Brad Templeton:

There’s a lot of excitement about the potential of autonomous drones, be they nimble quadcopters or longer-range fixed wing or hybrid aircraft. A group of students from Singularity University, for example, has a project called MatterNet working to provide transportation infrastructure for light cargo in regions of Africa where roads wash out for half the year.

Closer to home, these drones are not yet legal for commercial use, while government agencies are using them secretly.

Here’s one useful idea: A small set of medical drones scattered around the city. Upon emergency call, they can fly, via a combination of autonomous navigation and remote-human-operated flying at the end, to any destination in the city within a couple of minutes. Call 911 and as soon as you say it’s a medical emergency the drone is on the way. When it gets there, the human operator lands it or even sends it in a balcony on tall buildings with balconies. Somebody has to carry it to the patient if they are far from the outside.

When it gets to the patient it has a camera and conferencing ability to a remote doctor can examine the patient and talk to people around the patient to ask them questions or give them instructions. It also could contain one of those “foolproof defibrillator” modules able to deal with many kinds of heart attacks. They are already in many buildings but this way they could be anywhere. It’s more useful than a taco.

BusinessWeek:

Weather Underground, a site that compiles local data collected by 24,000 weather geeks with sensors on their roofs, this week released a free tool for businesses to use to look for patterns in their sales related to the weather. Anyone can punch in a location and time period to download a spreadsheet with detailed weather data. The file also has a place to enter daily sales (which comes prepopulated with fake sales numbers) and charts that show the sales numbers in relation to temperatures, precipitation, and dew point (a measure of humidity). The spreadsheet calculates the correlation between sales and those three weather metrics to show which have a meaningful relationship.

Weather Underground's main business since it started in 1995 has been targeting ads on its site for brands that want to reach consumers during certain weather conditions. Companies can, for example, offer getaway deals to Hawaii during nasty winter storms, or hawk lawn furniture and garden supplies on the first sunny weekend of spring.

Cornell Chronicle:

Once you pop the top of a tube of potato chips, it can be hard to stop munching its contents. But Cornell researchers may have found a novel way to help: Add edible serving size markers that act as subconscious stop signs.

As part of an experiment carried out on two groups of college students (98 students total) while they were watching video clips in class, researchers from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab served tubes of Lays Stackables, some of which contained chips dyed red.

In the first study of the research, which is published online this month in Health Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association, the red chips were interspersed at intervals designating one suggested serving size (seven chips) or two serving sizes (14 chips); in the second study, this was changed to five and 10 chips.

Unaware of why some of the chips were red, the students who were served those tubes of chips nonetheless consumed about 50 percent less than their peers: 20 and 24 chips on average for the seven-chip and 14-chip segmented tubes, respectively, compared with 45 chips in the control group; 14 and 16 chips for the five-chip and 10-chip segmented tubes, compared with 35 chips in the control group.

Photo by Robin Wishna.