Lifeboat Foundation

Medcalf: Because you’re moving away from the economics of scale to closer to the clinic, the batches are smaller and some of the traditional paradigms for quality assurance, such as proof of sterility, are harder to arrange. Thus, you need to have a manufacturing system that includes quality assurance within the system itself.

Automation is often presented as a way to remove the single largest source of infective risk, i.e. the human operator. For example, the self-sterilizing reusable units being developed at the University of Osaka under Professor Masahiro Kino-oka allow small-scale production with a high degree of confidence in the aseptic management of the environment.

Another challenge is defining a product that has variable characteristics. The main reason for decentralizing is to allow customization to a patient, which means you need to have a hierarchy of levels of specification. For example, with bioprinting, which also produces a customized product, you need to define bulk properties, but you also need to set constraints around how it’s anchored or implanted into the patient.

Astronauts representing countries in direct armed conflict have never worked on the space station. Right now, the International Space Station crew consists of U.S. astronauts Raja Chari, Mark Vande Hei, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron; Matthias Maurer, a German from the European Space Agency; and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.

Economic sanctions may affect the space programs on Earth, Mastracchio says, but the space-station crews never saw the impact of anything. “The programs themselves still get along,” he says. “It was really just, we were friends before we went up to space, and you’re working up there relying on each other and you continue to do that.” Chamitoff says he wishes the world would take more notice of cooperative operations in space, which could be a better model for how to do things geopolitically. “The space station has been an amazing project that’s brought 15 countries together for 30 years,” he says. “When things like this happen and there’s these kind of tensions, you kind of wonder, ‘Does anybody notice that we’re working together and it’s going great?’”

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Rutgers professor Jason Barr has proposed adding 1,760-acres of reclaimed land, named New Mannahatta, to the tip of Manhattan to provide housing and combat climate change.

Called New Mannahatta in reference to the indigenous name for the island in New York, the plan would extend Manhattan Island into New York Harbor beyond the Statue of Liberty.

Barr, a professor of economics at Rutgers University, outlined his plan in an opinion piece directed at the city’s mayor Eric Adams, which was recently published in the New York Times.

Building a better supercomputer is something many tech companies, research outfits, and government agencies have been trying to do over the decades. There’s one physical constraint they’ve been unable to avoid, though: conducting electricity for supercomputing is expensive.

Not in an economic sense—although, yes, in an economic sense, too—but in terms of energy. The more electricity you conduct, the more resistance you create (electricians and physics majors, forgive me), which means more wasted energy in the form of heat and vibration. And you can’t let things get too hot, so you have to expend more energy to cool down your circuits.

We can summarize this as:

Price = Demand / Supply.

When there is more demand or less supply, the price goes up. When there is less demand or more supply, the price goes down. This is basic economics.

TOKYO, Feb 15 (Reuters) — Japan’s economy rebounded in the final three months of 2021 as falling coronavirus cases helped prop up consumption, though rising raw material costs and a spike in new Omicron variant infections cloud the outlook.

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda also highlighted escalating tensions in Ukraine as a fresh risk to the central bank’s forecast for a moderate economic recovery.

The world’s third-largest economy expanded an annualised 5.4% in October-December after contracting a revised 2.7% in the previous quarter, government data showed on Tuesday, falling short of a median market forecast for a 5.8% gain.

While it’s difficult to put something as vast, conceptual, and, frankly still emerging as the metaverse in quantifiable terms, Jon Radoff breaks it down logically and thoroughly.

When it comes to describing the metaverse, definitions and opinions abound. And while it’s difficult to put something as vast, conceptual, and, frankly, still emerging as the metaverse into quantifiable terms, Jon Radoff, entrepreneur, author and game designer, breaks it down logically and thoroughly in Measuring the Metaverse. He moves up the value chain from infrastructure at the bottom to experience at the top, stopping at human interface, decentralization, spatial computing, creator economy, and discovery along the way.

A common framework is necessary in Radoff’s view of the metaverse. He writes, “And while there will be many proprietary (and very fun) theme parks in the metaverse, I’m even more excited by the opportunity in the Switzerlands: a metaverse powered by a robust creator-economy enabled through decentralization.”

Continue reading “Understanding the 7 layers of the metaverse” »

Before the pandemic started (ah, those glorious days…) a collective panic was mounting over automation and robots gradually replacing workers in various fields, or “stealing our jobs,” as the common refrain went. These worries haven’t subsided two years later, but they’re being countered by severe and largely unexpected labor shortages across multiple sectors of the economy. One of the industries that’s struggling most is restaurants. While we may still encounter automation-related unemployment problems down the road, right now it seems robots are lending a much-needed hand in food service.

One of these robots is none other than Flippy, initially debuted in 2017 to flip burgers at a California fast food chain. Since then Miso Robotics, Flippy’s maker, has expanded the bot’s capabilities, creating a version that can cook chicken wings, fries, and other greasy delights. This week also brought a significant expansion to Flippy’s presence as White Castle announced plans to install the robot at more than 100 restaurants this year.

Continue reading “Flippy the Fast Food Robot Just Got Hired in 100 Restaurants” »