This Refugee Camp In The Jordanian Desert Now Has Its Own Solar Farm | Fast Company

May 23, 2017May 22, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When the temperature soared to 100 degrees in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan last week, refugees living there could keep fans running inside their shelters. The camp, which had only sporadic access to electricity for its first two and a half years, is now home to the first solar farm in a refugee community.

The two-megawatt solar plant, funded by a donation from the Ikea Foundation, sends power into Jordan’s national grid, helping offset the electric bill for part of the camp, which is now connected to the grid. For 20,000 Syrian refugees living in two villages in the camp, power is free 24 hours a day. The plant will soon be scaled up to five megawatts to cover the needs of all of the camp’s 35,000 residents.

This Is the Night That People Have the Most Trouble Sleeping | Entrepreneur

May 23, 2017May 22, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The Sunday Night Blues are real.

A recent survey conducted through YouGov for meditation platform Calm polled 4,279 Americans and Brits and found that insomnia plagued people the most on Sunday night.

Forty-six percent reported having trouble sleeping on Sunday night, followed by 17 percent on Monday, 9 percent on Saturday and Wednesday, 8 percent on Tuesday, 7 percent on Friday and oddly enough Thursday came in last with only 5 percent identifying it as the night where they did the most tossing and turning.

How Regular Exercise May Make Your Body ‘Younger’ | Live Science

May 22, 2017May 21, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Getting regular exercise may help slow the aging of your body’s cells, a new study finds.

Compared with the people in the study who didn’t exercise at all, the highly active people had a “biological age” that was about nine years younger, said study author Larry Tucker, a professor of exercise science at Brigham Young University in Utah.

To reap these benefits of exercise, you’d need to spend 30 to 40 minutes running, five days a week, according to the study.

Why Western brands are taking a chance on the UK | Fast Casual

May 22, 2017May 21, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

While dining out seems to have lost some of its appeal to US consumers, it’s becoming a more popular option for people in the United Kingdom.

“It is a solid fact that the demand for eating out among UK consumers are growing,” said Elif Polat, Research Analyst at Euromonitor International.

“Consumer foodservice grew by 3 percent in value terms in 2016, an important achievement for the industry considering the fact that UK is a quite mature market,” she said in an interview with FastCasual

Cannes Film Festival: Netflix ‘Ojka’ Screening Sparks Debate | Fortune.com

May 22, 2017May 21, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Even an inexperienced movie director would have said the symbolism was too heavy-handed. When the screening of a Netflix-backed movie started on Thursday night at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, the aspect ratio was wrong, so large parts of the film couldn’t be seen.

The problem was quickly corrected, and the Festival said it was just a simple projection error. But that small mistake took on much greater significance because it involved Netflix.

The Ingenious Stunt That Landed This Ad Veteran Her First Agency Gig | Adweek

May 19, 2017May 18, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Today’s graduates are hungry for agency jobs, and they’re coming up with some pretty insane ways to get noticed. It makes perfect sense in the creative business, but it turns out this trend of outlandish stunts isn’t new. Tuesday Poliak, currently evp, chief creative officer of Wunderman D.C., was winning the creative job stunt game before going viral on the internet was even a thing.

Poliak developed a brilliant idea to get her portfolio into the hands of every major creative director—from Lee Clow to Jeff Goodby—without spending a ton of money on multiple big-budget portfolios. She landed a call back from every single creative director, and the stunt eventually led to her first art director gig at TBWA/Chiat/Day Venice.

So why go to such great lengths to get her portfolio in front of every creative director that she wanted to work for?

San Francisco Tries to Ban Delivery Robots Before They Flatten Someone’s Toes | WIRED

May 19, 2017May 18, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

A LITTLE MORE than a month after a startup announced it was unleashing robots to deliver food to San Franciscans, a city lawmaker wants them curbed.

Marble’s robot is technically semi-autonomous, as a human operator monitors each robot in case it gets in any trouble. But that’s not good enough for San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee, who just proposed legislation to ban delivery robots of all types, saying they’re a public safety hazard. While he isn’t aware of robots tangling with humans on the sidewalks of San Francisco yet, that’s not the point. “For me to wait for something to happen is silly,” Yee says, “because I think it’s going to happen.”

Don’t touch the tap in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County | Business Insider

May 19, 2017May 18, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

MAY 18, 2017 INEZ AND TOMAHAWK, KY.—T.J. Fannin, sitting on his porch as the sun sets, speaks fondly of the 27 years he spent working in nearby coal mines.

But despite the hard labor that fueled a coal boom and sent millions of dollars into Kentucky’s coffers, he says he and his neighbors lack a basic amenity: clean tap water.

“[O]n the TV you see someone go to the faucet and get a drink of water, and it just makes me mad cause, you know, we can’t do that,” says Mr. Fannin, who buys two or three 24-packs of bottled water a month for drinking and cooking. “There’s an odor to the water…. It’s just like stagnant water [that] comes out of the bottom of a pool.”

Retailers Have Long Feared Showroomers. Maybe They Should Love Them Instead | Forbes

May 18, 2017May 17, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When San Francisco-based management consultant Vivian Zeldis walks into a clothing store, she expects it to mirror the websites and apps where she now does most of her shopping. “I kind of want stores that look very clean and yet at the same time have all the sizes and all of the colors,” she says. “And I want to check out fast. I don’t want long lines. If there’s long lines, I leave.”

For years, traditional retailers have worried customers like Zeldis would hurt their bottom lines. The main concern is that consumers will go to physical stores to look around and evaluate products, then buy online from other sources, often at a discount – a practice called “showrooming.”

If Instagram Becomes Snapchat, Who Will Be Instagram? | Inc.com

May 18, 2017May 17, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when Instagram was an app people used to make their photos look good. A retro wash of sepia here, a studied overexposure there, and, voilà, you could fool your friends into thinking you had an artist’s eye.

That was before the advent of Snapchat. For the past few quarters, Instagram has been sprinting with its hair on fire away from the idea that a good photo is one that looks like one a professional might have taken. Its only goal, seemingly, has been to make sure anything people like doing on Snapchat they’re able to do on Instagram, whether that’s marking up photos with drawings and stickers, publishing slideshow-like “Stories” that disappear after a day, or navigating between parts of the app by swiping around randomly. As of Tuesday, the cloning is complete, with Instagram adding face filters that allow users to alter their own appearances with augmented reality overlays.