There’s nothing like traveling with children. It can be hectic to keep them entertained while on the go. Trying to keep up with the small child, and all of their belongings can be quite the challenge when making a trip across the country to visit Grandma.
Bontoy Traveller is the inanimate traveling companion to make these trips much more enjoyable for both the child and the parents. This happy travel puppy can be ridden on or pulled and even has a compartment for all of your child’s needs.
Available as a Beagle or a Dalmatian, your child and you, the parent will all be super pleased to go on many adventures together. With wheels on the bottom, the child can sit and ride as you pull him, or they can push themselves. The inside compartment has a secure fastening belt that keeps all of your children toys or clothing safe and secure. When you’re not traveling, The Bontoy Traveller makes for a perfect at home companion.
The day after Super Bowl XLV, Feb. 7, 2011, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta described AOL’s deal to acquire The Huffington Post as “Tim Armstrong’s Hail Mary Pass.” That description was comically recalled Tuesday night by Arianna Huffington as she bid her official farewell to staff at a party hosted at Catch’s rooftop. Huffington is moving on to Thrive, while her game-changing content company now belongs to Verizon.
“If I knew more about football, I would complete the [New Yorker] metaphor in some inspiring way,” joked Huffington. “But I know enough to know that whatever kind of pass it was, it worked. Appropriately, the deal was signed on Super Bowl Sunday, actually at the Super Bowl. It’s the only part of a Super Bowl I’ve ever paid attention to.”
“And now here we are celebrating a new chapter, both for me and for The Huffington Post, just as football season starts again,” she continued. “Sadly, I am as clueless about football now as I was then, but I am very up on how many hours a night Tom Brady sleeps and how that helps improve his stats – though I have no idea what those stats mean.”
“Tim believed in our global expansion from Day One. In fact, he and I announced it days after the acquisition when we were in London. And now HuffPost is set to launch HuffPost Mexico in two days [Thursday], building a bridge between our two countries at a time when Donald Trump wants to build a wall. So thank you Tim for proving right the prediction I made on the day of the acquisition, that HuffPost was stepping off a train and getting on a supersonic jet.”
French office Studio Razavi has inserted a multifaceted black block into the centre of an apartment in Paris, creating a new layout while also offering a contrast to Haussmann-era details (+ slideshow).
Studio Razavi renovated Apartment XIV for a young couple who collect contemporary artwork, as well as their dog. The aim was to create a more open configuration, while also preserving the ornate 19th-century detailing.
The architects removed some walls and slotted a sculptural multi-functional furniture block into the gaps. Made out of black wood-fibre panels, it has a staggered profile that allows views between different areas and frames selected ceiling mouldings.
“The existing context is that of a 150-year-old ‘Haussmannian’ apartment with a rigid layout, which we intended to disrupt so that ultimately its inner qualities are revealed,” architect Guillen Berniolles told Dezeen.
“Our focus was to remove all existing partitions and to create new contemporary spaces,” said Berniolles. “Materials and shapes were chosen to create a contrast between existing and new and dark and light.”
The structure sits in the centre of the space. Each of its faces hosts a different function for the kitchen, living and dining area arranged around it.
“Programmatic clusters respond to specific client needs, create a landscape inside the apartment and modify the perception of this very classical Parisian layout,” said Berniolles.
At its tallest peak, the structure features storage cabinets that point towards the kitchen. This rooms features cabinets in the same material, as well as a splash-back comprising a jagged patchwork of marble.
A study desk is fitted in the lowest end of the black volume, while a television is mounted on the side that faces the living area.
A matching triangular column sits alongside it in the entrance space, which accommodates a dog bed and more storage cabinets.
The architects also added a white block with a V-shaped profile to accommodate a new bathroom, with a space above that can be accessed by a ladder.
It angular form is mirrored by a row of cupboards that creates storage space for the master bedroom.
Minimal materials and a stripped-back colour palette feature throughout the apartment, but timber flooring offers some relief from the otherwise monochrome colour scheme.
Apartment XIV dates back to Baron Haussmann’s reorganisation of Paris during the second half of the 19th century, when all structures were designed under height restrictions and constructed from the same cream-coloured stone.
Areas of Chicago have been fitted with a network of sensors, which will work like a Fitbit activity tracker to provide both scientists and citizens with open data about the urban environment (+ movie).
The Array of Things sensor packages are designed to collect data about the urban environment
The project’s title is based on the Internet of Things – a collective name for everyday devices, objects and systems that are networked via Wi-Fi to share and respond to data.
The first of 500 sensor packages have been installed across the city, working similarly to werable activity trackers to provide data about various environmental factors.
“Array of Things is designed as a ‘fitness tracker’ for the city, collecting new streams of data on Chicago’s environment, infrastructure, and activity,” said a spokesperson for the university.
Their sensors can collect information about climatic and atmospheric conditions, while two cameras obtain visual data
The aim is to help Chicago’s experts, policymakers and residents better understand issues like urban flooding, air quality and traffic patterns, so solutions to any problems can be developed.
“We’ll be able to understand things like road conditions better, because the Array of Things will show us where water is collecting,” said Brenna Berman, the City of Chicago’s chief information officer. “It will help us predict vehicular and pedestrian traffic patterns better, so we can offer better services.”
Installed on lamp posts and the sides of buildings, each beehive-shaped sensor package can collect information about air quality, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, vibration and magnetic field.
The sensor packages, depicted here as an earlier iteration, are designed to be mounted on lamp posts and the sides of buildings
Two cameras also obtain data about vehicle and foot traffic, standing water, sky colour and cloud cover.
The information gathered will be accessible to all via open platforms, including on the University of Chicago website.
According to the Array of Things team, many organisations have already approached them with proposals to use the data to provide users with relevant information via various apps.
The data collected by the network of sensors will be available to everyone via online platforms
For example, asthmatics could be informed about which areas of the city are experiencing poor air quality.
“It’s truly doing science out there in the city and in the communities,” said Berman. “We’ll be able to engage with community groups to make the data their own.”
The first batch of sensors has been installed in different parts of Chicago
The industrial Pilsen area of Chicago – south-west of the city centre – was chosen as one of the initial testing grounds for the Array of Things, where air quality levels will be assessed.
In the city’s central Loop area, sensor packages are being placed at every block along State Street and Randolph Street to help understand pedestrian and traffic flow.
It is hoped that a citywide network of 500 Array of Things modules will be in place by 2018
By 2018, a citywide network is hoped to be in place.
How to pique interest in another spooky motion picture about technology run amok? Have a powerful AI take a crack at pitching it to humans. In support for the upcoming release of Morgan, 20th Century Fox enlisted IBM’s Watson to put a real thinking-machine take on the tech thriller’s trailer. The scary part? It works great.
Here’s the result, with commentary by its human parents:
To accomplish the trailer’s design, IBM used new Watson APIs and machine learning. Trailers for 100 horror movies were scrutinized for audio, visuals, and composition. These categories had Watson filtering through facial cues, dialog, lighting, soundtrack and more in search of core factors that make a trailer eerie, emotional, suspenseful, and compelling to us squishy meat robots.
What makes a good trailer is still hotly contested (at least on the internet), so we might fairly assume that our new AI companions are a long way from recognizing and replicating human emotional nuance (goodness knows many humans still are, especially on the internet). But Watson’s treatment of the Morgan footage is pretty damn strong.
The trailer was given final creative massaging by human editors, but it shows a familiar handle on the pacing, lighting, dialog, and tone traditionally used to create narrative and stimulate human interest and tension. Perhaps most importantly, it cut what would have been weeks of human research and labor down to just 24 hours.
While there is no true “average” viewer, and no universally correct way to make or pitch a film, movie tropes use a lot of subtle socially enacted cues. Watson’s successful replication of editing for those emotional and intellectual cues illustrates the thrilling breadth of uses for machine learning. …And how easily we’ll be manipulated when the time comes for our digital overlords to rise.
Morgan opens September 2. For more on the IBM team’s process check out their PR blog post here.
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