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As businesses increasingly prioritize good design and as we start demanding it in our daily lives, more and more technology companies will face tensions over how to incorporate design principles without compromising on the engineering goals that can also make or break a product or service. It’s a challenge that every company handles differently, and in many cases, one group wins out at the expense of another’s ideals.

But at Pinterest, the social media darling that has seen incredible user growth over the past few year and whose design has copied widely, the designers and engineers have one seemingly-improbable message: We can do both. At least for now, anyway: one of Pinterest’s greatest challenges in turning from web sensation into a viable business will be its ability to adhere to these principles as revenue and profit pressures sink in.

I talked with Pinterest software engineer Joshua Inkenbrandt and lead product designer Jason Wilson this week, and we discussed the recent Pinterest re-design: specifically, how both visual and engineering elements played into the overhaul, and how those tensions play out at Pinterest. The two were obviously passionate about the issue, re-iterating the unique qualities of Pinterest’s internal culture and the crossover between their roles. At one point, Inkenbrandt referred to a feature that Wilson had designed, and Wilson automatically jumped in to correct him:

“It’s the designs that I visualize. We’re all designers.”

But at an awful lot of companies, designers and engineers aren’t finishing each other’s sentences. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Michael Abbott explained the tensions best at our Structure:Data conference this week: “The tension on the design side is that it’s never good enough,” he said, “and on the engineering side he or she wants to ship… How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.”

Building a culture of mutual respect

It’s not that Pinterest is somehow immune from the tensions that other companies face. In fact, Wilson and Inkenbrandt noted that they think the media has probably underplayed just how much the site has changed over the years and the compromises that are inherent in every tweak:

“With every feature, there’s that tension between it being beautiful and then figuring out how hard it is to actually implement it. So everything you see on the new site has actually gone through that balance,” Inkenbrandt said. For instance, just looking at the main Pinterest grid — which doesn’t feel like it’s changed all that much since the site launched in limited beta in March 2010 — you would never know the number of iterations it has gone through.

Ben Silbermann, CEO, Pinterest RoadMap 2012 (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger [email protected]

“We’ve iterated on that 70+ times,” said Inkenbrandt, who just joined the company slightly more than a year ago. Of course, rapid iteration on the web wasn’t invented at Pinterest: Google’s web development strategy in its early years, overseen in large part by current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, blazed this trail for a generation of Silicon Valley engineers and designers.

In the relatively short time Inkenbrandt has been with Pinterest, the company has grown from about 17 employees to more than 100. Pinterest does not release official user stats, but recent ComScore numbers put users of the popular social content pinning site at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is about the same as the number who use Twitter. The company recently raised $200 million in a new round of financing, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion.

So the fact that the company has managed to weather this type of rapid growth without any notable or constant outages (just compare to the number of fail whales in Twitter’s early years), while also remaining one of the most-copied designs on the web at the moment, certainly speaks to Pinterest’s ability to balance both priorities.

It comes down to the company’s culture, the two said, in that the company values open communication among employees and prioritizes the goals of both designers and engineers. Of course, whether this can scale along with the company is always in question — it’s easier to support both when you’re just a 20 person operation. But the two said that heavy involvement from co-founder Evan Sharp plays a key role in fostering that balance.

“Evan himself designed and coded the original site,” Wilson said. “So we know that at the end of the day he understands what it takes to get it done.”

Wilson, who’s designed for companies like Apple, Lytro, and Adobe, said he thinks the company’s efforts to make sure new hires understand the importance of collaborative culture has helped keep the company on that track:

“I’m basically a vagabond in the industry. I’ve worked at a hell of a lot of places. And every place has its way of doing things. When I worked at Apple, it was very design-centric, and things came from the direction of the executive and it’s thrown over the wall at the engineers. And I’ve worked at places like Adobe, where they develop the features and then say, make it look good. And I don’t believe personally — and this is just a personal opinion — that either of those really are ideal. It’s not bullshit to say that here, it’s a total team effort. I can point to a design element, like actual pixel-level design elements, that Josh gave me creative direction on.”

Design and engineering building the new look

Pinterest rolled out its new design to the general public earlier this week, and to the un-trained (or un-Pinterested) eye, the new look wouldn’t seem too different. But two key changes to the look — larger pins, or photos, that come with the content suggestions along the side, and a new way to remain in-stream while scrolling — actually started at engineering problems that were solved by the design team.

The engineering team had long wanted to fix some of the structural issues that had come with the site’s rapid growth, Inkenbrandt said, and one of them was how to suggest more content for users in a way that was both natural and useful. But in the end, it was Wilson’s design team that found an answer to the recommendation engine quest, by surfacing similar pins from boards users had created:

“One of our challenges was how to recommend content,” Inkenbrandt said. “So we’re coming up with like, secret sauce algorithms, where we’re trying to figure out based on content what people might like. And then it turns out that based off the design, just having the actual board where the pin was from, well, that content is obviously highly relevant, usually in the same theme, and can help people find great stuff.”

By showing related content next to individual pins, and then allowing users to navigate to that content without leaving their spot in the stream, also solved another engineering issue with navigation. Wilson said Sharp gave him and the designer some high-level goals for the re-design, and one was to make the overall feel much more lightweight.

“Before, you would look at one close-up and then go back to the grid and then back to the close-up. So we wanted to figure out a way so you wouldn’t have to do that jump. It seems like a simple thing, but if you’re on there for an hour let’s say, and you do that repeatedly, you might do that a few hundred times.” he said. “To me anyway the holy grail to navigation is to get to the user to navigate via content.”

But while Pinterest has been able to balance the priorities of design and functionality fairly remarkably so far, the rubber might be about to hit the road. The company has been nudging its way toward a business model recently, adding features like analytics for businesses and encouraging marketers to the site, which makes sense if the company is going to live up to that $2.5 billion valuation.

But just ask Twitter and Facebook: it’s a lot easier balancing design and engineering when salespeople aren’t breathing down your neck every day.

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Bitcoin is having a wild ride right now. Partly due to the euro crisis, and partly due to a lot of press coverage, some people seem to be taking a keen interest in the crypto-currency — in the last week, its value in relation to the U.S. dollar has shot up by almost 60 percent.

As I mentioned the last time I wrote about Bitcoin, I’m not an economist: I’m a technology journalist who is intrigued on a technical level by the theory and mechanics behind a distributed, algorithmically-generated “currency”, and that makes me want to track it and occasionally cover it when the tech angle is strong. Now, I don’t actually own any Bitcoins, but what if I did?

If I were to own stock in a tech company (I don’t, by the way) and I found myself writing about said company, I would at the very least be obliged to put a disclosure into the article — in fact, I would probably just avoid writing about the firm altogether. However, bloggers and journalists don’t follow that convention with currencies. Imagine an American journalist covering the fortunes of the dollar, and putting in a disclaimer to say that all her savings are held in USD – it would seem daft.

So I posed the question on Twitter earlier: “What are the ethics of writing about Bitcoin if you’ve bought some (I haven’t). Does it require stock-style disclosure?” Some quickly responded in the affirmative:

@superglaze I disclose my Bitcoin holdings when I write about them.

— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) March 22, 2013

@superglaze I think journalists should disclose if they own bitcoin. Say this today: Finnish “leave the euro” website eroaeurosta.fi

— Krista Kauppinen (@kristajessica) March 22, 2013

Whereas others were more circumspect:

@andyvan @superglaze I haven’t thought about it in as much detail, but I don’t think it’s the same as having stock.

— Nate Lanxon (@NateLanxon) March 22, 2013

@kristajessica @superglaze Same principle applies to media owners owning property and their papers constantly talking up house prices

— Natasha (@riptari) March 22, 2013

There’s some serious debate going on about whether or not Bitcoin actually is a currency, but I (like the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems) feel that it is, albeit an unique one. Its uniqueness stems not only from the way in which its creation is automated, but also from its current volatility and, crucially, the fact that people don’t generally understand it very well. We all know what nationally-issued currencies like dollars and yen are, and we don’t need the concept explained to us every time we read an article about them. The situation with Bitcoin is very different.

I strongly suspect Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in recent weeks is largely an echo chamber effect — coverage begets coverage — which puts those writing about it in an unusual position. We bloggers and journalists have an extraordinary amount of influence in people’s perceptions of Bitcoin and, as a result, the trajectory of its value. For that reason alone, I think any coverage from a writer who has bought into Bitcoin should come with a clear disclosure.

That said, my colleague Tom Krazit also brought up an interesting tangential point in discussion, suggesting that writers covering Bitcoin may actually have an obligation to buy into it on a low level, so they can conduct a few transactions and basically have a clearer idea of what they’re talking about in their coverage.

This is all clearly a new and unusual field to explore, so I’d be interested in hearing further thoughts on the subject.

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evleaks on Twitter has a history of leaking photos and one such photo of the ZTE Grand X Quad is up for all to see. It looks relatively nice and specs aren’t so bad either with a 5-inch 720p HD display, 1.2 GHz quad-core processor, 8 megapixel camera, dual-SIM support, and 2500 mAh battery. As with any leak, we can’t guarantee this is what the ZTE Grand X Quad will truly look like and it may not make it to the US. Also, with ZTE not releasing any pricing, availability, or specs, one should take these specs with a grain of salt until we hear more.

Source: evleaks

Come comment on this article: ZTE Grand X Quad Shown Off In Leaked Photo

Continue reading…

Final Book Now Available

Interim Report of the Committee on Geographic Variation in Health Care Spending and Promotion of High-Value Health Care: Preliminary Committee Observations is designed to provide the committee’s preliminary observations for the 113th Congress as it considers further Medicare reform. This report contains only key preliminary observations related primarily to the committee’s commissioned analyses of Medicare Parts A (Hospital Insurance program), B (Supplementary Medical Insurance program) and D (outpatient prescription drug benefit), complemented by other empirical investigations. It does not contain any observations related to the committee’s commissioned analyses of the commercial insurer population, Medicare Advantage, or Medicaid, which will be presented in the committee’s final report after completion of quality-control activities.

This interim report excludes conclusions or recommendations related to the committee’s consideration of the geographic value index or other payment reforms designed to promote highvalue care. Additional analyses are forthcoming, which will influence the committee’s deliberations. These analyses include an exploration of how Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage) and commercial spending, utilization, and quality vary compared with, and possibly are influenced by, Medicare Parts A and B spending, utilization, and quality. The committee also is assessing potential biases that may be inherent to Medicare and commercial claims-based measures of health status. Based on this new evidence and continued review of the literature, the committee will confirm the accuracy of the observations presented in this interim report and develop final conclusions and recommendations, which will be published in the committee’s final report.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

AXA on Friday announced the sale of a majority stake in its PE arm to an investor group led by Dominique Senequier. AXA Investment Managers will receive Euro 488 million for its holding in AXA Private Equity, a statement says. The deal is expected to close before the end of third quarter. Once the deal closes, AXA PE management and employees will have 40% of voting share capital, while external investors will have 33%. AXA Group will have nearly 27%.

PRESS RELEASE
AXA announced today that its asset management subsidiary, AXA Investment Managers (“AXA IM”) has received an irrevocable offer from an investor group for its entire stake in AXA Investment Managers Private Equity SA (“AXA Private Equity”).
The proposed transaction would be structured with a view to protecting AXA Private Equity’s investment expertise and performance-driven culture, and to ensuring that its clients continue to benefit from the outstanding service and performance they have enjoyed over the past several years. The transaction would enable AXA to monetize its interest in AXA Private Equity, a business successfully developed by the Group since 1996, and would provide a strong foundation for the next growth phase of one of Europe’s leading private equity firms.
The acquiring investors would be composed of AXA Private Equity’s senior management, led by Dominique Senequier, a group of institutions and French family offices and AXA Group. AXA Private Equity’s 298 employees would be given the opportunity to participate in the transaction through a dedicated vehicle. Post-transaction, AXA would continue to invest in private equity through AXA Private Equity funds1.
Upon the completion of the proposed transaction, AXA Private Equity’s voting share capital would be held as follows:
· AXA Private Equity’s management and employees: 40.00%
· External investors: 33.14%
· AXA Group: 26.86%

The transaction would value AXA Private Equity at Euro 510 million for 100%. The sale of AXA IM’s entire stake would result in AXA IM receiving a total consideration up to Euro 488 million. The consideration would be divided into an upfront payment of approximately Euro 348 million and deferred consideration up to Euro 140 million, to be paid in installments subject to achieving certain targets and meeting certain conditions.

“We believe that private equity is an attractive asset class for the diversified investment portfolios of the Group operating insurance companies. We intend to continue to invest in AXA Private Equity funds, with an expected total commitment of approximately Euro 4.8 billion between 2014 and 2018, as the firm pursues its purpose of supporting the growth of French and European companies and investing responsibly for clients around the world. The potential new shareholders in the capital of AXA Private Equity are strongly aligned in their commitment to ensuring that AXA Private Equity would be positioned to continue creating value for its portfolio companies and investors. I am convinced that going forward, thanks to Dominique Senequier, Vincent Gombault, Dominique Gaillard and their team, the company should continue to grow and foster its potential to the full of its ability” said Gérald Harlin, Group Chief Financial Officer of AXA.
“The new structure for AXA Private Equity would deliver continuity valued by our clients, keep entrepreneurialism at the heart of what we do, and build a platform for new opportunities and broader horizons” said Dominique Senequier, Chief Executive Officer of AXA Private Equity. “We promised to develop a structure that keeps our talented team together and reinforces our investment approach, which is particular to AXA Private Equity. As we embark on this next phase of our story as an independent firm, our future will be one of capturing new opportunities borne out of the renewed confidence and vigour that will come with this deal.”
The proposed transaction would enable AXA Private Equity to become an independent private equity firm, with a powerful international network and reach. With USD 31 billion (or Euro 24 billion) assets under management raised from investors worldwide, the firm would offer its 255 investors a broad spectrum of asset classes: Funds of Funds, Direct Funds (comprising 160 portfolio companies), including Mid and Small Market Enterprise Capital, Infrastructure, Innovation & Growth, Co-Investment and Private Debt.
The proposed transaction is subject to customary conditions, including the completion of the works council consultation process and obtaining required regulatory approvals and should be finalized before the end of Q3 2013.
AXA Private Equity’s underlying earnings were Euro 59 million in 2012, based on AXA’s group share.
Estimated impacts on AXA expected at the closing date:
· Euro 0.2 billion exceptional capital gain, which will be accounted for in Net Income;
· Euro 0.2 billion cash expected to be remitted to the Group, net of reinvestment;
· Decrease of AXA’s group share in AXA Private Equity from 95.80% to 26.86%.

The post AXA Inks Spin Out of PE Arm appeared first on peHUB.

My emotional response to Google Reader and the ensuing lack of trust in betting on Google’s applications has received many reactions. Marco Arment, who is the co-creator of Tumblr and the brainiac behind Instapaper, disagreed with my take on Google Keep in his widely read blog.

In this business, you can’t count on anything having longevity. To avoid new services that are likely to get shut down within a few years, you’d have to avoid every new tech product. Products and services lasting more than a few years are the exception, not the rule.

Fair enough! Except I didn’t say that.

This is what I said: It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep those businesses intact. Sure, they embraced mobile advertising and mobile search, but that’s just the same business on a different device.

I am far more likely to believe in and use products that are the main focus of the company behind them. Online storage? Dropbox. Time-shifting web content? Pocket or Instapaper. Short form communication? Twitter. Baby pictures and wedding photos to make single people miserable (or happy for being single)? Facebook.

The point is that a company whose main focus is a specific service or a singular product, like Evernote, is far more likely to focus its energies to build a business around it and keep it around. And if in seven years (or seven months) they fail — hell, at least they went down trying.

Our company pays thousands of dollars for Google Apps and the reason we do is because it is a business for Google and it makes good business sense. I have no problem paying for Instapaper or Pocket or Dropbox or Skype or anything that helps me do my job. And if anything that starts out free (Dropbox did) and then wants me to pay for it (like Evernote), I don’t hesitate upgrading. Why? Because I want these guys to be around.

As the Google Reader example shows (and as Chris Wetherell told me in an interview), Google didn’t even try with Reader. It never gave us an option to pay, even though Google is willing to offer some paid services when it makes sense, like multiseat licenses for Google Apps.

As Marco said, in the end it’s always business. It’s just not Google’s business, so perhaps that is why we should shift our energies and attention to services whose business is the apps they want us to use.

That said, I don’t think Marco is that far off from my way of thinking. He wrote, “Investing too heavily in someone else’s proprietary system for too long rarely ends gracefully, but when it bites us, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.”

Isn’t that what I am saying? Albeit, with a lot more emotion?

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Every automobile enthusiast out there has that one car or truck that they look upon as their holy grail. It’s the vehicle that lit the spark under their bottom and got them revved up about anything with an engine. For Fred Williams, host of Dirt Everyday on MotorTrend’s Youtube channel, that vehicle happened to be a beat up 1951 Jeep CJ3a that he saw in a magazine way back in 1989. It was dirty and rough around the edges, but it worked flawlessly and acted as the off-road catalyst for Fred. Check it out after the jump.

Source: MotorTrend.com

Comedian and MADtv alum Will Sasso is doing Vine right. What does it mean to do Vine right? Well, Twitter’s 6-second-video app is so young, that it’s hard to know exactly what it’s for. Is it for porn? Is it for keeping your constituents up to date on your Congressional activities? Maybe, and maybe.

But one thing that it is definitely for is lemon videos. Yeah, lemon videos. Will Sasso is making a lot of them, and here’s a handy compilation of them all. Make sure to follow Sasso on Twitter for more fun Vine videos. They’re not all about lemons, by damnit if they aren’t brilliant.

[via reddit]

Back in February Adobe announced plans to kill the storage portion of its seemingly popular Photoshop.com web service and migrating users’ content to Adobe Revel. The move seems painless on the surface — all of your images will be exported to Revel automatically. Except, that is not entirely the case.

In fact, all of the JPEG images will be moved. Only. Other formats, including video, PSD, RAW, ACR, PNG, TIFF, must be archived by the customer or they will be lost. Those file formats are not yet supported.

Today Adobe began sending notifications out via email to all of its customers, calling it a “friendly reminder”, but there was bit more than a warning included about file types. The company also pointed out that “Revel gives you more access to your photos than ever before — on the web, iPhone, iPad, and Mac”.

While those on Windows and Linux will still be able to access Revel on the web, there is currently no real support for these platforms, nor is there any for Android or Windows Phone. Adobe does promise that it is “planning to support additional platforms, as well as, popular file formats beyond JPEG and video”. So much for “more access to your photos”.

For those currently on Photoshop.com, your JPEG images will be automatically moved to Revel, starting April 2 — providing you visit the site and confirm that you wish them to be moved. The rest of your videos and images will remain safe on the Photoshop site until June 18. Revel is free for up to 50 photos per month, while a Pro plan provides unlimited importing at $5.99 per month.

Photo Credit: Olaru Radian-Alexandru/Shutterstock

The booming mobile app economy is quickly expanding into health care — by 2017, market research firm Research2Guidance estimates the mobile health market will be worth $26 billion. But one specter hanging over the industry has been uncertainty around regulation.

In July 2011, the Food And Drug Administration issued draft guidance on the regulation of mobile apps. But since then, developers and health entrepreneurs have been waiting for the agency’s final word. In the absence of clarification, some say, the threat of intervention and uncertainty has already held innovation back.

This week, Congress held three days of hearings to explore how to regulate health apps on smartphones and tablets. Executives from technology companies like Qualcomm (QCOM) and health services giant McKesson joined economists, medical leaders and regulators to weigh in on the debate.

Ben Chodor, CEO of health app store and certification service Happtique and one of this week’s speakers, said that while the hearings and FDA testimony didn’t provide as much clarity as developers ultimately need, the hearings and the attention they generated gave the mobile growing health industry exposure to a larger audience.

“I think it moved the needle a little bit,” he said. But “the bottom line is … we still need to see the guidance.”

The industry will have to wait a bit longer for the FDA’s final decision — but this week still uncovered a few interesting details worth considering for developers and investors in mobile health. Take a look at seven below.

• The FDA has been regulating mobile medical device software for more than 10 years, said Christy Foreman, director of the Office of Device Evaluation at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. In fact, she added, the agency’s first clearance of a mobile app goes back to 1997. So far, the agency has reviewed 100 mobile medical apps, including remote blood pressure, heart rhythm and patient monitors, as well as smartphone-based ultrasounds and glucose meters.
• Some estimate that there are 40,000 health apps available globally, but during her testimony before the Committee on Energy and Commerce (video here), Foreman said the FDA focuses on a small subset of “mobile medical apps.” These are apps that meet the definition of a medical device according to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and are intended to be used as an accessory to a regulated medical device or turn a mobile platform (smartphone or tablet) into a regulated medical device. Among those apps, there are three classes of apps that vary in potential risk and regulation requirements. But, so far, the agency has only regulated the less risky class 1 and class 2 apps and has not yet seen a class 3 app.
• The FDA does not intend to regulate apps that track a person’s daily steps, enable patients to refill prescriptions, search medical references, provide electronic health record services or offer similar services. The only thing that would change the FDA’s mind, Foreman said, is if they learned of anything related to those apps that compromise patient safety.
• Despite concerns that the FDA will have trouble keeping up with technology, Foreman said the FDA receives less than 20 applications to review mobile health apps a year. Once the agency releases its final guidance, it’s very likely that number could climb, but to put it in perspective, she said that’s just 0.5 percent of the total number of medical device applications they receive each year.
• Based on its performance over the past three years, the FDA estimates that it takes them about 67 days to review a mobile medical app. That is well within the 90-day time period the FDA has to review any medical device looking for a 510(k) clearance to come to market.
• When pushed by members of Congress to share when the FDA plans to issue final guidance on regulating medical mobile apps, Foreman said it would come before Oct. 1 (the end of the government fiscal year).
• Despite rumors that smartphones and tablets could be subjected to a new 2.3 percent medical device tax, Foreman said those devices would not be regulated as medical devices and therefore not subject to the new tax.  During the week, others discussed the possibility of taxing mobile medical apps, with some saying that mobile health apps would be exempt from the tax if they were distributed through retail channels.

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Angelo Vermeulen taking soil samples for microbial analysis during the shakedown mission at MDRS in Utah. Photo: Kate Greene.

Can real food be cooked on Mars? Thanks to the work of artist, biologist and space scientist Angelo Vermeulen (watch his TED talk), the answer may one day be yes.

When the Universities of Cornell and Hawai’i put out a call for participants for their NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars simulation, investigating the feasibility of real food on Mars, Vermeulen – known for his Biomodd art installations creating symbiotic relationships between plants and computers — landed the crew commander position. The HI-SEAS crew has now been in training for months and, on April 15, they’ll enter the simulation habitat itself — located in Hawaii — for four months.

Vermeulen will be blogging about his experience from within the simulation for the TED Fellows blog. In the meantime, we ask him about the mission, what it means to be a space crew commander and why boredom in isolation isn’t actually a problem.

What will the HI-SEAS simulation be investigating and teaching us?

The Mars simulation we’re setting up is called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog & Simulation or HI-SEAS. It’s primarily a food study. One of the main problems during long-term space travel is so-called menu fatigue. It’s basically astronauts getting tired of their food and losing appetite. By the way astronauts do not eat out of tubes and do not swallow food pills. That’s an old persistent cliché which is still in a lot of people’s minds. It’s almost an archetype of astronaut life. However this dates to the ’50s and ’60s, and has been long abandoned. The food that astronauts currently eat is pretty good, but it’s all pre-prepared. It’s add-water-and-heat, and you have your meal. But even those meals, even when they try to make variations, after a couple of months people get tired of that, and so they start to eat less. As a consequence they might also perform less, and jeopardize the mission.

For example, in the Mars-500 experiment — an isolation study of 500 days near Moscow, a collaboration between Europe and Russia — food became the item that people constantly talked about. Food is absolutely crucial to the psychology of your crew, and you need to handle that carefully.

One of the solutions could be to allow the crew to cook. Because cooking empowers you over your food. You can make endless variations, and there’s an interesting bonus: it improves social cohesion. You talk about food, you share food. It’s a basic human thing. The reason that space agencies have been holding it off are twofold. First of all, current human space exploration is done in microgravity conditions — like in the ISS — and as such cooking has hardly been possible. One needs a good deal of gravity to cook meals. In HI-SEAS we’re talking about simulating life on the surface of Mars, not about traveling to Mars. And since there’s a decent amount of gravity on Mars (38% of Earth’s gravity), you can do your regular cooking.

So what you’re doing is not for people in a space vehicle.
No, it’s not for the transit phase. It’s for an actual stay on a planetary surface, such as Mars, but also the Moon. The second reason space agencies have been holding off cooking is because it takes more time, water and energy, and all of those things are extremely precious in outer space. A pre-prepared meal is indeed way more efficient. But it’s a tradeoff: if your crew becomes unhappy and starts to perform less, you might want to invest a little bit by allotting more time and resources for preparing food.

We are actually the first crew in the history of space exploration to be allowed to cook properly. Obviously we’re not real astronauts, we’re simulating astronaut life. But still. This is the very first, very thorough study of the potential of cooking. That’s the baseline research — that’s why we’re funded.

Angelo Vermeulen growing vegetables inside the greenhouse at MDRS in very harsh winter conditions. Photo: Sian Proctor.

What else does the mission entail?

While we’ll spend most of our time researching food in different ways, there is a second layer of research, and that’s our personal research. Each crew member had to define his own or her own research program.

Normally in space exploration you’re strictly an operator, and you do what you’re told. But in HI-SEAS, we get a higher level of autonomy, and being able to define your own research is a clear example of that. In my case, I chose to research the potential of remote operated gardening — basically gardening using robots over long distances in a separate location. It’s the first step to semi-autonomy where robots can start taking care of crops, partially by themselves.

The personal research programs vary a lot. Roboticist and crew engineer Simon Engler will investigate the use of rovers when we’re doing so-called EVAs or explorations outside of the habitat. Crew biologist Yajaira Sierra Sastre is doing research on bacteria and nano-materials. She’s more specifically researching the use of antimicrobial garments. We’re testing NASA’s Advanced Clothing System for that purpose.

You’ll have a lab?

We have a lab, yeah. Crammed with all the other stuff in a 36’ diameter dome. The last layer of research is opportunistic research, very characteristic for space exploration. This means that other institutes, agencies, and researchers use the opportunity of the HI-SEAS isolation campaign to run research on us. We’re glad to help out because the more publications we can churn out after HI-SEAS, the better for science, for progress, and for future funding.

So while you’re there, what will the space conditions simulation be like? Will you be wearing suits, or will the atmosphere be different?

Inside the hab we’ll wear regular clothing. Once we want to go outside of the hab, we have to go through an airlock and wear space suits. They’re not real space suits — those are multi-million-dollar devices — but we’ll be wearing suits that simulate space suits, inhibiting our movements, with a glass helmet, and so on. We’re trying to get as close to the real experience of living on Mars. Essentially we’ll be subjected to restrictions that you would also experience in space exploration missions.

If you’re growing food on Mars, the environmental conditions will be very different and you’ll have to work around that by using shielded greenhouses for example. Here I have to add something about my personal research project. In fact I cannot access the food that I’m growing in the remote-operated farm.

Why not?

Because the food study is focusing on shelf stable ingredients. These are ingredients that don’t need refrigeration and that can be kept at room temperature for multiple years. Moreover we’re only using food that is relatively light. And then you end up with things like flour, rice, honey, and lots of freeze-dried ingredients. And that’s what we have to work with during the 4 months of the study. Mixing in fresh vegetables would obviously confound the study, and therefore I can’t harvest my own robot-grown plants. We can grow sprouts though, and this will be the closest we get to fresh food.

Crew of the HI-SEAS Mars mission simulation inside the MDRS training facility in Utah. The lighting devices are part of a sleep study. From left to right: Yajaira Sierra Sastre, Oleg Abramov, Simon Engler, Angelo Vermeulen, Kate Greene and Sian Proctor. Photo: Sian Proctor.

And you’re crew commander. What are your responsibilities, and why do you think you were chosen for this role?

Crew commander is a central role in isolation and space missions in general. It’s a bit like the captain on a ship, quite a comparable role. But with this difference: in space missions you’re dealing with highly trained, highly accomplished people. As a commander in such a situation, you simply can’t start the day by delivering orders to everybody. That’s not how it works. You’re much more of a facilitator and mediator.

The reason I was offered the role of crew commander was because of my experience in community building in complex conditions, such as in Biomodd and other projects. I worked in the Philippines for a long time, in a volcanic disaster zone in Indonesia, and in many other places around the world, always with the goal of building communities around challenging art/science projects. Last year I’ve created a new Biomodd version in New York City with a heterogeneous group of collaborators with culturally, socially and professionally very different backgrounds. In this way I have quite some experience keeping groups together, and that definitely helped.

How has doing this research changed your perspective?

It’s changed my perspective on designing spaceships. Every engineer that works on spaceships should go through a similar isolation experience. Through physically living in a confined off-grid space with people, you come to realize so many things. A lot of assumptions actually seem to be wrong. A classic one: most people think when you go into an isolation study, you’ll be bored for sure. It’s a universal thing, people ask me this question all the time. However, it’s rather the contrary, you hardly have enough time. The crew gets up at seven, and almost every day we work until 10. By  then we’re all pretty exhausted. We have to almost enforce a day off, like on Sundays, otherwise we would just keep on experimenting and doing research. So boredom is really not an issue at all.

In the photo, you’re taking soil samples in a spacesuit, doing extra-vehicular activities. If the mission is about cooking, why do you need to do this?

It’s to increase the fidelity of the mission. If you’re doing a food study that’s supposed to be useful for a stay on Mars, you have to do all the things you would actually do when you were there. Or at least try to get as close as possible to that kind of life. Otherwise the results wouldn’t be really relevant.

But would you personally like to be shot into space?

I wouldn’t mind.

Angelo will be blogging for the TED Fellows blog on a regular basis from within the HI-SEAS simulation. Stay tuned for transmissions!

For years, fans of the Warcraft franchise have pestered Blizzard for a new entry in the real-time strategy series. After nine years of World of Warcraft, Blizzard is poised to deliver a non-MMO title in the Warcraft franchise, but it’s not exactly what fans are expecting.

Blizzard announced today at PAX East that its new Warcraft game will be titled Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. It’s a free-to-play collectible card game for PC, Mac and iPad. The game will be supported by the sale of booster packs for players to expand their digital card collection.

If you want to see more behind the scenes stuff, check out this making of video:

Continue reading…

Julius Genachowski will step down as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, confirming press reports Thursday of his planned resignation. An FCC statement on Friday said he would depart in “coming weeks” even though his term expires this year.

President Obama nominated Genachowski to the commission in 2009, where he oversaw some fairly momentous -– and controversial — FCC actions: the creation of the National Broadband Plan, the quashing of AT&T-Mo and the approval of Verizon’s plan to cooperate with the cable companies on residential broadband.

Here’s the full text of Genachowski’s statement:

“Over the past four years, we’ve focused the FCC on broadband, wired and wireless, working to drive economic growth and improve the lives of all Americans. And thanks to you, the Commission’s employees, we’ve taken big steps to build a future where broadband is ubiquitous and bandwidth is abundant, where innovation and investment are flourishing.

“To connect all Americans to broadband, we adopted a landmark overhaul of multi-billion dollar universal service programs, modernizing them from telephone to broadband and creating the Connect America Fund and the Mobility Fund, an unprecedented commitment to broadband infrastructure.

“To unleash the enormous opportunities of mobile, we pioneered incentive auctions and other cutting-edge spectrum policies.

“To fuel America’s innovation economy, we put in place the first rules to preserve Internet freedom and openness.
“To drive competition and empower consumers, we opposed and modified transactions where necessary, deployed technology to drive transparency, and took unprecedented enforcement actions.

“We helped harness the power of digital technologies to give students a better chance, people better health care, and make Americans safer in their homes and communities, while also guarding against digital threats and strengthening cybersecurity.

“Today, America’s broadband economy is thriving, with record-setting private investment; unparalleled innovation in networks, devices and apps; and renewed U.S. leadership around the world.

“While there are challenges ahead in this fast-moving, globally competitive sector, a revitalized FCC is prepared to continue taking them on. I’m deeply grateful to President Obama for his vision, friendship, and the opportunity to serve our country.

“I’m proud of what we’ve done together to harness technology to advance the American dream for the 21st century. I know you’ll continue to fight hard to fulfill this agency’s vital mission, and I look forward to continuing to work together until my last day at the agency, and to count you as family and as an inspiration for long after that.”

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Opera singer Risë Stevens died this week at the age of 99. Stevens was best known for her title role in the opera Carmen during the 1950s.

According to her New York Times obituary, Stevens died at her home in Manhattan on March 20.

Stevens was born in New York City in 1913. She later attended the Julliard School for three years before being trained by opera singers in Vienna, Austria. After developing her voice in the Vienna State Opera, Stevens joined the Metropolitan Opera (Met), where she was the company’s lead mezzo-soprano for 22 years, from 1938 until 1961. The Met has stated that Stevens sand 337 performances at the met, 124 of which were in the role of Carmen.

After her retirement from opera singing, Stevens went on to be the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera National Company for several years during the 60s. She also continued to coach younger singers at the Met.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case a chilling picture is worth at least 14,000 retweets.

In an effort to bring attention to gun violence in the U.S., Yoko Ono tweeted a photo of John Lennon’s bloody glasses. Lennon, as you know, was shot and killed on December 8th, 1980 outside the Dakota apartment building by Mark David Chapman.

“The death of a loved one is a hollowing experience. After 33 years our son Sean and I still miss him. Yoko Ono Lennon,” read the tweet.

So far, tweet has received over 14,800 retweets and over 4,000 favorites.

The death of a loved one is a hollowing experience. After 33 years our son Sean and I still miss him. Yoko Ono Lennon twitter.com/yokoono/status…

— Yoko Ono (@yokoono) March 20, 2013

The tweet was even retweeted by President Obama’s Twitter account.

Whatever your feelings are about the current battle between gun control activists, 2nd amendment activists, and everyone in between, it’s hard to argue against this image as a particularly powerful one.

Months ago, the world watched the stock Toyota Tundra pull the Space Shuttle Endeavour across the bridge in L.A. Now, Toyota has produced this really sweet short documentary on how it all happened. Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not much else to say, but wow what a cool video behind the scenes. Wonder what the haters will say now!

It is interesting to learn that they had to move the shuttle from the robotic transporter and the reason they needed the Tundra. Here is the link to the official Toyota Endeavour website.

What do you think? Did you learn anything new?

Search terms people used to find this page:

• 2013 ram production delays

The post Toyota Endeavour Shuttle Tow Short Documentary – Sweet! appeared first on Tundra Headquarters Blog.