Hasta La Gadget!

Having a bunch of healthy employees is a good thing for a company. This is because being healthy and leading an active lifestyle has usually been associated with a person having more energy in the day and being a lot more mentally alert, as opposed to being lazy and lethargic. For those unfamiliar, Limeade is a company that helps other companies’ employees get into shape through their employee engagement platform.

Today the company has announced that their employee engagement platform supports more than 80 wearable device and fitness apps, meaning that regardless of what an employee chooses to use to measure their fitness, it should play nicely with Limeade’s platform, which in turn allows them to compete against their colleagues, gain feedback and support, and ultimately earn rewards for accomplishing certain tasks.

According to Henry Albrecht, the CEO of Limeade, “Personal choice is vital to help employees reach their potential. People want to use the device or app that meets their – and their companies’ – needs and budgets. Choice is key to driving sustained engagement.” Devices and apps that are supported include Nike+, Fitbit, Withings, Garmin, Jawbone, Moves, Bodymedia, iHealth, FitBug, MapMyFitness, Misfit, Movable, RunKeeper, Strava, and more.

Justin Jed, the company’s VP of Product Management adds, “When someone syncs a device or app they are more likely to engage in their employer’s well-being program, which helps drive the long-lasting cultural and organizational change our customers are striving for.”

Limeade’s Platform Now Supports More Than 80 Wearable Devices And Apps , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Our ears are all shaped differently. This means that when it comes to earphones, it’s definitely not the case of one-size-fits-all. If we wore headphones with cups that either rest on or cover our ears, that would be a different story. This is why earphone manufacturers such as Shure and Sennheiser tend to bundle foam/silicon earbuds that come in different sizes.

However even then there are some users who find that none of these sizes truly fit very well. That being said, Normal, a high-end earphone manufacturer, has revealed that they are planning on using 3D printing technology to help create earphones that will fit your ear specifically. These earphones will ultimately cost the user around $199 for a pair of customized earphones, which we have to admit is pretty decent, especially when you consider other customized earphones which can cost thousands of dollars.

Normal, the brainchild of Nikki Kaufman, will have an app available on iOS/Android that will take photos of the user’s ear by using a coin as a reference, so that they will be able to gauge the size of your ears without you having to come in to their offices. The app will also allow users to customize their headphones further, such as cord length, color, accent colors on the earphones, and so on.

According to Kaufman, “When we set out to make Normal we wanted not just an amazing brand, and an amazing fit and a product that you design, but one that sounds incredible. Anyone would really appreciate that sound. We went out to find the best components we could find and it’s about the engineering, too — how it’s engineered and manufactured. Because of the 3D-printed custom fit, it’s creating a seal for you which makes it sound that much better.”

In the meantime for those interested, you can download the app from the iTunes App Store or the Google Play Store where you can customize and order your very own customized earphones. Alternatively the company plans to launch their own storefront on their website starting in August.

Normal Will Use 3D Printing To Create Customized Earphones , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Known as the “science of sustainable agriculture,” agroecology is also a practice and a movement. For, Ricardo Salvador, Director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists agroecology is the “agriculture of the future.”

As a science, agroecology was originally developed by researchers who made careful ecological observations of traditional farming systems. These observations revealed that 1) traditional farming systems were not static but actually always changing and adjusting, and 2) that farmers around the world had developed highly sophisticated methods of managing and enhancing ecosystem functions in order to sustainably produce food, fiber, medicine and fuel. Some of these systems have been around for millennia.

A half-century of research and practice in the field of agroecology has yielded spectacular results for hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers and many medium-to-large scale farmers around the world. Because it opens possibilities for grassroots food systems transformation, peasant movements for food sovereignty have embraced agroecology, as have many urban and organic farmers in the Global North. But despite its documented benefits, agroecology is still largely limited to localized experiences and a few, poorly funded university programs. The problem is systemic. The solution is social and political.

Agroecology is ecologically and socially antithetical to large-scale industrial agriculture and does not provide high-return opportunities for agribusiness companies. Since our land grant universities now rely primarily on private-sector funding, they carry out very little agroecological research — agribusiness won’t pay for it. What little government funding does exist for agricultural research has largely followed the lead of the private sector. Despite its superior performance under favorable to extreme farming conditions, its endorsement by global assessments and high-level policy analysts and its proven potential for the mitigation, adaptation and remediation of climate change, agroecology is not part of the high-profile private-public partnerships to end hunger promoted by government agricultural development agencies.

There is general dismissal of agroecology in multilateral and national policy circles, an absence of agroecology in mainstream media and a general ignorance among legislators regarding agroecology. Even some otherwise liberal-minded philanthropies have moved away from the term “agroecology” in the hopes of joining the single-minded conversation on the future of our food systems that always boils down to a shopworn call for more free markets and another Green Revolution.

The silence surrounding agroecology is profoundly disturbing. Proposals for “sustainable intensification” or “climate smart” GMOs can only be peddled as answers to the problems of hunger and global warming by studiously avoiding agroecological science and practice. The acceptance of corporate monopolization of the planet’s seeds, plantation-scale monocultures (conventional and organic) and the “localization” of corporate agrifoods systems, follows on the lack of an agroecological understanding of food systems.

Decades-long efforts to scale up agroecology are stuck at the project level, unable to substantively integrate into the institutions and regulations that shape our food systems. This has produced small islands of sustainability in a vast sea of destruction. To scale up agroecology — to systemically connect the islands — we need to confront the ways in which agroecology is systematically being held back.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently launched a Call for Public Investment in Agroecological Research. The sign-on letter for experts, researchers and academics claims:

“Agroecological research can further our understanding of productive and profitable farming methods that will minimize harmful impacts on human health, the environment, and rural communities. These methods will provide resilience to both anticipated events such as climate change as well as unforeseen developments. Modest public investment can yield enormous returns for farmers and society well into the future.”

Leveling the corporate-dominated research field with public funding would go a long way to removing one of the primary obstacles to agroecology.

London has been written about, painted, sketched, photographed, and depicted in pretty much any and every creative medium available to human hands, but Edward Bawden’s linocuts of England’s capital are some of the coolest depictions of the city, ever ever ever.

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Last month, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor revised the design for a new building on L.A.’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus after scientists claimed his proposal would damage the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits. Now he’s revealed the first model of the new design: an ink blot that spans Wilshire Boulevard.

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