An innovative saving product: “With myAgro’s Mobile Layaway platform, farmers save for seeds, fertiliser and specialised training via scratchcards – in the same way they might buy phone credit”
https://rob.al/2uTaXwb
Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship winner: Anushka Ratnayake, myAgro
An interesting concept – obvious when explained, but of course, many of the good ones are: “While paradigms like imperative or functional programming characterize certain underlying aspects of our mental model of program, gradual programming describes a process by which a mental model is formed”
https://rob.al/2qd2krk
Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and our programming languages should reflect that. I show several ways in which program models transition over time and discuss how…
A fascinating tool to support developers. I'm proud to say they had only a few recommendations and findings from my code/repositories (although i have subscribed, so i'll get notifications for others in future too) – and i can see how a tool like this could really help developers to produce better, more supportable, more secure code.
https://rob.al/2FpzVTH
Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system — essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code — is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rule…
While IBM's latest figures show that perhaps the elephant can't dance after all (https://rob.al/2Kn2HrS), Microsoft's pivot from a software to cloud services company is really starting to pay off – reporting revenue nearly $1bn higher than market expectations last year. Changing the direction has clearly been hard (e.g. disbanding the Windows Engineering team, previously the core of the company), and it's hard to see how a company of that size, and with that number of highly passionate people, can successfully adapt so quickly, but it seems to be well on track.
https://rob.al/2KlrI6N
Revenue boost from cloud business and upbeat forecast add to stock price confidence
Scratch is a great tool for introducing young children to programming, so I’m glad to see it continues to evolve and grow.
https://rob.al/2HfW0Xt
A new version of Scratch is coming this August!
Construction sites are perfect examples of chaotic environments – a massive number of moving parts, unpredictable environmental conditions, hundreds of people – and there’s a very real risk of injury or even death for every human present. Automation therefore is highly complex, but the first steps are starting to be taken, with robots moving parts and materials to free up humans to work on the more challenging task of actually building.
https://rob.al/2HH1kpB
Japanese companies are turning to robots to help build their skyscrapers.
Most power outages are due to failures in the transmission network (storms, broken power lines), not instability in supply. Making the move to newer, cleaner energy solutions is going to be difficult and take time – and cause pain for those involved. But that's not a good reason to prop up old, dirty, under-utilized coal and nuclear plants with subsidies or tricks. Let the newer "old fuel" plants provide the resilience needed, and replace the even older dirty capacity with newer, cleaner energy.
https://rob.al/2HmrMFC
There’s not a lot of evidence behind his laser focus on coal and nuclear power.
I'd love to have a robot butler. Previous attempts have been hilariously unsuccessful – so i'm not holding my breath – but the goal is certainly worth chasing.
https://rob.al/2vI9WaE
Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to…
Find yourself snowed under with no time to come up with your next big idea? Most of us come back from holidays refreshed and with new goals and objectives – but how do we achieve that level of innovative ideation on a more regular basis? Make time – two hours a week, locked away from distraction, could be enough. This article includes some tips on getting started.
https://rob.al/2Jb7b3m
Zat Rana looks at the trait shared by Einstein, Darwin and Nietzsche – taking the time to pause and think.
“AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said at Davos said. “Any time you work with technology, you need to learn to harness the benefits while minimising the downsides.”
https://rob.al/2J8L1P6
The technology could eliminate many of the constraints we now face, he said.