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New York state will spend $500 million building up ports and manufacturing infrastructure for offshore wind farms in a bid to become home base for the nascent industry.

The investments announced Wednesday by Governor Kathy Hochul will focus on building the supply chain for offshore turbines, which can provide clean power to a densely populated coast with little room for onshore wind farms or solar power plants.

“With this investment, New York will lead the nation on offshore wind production, creating green jobs for New Yorkers, and powering our clean energy future,” Hochul said in the statement.

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This article was contributed by Valerias Bangert, strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three media outlets, and published author.

AI job automation: The debate

The debate around whether AI will automate jobs away is heating up. AI critics claim that these statistical models lack the creativity and intuition of human workers and that they are thus doomed to specific, repetitive tasks. However, this pessimism fundamentally underestimates the power of AI. While AI job automation has already replaced around 400,000 factory jobs in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, with another 2 million on the way, AI today is automating the economy in a much more subtle way.

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Solar roofing provider GAF Energy announced today its Timberline Solar product uses solar shingles that you can nail to a roof.

GAF Energy, a division of Standard Industries, has made a solar roof system that integrated easily into traditional roofing processes in materials thanks to what it calls the first “nailable” solar shingle, the Timberline Solar Energy Shingle, which will be assembled domestically at GAF Energy’s manufacturing and R&D facility in San Jose, California. The company showed off the tech at the CES 2022 trade event in Las Vegas.

The project will create local American jobs and hopefully create more demand for residential clean energy. One of the challenges to date has been the need to house solar tiles on platforms that have to be attached to roofs, making a solar roof installation more complicated than putting on a traditional roof.

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Such is the promise and peril of NFTs.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, offer many potential benefits to creators. They apply the mechanisms of scarcity to digital assets by allowing artists to render them as one-of-a-kind collectibles, like a painting or a baseball card. This means artists — especially digital artists — who have struggled to make their streamable, screenshot-able or reprintable work hold value — can price their items at rates appropriate for something in short supply.

However, the digital trading mechanism is still in nascent stages, and rife with scams, hacks and copyright issues. Beeple was hit by an organized hack, for example. While artists can sometimes find financial solvency with NFTs, other times, they lose millions.

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An evolution of its 2018 ‘Valkyrie’ hypersonic airliner concept.

If you work out of an office, you know that the coffee machine is the favorite spot in the office to hang out or have conversations at. From giving us the first cup of the day to keeping us awake for late-night meetings, that machine is a lifesaver. But just for a day, try not getting your coffee from the coffee machine. Don’t skip coffee entirely, but instead, go out to your local coffee shop that doesn’t use coffee machines or make yourself a flask at home. You will realize that hand-made coffee is inherently better than the one that is made from a machine. Not just making coffee, but highly creative jobs–like designing an outfit or writing a book–are considered best left to human creators. Many do not think that machines could emulate them. But with the takeover of artificial intelligence, this belief is steadily being challenged. Creativity and AI are together transforming many spaces that were traditionally reserved for the “artists.” In this article, we’ll be exploring these spaces and how AI is making a significant impact on them.

Creativity and AI Are Literally Changing the World When you think “creative,” the first things that come to mind are music, poetry and novels. The best works in these three areas of art have been the results of human imagination and innovation. Every significant progress in these fields has challenged traditional ways of creating art and presented a new side to human creativity. For example, there was a time when classical music was considered to be the peak of musical art, but today, we see hip-hop and K-pop taking over the world, their styles and structures very different from classical music.

Full Story:

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One of the best thing about electric and hybrid vehicles is that the energy doesn’t get completely wasted when you need to brake. By using an electric motor as a generator, you can slow a vehicle down and put some of that kinetic energy into a battery pack so you can use it again later. Sure, there are conversion losses both going into the battery and coming back out to the wheels, so you don’t get a lot more than half of the energy back, but an ICE vehicle turns all of that energy into heat, which gets dissipated into the air.

Electric bikes, scooters, and other micromobility options can do regenerative braking, too. This is great for getting better range and doing fewer brake jobs, just like in a car.

But can this be done without batteries and electric motors? Can you store energy away for later use? It turns out that you can, and this guy built a bicycle that does it.

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BayWa r.e., in partnership with Grüne Energien, has received planning permission for the development of the Rag Lane Solar Farm project near Bristol, UK.

Construction of the 49.9 MW solar project in South Gloucestershire is planned to commence at the beginning of 2023, with grid connection expected in the second half of 2023. When complete, Rag Lane will deliver approximately 52 GWh/year of clean renewable electricity for distribution to the national grid, the equivalent to the annual electrical needs of approximately 15,000 family homes.

BayWa r.e. is committed to ensuring maximum benefit to the local community and environment in the development of Rag Lane. As part of the construction of the project, BayWa r.e. will provide biodiversity enhancements to the local area including the reinforcement and planting of 1.7 km of new hedgerows as a haven for wildlife, as well as ecological connectivity and improvements to the public footpath that runs across the site.

The company also anticipates that at least 20 local jobs will be created through the construction phase, with 2–3 long term jobs through the operational life of the project.

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2.7 billion people on this planet have “deskless jobs,” many of which require bending, lifting, moving, and carrying. German Bionic just released the fifth generation Cray X AI-enhanced power suit, or exoskeleton, to help those billions of people with almost 70 pounds of additional lifting capacity, reducing the risk of back injury and repetitive stress injuries. The Cray X is already in use at BMW, IKEA, and the French delivery service DPD, and will be launched internationally in January 2022.

The AI-powered suit boosts productivity, reduces error rates, decreases accidents, and results in a 25% reduction in the number of sick days workers take, German Bionic says.

The smart exoskeleton market has been estimated to be growing 41.3% a year to a nearly $2 billion industry by 2025, with applications in construction, shipping and receiving, healthcare, and the military. But it’s not just for the billions in the workforce.

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