Veronica Kalas:

I have been asked to write a report for the International Center of Medieval Art newsletter concerning recent events in Turkey whereby Byzantine churches that long have held the status of state museums and cultural heritage sites are being converted into mosques. It is crucial to raise awareness about this very critical issue. The examples include the church of the Hagia Sophia in Iznik (Nicea), the church of the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon (Trebizond), and the plans for the church and associated monastic complex of St. John Stoudios in Istanbul (Constantinople). Although these events have been ongoing for quite some time, the world started watching more closely in recent months when certain representatives of the Turkish government publicly called for the conversion of THE Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. For every example, the original Byzantine church building testifies to the vast contribution of Byzantine culture and civilization to the history of medieval art and architecture and world architecture more broadly. These churches were converted into mosques under Ottoman rule and subsequently into museums under the Turkish Republic.

Blake Hurst:

Most combines traveling across fields in the Midwest this fall had a GPS receiver located in the front of the cab. Although agriculture has been experimenting with this technology for a decade or so, only now is the industry starting to consider all the uses of this transformative technology. For several years, farmers have had the ability to map yields with global positioning data. Using that information, firms can design “prescriptions” for the farmer, who uses the “scrips” to apply seed and fertilizer in varying amounts across the field. Where the yield maps show soil with a lower yield potential, the prescription calls for fewer seeds and less fertilizer. This use of an individual farmer’s data to design a different program for each square meter in a field spanning hundreds of acres could replace a farmer’s decades of experience with satellites and algorithms. What we have gained in efficiency and by avoiding the overuse of scarce and potentially environmentally damaging inputs, we may be losing in the connections of the farm family to the ancestral place. Precision technology will allow managers to cover more acres more accurately and will likely lead to increasing size and consolidation of farms. While Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters continue to argue that we need to turn back the clock on technology in agriculture, much of the world is moving in a quite different direction.
 
 Advice for individual fields is only the beginning of the uses for this technology. The leading agricultural equipment firm, John Deere, is running a pilot program this fall with 500 farms and 1,000 combines across the Midwest. Data is uploaded every several hours to the cloud, where it can be used… well, we don’t really know all the ways it can be used. If 1,000 machines randomly spread across the Corn Belt were recording yield data on the second day of harvest, that information would be extremely valuable to traders dealing in agricultural futures. Traders have traditionally relied on private surveys and Department of Agriculture yield data (the latter delayed by a month this year because of the government shutdown). These yield estimates are neither timely nor necessarily accurate. But now, real-time yield data is available to whoever controls those databases. The company involved says it will never share the data. Farmers may want access to that data, however, and they may not be averse to selling the information to the XYZ hedge fund either, if the price is right — but that’s only possible if farmers retain ownership of the data.

osvehicle:

Macchi decided to leave the corporate world and start a project of their own to change the way vehicles are created, making them open source, low cost and with zero initial investment on DIY/DIT production anywhere over the world. This project became known as OSVehicle.

via Denis Metzger

Derek Edwards:

Cars do not belong in cities. A standard American sedan can comfortably hold 4+ adults w/ luggage, can travel in excess of 100 miles per hour, and can travel 300+ miles at a time without stopping to refuel. These are all great things if you are traveling long distances between cities. If you are going by yourself to pickup your dry cleaning, then cars are insanely over-engineered for the task. It’s like hammering in a nail with a diesel-powered pile driver. To achieve all these feats (high capacity, high speed, and long range driving), cars must be large and powered by fossil fuels. So when you get a few hundred (or thousand) cars squeezed onto narrow city streets, you are left with snarled traffic and stifling smog.
 
 Even if you ignore the pollution, cars simply take up too much space. Next time you are stuck in traffic behind what seems like a million cars, try to imagine if all those cars where replaced by pedestrians or bike riders. Suddenly, the congestion is gone.

Susan Young:

By tracking brain activity through electroencephalography, or EEG, software may be able to maintain a patient in a medically induced coma more safely than a human expert can.

Anesthesiologists use EEG to monitor a patient’s level of sedation through sensors placed on the scalp. When a patient is deeply sedated in a medical coma—a technique sometimes used to reduce brain swelling after a traumatic injury or to treat uncontrolled seizures—a nurse or doctor must currently monitor the patient’s brain activity and adjust the rate of anesthetic delivery around the clock, sometimes for days.

Emery Brown, an MIT neuroscientist and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, thinks the computer-controlled anesthetic system he has developed could do a better job. In a study published on Thursday in PLoS Computational Biology, Brown and colleagues demonstrate the technology in rats as a step toward developing it for human patients.

Flip Chart Rick, via Leigh Turner.

Andrew Hill:

It is always irritating to be stereotyped, but it must be particularly galling for cash-strapped, educated members of “Generation Y” to be told by demographers, marketers and futurologists that they have to get out and shake up management and the world of work.

Globally, under-30s may be “irreverent, change-seeking, challenging, better informed, mobile, and connected”, as Moisés Naím describes them in his new book, The End of Power. But the FT’s “Class of the Crunch” series has underlined that, in Britain at least, recent graduates are paying more for education and housing and earning less than their predecessors. Changing the world of work is the last thing on most of their minds: they have to get into it first.

Once there, new recruits find the reality of long hours at lean organisations that make few concessions to inexperience a shock, after years of cosseting by their baby boomer parents. London Business School’s Lynda Gratton details the challenges ahead in her book The Shift. She reprimanded an audience of older executives at the recent FT Innovate conference for giving young employees such “crap-awful work”.

Paul Downs:

I can assemble a roster of plans at different price points and model the effect of offering various employer/employee premium cost splits. I can also see what happens if I offer a defined contribution instead of a percentage split — and what it would cost me to fund health savings accounts for workers who choose a bronze-level plan. Of course, I will have to confirm that I can actually purchase my preferred configuration with my agent or insurer, but the estimates I make should at least be good enough to narrow my options.
 
 To do my projections, I created an Excel sheet that allows me to analyze up to 20 plans at once. I’ve been playing around with different plans and incentives, and I’m finding ways to save tens of thousands of dollars from the cost of the first plan my broker recommended. Would you like to try it? I put extra time into making it easy to use, and you can try it free. All you need is your roster of employees, with their ages, and a quote from any source. Spend some time messing around with numbers and you, too, might save significant money. The sheet and the instructions for how to use it are on my website. Be sure to read the instructions!

Fabius Maximus:

Automation need not be feared. Many of the dooms we fear will disappear along with the lost jobs. Automation improves productivity, giving us more national wealth and income. We need only adapt our society to gain its benefits, minimize the trauma of the transition, and share the benefits (which we have failed to do with the gains from the last 30 years). We want to succeed like Britain did in the 1760 – 1840 period, with internal peace and prosperity. We do not want to follow France’s path during that period.
 
 Planning for success requires reassessment of America’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, economists consider as strengths our relatively high fertility and attractiveness to immigrants. Not so as automation destroys jobs by the millions during the next few decades.
 
 In the 21st century population growth will not be necessary for economic growth. Perhaps the 21st century will reverse that, making Japan is the nation best prepared for the next wave of automation — as seen in the below graph from “Japan Meanderings”, Christopher Woods, CLSA, 5 December 2013:

Jason Fagone:

Why do major leaps forward come so rarely in the auto industry? There are of course the usual suspects: crash test standards, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requirements, European pedestrian safety protections; entrenched capital investment in infrastructure and manufacturing methods; long vehicle development cycles — the whole legacy kaboodle of a mature and highly regulated industry. But I spent four years researching, interviewing, and writing about inventors who aren’t limited to thinking like the auto companies, and who made cars that are drastic departures from the ones we’re driving now. They did this as part of a grand-challenges approach to innovation — a $10 million X Prize that pushed inventors to build the super-efficient car of the future.
 
 Auto companies like to sneer at legitimately futuristic cars, calling them “science projects” and saying consumers will never buy them. I believe this is a mistake. Because ultimately, they don’t really know. They’ve never tried to make and sell cars like the ones that ended up excelling in the X Prize contest. And they’re awfully good at blaming consumer timidity for their own engineering fears and failures.
 
 
 Announced in 2007 and staged in 2010, the Progressive Insurance Auto X Prize attracted diverse interest — not from big automakers but from lone inventors, garage hackers, students, entrepreneurs, and startup companies all over the world, all with different ideas about how to shape the future of the automobile. To win a piece of the $10 million prize pot, teams had to build a safe, practical car that could travel 100 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas (MPGe) and emit 200 grams per mile or less of CO2 (a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming).