Ten-year-old invents light-up crosswalks, IBM makes them real
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Sensors and bigger stripes would be nice.
(It's a great idea, and especially if she never saw one before, shows a great thought process.)
I only know IBM Labs people, who do complain about weird bureaucratic stuff, but no worse than anywhere else, and a few barely-competent people who work as "solutions architects", but they may just be outliers.
That said, IBM has changed and will continue to change. They constantly remix their portfolio, adapt and evolve and that has been the only way they have been able to survive over 100 years and prosper at a time when their traditional competitors, such as HP, are failing. One can see how they made the transition from a hardware-led business to a services-led business as a good example of that constant transformation.
Lastly, why is 'outsourcing' necessarily perceived as a negative thing? I see IBM and other multinational's ability to move work to the most effective -- from both a cost and skills perspective -- location as a very important tool in maximising shareholder value and ensuring profitability now and in the future. It's a fact that the world is evolving and, with it, labour traditionally sourced in local markets can now be found in low cost countries and hence in order to remain competitive globally companies must take advantage of this. Unfortunately, this often leads in a rebalancing of headcount in more developed (i.e. expensive) countries and this can sometimes lead to 'layoffs' but this is a fact of life and, I think, the consequences of ignoring it would be far worse for the other employees of the company as well as shareholders and the marketplace.
A priori reasoning doesn't work in Big Biz Land. As a (former) high-priced consultant, who worked with many other high-priced consultants, inside Fortune 100 companies and out, let me assure you… the actual effectiveness of a consulting co. has nothing to do with how many contracts they score or what their profit is.
Of course, it's true that GP is not a good measure, if taken alone, of the delivered value just as revenue and signings do not necessarily make good indicators. However, if one assumes that customers are able to gauge the effectiveness of the consultancy they receive then measurements such as backlog seem reasonable indicators of success; if clients are not receiving value, they would be cancelling contracts and/or not resigning and hence backlog would start to decline year on year. In the case of IBM, their services backlog went up 1 percent year on year and sits around 140 billion USD.
How to measure the success of a consulting company? Well, you have to ask "What are they REALLY hiring the consultants for for?"
Probably a third of the jobs I was hired for, inside large companies (and particularly corporate-y startups), were clearly (to me) about CYA. "Hey, we're doing something, look at all the money we're spending on consultants!" When you go in, as I did, trying to actually do a great job, this becomes incredibly disheartening. One more reason I came to loathe consulting. However, in that case, given the actual (unstated) goal, I was able to be very "effective" for the client, despite the fact that no matter what I did, they wasted endless hours of my & my partner's time at $500+/hr total. $2k on a meeting? Sure, why not? Changing "project managers" every week? Hey, why not? Putting a glorified secretary in charge of signing off on user interface designs? Sounds grrreat!
And yet… for their purpose… I was a tool they used effectively. Bummer.
Wasn't just me, either. Do you remember that "shocking" post a while back by an anonymous ex-McKinsey consultant? He detailed how McK hires kids out of college with no experience and gives them jobs pumping out Powerpoints to client specifications. That doesn't sound so bad, put that way, but he meant that he was told what outcome the client wanted to see, and that he should make the data (and the presentation) come to that conclusion. Given my experience consulting, I wasn't at all surprised (although it's a different type of consulting and I was never dishonest to a client).
We assume clients are rational actors, but they're not. They're people. And people often do things for all the wrong reasons. They will pay somebody to tell them what they want to hear; they'll pay somebody to look good; they'll pay somebody to listen to them, to have somebody have to obey them and their wishes on topics they know nothing about, because nobody listens to them usually.
As notable consultant Jerry Weinberg wrote, "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." And unfortunately it's not just "a people problem" but "problem people."
I simply wait on the edge until the cars stop. If they are stopped, it prevents cars further back from going into the crosswalk.
It works better than anything else. After all, if I get hit, I get hurt, even if I'm legally in the right. People who blithely step into a crosswalk and assume cars will see and stop are fools.
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/air-zebra/ And the implementation is in the works - laws being passed to make those required.
EDIT: And your link is nothing like the zebra crossing shown in the video.
I have to add that generally a 10 year old is not going to give you the next big app idea. 10 year olds will have no more creative ideas than you or me. But just like the lottery, it could happen.
When you've operated inside the box long enough, your mental models assume the walls of the box even if they cease to exist simply because so many assumptions about reality are based on prior experience.
Over time people tend to get less creative with regards
to big ideas due to self-limiting based on operating
within the confines of existing systems.
I guess I'm not the only one to think of this. My plan was piezoelectric crystals and some sort of electro-luminescent plastic or possibly solar charged. Also for the road lines since rain makes them hard to see, age dims the paint and snow cover them up pretty bad.
The only problem is I live in a winter environment and plows scrape the hell out of the roads it would have to be embedded in the road.
It should be more useful (but more expensive) to lighten up the actual crosswalk signs on the road as soon as pedestrians are approaching.
Obviously that's only because they see it for the first time in the video. In actual use it will not catch their attention at all...
Does it turn off immediately when there is no one in the crosswalk?
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/panorama/vermischtes/SwarovskiPe...
The question shouldn't be "how can we make crosswalks safer for pedestrians" but "why are there cars and roads where pedestrians walk". Otherwise we end up with things like the "bicycle lane".
Sounds legit. In contrast, I have no idea what your complaint is even about.
I think this is a great. She came up with her own question and then an answer to it.
Because, that's pointless. You should only stop when someone is waiting to cross at a crosswalk. This is a distinction people forget. Standing at a crosswalk does not mean you want to cross. Furthermore, wanting to cross at a cross walk does not mean you have the right of way to do so.
Regardless of where you live and the laws, these are problems.
With underground streets you could even collect the pollution the vehicles emit and store it instead of releasing it into the atomsphere.
But the huge downside which I have no idea how I could make this practical with is the construction costs. Maybe the first city to do this could get an increase in tourism thus offsetting the costs?
When self-driving cars are common, there won't be a need for street-side parking, which will give more walking area in urban centers. And the lidar navigational system will be far safer for pedestrians, so it won't be a safety issue to mingle cars with people.
1. a circular rotating peripheral parking in which you can get a car (or your car) in around 5 to 30 minutes.
2. incredible discounts using public transport.
3. huge taxes to ride the city by car, except for service transports (taxis, ambulances, distribution, ...).
There is a picture of it here, with a summary from the book below:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/justincormack/256217251/
In 1938 the inhabitants started to protest about the rising death toll on Western Avenue, the "Avenue of Speed and Death". They petitioned the Ministry of Transport to impose a speed limit of twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. The ministry said that would be an "ingenious provision" to save lives, but it would be against "the whole object of constructing a road free from congested traffic".
On 21 July 1938 the protestors filed across Western Avenue from the Approach, and then back, causing a huge tailback. The next day the Ministry arranged to build two bridges, one here and one by Gipsy Corner, much to the disgust of the protestors, who thought it would encourage cars to drive faster and to force pedestrians off more roads onto bridges and subways. A week later a thousand people demonstrated again for "their right to cross on the level".
In September the hastily erected bridge was complete, and five hundred people demonstrated against it again. The bridge became a tourist attraction and it was "quite usual to see people from other districts coming to look at it".
In October torchlight processions were held on the road every evening for a week, with a dog with a red light attached to it and four bearers carrying a coffin, and placards saying "We want crossings not coffins".
You're applying sarcasm to the idea of a ten year old?
Sorry, I don't want to sound mean, but
But you do sound mean. Since you don't want to, why don't you edit the meanness out of your comment? It would be easy. Though you might want to do it twice to be sure.
As a bonus, your point would then come across better.
I don't see it as an an insult to the ten year old; it's an insult to all the people pretending it's a unique idea because of that.