June 24, 2018

Dutch robots win big at Robocup 2018

Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 4:21 pm

10152328796_2c7e6de3f4

Last weekend the Eindhoven University of Technology won two major European prizes at the RoboCup 2018, held in Montreal, Canada. The team from Eindhoven won the Middle Size League, which is the most important football category where two robot teams play real football against each other without any human intervention. However, the final was won by the Portuguese CAMBADA 2-0. In all, 35 countries were competing for prizes.

Eindhoven University of Technology also won a prize with their robot Amigo in a category that tests the socially helpful abilities of robots in a home environment. Amigo beat the first and third places of the championship last year, both from Germany.

(Links: bright.nl, robocup2018.org, Photo of RoboCup2013 in Eindhoven by RoboCup2013, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

June 5, 2018

Dutch invent world’s first cement separating machine

Filed under: Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

inovahuis

Amsterdam company Rutte Groep has succeeded in building a machine capable of recycling cement – a world first. The machine is called ‘Freement’, which is being presented today at the Provada fair in Amsterdam together with the New Horizon Urban Mining company.

Fremeent, invented by Koos Schenk, can separate blocks of cement into its three original materials of gravel, sand and cement. It is a big deal, considering that producing cement is responsible for nine percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Not unlike a cow, the machine ‘ruminates’ cement until the gravel is clean. Freement can process 130.000 tonnes of cement a year.

(Link: trouw.nl, Photo of an unrelated energy-neutral house: bright.nl)

Tags: , , , ,

May 24, 2018

Dutch app helps you sort your recycling

Filed under: Sustainability,Technology by Orangemaster @ 6:34 pm

On 23 May, Dutch company Sitio IT launched the free phone app EcoScan for Android and iOS that helps you figure out in what recycling bin you need to sort things you’re throwing out.

In the Netherlands, there are bins for paper, plastic, glass and a few more that makes life complicated, and every municipality seems to have different bins as well. And you don’t want to be that person who puts an old lamp bulb in with the glass and forces someone somewhere to ‘disinfect’ your mistake. Sitio IT claim that there are 10 to 15 different bins for things, and this prompted developer Rick Buiten to comp up with an app for doing the right thing easier.

By using a photo scan, EcoScan can even tell you that you’d better bring certain things to the thrift shop, as they are not meant for any bins. Although I very much like the idea, I’m going to assume it’s still being beta tested or I’m really bad at scanning, as I’ve just tried it plastic, paper and glass, and it didn’t recognised any of them. And it’s only available in Dutch, but it’s point and click.

(Link: bright.nl)

Tags: , ,

May 5, 2018

Rabobank uses animal and plants for client privacy

Filed under: General,Online by Orangemaster @ 1:14 pm
privacy

To comply with the General Protection Data Regulation that will enter into force on 25 May 2018, the Dutch bank Rabobank has found a nifty way of using client data without having to ask permission: by assigning Latin animal and plant names to their clients data, pseudonymising it. They also claim it’s something they were toying around four years ago when the GPDR wasn’t on anybody’s radar, but yeah, Google was doing that back then as well with animal and creatures names that anonymised Google docs users.

Special software was developed by IBM to make people’s data unrecognisable, but still useable for analysis. The software is currently part of a service aimed at a small group of financial organisations. Later, it will also be used in retail and healthcare.

(Link: bright.nl)

Tags: , , ,

April 26, 2018

So many signs, still many bike removals

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 2:08 pm

Bike-signs-Leidseplein

Downtown Amsterdam near the Leidseplein, one of the main party areas, a total of 54 bright signs asking folks to remove their bikes before April 23 was not enough to make it happen, forcing the city to remove 115 bikes.

A few of my Facebook friends took pictures of the sheer amount of signs they saw while biking, cracking all the jokes. However, the city is legally obliged to put signs at pretty much every bike rack, which would explain why there are so many. We also know how annoying it is to have to deal with the bike depot folks who remove ‘wrongly parked bikes’ due to a lack of bike racks in the first place and bring them to a bike purgatory 10 kilometres away from the city centre.

(Link and photo: at5.nl)

Tags: , ,

April 19, 2018

First Dutch Netflix Original in the works

Filed under: Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 2:29 pm

Although last year we announced the first Belgian-Dutch series to hit Netflix, called ‘Undercover’, now there’s a Dutch Netflix Original in the works, with no name as of yet. Since Belgian television is developing and will broadcast ‘Undercover’ first, it isn’t considered a Netflix Original, while the unnamed Dutch project will be.

Produced by Pieter Kuijpers and Sander van Meurs of the Pupkin company, the eight-part series of 30 minutes will feature the combination of two elements, namely coming of age and horror, set in Amsterdam. A group of students enjoying the vices of the Dutch capital discover a link to a demonic world from the Golden Age upon which this country has built its entire fortune. This Dutch outing will be penned by writers’ collective Winchester McFly (Bankier van het Verzet, Smeris), while the showrunner will be Michael Leendertse (Van God Los, Smeris).

(Link: bright.nl, Photo of the VOC HQ (East India Company) by Josh, distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)

Tags: , ,

January 10, 2018

Dutch start-up shows translation gadget in Vegas

Filed under: Gadgets,Technology by Orangemaster @ 10:28 pm

Bright-Vegas

The CES in Las Vegas, a large exhibition of innovation, is currently showcasing some 50 Dutch start-ups, and one of them is Travis, presenting its real-time translation gadget Travis Translator, which costs 150 euro and can process 80 languages. However, the video below shows it doesn’t always work, but then maybe the person using it needs to learn how to use it a bit better.

The Travis Translator uses sites like Google and others to provide a live translation from one langue to another but also back again as people converse, which is a great idea. Some guys from Dutch tech site Bright.nl tried it out using Dutch on the Las Vegas Strip with tourists who spoke Japanese, English, Farsi and possibly Latvian or Lithuanian because the Dutch guy said ‘Latvanian’, which is nonsense and could have chosen the wrong language.

The first attempt with French at the beginning was wrong, but then the word Travis must have thrown the Travis off, and Latvian or possibly Lithuanian (someone tell us) turned up nothing at all as a translation, but then if the user thinks ‘Latvanian’ is a language, then the user could be at fault. Wouldn’t you want to the gadget to detect the language of a person like Google does? Maybe it does. And the interviewer does make a good point that it would be much better to have a phone app than yet another gadget to carry around.

Video in Dutch here, but also with some English.

(Link and screenshot: bright.nl)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

January 8, 2018

Netherlands gets first energy-neutral house

Filed under: Architecture,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 10:39 am

inovahuis

The small village of Abbenes, North Holland is home to the very first enery-neutral pop-up house in the country, based on a design from the company Pop-Up House that hails from Marseille, France.

Claiming to make passive construction easy, the idea is to build homes that are not only affordable, but also free of energy costs, in this case, natural gas. I specify ‘natural gas’ because electricity is not considered an energy cost for most people around the world, but I come from Québec, Canada where about 90 of heating is generated from electricity, with natural gas as a back-up during winters like the one they’re having right now.

“A passive house is a building which has limited heat loss and takes advantage of natural factors in its direct environment (bio-climatic design). A passive house’s energy consumption is very low and thermal indoor comfort is ensured all year long.” To me, this sounds great in a part of the world that barely sees a minus on the thermometer.

This Lego-like house (see video) also costs 80 per cent less than a ‘normal’ house and can be built much faster, in about five months, according to Pop-Up House.

Pop-Up House: the affordable passive house from Popup House on Vimeo.

(Link and photo: bright.nl)

Tags: , , ,

December 19, 2017

How does Rudolph’s nose glow? Find out

Filed under: Animals,Science by Orangemaster @ 9:11 pm

reindeer

An article in the Dutch biology research journal Deinsea, an annual publication of the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam, based on a study published in 2012 in the same journal, discusses the physiology of ‘Why Rudolph’s Nose is Red’.

The new study, entitled ‘Rudolph the red nosed reindeer had a very bioluminescent nose. A reply to Van der Hoven et al. 2012’ by Neil Crooks, Claire E. Marriott, Hannah R. Clifforth, Zain A. Ahmed, Arnold Xhikola, Samuel G. Penny, and Angelo P. Pernetta at the University of Brighton, UK, explain:

“Research published in Deinsea by Van der Hoven et al. (2012) identifies the cause of Rudolph’s infamous red nose to be the consequence of hyperemia of the nasal mucosa induced by the exertion of pulling a heavy load […] due to the excessive stresses endured whilst flying with Santa Claus and the sleigh in tow resulted in cerebral and bodily hyperthermia, overworking the nasal cooling system, causing the nose to glow. Whilst we recognise van der Hoven et al.’s (2012) central tenet of highly vascularized nasal mucosa in reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) helping regulate nasal heat exchange, we concluded that this is unlikely to be the causal factor of Rudolph’s particularly iridescent appendage for multiple reasons (PDF).”

(Link: improbable.com, Photo of reindeer by Dave Taylor, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

December 15, 2017

Queen Wilhelmina featured in Civilization VI

Filed under: Gaming by Orangemaster @ 3:45 pm
Kdag2010-2

Set to be released on 8 February 2018, computer game Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Rise and Fall will feature Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, the country’s longest-reigning Dutch monarch from 1890 to 1948 as well as the world’s first female billionaire in American dollars. In the game, the Netherlands’ particularities includes ‘grote rivieren’ (‘big rivers’), polders and ‘scheepsbouw’ (‘shipbuilding’). It is nice to see a game that left William of Orange aside for a change.

Although game creator Sid Meier is Canadian (actually, Canadian-American as well as Swiss by birth), he also inherited Dutch roots from his parents, which may or may not have played a roll in designing this part of the game. And the Dutch press loves playing a quick game of ‘Zoek de Nederlands’ (‘Find the Dutch person’) any chance they get, especially when it’s a talented person.

24oranges HQ has staff still playing Civilization III that was not designed by Meier, but rather by Americans Jeff Briggs and Soren Johnson, but hey, it’s still ‘Civ’ to us.

(Link: bright.nl)

Tags: , ,