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://www.theguardian.com/social-entrepreneurs-solving-problems-around-the-world/2018/apr/04/developing-mobile-technology-manage-funds-farmers-poverty-myagro-anushka-ratnayake-skoll-social-entrepreneurship-awardsSkoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship winner: Anushka Ratnayake, myAgro

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://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/deepcode-cleans-your-code-with-the-power-of-aiZurich-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…

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”
http://willcrichton.net/notes/gradual-programming/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…

While IBM’s latest figures show that perhaps the elephant can’t dance after all (https://www.ft.com/content/84dfe694-432f-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd), 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://www.ft.com/content/6add94ac-49a7-11e8-8ee8-cae73aab7ccbRevenue 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://medium.com/scratchteam-blog/3-things-to-know-about-scratch-3-0-18ee2f564278A 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://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611005/robots-are-going-to-redefine-japans-skylines/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://www.axios.com/trumps-electricity-solution-in-search-of-a-problem-287efa7b-181f-44a2-85f2-40625e9e22d0.htmlThere’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://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/amazon-is-said-to-be-working-on-another-big-bet-home-robotsTen 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://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/einstein-darwin-and-the-two-hour-genius-ruleZat 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://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/google-ceo-ai-will-be-bigger-than-electricity-or-fireThe technology could eliminate many of the constraints we now face, he said.

As more and more services compete for valuable kerb space (deliveries, ride shares, taxis, emergency vehicles), having a common framework, platform, and language to share valuable data on utilisation and timings can help city planners optimise rules and maximise value, ensuring they do this without compromising customer confidentiality (does the city need to know who is getting out in front of the health clinic, or just that it’s a busy place?) https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/?mbid=social_fb&mbid=social_fbThe ride-hailing company is working with DC to share data—and the much coveted curb.

A fascinating insight - what traces would be left of a civilisation which died out 4 million years ago? Certainly nothing on the surface (the oldest is only 1.8m years), and fossils are incredibly rare (only a few thousand dinosaur fossils exist despite their 180m year existence) - but what about chemical traces? https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-knowhttps://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=technology_review&utm_source=facebook.comFossils and objects are unlikely to survive more than a few million years. Searching for chemical traces of industrialization offers an intriguing alternative.

Assembling an Ikea chair in 20 minutes, rather than the 5 that a person takes, doesn’t seem like much of an advance. But while computers excel at trigonometry and logic games like chess, evolution’s billion year head start on interacting with the physical environment means that advances like this are drawing us (very) slowly closer to a world where robots can perform menial but unpredictable physical tasks.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21740733-cower-your-silicon-overlords-puny-humans-robots-can-assemble-ikeaCower before your silicon overlords, puny humans

Apple’s new robot, Daisy (an upgraded version of a robot announced in 2016), can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour, sorting the parts for reuse and recycling, extracting parts which traditional recyclers are unable to safely or cost effectively remove.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/apple-earth-day-daisy-iphone-recycling-a8312951.htmlApple has created a new robot – not for building products, but for ripping iPhones apart. The robot, named Daisy, can take nine different iPhones models apart and extract the important parts of them,…

The move to paperless movement of goods in these extraordinarily complex logistics chains has the potential to unlock massive benefits, reducing the cost of movements, by shortening the time it takes for goods to cross checkpoints and borders - an example 32 day journey of perishable goods could be completed in 20.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/drowning-in-a-sea-of-paper-world-s-biggest-ships-seek-a-way-outGlobalization has brought the most advanced trading networks the world has seen, with the biggest, fastest vessels, robot-operated ports and vast computer databases tracking cargoes. But it all still…

I have no idea about the game that the author is engineering manager for, but this is a good write up of a framework for assessing technical debt, including the value of resolving it now vs later (never)
https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debtBill Clark discusses classifying and managing tech debt at Riot.

While I’m sure that eventually, the process could have been automated, anyone who’s tried this even at a trivial scale would tell you to get the process working first, then to automate. So I don’t get how Tesla ended up in this position.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips-his-tesla-cap-to-humans-after-robots-undercut-model-3Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who’s built up an aura around how automated his car assembly plant will be, has good news for humans: We still need your help.

The clothing industry has long relied on low cost labour in developing countries, but advances in industrial robotics and machine learning and vision, at reducing cost, mean even those jobs are now at risk.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/your-next-tshirt-will-be-made-by-a-robotGeorgia Tech spin-off SoftWear Automation is developing ultrafast sewing robots that could upend the clothing industry

“For the past two decades, it was China who learned more from the US,” he says. “But in the next 10 years, we’ll ride on each other’s successes. There’s no point thinking who will surpass who.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43735023The head of China’s ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing says his team is young, idealistic and full of surprises.

An interesting move from hardware vendor to PaaS provider: The NVIDIA GPU Accelerated Cloud (NGC) for Deep Learning and HPC
https://www.nvidia.co.uk/gpu-cloud/A GPU-accelerated cloud platform with access to catalog of fully integrated and optimized containers for deep learning and HPC frameworks. Learn more.