Your hub for Blerd news, mobilized by AT&T.
Source: RIDE Channel
Tony Hawk and Dave Carnie visit the Hendo Hover warehouse to ride the world’s first real hoverboard.
Source: Volvo Trucks — “Volvo Trucks has developed new technology that can do a 360-degree scan of its surroundings and suggest actions to avoid incidents. The technology is developed specifically to protect vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists.”
Source: Verge – “What would a martian habitat look like? And how would we handle food shipments and radiation management?”
Sci-fi and fantasy are two genres dominated by white, male voices. It can be extremely exhausting to see the same themes written by people with the same or similar perspectives. Here are seven prominent African-American women working in these two genres who have made a name for themselves by telling unique stories.
N. K. Jemisin
Jemisin found acclaim after the release of her first novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She has been short-listed for major awards in such a young career and was awarded the Locus Award for Best First Novel.
Nnedi Okorafor
Okorafor writes African-based science fiction stories and children’s books. Her novel Who Fears Death won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. Her works include Akata Witch, Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker and a children’s book Long Juju Man. She is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Buffalo.
Smartwatches
Perfect for business professionals operating on the go, this lightweight, flexible smartwatch takes the power of the iPhone and puts it right on the wrists of wearers. With rumors that Microsoft, Apple and Google have all been working on their own watches to work with their respective smartphones, we’re bound to see some of that hard work in the next year. Word is, Apple has hired a number of fashion executives in recent months, including former Yves Saint Laurent CEO Paul Deneve, who joined the tech company this year to work on “special projects,” one of which is the rumored iWatch, according to Snap Fulfil.
Compact Projection
Travel presentations will be transformed in 2015, thanks to the world’s smallest projector. The tiny keychain projector eliminates the need for heavy equipment or the expense of having to pay for projection equipment to be delivered. This Sekonix DLP Keychain Projector works with smartphones, tablets and personal computers through a USB connection, as reported by Forbes. Not only can compact projection transform the business world, it can also truly innovate our educational system if it is provided in classrooms around the country.
Luke Cage
Luke Cage, wrongly convicted and unjustly imprisoned, was altered in a failed prison experiment that granted him bulletproof skin and superhuman strength. With his street smarts, and unending determination to do right, he fights for the common man. He also has a wife and child, showing his nature as a family man.
James Rhodes (Iron Patriot)
James Rhodes is Tony Stark’s personal pilot and one of the playboy’s oldest friends. Rhodes has often donned the Iron Man armor when the burden has been too much for his friend, but has also established his own identity as the Iron Patriot.
A former teacher turned tech entreprenuer has found a way to help close the achievement gap for students of severely under-resourced schools by giving educators the power to track their students’ progress with nothing more than a smart phone.
In an interview with Blerds, former teacher and Quick Key creator Walter Duncan said that closing the achievement gap is his passion and this new app has certainly allowed him to do just that.
He explained that schools with more sufficient funding can incorporate technology in the curriculum and grading process in a way that under resourced schools can’t.
This, in turn, widens the achievement gap between well-funded and low-funded schools.
Quick Key is working to significantly reduce that gap.
“Quick Key turns a mobile device into a scanner that allows teachers to grade assessments in paper based classrooms with or without an Internet connection,” the self-proclaimed “teacherpreneuer” told Atlanta BlackStar. “It then gives teachers the student performance data right away. This tool allows a dedicated teacher to improve student performance, irrespective of their schools infrastructure and budget.”
After spending 15 years in the classroom, Duncan realized there was a serious need for teachers to have a tool like this in their hands.
Tracking students’ daily progress and understanding of intense lesson plans is a task that would be nearly impossible to do by hand.
On average, teachers already spend more than 10 hours every week grading papers and assignments, according to estimates.
Ducan’s revolutionary app, Quick Key, will give teachers back those precious hours and allow them to focus on “developing and executing creative and engaging lessons.”
The impact of such an app is even greater than just saving time.
In the long run, allowing teachers to track student progress, have more time to develop lesson plans and prevent any one student from falling too far behind has the potential to boost graduation rates on a global scale and save the futures of students who potentially could have slipped through the educational system’s cracks.
More traditional means of tracking student progress often allows many students to fly under the radar, which means it could be too late by the time their parents or teachers notice they have fallen behind.
The technology behind Quick Key also has the ability to revolutionize the way people track progress even outside the classroom.
“In terms of companies, I would say AT&T, Coca-Cola, Target, Best Buy and Starbucks could benefit from using Quick Key for customer feedback and corporate training feedback,” Duncan said.
The same way the app would help teachers identify areas where students are struggling, the app could allow higher ups at any given company to identify areas where their corporate training programs could use improvements.
“Corporate training is critical to successful companies,” Duncan said. “But tracking participant mastery of concepts can be time consumer and challenging. Quick Key allows companies to track mastery of corporate training in real time.”
Duncan also explained that the app is a tool that should be used to help improve relationships between teachers and students.
In fact, it was his own positive relationship with a former student from Los Angeles that helped bring Quick Key to the market.
“Over the course of my career, I built many healthy relationships with students,” Duncan explained. “These relationships persisted during the time after I had been their teacher. One such student, from Los Angeles, helped to change my life.”
Duncan explained that he had just created a “grainy” video with his iPhone that revealed the app’s prototype and overall vision for the app.
“I asked Jacob, my former student, to help me improve the video, and he agreed,” Duncan said. “I gave him my YouTube password (reluctantly) and went to bed.”
The next morning he “woke up to a different world than the one [he] went to bed in.”
Jacob had posted the video to Reddit along with a heart-warming message.
“The best teacher I ever had created this cool new app, let’s show him we appreciate his hard work,” Jacob wrote.
It wasn’t long before the video went viral and garnered the media attention of major outlets including Techcrunch.
So many teachers started signing up for the app that the servers crashed.
Today, more than 400,000 assessments in more than 40 different countries have been graded using the Quick Key mobile app.
The app is free to download from iTunes and truly harnesses the power to level the playing field for students at under-resourced schools.
Star Trek is a science-fiction franchise spanning comics, books, film and television. These are some of the main Blerd figures from the Star Trek saga.
Nyota Uhura
Nyota Uhura is a character in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, the 2009 film Star Trek, and its 2013 sequel Star Trek Into Darkness.
In 2266, Uhura (played originally by Nichelle Nichols and later by Zoe Saldana) began her Starfleet career as a communications officer aboard the USS Enterprise with the rank of lieutenant in the command division.
In the following years of that vessel’s historic five-year mission, she was transferred to the operations division where she proved to be a proficient technician and was considered by Captain Kirk to be a capable and reliable bridge officer, manning the helm, navigation and main science station when the need arose.
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994 and was the basis of four Star Trek movies, Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge is the chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise.
In Star Trek: First Contact, La Forge (portrayed by LeVar Burton) and the Enterprise-E travel back in time to the 21st century to stop the Borg from preventing mankind’s first warp space flight. The inventor of the warp drive is a financially motivated, white alcoholic named Zefram Cochrane who lives in Bozeman, Montana. La Forge has to hold his hand to get him to launch the Phoenix and make “first contact” with the Vulcans.
As the holiday shopping season begins, many people will be looking for an iPhone 6 Plus for a loved one. Apple products always create a lot of buzz, and this one is no different. Here are a few things iPhone 6 Plus users may hear often from non-users.
“That’s too big for me.”
“Did you try to bend it yet?”
