Truly impressive

 

 

Reaprender a viajar depois dos 80

 

Desde pequeno sempre quis conhecer o mundo. Ainda que na minha infância eu não soubesse ao certo aonde gostaria de ir, eu conseguia sentir que teria grandes experiências.

Na faculdade, em 1947, fizemos um projeto de ir para a Argentina de carro. Compramos, eu e uns amigos, um Fiat 1929! Mas o carro não passou do Largo de Indianópolis. Voltamos para casa e tomamos um avião Mosquito, um daqueles antigos bombardeiros ingleses usados na Segunda Grande Guerra e que haviam sido adaptados pelos argentinos para transportar passageiros. Era baratíssima a passagem...ninguém queria viajar naquilo, claro! Mas fomos...

A vida financeira melhorou depois de me casar com a Flora e ter meus primeiros filhos. Era tempo de curtir férias em família. Gostávamos de arriscar, alugando casas bem simples, “no meio do nada”: praias desertas, sem luz, sem água e cheias de mosquitos, como reclamava minha filha mais velha. Pegava uma Kombi e carregava a família inteira, incluindo sogros, cunhados e sobrinhos. Eram férias deliciosas. Malucas, mas deliciosas.

Um dia resolvi comprar um sítio. As férias agora tinham endereço. Foi uma época de viagens de casal, Flora e eu. Fomos para Buenos Aires, na Argentina e Santiago, no Chile. Conheci a América do Sul praticamente inteira, o lado mais romântico, com certeza.

Viajar é sempre uma aventura, não importa a idade Viajar é sempre uma aventura, não importa a idade

Quando tive meus primeiros netos, minha vida estava numa boa. Não era mais um jovenzinho, mas ainda gostava de boas aventuras. Fui muito para o Pantanal com meus filhos e meu neto mais velho e foram as mais incríveis pescarias e caçadas! As mulheres, na época, não encaravam esse tipo de aventura, tudo era muito improvisado!

Já estava prestes a me aposentar quando decidir viajar mais longe e ficar fora por mais tempo. Sempre gostei de desfrutar ao máximo do lugar onde estou. Não consigo entender como alguém pode achar que consegue conhecer Paris em apenas quatro dias! Passava no mínimo duas semanas em cada cidade e conheci de fato, o mundo inteiro. Américas, Europa e África. Se considerarmos Rússia oriental, inclusive Ásia. Hoje, quando me perguntam qual o país mais interessante, não sei responder. Não existe um único lugar incrível, todos os lugares são incríveis, cada um a seu modo!

Não parei de viajar, nem mesmo com meus 80 e poucos anos. Hoje tenho 88. Foram viagens mais curtas, para lugares mais próximos, como Argentina e Uruguai. Claro que as condições físicas mudaram. E o olhar muda. A velhice subverte o tempo da viagem, o que passava rapidinho agora demora mais, você saboreia com lentidão as experiências. Examina cada uma à luz do conhecimento e da sensibilidade que acumulou...mas continua sendo uma experiência deliciosa.

Aprendi a curtir momentos diferentes, como observar as pessoas numa praça, uma boa conversa com um taxista e o desfrutar de uma saborosa comida típica. Se me pedissem um conselho em relação à viagem, eu diria: troque dez países em vinte dias por um país em dez.

A Europa é um bom destino, fácil transporte, cidades planas – não temos mais os joelhos dos trinta e poucos anos – e uma boa infraestrutura. Não há necessidade de se afobar: acorde no seu horário normal, passeie, conheça o que quiser conhecer. Se não quiser visitar algum ponto turístico, não vá, pronto! A gente conhece de fato um lugar pelas pessoas, pela comida e pela arquitetura.

Não existe idade certa para viajar. Existe um modo e uma experiência distinta, nem mais, nem menos interessante.

Luiz Gerevini é advogado e empresário aposentado. Patriarca de uma família de 5 filhos, 11 netos e 6 bisnetos (por enquanto), com 89 anos, ele atualmente dedica sua vida aos seus maiores prazeres: viagens, leitura e um bom vinho. Sua mais recente aventura está sendo se arriscar no universo da escrita para web.

Fitbit’s Charge provides automatic sleep tracking and an optional heart rate monitor

 

Fitbit's Charge tracker serves as a replacement for the Force, adding a touch of new functionality

 

Fitbit’s Charge may provoke a touch of déjà vu in anyone familiar with the ill-fated Force fitness tracker, but it’s not a direct clone. The new wearable provides a touch of new functionality and offers an optional pulse tracker.

The Charge is decidedly familiar. It shares both its looks and its functionality with the company’s Force tracker, that was recalled earlier this year in response to cases of contact dermatitis caused by the wearable. As you might expect, Fitbit has altered the materials used on the new tracker, with the product featuring a softer, textured rubber construction.

Like the Force, the Charge has the ability to track steps, distance, active minutes and calories burned, and packs an altimeter for keeping tabs on number of floors climbed. The OLED display presents the user with information including time of day, exercise mode and their daily fitness stats, and will also display and vibrate to alert them to incoming calls on a connected smartphone.

The Charge can additionally track the user while they’re sleeping, later providing an analysis on the Dashboard of the company’s smartphone app. Unlike Fitbit's previous trackers, the Charge doesn’t need to be told when it’s time for bed, but automatically detects when the user is hitting the hay.

If you decide to pick up the tracker, then you’ll also be able to use it as an alarm clock, replacing your phone's jarring jingles with a more civilized silent vibration. The wearable is water-resistant to 1 ATM, and is available in three sizes.

The new tracker connects to iOS, Android and Windows Phone smartphones, with the company’s app providing simple, accessible charts and graphs detailing the user's performance, as well as allowing them to set fitness goals.

The Charge will reportedly run for seven days on a single charge, comes in black, grey, blue and red, and is available now for US$130.

The company will also ship a variation of the product, known as the Charge HR that throws a heart rate monitor into the mix. There’s a slight trade-off for the extra functionality, with the pulse-tracking version of the device only rated for five days of battery life. The Charge HR is available for pre-order now, and will ship for $150.

Source: Fitbit

 

Reflita.

 

 

A Dale Carnegie quotation

Skip the Sugar, Add This to Your Drink for a Flavor Boost

 

Michael Roizen, MD, and Mehmet Oz, MD

Helpful person found this helpful.

Mary Poppins claimed a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but clearly she was unaware added sugar makes you sick, so you need even more medicine -- and medical intervention.

Related: How bad is sugar for you...really?

A study of postmenopausal women found those who drink a lot of sweetened beverages have a 78% greater risk of estrogen-dependent type I endometrial cancer (the most common form) compared to women who don’t consume such liquid sugar bombs. And we’ve known for a long time that anyone who drinks a lot of sweetened beverages is at increased risk of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Drinking one can of sugary soda a day can increase your diabetes risk 18% and added sugars fuel the growth and spread of prostate and breast cancers.
So what’s our trick for giving beverages a flavor boost and a touch of sweetness, so they’re part of your healthy choices for a younger RealAge?

Cinnamon. It tastes and smells great and one study found taking a 500mg capsule of cinnamon twice a day for 90 days significantly lowers A1C levels (a measure of your blood sugar levels for the past 3 months). Cinnamon also lowers lousy LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, increases good HDL cholesterol and decreases BMI and weight.

Try it in coffee or tea, on cereal and whole-grain toast and add it to casseroles, stir fries and roasted veggies. For a healthy winter dessert, check out Dr. Oz's Cinnamon Apple Sauté a la Mode. It's a sweet taste with no downside. Bon appetite!

Drivebot provides real-time monitoring of vehicle health

 

The Drivebot is a simple dongle device that plugs into the car’s On Board Diagnostic (OBD-II) port

Designed by a team out of Thailand, Drivebot is a real-time vehicle monitoring system comprising a simple dongle device that plugs into the car’s On Board Diagnostic port (OBD-II) to provide real-time vehicle diagnostics via a smartphone app.

For many drivers, a vehicle’s inner workings are akin to magic. When something goes wrong with the car, we take it to the mechanic and trust them to provide an accurate, honest resolution recommendation. But what if there was an app that could provide us vehicular simpletons with ongoing monitoring and recommend a non-biased solution when a problem is identified? That’s exactly what five Thai engineers thought when they set about developing the Drivebot, a device described as a Fitbit for your car.

The Drivebot is a simple dongle device that plugs into the On Board Diagnostic (OBD-II) port found on most cars produced since 1996. The Drivebot dongle pairs with a companion smartphone app via Bluetooth to provide real-time vehicle diagnostics and detect a problem in its earliest stages.

Since most vehicle owners aren't certified mechanics, the developers have designed the app to provide basic instructions on how to resolve simple problems. For more complicated problems, the app will advise drivers to contact their mechanic or service center to address the issue. The basic idea is to proactively identify issues before they become more serious (and more expensive to repair).

IN addition to keeping an electronic eye on the health of the vehicle, Drivebot can also be programmed to monitor driving habits and driving routes and make recommendations on how to save gas or suggesting different driving routes in order to save time and money. Drivebot can also tag business trips and export the files to your email in an effort to improve business expense tracking.

The Drivebot dongle has built-in flash storage that can store roughly two months of trip data, while the smartphone app is available for iOS7 or later, or Android 4.0 or later. The app can also support multiple vehicle profiles and exports user trip data as CSV files.

Drivebot has currently raised almost US$60,000 in crowdsourced funds on Indiegogo, far surpassing its initial goal of $35,000. The minimum pledge level currently remaining for a Drivebot is $75, with the team hoping to ship an iOS version of the device in February 2015 and an Android version to follow in March, if all goes to plan.

Source: Drivebot

 

New hookworm vaccine passes clinical trials in Brazil

 

A clinical trial of a permanent vaccine for hookworm has been completed in Brazil, giving hope for a permanent end to a problem that affects 600 million people worldwide.

Hookworms are aptly named for how nasty they are. The parasites mainly live in the small intestine, feeding from blood leached from the intestine walls they hook into. They can also live in the lungs. Some of the problems associated with a hookworm infection are anemia and nutritional deficiencies and a lack of protein and iron. Small children can suffer worse complications, such as stunted growth and slowed mental development.

The only possible upside might be a link between protecting against asthma and other allergies and hookworms. And whilst far greater attention is now being paid to the importance of gut bacteria in humans the blood leaching hookworms are not really considered the "good" kind.

They are, however, a relatively treatable problem. Getting rid of an infection is not especially difficult; treatments can take only a few days. However prevention is preferable. Hookworm infections are the most common in the tropics and other warmer areas with poorer sanitation. Typically infections occur when the larvae hatch from eggs in feces and travel through the skin and into the bloodstream and then lungs or small intestine and basic prevention methods include wearing shoes when outside and ensuring human defecation is limited to certain areas, so the eggs and hatching larvae are not widely spread.

The vaccine’s active ingredient comes from hookworms themselves, a protein from a common species of adult hookworm. When exposed to it, patients develop antibodies that recognize the protein and can later mobilize against should the body be infected with hookworms at some point.

"Developing lasting solutions for hookworm and other NTDs trapping people in poverty requires comprehensive collaboration, cutting-edge science and leadership among health and policy leaders in endemic countries," Peter Hotez, president of Sabin, has said.

The problem with hookworm is repeat infections, from contaminated water. It is hoped that this drug can be streamed into the nation’s vaccination programs to provide lasting immunity rather than burden the health system with multiple trips to the doctor for free single dose treatments.

Whilst offering hope for the developing world it may still take time. Though Phase 1 clinical trials were completed in August in two cities of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, over a period of three and a half years and involving 102 participants, a license may not be forthcoming until 2020. More trials are expected to start in Gabon soon, a nation with a three-in-ten rate of hookworm infection.

 

 

How big data is helping farmers save millions

 

The predictive abilities of big data is being used to improve farming outcomes (Photo: Shutterstock)

Data scientists studying crop growth and weather patterns in Colombia have advised rice farmers not to plant crops, saving them millions of dollars. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the Colombian Rice Growers Federation have developed a computer model that can work out what crops work best under specific weather conditions in certain areas.

Farming has always been as much art as science: knowing what to plant and when is often intuitive for many farmers. However the vagaries of shifting weather patterns and climate change make this much more difficult and a crop destroyed by inclement weather or drought may cost small hold farmers and their families their livelihoods. In Colombia, where rice yields are already dropping and free trade agreements threaten local farmers, improving farming conditions by harnessing the predictive abilities of big data is showing signs of being terrifically useful.

According to CIAT: "Joint efforts on multi-environment trials with detailed physiological evaluation, studies on the adaptation of elite lines, historical data analysis, and crop modeling in Colombia provided important inputs for initiating the development of a system to better manage rice under highly variable weather scenarios."

Considering that there are predictions of massive crop yield fall offs in the coming decades thanks to climate change, such predictive computer modelling is going to become increasingly necessary. CIAT has found that climate accounts for 30 - 40 percent of crop production variability in some parts of Colombia.

Colombia’s rice yields have apparently been hit by climate change problems and harvests of the staple food have declined by a tonne per hectare in the past five years, a steep drop. Maize, potato, cassava and beans are also important crops and the modelling tool will eventually take these in also, under the two year agreement between CIAT and Colombia’s ministry of agriculture.

Last year, researchers from CIAT working with Colombian Rice Growers Federation, advised a group of Colombian farmers against planting crops as they predicted a drought would hit. They were right and saved farmers $3.8 million; those who did not take their advice were not as lucky and lost their crops. Their advice was well grounded: they had developed a complex computer model that had ten years’ worth of data from Colombian farms, from farm management and crop yield to the types of crops and the weather conditions that year. From this inferences could be drawn on what works where, and during what kinds of weather conditions. Whilst traditional farming knowledge is already based around such concepts – otherwise how could farmers grow anything? – this refinement seems to have led to greater accuracy if their success so far is any way to tell.

This project won the UN’s Big Data Climate Challenge in September and is already being looked at in other nations, such as Nigeria. The UN project wishes to, "bring forward data-driven evidence of the economic dimensions of climate change," using big data and analytics. The fields of study are diverse, from transportation and smart cities to agriculture and behavioral science.

 

 

Stealthy Norwegian entrepreneur aims to revolutionize U.S. energy storage

 

Monday, October 27, 2014

Jostein Eikeland, a Norwegian entrepreneur with a mixed record of success, is hoping to jolt the world of energy storage.

On Tuesday, Eikeland’s latest venture, Alevo, will unveil a battery that he says will last longer and ultimately cost far less than rival technologies.

The technology, which is meant to store excess electricity generated by power plants, has been developed by Eikeland in secret for a decade.

“We’ve been very stealth,” Eikeland said in a telephone interview. “We didn’t know if we were going to succeed.”

Martigny, Switzerland-based Alevo Group is gearing up to start manufacturing batteries next year at a massive former cigarette plant near Charlotte, North Carolina, that it says will employ 2,500 people within three years.

Eikeland, 46, said Alevo, named for the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, has $1 billion from anonymous Swiss investors and has taken no state funding or incentives.

Alternately brash and self-deprecating, Eikeland did not shy away from discussing his up-and-down past. He founded software company TeleComputing Inc during the dot-com boom, helped take it public on the Oslo stock exchange, then left in 2002 after the tech bubble burst.

He later invested heavily in and took the helm of Sweden-based auto parts manufacturer, TMG International, which went bankrupt in 2008. Broke, he was forced to sell his lavish homes to pay his taxes, according to media reports that were confirmed by representatives for Alevo.

After TMG, Eikeland spent a few years investing in software and battery technologies, many of which he admits failed.

“I know how hard it is to lose eight of your 10 fingers,” he said. “I wish I had somebody else to blame.”

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

Claims of technological breakthroughs from unfamiliar companies are common in the world of green technology. Many startups fizzle out before they achieve mass production. Among the recent high-profile flameouts: battery maker A123 and solar panel maker Solyndra.

“One billion dollars is a colossal amount of capital raised for any clean-tech company,” said Raymond James analyst Pavel Molchanov, who said he is not familiar with Alevo. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to be a smashing success.”

Typically in high-tech manufacturing, companies use pilot projects to prove their technology to investors and potential customers before ramping up. That’s not how Eikeland is proceeding.

“Building as big as we did, it might seem a little bit risky,” said Eikeland, who described himself as “a controversial guy.”

Producing on a mass scale will make Alevo’s technology cost- effective from the start, Eikeland said. The high cost of grid storage has prevented it from being deployed more widely.

Eikeland plans to deliver 200 megawatts of batteries – roughly enough to power 100,000 homes – into the U.S. market next year and is in talks with big utilities, which he hopes will become customers.

Alevo’s approach stands in stark contrast to the public announcement last month of Tesla Motors Inc’s planned $5 billion factory in Nevada, which will make batteries for electric cars. Tesla says its plant will employ 6,500 people by 2020. It will receive more than $1 billion of state incentives.

“Building a $1 billion facility in stealth mode is definitely unusual,” said Dan Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University. Reicher, a former green technology investor, said he was not familiar with Alevo or its technology.

State and county officials in North Carolina confirmed that Alevo has not sought any business incentives.

PACKING A LOT OF POWER

The company has created what it calls GridBanks, which are shipping containers full of thousands of battery cells. Each container can deliver 2 megawatts of power, enough to power up to 1,300 homes for an hour.

The batteries use lithium iron phosphate and graphite as active materials and an inorganic electrolyte – what Eikeland called the company’s “secret sauce” – that extends longevity and reduces the risk of burning. They can be charged and discharged over 40,000 times, the company said.

That is about four times as much as rival batteries, said Sam Wilkinson, who follows energy storage for IHS Technology. Wilkinson, who said he was briefed by Alevo on its plans, said that if the batteries work as promised they will constitute a technological leap.

Grid storage has become critical as more renewables are introduced into the world’s power supply. For instance, batteries can store power generated during windy nights to use during the day when the wind may not be blowing, or can extend solar power into the hours after the sun goes down.

The industry is expected to grow to $19 billion by 2017 from just $200 million in 2012, according to research firm IHS CERA.

Eikeland holds several patents in the United States related to battery technology. The company will compete with established manufacturers like Samsung and France’s Saft as well as a handful of privately held startups like Enervault and Primus Power.