Coffman High School teacher, Jim Roscoe, with the help of students, built a 3D printer last spring and is now turning out plastic items that can be used in a number of scenarios. The machine melts plastic from a spool to make 3D items.
“All the information for this is open source,” Roscoe said. “The parts for the machine were made on a machine just like this. Now we can make another one.” The electronics and machines for the printer had to be purchased, but Roscoe said about $600 went into the machine that usually sells starting at $1,500.
The printer took about a month to put together plus some time to calibrate. The machine has been used to make parts for the Dublin FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team that Roscoe coaches. It also has other applications around the school. “We’re going to partner with the school store to make things,” Roscoe said, showing off small Coffman Rocks plastic figurines. “I have a product design class that will work on that.”
“We’re thinking up many uses.” Roscoe said, “We print something every day. This will have applications in math, science and physics. There are shapes you can make with it that you really can’t make in another way. You can make very complicated shapes.”
Consider the Source

Build a pulse-sensing headband that flashes a heart-shaped LED display to the beating of your heart!

Consider the Source

You no longer have to win an election, be an elite athlete, or possess movie star looks to have power. We are entering the age of the Citizen Influencer, in which every person has a chance to get behind the velvet rope and be treated like a rock star. So says author Mark W. Schaefer in his new book Return On Influence.
It’s no secret that Facebook and Google keep running accounts of our every move, want, and desire with a cold completeness and unnerving efficiency that would shock even George Orwell. This trend of social scoring is creating new classes of haves and have-nots, social media elites and losers, frenzied attempts to crash the upper class, and deepening resentments.
Social scoring is also the centerpiece of an extraordinary marketing movement. For the first time, companies can—with growing confidence—identify, quantify, and nurture valuable word-of-mouth influencers who can uniquely drive demand for their products.
Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence. And they’re not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. They are beginning to measure online influence through extraordinarily complex algorithms tweaked daily by teams of PhD-level researchers and scientists. They’re declaring their judgments online, too, for the entire world to see.
Although being publicly rated and compared has a significant icky factor, we can’t ignore the breathtaking business opportunities. The good news is that in this new world of social influence, even the obscure, the shy, and the overlooked can become celebrities in their slice of the online world.
You too can be an Internet celebrity.
You too can earn your way into the influence class.
You too can discover the power of your own return on influence.

A Michigan man moves massive blocks in his backyard using simple contraptions.
Visit W. T. Wallington’s website at: http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame. The quadrotors play this “couch guitar” by flying over guitar strings stretched across a couch frame; plucking the strings with a stiff wire attached to the base of the quadrotor. A special microphone attached to the frame records the notes made by the “couch guitar”.
These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is home to some of the most innovative robotics research on the planet, much of it coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.
This video premiered at the TED2012 Conference in Long Beach, California on February 29, 2012. Deputy Dean for Education and GRASP lab member Vijay Kumar presented some of this groundbreaking work at the TED2012 conference, an international gathering of people and ideas from technology, entertainment, and design.
The engineers from Penn, Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev, have formed a company called KMel Robotics that will design and market these quadrotors.
More information: http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-quadrotors-ted
Video Produced and Directed by Kurtis Sensenig
Quadrotors and Instruments by Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev and Vijay Kumar

There is a short-sighted methodology for calculating the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on an investment. It causes some investors to focus on smaller and smaller wins. If something doesn’t pay off for years, the IRR is so unattractive that the addled investor will focus capital on shorter and shorter term wins.
The other myopic view is called RONA. It is the rate of return on net assets. It sometimes causes companies to reduce the denominator through a reduction of assets. The “thinking” is: The fewer the assets, the higher the RONA.
Profitability is often measured by these ratios. The financial services industry has sought to simplify its practices through describing profitability by a ratio so that it can be compared across different industries. It effectively ‘neutralizes’ the measures so that they may be applied across sectors to every firm.

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.” — Morris Chang (Chairman and Founder of TSM)

The calculation of the IRR and RONA, based on a narrow view of costs and benefits, discounts long-term implications that include:

• The cost of the knowledge that is being lost, possibly forever.
• The cost of being unable to innovate in future, because critical knowledge has been lost.
• The consequent cost of  business being captured by emerging competitors that can make a better product at lower cost.
• The missed opportunity of profits that could be made from innovations based on knowledge that was given away.

Aevia — Consider the Source

Throughput Accounting (TA) improves profit performance with better management decisions by using measurements that more closely reflect the effect of decisions on three critical monetary variables (throughput, investment (AKA inventory), and operating expense. It is thus part of the management accountants’ toolkit, ensuring efficiency where it matters as well as the overall effectiveness of the organization.
TA is the only management accounting methodology that considers constraints as factors limiting the performance of organizations. It is the business intelligence used for maximizing profits. In contrast to cost accounting that primarily focuses on ‘cutting costs’ and reducing expenses to make a profit, TA focuses on the speed or rate at which throughput is generated by products and services with respect to an organization’s constraint, whether the constraint is internal or external to the organization.
Throughput Accounting is a principle-based and comprehensive management accounting approach that provides managers with decision support information for enterprise profitability improvement. TA is relatively new in management accounting. It is an approach that identifies factors that limit an organization from reaching its goal, and then focuses on simple measures that drive behavior in key areas towards reaching organizational goals.
Aevia — Consider the Source

“Hi Scott, this is Steve.” Scott Steckley asked: “Steve Jobs?”
“Yeah,” Jobs said. “I just wanted to apologize for your incredibly long wait. It’s really nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things.”
“Yeah, I understand.”
Then Jobs explained that he expedited the repair of Steckley’s computer. “I also wanted to thank you for your support of Apple,” Jobs said. “I see how much equipment you own. It really makes my day to see someone who enjoys our products so much and who supports us in the good times and bad.”
Jobs got directly involved in customer service, which was a part of Apple’s business for which he exercised a great deal of attention and patience. He fielded e-mails about broken laptops and intervened on support calls. CEOs of public companies are generally hands-on, but Jobs was involved in practically every detail.
When a customer asked Jobs via e-mail in 2008 why BlackBerry owners could tether their phones to their computers for wireless Internet access but the same could not be done with an iPhone, Jobs wrote, “We agree, and are discussing it with ATT.” The feature eventually came.
The value of using front line customer support to inform product development is unique in a marketplace characterized by surveys that yield a filtered view of customer relationships. The Jobs approach is truly refreshing in a world that often outsources relationship management.
Aevia — Consider the Source

When confronted with any of the following three people—and you have found it impossible to change their ways, say goodbye. These people passive-aggressively block innovation from happening and will suck the energy out of any organization.
1. The Victims
“I wanted a happy culture. So I fired all the unhappy people.” — A Successful CEO
Victims are people who see problems as occasions for persecution rather than challenges to overcome. Just when you think everything is humming along perfectly, they find something, anything, to complain about. So if you want an innovative team, you simply can’t include victims.
2. The Nonbelievers
“If you think you can or think you cannot, you are correct.” — Henry Ford
The link between believing and succeeding is incredibly powerful and real. Great leaders understand this. They find and promote believers within their organizations. They also understand the cancerous effect that nonbelievers have on a team and will cut them out of the organization quickly and without regret.
3. The Know-It-Alls
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.
The best innovators are learners, not knowers. The same can be said about innovative cultures; they are learning cultures. The leaders who have built these cultures, either through intuition or experience, know that in order to discover, they must eagerly seek out things they don’t understand and jump right into the deep end of the pool. They must fail fearlessly and quickly and then learn and share their lessons with the team. When they behave this way, they empower others around them to follow suit—and presto, a culture of discovery is born and nurtured.
Aevia — Consider the Source

The material has been dubbed “ultralight metallic microlattice,” and according to a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its “microlattice” cellular architecture.
It is so lightweight that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth. As yet,  no one has asked them to run a correction.
“The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in the release.
To understand the structure of the material, think of the  Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge — which are both light and weight efficient — but on a nano-scale.
The material in the picture above is made out of 90% nickel, but Bill Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, said it can be made out of other materials as well — the nickel version was just the easiest to make.
As for the uses of such a material? That’s still to be determined. Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI’s principal investigator on the project, brought up impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications.
Aevia — Consider the Source