by davidmiller4312

This article is originated from here.

Project management is very important and one of the key ingredients for increasing productivity. Nowadays, project managers use sophisticated tools or software to help them out in task distribution or ticket resolutions etc. However, it would be wrong to assume that all of them are using the full potential of their task management software.

They usually just add projects, set deadlines and hand out assignments, yet there is a feature that can really help them out become better managers. Most quality tools nowadays have an in-built time tracking software that should be utilized. The following article will explain why time tracking is so important in managing projects and what its true benefits are for the future.

It can help you plan better

The core of project management lies in planning and knowing whether something will be plausible or not. By using online time tracking, project managers can receive valuable input regarding the time necessary for project completion.

Once you have the necessary statistics, you will know whether some projects will need less time to be completed, or more. Every project manager knows that you need to plan in advance and anticipate potential changes or repairs, thereby knowing the accurate time for project completion is very valuable for planning.

It improves efficiency

People tend to be more efficient when you introduce the element of competition to the equation. Only in this case, they would compete with their previous selves. Once you know just how much time they would need to finish a certain type of project, you can turn it into a record that they need to beat. So, in a way time tracking can serve as a form of motivation.

Moreover, if you know how to estimate the time you need for a project, chances are you won’t leave any unnecessary vacancy. You can organize your daily work evenly so that each day the amount of workload is the same.

If one day your workers are too relaxed, whereas the next one they are swamped, it can reflect badly on their performance. So, track time and categorize tasks accordingly, if you want your workforce to be satisfied and not overburdened.

It will help you organize future projects

Another group of people that benefits from time tracking tool are client managers. You can create an amazing spreadsheet that will help them in their negotiations. Once they know the nature of the project they can immediately know how to respond, and tell the client just how much it will take for the project to be completed; they won’t have to check with you every time a new client arrives.

These features are also a part of task management software, so creating these spreadsheets will be quite easy. Moreover, with such swift response your clients will find you more proficient and reliable, which will only result in positive reviews and future business transactions.

Reduces the chance of not delivering everything on time

The most important aspect of online time tracking is risk management. There is nothing more disappointing than missing a deadline, and it always reflects badly on your reputation. Sure, even if you keep monitoring projects and know exactly how much time it will take to complete them, it doesn’t make your strategy bullet proof, but it does mitigate the risks significantly.

As mentioned, always leave 2-3 days as backup, in case things do not go as planned, and if the client asks for something urgently you can immediately point out the potential dangers of such a request. All things considered, failing to deliver projects on time is really unprofessional, and should be avoided at all costs.

You become a better estimator

Once you get a hang of it, you will become an excellent estimator. You can modify an entire business plan based on your knowledge, create far better working strategies, and bring the optimization of the workflow to a whole new level. From that point on, you won’t use task management software to track time, you’ll simply use it to see if you made a valid educated guess regarding a certain project, and if not, you’ll use it to rectify those mistakes in the future.

In other words, this will help you grow professionally and you’ll become way more competent than before. You’ll know exactly what tasks you can take on, and which takes should be outsourced, whether you need a new employee or a part time solution only, so you can become really good at managing your budget and helping out in that department as well.

More thorough reports for clients

Finally, it can help you secure customer loyalty. If you use time management software you can also send you clients a detailed report on project progression. Whenever a client is updated, he or she will know exactly at which pace you are progressing, and will more likely re-hire your company in the future. This will make you look more professional and it will give you positive reviews, which increases your chances of gaining additional clients.

As you can see, these are all quite good benefits, and the whole process of tracking time is optimized thanks to task management software. All you need to do is use the statistics and results in order to organize better for future tasks. You get to distribute the workload evenly, you improve customer service, and you improve the budget management of the company. So, as far as online time tracking is concerned, go for it.

By: Albert M. Green, PhD, CEO, Kent Displays, Inc.

This article is obtained from here.

In your next meeting, notice how many people use pen and paper to take notes – despite access to smartphones, laptops and other communication technology. You are witnessing the power and durability of handwriting. Now technology experts in academia and industry are developing tools to integrate handwriting into digital communications, and have spawned revolutionary solutions in the new category of “eWriting.”

Recent academic research shows that humans tend to retain information better when writing by hand, rather than typing. A widely cited article published in Psychological Science revealed that, participants who wrote notes by hand demonstrated stronger understanding and retention of the material covered – and were also more successful in applying and integrating the information – than participants who typed notes. Many studies show handwriting activates areas of the brain, which aid in early childhood language and literacy development. In 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program funded Kent Displays, Inc., with Kent State University, to investigate the impact of Boogie Board™ eWriters on student learning.

eWriting technology combines the familiarity and natural feel of handwriting with the capabilities of mobile devices and computers for digital information storage and sharing. As a result, businesses, schools and others can reduce costs, improve communication and inspire great ideas for individuals and teams.

An “eWriter” – a portable, reusable storage and display medium – captures handwritten information electronically and can be erased (refreshed) many times. Low-power eWriter displays are made by Kent Displays, E Ink,CLEARink, Sharp and others, some of which offer writing experiences for users similar to writing on paper. For example, Kent Displays’ flexible, plastic cholesteric liquid crystal display (LCD) is lightweight, about the same thickness as a business card, and even sounds like the scratch of pen on paper when users write on the surface with any stylus, even a fingernail. Industry expert Ken Werner writes, “The device provides a pleasing pen-on-paper feel, which is an absolute requirement for a successful eWriter.”

New directions for eWriting allow users to take pen-and-paper-style advantage of our ubiquitous handhelds. Many tablets now have a pen input feature, and, new writing options exist for smartphones. For example, Samsung’s popular Galaxy Note [ a phablet (smartphone/tablet crossover) incorporates pen writing ability.

eWriting technology offers significant benefits of communication efficiency and effectiveness for several handwriting intensive industry sectors:

–        Healthcare – communications with patients with voice limitations, documentation of care

–        Education – teaching and testing, especially math, chemistry and languages

–        Business – note-taking and sharing in meetings, collaborative brainstorming

–        Defense/security – maintenance checklists, signature authentication

eWriting technology helps our environment. Per the Environmental Paper Network, making one sheet of non-recycled paper releases about 0.03 pounds of greenhouse gases. However, an iPad releases about 0.004 pounds of greenhouse gases an hour. Therefore, a student could take notes for seven hours on an iPad before the greenhouse gas emissions exceeded those of a single piece of paper. Schools that implement eWriting programs can reduce environmental damage, while enabling students to learn, communicate and spark ideas more effectively with handwriting.

Display industry innovators will help transform global communication for humans that currently use analog writing. Successful leaders will develop new sustainable eWriting technologies that can capture, store, share and present information while leveraging the user’s natural handwriting experience, Together, we will write – rather, eWrite – the future of display technology to improve our workplaces, our communities and our world.

This article is taken from:  here

Guest Editors’ Introduction • Arkady Zaslavsky and Prem Jayaraman • September 2016

One of the most valuable aspects of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is the data it produces. Businesses use that data to support their decisions, and — as IoT grows — they need better tools for relevant and timely discovery. These days, discovery systems can find the right data without even knowing its structure, semantics, sensor description, or location. These systems can also deduce context information such as annotations and metadata.

The term “IoT data and context discovery” refers to both activities that are specific to data providers (certain prepublication curation tasks, for example) and those that are specific to end publishers or brokers (such as integrating datasets to support data linking and context-driven search). The discovery process comprises two successive loops:

• The foraging loop identifies, assesses, and validates data sources at the point of data acquisition, as well as extracts and formats the relevant data into a consumable form.
• The sense-making loop processes, analyzes, and exploits the extracted data to generate relevant context, aiming to provide answers and insights.

The advent of IoT has fuelled a paradigm shift in data and context discovery. Datasets that were once confined to single applications are now discoverable and available for reuse and repurposing in multiple applications. This new paradigm provides vendors with incentive-based approaches to opening their IoT data repositories while still upholding their security and privacy policies. Despite this progress, the diversity of capabilities and standards among devices poses significant challenges. Computing Now’s September 2016 issue includes seven articles that examine opportunities and challenges in IoT data and context discovery.

A Common Consortium

Currently, different devices store data in separate “silos.” For example, Fitbit devices collect personal health data, and EarlySense devices monitor patient vital signs. Both companies produce zettabytes of data, but each keeps its data on its own servers. To fulfill the ambitious dream of a truly interconnected IoT, data would have to be stored in widely distributed, heterogeneous databases to ensure global availability. Retrieving the data would require a common, machine-readable data-representation framework.

Figure 1 depicts the guest editors’ vision of a common consortium of IoT service providers. In Figure 1a, the current vendor-specific approach creates IoT data silos by tightly coupling applications with specific sensors. In Figure 1b, a discovery-enabled system loosely couples applications and sensors to allow for interoperability and IoT data reuse and repurposing.

Figure 1. Vision of IoT discovery.  a) Vendor-specific IoT approaches currently create data silos. b) Our vision of a discovery-enabled system would leverage loose coupling between applications and sensors to enable interoperability, reuse, and repurposing of IoT data and context.

A discovery engine, supported by a context engine and an integration engine, would discover underlying IoT data sources that multiple vendors host and manage. The system would require common, well-described interfaces that utilize Internet standards such as the semantic web. The evolution of IoT and big data requires support for new data- and sensor-discovery techniques to overcome issues that prevent seamless data access and reuse.

In this Issue

This month’s Computing Now theme begins with “Physical-Cyber-Social Computing: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” by Payam Barnaghi and his colleagues. The authors introduce physical-cyber-social computing, explaining how systems interpret users’ social structures through IoT data and provide (near) real-time actionable information and services.

Dimitrios Georgakopoulos and his colleagues provide a vision of a future IoT system architecture driven by service discovery and real-time service integration in “Discovery-Driven Service Oriented IoT Architecture.” This vision includes on-demand discovery, IoT device integration, cloud storage, and computing resources.

In “Semantic Description, Discovery and Integration for the Internet of Things,” Sejin Chun and his colleagues provide a semantic, model-based IoT directory system to help manage metadata and relationships among devices. The proposed model enables shared conceptualization for efficient interaction between the devices and the online directory service.

Security is an important concern in IoT. In “Context-Sensitive Policy Based Security in Internet of Things,” Prajit Kumar Das and his colleagues propose a framework that lets IoT devices capture, represent, and enforce information-sharing policies. The authors use semantic web concepts to enable consistent policy representation and present use cases to demonstrate their design.

“Matching Over Linked Data Streams in the Internet of Things,” by Yongrui Qin, Quan Z. Sheng, and Edward Curry, explores techniques for efficient dissemination of IoT data to consumers. The authors use linked open data to represent IoT data and its relationships, and then disseminate matched data based on system-registered queries. The paper presents a use case to validate the system’s applicability, speed, and efficiency.

In “Resource Discovery in Internet of Things: Current Trends and Future Standardization Aspects,” Soumya Kanti Datta, Rui Pedro Ferreira Da Costa, and Christian Bonnet discuss the current technology landscape for discovery in IoT, including advantages and limitations. They propose a centralized registry for storing resource configurations and parameters, as well as a search engine that ranks available resources and provides URIs for direct access to resources.

The final article, “The Web of Things: Challenges and Opportunities,” presents concerns arising from the increasing use of virtual representations for physical or abstract things that are accessible via web technologies. Author Dave Raggett argues that achieving a new phase of exponential growth will require open markets, open standards, and the vision to imagine the potential for this expanding network.

Industry Perspectives

This month’s Computing Now issue includes two video interviews with prominent industry experts on the importance and challenges of data and context discovery in IoT middleware, services, and applications. The first features Rodolfo Milito from Cisco in San Jose, California, who is reputed to be the father of fog computing. The second provides insight from Manfred Hauswirth, the director of Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) in Berlin.

Conclusion

The articles in this Computing Now issue address various challenges that IoT data and context discovery raises, as well as propose solutions to make IoT practical, feasible, deployable, and usable. Of course, more research is necessary before IoT data and context discovery becomes a common feature of IoT applications, systems, and services. We encourage interested readers to dive into the research and join the large community of IoT champions, developers, architects, and users.

Guest Editors

Arkady Zaslavsky is senior principal research scientist at Data61 of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales, La Trobe University, and ITMO University. Zaslavsky has a PhD in computer science from the Institute of Control Sciences, USSR Academy of Sciences. His technical interests include the Internet of Things; pervasive, ubiquitous, and mobile computing; context-awareness; semantic data management; and mobile analytics. He is a member of the Computing Now editorial board. Contact him at arkady.zaslavsky@csiro.au.

Prem Prakash Jayaraman is a research fellow at the Swinburne University of Technology. His research interests include the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big-data analytics, and mobile computing. Jayaraman has a PhD in computer science from Monash University. Contact him at prem.jayaraman@gmail.com or www.premjayaraman.com.

The full article can be obtained here

Applications for wearable devices (Source: IDTechEx Wearables Report)

By Sri Peruvemba, Board Director & Head of Marketing, Society for Information Display

Are consumers becoming jaded by all the wearables products out in the marketplace now? Has all the hype and fancy buzzwords met expectations?  The jury’s still out but the wearables market, nonetheless, continues to grow.

There are currently scores of smart electronic devices on the market that can be worn on the body. As the examples in Figure 1 show, these include not only the familiar wrist-worn and clip-on fitness bands and watches, but also arm bands, head- and shoe-worn devices, and clothing. Because a great deal of the functionality tends to focus on measuring and tracking such health parameters as steps taken, heart rate and sweat output, it’s natural that these devices have initially been most strongly embraced by the makers of sports and fitness products. But which of these products will survive and even thrive? What else that qualifies as “wearable” is on the horizon? And what role does the electronic display play in driving these advances?

In the short term, the makeup of the consumer wearables market will continue to be dominated by wrist-worn devices, with the majority of product development focused on new-generation IoT-connected smart watches. Most of the smart watches are made by technology startups and consumer electronic giants that focused on technical features in their development. The smart watch on my wrist can count steps, show incoming calls and messages, display weather data, alert me about my next appointment – all useful features, but the watch itself is bulky, communicates to me via an annoying haptic buzz and will probably not win any awards for design in the traditional wristwatch industry.

And smart watches still don’t quite make the same statement that a Rolex does– I don’t see friends and colleagues parting with their traditional high-end watches. Yet, millions of not-so-great-looking smart watches have been sold in the past year.  And their novelty has worn off sufficiently that consumers are increasingly demanding the kinds ofaesthetically pleasing designs typically associated with traditional high quality wristwatches. As a result, we’re seeing such high-end brands as TAG Heuer, Bulgari and Gucci – to name a few – dipping their toes into the smart watch pool, with curved and uniquely shaped displays helping bring some of these elegant innovations to life.

Designers will also increasingly develop smart jewelry – rings, necklaces, earrings, bracelets – embracing integration of smart devices that marry fashion with function. Similarly, we will see growth in development of clothing with built-in electronics, thanks to flexible devices. Not only are they thin and light, but they also conform to the body. We expect to see sensors and actuators integrated that can provide a sort of “body GPS,” telling you both where you are and if someone else is getting too close to your personal space – kind of like the forward collision warning sensor in your new car.  In addition, nanotechnology is being utilized in the clothing to provide superinsulation, with sensors noting your condition (cold, hot, dehydrated, etc.) and connectivity that can send out an SOS if you fall or are injured if you are hiking in the wilderness or by yourself at home.

The area that will really take off between now and 2019 in the wearables space is infotainment –a key component of which is augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) devices.

Many areas besides gaming can benefit from AR/VR, such as education. Using these systems, and adding haptics – touch technology that uses force on the skin to deliver tactile feedback – children in dry parts of Africa, for example, can not only learn about the rain forest, but can actually experience being in pouring rain with the combination of visual, auditory and sensory experiences. Teaching can become a much richer experience through the use of VR/AR technology, enabled by displays with excellent optical quality (more vivid colors, better viewing angles, faster response time).

Nearly all of the applications cited above must convey large amounts of information on small (even miniscule) displays, which must deliver high brightness and resolution with very low power consumption. But these tech hurdles will eventually be surmounted and we’ll continue to see – and experience – a lot of innovative wearables products!

A squishy underwater robot with limbs that bend in every direction requires unusual control strategies

Up until recently, robots have mainly been used in factories, where their rigid arms are well suited for the repetitive tasks at hand and the accuracy required. Now, however, roboticists want to put their creations to work in more unpredictable settings where conventional robots often run into trouble.

Some researchers want to build flexible robots that can navigate irregular landscapes, like the ocean floor or the surface of Mars [pdf]. These robots must move over rough terrain without getting stuck and need manipulators that can grab whatever strangely shaped objects they encounter. Other researchers are focusing on soft robots that can be trusted not to hurt the people they come into contact with. Such soft robots could, for example, work as aides for the disabled or the elderly, and miniature soft robots could even serve as surgical tools inside the body.

In pursuit of these goals, robotics researchers are increasingly studying animals. That makes sense because the bodies of animals are composed mostly of soft materials, with pliable joints and tissue that can change shape without damage. Because their soft tissues absorb shocks and can conform to varied surfaces, animals can use simple control strategies that don’t demand great precision.

That, in a nutshell, is why I helped launch the Octopus Integrating Project. The effort brought together several labs from European and Israeli universities, which began working together in 2009 to build a robot replica of the fascinating animal. Some of the consortium members had worked on a previous effort that resulted in an “OctArm” attached to a tanklike robot, and they eagerly joined the new effort to copy the animal’s remarkable capabilities. We knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Illustration: Emily Cooper

Octo-anatomy: In a real octopus’s arm, a criss-cross arrangement of muscles provides all the movement. When the longitudinal muscles contract the arm gets shorter and fatter; when the transverse muscles contract the arm gets longer and skinnier.

The octopus has neither an internal nor external skeleton, and its eight arms can bend at any point, elongate and shorten, and stiffen to apply force. It can twist its arms around objects and manipulate them with great dexterity, as demonstrated in plenty of entertaining YouTube videos, including one where the animal steals a camera from an underwater photographer and another where it releases itself from a jar by unscrewing the lid from the inside. An octopus needs such dexterity to survive in the wild. When it crawls along the seafloor, for example, its arms must coordinate their movements in a complex rippling sequence to push and pull its body forward.

We wanted to build a robot that could replicate those agile motions. We started by studying the octopus arm’smuscular hydrostat structure, which allows the overall volume of the arm to remain constant while individual muscles contract and change shape. So when the diameter of an arm decreases, its length increases, and vice versa. To translate biology into engineering, we worked with marine biologists to take measurements of octopus arms and make computer models that could inform our designs. Then we began experimenting with soft actuators that could mimic the animal’s muscles.

One option was to make artificial muscles using materials known as electro-active polymers (EAPs). A layer of a soft material is sandwiched between two electrodes; when a voltage is applied, the EAP acts as a capacitor and the electrodes draw closer together, squeezing the soft material between them. Exploiting this phenomenon, researchers have created contractile units that can be arranged in stacks to generate significant forces. A research network in Europe is actively pursuing EAPs for artificial muscles.

Another possibility was to construct our robotic arms using fluidic actuators, in which liquids or gases fill soft chambers to change the shape of the larger structure. Clever design of the shapes and arrangement of the compartments allow a robotic arm to bend in the desired directions and may eventually enable more complicated movements.

Yet another interesting approach relies on filling a chamber with a granular material, such as sand or even ground coffee, instead of a fluid. With this technique, called jamming, the soft robot remains pliable until a vacuum is applied. Then the robot’s body stiffens into a hard shape—like a vacuum-packed brick of coffee on the grocery-store shelf. By applying vacuum to discrete sections in programmed sequences, researchers can make soft robots stiffen and move in specific ways.

My team was most interested in creating artificial muscles using materials called shape-memory alloys (SMAs). When heated, SMAs deform to a predefined shape, which they “remember.” We fashioned SMA wires into springs and ran electric current through them to heat them, causing the springs to scrunch up in a way that imitates muscular contractions. For the Octopus project, my team constructed a prototype arm using SMA springs to stand in for the longitudinal and transverse muscles found in the limbs of a real octopus. By sending current through different sets of springs, we made the underwater arm bend at multiple points, shorten and elongate, even grasp things.

Gif: The BioRobotics Institute/Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

An octo-bot’s actuators mimic real octopus muscles.

Our work is primarily meant to demonstrate the potential of soft robotics, and much work remains before a robot octopus will be ready to crawl out of the lab. For example, a bot with sensors on its limbs could provide feedback about its position and the materials it encounters, which could lead to better control strategies. A team of researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, is addressing just that challenge by embedding proprioceptive sensors in a robotic snake [pdf].

It’s fun to imagine how an advanced robot octopus with eight dexterous arms could perform in the wild. Take the marine-energy industry, where there’s great interest in placing tidal turbines on the seabed to harvest power from the flowing water. But if the machinery breaks, repairs would be difficult and expensive: Workers would have to either haul turbines up to the surface or send human divers down. Maybe, one day, an octo-bot technician could be sent instead. With its agile limbs, it could manipulate tools and fix whatever is broken.

We roboticists aren’t interested in the octopus for its limbs and muscles alone—we also value its particular brand of intelligence. The octopus’s brain and peripheral nervous system are well developed compared with those of other mollusks, but they’re still fairly limited. It’s surprising, then, that they can control a huge range of movements in eight independent arms. So our next challenge under the Octopus project was to study how the animal controls its arms. We hoped the results would help us find ways to manage a flexible robot’s complex movements.

Biologists have determined that the octopus’s brain doesn’t issue top-down commands for every small movement of its twisty limbs. In Octopus vulgaris, the common octopus, the brain actually contains far fewer neurons than the peripheral nervous system. Biologists believe that the brain initiates motions, while lower motor centers control the precise neuromuscular activity. Experiments have shown that even if you sever the nerves descending from an octopus’s brain, its arms can still recoil from unpleasant stimuli and reach out as if to grab something.

And here’s what we found even more interesting: The octopus’s limbs don’t need comprehensive directions to produce the desired movement. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, their bodies are designed to respond to their environment in certain automatic and useful ways. This concept is often called morphological computation [pdf] by roboticists, while artificial intelligence researchers refer to it as embodied intelligence.

When translated to the robot world [pdf], this principle means we should design our robots so that the physical properties of their bodies automatically produce the desired movements. With this strategy, extremely simple commands can cause a robot to efficiently carry out complex tasks.

For further reading, go to:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-hardware/robot-octopus-points-the-way-to-soft-robotics-with-eight-wiggly-arms

This article is obtained from this link.

Smartphone owners have yet another reason to stare at their device. Game developer Niantic last month released Pokémon Go—a location-based, augmented reality game for iOS and Android devices. More than 75 million people worldwide have downloaded the free game, which tracks your phone’s location and sends notifications when fictional creatures—with names such as Pikachu and Squirtle—are nearby. Their images appear on a street map of the player’s location. When the creature is less than 2 meters away, the map disappears and the creature appears on the screen as if it were in the same real-world location as the player.

Pokémon Go has made augmented reality more accessible, and almost commonplace, to millions of people—many of whom had never interacted with an AR game or device before.

AR expert John Rousseau, head of insights and strategy at Artefact, a design firm in Seattle, predicts that virtual and augmented reality apps such as Pokémon Go will become ubiquitous. At the Augmented World Expo, held in June in Santa Clara, Calif., Rousseau proposed three “laws of mixed reality” to ensure that AR and VR technology positively impacts society. So, how does Pokémon Go hold up?

1. Mixed reality must enhance our capacity for mindful attention.Developers at Niantic know how distracting the game can be. The first screen that appears whenever a player opens the game has a warning message: “Remember to be alert at all times. Stay aware of your surroundings.”Despite the disclaimer, the game has already caused deadly distractions, as people walk around while looking at their phone to find and capture nearby Pokémon creatures. Some players have been robbed, stepped into traffic, and have even fell off a cliff while playing the game. People who choose to play Pokémon Go while driving pose even more risks to themselves and those around them.One way to cut down on the danger is by playing the game on a different device. Osterhout Design Group, for example, recently loaded the game on its R-7 AR smartglasses, which let players keep their heads up. Engineers at ODG had a blast testing the smartglasses. The glasses require a Wi-Fi connection to play games, though, and they cost US $2,750. So for many of us, using an AR headset to catch that rare Charizard isn’t quite feasible.
2. Mixed reality must embody a shared human experience.In terms of benefiting society, bringing people together is where Pokémon Go really shines. Many people say they have gotten out of the house and are interacting with other players, striking up conversations with strangers they might typically ignore.

   The inspiration to go outside and become more social seems to benefit players with anxiety, depression, or autism. A mother of a 12-year-old autistic boy in North Carolina, for example, told ABC News that her son, who would normally be inside playing video games, is now taking his passion for gaming outside and relating to people with whom he normally would have difficulty interacting.

3. Mixed reality must respect boundaries between commerce and data.Rousseau notes in a blog post that as mixed reality starts to take over, “data will become more valuable and easily manipulated to serve other interests.”The Pokémon Go’s first update limited the amount of personal data it collects—but according to its privacy policy, Niantic has permission to share information about users with other companies for what it says are “research and analysis, demographic profiling, and other similar purposes.”On the bright side, the game has benefited some small businesses by allowing owners of game shops, restaurants, and retailers to declare their buildings as Pokéstops, where players can stock up on virtual supplies. Business owners also can purchase lures that attract Pokémon creatures—and therefore Pokémon Go players—to their locations.

Although the game does not obey all three of Rousseau’s laws, it does have its plus side. In addition to the benefits already listed, the game encourages exercise and teaches players about local historic landmarks that have been designated as Pokéstops. It’s also speeding up the adoption of augmented reality—for better or worse.

The original article can be obtained here

Developing digital assets is rapidly becoming one of the most expensive undertakings for businesses in 2016. Skilled developers command high salaries, which can add up to millions of dollars over the life of your startup. After all, it often takes a team of project managers and developers to create and maintain unique, high quality software.

This leads many businesses down the road of outsourcing development work to remote developers, often in countries like India or Ukraine. It allows businesses to maintain low costs, and can even reduce product development time by allowing for larger number of developers to be hired.

Is there a problem with this? Not really, just differences, which you can manage if you know what to expect. You can’t directly manage these remote workers in-person, so getting the work done remotely will be a different experience than with your in-house employees. This doesn’t have to be a difficult experience though! Here are three ways to have your cake and eat it too with outsourcing your software development.

Hire an Experienced Project Manager

Having an in-house project manager is a great way to maintain control over your development without bringing on expensive in-house workers. It’s up to the project manager to oversee the remote workers and keep you up to date on the progress being made. This may even be a part-time position, because it’s rare that remote workers need full time management, unless there are large numbers of people working abroad.

This means you and your team can concentrate on business, while still being completely informed of the ups and downs related to the project. Your manager can brief you daily or weekly, translating the technical jargon to English, as well as providing demonstrations as projects are fleshed out.

For those who thrive on control, this may be a great solution to reduce costs of in-house developers and reduce the risk that comes from outsourcing.

Bring on a Firm to Handle it All

If your company doesn’t want the extra overhead of a project manager, you could bring on a firm like DevTeam.Space or Toptal.com to handle the entire process.

These types of companies have their own developers, or source from a pool of hundreds of manually vetted development teams in the case of DevTeam.Space, so that you don’t have to worry about recruiting or managing developers. This solution also allows your business to scale up projects if necessary, as these firms can more easily bring in additional developers than you could in-house.

The goal of these businesses is to be a safe solution for outsourcing software, as there’s more organization and peace of mind than working with individual remote developers.

“The software outsourcing market will continue its rapid growth, serving more and more companies every year. To actively participate in this growth, every company should focus on providing a higher level of quality and communication,” says Alexey Semeney, CEO of DevTeam.Space, a firm that helps companies build software using elite remote development teams. “We provide every client with two project managers, vetted and trained senior level developers with at least 5 years of dev experience, and a reporting dashboard with daily written updates and roadblocks tracking. This not only allows us to build precise project estimates and deliver products faster, but makes our clients feel safe and in control of the situation.”

Find a Rockstar as Your Lead Developer

If you already have someone to oversee the project, a rockstar in-house developer can be an extremely valuable asset to maintain quality standards and handle the most complex parts of the development process.

Having access to someone in-house can also make getting through roadblocks easier, as well as keep you even more informed of the ups and downs associated with developing digital products, especially enterprise-level software.

Yes, you’ll end up paying this person more than even an average in-house developer; however, it’s more than worth it if this rockstar is providing the value of 2 or 3 mediocre developers. Like hiring an in-house project manager, this option is for companies looking to save money through outsourcing without sacrificing control–and potentially quality–in the process.

To find the right fit for your company, consider using a service like CyberCoders to get the most exposure for this type of position. You’ll want to make sure you get the right person in for the job, as they could make or break a project.

Drew Hendricks is a tech, social media, and environmental addict. He’s written for many major publications, such as Forbes and Entrepreneur.

The powerful Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer makes some telling trade-offs in pursuit of efficiency

By Rachel Courtland

Posted 20 Jul 2016 | 15:00 GMT

In June, the ranks of the Top500 list were rearranged, and the title of world’s most powerful supercomputer was handed off to a new machine—China’s Sunway TaihuLight.

The Wuxi-based machine can perform the Linpack Benchmark—a long-standing arbiter of supercomputer prowess—at a rate of 93 petaflops, or 93 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. This performance is more than twice that of the previous record holder, China’s Tianhe-2. What’s more, TaihuLight achieves this capacity while consuming 2.4 megawatts less power than Tianhe-2.

Such efficiency gains are important if supercomputer designers hope to reach exascale operation, somewhere in the realm of 1,000 Pflops. Computers with that capability could be a boon for advanced manufacturing and national security, among many other applications. China, Europe, Japan, and the United States are all pushing toward the exascale range. Some countries are reportedly setting their sights on doing so by 2020; the United States is targeting the early 2020s. But two questions loom over those efforts: How capable will those computers be? And can we make them energy efficient enough to be economical?

We can get to the exascale now “if you’re willing to pay the power bill,” saysPeter Kogge, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Scaling up a supercomputer with today’s technology to create one that is 10 times as big would demand at least 10 times as much power, Kogge explains. And the difference between 20 MW and 200 MW, he says, “is the difference [between having] a substation or a nuclear power plant next to you.”

Kogge, who led a 2008 study on reaching the exascale, is updating power projections to cover the three categories of supercomputers built today: those with “heavyweight” high-performance CPUs; those that use “lightweight” microprocessors that are slower but cooler, and so can be packed more densely; and those that take advantage of graphics processing units to accelerate computation.

TaihuLight follows the lightweight approach, and it has made some sacrifices in pursuit of energy efficiency. Based on its hardware specs, TaihuLight can, in theory, crunch numbers at a rate of 125 Pflops. The machine reaches 74 percent of this peak theoretical capacity when running Linpack. But it does not fare as well on a new alternative benchmark, High Performance Conjugate Gradients(HPCG), which is designed to reflect how well a computer can perform more memory- and communications-intensive, real-world applications. When it runs HPCG, TaihuLight utilizes just 0.3 percent of its theoretical peak abilities, which means that only 3 out of every 1,000 possible floating-point operations are actually used by the computer. By comparison, Tianhe-2 and the United States’ Titan, the second- and third-fastest supercomputers in the Top500 rankings, respectively, can take advantage of just over 1 percent of their computing capacity. Japan’s K computer, currently ranked fifth on the list, achieved 4.9 percent with the HPCG metric.

“Everything is a balancing act,” says Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and one of the organizers of the Top500. “They produced a processor that can deliver high-arithmetic performance but is very weak in terms of data movement.” But he notes that the TaihuLight team has developed applications that take advantage of the architecture; he says that three projects that were finalists for this year’s ACM Gordon Bell Prize, a prestigious supercomputing award, were designed to run on the machine.

TaihuLight uses DDR3, an older, slower memory, to save on power. Its architecture also uses small amounts of local memory near each core instead of a more traditional memory hierarchy, explains John Goodacre, a professor of computer architectures at the University of Manchester, in England. He says that while today’s applications can execute between 1 and 10 floating-point operations for every byte of main memory accessed, that ratio needs to be far higher for applications to run efficiently on TaihuLight. The design cuts down on a big expense in a supercomputer’s power budget: the amount of energy consumed shuttling data back and forth.

“I think what they’ve done is build a machine that changes some of the design rules that people have assumed are part of the requirements” for moving toward the exascale, Goodacre says. Further progress will depend, as the TaihuLight team has shown, on end-to-end design, he says. That includes looking not only at changes to hardware—a number of experts point to 3D stacking of logic and memory—but also to the fundamental programming paradigms we use to take advantage of the machines.

This article appears in the August 2016 print issue as “China Inches Toward the Exascale.”

Source from here