A proposal to overhaul wayfinding inside SEPTA’s notoriously baffling rail system would introduce new nomenclature and better signage.

GreatSchools wanted to disrupt online school ratings. But did it make neighborhood segregation worse?

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Thalia Tringo, a real estate agent in the Boston area, faces a dilemma whenever a homebuyer asks her if the local schools are any good.

History of New Zealand Huts

Empress Hut, perched on the western flank of Mt Cook, is one of more than 1000 huts peppered throughout the New Zealand back country. But how secure is this heritage in the face of difficult economic times? Tramping hugs and bivvies are dot­ted around the back country of New Zealand like nowhere else on earth.

Tech Firms Are Spying on You. In a Pandemic, Governments Say That's OK.

While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Joshua Anton created an app to prevent users from drunk dialing, which he called Drunk Mode. He later began harvesting huge amounts of user data from smartphones to resell to advertisers.

Airport Surveillance Is About to Reach a Whole New Level of Ridiculousness

This article is part of Privacy in the Pandemic , a Future Tense series. Flying seems like just about the most dangerous thing you could possibly do right now. You're spending hours confined in a metal tube, with hundreds of strangers from all over the world, without any way of knowing where they've been or whom they've been with.

Norway halts coronavirus app over privacy concerns

The news: Norway is halting its coronavirus contact tracing app, Smittestopp, after criticism from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, which said that the country's low rate of infections meant that the app's privacy invasions were no longer justified. As a result, the app will cease collecting new data, all data collected so far is being...

The circular economy "will never work with the materials we have" says Cyrill Gutsch

Plastics will be replaced within ten years by biofabricated materials that eliminate waste and pollution, according to Parley for the Oceans founder Cyrill Gutsch. In future, natural substances such as algae, bacteria, enzymes and proteins will be used to grow materials that will replace today's plastics, said the former designer.

Lucy Siegle meets Cameron Sinclair, the man behind a quiet architectural revolution

Solar-powered tents, inflatable housing, buildings in a bag ... Since 1999, Architecture for Humanity has been galvanising the design community to respond to the needs of disaster and war-ravaged peoples from Darfur to Banda Aceh - helping locals to rebuild their homes with innovative and often brilliant results.

The Coronavirus and the future of Main Street

What can we do to save our streets? Decentralize everything. Our Main Streets and High Streets have been in trouble for decades, thanks to the onslaught of malls, then Walmart and the big box stores, then Amazon and online shopping. It wasn't just the competition, either; in many cities, rising real estate values led to massive rent increases.

What does a good megadevelopment look like?

Deep dives on cities, architecture, design, real estate, and urban planning. The first of my recent conversations about megadevelopments with Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), took place in early February, when the world was a different place.

From Running and Fiction to Baking and Videogames: Social Networking Goes Niche

Sidney Drill downloaded the fitness app Strava a few years ago to log her runs. It's now a central part of how she networks online, especially with the coronavirus pandemic limiting her ability to socialize with friends. The 26-year-old Philadelphia sales professional says Strava offers something she can't get on Facebook or other mainstream social networks.

The Tool Was Supposed To Predict Crime. Now Los Angeles Police Say They Are Dumping It.

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today .

Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity

Specification gaming is a behaviour that satisfies the literal specification of an objective without achieving the intended outcome. We have all had experiences with specification gaming, even if not by this name.

AI researchers propose 'bias bounties' to put ethics principles into practice

Researchers from Google Brain, Intel, OpenAI, and top research labs in the U.S. and Europe joined forces this week to release what the group calls a toolbox for turning AI ethics principles into practice. The kit for organizations creating AI models includes the idea of paying developers for finding bias in AI, akin to the bug bounties offered in security software.

Uber Wars

Since Uber launched in Argentina in 2016, taxi drivers have come out in force, torching ride-share cars, beating drivers, and shaming passengers. And they're still angry.

Bird's wildly short ride

Emma* was up late working on a complex analysis from her laptop in bed for Bird. In mid-March, as COVID-19 was extinguishing public life in cities across the world, the scooter company announced that it would pull its signature electric two-wheelers from some areas.

Garbage Pickups Tell a Tale of Two Cities, With Part of Manhattan Shrinking

Need to know more about coronavirus in New York? Sign up for THE CITY's daily morning newsletter . As many New Yorkers began to stay away from work, school and restaurants, city sanitation workers picked up more household trash last month than they did the previous March, statistics show - except, primarily, in parts of Manhattan.

Rural Transit Agencies Are Keeping People Alive

A few days after Jeanne McMillin started working as a dispatcher for Little Dixie Transit in the small southeastern Oklahoma town of Hugo nearly 20 years ago, she got a call from someone she described as "a little lady." Unbeknownst to McMillin, this lady had been a long-time rider.

A facial recognition company wants to help with contact tracing. A senator has questions.

Just a few months ago, Clearview AI faced outrage for scraping photos off social media sites like Facebook to create a near-universal facial recognition system that has been embraced by law enforcement agencies.

Ireland trials drone food and drug delivery

A drone company that had to abandon its fast-food delivery tests has partnered with Ireland's health authority to deliver prescriptions instead. Manna Aero is working with the Health Service Executive to deliver medicines and other essential supplies to vulnerable people in the small rural town of Moneygall.

Common Sense Comes to Computers

One evening last October, the artificial intelligence researcher Gary Marcus was amusing himself on his iPhone by making a state-of-the-art neural network look stupid. Marcus' target, a deep learning network called GPT-2, had recently become famous for its uncanny ability to generate plausible-sounding English prose with just a sentence or two of prompting.

Coronavirus Trackers Try Out AI Tools as Eyes Turn to Reopening

Tech companies, health insurers and governments are turning to artificial intelligence to predict potential coronavirus outbreaks and help guide policy decisions about social-distancing as pressure mounts to end lockdowns. The software, they say, can learn to flag disease risk and outbreak threats based on personal data, such as medical history, real-time body-temperature readings and current symptom reports, as well as demographics.

Rome Has Been Sacked, Conquered and Abandoned. Now It's the Pandemic's Turn.

The Great Read Rome Dispatch The city's turbulent history has forged an irreverent, anti-authoritarian and, in some ways, cynical character. Can that survive the coronavirus? ROME - Rome turned 2,773 last week. To mark the legendary founding of the city and its past glory, there is usually a crowded birthday parade of re-enactors dressed up as gladiators and vestal virgins.

Coronavirus Offers a Clear View of What Causes Air Pollution

The coronavirus shutdowns are giving scientists an opportunity they never thought they would have: to see what would happen to the planet if the world's economy went on hiatus.

Parking Lots Have Become a Digital Lifeline

With cafes and libraries closed, Americans without internet access are sitting outside them to get free and fast connections. As the sun set on a recent evening in Rutherfordton, N.C., the author Beth Revis drove her green S.U.V. into the parking lot of a closed elementary school and connected to the building's free Wi-Fi.

COVID-19 Is the First Truly Global Event

Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide Trump Can't Just Refuse to Leave Office Remove Trump Now Tanker Truck Speeds Into Thousands of George Floyd Protesters on Minneapolis Bridge There is no one on the planet who remains unaffected by COVID-19.

How coronavirus could bring cities closer to home

Coronavirus is changing the world in unprecedented ways. Subscribe here for a daily briefing on how this global crisis is affecting cities, technology, approaches to climate change, and the lives of vulnerable people.

Death of the office

In the spring of 1822 an employee in one of the world's first offices - that of the East India Company in London - sat down to write a letter to a friend.

Opinion | Will You Want to Go Straight Back Into the Crowd?

Planners once dreamed of cities with vast empty plazas and quiet streets. Post-pandemic, might they do so again? By Dr. Williams is a professor of contemporary visual cultures. Of all the media images that the Covid-19 crisis has generated in recent weeks, it is the city devoid of crowds that has perhaps been the most affecting.

Uber, Lyft Sued by California in Major Gig-Economy Crackdown

Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. were sued by California for allegedly violating a new state law designed to give gig-economy workers the benefits of employees. While expected, the lawsuit filed Tuesday in state court marks a serious threat to the business model of an array of companies that save on labor costs by classifying workers as independent contractors. If the companies ultimately lose the suit, they could be forced to pay for overtime, health care and other benefits. The complaint “asserts that Uber and Lyft gain an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by inappropriately classifying massive numbers of California drivers as independent contractors,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said during a virtual press conference. The cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego joined the legal action, which was filed in San Francisco.

Mapping America's Aging Population

The U.S. population has changed substantially in the last half century, growing by nearly 63 percent. Perhaps the two most prominent demographic changes over the past 50 years relate to age. In 1968, the baby boom had just ended, and the oldest members of its cohort were only 22 years old.

Uber to lay off 14% of its staff

Uber is laying off thousands of staffers as the ongoing pandemic continues to impact its business.

How Facebook's oversight board could rewrite the rules of the entire internet

Facebook's audacious experiment in corporate governance inched closer to reality Wednesday with the announcement of the first 20 members of its oversight board. But while much attention has been paid to how the board stands to rewrite Facebook's own rules, an equally important question is how it stands to rewrite the rules for every other tech platform, too.

Why I’m Joining Facebook’s Oversight Board

Almost exactly a year ago, back in the days when near strangers could strike up random conversations in Italian bars, I found myself learning about a new initiative on which Facebook was embarking — a kind of independent Supreme Court to help the company rule on the deluge of moral, ethical, editorial, and legal challenges it was facing.

These are the people Facebook put in charge of deciding whether to delete controversial posts

Facebook on Wednesday announced the first 20 members of its Oversight Board, an independent body that can overturn the company's own content moderation decisions. The oversight board will govern appeals from Facebook and Instagram users and questions from Facebook itself, although it admitted it will have to pick and choose which content moderation cases to take due to the sheer volume of them.

India's Covid-19 Contact Tracing App Could Leak Patient Locations

As countries around the world rush to build smartphone apps that can help track the spread of Covid-19, privacy advocates have cautioned that those systems could, if implemented badly, result in a dangerous mix of health data and digital surveillance.

Smartphone data shows out-of-state visitors flocked to Georgia as restaurants and other businesses reopened

One week after Georgia allowed dine-in restaurants, hair salons and other businesses to reopen, an additional 62,440 visitors arrived there daily, most from surrounding states where such businesses remained shuttered, according to an analysis of smartphone location data.

Why U.S. Unemployment Is Sky-High and Europe's Isn't

Here is today's Foreign Policy brief: Early unemployment numbers spell more trouble for the U.S. economy, Netanyahu cleared to form a government, and Iraq approves a new prime minister. If you would like to receive Morning Brief in your inbox every weekday, please sign up here. Early Jobs Numbers Outline Extent of U.S.

Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

Google's sister firm Sidewalk Labs has scrapped a plan to build a smart city in Canada, citing complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. For several years it had pursued ambitions to build a digital-first city in Toronto "from the internet up". Chief executive Dan Doctoroff blamed "unprecedented economic uncertainty" for abandoning the plan.

India is forcing people to use its covid app, unlike any other democracy

What the app lacks also sets it apart. India has no national data privacy law, and it's not clear who has access to data from the app and in what situations. There are no strong, transparent policy or design limitations on accessing or using the data at this point.

Map GAN Training

As part of my residency with @natlibscot and @CreateInf I've been training GANs on the library's digitised map collections. Here are some latent space interpolations that demo the first model...

France is using AI to check whether people are wearing masks on public transport

As France makes the wearing of facial masks mandatory on public transport, it's trialling new AI technology to check whether passengers are complying. The software, made by French startup Datakalab, is being trialed first in Paris, and will only generate anonymous statistical data.

South Korea to Make 5G and AI Centerpieces of ‘Korean New Deal’

South Korea will make artificial intelligence and wireless communications centerpieces of what it is touting as a “New Deal” to create jobs and boost growth after the coronavirus pandemic subsides.

The US has no idea how to manage all the testing data it's collecting

In the US, each state decides how it reports findings from covid-19 tests. The result is a chaotic system that's hurting our response to the pandemic. Imagine you're an epidemiologist or public health expert in the US during the current crisis.

The Bee Whisperers of Slovenia Have a Plan to Save Colonies From Climate Change

As climate change threatens bee populations around the world, beekeepers in Slovenia are taking up the fight.

Porches, Yards, Driveways, Parking Lots: Where the Neighborhood Is Now

How we come together when we can't go very far. Picking fruit out of a yard in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Credit... Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times We walk the dogs across the meadow in the rain. We don't talk much.

Drive-throughs and drive-ins were fading. Coronavirus made them a lifeline

To venture out in Southern California during the COVID-19 pandemic is to encounter a landscape dressed in an unfamiliar coat. Freeways bear unimaginably light traffic. Playgrounds are wrapped in caution tape. The simple act of picking up a loaf of bread at the supermarket is now a dystopic obstacle course of Plexiglas shields, social distancing markers and masked shoppers circling one another like repellent magnets.

Can we escape from information overload?

One day in December 2016 a 37-year-old British artist named Sam Winston equipped himself with a step-ladder, a pair of scissors, several rolls of black-out cloth and a huge supply of duct tape, and set about a project he had been considering for some time.

The Year the Internet Thought I Was MacKenzie Bezos

Almost a year ago, I wrote a story about MacKenzie Bezos. The novelist had recently divorced Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and announced she planned to give away the majority of her fortune, estimated at the time to be worth more than $36 billion.

Curbing Coronavirus With a Contact-Tracing App? It's Not So Simple.

Contact-tracing apps aim to help health authorities trace paths of coronavirus infection, and in many cases, to notify users that they've been near a person infected by Covid-19. Yet while trying to solve one big problem, they create a lot more small ones.

Growing Atlanta Suburb Reclaiming an Unexpected Public Space

If city-dwellers wanted to visit a green space in the 19th century, they likely found themselves at a cemetery. During much of that time, cemeteries played the role that city parks often do today, acting as a spot for people to gather. But increasingly over the past decade, communities have once again embraced hanging out in cemeteries.

Why a Struggling Rust Belt City Pinned Its Revival on a Self-Chilling Beverage Can

On an unseasonably warm November morning in 2016, Youngstown's business and political leaders crowded onto a small, scraggly plot of land on the Ohio city's long-suffering East Side. Reeling from decades of decline, the area was a patchwork of potholed streets, weeded lots, moldering homes and drive-thru liquor marts.

The Office Is Dead - Get ready for the commercial real estate apocalypse

In early March, Jeff Haynie, the CEO of Austin-based software company Pinpoint, was gearing up to find new office space. Pinpoint’s $25,000-per-month lease with WeWork for 1,800 square feet would be up in August, and it was time to move on. He was thinking he’d need maybe 10,000 square feet for his growing company, which makes software for programmers.

Feds Warn States That Online Voting Experiments Are 'High-Risk'

The federal government is letting states know it considers online voting to be a "high-risk" way of running elections even if all recommended security protocols are followed. It's the latest development in the debate over Internet voting as a few states have announced they plan to offer it to voters with disabilities this year, while security experts have voiced grave warnings against doing so.

Quarantine Fatigue Is Real

What does harm reduction look like for the coronavirus? First, policy makers and health experts can help the public differentiate between lower-risk and higher-risk activities; these authorities can also offer support for the lower-risk ones when sustained abstinence isn't an option.

When Coronavirus Hits Food Deserts

Kimyatta Terrell was home watching a movie when a bag of veggies, from mustard greens to Chinese cabbage, was placed at her front door. An employee from Growing Home, an urban farm in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, had delivered fresh greens and a recipe card to the home 5 miles away, where Ms. Terrell, 44 years old, lives with her sister and brother-in-law.

Covid-19 Is Forcing an Exodus From Peru's Cities

The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on a visual chronicle of untold stories as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States and the rest of the world-read more from The Invisible Front Line. -The Editors In Peru's capital city, an exodus is underway.

Opinion | The Cities We Need

Jeenah Moon/The New York Times America's cities were once engines ofAmerica's cities wereIn this crisis, how can growth and opportunity.once engines of growth and opportunity. In this crisis, how can we save them?we save them? Crises can be clarifying. By The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.

Bluetooth may not work well enough to trace coronavirus contacts

The UK's upcoming contact tracing app aimed at limiting the future spread of coronavirus may not be an effective tool for identify whether users have had close contact with someone carrying the virus, and should not seen as a panacea, according to a study of how Bluetooth signals work in real world situations.

BART unveils a new system map. Here's what's changed.

Bay Area residents have a history of being very particular about the design of the BART map. Today, they'll be able to view the next version of the map set to be released once service to Milpitas and Berryessa stations begins.

These ZIP Code-Level Maps Show The Places Hit Hardest By COVID-19

BuzzFeed News has reporters across five continents bringing you trustworthy stories about the impact of the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today . COVID-19 has hit urban America hard.

What would happen if Londoners tried to go back to normal on a socially-distanced Underground?

The prime minister, Boris Johnson, says that from today, people are "actively encouraged" to return to work, although they should continue to work from home if possible. We looked into what would happen if everyone in London tried to go back to their morning commutes while staying 2 metres apart.

Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm

Even after the crisis eases, companies may let workers stay home. That would affect an entire ecosystem, from transit to restaurants to shops. Not to mention the tax base. Before the coronavirus crisis, three of New York City's largest commercial tenants - Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley - had tens of thousands of workers in towers across Manhattan.

India's Contact Tracing App Is All But Mandatory. So This Programmer Hacked It So That He Always Appears Safe.

For days, Jay, a software engineer in Bangalore, watched with mounting alarm as people in India were forced to install the government's coronavirus contact tracing app. Then, he rolled up his sleeves and ripped its guts out. "I didn't like the fact that installing this app is slowly becoming mandatory in India," said Jay, who requested a pseudonym to speak freely.

India made its contact tracing app mandatory. Now people are angry

India's digital contact tracing app is controlling the behaviour of millions. One evening in the first week of May, Jyoti Bandooni, left her home for her weekend grocery run at the nearby supermarket. For Bandooni, 24, who lives with her parents in suburban Delhi and works in events management, it had become second nature to go shopping after six weeks of lockdown.

In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.

The coronavirus has pushed the coal industry to once-unthinkable lows, and the consequences for climate change are big. WASHINGTON - The United States is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time on record, new government projections show, a transformation partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, with profound implications in the fight against climate change.

Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic

For a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile. "We are ready, we're all-in," the governor gushed.

WeWork Locations Are Essentially Unusable Now. They're Still Charging Rent.

Rebecca Shamtoob had only been working for a month at a firm based in a Manhattan WeWork before things started feeling off-well, more off than usual for the scandal-beset co-working company. It was early March, and COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in New York City.

Analysis | Sweden's coronavirus strategy is not what it seems

Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday, along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today's WorldView newsletter . As societies battened down the hatches and imposed quarantines, one European country appeared to take a different approach.

Opinion | A Study Said Covid Wasn't That Deadly. The Right Seized It.

How coronavirus research is being weaponized. By Aleszu Bajak and Mr. Bajak and Mr. Howe teach journalism at Northeastern University. Last month, a group of Stanford University researchers released a remarkable study: Covid-19 infections in Santa Clara County, Calif., might well be 85 times higher than official estimates.

Sony's first AI image sensor will make cameras everywhere smarter

Sony has announced the world's first image sensor with integrated AI smarts. The new IMX500 sensor incorporates both processing power and memory, allowing it to perform machine learning-powered computer vision tasks without extra hardware. The result, says Sony, will be faster, cheaper, and more secure AI cameras.

Nvidia unveils monstrous A100 AI chip with 54 billion transistors and 5 petaflops of performance

Nvidia unwrapped its Nvidia A100 artificial intelligence chip today, and CEO Jensen Huang called it the ultimate instrument for advancing AI.

Beware of these futuristic background checks

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us. Unemployment in May reached its highest levels since the Great Depression, but companies like Postmates and Uber have continued to hire new workers during the pandemic.

This Was Supposed to Be the Year Driverless Cars Went Mainstream

Perfecting the technology has taken longer than expected. The coronavirus pandemic has made it even more difficult. SAN FRANCISCO - Tech companies once promised that fully functional, self-driving cars would be on the road by 2020 and on the path to remaking transportation and transforming the economy.

This is how the CDC is trying to forecast coronavirus's spread

Every year the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention holds a competition to see who can accurately forecast the flu. Research teams around the country vie with different methods, and the best performers win funding and a partnership with the agency to improve the nation's preparation for the next season.

Can symptoms surveys nail down future Covid-19 hotspots?

Dry cough. Fever. Chills. The symptoms of Covid-19 have become global public knowledge. And as countries try to get a handle on the disease, you may have already been asked to disclose your own online. A growing number of online studies, apps, and trackers are polling the public about their health.

Roaming 'robodog' politely tells Singapore park goers to keep apart

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Far from barking its orders, a robot dog enlisted by Singapore authorities to help curb coronavirus infections in the city-state politely asks joggers and cyclists to stay apart. The remote-controlled, four-legged machine built by Boston Dynamics was first deployed in a central park on Friday as part of a two-week trial that could see it join other robots policing Singapore's green spaces during a nationwide lockdown.

Who's in charge of lifting lockdowns?

In a nation with more than 90,000 governments, responses to the coronavirus pandemic have highlighted the challenges posed by the United States' system of federalism, where significant power rests with states and local governments. Wisconsin's Supreme Court just overturned their governor's order for residents to stay at home - and then several cities and counties imposed their own restrictions, very similar to the governor's rules.

'A Nightmare Scenario': Coronavirus Has Reached the World's Biggest Refugee Settlement

Aid groups are warning of a devastating coronavirus outbreak after COVID-19 was confirmed in the world's largest refugee settlement, where nearly 900,000 vulnerable Rohingya refugees live in overcrowded and dirty conditions. The confirmation of the first case in the camps at Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh late Thursday, was "the realization of a nightmare scenario," said Daniel P.

San Francisco Shifts From Trashing Homeless Camps To Sanctioning Them Amid COVID-19

subscribe to Coronavirus Daily podcast San Francisco is set to enact a homelessness solution that it once thought unthinkable: city-sanctioned open-air encampments. For years, San Francisco police have ordered tents removed from city streets, even at times slashing them with knives themselves.

A Make-or-Break Moment for Cities

Shaping the transformation of the past few decades has been a collection of planning ideas loosely called "new urbanism." It's hard to remember that terms such as mixed-use development and adaptive reuse and transit-oriented development and infill construction were once heterodox ideas promoted by a handful of maverick planners.

A Full-Bodied Red, With Notes of…Ultrasound?

A good wine is magical on the palate. But at the microscopic level, it is complex chemistry. A Spanish enological firm, with the help of a research group at the University of Murcia, is looking to add ultrasonic pulses to the winemaking process, with an aim of gleaning more from the grapes that make the vintage while saving the winemaker time and energy. Agrovin, a Castile-La Mancha–based maker of products for winemakers, is on the way to finding out what its newly-developed ultrasound treatments can do in vineyards. Using what is basically a large container wired for high-powered, low-frequency sound, Agrovin plans to shake up the grapes by bombarding them with noise.

Your shoe, chewing gum, or ciggies are now your extra password

Computer researchers at Florida International University and Bloomberg have come up with an alternative to crypto baubles like YubiKeys for two-factor authentication. It's not that there's anything wrong with YubiKeys and similar login tokens, apart from the occasional security blunder. But they can be a potential faff for non-savvy netizens.

A New Strain of Ransomware Is Hitting Eastern Europe

Malware called BadRabbit is bouncing between networks in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and Bulgaria, demanding Bitcoin payment in exchange for decryption of files. Reuters reports that Odessa airport (pictured above) and the metro system in Kiev, both in Ukraine, have been hit by the malware. Russian cybersecurity firm Group-IB says that at least three of the nation's...

Amazon to sell smart locks so it can slip packages into your home

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc () has plans to drop off packages directly into shoppers' homes. The world's largest online retailer on Wednesday announced Amazon Key, a lock and camera system that users control remotely to let delivery associates slip goods into their houses.

Wi-Fi hacking is nothing new

On October 16, a security researcher in Belgium named Mathy Vanhoef published some concerning findings about a vulnerability in Wi-Fi, the near-ubiquitous standard for wireless connection to the internet. The first reaction was alarmist - " The 'Secure' Wi-Fi Standard Has a Huge, Dangerous Flaw," wrote Wired - but the second wave was more measured - " There's a Huge WiFi Security Hole, But Don't Panic," wrote The Daily Beast.

Arm Has a Plan to Secure the Internet of Things

The company that designed the chip in your smartphone hopes an entire industry will adopt its new set of rules to lock down connected devices. When Japanese telecom company SoftBank acquired British chip designer Arm last year for $32 billion, it did so with an eye on more than just phones and tablets.

Electric Buses Get a Power Boost

Taking a 13.5-metric ton vehicle from 0-20 mph in 4.5 seconds is no mean feat. But that's what a new all-electric drivetrain from clean-energy bus maker Proterra promises. Its new DuoPower system uses two electric motors to deliver 510 horsepower. In fact, it can haul a 40-foot bus up a 26 percent slope, which is...

The US Postal Service Is Working on Self-Driving Mail Trucks

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds-and if the United States Postal Service has its way, the robots won't stop them, either. Yes, the agency you know best for bringing you junk mail addressed to whomever lived in your apartment before you has caught robofever.

JinkoSolar and Fraunhofer ISE break solar efficiency records for everyday solar panels - Electrek

Solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar has broken the record for solar cell efficiency for the most commonly used type of solar cells - 22.04% for a P-type multicrystalline product. Near concurrently, solar research facility Fraunhofer ISE has broken the record for n-type multicrystalline solar cells with an efficiency of 22.3%.

This Fun AI Tutorial Highlights the Limits of Deep Learning

Sure, neural networks can easily classify images-but they still don't really understand what they see without human intervention. That much is made plain in Google's new AI tutorial, called Teachable Machine, which was brought to our attention by the Verge. You can watch it in action in the video above, or try it out for yourself....

'I risk death threats to expose scammers'

In the flesh, Wayne May (not his real name) is an affable gentleman in his late 40s, softly spoken with a lilting Welsh accent. When we meet he's casually dressed in jeans and a Batman T-shirt. He works full-time as a carer.

Facebook tells advertisers more scrutiny is coming

Facebook is going to require ads that are targeted to people based on "politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues" to be manually reviewed before they go live, according to an email sent to advertisers and obtained by Axios. That's a higher standard than that required of most Facebook ads, which are bought and uploaded to the site through an automated system.

GCHQ is coming out of the shadows to protect Britain's economy from cyber-criminals

GCHQ's role has always been to collect and use intelligence to disrupt, divert and frustrate our adversaries. We've been doing this since 1919 and we're very good at it. But we cannot afford to stand still.

What Does Autonomy Mean for Supercars?

In a future without steering wheels, you may wonder what remains for Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, and other automakers that have built their businesses on driving experience. As it turns out, supercar manufacturers are also eyeing autonomy-just not in the way that passenger-hauling firms like Uber are.

Parscale: TV news "thought I was a joke"

On 60 Minutes this week, Lesley Stahl interviewed a man few people have heard of-- Brad Parscale. He was an influential player in the Trump campaign, working behind the scenes as a sort of secret weapon, reports Stahl. Parscale was hired to run the digital team but eventually came to oversee advertising, data collection, and much of the campaign's fund-raising.

Is it Weird to Ask Customer Service Reps if They're Robots?

In, say, a customer service chat window, what's the polite way to ask whether I'm talking to a human or a robot? Back in June 2006, before any of us needed to worry about whether we were talking to a robot in our daily interactions, it was up to contemporary artists to make people feel vulnerable and confused.

Renewables - Fuels & Technologies - IEA

Renewables, including solar, wind, hydro, biofuels and others, are at the centre of the transition to a less carbon-intensive and more sustainable energy system.

Why we launched DeepMind Ethics & Society

At DeepMind, we're proud of the role we've played in pushing forward the science of AI, and our track record of exciting breakthroughs and major publications. We believe AI can be of extraordinary benefit to the world, but only if held to the highest ethical standards.

Forget Killer Robots-Bias Is the Real AI Danger

Google's AI chief isn't fretting about super-intelligent killer robots. Instead, John Giannandrea is concerned about the danger that may be lurking inside the machine-learning algorithms used to make millions of decisions every minute. "The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will...

Red Tomato - Righteous Produce!

Red Tomato is a distributor that acts as a food hub. By arranging trucking, handing the paperwork, making the sale, and marketing their story, we support our growers in doing what they do best - growing healthy, local food.

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs just unveiled a software that designs whole neighborhoods

When it comes to designing a neighborhood, you might say it takes a village. Urban planners, architects, developers, and city officials all have to work together to create a space that will serve its community best. And all of these stakeholders generally mean increased time, cost, and a fragmented process that leaves constituents to wonder, "what actually is the best option available?"

Sidewalk Labs abandons Toronto smart city during pandemic

Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs has abandoned its ambition to create a smart neighbourhood in Toronto amid "unprecedented economic uncertainty" caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L Doctoroff announced in an article posted to Medium today that the current economic climate meant the company was unable to move forward with developing the neighbourhood for its partner Waterfront Toronto.

Sidewalk Toronto: Post-It Note City

In the shadow of an elevated freeway near Toronto's Port Lands, a former fish processing plant has been painted cerulean blue and converted into a test lab for a networked urban development project where physical and digital infrastructures will be optimized to support a "people-centered" neighborhood.

A City Is Not a Computer

"What should a city optimize for?" Even in the age of peak Silicon Valley, that's a hard question to take seriously. (Hecklers on Twitter had a few ideas, like "fish tacos" and "pez dispensers.") Look past the sarcasm, though, and you'll find an ideology on the rise.

Live interview with architect Carlo Ratti as part of Virtual Design Festival

Architect Carlo Ratti spoke to Dezeen in this Screentime conversation sponsored by Enscape as part of Virtual Design Festival. Italian architect Ratti is the founder of international design and architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati and is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT), where he directs the SENSEable City Lab.

Reading List | Reading Cities

Reading List This list is condensed and edited from a much longer reading list - "Here's What You Can Read If You'd Like to Think About Cities In Exactly the Way That I Do" - that I published on Medium.

Purchase or develop property

On this page, you can learn: how we sell property for development which properties are now in development, and what opportunities for affordable housing development we offer right now.

Server Side Modding * Basic BF1942 Tutorials

Website for modding Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam without requiring clients to download files. Offers tutorials and forums.

Turbo Jeeps

Download Turbo Jeeps now from the world's largest gaming download site, FilePlanet!

BattleField 1942 Servers : Buy BF1942 Server Hosting (rental)

Our worldwide network, designed by gamers for gamers, offers multiple redundant locations in your geographic region for lag free BattleField 1942 hosting. Should you change your mind, you can migrate your server to a new datacenter from the control panel any time!

Battlefield 1942 Fame Files and Mods

A site hosting links to a number of files and mods relating to battlefield 1942, they include the original files as well but we have our own archived here.

Windows 10 - BF1942 not starting - SiMPLE | Forum

This is a forum thread from the SiMPLE Forum that works through some technical help and offers some of the details highlighted in the documentation on Builder.

IdeaSpaceVR - Create beautiful virtual reality web experiences

IdeaSpaceVR - a PHP content management system (CMS) for the virtual reality web (WebVR)

A-Frame - Make WebVR

A web framework for building virtual reality experiences. Make WebVR with HTML and Entity-Component. Works on Vive, Rift, desktop, mobile platforms.

Pannellum

Pannellum is a lightweight, free, and open source panorama viewer for the web. Built using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and WebGL, it is plug-in free.

pchen66/panolens.js

panolens.js - Javascript panorama viewer based on Three.js

KRPano

The krpano Viewer is a small and very flexible high-performance viewer for all kind of panoramic images and interactive virtual tours. The viewer is available as Flash and HTML5 application.