Lucy Ingham

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“We Could 3D Print A Garment Within 24 Hours”

April 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Action figure of Fran Lebowitz or, perhaps, Harry Styles.

Action figure of Fran Lebowitz or, perhaps, Harry Styles.

Fran Lebowitz thinks we look sloppy because we’re wearing clothes that weren’t intended for us. “What people don’t know is: Clothes don’t really fit you unless they’re made for you,” she told Elle last year. Sure, that’s true, but who can afford custom-made outfits? 

The promise of 3D printing is that it will destabilize manufacturing, a transition that will be attended by both positive and negative results. One item on the plus side is that clothing may be much cheaper and made to fit individuals to the minutest specifications. Of course, that won’t be so good for garment workers, tailors, etc.

In a Factor-Tech piece, Lucy Ingham write of 3D printers moving bespoke beyond the boutique and manufacturing from factories to shops. Eventually, the creative process will likely relocate even further, directly into many homes. The opening:

A project between Loughborough University and clothing manufacturer the Yeh Group is set to make it possible to manufacture entire garments and footwear that perfectly fit their intended wearer in just 24 hours.

The project, which will run for the next 18 months, has come about as a result of advancements in additive manufacturing, enabling clothing to be printed in their entirety from a raw material such as polymer, without the waste and associated costs normally associated with clothing production.

“With 3D printing there is no limit to what you can build and it is this design freedom which makes the technology so exciting by bringing to life what was previously considered to be impossible,” said Dr Guy Bingham, senior lecturer in product and industrial design at Loughborough University,

“This landmark technology allows us as designers to innovate faster and create personalised, ready-to-wear fashion in a digital world with no geometrical constraints and almost zero waste material. We envisage that with further development of the technology, we could 3D print a garment within 24 hours.”•

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“The Mechanisms Of Aging Can Be Treated”

March 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Aubrey de Grey’s wife hasn’t killed him despite the fact that he lives with his two younger girlfriends, so it’s hard to blame the guy for feeling immortal.

In the 2014 documentary The Immortalists, the radical gerontologist’s fascinating personal and professional lives were on display. In that film, de Grey discussed why he feels we’re close to defeating death, which will allow him to frolic forever in his Northern California idyll with his Eves, but I will (regretfully) argue he’s wrong. I’d like him (and the rest of us) to have eternal life, but I doubt those of us breathing today will know an endless summer. There’s nothing theoretically impossible about, at least, extending life significantly, but it will require time, which is the one thing we don’t have. At any rate, it’s a growth industry with ballooning funding.

From Lucy Ingham at Factor-Tech:

It’s an exciting time to be working in ageing research. New findings are coming thick and fast, and although eliminating the process in humans is still some way away, studies regularly confirm what some have suspected for decades: that the mechanisms of ageing can be treated.

“It’s an amazingly gratifying field to be part of,” says biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer and founder of SENS Research Foundation, the leading organisation tackling ageing. “It moves on almost every week at the moment.”

At the start of February, for example, a study was published that had hugely significant findings for the field.

“There was a big announcement in Nature showing that if you eliminate a certain type of cell from mice, then they live quite a bit longer,” says de Grey. “Even if you do that elimination rather late; in other words when they’re already in middle age.”

For those following the field, this was exciting news, but for de Grey, it was concrete proof that ageing can be combated.

“That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been promoting for a long time, and it’s been coming but it’s been pretty tricky to actually demonstrate directly. This was really completely unequivocal proof of concept,” he says. “So of course it motivates lots of work to identify ways to do the same thing in human beings. These kinds of things are happening all the time now.”•

______________________________

“This is not science fiction.”

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“The American Consciousness About Inequality Is Frozen In A Previous Era”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Life has always been, in some sense, a tale of two cities, those who have and those who have not–or at least much less. Even granting that, however, we’re living in a wildly unequal world. In a Factor-Tech piece, Lucy Ingham analyzes the conditions that have made it possible for the 1% to own most of the assets. She traces concentrated wealth in the U.S. back to the Ronald Reagan economic policies (tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, etc.) and a less sexy salvo, a change in law allowing companies to buy back large amounts of their own stock. The writer thinks financialization, more than automation, is the problem, and the result of a growing underclass has been a rising police state. An excerpt:

Inequality has always existed, and there is an argument to say it’s an inherent part of human society. However, the level of inequality is now far beyond what we perceive it to be, and that’s a big problem.

“The American consciousness about inequality is frozen in a previous era,” says [Les] Leopold, citing the US results of an international poll about the perceived gap between entry level workers’ and CEOs’ pay as an example.

In the poll, people from all walks of life and political affiliation were asked to state what they thought the average gap was between the lowest and highest earners at a typical company.

“By and large, no matter what their age or background or political affiliation was, it sort of came out to about 40:1 – for every one dollar to the entry-level worker, 40 to the CEO,” says Leopold. “That’s kind of what it was in 1970.”

The reality, according to The Labor Institute’s data about the top 100 CEOs, is 829:1, making the inequality gap around 20 times larger that people perceived it to be. In 2016 the Institute believes it will be worse still, projecting 859:1.

Yet when asked in the poll what the ratio should be, participants consistently said it should be even lower that the imagined rate of 40:1.

“Strong Republicans in this survey think it ought to be 12:1, strong Democrats say 5:1, the average is about 8:1,” adds Leopold.

So how have we not noticed that the reality is so very far from our perceptions?•

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“They Will Have The Opportunity To Travel Beyond Earth”

November 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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If we don’t kill off our species before space travel and interplanetary living become the new normal, it certainly will be difficult for those born into that reality to imagine life as it was before. 

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden thinks the youngest among us will the first to accept space travel as the natural condition, and he’s awfully sanguine about how exploring other planets and asteroids will impact life on Earth. What JFK said in proposing a journey to the moon still holds true: “There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again.” Being humans and fallible, I would guess these new treks and achievements will also deliver new struggles and failings both down here and out there.

From Lucy Ingham at Factor Tech:

Charles Bolden, the administrator of NASA, has described today’s children as the “Space Generation,” saying they will have the opportunity to travel beyond Earth.

In a speech to the Center for American Progress in Washington today, Bolden said that the mission to Mars, the plans for which were detailed by the space agency earlier this month, would involve his granddaughters’ generation.

“I’ve been blessed to be able to travel to nearly every corner of our world, and I’ve been blessed to have seen the planet from space over the course of four space shuttle missions,” he said. “I can honestly tell you, however, that there is nothing, not a single thing, quite as awe-inspiring as being able to look into the eyes of my three beautiful granddaughters.

“To me, American progress is all about the world in which they’ll grow up, the world where they’ll someday raise their own children and grandchildren when we talk about our journey to Mars, when we talk about the next giant leaps in space exploration, we’re talking about their generation.”•

 

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“We’ll Have To Get Used To Them, Much Like We Did With Mobile Phones”

April 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Comparing delivery drones to mobile phones seems an odd choice–or at least only half the answer.

Drones may soon be ubiquitous as smartphones, as one analyst asserts in Lucy Ingham’s sanguine Factor-Tech piece, “Forget the Fear,” but they have the ability to be as destructive as guns, even more, actually. Is that a pizza or a book or a bomb that’s coming our way? Drones will likely be ever-present soon and will do a lot of good, but even if they’re closely regulated, it’ll be easy to rig up your own and deliver whatever you want to someone–even fear. 

The piece’s opening:

Drones are set for mass proliferation, despite commonly voiced concerns about privacy and use, according to a leading British aviation safety expert.

Speaking at a panel discussion during SkyTech, a UAV conference held today in London, Gerry Corbett, UAS programme lead for the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s Safety and Airspace Regulation Group, said that people would have to get used to the presence of drones in urban areas.

“Society has to accept that we’re going to see a lot more of these flying around towns and cities,” he said.

“We’ll have to get used to them, much like we did with mobile phones.”

However, in order for this to happen, regulation will need to improve in order to ensure that the drones are safe.•

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“In The Future, Berners-Lee Sees AI Dominating Communications”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite, you know, the issues, I’m happy there’s a World Wide Web, understanding how much it’s enriched my life with its trove of information. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who gifted the globe with double-yous, spoke about his creation and other topics with Lucy Ingham of Factor-Tech. A passage about AI:

“Turning his attention to artificial intelligence, Berners-Lee argues that it was, more or less, already here.

‘Yes, you don’t have a completely human-like assistant helping you with everything,’ he says. ‘But originally, 20 years ago they taught in schools that there are things that people can do and things that computers can do.

‘Computers can do calculations; computers can do lots of data. People can do intuitive things like music and play chess. People can do things which need really sort of very powerful parallel processing, like driving a car, which is the sort of thing that computing can never do.

‘Ok, hello? A large number of those things which were up there as challenging for artificial intelligence actually have quietly gone by. AI has done that.’

In the future, Berners-Lee sees AI dominating communications.

‘As the machines get more powerful, and in something like financial trading in a lot of companies the work is all done by machines. The machines are making the trading decisions, the machines are basically running the company. So that means that communication out there is largely going to be machine communication – it’s going to be data.'”

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