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Technologically-Weaponized Martial Arts

Chiron Global has invented a new martial arts category. The Unified Weapons Master uses a "suit of armor" that lets combatants use weapons without fear of serious injury. Sensors in the suits measure the force being used, and algorithms are used to calculate just how much damage would have been done if weapons were being used without protection.
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Vehicle blind spots. Time to start doing something…

A young Boston woman was killed recently in an accident wtih a duck boat. Rather than banning duck tours, what might be better is equipping these vehicles with cameras and sensors that would alert the driver to something that they couldn’t see. These could even be connected to a braking or sound-warning system. The technology exists, and there are already many commercial products on the market that address the problem of vehicular blind spots.
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Energy Harvesting

Off and on, I’ve been seeing articles on energy harvesting, which captures energy from ambient sources like wind and solar. One of the articles that I saw a couple of months ago, which was sitting on my blogging back burner, was one on the development of artificial “trees” to do the capturing.
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Built to last? Not for some products

At Critical Link, the applications that we get involved with tend to fall into the category “built to last.” But not all products are. Take the Revolv hub, which was acquired by Nest a couple of years back...
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Standardization comes to the IoT

Don’t know whether you caught the news, but earlier in the year a consortium of tech companies released the specs for a new Internet of Things (IoT) sensor platform, M2.COM. The entities include ARM and one of our partners, Texas Instruments
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The Internet of Fishing Fleets

When we think about the Internet of Things (IoT), for most of us, the first thought is probably a Nest thermostat or some other connected appliance or home device, or a fitness application like FitBit....But many of the most challenging, interesting and very worthwhile uses for IoT aren’t going to be in our houses or on our wrists. Some will be in fishing fleets.
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Name that variable!

For all the software guys and gals out there, earlier this week, I saw a somewhat funny, somewhat cranky, and mostly insightful article by Jack Ganssle, which appeared on embedded.com. His topic? How we name things – functions, variables, parameters, macros, identifiers - when we code.
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