and she makes the stress melt away at the end of a long day. But Lucy isn t Mr. Petrone s girlfriend.
##If it s a friend or a girlfriend, there s always points in time where there could be stress within that relationship,
Mr. Petrone is in his fourth year of a Doctor of Chiropractic program at Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto.
He works out religiously, is the school s students council president and spends eight to 10 hours a day at school.
Now, experts and marketers see an emerging trend among young professionals: pets as partners. For many people focused on building their careers like Mr. Petrone, 25,
According to a Canadian Pet Market Outlook report, about half of Canadian households without children own pets.
Free from family-related expenses, their disposable income buoys Canada s growing pet industry, valued at $6. 6-billion in 2013 and expected to reach $8. 3-billion by 2018, the report states.
a family sociologist at Simon Fraser University. I would definitely say it supports a lot of the broader trends we re seeing with respect to young people delaying their own family formation,
Animal experts say North american pet owners are forming stronger, closer relationships with their pets than they did two decades ago.
says John Sorensen, a professor of sociology at Brock University in St catharines, Ont.,who specializes in human-animal relationships.
Keiley Abbat, owner of Small Wonders Pets, a Toronto shop that specializes in nutrition education
Realizing many young apartment dwellers also miss their pets, Mr. Ro is now working with a business partner to open up the city s first cat café,
It s hard work getting human partners, says Stanley Coren, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British columbia and author of#The Wisdom of Dogs.
You can go out and for a couple of hundred bucks you can buy yourself a pet and some affection.
Now, the100-lb. lap dog tags along on cottage getaways, hangs out at backyard barbeques, and listened to him explain the rules of soccer during the FIFA World cup.
California s push to transform the market for grid-scale energy storage is working even better than expected.##
As of mid-2014, more than 2, 000 megawatts of energy storage projects have applied to interconnect with the state s grid, according to recent data from state grid operator California ISO (PDF.
The list includes 1, 669 megawatts of standalone battery storage, 44 megawatts of other standalone storage,
255 megawatts of batteries combined with generation projects, and a 90-megawatt project combining solar and batteries.
They are all seeking interconnection under the initiative scluster 7 window, which closed on April 30, 2014.
A project-by-project breakdown of all the applications is available in#PDF. What s more, CAISO only tracks projects seeking interconnection to the high-voltage transmission grid,
said Heather Sanders, the grid operator s director of smart grid technologies and strategy, at last week s Intersolar conference.
That leaves out all the distribution-grid-connected and customer-sited storage systems, which make up a combined 875 megawatts of the state s 1. 3-gigawatt target.
However, just because a storage project is in the queue doesn t mean it will be built, Sanders noted.
We ve seen the same thing in solar in the past. At this point, proposals don t even require any money from the applicants.
That step will come only after a first-phase study to determine the costs of individual projects.
Sanders compared the present storage rush to the early days of California s renewable portfolio standard,
and discharges electricity, unlike traditional generation resources that only produce power, she said. That may sound like a simple problem to solve,
multi-hour grid resources#to help it manage the so-called#duck curve problem. That s the situation increasingly occurring on California s grid,
when lots of distributed solar generation pushes midday energy use way down, then fades away just as a steep rise in evening energy usage sets in.
How many hours of continuous ramp should these flexible resources provide? And should smaller-scale storage be aggregated into larger blocks for multi-hour availability?
Those are some of the questions being asked in this process, she said. Energy storage paired with solar
Finally, CAISO isn t ruling out the potential for distribution-grid-connected, or even customer-sited,
energy storage to play a role in grid markets and programs. That brings the state s utilities into the picture,
independently owned assets into grid markets make the matter of transmission-connected storage seem simple by contrast
2013, Elon musk, chief executive of Tesla motors TSLA+2. 28%and Spacex, revealed details of a new super fast mode of transportation called the Hyperloop.
because the technology and intellectual property has been floated to the public as an open source transportation solution.
Magline further improves on system economics by utilizing apacket switching model that enables offline stops without slowing traffic on the mainline.
This enables more vehicles that are connected not to one another to run more often on the network.
next-generation rolling stock and signal upgrades are expected to raise high-speed rail services in the excess of 320 kilometers per hour.
but the Southern European countries struggling with debt, like Spain. Spain is expected to build 3, 010 kilometers of new HSR by 2022 (1, 308 kilometers currently under construction and 1,
Germany, on the other hand, has plans of building about 670 kilometers of new lines with target operations by 2025.
China is expected to become a world leader in the rail industry by investing, constructing, supplying material,
##That s the promise ofsmart luggage, in which GPS tracking chips are embedded in bags capable of transmitting their locations to travelers
The jumbo jet maker Airbus introduced a concept design for smart luggage at the Paris Air Show last year.
The product, known as Bag2go, can be tracked via a smartphone app. It also allows for self-service check ins
AT&T unveiled a similar concept at a demonstration of itsnext-generation technologies in May. The company envisions integrating the product with standard suitcases
The ultimate plan is to for the luggage to work with airlines IT systems, contacting the carriers directly and arranging for delivery to your home or hotel.
About ten years after the commercial debut of the Internet, America s newspapers posted record high advertising sales of $49. 4 billion in 2005.
the industry has undergone a dramatic and traumatic contraction, losing#nearly half of its print readership and#more than a third of its revenues.
With the pre-tax profits of the publicly held publishers cut by 39%since 2003, newsroom staffing has dropped to a historically low level.
In spite of the declared determination of most publishers to pivot from print to pixels, the industry s share of the digital advertising market has plunged by more than 50%.
Combined print and digital advertising revenues at the 1 300-plus newspapers in the nation tumbled 55%from $46. 2 billion in 2003 to $20. 7 billion in 2013, according to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA.
While the industry s collective digital ad revenues rose 181%from $1. 2 billion in 2003 to $3. 4 billion in 2013
and overall digital data are from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. While newspaper publishers are continuing to gain audience at their web and mobile sites,
their interactive efforts typically trail the level of engagement achieved by many native digital media.
By contrast, Facebook alone attracts 166.5 million uniques per month. Here is the big difference:
While the typical visitor spends#1. 1 minutes#at a newspaper site, the average dwell time at Facebook,
the super-sticky social network, is nearly half an hour. Weekday print circulation dropped 47%from an average of 54.6 million papers a day in 2004 to an average of 29.1 million papers per day in 2014,
according to my analysis of a random sample of data from the Alliance for Audited Media. Sunday circulation in the same period fared somewhat better,
sliding 40%to an average of 34.7 million papers per week in the period ended in March,
NAA data show that the industry s total advertising and audience revenues across all categories shrank 35%in the last decade, wilting from $57. 4 billion in 2003 to $37. 6 billion in 2013.
The drop occurred even though many publishers sought to offset declines in print advertising and circulation volume by boosting prices for their print products
and/or putting paywalls on their digital media. Despite the heavy emphasis most publishers have put on increasing audience revenues,
even this category slipped by 3%from $11. 2 billion in 2003 to $10. 9 billion in 2013.
In spite of effusive efforts by the industry to reduce expenses in the face of plummeting revenues,
pre-tax profits of the publicly held newspaper companies fell by 37%in the last 10 years.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization slid from an average of 25.8%in 2003 to 16.3%in the last 12 months,
which still compares favorably to the pre-tax margins of#4. 9%#at Amazon and#9. 4%at Walmart.
The International News Marketing Association provided the historical data and I compiled the current data at Yahoo Finance.
One major consequence of the industry-wide contraction is that newsroom staffing dived by 31%from 54,700 journalists in 2002 to 38,000 in 2012,
A newspaper executive told me a few days ago that some people in the industry hate my continuing coverage of the challenges facing newspapers.
#Department of education shuts down for-profit Corinthian Colleges Federal regulations are designed to make sure that colleges that don t offer a good value to students,
don t get student aid money. Corinthian Colleges will put 85 of its U s. campuses up for sale and close the remaining dozen under an agreement with the U s. Department of education.
The for-profit college chain operates campuses under the names Heald, Everest and Wyotech. It has more than 70,000 students across North america.
It s the largest-ever college, by enrollment, to be shut down in this way. It all started in January
when the U s. Department of education asked the company to provide detailed records, including Social security numbers, job placement results,
and attendance and grade changes, of students. This was part of compliance with federal regulations designed to make sure that colleges that don t offer a good value to students,
don t get student aid money. When Corinthian didn t fully respond, in June, the Department of education placed a three-week hold on financial aid payments to Corinthian.
The cash freeze was a big problem for the college, which had underlying financial difficulties.
Inside Higher Ed reported in May that the college faced closing off or selling its business
with both enrollment and revenue slumping. We are pleased to have reached an agreement with ED that helps protect the interests of our students, employees and other stakeholders, Jack Massimino,
Corinthian Chairman and Chief executive officer, said in a company press release. This agreement allows our students to continue their education
and helps minimize the personal and financial issues that affect our 12,000 employees and their families.
It also provides a blueprint for allowing most of our campuses to continue serving their students and communities under new ownership.
Current students have a number of choices. For those who stay on at campuses that are closing
the Department of education will release enough money to allow the college toteach out or enable them to finish their degrees.
Some students will also be offered refunds or the opportunity to transfer, and their loans may be discharged.
The problems in the for-profit college sector are wider than Corinthian. They come both from market forces and the government.
For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing ITT Educational Services, a chain with 135 campuses and 55,000 students in 40 states.
The CFPB s allegations include predatory lending and misleading students about their job prospects. ITT has filed a motion to dismiss this lawsuit.
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#Fingerreader reads to the blind in real time MIT s Fingerreader Massachusetts institute of technology scientists are developing an audio reading device to be worn on the index finger of people
whose vision is impaired, giving them affordable and immediate access to printed words. The so-called Fingerreader, a prototype produced by a 3-D printer,
fits like a ring on the user s finger, equipped with a small camera that scans text.
A synthesized voice reads words aloud, quickly translating books, restaurant menus and other needed materials for daily living, especially away from home or office.
Reading is as easy as pointing the finger at text. Special software tracks the finger movement
identifies words and processes the information. The device has vibration motors that alert readers when they stray from the script,
said Roy Shilkrot, who is developing the device at the MIT Media Lab. For Jerry Berrier, 62,
who was born blind, the promise of the Fingerreader is its portability and offer of real-time functionality at school, a doctor s office and restaurants.
When I go to the doctor s office, there may be forms that I wanna read before I sign them,
Berrier said. He said there are other optical character recognition devices on the market for those with vision impairments
Berrier manages training and evaluation for a federal program that distributes technology to low-income people in Massachusetts
He works from the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Everywhere we go for folks who are sighted,
an MIT professor who founded and leads the Fluid Interfaces research group developing the prototype,
Developing the gizmo has taken three years of software coding, experimenting with various designs and working on feedback from a test group of visually impaired people.
Much work remains before it is ready for the market, Shilkrot said, including making it work on cellphones.
Shilkrot said developers believe they will be able to affordably market the Fingerreader but he could not yet estimate a price.
The potential market includes some of the 11.2 million people in the United states with vision impairment, according to U s. Census bureau estimates.
and offices offers cumbersome scanners that must process the desired script before it can be read aloud by character-recognition software installed on a computer or smartphone,
the new device would enable users to access a vast number of books and other materials that are not currently available in Braille.
Developers had to overcome unusual challenges to help people with visual impairments move their reading fingers along a straight line of printed text that they could not see.
Users also had to be alerted at the beginning and end of the reading material. Their solutions?
Audio cues in the software that processes information from the Fingerreader and vibration motors in the ring.
The Fingerreader can read papers, books, magazines, newspapers, computer screens and other devices, but it has problems with text on a touch screen,
said Shilkrot. That s because touching the screen with the tip of the finger would move text around,
producing unintended results. Disabling the touch-screen function eliminates the problem, he said. Berrier said affordable pricing could make the Fingerreader a key tool to help people with vision impairment integrate into the modern information economy.
Any tool that we can get that gives us better access to printed material helps us to live fuller
#Lawrence Lessig s Mayday smashes $5m crowdfunding goal Lawrence Lessig s#Mayday. us#just raised a lot of money to help get the money out of politics by campaigning to#elect five politicians
who will enact campaign finance reform. Last week, the Super PAC hit its $5 million grassroots fundraising goal thanks to 47,000 supporters,
and Union square Ventures Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham brings Mayday to it full $12 million funding goal before this year s mid-term elections.
Harvard Law Professor Lessig s ability to raise large sums from both wealthy tech luminaries and the general public shows broad support for making elected officials less beholden
to big money campaign donors. People can still#donate here. In a#Letter To Everyone#upon reaching the goal,
and start thinking about how to get the most out of not only the money we ve collected but more importantly the great community we ve built.
because corrupt politicians threaten innovation and a fair Internet. We have no protection for network neutrality because of the enormous influence of cable company s money in the political system
##If NN is your issue, then this is why you should see that politic$ is your issue too Lessig says.
if it successfully gets candidates elected in its 2014 pilot campaign it plans to raise orders of magnitude more money to elect an an more pro-campaign finance reform congress in 2016,
#Commercial nanotube transistors could be ready by 2020 Each chip on this wafer has 10,000 nanotube transistors on it.
For more than ten years, engineers have been worrying that they are running out of tricks for continuing to shrink silicon transistors.
Intel s latest chips have transistors with features as small as 14 nanometers, but it is unclear how the industry can keep scaling down silicon transistors much further or
what might replace them. A project at IBM is now aiming to have built transistors using carbon nanotubes ready to take over from silicon transistors soon after 2020.
According to the semiconductor industry s roadmap transistors at that point must have features as small as five nanometers to keep up with the continuous miniaturization of computer chips.
That s where silicon scaling runs out of steam, and there really is nothing else,
says Wilfried Haensch, who leads the company s nanotube project at the company s T. J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights,
New york. Nanotubes are the only technology that looks capable of keeping the advance of computer power from slowing down,
by offering a practical way to make both smaller and faster transistors, he says. In 1998, researchers at IBM made one of the first working carbon nanotube transistors.
And now after more than a decade of research, IBM is the first major company to commit to getting the technology ready for commercialization.
We previously worked on it as a sandbox type of thing, says James Hannon, head of IBM s molecular assemblies and devices group.
Hannon led IBM s nanotube work before Haensch, who took over in 2011 after a career working on manufacturing conventional chips.
Wilfried joined with a silicon technology background and our focus really shifted. Haensch s team chose the target for commercialization based on the timetable of technical improvements the chip industry has mapped out to keep alive Moore s Law
a prediction originating in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be crammed into a circuit would double every two years.
Generations of chip-making technology are known by the size of the smallest structure they can write into a chip.
The current best is 14 nanometers, and by 2020, in order to keep up with Moore s Law,
the industry will need to be down to five nanometers. This is the point IBM hopes nanotubes can step in.
The most recent report from the microchip industry group the ITRS says the so-called five-nanometernode is due in 2019.
IBM has made recently chips with 10 000 nanotube transistors. Now it is working on a transistor design that could be built on the silicon wafers used in the industry today with minimal changes to existing design and manufacturing methods.
The design was chosen in part based on simulations that evaluated the performance of a chip with billions of transistors.
Those simulations suggest that the design chosen should allow a microprocessor to be five times as fast as a silicon one using the same amount of power.
IBM s chosen design uses six nanotubes lined up in parallel to make a single transistor.
Each nanotube is 1. 4 nanometers wide about 30 nanometers long, and spaced roughly eight nanometers apart from its neighbors.
Both ends of the six tubes are embedded into electrodes that supply current, leaving around 10 nanometers of their lengths exposed in the middle.
A third electrode runs perpendicularly underneath this portion of the tubes and switches the transistor on and off to represent digital 1s and 0s.
The IBM team has tested nanotube transistors with that design, but so far it hasn t found a way to position the nanotubes closely enough together,
because existing chip technology can t work at that scale. The favored solution is to chemically label the substrate
and nanotubes with compounds that would cause them to self-assemble into position. Those compounds could then be stripped away,
leaving the nanotubes arranged correctly and ready to have electrodes and other circuitry added to finish a chip.
Haensch s team buys nanotubes in bulk from industrial suppliers and filters out the tubes with the right properties for transistors using a modified version of a machine used to filter molecules such as proteins in the pharmaceutical industry.
It uses electric charge to separate semiconducting nanotubes useful for transistors from those that conduct electricity like metals
and can t be used for transistors. Last year researchers at Stanford created the first simple computer built using only nanotube transistors.
But those components were bulky and slow compared to silicon transistors says However, for now IBM s nanotube effort remains within its research labs, not its semiconductor business unit.
And the researchers are open about the fact that success is guaranteed not. In particular, if the nanotube transistors are not ready soon after 2020
when the industry needs them, the window of opportunity might be closed, says IBM s Hannon.
If nanotubes don t make it, there s little else that shows much potential to take over from silicon transistors in that time frame.
Devices that manipulate the spin of individual electrons are the closest possible candidate but they re less mature,
and unlike carbon nanotubes, they don t behave similarly to silicon transistors, says Hannon. Subhasish Mitra, a professor who worked on the project.
We now know that you can build something useful with carbon nanotubes, he says. The question is,
how do you get the performance that you need? Although IBM hasn worked t out how to make nanotube transistors small enough for mass production,
Mirta says it has made concrete steps, and has devised processes that should be amenable to the semiconductor industry.
Via Technology Revie e
#Advances in emotional computing will give businesses an unfair advantage Pepper will understand human emotions.
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son announced last week they have developed an amazing new robot called Pepper.
The most amazing feature isn't that it will only cost $2, 000, or that Pepper is intended to babysit your kids and work the registers at retail stores.
What's really remarkable is that Pepper is designed to understand and respond to human emotion.
Heck, understanding human emotion is tough enough for most HUMANS. There is a new field of affect computing coming your way that will give entrepreneurs and marketers a real unfair advantage.
That's what this note to you is about. It s really very powerful and something I'm thinking a lot about.
What are the unfair advantages? Recent advances in the field of emotion tracking are about to give businesses an enormous unfair advantage.
Take Beyond Verbal, a start-up in Tel aviv, for example. They've developed software that can detect 400 different variations of humanmoods.
They are now integrating this software into call centers that can help a sales assistant understand
and react to customer s emotions in real time. Better than that, the software itself can also pinpoint
and influence how consumers make decisions. For example, if this person is an innovator, you want to offer the latest and greatest product.
On the other hand if the customer is conservative, you offer him something tried and true. Talk about targeted advertising!(You can check it out
and test it out here: www. beyondverbal. com). But it goes beyond advertising, more importantly, to improving quality of life.
How can this improve quality of life? Mary Czerwinski is a cognitive psychologist at Microsoft Research doing pioneering work in Affect Computing.
She tells a story about how she and her boyfriend were in a nasty fight.
While they were bantering back and forth, a small wireless device on her wrist was monitoring her emotional ups and downs (through heart rate monitoring and electrical changes in her skin).
At the peak of the argument, when she was most upset, her boyfriend received a text message saying:
Your friend Mary isn t feeling well. You might want to give her a call. Can you imagine?
The constant monitoring of our emotional landscape and personal interactions is a bizarre concept. But it is one that could help many people.
Some of her early projects were aimed at helping autistic children who can't easily communicate their mood.
Other technologies monitor how hard you're pounding on your keyboards (another possible indicator of mood.
Imagine if your computer flashed you a message: Don't send that e-mail! What does it all mean?
The point here is that something as subtle and powerful as human emotion is coming digitally online.
It's being digitized and understood and monitored and commercialized. And you should know about it.
If you'd like to learn more about this, and other potentially disruptive technologies, join us in the Abundance 360 community.
At Abundance 360, entrepreneurs and CEOS are constantly engaging about cutting edge technologies like this, and learning how to make them applicable and actionable today.
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