Archive for May, 2014
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Home » Archives for May 2014
NASA says 2.1MM deaths annually due to PM2.5 pollution.
[A version of this was original posted on our Facebook feed]. “2.1 million deaths occur worldwide each year as a direct result of a toxic type of outdoor air pollution known as fine particulate matter (PM2.5)” according to Environmental Research Letters study cited in a NASA article. (This is, of course, the type of dust pollution that our app lets take control of, especially in your home.) If you live in a major city anywhere in the world, you need to be concerned about premature death due to PM2.5 particulate dust, with the possible exception of people living in Florida (!). (The article actually compares current dust pollution levels to pre-industrial pollution levels.) China and India are, of course, off the scale, a concern for neighboring countries like Japan, South Korea, and the West Coast of the U.S. that get airflows from their cities. [We’ve noticed that air pollution in Los Angeles seems much worse in the winter than in the summer.… Read the restOh send in the trolls. Oh where are the trolls? There aren’t any trolls….
Send in the trolls…. Oh where are the trolls…. (With apologies to Stephen Sondheim) Our Miley Cyrus SQL Server Hadoop article got trolled on Twitter today. And we thought ‘yes! Finally! A troll.’ Then it turned out he had no Twitter readership. We admit there was a problem with the article. We didn’t list the fact that some people think  Miley Cyrus and using SQL Server together with Hadoop are both somewhat messed up. Mea culpa. (Also, we did not come down nearly hard enough on Microsoft. The article goes on endlessly with its tepid praise for SQL Server. If you can’t afford Oracle and need an top-of-line SQL solution it is actually quite a cost effective solution. If you can afford the risk of running Windows, that is. Mainly we attack MySQL. We thought that we’d at least get some MySQL fans trolling us. No, some random Microsoft type apparently thought their honor had been grievously offended with our insufficient praise of Redmond.)… Read the restFunny post about using fashion design as a device GUI
We posted this back on our Facebook page back in January in response to our then-very popular climate dress article.  Although our posting is intended to be funny, there is a serious point: perhaps we have a lot to learn from fashion design on how to make better GUIs for our electronic devices and gadgets. We did actually contact the designer, Diffus DK, as mentioned in the Facebook post, quoted below. We had a nice discussion about some of the other products they are working on, including some home furnishing designs and interfaces. (We probably should have posted here instead of on Facebook. As due to the “new” algorithms Facebook has been gradually rolling over the last few months, this blog gets much more readership than posting to Facebook page will. This has infuriated some marketers, who spent a great deal of money buying supposedly highly-targeted, highly-engaged Facebook likes from Facebook at cost typically of maybe $1-$2 or more.… Read the restReviews of our app, or working more with governments on air quality
It’s probably time to talk about our iOS mobile app again. Our recent articles on IBM Watson analytics and Google Glass generated a lot of interest with people contacting us privately to ask for advice on various start-up projects their working on. (Some more dubious then others — we’re going to an article talking generally about some of the worst mistakes we’re seeing on the start-up scene, so that readers can avoid them.) One comment we’re been getting is that we should doing more to get governments involved with our air quality app. So we decided to put some of the app reviewers from iOS on this blog (finally). The final commenter quoted below says he is a former environmental journalist, and points out that with our app you can monitor your own air quality, independent of government! He suspects not all governments will like this. We have a little anecdotal evidence he’s right.… Read the restRecent Posts
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