Hasta La Gadget!

We might be days away from witnessing SpaceX make history. The private space corporation has conducted a static test fire (yet again) of the first rocket it landed on an ocean platform. SpaceX wants to make sure it’s in tip-top shape for lift off, be…

At the moment the bands offered for the Apple Watch are pretty much purely for aesthetic reasons, which makes sense given that Apple has positioned the Apple Watch as more of a fashion accessory than your average tech gadget. However what if in the future Apple Watch bands were more functional?

Apparently that is an idea that Apple is exploring, according to a recently discovered patent in which Apple has come up with various ideas for a more functional band for the Apple Watch. In Apple’s patent, it talks about how the bands on the Apple Watch could be used to display information, alert users to notifications/reminders, or even show the progress of something, like a stopwatch, percentage of a download, the number of steps you’ve taken, and so on.

These bands won’t be stuffed with displays, but rather it talks about using an indicator in which only a portion of the band will be lit up. Now this isn’t the first time that it has been suggested that Apple wants to make the bands more functional. A patent from last year suggested that Apple was considering moving the haptic motor into the band itself, resulting in a possibly thinner Apple Watch.

However these are just patents meaning that there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever be made a reality, but if you think that the Apple Watch could stand to be more functional, who knows what the Apple Watch Series 3 could bring to the table? Cellular connectivity, perhaps?

Apple Looking Into Apple Watch Bands With Added Functionality , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Record all the stunning scenery while you’re on the road with Vivitar’s latest HD dash cam ‘DCM106’. This very affordable HD dash cam is packed with a 3MP CMOS image sensor, a 3mm fixed lens, a 2.0-inch LCD screen for preview, a microSD card slot (up to 32GB) and built-in microphone/speaker.

Powered by a built-in 90mAh lithium battery, this HD dash cam can capture both 720p HD video in AVI format and up to 1920 x 1440 pixels images in JPEG format.

Other highlights include Adjustable Suction Mount, Loop Recording – automatically overwrites the oldest saved footage and Motion Detection Recording – automatically begins recording once motion is detected and ends once motion stops.

The Vivitar DCM106 is available now for just $29.99. [Product Page]

The post Vivitar Hits Back With A New HD Dash Cam ‘DCM106’ appeared first on TechFresh, Consumer Electronics Guide.

There have been a flood of opinion pieces and news stories in recent weeks wrongly telling people that it was not trade that led to the loss of manufacturing jobs in recent years, but rather automation. This means that all of those people who are worried about trade deficits costing jobs are simply being silly. The promulgators of the automation story want everyone to stop talking about trade and instead focus on education, technology, or whatever other item they can throw out as a distraction.

This “automation rather than trade story” is the equivalent of global warming denialism for the well-educated. And its proponents deserve at least as much contempt as global warming deniers.

The basic story on automation, trade, and jobs is fairly straightforward. “Automation” is also known as “productivity growth,” and it is not new. We have been seeing gains in productivity in manufacturing ever since we started manufacturing things.

Productivity gains mean that we can produce more output with the same amount of work. Before the trade deficit exploded in the last decade, increases in productivity were largely offset by increases in output, making it so the total jobs in manufacturing did not change much.

Imagine that productivity increased by 20 percent over the course of a decade, roughly its average rate of growth. If manufacturing output also increases by 20 percent, then we have the same number of jobs at the end of the decade as at the beginning. This is pretty much what happened before the trade deficit exploded.

This is easy to see in the data. In December of 1970 the U.S. had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. Thirty years later, in December of 2000, it had 17.2 million manufacturing jobs. We had enormous growth in manufacturing productivity over this period, yet we had very little change in total employment.

To be clear, manufacturing did decline as a share of total employment. Total employment nearly doubled from 1970 to 2000, which means that the share of manufacturing employment in total employment fell by almost half. People were increasingly spending their money on services rather than manufactured foods.

However what we saw in the years after 2000 was qualitatively different. The number of manufacturing jobs fell by 3.4 million, more than 20 percent, between December 2000 and December of 2007. Note that this is before the collapse of the housing bubbled caused the recession. Manufacturing employment dropped by an additional 2.3 million in the recession, although it has since regained roughly half of these jobs.

The extraordinary plunge in manufacturing jobs in the years 2000 to 2007 was due to the explosion of the trade deficit, which peaked at just under 6 percent of GDP ($1.2 trillion in today’s economy) in 2005 and 2006. This was first and foremost due to the growth of imports from China during these years, although we ran large trade deficits with other countries as well.

There really is very little ambiguity in this story. Does anyone believe that if we had balanced trade it wouldn’t mean more manufacturing jobs? Do they think we could produce another $1.2 trillion in manufacturing output without employing any workers?

It is incredible how acceptable it is for our elites to lie about trade rather than deal with the issue candidly. The most blatant example of this dishonesty is a December, 2007 Washington Post editorial that praised NAFTA and, incidentally, criticized the Democratic presidential candidate for calling for renegotiating the trade deal.

The editorial absurdly asserted:

“Mexico’s gross domestic product, now more than $875 billion, has more than quadrupled since 1987.”

For GDP to quadruple over the course of two decades, it would have to sustain a 7.0 percent average annual rate of growth. China has managed to do this and almost no one else, certainly not Mexico. According to the I.M.F., Mexico’s GDP grew by 83 percent over this period.

While it is striking that the Washington Post’s editorial board would have been so ill-informed as to make such a huge mistake in their original editorial, the really incredible part of the story is that they still have not corrected the online version almost a decade later. After all, a reader could stumble on the GDP quadrupling claim and think that it is actually true.

This level of dishonesty separates trade out from most other areas of public debate. There can be grounds for honest people to differ on many issues, but there is less of a basis for asserting Mexico’s GDP quadrupled during this period than there is for denying global warming. It is unfortunate that the proponents of recent trade deals feel they have to be this dishonest to push their agenda.

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SAN FRANCISCO ― Much of Southern California’s iconic coastline, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, could be “completely eroded” due to rising sea levels by the end of the century, a new study predicts.

Between 31 and 67 percent of the iconic beaches, dunes and cliffs in the area may be washed away by 2100 thanks to climate change unless something’s done to protect the shores, according to the study published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

“This is not a problem that’s going away,” said United States Geological Survey scientist Patrick Barnard, one of the co-authors. “But we can mitigate it.”

The question isn’t whether the seas are rising — it’s a matter of how much. Previous conservative estimates by a United Nations panel said the oceans would rise by 1 meter by the end of the 21st century, but newer data showing the accelerated melting of Antarctic ice may double that rate.

That’s a vital question for the 310 miles of Southern California the scientists examined. The region is home to nearly 20 million people and features some of the most desired real estate in the country, in places like the low-lying Westside neighborhoods of Los Angeles or suburban communities in Orange County.

Beaches provide the “first line of defense” against storms, Barnard said. If humans don’t intervene more decisively to counteract erosion, flooding will become more common and severe in places like LA’s Venice neighborhood, Barnard said.

“It is likely that beaches in Southern California will require substantial management efforts … to maintain beach widths and prevent impacts to coastal infrastructure,” the study said.

Researchers used data from 1995-2010 collected from GPS and LIDAR technology that measured small changes in elevation and shoreline formation to come up with a model that predicted the beaches’ future.

The erosion of two-thirds of the region’s beaches is possible if sea levels rise by 2 meters, researchers wrote.

Averting the worst-case scenario calls for replenishing beaches and dunes with more sand — a temporary solution that officials already use — and building sea walls, levees and other mechanisms, Barnard said. The current approach for beach management, however, isn’t capable of confronting the coming changes, he said.

“It’s been primarily a Band-Aid approach for many years,” he said. It’s unclear how much money must be invested in infrastructure, but Barnard said it would easily be “more than a billion” dollars.

Other options such as a moving homes and businesses inland is not realistic for one of the most densely populated areas of the country, though it could be carried out in some instances for important infrastructure, Barnard said.

California officials who reviewed the study said the economic activity along the coast generates $40 billion a year in the state.

“The prospect of losing so many [of] our beaches in Southern California to sea level rise is frankly unacceptable,” state Coastal Commission Executive Director John Ainsworth said in a statement. “The beaches are our public parks and economic heart and soul of our coastal communities. We must do everything we can to ensure that as much of the iconic California coast is preserved for future generations.”

Historically, there’s been more accretion (or growth) in the size of the region’s beaches, yet the trend is expected to reverse, researchers said.

Some beach communities are already reeling from recent, devastating storms. Parts of Santa Barbara County in particular have been adjusting to more turbulent times.

Rising sea levels pose a problem to many American coastal areas. Parts of the Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard have risen much more than along parts of the West Coast, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“We’ve really urbanized the coast in a lot of regions,” said Barnard. “We’ve built up these places with the implicit assumption is that the environment is never going to change. But the reality is they’re some of the most dynamic settings.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.