The Pedigree of Yuasa and GS Brand Motorcycle Batteries From GS Yuasa

Powering the best: The pedigree of Yuasa and GS brand motorcycle batteries from GS Yuasa. GS Yuasa is the leading original equipment manufacturer for motorcycle batteries globally. With over 40 years of development, GS Yuasa motorcycle and powersport batteries are factory fitted by all major motorcycle brands, including Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Harley-Davidson and many more. So, every GS Yuasa motorcycle and powersport battery provides the same high performance, quality and reliability as the bike’s original. By working closely with these major bike manufacturers to develop batteries, it’s meant GS Yuasa has been able to meet the unique needs of riders and manufacturers and establish themselves as the global market leader for bike batteries and a trusted partner for quality and innovation. Over the years, this has been marked by numerous milestones. Travel back in time to 1983, a time when the battery world was turned on its head by the introduction of the revolutionary Yuasa dry charge, Valve Regulated Lead Acid (VRLA) sealed maintenance free battery types. At the time, these ‘futuristic’ batteries were a game-changer as they eliminated the need for an open vent, while also reducing weight and size, making them more convenient and accessible than ever before. But the innovation didn't stop there, fast forward to 1999, and the factory activated YTZ® wet type, sealed maintenance free, high-performance battery burst onto the scene. With no need for the commissioning process, these batteries allowed for multi-angled fitment, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for motorcycle manufacturers and riders around the world. Although widely used as standard references, YTX®, YTZ®, and GYZ® are registered trademarks of GS Yuasa International Ltd. Only Yuasa and GS manufacture genuine YTX®, YTZ®, and GYZ® motorcycle batteries. This is important to remember when choosing a motorcycle battery, as using an unsuitable or cheaper battery can result in lower performance and potential issues that could even damage your bike. When it comes to batteries, the expression of buy cheap buy twice is particularly true. While cheaper batteries may seem like a cost-effective option, they often have a shorter lifespan and need to be replaced more frequently. In contrast, more expensive batteries are usually designed with higher-quality materials and advanced technology, giving them a longer lifespan and higher performance. This means that while they may cost more upfront, their higher build quality and extended life can save you money in the long run as you won't need to replace them as frequently. Theo den Hoed Motorcycle Battery Product Manager for GS Yuasa Battery Europe Ltd said, “Yuasa and GS are prestigious and iconic brands in the motorcycle industry. We are known for our innovative battery technology and high-quality products. With our rich history dating back over a century, the GS Yuasa brand has become synonymous with quality, reliability, and performance. “In addition to our rich and ongoing pedigree with motorcycle manufacturers, our long-standing partnership with HRC Repsol Honda in MotoGP is a testament to our commitment to excellence and our drive to innovate. We take great pride in providing riders across the globe with the high-quality products they need to power their passion for motorcycling.” GS Yuasa offers the widest range of motorcycle batteries in the market, ensuring that there is a battery for every type of motorcycle. Whether you ride a sports bike, touring, or adventure bike, GS Yuasa has a battery that will suit your needs. To find out more about GS Yuasa and their products visit www.gs-yuasa.eu

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New Post has been published on https://primorcoin.com/bridge-attacks-will-still-pose-major-challenge-for-defi-in-2023-security-experts/

Bridge attacks will still pose major challenge for DeFi in 2023 — Security experts

Security has been a critical challenge for decentralized finance (DeFi) and its evolution. Between 2020 and 2022, hackers stole over $2.5 billion through vulnerabilities on cross-chain bridges, Token Terminal data shows. This is a substantial amount compared with other security breaches.

Issues with bridges have a root cause: All of them have an “inherent vulnerability,” Theo Gauthier, founder and CEO of Toposware, told Cointelegraph. According to Gauthier, no matter how secure a bridge is on its own, it is “entirely reliant on the security of the chains it connects,” meaning any breach or bug within one of the two bridged chains makes the overall bridge vulnerable.

Briefly, bridges are used to connect different blockchains and aim to address the lack of standards between protocols. Interoperability between blockchains is considered to be a critical goal for enhancing the end-user experience and promoting broader crypto adoption.

Solutions for interoperability and security in the crypto industry are gaining traction despite the bear market. One of the major technologies available is zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), which allow data to be verified and proven as accurate without revealing further information, unlike typical interoperability solutions that require networks to disclose their states.

Related: Industry execs voice confidence in DeFi adoption despite security flaws

Through ZKPs, it is also possible to create a ZK-powered Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), noted Polygon’s chief information security officer, Mudit Gupta. This would allow developers to launch scalable and completely private Ethereum-compatible smart contracts. Gupta also noted:

“We believe in the old crypto adage of ‘don’t trust, verify.’ With ZK-powered solutions, this is absolutely possible. The zkEVM has shown that it can maintain privacy, decentralization, speed and scalability. With this, there is no need to sacrifice anything that has made the crypto space what it is, and in fact, it improves it.”

For bridges, the solution would be auditing and real-time monitoring standards, noted Gustavo Gonzalez, solutions developer at Open Zeppelin. Bridges’ smart contracts “should be audited, ideally by multiple third parties, before being released ‘into the wild.’ New audits should happen anytime updates are made, and all results should be transparently shared with the community.”

Machine learning technology could also be used to flag potentially suspicious patterns of activity with advanced security monitoring, detecting an attack before it actually happens, said Gonzalez.

Combining security software solutions with blockchain protocols could make the entire space more secure for users and investors. A Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist would say “Just use Bitcoin, and you won’t have these issues at all.” While smart contracts for Bitcoin are in the works, DeFi players will be tasked with building trust within their respective ecosystems amid ongoing security concerns.

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As the future of ByteDance’s TikTok ownership continues to get hammered out between tech and retail leviathans, investors and government officials, the video app today published its latest transparency report. In all, over 104.5 million videos were taken down; it had nearly 1,800 legal requests; and received 10,600 copyright takedown notices for the first half of this year.

Alongside that, and possibly to offset the high numbers of illicit videos and to also coincide with an appearance today in front of a parliamentary committee in the UK over harmful content, TikTok also announced a new initiative — potentially in partnership with other social apps — against harmful content.

The figures in the transparency report underscore an important aspect around the impact of the popular app. The government may want to shut down TikTok over national security concerns (unless ByteDance finds a new non-Chinese controlling structure that satisfies lawmakers).

But in reality, just like other social media apps, TikTok has another not-insignificant fire to fight: it is grappling with a lot of illegal and harmful content published and shared on its platform, and as it continues to grow in popularity (it now has more than 700 million users globally), that problem will also continue to grow.

That will be an ongoing issue for the company, regardless of how its ownership unfolds outside of China. While one of the big issues around TikTok’s future has been related to its algorithms and whether these can or will be part of any deal, the company has tried to make other efforts to appear more open with regards to how it works. Earlier this year it opened a transparency center in the US that it said would help experts observe and vet how it moderates content.

TikTok said that the 104,543,719 total videos that TikTok removed globally for violating either community guidelines or its terms of service made up less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok, which gives you some idea of the sheer scale of the service. 

The volume of videos that are getting taken down have more than doubled over the previous six months, a reflection of how the total volume of videos has also doubled.

In the second half of 2019, the company took down more than 49 million videos, according to the last transparency report published by the company (I don’t know why exactly, but it took a lot longer to publish that previous transparency report, which came out in July 2020.) The proportion of total videos taken down was roughly the same as in the previous six months (“less than 1%”).

TikTok said that 96.4% of the total number were removed before they were reported, with 90.3% removed before they received any views. It doesn’t specify if these were found via automated systems or by human moderators, or a mix of both, but it sounds like it made a switch to algorithm-based moderation at least in some markets:

“As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, we relied more heavily on technology to detect and automatically remove violating content in markets such as India, Brazil, and Pakistan,” it noted.

The company notes that the biggest category of removed videos was around adult nudity and sexual activities, at 30.9%, with minor safety at 22.3% and illegal activities at 19.6%. Other categories included suicide and self harm, violent content, hate speech and dangerous individuals. (And videos could count in more than one category, it noted.)

The biggest origination market for removed videos is the one in which TikTok has been banned (perhaps unsurprisingly): India took the lion’s share of videos at 37,682,924. The US, on the other hand, accounted for 9,822,996 (9.4%) of videos removed, making it the second-largest market.

Currently, it seems that misinformation and disinformation are not the main ways that TikTok is getting abused, but they are still significant numbers: some 41,820 videos (less than 0.5% of those removed in the US) violated TikTok’s misinformation and disinformation policies, the company said.

Some 321,786 videos (around 3.3% of US content removals) violated its hate speech policies.

Legal requests, it said, are on the rise, with 1,768 requests for user information from 42 countries/markets in the first six months of the year, with 290 (16.4%) coming from US law enforcement agencies, including 126 subpoenas, 90 search warrants and 6 court orders. In all, it had 135 requests from government agencies to restrict or remove content from 15 countries/markets.

Social media coalition proposal

Along with the transparency report, the harmful content coalition announcement is coming on the same day that TikTok appeared before a committee from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, a UK parliamentary group.

Practically, that interrogation — which featured the company’s head of public policy in EMEA, Theo Bertram — doesn’t have a lot of teeth, but it speaks to the government gaining a growing awareness of the app and its impact on consumers in the UK.

TikTok said that the harmful content coalition is based on a proposal that Vanessa Pappas, the acting head of TikTok in the US, sent out to nine executives at other social media platforms. It doesn’t specify which companies, nor what the response was. We are asking and will update as we learn more.

Meanwhile, the letter, published in full by TikTok and reprinted below, underscores a response to current thinking around how proactive and successful social media platforms have been in trying to curtail some of the abuse of their platforms. It’s not the first effort of this kind — there have been several other attempts like this one where multiple companies, erstwhile competitors for consumer engagement, come together with a united front to tackle things like misinformation.

This one specifically is identifying non-political content and coming up with a “collaborative approach to early identification and notification amongst industry participants of extremely violent, graphic content, including suicide.” The MOU proposed by Pappas suggested that social media platforms communicate to keep each other notified of the content — a smart move, considering how much gets shared across multiple platforms, from other platforms.

The company’s efforts on the harmful content coalition is one more example of how social media companies are trying to take their own initiative and show that they are trying to be responsible, a key way of lobbying governments to stay out of regulating them. With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others continue to be in hot water over the content that is shared over their platforms — despite their attempts to curb abuse and manipulation — it’s unlikely that this will be the final word on any of this.

Full memo below:

Recently, social and content platforms have once again been challenged by the posting and cross-posting of explicit suicide content that has affected all of us – as well as our teams, users, and broader communities.

Like each of you, we worked diligently to mitigate its proliferation by removing the original content and its many variants, and curtailing it from being viewed or shared by others. However, we believe each of our individual efforts to safeguard our own users and the collective community would be boosted significantly through a formal, collaborative approach to early identification and notification amongst industry participants of extremely violent, graphic content, including suicide.

To this end, we would like to propose the cooperative development of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will allow us to quickly notify one another of such content.

Separately, we are conducting a thorough analysis of the events as they relate to the recent sharing of suicide content, but it’s clear that early identification allows platforms to more rapidly respond to suppress highly objectionable, violent material.

We are mindful of the need for any such negotiated arrangement to be clearly defined with respect to the types of content it could capture, and nimble enough to allow us each to move quickly to notify one another of what would be captured by the MOU. We also appreciate there may be regulatory constraints across regions that warrant further engagement and consideration.

To this end, we would like to convene a meeting of our respective Trust and Safety teams to further discuss such a mechanism, which we believe will help us all improve safety for our users.

We look forward to your positive response and working together to help protect our users and the wider community.

Sincerely,

Vanessa Pappas Head of TikTok

More to come.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2ZYEnWR Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

TikTok says it removed 104M videos in H1 2020, proposes harmful content coalition with other social apps

As the future of ByteDance’s TikTok ownership continues to get hammered out between tech and retail leviathans, investors and government officials, the video app today published its latest transparency report. In all, over 104.5 million videos were taken down; it had nearly 1,800 legal requests; and received 10,600 copyright takedown notices for the first half of this year.

Alongside that, and possibly to offset the high numbers of illicit videos and to also coincide with an appearance today in front of a parliamentary committee in the UK over harmful content, TikTok also announced a new initiative — potentially in partnership with other social apps — against harmful content.

The figures in the transparency report underscore an important aspect around the impact of the popular app. The government may want to shut down TikTok over national security concerns (unless ByteDance finds a new non-Chinese controlling structure that satisfies lawmakers).

But in reality, just like other social media apps, TikTok has another not-insignificant fire to fight: it is grappling with a lot of illegal and harmful content published and shared on its platform, and as it continues to grow in popularity (it now has more than 700 million users globally), that problem will also continue to grow.

That will be an ongoing issue for the company, regardless of how its ownership unfolds outside of China. While one of the big issues around TikTok’s future has been related to its algorithms and whether these can or will be part of any deal, the company has tried to make other efforts to appear more open with regards to how it works. Earlier this year it opened a transparency center in the US that it said would help experts observe and vet how it moderates content.

TikTok said that the 104,543,719 total videos that TikTok removed globally for violating either community guidelines or its terms of service made up less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok, which gives you some idea of the sheer scale of the service. 

The volume of videos that are getting taken down have more than doubled over the previous six months, a reflection of how the total volume of videos has also doubled.

In the second half of 2019, the company took down more than 49 million videos, according to the last transparency report published by the company (I don’t know why exactly, but it took a lot longer to publish that previous transparency report, which came out in July 2020.) The proportion of total videos taken down was roughly the same as in the previous six months (“less than 1%”).

TikTok said that 96.4% of the total number were removed before they were reported, with 90.3% removed before they received any views. It doesn’t specify if these were found via automated systems or by human moderators, or a mix of both, but it sounds like it made a switch to algorithm-based moderation at least in some markets:

“As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, we relied more heavily on technology to detect and automatically remove violating content in markets such as India, Brazil, and Pakistan,” it noted.

The company notes that the biggest category of removed videos was around adult nudity and sexual activities, at 30.9%, with minor safety at 22.3% and illegal activities at 19.6%. Other categories included suicide and self harm, violent content, hate speech and dangerous individuals. (And videos could count in more than one category, it noted.)

The biggest origination market for removed videos is the one in which TikTok has been banned (perhaps unsurprisingly): India took the lion’s share of videos at 37,682,924. The US, on the other hand, accounted for 9,822,996 (9.4%) of videos removed, making it the second-largest market.

Currently, it seems that misinformation and disinformation are not the main ways that TikTok is getting abused, but they are still significant numbers: some 41,820 videos (less than 0.5% of those removed in the US) violated TikTok’s misinformation and disinformation policies, the company said.

Some 321,786 videos (around 3.3% of US content removals) violated its hate speech policies.

Legal requests, it said, are on the rise, with 1,768 requests for user information from 42 countries/markets in the first six months of the year, with 290 (16.4%) coming from US law enforcement agencies, including 126 subpoenas, 90 search warrants and 6 court orders. In all, it had 135 requests from government agencies to restrict or remove content from 15 countries/markets.

Social media coalition proposal

Along with the transparency report, the harmful content coalition announcement is coming on the same day that TikTok appeared before a committee from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, a UK parliamentary group.

Practically, that interrogation — which featured the company’s head of public policy in EMEA, Theo Bertram — doesn’t have a lot of teeth, but it speaks to the government gaining a growing awareness of the app and its impact on consumers in the UK.

TikTok said that the harmful content coalition is based on a proposal that Vanessa Pappas, the acting head of TikTok in the US, sent out to nine executives at other social media platforms. It doesn’t specify which companies, nor what the response was. We are asking and will update as we learn more.

Meanwhile, the letter, published in full by TikTok and reprinted below, underscores a response to current thinking around how proactive and successful social media platforms have been in trying to curtail some of the abuse of their platforms. It’s not the first effort of this kind — there have been several other attempts like this one where multiple companies, erstwhile competitors for consumer engagement, come together with a united front to tackle things like misinformation.

This one specifically is identifying non-political content and coming up with a “collaborative approach to early identification and notification amongst industry participants of extremely violent, graphic content, including suicide.” The MOU proposed by Pappas suggested that social media platforms communicate to keep each other notified of the content — a smart move, considering how much gets shared across multiple platforms, from other platforms.

The company’s efforts on the harmful content coalition is one more example of how social media companies are trying to take their own initiative and show that they are trying to be responsible, a key way of lobbying governments to stay out of regulating them. With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others continue to be in hot water over the content that is shared over their platforms — despite their attempts to curb abuse and manipulation — it’s unlikely that this will be the final word on any of this.

Full memo below:

Recently, social and content platforms have once again been challenged by the posting and cross-posting of explicit suicide content that has affected all of us – as well as our teams, users, and broader communities.

Like each of you, we worked diligently to mitigate its proliferation by removing the original content and its many variants, and curtailing it from being viewed or shared by others. However, we believe each of our individual efforts to safeguard our own users and the collective community would be boosted significantly through a formal, collaborative approach to early identification and notification amongst industry participants of extremely violent, graphic content, including suicide.

To this end, we would like to propose the cooperative development of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will allow us to quickly notify one another of such content.

Separately, we are conducting a thorough analysis of the events as they relate to the recent sharing of suicide content, but it’s clear that early identification allows platforms to more rapidly respond to suppress highly objectionable, violent material.

We are mindful of the need for any such negotiated arrangement to be clearly defined with respect to the types of content it could capture, and nimble enough to allow us each to move quickly to notify one another of what would be captured by the MOU. We also appreciate there may be regulatory constraints across regions that warrant further engagement and consideration.

To this end, we would like to convene a meeting of our respective Trust and Safety teams to further discuss such a mechanism, which we believe will help us all improve safety for our users.

We look forward to your positive response and working together to help protect our users and the wider community.

Sincerely,

Vanessa Pappas Head of TikTok

More to come.

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A Work In Progress

So I’m working with a friend for nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), and we’re doing a thing where I write an entry, they write the follow up, with each new entry a complete surprise to the other, and hopefully the end result will be a weird and wonderful piece of fun. So here is the first part for nanowrimo, with the first sentence that I was given being “The paintings that lined the hall, though full of detail upon closer inspection, blended into the beige of the walls...”

The paintings that lined the hall, though full of detail, upon closer inspection, blended into the beige of the walls.

“Hm?”

AJ held a stationary fingertip so that it just hovered above the intricate design, which had jut seconds ago been the centre pieces for a gallery exhibition, and tried to blink away the illusion. They pressed said fingertip against the painting.

Flat. Utterly smooth, a texture not unlike that of cheap plaster, without so much of a hitch or any sort of indication that anything remotely three dimensional graced the walls.

They dragged their finger to where the painting’s frame should’ve been protruding. Nothing. Completely flat to the touch.

Frowning, AJ retracted their finger, unconsciously rubbing their forefinger and thumb together in what had developed as a nervous tick. “What the fuck,” they mumbled under their breath, briskly backing up to were they’d been standing when they’d first noticed something misplaced. The illusion of flat walls melted away instantly, and once again, there hung impossibly detailed masterpieces.

There it was. The vaguest twitch that catches the eye, or that prick on the back of the neck. Like one of those ‘Spot-the-difference’ games, where a single pixel is changed. Subtle enough not to be glaringly obvious, but enough that the human subconscious picks up something misplaced.

AJ threw a bewildered look over their shoulder. “Is anyone else seeing this shi-”

The hallway was empty. Where once a healthy populated audience and passing strangers had stood around them, silently side-by-side to admire the works in a mutual understanding of privacy, the throbbing neon lighting bleakly illuminated a beige abyss.

Any kind of logical sense had been thrown clean out of the metaphorical window of reason, as the hallway appeared to warp physics itself, and was now stretching out in either direction, glitching over and over and over again with the same damn camouflaging paintings, twisting like a vine. Reality was being blurred with surrealism.

AJ sharply drew in a breath, a reflex that happened so fast it burned the back of their throat.

“Hello?” Their voice simply bounced around the growing pathways, reverberating in a crude echo, twisting their voice so that it contorted to a sloppy caricature of the original. Above, the lighting had started to flicker, blinking painfully bright and pulling AJ’s shadow out into a ghoulish imprint.

They didn’t know what to do. They ran. Couldn’t even remember which way they chose in their desperate blind panic of escaping the freak house playing mind tricks on their psyche, and they ran. It didn’t matter how far they thought they’d gotten, every damn stroke of the place looked identical to the one before it. The swirling detailing of the paintings changed, but, as before, upon closer inspection, they all seemed to melt away into the plaster the closer AJ got to them.

So they kept running.

xxxx

 Time passage was tricky to identify. Minutes, hours, days, as soon as AJ felt they had a definite track of what had passed, they slipped out of their mind, and they were stuck, once again, in a trippy dream-like scape, where everything and nothing was real at the same time.

Trying their phone had seemed like an excellent idea, right up until when they turned it on. The screen hadn’t even lit up before the stupid thing had burned red hot in their hand and fried with a theatrical puff of smoke, effectively destroying it. And that was how they found out that technology didn’t work in the gallery. They didn’t risk trying the laptop in their backpack.

The more time (as uncharted as it was) passed, the more and more AJ tried to understand what sort of hellish thing place they were stuck in.

Relative special awareness - Were they in an endless ongoing corridor, or where they stuck in some sort of loop? Pens thankfully didn’t explode when they tried to use them, and they had an abundance of them kicking around in the bottom of their bag. So, selecting the most garish red, they dragged the pen along the wall as they made their way down the hallway. The idea was to essentially draw a large ring, if they were indeed stuck in a loop. The pen ran out of ink before they reached back to where they started. So not a loop, then. Or a stonking great big one.

Food - wasn’t an issue. They never felt hungry or thirsty, and they never seemed to be deteriorating. That was one of the more simple things AJ had learnt during their relative imprisonment in the hellscape. How was that possible? They didn’t particularly care. As long as...whatever it was, was keeping them alive and not starving, they didn’t think about it too much.

Location – right off the bat, they knew it wasn’t a dream (as much as they wanted it to be). Despite nourishment being seemingly taken care of, exhaustion and sleep were in their ball park. And unless the whole thing was a crude impersonation of Inception, with dream within dreams and the like, then what they were living through was actually happening. In some way or another. Aside from that, location they were pretty much stuck on. One phone down, there was no way to use technology to pinpoint where on earth they actually were, and thanks to the lack of landmarks and street maps, where the demonic gallery was, geographically speaking, still remained a mystery.

AJ sighed, and clicked the biro they’d been using to make scribbling notes in a worn down notebook, and shoved the items back into their bag. Above, the ever present industrial lighting buzzed, creating the vaguest hint of something other than deathly silence.

It was probably the isolation that was going to drive them mad first, AJ decided, glumly picking at a loose thread in their skirt. Just never ending loneliness, with nothing but mind bending walls to talk to, and the faint buzzing of the lamps...

AJ sat up straighter like a shot, ears prickling, the most alert they had been for a while. The lighting was creating a soft hum, yes, but underneath that there was something else. They desperately strained their ears, trying to squash down any glimmer of hope that was threatening to build up in their chest.

It’s probably still just the lamps, AJ thought, a tad more eager that they would’ve liked. Its definitely not...

But it was. The lowest frequency possible, but definitely muttering. Coming from where the corridor stretched out, to the left.

Just the prospect that they might not be the singular living soul stuck in the damn hellhole had their legs sprinting faster than they had ran yet. Not even when they were running away from the hallway’s mind tricks when they had first gotten stuck had they ran so fast, and they felt their heart soar.

I’m not alone! AJ thought brightly. I’m-

As they turned a corner, they slammed into a solid body. Both fell to the floor unceremoniously.

“Theo!” A high voice cried as AJ tried to shake the stars out of their eyes.

“Watch it, kid,” a lower voice grumbled. The solid body they had run into was glowering at them, but was nowhere near old enough to be calling them ‘kid’.

“We look around the same age,” AJ replied, picking themselves of the floor, and dusting off their skirt. But they still couldn’t help grinning. “But thank god! I thought I was the only one here!”

“Please don’t cry on us,” the higher voice said weakly, which belonged to a willowy kid with short auburn hair and an unimpressed look.

“And you ran into me, I’ll call you kid as much as I damn like,” the solid body said hotly. “But Ari’s right, don’t cry on us. I don’t have any tissues.”

The auburn haired kid, presumably Ari, stared at AJ. “Are you nonbinary?”

AJ blinked, surprised. “Yeah. Pronouns are they/them. How d’you know?”

Ari shrugged “Well, I thought it was better to ask, but you’ve got stubble and a skirt. There aren’t too many people apart of the binary who would rock that combo without, I dunno, crying.”

“Yeah, I just almost cry at the revelation that I’m not the only person stuck in a hellish gallery, but that’s just me, I guess.”

Ari gave them a sharp look. “Gallery? This is a hotel.”

“What?”

“We still don’t know your name,” interjected the solid kid, clapping a hand on Ari’s back as if to say not now.

“AJ. They/them pronouns, like I said.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Theo, pronouns he/him.” Theo stuck out a hand, and the both of them shook hands.

Ari was still giving AJ a weird look, but all the same followed suit. “Ari. She/her.”

More handshakes.

“Great!” AJ said. “So, now we’re all best buddies, back to what you said; what the fuck do you mean to say that this is a hotel?”

Theo sighed, and scrubbed his face with a free hand. “Listen, as far as I’m concerned, this is a nightmarish hospital-”

“A hospital?”

“So I think it’s fair to say,” Theo continued, glaring at AJ for interrupting him. “That this...place, changes depending on who we are.”

He gestured at Ari. “She was in a hotel corridor when she got stuck here, I was in a hospital, so I’m guessing you were in ... where was it again?”

“A gallery.”

“Right,” Theo agreed. “And we all see impossible shit, right?”

Ari nodded rapidly, her hair flying around her head. “Right. I’m in a corridor with thousands of doors, but none of them open. When I get closer, they blend into the walls and suddenly it’s as though nothing was there in the first place.”

Theo turned to AJ. “And for you?”

“Paintings,” they supplied. “Lots of paintings. And they all seem so incredible detailed, but when I get closer-”

“They blend into the walls?” Theo interrupted.

AJ looked at the nearest wall, the swirling patterns ready just to disappear at the blink of an eye. “Yeah.”

How 3-D Printing May Break into the Constructing Trade

Since Spain opened the primary 3-D-printed pedestrian bridge in 2016, the push for printed structure appears to be accelerating. Shanghai inaugurated the world's longest printed concrete bridge in January, and the first-ever printed metal span is ready to cross a canal in Amsterdam this yr. Past bridges, the primary 3-D-printed houses accessible to rent--five bulbous buildings within the Dutch metropolis of Eindhoven--should hit the market by this summer time. A number of the artsy, even zany, designs appear to be architectural fantasy. However some specialists consider these novel prototypes may herald a significant shift within the building sector. "The building industry is very stubborn" on the subject of change, says Capt. Matthew Friedell, who leads the U.S. Marine Corps' 3-D printing operations. However "once we prove 3-D printing's advantages for construction at scale, its adoption will increase rapidly." In ordinary bridge building, expert employees combine concrete and pour it into plywood molds known as types. Massive-scale 3-D printers, against this, pump out quick-setting concrete slurry from a nozzle on a crane or gantry arm that strikes on rails, guided by a pc, to create whole buildings layer by layer. As an alternative of constructing new types for each piece, builders can reuse one printer to create a wide range of initiatives. With out requiring forms--or expert employees to assemble them--a printer can get to work sooner, with fewer supplies and fewer labor. Designing and constructing issues like bridges quick and on the go is of apparent curiosity to the army, which frequently debuts new expertise that finally spreads into the business mainstream. It was the Marines who created the primary 3-D- bridge within the U.S., a flat 32-foot span at California's Camp Pendleton, late final yr. They made it in a fifth of the time of conventional strategies, Friedell says. Usually troopers transport cantilever-style cellular bridges, about $750,000 apiece, that they will later assemble to span water or tough terrain. A 3-D printer would price about the identical as a type of models, and the army would nonetheless have to hold its parts to assemble on-site. However as soon as it arrived, one printer may produce a number of bridges, buildings, partitions and water storage tanks--anything the troops would possibly want whereas deployed. For instance, the Marines have additionally printed a concrete barracks giant sufficient to accommodate eight troopers, which they may use as an alternative of shipping-container housing models. Along with offering larger flexibility, this feature would minimize prices and labor. The elements for concrete are low cost, and troopers may supply these uncooked supplies regionally, Friedell says. After that, their 3-D printer may run with minimal human enter. "The ultimate goal," Friedell says, "is to have one person stand there and hit 'print'." In reality, one report by the Related Basic Contractors of America says some corporations are taking a look at 3-D printing to assist ease labor shortages. Testing a 3-D printer that architects are utilizing to construct 5 concrete homes in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Credit score: Technical College of Eindhoven Some consider these decrease prices might be a recreation changer for reasonably priced housing. Austin-based building expertise startup Icon just lately unveiled a 3-D printer that the corporate claims could make a 2,000-square-foot household dwelling in three days for about half the price of conventional constructing strategies. Icon says it plans to construct reasonably priced housing communities at websites in Austin and Latin America. "The idea that we can bring this cheap machine to make houses is pretty exciting, especially for humanitarian relief missions," Friedell says. "And I see a direct correlation for the housing market." Though the house building business doesn't have the identical wants army or reduction mission does--assembling bridges or barracks shortly in distant places--it may nonetheless profit from a constructing methodology that saves time, labor and constructing materials. On prime of that, printing can allow complicated designs which can be a lot more durable to make with conventional strategies. For instance, in line with Friedell, the sinuous partitions of the Marines' printed barracks are 2.5 occasions stronger than typical straight ones, however constructing these curvy partitions the standard means (from particular person concrete blocks) would have been way more troublesome and time-consuming than printing them, he says. Such complicated designs can permit architects to make use of fewer supplies. Take the primary printed bridge in Spain, which resembles tangled vines: That sample provides the best power attainable utilizing the least quantity of cement. "By putting material exactly where you want it, you reduce consumption and wastage," says Leroy Gardner, professor of structural engineering at Imperial Faculty London. A examine by researchers at Brunel College suggests 3-D printing may create as much as 30 % much less materials waste than typical building strategies, in addition to utilizing much less power and producing fewer carbon dioxide emissions. "Clearly this is an interesting technology with enormous potential," says Timothy Gutowski, who leads the Environmentally Benign Manufacturing analysis group at Massachusetts Institute of Expertise. However, he says, there's a want for extra systematic research to check the environmental impacts of 3-D printing expertise and traditional strategies over your entire life cycle of a construction, from its uncooked supplies to the top of its life. Most 3-D printers as we speak, as an example, construct with concrete--a materials blamed for 7 % of Earth's carbon dioxide emissions, per the Worldwide Power Company. To fight this, some builders are engaged on extra sustainable options: In 2016 a Dutch structure agency printed a tiny 86-square-foot cabin from a sustainable bioplastic, and in 2017 the College of Hong Kong demonstrated 3-D-printed terra-cotta bricks. Gutowski additionally warns that the supposed discount in price and materials use may fall prey to the rebound impact, a time period utilized in economics: If one thing runs on much less power, for instance, folks will run it extra, quashing power financial savings. 3-D-printed houses would possibly minimize materials use in theory--but that might encourage builders to go larger. The advantages get diluted, Gutowski says, when "affluent people start putting on additions to their homes or making vacation homes." Regardless of the obstacles, architectural initiatives that depend on 3-D printing have continued to extend in quantity over the previous 5 years. The explosion of curiosity is an indication of "an ongoing digital transition in the construction industry," says Theo Salet, a concrete expertise professor on the Eindhoven College of Expertise, who's directing the Dutch undertaking to print houses for hire. The expertise remains to be younger, although, and requires extra improvement to achieve wider use. Printing an enormous bridge or skyscraper won't actually be as straightforward as hitting a button within the foreseeable future, says Skylar Tibbits, a computational architect at MIT. Printers that work at this scale are nonetheless sluggish and costly. And for now they solely produce one form of materials at a time, so builders nonetheless should manually combine doorways, home windows, wiring and plumbing. In reality, other than the Marines' initiatives, which aimed for quick on-site building, a lot of the current bridges and houses have been printed in elements that people later assembled. For now, Tibbits says, the development business will seemingly use 3-D printing to mass-produce modular parts that also require human labor to place collectively. Printers may additionally be used to construct buildings with distinctive designs or to brighten them with intricate architectural particulars. "Printing," Tibbits says, "is one of many tools you can utilize in harmony to create buildings and products." Read the full article

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How 3D-Printing May Break into the Constructing Trade

Since Spain opened the primary 3-D-printed pedestrian bridge in 2016, the push for printed structure appears to be accelerating. Shanghai inaugurated the world's longest printed concrete bridge in January, and the first-ever printed metal span is ready to cross a canal in Amsterdam this yr. Past bridges, the primary 3-D-printed properties accessible to rent--five bulbous buildings within the Dutch metropolis of Eindhoven--should hit the market by this summer season. Among the artsy, even zany, designs appear to be architectural fantasy. However some specialists imagine these novel prototypes may herald a significant shift within the development sector. "The building industry is very stubborn" with regards to change, says Capt. Matthew Friedell, who leads the U.S. Marine Corps' 3-D printing operations. However "once we prove 3-D printing's advantages for construction at scale, its adoption will increase rapidly." In standard bridge development, expert employees combine concrete and pour it into plywood molds referred to as types. Giant-scale 3-D printers, against this, pump out quick-setting concrete slurry from a nozzle on a crane or gantry arm that strikes on rails, guided by a pc, to create whole constructions layer by layer. As an alternative of creating new types for each piece, builders can reuse one printer to create a wide range of tasks. With out requiring forms--or expert employees to assemble them--a printer can get to work sooner, with fewer supplies and fewer labor. Designing and constructing issues like bridges quick and on the go is of apparent curiosity to the army, which regularly debuts new know-how that finally spreads into the industrial mainstream. It was the Marines who created the primary 3-D- bridge within the U.S., a flat 32-foot span at California's Camp Pendleton, late final yr. They made it in a fifth of the time of conventional strategies, Friedell says. Sometimes troopers transport cantilever-style cellular bridges, about $750,000 apiece, that they will later assemble to span water or tough terrain. A 3-D printer would value about the identical as a kind of models, and the army would nonetheless have to hold its elements to assemble on-site. However as soon as it arrived, one printer may produce a number of bridges, buildings, partitions and water storage tanks--anything the troops would possibly want whereas deployed. For instance, the Marines have additionally printed a concrete barracks giant sufficient to accommodate eight troopers, which they might use as an alternative of shipping-container housing models. Along with offering higher flexibility, this selection would lower prices and labor. The components for concrete are low cost, and troopers may supply these uncooked supplies regionally, Friedell says. After that, their 3-D printer may run with minimal human enter. "The ultimate goal," Friedell says, "is to have one person stand there and hit 'print'." The truth is, one report by the Related Basic Contractors of America says some corporations are taking a look at 3-D printing to assist ease labor shortages. Testing a 3-D printer that architects are utilizing to construct 5 concrete homes in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Credit score: Technical College of Eindhoven Some imagine these decrease prices could possibly be a sport changer for inexpensive housing. Austin-based development know-how startup Icon not too long ago unveiled a 3-D printer that the corporate claims could make a 2,000-square-foot household house in three days for about half the price of conventional constructing strategies. Icon says it plans to construct inexpensive housing communities at websites in Austin and Latin America. "The idea that we can bring this cheap machine to make houses is pretty exciting, especially for humanitarian relief missions," Friedell says. "And I see a direct correlation for the housing market." Though the house development business doesn't have the identical wants army or reduction mission does--assembling bridges or barracks shortly in distant places--it may nonetheless profit from a constructing technique that saves time, labor and constructing materials. On high of that, printing can allow complicated designs which can be a lot tougher to make with conventional strategies. For instance, in keeping with Friedell, the sinuous partitions of the Marines' printed barracks are 2.5 instances stronger than typical straight ones, however constructing these curvy partitions the standard means (from particular person concrete blocks) would have been way more troublesome and time-consuming than printing them, he says. Such complicated designs can permit architects to make use of fewer supplies. Take the primary printed bridge in Spain, which resembles tangled vines: That sample gives the best energy potential utilizing the least quantity of cement. "By putting material exactly where you want it, you reduce consumption and wastage," says Leroy Gardner, professor of structural engineering at Imperial School London. A examine by researchers at Brunel College suggests 3-D printing may create as much as 30 p.c much less materials waste than typical development strategies, in addition to utilizing much less power and producing fewer carbon dioxide emissions. "Clearly this is an interesting technology with enormous potential," says Timothy Gutowski, who leads the Environmentally Benign Manufacturing analysis group at Massachusetts Institute of Know-how. However, he says, there's a want for extra systematic research to check the environmental impacts of 3-D printing know-how and traditional strategies over your complete life cycle of a construction, from its uncooked supplies to the top of its life. Most 3-D printers right now, as an illustration, construct with concrete--a materials blamed for 7 p.c of Earth's carbon dioxide emissions, per the Worldwide Power Company. To fight this, some builders are engaged on extra sustainable alternate options: In 2016 a Dutch structure agency printed a tiny 86-square-foot cabin from a sustainable bioplastic, and in 2017 the College of Hong Kong demonstrated 3-D-printed terra-cotta bricks. Gutowski additionally warns that the supposed discount in value and materials use may fall prey to the rebound impact, a time period utilized in economics: If one thing runs on much less power, for instance, folks will run it extra, quashing power financial savings. 3-D-printed properties would possibly lower materials use in theory--but that might encourage builders to go larger. The advantages get diluted, Gutowski says, when "affluent people start putting on additions to their homes or making vacation homes." Regardless of the obstacles, architectural tasks that depend on 3-D printing have continued to extend in quantity over the previous 5 years. The explosion of curiosity is an indication of "an ongoing digital transition in the construction industry," says Theo Salet, a concrete know-how professor on the Eindhoven College of Know-how, who's directing the Dutch mission to print properties for lease. The know-how continues to be younger, although, and requires extra improvement to achieve wider use. Printing a large bridge or skyscraper won't actually be as simple as hitting a button within the foreseeable future, says Skylar Tibbits, a computational architect at MIT. Printers that work at this scale are nonetheless sluggish and costly. And for now they solely produce one type of materials at a time, so builders nonetheless should manually combine doorways, home windows, wiring and plumbing. The truth is, except for the Marines' tasks, which aimed for fast on-site development, many of the current bridges and houses have been printed in components that people later assembled. For now, Tibbits says, the development business will probably use 3-D printing to mass-produce modular elements that also require human labor to place collectively. Printers may additionally be used to construct constructions with distinctive designs or to brighten them with intricate architectural particulars. "Printing," Tibbits says, "is one of many tools you can utilize in harmony to create buildings and products." Read the full article