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Welcome back to CrunchWeek, friends. We are glad that you are here. Very glad in fact, because the TC crew has new digs. New in that we just rebuilt a large chunk of the office — not new in that it’s the same space as before. But now it’s better, so we dragooned Megan Rose Dickey and Lucas Matney to come in and chat about the week’s most important stories:… Read More
via TechCrunch
CrunchWeek: Slack, Diversity, And Have You Heard Of Apple?
Former Disney animator Glen Keane doesn’t need much of an introduction. He’s the man who drew The Little Mermaid’s Ariel. And Aladdin. And Pocahontas. And Beast. Now, he’s embracing the latest tool for digital artistry.
Here, the legendary animator is using an HTC Vive virtual reality headset with Google’s amazing Tilt Brush software to draw some of his famous characters in 3D. He can walk around his characters as he paints them into existence, which is pretty much the coolest thing ever.
While Keane is mostly known for his physical—not digital—artistry, he also has a bit of a thing for experimental digital art forms, too. Most recently, he created this amazing 360-degree short story you can experience on your smartphone.
He was also the driving force behind Disney’s recent move to make CG films feel more like hand-drawn creations, starting with Disney’s Tangled, which inspired the hybrid of 2D and 3D animation used in the critically acclaimed Paperman.
Two years ago, Paperman won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.
[Future of Storytelling Summit via Engadget]
via Gizmodo
Watch Disney Artist Glen Keane Draw the Little Mermaid in Virtual Reality
Whether you’ve got DIY projects to do or the occasional home repair, everyone needs a solid collection of tools. The Sweethome spent hundreds of hours of research and testing to create a list of the 22 best tools and toolbox.
In the guide, you’ll find specific recommendations for a screwdriver, tape measure, drill, utility knife, hammer, and other essential items. Although the entire kit costs $500, you can grow your collection over time.
Alternatively, we’ve got recommendations for what to put in your toolbox for different levels of DIY, so you can pair that with The Sweethome’s product recommendations.
The Best Tools and Toolbox | The Sweethome
via Lifehacker
Get the Best Tools for Your Workshop with This Guide
Mobile phone data can provide a rich source of information for understanding human activity. Now, researchers from MIT have built a tool that visualizes cell phone use in cities around the world, for any of us to study.
The new tool, called ManyCities, is a collaborative effort between the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT and Ericsson. It compiles mobile phone data — such as text message traffic, number of phone calls, and the amount of data downloaded —from base stations in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. It’s all anonymised, so there’s no sensitive information on display, but there is enough data to understand usage patterns, even down the the scale of small neighbourhoods.
What’s nice about the site is that there are plenty of intuitive interpretations of the data available from the get-go. So, you can see how phone use varies geographically, say, or by time, spotting the general upward trend in data use or how holidays affect the number of phone calls. And then you can dig deeper, to compare data use over time between different neighbourhoods or cities: like, how does the number of texts sent in Hong Kong compare to New York? (It peaks in Hong Kong in the morning, but in the evening in New York, by the way.)
There are other ways to look at the data, too, including smart tools that cluster different areas by usage patterns — essentially classifying regions as residential or commercial depending on phone use — or tie in demographic data, to gain a richer picture of why different behaviours are observed in different locations.
It’s easy to see how this kind of data could be used by all kinds of organisations to understand behavior in cities, providing all kinds of people — and not just telephone companies — with insights that can be used to plan and forecast activity and demand. It’s a shame the data isn’t available in real-time, but one suspects it might not be too long before that’s the case.
[ManyCities via arXiv Blog]
via Gizmodo
This Website Lets You Study Cell Phone Use In Cities Around the World
Non-stripping, self-countersinking screw
via Cool Tools
GRK R4 Multi-Purpose Screws
It’s counterintuitive, but sport hunting as it’s practiced in the US is the most significant conservator of animals in the country. And some of that applies even if you’re murdering lions in Africa. Yesterday, I made that point on Dr. Drew, amid much shouting.
Yesterday around lunchtime, my buddy Scott called up and asked if I was free to go on TV. He and I hunt together and he’s gone on Dr. Drew a couple times in the past to discuss this sport. He was shooting something else last night, so suggested me to the show’s producers. I said “yes,” went and got a quick haircut, showered, then walked down the street to the CNN tower not really knowing what to expect.
Shook Dr. Drew’s hand, got mic’d up, had my face airbrushed to mask my hideous features, then walked out on stage, was introduced as a big game hunter and got booed. A skinny blonde chick shouted at me that she was a vegan, a woman from the audience shouted at me that she was South African and didn’t know anything about hunting, but wanted to shout anyways, then another guy shouted that hunting is too easy because we use tools.
The fun part came in the green room after the show when I got to invite Dr. Drew to come hunting and he declined, explaining he was simply too good a person. Then I got to tell some Young Republican that he was a sinner for wearing polyester pants and called Kim Davis “a bigot.”
I guess the TL;DR on the whole issue is that it’s a fact that hunting funds conservation more significantly than goodwill does. That’s a shame, but it’s also a real thing and it’s why populations of lions, white rhinos, whitetail deer and other species still exist in this human age; hunting attaches an economic value to the success of their populations. Is that cold? Yeah. Does shouting on national TV do anything for animals? Not any more than being a vegan helps lions. Would I hunt a lion? Probably not, but Corey Knowlton didn’t think he’d ever hunt a black rhino either.
My point about African villagers not being huge fans of living next to big animals? Read this piece in the NY Times.
You can either be emotional about hunting and ignore the facts or you can treat it rationally and acknowledge its factual role in the real world. Personally, I don’t really care for trophy hunting, but wanted to at least be a voice of reason in this time of manufactured (and ultimately pointless) outrage. You may scream and shout, but hunting will keep on keeping animal populations viable while you do.
IndefinitelyWild is a new publication about adventure travel in the outdoors, the vehicles and gear that get us there and the people we meet along the way. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Wifi networks aren’t ubiquitous yet, and other wireless communication protocols like Bluetooth can suck battery life. So researchers at Disney have come up with an alternative way for devices to talk to each other using LEDs blinking faster than the human eye can see.
The applications seem a little toy-focused at this point (this is Disney, after all) but the technology is impressive nonetheless. Unlike incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, the brightness of LEDs can be controlled with extreme accuracy. In other words, they can be turned on and off at very high rates, faster than the human eye can detect. The other key feature? LEDs can detect light like a photodiode as effectively as they can produce it.
In the same way two ships passing in the night can communicate using morse code, or the way digital signals race down fiber optic cables as pulses of light, two devices can secretly communicate using the visible light generated by an LED. And that’s why Disney Research calls it Visible Light Communication.
Simple examples of the technology include a toy car coming to life when placed under a lamp, or light-up LEDs on a dress illuminating as they’re tapped with a wand featuring a flashing LED on the end. But through the use of a cheap and simple adapter connected to a headphone jack, a smartphone or tablet could receive signals from overhead LED lights, even those operating in wavelengths completely invisible to the human eye.
So invisible LED emitters could be set up around a grocery store, and automatically beam notifications about a sale or a coupon to your smartphone while you’re walking around. And given how incredibly cheap and commonplace LED technology has become, the Visible Light Communication technology could be easier to implement than NFC or other wireless protocols gaining popularity.
via Gizmodo
Disney Found a Way To Make LED Lights Talk To Each Other
Of the many new experiences you might have during a high-risk pregnancy, one of the least fun is a fetal monitoring test called a Non-Stress Test, or NST. It really should be called a High-Stress Test because of the anguish it puts parents through. Apple just made it a little bit better.
An NST is the best way for doctors to examine the health of a fetus in the final trimester. Here’s how it works: You’re essentially chained to a zillion monitors for an hour or so while doctors determine if your baby’s heartbeat and movement are normal. This usually has to be done in the hospital and it sometimes has to be done several times in the last few weeks of pregnancy. Due to my high blood pressure, I was admitted into Labor and Delivery six times to do NSTs before my daughter was actually born. (On the bright side, all the nurses knew me when I finally came back to give birth.)
But one of the biggest problems with this whole process is that even with all those sensors, doctors still have a hard time differentiating the mom’s heartbeat from the baby’s, which means they’re moving the sensors around, listening, moving them around, listening. Again, this is all incredibly scary, when you’re already worried about the health of your baby.
Airstrip, an integrated fetal monitoring app announced by Apple at today’s event, can comfortably gather all the information for an NST, even at home, and transmit all its data wirelessly to your Apple Watch. More importantly, it can send all this information to your doctor. But this is not just a UX innovation: Apple’s also partnered with an important medical device to work with it. The streamlined Sense4Baby monitor, which Airstrip acquired in April, looks like a comfy battery-powered band to replace a complicated array of wands, sensors, and stickers. And thanks to the excellent heartbeat tracker in the Apple Watch, supposedly it can work with the monitor to tell mom’s and baby’s heartbeat apart.
The Airstrip system also solves the problem of needing to check the baby’s health during labor—high-risk pregnancies especially need to be constantly monitored. Airstrip can apparently do all of this, including tracking the time and strength of contractions. Anyone who’s tried to squeeze a baby out of their vagina knows that the last thing you want is to be tethered to a fetal monitoring machine. You want to MOVE. And if you could track all of this data—the length and strength of contractions, with updates on the baby’s health—easily on your tiny Apple Watch, you could confidently wander around laboring at home, only coming to the hospital or birthing center when it was time to deliver.
Let’s hope this is financially feasible for hospitals, doctors, and midwives to use—and it’s not just women who can afford an Apple Watch. While I don’t think there’s too much value in sitting around at home checking your unborn baby’s heartbeat unless your doctor needs that information (in fact, many doctors will recommend you not become obsessed with tracking your baby’s heartbeat at home), I can see this being immensely helpful in developing countries with unreliable or nonexistent power. It will almost certainly help deliver healthier babies. And of course, hopefully you don’t need an Apple Watch to view the data—let’s hope it will track just as easily on a phone or tablet.
As an owner of a uterus who has lamented the lack of women presenters onstage at Apple events, and was pretty peeved that Apple’s HealthKit originally didn’t include female-friendly features like a period tracker (they’ve since added it), this is actually one of the best things a tech company has ever done for women’s health. I’m almost looking forward to the Non-Stress Test in my next pregnancy.
Follow the author at @awalkerinLA
via Gizmodo
This Fetal Monitoring System Is The Best Thing Apple Has Ever Done for Women
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Interactive maps are a fantastic way to present geographic data to your visitors. Libraries like Google Maps and Open Street Maps are a popular choice to do this and they excel at visualizing street-level data. However, for small-scale maps, SVG maps are often a better option. They are lightweight, fully customizable and are not encumbered by any licensing restrictions.
It’s possible to find a number of SVG maps released under permissible licenses in the Wikimedia Commons. Unfortunately, it’s likely that you will eventually find these options lacking. The map you need may not exist, may be out of date (as borders change), or may not be well-formatted for web use. This article will explain how to create your own SVG maps using Natural Earth data and open source tools. You will then be able to create SVG maps of any area of the world, using any projection, at any resolution. As an illustration, we will create an SVG world map.
The post A Guide To Building SVG Maps From Natural Earth Data appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
via Smashing Magazine
A Guide To Building SVG Maps From Natural Earth Data
Hating exercise isn’t the same as being lazy. Exercise motivation is a complicated subject, but if getting off the couch is the hardest part for you, we’ve got you covered. Here’s how to finally start working out, no matter how much you might hate it.
There is actually evidence to suggest that your innate enjoyment from exercise may be determined by your genes. Relatively recent research from The Journal of Physiology selectively bred mice based on their predisposition to exercise. After a few generations of breeding (or shall we say inbreeding like Lannisters), brain activity showed that one group of mice found exercise to be rewarding—and thus voluntarily exercised more—while the other group did not.
But of course, people aren’t mice—Peter Pettigrew aside. There plenty of reasons exercise may bore you. Still, it’s hard to discount the fact that genetics play a role. For the unlucky individuals in this pool, this can quickly spiral out of control if you put on weight as a result; you hate exercise, and gaining weight compounds the difficulty of getting started.
More importantly: hating exercise isn’t a moral failure, as many would have you believe. Hell, the treadmill was originally created as a torture device, and you’re no more to blame for hating it than you are for…well…any other torture device.
But as I’ve said before, culpability and responsibility are not the same thing. You can’t help your innate feelings or preferences, but you’re damn well responsible for doing something about it. I’ve found that if there is a laziness of sorts preventing people from exercising, it’s not a physical one, but a mental one—it’s the laziness of considering alternative explanations rather than reducing the problem to sheer “laziness,” showing yourself some compassion, then committing to an actionable plan.
So get yourself in the correct mental headspace, and move forward with the following plan.
I’ve found this is where people make the biggest mistake. The default activity for anything health related is to start running or commit to an event such as a marathon. “I need to lose weight…I should start running!” “I need to improve my flexibility and back issues…I should join a marathon!” “Man, this rash still isn’t going away…I bet there’s a treadmill sale somewhere!”
There are natural reasons that running is the default exercise of choice. Not only is it super accessible, but society has a bit of a “just do it” mentality, which further implies that you should “just suck it up” and get started. But this is the wrong mindset. It implies that there are few nuances to adhering to your regimen, and failing means that you “just couldn’t do it.” Translation: you obviously “weren’t tough enough” to do something so simple.
In reality, because most people start exercising for purposes of weight loss, running might actually be the worst route to go. It can be a painful endeavor for those considerably overweight and—along with other forms of exercise that focus on the caloric burn—yields a low return on your investment.
This is not to say that running is bad. Do start running if you truly love it (or can honestly see yourself loving it), if weight loss isn’t your main focus, or if you explicitly want to improve your endurance. However, if weight loss is your priority or you just can’t stand running, consider other forms of exercise. Those who are overweight and sedentary will benefit from starting off by walking instead. Even better, consider investing some time into strength training in the gym (if finances permit) or using your own body weight.
The best apps are famous for getting users to stick and create habit around using them every day. One of the ways that they do this is through a concept known as activation—the magical “aha” understanding that causes someone to start using a product repeatedly. For example, Facebook’s “activation” is getting seven friends in the first ten days, whereas Dropbox’s activation is uploading your first file.
Thinking of exercise as “sticky” will do wonders for adherence, and luckily we can apply these same concepts to fitness.
When you pick your exercise of choice—be it yoga, running, strength training, boxing, or something else—find the one improvement that will excite you the most. If you take up strength training, this might mean being able to do more pushups in one total set or increasing your favorite exercise, like a dumbbell shoulder press. If you want to get better at running, this might mean a better one-mile time or a better time on your sprint. If it’s difficult for you to come up with a metric, consider using “perceived exertion” on a scale of one to ten. For example, if you start walking more, consider using the total amount of time that you’re walking at a brisk pace until you feel a 7/10 in terms of fatigue.
The concept of activation explains why many group classes, despite their cult-like hype, aren’t effective when it comes to adherence. It’s harder to find your personal definition of “activation” doing something like SoulCycle, or a similar cookie cutter class. Furthermore, you are forced to move at the pace of others in the group, rather than your personal one.
Whatever your choice for “activation,” realize that the improvement might be miniscule at first—an extra rep on your set of push-ups or a few seconds on your mile. But make no mistake, activation is important because it makes exercise “sticky.” It’s not enough to just feel good that you did something. That’s fine at first, but it will only last for so long, especially in those who inherently dislike exercise. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you’ll eventually love it one day. Hell, even I still don’t.
Once you’ve figured out your metric for activation, measure your baseline. Using the examples above, that means seeing how many pushups you can do in one set or how long it takes you to run a mile. Make sure that you use a reasonable amount of effort.
Next, embark on a well-vetted beginner’s program, rather than going off on your own. For strength training, I suggest Starting Strength, Lifehacker’s body weight program, or the Minimum Viable Fitness program that I wrote. For running, I’ve heard many great things about Couch to 5k. Reddit’s /r/fitness subsection has a good selection of beginners programs. Make sure that the program that you select incorporates your metric and exercise for “activation.” Better yet, pick an activation metric that’s already in the program of your choice if you can.
After a week, measure against the baseline that you set, using the exact same conditions. In all likelihood, you’ll see an improvement—if not, treat fitness like an objective problem and figure out what went wrong. This as a concrete win…you improved. This didn’t take weeks or months, but close to a single week. Make sure to celebrate and appreciate that as a newbie, you’ll continue to make week-to-week improvements. Eventually, you’ll realize that success isn’t about following shallow mantras like “just do it”, but rather, moving beyond that mentality.
Title image remixed from Frans Dono (Shutterstock).
via Lifehacker
How to Finally Start Working Out (Even If You Hate It)