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#car mechanic trade school in philadelphia
pttedu · 10 months
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Explore common challenges in auto repairing faced by technicians. From mechanic cars to electrical woes, discover how experts navigate complexities for reliable fixes.
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audvidis · 6 years
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listen. i dislike over the top stans who are overly possessive of players to the point of risking said player’s well being like anyone else. but people are really saying that owl stans are the worst fans in esports bc “they want to protect their favorite players.” like bro. Bro. you all spend all this time bitching on your fuckin twitter page about how sports fans wont take owl/esports seriously, then pretend that owl fans are irrational babies for like feeling attachment to a player? 
my dude... people in philly call nick foles, a player for the eagles, st. foles and worship the ground that man steps on. i went to a local grocery store where they sold 16 dollar coffee with his face and name on it. my history teacher from high school, who is a grown fuckin man, almost started crying when another player tore his acl several games away from the playoffs in 2017. i grew up listening to talk radio where fans would call in and scream at the top of their lungs complaining about trades. 
people get attached to the fuckin players in sports! they do! that’s part of their marketing and it fucking pays dividends!  i dont even like give a fuck about philadelphia baseball but i almost started crying in the car when the radio host informed the viewers that roy halladay had died in a plane crash, bc i had seen him play as a child and knew what he meant to this city. you want esports to be legit. you want the masses to give a fuck about what happens in counterstrike, what happens at the lcs, what happens in owl, but the Instant people like grow fond of the players you're like "woah woah woah woah... you cant CARE about players!!! this is all about mechanics and skill!!! players get traded all the time blah blah blah" you're basically negating your words like a gigantic ouroboros. fuck off 
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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years
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Shared love of trains brings Johnson and Biden together
Shared love of trains brings Johnson and Biden together
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Boris Johnson paid tribute to Joe Biden’s well-attested love of the railways by choosing a sleek silver Amtrak train to travel between New York and Washington for his first White House visit as prime minister.
The mode of travel was not only a hat-tip to Mr Biden’s decades of rail commuting as senator and vice-president between his Delaware home and the capital, but also a physical reminder of the main purpose of Johnson’s US trip – to drum up support for carbon emission reductions and polluting car use.
He was rewarded for his gesture with a rambling anecdote from the president as the two of them sat down together in the Oval Office.
In comments which bore the hallmark of having been rehearsed many, many times over the years, the president told Mr Johnson how an Amtrak conductor had approached him to say that he and his colleagues had calculated that over the years, he’d covered more than 2 million miles on the route.
As panicky reporters shuddered at the thought that their precious few minutes with the two leaders were about to be swallowed up in their entirety by the older man’s reminiscences, the PM stepped in to steer the conversation back onto matters of policy, telling the president how much he shared his “belief in transport infrastructure”.
The three-hour, 225-mile journey from New York to Washington, snaking through the stunning countryside of coastal Maryland with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore, was a rare break from the conference room and debating chamber for the prime minister in a three-day trip which has been totally dominated by climate change.
Unlike on previous trips, the deadly serious purpose of his visit prevented Mr Johnson from indulging in the usual photo-opportunities which have seen him don hard hats, try his hand at various sports or dance with local beauties in the hope of a bit of positive publicity.
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Instead, his attendance at the United Nations General Assembly has involved an endless sequence of 30-minute bilateral meetings with countries ranging from Ukraine to Colombia, along with a roundtable discussion with countries threatened by the impact of rising temperatures and topped off by a keynote speech on Wednesday in which he will plead with fellow leaders to come up with the emission-cutting pledges he needs to make his COP26 summit in Glasgow a success.
There was palpable relief in the UK contingent when Biden doubled his $5.6bn climate finance and the Chinese promised not to build any more polluting coal-fired power stations abroad (though notably not halting the construction of a plant a week at home). Normally poker-faced COP26 president Alok Sharma could barely suppress a smirk as the news of the American offer seeped out.
Johnson himself has been in ebullient mood, visibly relieved to be freed of the bounds of Covid restrictions and allowed back into the hurly-burly of in-person political life on which he thrives.
Though both he and the president wore black face-masks for their 90-minute chat in the Oval Office, Johnson’s first major international trip since the Biarritz summit of 2019 was characterised by a level of mingling and face-to-face interaction which feels unusual after the era of the Zoom conference.
The fact that in his public comments, Biden effectively sounded the death-knell for Johnson’s long-cherished dream of a UK/US free trade deal, as well as admonishing the PM once more for allowing Brexit to put stability in Ireland at risk, did not appear to have soured the prime minister’s trip.
He presented the president with a signed copy of astronaut Tim Peake’s plea for the protection of the planet Hello, Is This Planet Earth, while Mr Biden gave him a framed photo of their earlier meeting in Cornwall in June and a White House-branded watch
As he departed the White House for dinner with Australian counterpart Scott Morrison, the mood in Johnson’s camp was that he was delighted to be back on the world stage and to have been given reason to hope that his next major appearance – as chair of the Cop gathering – will end in success.
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xpvpatel · 4 years
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olympiansrpg1-blog · 7 years
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BASICS
Name: Alexandros Li Age: 24 Affiliation: Old Olympus Occupation: Hitman Faceclaim: Zhang Yixing Status: TAKEN by Nik
THE STORY
They call you Ares, but you’re not sure if you’re ready to fill his shoes, yet. You were only given the name when the Ares before you was killed by the Titans - a brave man, they called him, and you know you pale in comparison to your predecessor. However, a combination of hard work, dedication, and a certain subset of skills has earned you your place in Olympus. You have not found your footing in all of this yet, simply drifting from one person to another in between jobs. All eyes are on you to prove yourself, your worthiness to Old Olympus, and you can tell the majority of them are all holding their breaths while simply waiting for you to fail miserably. You know you are not and will never be a carbon copy of the old Ares, but you were given this title for a reason and you want nothing more than to earn it in everyone else’s eyes too. Their doubts and whispers only fuel you, pushing yourself harder and harder into your role. It may wear you down, but you want nothing more than to simply fit as everyone else seamlessly does.
CONNECTIONS
APHRODITE - You can hardly blame Aphrodite for not wanting to be around you. Subtlety is a lost art, and they make their distaste known whenever you’re around. You understand that they see you only as an unworthy replacement to someone they once loved, but you cannot control what was bestowed upon you. You can only do what you have always known to do: plant yourself like a tree with your head held high, your gaze unwavering as you hope they can look at you with something other than distrust one day.
EROS -  In a world full of people who want to see you fail, Eros has been the one person that you have come to rely on and trust. You have never seen the doubt in their eyes as you have with nearly everyone you run across, knowing their belief in you has made you even more determined to earn your place. You suppose love and war is an odd combination, but from that stems the passion that you need some days to push forward.
HYPERION - It’s no secret that Hyperion was the one who had killed the old Ares - it’s something that all of Olympus already knows but hasn’t been able to do anything about it. You know that there is no better way to prove your worth than to kill them yourself, but you are not a fool. They are far more skilled than you know or have observed and you have to bide your time, nurse the wounds of Old Olympus, and wait for the perfect time to strike to wipe that self-satisfied smirk off their face.
SUGGESTED FACECLAIMS
Ludi Lin, John Boyega, Choi Seung-hyun, Lindsey Morgan, Kylie Bunbury, Christian Serratos
BIOGRAPHY
YOU REMEMBER YOUR MOTHER. Aline was an immigrant from China, brought here at a young age in the hopes of a better life and one of the lucky few who found it. Her days were spent studying medicine, her evenings spent playing the violin, until she met a man, your father. His life was much the same as hers, with university classes during the day and a hobby by night, though their interests differed.
In her future was the chance to save lives; in his, to end them.
They marry two years after meeting, the wedding a small affair. You come around seven months later, held in loving arms shortly after your arrival. Your parents raise you as best they can, enrolling you in summer camps, gym classes, and even the Shaolin kung fu courses you’re desperate to take with your friends. You’re not the best at sports, but you’re far from the worst, and they give you the encouragement you need to pursue everything you take an interest in.
Your entry to the world parallels Aline’s exit. She lays in bed, back to the window with you before her, held tight against her chest. Blood splatters across all before her including you, the only sound you hear being the tinkling of glass falling behind you. Her grip loosens but you don’t move – you’re only ten, too young to lose your mother to anything, much less such violence.
Your father takes care of you as best he can, but he’s only one man, and a busy one at that. He has work during the day, work at night; he’s gone at odd hours, and though he claims to be a mechanic, you’ve never heard of one repairing cars at three in the morning. It’s then that you start doing poorly in school, a desperate yet silent cry for attention, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Your Ds and Fs are taken in stride, although he does suggest you study more.
Things continue as such for four years until you garner the courage to follow him one night and overhear him on the phone down the street. Though you don’t fully understand, something becomes clear – your mother’s death is his fault, related in some way to an unfinished job. It’s then you decide you’ll finish it for him, no matter how long it takes.
You throw yourself back into your studies and hobbies – archery, gymnastics, martial arts – with a passion like never before, and soon everyone believes you’ll follow in your mother’s footsteps to become a doctor. You pick up her violin, feigning ignorance to the pain it causes your father; this you do from spite. Jack of all trades, master of none, is who you become, dabbling in this and that until the end of high school.
University of Maryland, College Park campus, is where you go in the fall directly after you graduate. Their criminology degree is what you have your eye on, and you get it within three years before making your way into the world. Your mother’s murderer is the first man you kill, for you can’t go on with this desire for vengeance eating at your soul, whispering in your ear during every waking moment.
It’s over and done with before you even know it; a pull of the trigger, compensation for recoil, and a person’s life has been taken. You’re not even sure of it at first – shouldn’t you feel different? A stranger lies on the floor, blood pooling around him, and yet your soul feels intact.
Days pass before the dreams begin, nightmares that leave you screaming your mother’s name to an empty room. Her killer may be dead but he follows you, haunting you in your days and nights until you’re little more than a ghost yourself. Aline’s violin is what saves you, the bloodstains marking the fair wood reminding you of why you did it to begin with. Vengeance may not have given you nor her spirit satisfaction, but the balance of the world is kept; one killer has gone and another, you, has taken his place.
You start travelling northward then, heading to Baltimore and then Philadelphia, where you settle for what you think of as the foreseeable future. A hitman is what you become, much like your father – though you’ve striven to be like your mother, you’re an even mix of them both. Lives are taken for pure profit, nothing more, and though you feel for their passing, you remind yourself that this is simply a means of survival. You don’t live lavishly, after all; your services are mostly for hire when you’re in need of extra money, and your day job as a paralegal covers the rest.
It’s a sudden round of lay-offs that forces you to make a change. Your choices are all horizontal, and since the chance for upward motion is available in only one possibility, you see no reason to stay where you are. You travel to New York and take your place amongst the Olympians, biding your time until a position opens by the death of Ares. You will never be him, but you take his place, and for the first time in your life, you find pressure on you from all sides. They believe you will fail, but you will prove them wrong.
Your days are spent with your mother’s violin in the subways; your nights with a variety of weapons. Knives, guns, your fists; they are all the same to you, a means to an end. The walls of your apartment turn bloody as you bruise your knuckles against them time after time, your frustration taking form in a version of violence turned selfward. Fingertips are cut by blades and strings alike – you work yourself to the bone until you have nothing left to give, and then continue, forcing strength you didn’t know you had.
You may not be the Ares Olympus once knew, but you will do the name justice nevertheless.
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delhi-architect2 · 4 years
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Journal - One Drawing Challenge 2020: The 100 Finalists (Part 3)
Explore a further 25 extraordinary architectural drawings, each one a Finalist in the 2020 One Drawing Challenge. Let us know which are your favorites on Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #OneDrawingChallenge!
← Previous 25 Drawings     Next 25 Drawings →
“House by the sea” by Kees Fritschy, Atelier Fritschy
“As a recent graduate during this unusual times, I start my architectural career different than expected.
The worldwide lockdown made people more bound to their houses than ever before. In a post pandemic situation people might ask for a home that includes different qualities. My painting investigates an atmosphere in which the inhabitants can experience a peaceful surrounding. A healthy environment where inside and outside space merge. Natural elements such as the sky, water and the views are decomposed to form a balanced composition with the architecture and inhabitant. The surroundings play an active role in the experience of the space.
I got inspired by architects such as Luis Barragan and Mies van der Rohe. The use of color is limited to a few tones as a statement of reduction. Nevertheless the colors are more or less necessary to increase the sensation of the place.”
“Stacking Collectives” by Mark Heinrichs, University of Toronto
“The dearth of affordable in many contemporary city’s is an issue many urbanites are uncomfortably familiar with. The problem is ubiquitous, and solutions are similarly scarce. Possibly through implementing a novel development strategy, programmatic amalgamation and unorthodox site selection, a potential solution may emerge: a stacking of collectives. This drawing visually summarizes a theoretical typology that would combine communal living, collaborative design, and collective financing and allow for a number of distinct groups of individuals to occupy a single, co-owned mid-rise tower.
These groups (those present in this drawing ranging from frat-boys to a covenant of nuns) would be present from the beginning of the design process and would contribute both financially and aesthetically to their portion of the building. This would allow for flexible layouts depending on desired function and a greater sense of ownership over the resulting building. An urban mid-rise becomes a stacking of collectives.”
“Turnme” by Jono Yoo, The University of Auckland
“As Banham walks into the battlefield of car exchange, the Turnme market, he hears vigorous interactions between the motorists of Auckland sharing values over the automobiles.
A rusty 1970s Ford calls out his name, peaking at him amongst the chaos of battling, bidding, and negotiation between sellers and buyers. Drawn by the life story of the Ford, Banham purchases the dear loved car so that he can mend him back to health to put to good use.
First of all, the title, Turnme is a compound word of Turners and Trademe, the two most predominant second-hand car markets of New Zealand. The reason for this wordplay is to highlight the unexpected autonomy and free expression advocated in the interactions held during the trading of used cars which includes, the display of cars, negotiation, bidding and most importantly the exchange of sign-value…”
“Incarceration Alchemy” by Kathryn Cybulski, University of Waterloo
“The time an inmate spends at the facility is under their control, no matter the crime committed, but under one condition: they must reach the top of the structure.
In order to do so, there are 50 levels the inmate must unlock, each level containing an important skill that must be learned and mastered, a fun activity, or something needed for survival. At the bottom of the structure is a massive library that contains the knowledge needed to follow a path to the top.
The exploration of new ideas, a new mindset, a new perspective and the possibility of a new life is rooted in the imagination. This system keeps the mind and imagination of inmates engaged, as they are always working towards a goal. Inmates have to earn their release and in the process of doing so, are able to gain valuable life skills and rehabilitate themselves.”
“Mechanized habitable vertical farm for a COVID generation” by Ian Lai, University of Pennsylvania
“Everyone is working from home during the COVID pandemic. How is office space rethought to integrate with the housing typology and its integrated systems? Is sustainability inherently tied to conservative building schemes and forms?
This project addresses the growing need for buildings in Philadelphia to be repurposed and reused in spite of increasing unemployment and the crisis of housing shortage during the coronavirus. Despite the rising numbers of unemployment and people’s needs to spend money simply on rent, food and water.
The use of vertical space, access to views an sunlight should not only be reserved for the upper class but any low-income population as well. By taking and extruding a volume of 600sqft from the site FAR and twisting it to account for wind forces as well as sunlight in angles round the building and pixelating the facade to increase surface area for rainwater catchment, the resulting form is achieved.”
“Making of a Place” by Abin Chaudhuri, Abin Design Studio
Conceived to introduce a peri-urban context to the viewer, this illustration aims to convey a sense of scale, lifestyle and spatial demographic of Bengal’s countryside within which numerous projects of Abin Design Studio are situated.
Dominated by a Temple complex and dotted with small lakes and open fields, the graphic highlights the insertion of the studio’s works in the region that introduced an entire community to the impact of design and the ability of architecture to expand beyond its footprint.
The illustration was meticulously created using various software such as Sketchup, AutoCAD, Illustrator and Photoshop.”
“A CITY OF NOWHERE” by Haoyu Wang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“This drawing represents a notion of displacement in contemporary society by illustrating a fictional city that infinitely grows without a ground of belongingness.
While the world increasingly connects by technology, our lives and social existence are detaching from fixed places or communities. The pandemic of COVID-19 switches our work-live routines to virtual substitutes. On the other hand, social media raises the voices of migrants, refugees, and urban nomads on their identity crisis in constant resettling.
Can we translate displacements into architectural imagination? In A CITY OF NOWHERE, an infrastructural framework stretches three-dimensionally with interconnected mobility systems representing the force of technology. In contrast, the properties built upon the framework are independent of their neighbors in typology, culture, and social identity. This city nourishes a society where people enjoy optimized freedom of traveling and exploring while losing the materialized sense of home or community.”
“Smash Palace” by Jono Yoo, A12
“The next place that Banham visits is one that most cars of Autopia have been through, the Mechanical Theatre of Smash Palace; a place where his Ford finally transforms to become Banham’s unique counterpart. Banham trudges along the entrance, passing the oath stone of Mechanical Theatre stated by Karl Benz, that all Mechanics are devoutly tied by to clear their mind.
Inside, another scene unfolds. Mechanics at the surgical rooms diagnosing each car carefully, understanding that the car is an extension of the owner’s body, where above there is a showcase laid out for people to display and boast their modified car’s new look and performance.”
“Architecture without architects, a slum made out of stories” by Yennifer Johana Machado Londoño, Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín
“It’s an everyday place in a nondescript slum in the outskirts of Medellín, but the longer you watch, the more you let yourself get unraveled in the stories that make the societal networks that, as if a tapestry, have been woven thread by thread by every humble Colombian family in the pursuit of a better life. It’s architecture without architects that, against violence and scarcity, stays on its feet as it hosts a community that makes its spaces their own and, little by little, rewrites its history. Its magic resides in the spontaneity, the ingenuity, the cooperation and the tight-knit urban relations that have been maintained and upheld even in the quarantine of 2020.”
“Unobtainable Cities” by Joanne Ho and Emily May
“Let’s face it: modes of production are being more efficient by the minute and we can’t stop it. We’ve developed 6-axis robotic arms that can 3-D print walls of a home. We’re surrounded by embedded smart sensors and intelligent systems that use our behavioral data to tell us what to conserve and when. Frankly, who isn’t speculating about the future of the infrastructure built by AI architects?
Through the use of Generative Adversarial Models (GAN), we have collected and trained over 500 images of architectural renderings and drawings. This drawing is a collage of images produced by the machine itself, and our personal stitching of an AI-built future entwined with nature.
“Unobtainable Cities” captures the atmosphere of the overwhelming enormity of a future where our lives are increasingly being designed for us, engulfing us in the thought of creating a superior intelligent entity, which ultimately writes our own fate.”
“Pilgrimage of Everyday Life” by Tzu-Jung Huang, The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL)
“Pilgrimage of Everyday Life is capable of generating over 1300 litres of water per day, tremendously ameliorating the inefficiency of water collection, as well as creating ever-changing landscape formed by the glistening, translucent waxed linen. Also, the spiral structure amplifies the abundance of religious and natural power in this area, providing a place beneath it for people to worship the blue sky and celebrate the harvest of water. The plaza space can be highly flexible, used for meeting, food preparation, mediation and festive activities and so forth.
The stone floor radiates out from the well with a series of bamboo columns, reinforcing the notion of community, enhancing the transition from sacredness to openness and re-integrating the stunning surroundings. Thus, going to the community centre becomes a delightful and spiritual journey which one can experience personal and social transformation and celebrate the importance of local traditions, communal gatherings and Mother Earth.”
“Perpetual Home” by Kate Korotayeva, Ryerson University
“In order to survive as a species, today, we have to stay at home. In the last few months, the limits of home became a battleground for our work selves, social selves, sexual selves, creative selves, and other ways we choose to manifest our humanity. This perspective of an imaginary and perpetually changing home emerges as a monstrous amalgamation of our hugely expanded bodies, technology, and built form.
The tumor-like forms encroach into the territory of the former clearly defined domesticities and transform the image of what was once a home into the image of a new programmatic anomaly – a place that does everything. After years of socially distanced existence, this home has illegitimately transformed itself into a monster, constantly changing to meet professional, sexual, aesthetic, creative, and other needs of its confined owner.”
“The Illusion of Boundary” by Maira Waqar, Khan Office of Design
“What is reality? What if we can manipulate all the existential data and create a new world or maybe a new dimension? One that focuses on generating experiences by using various architectural elements as a means of informing space.
They exist in numerous forms in buildings where their use may be superficial or functional. However, they have astronomical potential to dominate space and make their presence felt. The architecture, like a well written chronicle stands in all its glory. The romance among the abstract structures, the chemistry can only be discovered by experience.
Welcome to a mixed reality space where it navigates between the physical and virtual realms. While the physical exists as a ground condition, the virtual constructs enclosures and thresholds that are at both permanent and ephemeral.
They collide and transcend the boundaries of the real world, elevating it into a new reality. New possibilities with no horizons.”
The Melting Archive by Thomas Riddell-Webster, University of Westminster
“Based on sensitive speculation, this drawing proposes a temporary architecture to soften Hanoi city, amid a rapidly developing urban context. Hanoi’s 1000 year old tradition of kite flying provides a vehicle for the creation of temporary spaces that will facilitate Hanoi’s street culture, a culture that relies on permeability to provoke spontaneous interaction.
This drawing questions the path of Hanoi’s development towards a western city and proposes an alternative technology, in reference to Hanoi’s past, that provides the tools for the organic social reconstruction of the present and the future.
Pectin, Cellulose and Chitosan, extracted from kite production, combine to form bio-polymer building components that contribute to temporary spaces, designed to melt back into earth’s ecosystem after several years. Unlike architecture as we know it, each decay provides the opportunity for redesign thereby allowing a sustainable and affordable infrastructure to evolve across the city, in harmony with contemporary social requirements.”
“The Duckpit” by Jakob Jakubowski, Academy of fine Arts Vienna
“The Duckpit project is a critical interface for a collaborative reaction on a borderline of virtual and “real”, an architectural speculative device for re[dis]covering economical and social glitches in political propaganda. An old ruin in the alternative Sava-Mala district was scanned and so digitally preserved before it’s demolition for the Belgrade Waterfront development, a giant ambiguous housing and commerce implant to the heart of the city.
Through a fictional transformation of this ruin into a digital-underground art gallery, people are asked to use their voice (click) for a new kind of protest against the capitalist savage sign, Belgrade Waterfront. With the help of an elucidated website this project becomes a digital art installation itself, the subject of a parasite-sabotage from within a structure is introduced and growing with every voice to a governing manipulating virus, which transforms the construction site and so gives the city back to its habitants.”
“A Tribute to My Grandmother : Her Real Battles with Dementia” by Ker Xin Lee, Loughborough University
“This drawing is my architectural interpretation of my grandmother’s daily struggles with dementia. As a young girl growing up with her, I witnessed how her dementia progressed as she aged. The drawing illustrates her journey with dementia and encapsulates a glimpse of her confusing memories.
It depicts her vivid childhood memories of China as a young girl before she fled, her struggles to find her way home when she got lost in our neighborhood, her hallucinations and delusions, and finally, her last few weeks in the hospital due to failure in parts of her brain, inhibiting her feelings of hunger or thirst.
Dementia causes the brain to deteriorate and can be disorientating to the patient. I wish to raise awareness about Dementia and hope to someday be able to design purpose built architecture, which helps slow the deterioration process and improve the quality of life for those with dementia.”
“The Unity Center” by Joana Benin, Ryerson University
“In a future communist society, humans must be taught how to interact with one another in a world that fosters equality and stability. To avoid conflict and live peacefully, the Unity Center is youth’s first exposure to volatile emotion and social interaction. The center aims to provide spaces where youth can experience different types of emotion within a safe environment to build an emotional tolerance to conflict and distress.
The movement through the building is a ride that conforms to the idea that the physical nature of the Unity Center no longer needs to be restricted by traditional design standards, allowing for molding of the architecture purely for user experience. The structure is a membrane that shapes according to the youth’s emotional capacity, becoming ’a womb;’ from which a new understanding of emotion emerges. The four main spaces exhibit the most commonly encountered emotions: frustration, fear, melancholy and joy.”
“VIRTUAL | REALITY” by Giangtien Nguyen, Afreen Ali, Aziz Alshayeb and Erik H Kusakariba, INVI LLC
“When our streets became empty and we are isolated in our own homes, humans will feel the need to connect through our digital infrastructure. As our reality becomes more physically unconnected, while our virtual city strengthens in connectivity, it creates a juxtaposition visually between our crowded virtual city and our empty reality.”
“Hemp Tech Garden” by Umar Mahmood, University of Pennsylvania
“The drawing is a top view of a new market designed in Callowhill district of Philadelphia. The market provides facilities of Hemp products. It is designed by building, carving and rebuilding reliefs from defamiliarized neighborhood artifacts. The market is serving the city with sustainable, environmentally friendly and ethical products. It carves its identity in the city as the density of ubiquitous elements while having unique courtyards of rare figures.
The market has five quadrants, each has a mat density of crisscross Cartesian elements which break their own limits and intersect with elements in adjacent quadrant. The main difference between each quadrant are the unique figural artifacts. Functionally, the market operates on four sections. The retail space, industrial section, harvesting area and public gardens. Each program operates on different level. The market has an industrial and synthetic programmatic interaction with the city. Moreover, it inhabits nature by providing urban farming platform.”
“Phantasmagoria: A Cautionary Tale” by Rawan AlWazna, School of The Art Institute of Chicago
“As the world pauses at this moment in time amid a pandemic that, more than ever, has been exposing various aspects of deception, image-making and defactualization in existing structures and systems of powers, we confront ideas about our built environment; a manifestation of the habitat or the inhabitant? The structure or the institution?
Phantasmagoria is a meditation on such struggle, fear and censorship in storytelling, an invitation to extend our perception beyond the physical appearance, and ultimately, a statement about the right to narrate our own stories.
Structures transform into active protagonists in this rig-like city which disguises gruesome truths through its festive facade. The “All-seeing-eye Tower” stands tall, higher than everything else, making sure other characters like the “Injustice Police”, a character of arbitrary detention, and the “Instant Oases”, a character of constant displacement, do their job well. These carnivalesque machines are the characters that make up this city.”
“after work” by Yoonsoo Kim and Christoph Schmollinger, TU München
“Many people predict that in the future automated systems will replace our work. There will be countless unemployed people, who will receive universal basic income(UBI). Then, where should we go and what can we do?
Hannah Arendt classified human behavior into three different categories. “labour” is obligatory behavior for survive, “work” is useful behavior for production. Through “Action”, we can express our identity. And “action” cannot be replaced by automated systems.
The underground space in this drawing is a space for “action”. The more you go down, the more powerful, social and communal action takes place. Hannah Arendt subdivided the action into three further. Accordingly, we structured the underground dome-shaped space. In the space of “Willing” at the top, individual actions are drawn, in the space of “Judgement” at the bottom, collective actions are drawn, and in the space of “Thinking” at the middle, the process between them is drawn.”
“Archicov19” by Angela Ruiz Plaza, Polytechnic University
“The new Archicov-19 system is invading the world. It can solidify sand, or float amid clouds, parasite old cities or dive into the sea. It is a living organism made out of fungi, bacteria and nature, in symbiosis and behaving like an ecosystem. Earth can finally breathe, and we live happy and healthy in its bubbles.
When it grows in the desert it uses Bacillus Pasteurii bacteria to solidify sand so it is an artificial oasis in the dunes. When in the sea it makes shell structures with microalgae diatoms, and using the oxygen it produces. When it floats, it uses Helio in the bubbles of the architectural skin. When it parasites an old city, it uses garbage to grow, recycling materials. Life has changed so much since 2020, and now we live in peace, in this bioarchitecture, living according to our soul, in ecological balance with the whole nature.”
“Pinnacle at White Hill” by Philip O’Brien, Johnson Roberts Associates Inc
“‘Pinnacle at White Hill’ illustrates a self-contained, covered city at time when the Earth’s atmosphere has been degraded to the point that life in the natural environment is no longer sustainable. The caramel sky and red-brown earth visible beyond the protective film of the city cover tells the story of an environmental disaster out of control.
The central portion of the city is free from vertical supports with the exception of the Pinnacle. The Pinnacle is at once the center support for the dome’s superstructure, the focal point of the city, and the seat of city governance and management. Planning and zoning is evident in the layout of the public ways, parks, artificial waterways, and building limits. Green space dominates the city and is used as the organizing principal in the layout of White Hill, where recycling and reuse — including air, food and water — is required to survive.”
“Redwood” by Gregory Klosowski, Pappageorge Haymes Partners
Dubbed “Redwood”, this series of sketches are pure architectural escapism, testing exceedingly optimistic visions of possible futures, assuming the resolution of base societal issues through exotic approaches (limitless fusion energy, asteroid harvesting for raw materials, robotic assembly techniques). Intentionally fantastical, the intent is to spark imaginative thinking outside of practical constraints of current structural technologies.
In this iteration, towering structures drop into place, akin to redwoods falling in a forest, allowing new structures to shoot upward from the carcass, pulling cabling and piping upward, forming swaths of elevated fields, suspended transit systems stringing between the towering forms, and an endless array of habitats, blurring construction and organics.
While arguably irresponsible to brush aside big problems, its worth exploring, given decades of apocalyptic visions are have not proven persuasive. Taking an alternate approach, encouraging and positive visions might better spark the imagination and inspire consideration for wider timescales and broader solutions.
“Apartment #5, a Labyrinth and Repository of Spatial Memories” by Clement Laurencio
“In this frightening period of the pandemic, travel has become unsafe and restricted. The future bears uncertainty, if and when we may travel to experience new places, and re-visit places of our past. Places which once drew people are now “indefinitely” and “temporarily closed”, with no certain opening date. We are isolated in our homes…left with our memories of those faraway places. Locked in our dwellings, we long to be able to escape to a past before the lockdown, to places far away from here.
Residing in London, the dwelling curates spatial experiences from a recent voyage to India. Set both in real space and imaginary space, the project seeks to re-create those atmospheres and spatial conditions of the places remembered through memories.
The memories are rekindled, by manipulating scale, forced perspective and atmospheric phenomena of the places. However, they may become embellished, corrupted, re-imagined; a labyrinth of memories…”
← Previous 25 Drawings     Next 25 Drawings →
The post One Drawing Challenge 2020: The 100 Finalists (Part 3) appeared first on Journal.
from Journal https://architizer.com/blog/competitions/one-drawing-challenge-2020-finalists-part-3/ Originally published on ARCHITIZER RSS Feed: https://architizer.com/blog
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danbily · 6 years
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A Night in Scranton
We all take jobs that lead us far off our intended career path.  Mine started in the summer of 1973 as a newly minted Greyhound bus driver, trying to make extra money while teaching school in Buffalo, New York.  I answered their help wanted ad in the Buffalo Evening News out of curiosity and as more of a joke than anything else. What does an elementary school teacher have to offer a bus company known for a dog as its trademark?  They explained at the interview that teachers made the perfect fill-ins during their heavy travel times. We appeared clean cut and were polite with the traveling public. I bought their pitch and signed up for a new driver school that started in March.  I was all of 24 and eager to make extra money to supplement my abysmal teacher’s pay. My wife and two infant daughters were my main concern in this venture into transportation.
In 1973 the highway buses all shifted with manual transmissions.  This seemed like a piece of cake for me since I drove a VW Beetle with a four speed.  I was soon in for a surprise. The industrial transmissions used in buses required a technique known as a double clutching between gears.  The entire month of March was devoted to our mastery of the elusive art of timing our gear shift movement to the speed of the engine and that of the bus. Each shift required two presses of the clutch, not one as in a car.  It was a mechanical ballet that needed perfect timing in order to avoid the ugly and annoying sound of grinding gears and a lugging diesel engine. The clutch was also industrial and needed a lot more effort than my little VW.  I went directly from Greyhound class to soaking my left knee in a hot bath at home.
By April, they’d culled out several of the teachers for their inability to master the art of the double clutch transmission.  I felt fortunate to still be in the running. We were now onto the many other issues involved in driving a forty foot long highway bus. Tight roadways and heavy traffic are not your friend.  Weather is always in the back of your mind. A bus will hydroplane in a heavy downpour. The wind can force you into another lane of traffic. Snow and ice are the food of legendary driver room stories.  Slowly, I was becoming a bus driver, sans the rough edges of a Ralph Kramden. I was to be the Greyhound model of the trade.
This all led up to my night in Scranton.  The regular driver on the run from Buffalo to Scranton was Ron Perry.  He was in his early thirties and sported a modified Elvis haircut very much out of date by the seventies.  He’d been assigned to train me on this difficult run and he instructed me to sit in the first passenger seat on the right, take out my route schedule, and keep notes.  
As we broke the state line into Pennsylvania, the road narrowed and the shoulder rose up on one side.  “Deer will leap off those banks at night,“ Ron remarked, “My buddy had one come through the windshield and kill the lady sitting where you are.”  Perhaps the extra money no longer sounded so enticing. This was a real driver speaking without the Greyhound PR department providing the script. I knew from teaching that nothing equals the wisdom in the trenches. What was I in for?
We rolled into Scranton around five and turned the bus over to a Philadelphia driver for the remainder of the run.  Ron walked me through his log book entries and took a brief peek at my notes. “Hopefully you won’t see much of this run,” he said, which didn’t sound very encouraging.  “Wait till you see the Jeremy Hotel, only the best for Greyhound!” As we walked from the bus depot into downtown Scranton, I suddenly became aware of the old coal town’s state of decay.  Soot ran in streaks off window sills. The brownstone and brick buildings were blackened like fire ruins. The sidewalks were devoid of activity and many of the local shops were already closed.  “This is the only diner open. I like their fried baloney plate for three bucks.” Mr. Perry was not a man of complicated culinary needs. We went inside and sat at the counter as the heavy scent of the fryer filled my nostrils.  “Two coffees and a menu for the new guy.” The waitress pointed to the board above the short order window. “It’s all there, hun, and if you don’t see it, just ask.”
Lo and behold, there it was. Charbroiled liver and onions with the side note “new.”  Charbroiled was new in the seventies and I couldn’t imagine what it could do to rescue liver and onions from the bottom of my list of edible disasters. Knowing that Ron would soon have that baloney plate special in front of him, I didn’t want to be outdone in the search for politically incorrect food.  Liver is high in cholesterol and acts as a filter for an animals toxins. If the road didn’t kill me, the food sure would. “I think I’ll try your liver and onions tonight,“ I said. The waitress jotted down our orders on her pad and hung a copy on a little stainless steel wheel for the cook to view. Ron smirked and remarked that he was glad we had separate rooms.  
I actually enjoyed the charbroiled liver and onions and finished my entire plate before Ron got through with his fried baloney.  We both ate for less than our Greyhound dinner allowance of five dollars and off we went to the Jeremy Hotel across the street from the diner.  The Jeremy had once been the grand residence of downtown Scranton in the days of coal. Hard times and hard traffic had left a worn track in the once plush carpet from the entrance to the clerk’s desk at the rear of the lobby.  “Hey Ron, another new driver tonight?” the clerk asked. He obviously knew his regulars and my uniform left little to ask about my profession. “Did Ron tell you about our TV policy?” I’d never heard of a TV policy and shook my head.  “They’re portables you carry up to your room. The black and whites are two dollars a night and the color ones are three dollars. Greyhound has your room charge but you need to cover your TV out of pocket.” Ron handed the clerk his two bucks and grabbed a small black and white portable from a closet behind the clerk’s desk.  “I’m beat, forget the TV. I’m hitting the hay,” I said. Then the clerk said the oddest thing. “Radio is free. It hangs on the wall above your bed and has five local stations. Oh, did Ron tell you about your bathroom?” This was getting really strange. “You share it with your neighbor. You lock him out when you enter and unlock him when you exit.  Please don’t forget this, especially in the middle of the night.” A shared bathroom? A radio with five stations that hung on a wall? What year was this? Was I still in America?
Ron hit the stairs with more wonderful words of advice.  “Use the stairs, you’ll wait forever for that old elevator, sometimes it sticks between floors.  We need to meet down here in the lobby at five AM. Don’t be late.” My training experience had just hit a new low.  What if they stuck me in this shithole all summer? I didn’t think this old fire trap even had AC. I was writing my resignation letter in my mind as I climbed the worn wooden staircase that led to my second floor room.  I was holding a large skeleton key. I’d only seen this type of key in old movies and at my grandmother’s house years ago. The hallway leading to my room smelled of years of stale cigarette smoke and spilled booze. Did anyone pay good money to stay here?  Greyhound corporate needed to hold its Christmas party here.
I entered my room like a thief, cautious yet curious at the same time.  It was clean but dark in all aspects. The walls had been painted a dark green and the furniture was made of dark wood, an old design from before the war.  The head of the bed was pushed against the far wall and there was a strange art deco metal box the size of a toaster one foot above the headboard. What in the dickens was this contraption?  I moved closer and could plainly make out a small speaker in the center and two knobs on each side near the bottom. One knob had a pointer attached and was labeled with the letters A-E. The other was circular with “volume” written in small print above the knob.  So this must be the free radio? My God, I was born in 1948 and I’d never come across such a strange device. I carefully turned the volume knob and sure enough there rose that distinctive low fidelity sound of an AM station. I flipped the selector knob through the remaining alphabet.  Each letter brought another station with two of them smothered in static. I knew from an earlier job in broadcasting that these were most likely not local stations. What an odd device, and it still worked. I’d bet most guests had dismissed this little box as a joke left over from the glory days of booming downtown Scranton in the 40s and a hotel so broke it couldn’t afford to remove useless junk from the walls.  
At that moment, I could hardly wait to see the shared bathroom I’d been warned about.  I knocked lightly on the dark wooden door and twisted the old glass knob, and, there it was, a bathroom right out of the Great Gatsby era.  Small white hexagonal ceramic tiles on the floor and shiny square white tiles on the side walls. Halfway up they ended in a black ceramic border that ran the perimeter of the room.  On one side was a massive claw hammer tub and exposed brass fixtures with white ceramic handles labeled hot and cold. A chain with a rubber stopper hung from the overflow drain. A strange oval shower curtain hung from the ceiling.  Opposite the tub was a pedestal sink flawed with eggshell like age cracks and again sporting two large brass faucets with white ceramic handles. A small hotel soap labeled “The Jeremy” was neatly placed on one side. The purchasing agent must be in a time warp or have a strange sense of humor.  Would anyone want to be found with that bar of soap in their travel bag? The toilet sat next to the sink and was a good six inches higher than my new one at home. It sported a black wooden toilet seat of the horse collar style. The brass attachments had long ago turned green from missed aims. I locked the guest door at the far end and drew a bath.  I didn’t trust the shower and I felt like a good soak was a better choice.
I’d done plenty of shifting and my left knee ached.  I sat down in the oversized tub and laid my head back on a rolled towel.  I felt like I was 24 going on 60. My doubts surrounded me like the bath water.  How did one make a career out of this type of work? Why spend three nights a week away from your family in a run down shithole in the middle of nowhere?  Whatever good thoughts I had of a Greyhound career died that night in Scranton. I heard a knock on the guest door and shouted that I needed five minutes to clear out.  
Back in my room, I stared at my bed and the small grey box above the headboard.  Let’s see what this living antique has to offer, I thought.  I switched through two stations and heard a familiar voice from my youth.  It was Rod Serling introducing a radio play on the Zero Hour. I’d loved him when I was younger and decided that this was what I’d settle on.  The play was about the Bermuda Triangle and the possible reason for its mysterious goings on. I laid there and listened, and I found myself enjoying it.  I could visualize every detail in vivid color. Radio was perfect for storytelling, and I felt fortunate that I’d foregone the television and saved three dollars in addition.  The play ended with the explanation that the Triangle was a space port for aliens. Rod signed off in his distinctive deep voice and I went to sleep early.
Years passed and I left both Greyhound and teaching behind for a far more lucrative career in sales.  I traveled to many parts of the world, always eating at fine restaurants and staying at five star hotels with all the amenities.  Of those experiences, I can’t recount one as fondly as I can that night in Scranton in 1973.
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Online Shopping: The Complete Wired Guide
New Post has been published on http://webhostingtop3.com/online-shopping-the-complete-wired-guide/
Online Shopping: The Complete Wired Guide
Type “cheesecloth” into Google shopping. Hundreds of online shopping options pop up, in more than a dozen shades, at a range of price points. Many of the packages can be shipped to you in two days or less. In other words, shoppers live in a golden age of convenience. We’ve got more access to more stuff than ever before, at cheaper prices and ever-more-instant speeds. And the businesses who hawk us that stuff? They’ve got unprecedented levels of data on us, and they’re using it to target us in ever-more personalized ways.
As Americans, shopping’s in our bones. Patriotic fervor practically elevated consumerism to a religion after World War II, and today, we blur Jesus and Santa, ditch Thanksgiving for Black Friday, and mint new holidays (Cyber Monday) that give way to copycat holidays (Prime Day), all dedicated to buying stuff. Consumer spending on the “goods” portion of goods and services powers roughly one quarter of the economy, so it follows that retail is uber-susceptible to the technological, political, and economic forces that shape our society. Long ago, traveling peddlers were displaced by local merchants, who were supplanted by downtown department stores, which were upended by shopping malls, then big box chains, and now, the internet. And technology has armed today’s retailers with powerful tracking tools: We accept user agreements and pop-ups, trading gobs of valuable personal data in exchange for convenience—a commodity almost as prized as shopping itself.
The History of Online Shopping
The age of internet commerce really kicked off with Sting. Back in 1994, a band of coders led by a 21-year-old Swarthmore grad named Dan Kohn lived together in a two-story Nashua, New Hampshire, house. Fueled by ambition and a roaring Coca-Cola habit, they launched an online marketplace called NetMarket. The site let users make secure purchases by downloading encryption software named PGP, for “Pretty Good Privacy.” At noon on August 11, a Philadelphia man named Phil Brandenberger logged on. Typing in his address and credit card number, he bought a CD of Sting’s “Ten Summoners’ Tales” for $ 12.48 plus shipping. Champagne corks flew. The New York Times called it the first secure purchase of its kind. “Attention Shoppers,” a headline announced. “The Internet Is Open.”
Years later, Randy Adams, CEO of another online store called the Internet Shopping Network, claimed to have beaten out Kohn’s group by a month. In either case, the ecommerce floodgates didn’t quite fly open. The Unix-based programs required some tech know-how, and computers were a lot slower back then.
While we wait for modem speeds to rev up from bits to megabits, then, let’s review some retail history. Back in the ’80s, shopping largely centered around malls. Post–World War II migration to the ‘burbs had gutted downtown shopping centers and the sprawling department stores that served as their nuclei. Tax breaks and car culture spurred mass development of new big box stores and suburban shopping malls, and these parking-flush spaces recreated sanitized versions of urban retail corridors, writes Vicki Howard in From Main Street to Mall. Giant discount shops devoured local mom and pops. By 1990, Walmart had become the nation’s largest retailer.
Consumers were spoiled for choice, and they could get it on the cheap. But big box shops were laid out to maximize in-store time, turning shopping into a time-gobbling, endurance event. In the 2003 comedy Old School, Will Ferrell’s character Frank the Tank played this suburban ritual for laughs: “Pretty nice little Saturday, actually, We’re going to go to Home Depot…Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll have enough time!”
Online shopping, by contrast, offered the promise of near-limitless choice at relatively snappy speeds. One of the earliest pre-Internet shopping ventures to test the online waters, CompuServe’s “Electronic Mall,” opened in 1984, offering stuff from more than 100 merchants, from JC Penney to Pepperidge Farms. Next to today’s sleek web pages, CompuServe’s command line interface looks positively primitive. But it worked, and it saved a trip to the mall. (As one early adopter told his local newscaster: “I just don’t like crowds.”) When it opened, only eight percent of US households had a computer, and at dial-up rates starting at around $ 5 an hour, the mall enjoyed limited success. E-shopping was still a decade away from going mainstream.
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In 1988, a CompuServe competitor named Prodigy sprung up, the product of a partnership between Sears and IBM. Alongside news, weather, email, banking, and bulletin boards, the service included a store. Jaunty illustrations accompanied item descriptions, but as Wired noted in 1993, “the service’s cartoon-like graphics proved far less useful to purveyors of items that consumers wanted to see before buying, such as clothing and home furnishings.” A short-lived grocery service folded “because consumers were uncomfortable using a PC to select food.”
Until the World Wide Web debuted publicly in 1991, online shopping remained the province of services like Prodigy. That year, the National Science Foundation, which funded the networks that made up the backbone of the Internet, lifted its ban on commercial activity. Merchants were free to register domains and set up cybershop, but a problem lingered: Shoppers were—rightly—suspicious of handing over credit card data to remote, faceless webmasters. No mechanism existed to verify the sites’ authenticity.
In December 1994, a 23-year-old University of Illinois grad named Marc Andreessen released Netscape 1.0. The web browser featured a protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which let both sides of a transaction encrypt personal information. From there, ecommerce began to take off.
Without the cost of maintaining physical stores, online retailers could offer lower prices and larger assortments than their brick and mortar counterparts, and people could by them in less time than it took to gas up the minivan. A “nice little Saturday” no longer had to entail epic marathons to warehouse-style superstores. If Sting knocked on the floodgates, Amazon was the wave that was about to burst them open.
In July 1995, a hedge fund VP named Jeff Bezos opened an online bookstore. He named it after the world’s largest river, after deciding against Relentless.com. (The domain still redirects to Amazon.) The site carried a million titles, and Bezos billed it “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Within a month, Amazon.com had sold books to buyers in every US state, plus 45 countries.
Bezos recognized that shopping online at the time carried so-called pain points. Gauging quality could be difficult. Shoppers had to manually enter lines and lines of payment and shipping info each time they wanted to buy a nut sampler. High shipping costs could cancel out savings. Such headaches led shoppers to abandon their carts at distressing rates.
Amazon knew these minor irritations could add up, spelling major revenue losses. From the beginning, “Bezos was maniacally focused on the customer experience,” says retail expert and Wharton professor Barbara Kahn. No more cartoonlike graphics: Books were fully digitized, and shoppers could flip through the pages like they could in a physical store. Books were searchable by title, browsable by category, and readers could post reviews. In 1999, Amazon famously patented one-click ordering. This seemingly minor innovation slashed shopping cart abandonment, convinced customers to fork over their data, and helped cement Amazon as the go-to one-stop-shop for hassle-free shopping. Shipping got faster and cheaper, becoming free for orders above $ 99 in 2002, then for all Prime members in 2005.
Sites like Amazon and eBay, which also opened in 1995 as “AuctionWeb,” proved you didn’t need a physical store to give customers what they wanted. A lot of what they wanted. In 1999, Zappos (since acquired by Amazon) opened one of the first online-only shoe stores, enticing shoppers with free shipping, a generous (and free) return policy, and legendary customer service (one call famously lasted ten hours). The internet promised riches, and investors exuberantly, sometimes irrationally, supplied the funding.
Not every digital store survived that first boom. Cash-flush e-tailers like pets.com and grocery deliverer WebVan poured millions into ad campaigns, expanding rapidly before realizing that customers didn’t always want what they offered. Less than a year after the pets.com mascot soared over Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the company learned that plenty of pet owners in the already crowded space didn’t mind picking up dog food and kitty litter from the grocery store, especially if that meant avoiding shipping costs and long waits. The company closed in 2000. Not long after erecting state-of-the-art fulfillment centers in ten cities, WebVan discovered that the cost-conscious shoppers they targeted weren’t ready for what amounted to an upmarket service: Customers didn’t spend enough to subsidize the trips; they preferred coupons and economy sizes, which WebVan didn’t offer; they often weren’t home during the short delivery windows. The grocery business’s paper-thin margins provided little room for error, and the company declared bankruptcy in 2001, near the height of the dot-com crash. These failures, however, would become instructive for the next generation. “Get Big Fast” gave way to “Minimum Viable Product.”
The Latest Shopping Tech
Stock Bots Walmart partnered with Bossa Nova Robotics to deploy inventory-tracking droids in 50 stores this year.
Virtual Showrooms Hardware giant Lowe’s debuted its “Holoroom” last year, which guides headset-clad DIYers through home improvement projects in VR.
Face Time Gourmet confectioner Lolli & Pops recently installed facial recognition cameras in stores to flag regulars and compile customized shopping recommendations.
Mirror, Mirror Fashion retailer Farfetch unveiled touchscreen mirrors and clothing racks that sense when an item is removed—then beam a virtual version to the shopper’s smartphone.
Cinderella Scanners New Balance and Fleet Feet Sports recently introduced scanners by Volumental that generate a 3D virtual model of your feet in five seconds. An AI algorithm extracts 10 measurements, from length to arch height, to recommend a perfectly fitting shoe. No disposable sock required.
Swipe and Shop Through Instagram’s new shopping feature, users can tap stickers on Stories to display merchandise details and shopping links. The Facebook-owned social media platform is reportedly developing a standalone shopping app.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, “digitally native vertical brands” (DNVBs) like Bonobos (menswear) and Warby Parker (eyewear) spun up their own direct-to-consumer models. By controlling the entire process from factory to sale and reaching consumers directly through websites and social media channels, these brands could keep prices down, collect extensive data on their customers, and test new products. Last year, DNVBs grew three times faster than ecommerce as a whole. The more data companies swallowed up, the better they got at personalizing their recommendations. They burrowed their way into our inboxes and onto our social media pages. Their algorithms knew what we wanted and predicted what we were going to want. It started to seem like brick and mortar didn’t stand a chance.
Indeed, by the mid-2010s, tax breaks and a hunger for growth had led US retailers to build stores at rates that eclipsed Europe and Japan by a factor of six. This “over-storing,” combined with ecommerce competition, set the stage for the so-called “retailpocalypse.” In 2017, an estimated 7,800 US stores shuttered, and 3,600 were forecast to close in 2018.
If big box stores were going to survive, they needed to reinvent themselves. Consumers had grown to expect all the convenience, selection, and low prices of online shopping. To compete, brick and mortars had to act a little more like websites. Hardware giant Home Depot saw its stock price shoot up after integrating its desktop, mobile, and physical stores, introducing options like Buy Online, Pick-up In Store. By 2016, 61 percent of retailers offered some version of the service. Curbside pickup flourished, flying in the face of the old ethos of maximizing in-store-time.
For those that adapted, a retail future exists outside of bits and bytes. The web may know your habits better than any store clerk, but that’s starting to change. IRL stores aren’t headed for the deadstock pile. They’re just going to look a bit different, get a bit smarter. Some may ditch cashiers, or cash registers altogether. Others will employ robots. And those cameras—they’re not just for catching shoplifters anymore, either.
The Future of On- (and Off-) Line Shopping
The retailpocalypse, in fact, has come full circle. In 2015, Amazon opened its first physical bookstore, then followed it up with 17 more (then raised that by a Whole Foods acquisition). The shops aren’t particularly high tech. No holograms, no VR, plenty of good old-fashioned paper. The shops occupy modest footprints, carrying only four star-and-above-rated books. Squint, however, and you can see the future: Prices are not on display, and customers must log onto Amazon’s smartphone app to see them. Prime members get lower prices, of course. “They train you when you go in the store to open your app,” says Kahn. This lets them merge your online and in-store data. More data equals better personalized marketing, tighter inventories, and lower costs.
Of course, Amazon isn’t the only one corralling your digital data to optimize your in-store experience. Personalization companies like AgilOne and Qubit have sprung up to vacuum all our clicks, tweets, and e-communiques and merge them into individual profiles that stores like Vans and Under Armour use to better target their marketing. And some are going a step further.
Earlier this year, gourmet confectioner Lolli & Pops installed facial recognition cameras in its stores’ entryways. The cameras alert clerks when VIPs (who’ve opted in) enter, then call up their profiles and generate recommendations. In the future, face-identifying cameras could track shoppers throughout stores, noting where they linger and where they don’t. Retailers could use this to maximize purchasing by, say, rejiggering floor layouts and product displays. But some businesses fail to disclose cameras, inflaming privacy defenders.
When the ACLU asked 21 of the nation’s largest retailers if they were using facial recognition, presumably for theft prevention, all but two refused to answer. (Lowe’s owned up to it.) The organization warned of “an infrastructure for tracking and control that, once constructed, will have enormous potential for abuse.” Meanwhile, other companies have convinced shoppers to knowingly trade privacy for convenience.
Register-Free Retail
Visitors to the first Amazon Go store in Seattle said it felt like shoplifting: Walk in, grab what you need, and go without ever taking out your wallet. The shop’s balletic system of computer vision, motion sensors, and deep learning renders checkout lines obsolete. Amazon reportedly plans to open another 3,000 cashier-free stores by 2021, but it has some competition.
Zippin
In April, this San Francisco concept store became the first Amazon Go challenger to open in the States. The company aims to offer its cashierless platform to hotels and gas stations.
Bingobox
This company operates more than 300 RFID-powered human-free convenience stores throughout China, with plans to reach 2,000 locations by 2019.
Kroger
The supermarket giant’s “Scan, Bag, Go,” model, already used in nearly 400 stores, lets shoppers scan their barcodes on their groceries and pay straight from their smartphones.
Standard Cognition
This San Francisco startup has partnered with Japanese drugstore supplier Paltac to open 3,000 checkout-free shops by 2020.
This year, Amazon opened its first cashierless stores in the US, followed by a handful of smaller startups. Powered by hundreds of super-smart (but not face-recognizing) cameras and an array of weight and motion sensors, stores like Amazon Go and Zippin let shoppers simply grab what they want and leave. (Once again, Amazon customers must use their app, this time to swipe in.) The surveillance offers unprecedented intel about shoppers’ habits and supposedly prevents theft. Investors see the potential. CB Insights reports that over 150 companies are developing checkout-free technology.
In this new blended, digi-physical landscape, brick and mortar stores will leverage their physical advantages, while rendering unto the web that which is better handled digitally. This might mean smaller stores that act more like showrooms than storehouses. When digital-first brand Bonobos (now Walmart-owned) opened physical “guideshops,” they functioned more like fitting rooms-cum-hangout spots. Shoppers arrived by appointment, were offered a beer, tried on clothes, then had their orders shipped directly to them from an offsite warehouse. Other stores are fashioning themselves into tricked-out lounges and event spaces. Some won’t even sell you a darn thing.
It’s called “experiential retail,” In January, Samsung opened a 21,000-square-foot Experience Store in Toronto. Visitors can test out VR headsets and tablets, chat with tech pros, or partake in autumnal smoothie classes and artist demos. The one thing they can’t do? Buy stuff. Restoration Hardware has begun fusing retail with hospitality, outfitting luxurious furniture showrooms with rooftop restaurants, barista bars, and wine vaults. In a history-is-cyclical turn, Apple’s newest DC flagship will host concerts, coding classes, workshops, and art exhibitions, recalling the multipurpose, live-band- and tea-room-appointed department stores of the early 20th century.
The ultimate fusion of convenience and experience could lie in virtual and augmented reality. As with many things VR, it’s too early to predict the impact. You can imagine it though: endless stores featuring infinite inventory, all for zero rent. Walmart filed two patents this summer for a “virtual retail showroom system.” Headset- and sensor-glove-garbed shoppers would browse digital aisles selecting products, which would be packed and shipped from an automated fulfillment center. Ikea launched an AR app last year, letting shoppers “try” out true-to-scale virtual furniture models at home before buying. And Macy’s is already rolling out VR in 69 furniture departments this year. Shoppers can design their own room on a tablet, then traipse through the space in VR.
Some retailers are going all in on the Star Trek vision of shopping. Lowe’s launched its VR Holoroom last year, leading headset-clad in-store shoppers through DIY home improvement tutorials. A month later, fashion retailer Farfetch unveiled their “Store of Future.” Touchscreen dressing room mirrors let shoppers request new sizes, holograms help them customize garments, and smart clothing racks sense when items are removed, then beam virtual versions to a smartphone wishlist.
But much of the evolution is likely to happen behind the scenes. A lot of innovation will happen in logistics, with robot-staffed fulfillment centers and delivery drones, feeding appetites for ever-faster, cheaper shipment. This year, Walmart rolled out robots in 50 stores; the wheeled automatons scan shelves and notify employees when they need to be restocked.
Stores will seek out shoppers where they spend their time, increasingly cozied up to mobile devices and smart speakers. OC&C Strategy Consultants projects voice shopping in the US will reach $ 40 billion by 2022, up from $ 2 billion this year. Given that Echos comprise nearly two-thirds of smart speakers, with Google Home racing to catch up, Amazon is once again poised to dominate. Without infinite pages of cheesecloth to browse, voice shoppers will rely heavily on recommended products (a la “Amazon Choice”). And if the smart speaker company doubles as a private label (a la “AmazonBasics”), you can guess which brand they’ll suggest first.
It all adds up to an unnervingly creepy or fantastically convenient and curated world, depending on your vantage point. Or maybe it’s all the above. On the other end of that cart you casually abandon or that data you impatiently fork over sits a business that translates that behavior into real dollars and cents. Multiply that by thousands of shoppers and you’ve got a make-or-break bottom line. Times that by millions of businesses and you’ve got a fat chunk of the economy. No wonder retailers are doing backflips to make shopping as convenient, pleasurable—and quietly invasive—as possible. It’s up to shoppers to decide where to draw the line.
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Stepping Into An Amazon Store Helps It Get Inside Your Head Amazon’s new checkout-free stores may represent the future, but they’re just the latest in a long line of retail tech aiming to capture, digitize, and monetize your in-store behavior. One predecessor? Barcode scanners.
Welcome to Checkout-Free Retail. Don’t Mind All the Cameras Roam the aisles of Zippin, the cashierless store of the future, where smart shelves and cameras mean perfect inventory management. (And where you never have to speak to another human.)
The Shopping Malls and Big Box Stores Gutted By E-Commerce A haunting photo essay portrays the blanched wreckage of the retail apocalypse. Photographer Jesse Riser traveled the American southwest, stopping at more than 150 shuttered or near-shuttered shopping malls and big box stores. He transforms eyesores into meditations on the internet’s impact on public spaces.
Your Online Shopping Habit Is Fueling A Robotics Renaissance The demand you’re creating with all your Prime orders and Birchboxes is poised to have ripple effects beyond the fulfillment center. Newer, more advanced, more collaborative robots are coming online, thanks to the packing and shipping needs generated by ecommerce. Before long, these roving, picking, super-sensing bots could move from the warehouse into our homes.
Inside Adidas’ Robot-Powered, On-Demand Sneaker Factory The future of shopping will play out largely behind the scenes, and Adidas is striving to lead the way. The German shoemaker’s on a quest to reinvent manufacturing in the age of 3-D printing, fast fashion, and hyper-personalization, then bring it to America.
Google and Walmart’s Big Bet Against Amazon Might Just Pay Off In its effort to retain the Nation’s Top Retailer crown, Walmart’s been pouring billions into ecommerce, including last year’s purchase of Jet.com. The company’s recent partnership with Google Home marks their foray into an arena Amazon has all but owned: voice shopping.
Turns Out the Dot-Com Bust’s Worst Flops Were Actually Fantastic Ideas Dot-com-era failures no doubt made some ill-advised business moves, but perhaps they were also ahead of their time. Now that the internet’s more integral to our lives, remarkably similar ideas are finding second lives.
The Next Big Thing You Missed: Online Grocery Shopping Is Back, and This Time It’ll Work When Amazon Fresh’s lime-green vans started rolling into neighborhoods, they brought back memories of WebVan’s epic bust. But changing times and hard-earned lessons set the stage for a grocery delivery success story.
Last updated November 19, 2018
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pttedu · 2 years
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To become a mechanic, the time taken depends on the kind of training you want to take. To function as a mechanic, you must earn a high school diploma and enroll in a vocational school or training program. Mechanics require outstanding communication skills to talk to consumers about vehicle problems, repairs, and expenses. For instance, a consumer may inquire for recommendations about what's reasonable for their vehicle or ask about issues about how repairs were finished.The auto mechanic may select to work part-time at an auto shop while also serving auto repair services on their own time. The auto trade schools are helpful to auto mechanics because it permits them to authorize a career path.
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Online Shopping: The Complete Wired Guide
New Post has been published on https://www.articletec.com/online-shopping-the-complete-wired-guide/
Online Shopping: The Complete Wired Guide
Type “cheesecloth” into Google shopping. Hundreds of online shopping options pop up, in more than a dozen shades, at a range of price points. Many of the packages can be shipped to you in two days or less. In other words, shoppers live in a golden age of convenience. We’ve got more access to more stuff than ever before, at cheaper prices and ever-more-instant speeds. And the businesses who hawk us that stuff? They’ve got unprecedented levels of data on us, and they’re using it to target us in ever-more personalized ways.
As Americans, shopping’s in our bones. Patriotic fervor practically elevated consumerism to a religion after World War II, and today, we blur Jesus and Santa, ditch Thanksgiving for Black Friday, and mint new holidays (Cyber Monday) that give way to copycat holidays (Prime Day), all dedicated to buying stuff. Consumer spending on the “goods” portion of goods and services powers roughly one quarter of the economy, so it follows that retail is uber-susceptible to the technological, political, and economic forces that shape our society. Long ago, traveling peddlers were displaced by local merchants, who were supplanted by downtown department stores, which were upended by shopping malls, then big box chains, and now, the internet. And technology has armed today’s retailers with powerful tracking tools: We accept user agreements and pop-ups, trading gobs of valuable personal data in exchange for convenience—a commodity almost as prized as shopping itself.
The History of Online Shopping
The age of internet commerce really kicked off with Sting. Back in 1994, a band of coders led by a 21-year-old Swarthmore grad named Dan Kohn lived together in a two-story Nashua, New Hampshire, house. Fueled by ambition and a roaring Coca-Cola habit, they launched an online marketplace called NetMarket. The site let users make secure purchases by downloading encryption software named PGP, for “Pretty Good Privacy.” At noon on August 11, a Philadelphia man named Phil Brandenberger logged on. Typing in his address and credit card number, he bought a CD of Sting’s “Ten Summoners’ Tales” for $12.48 plus shipping. Champagne corks flew. The New York Times called it the first secure purchase of its kind. “Attention Shoppers,” a headline announced. “The Internet Is Open.”
Years later, Randy Adams, CEO of another online store called the Internet Shopping Network, claimed to have beaten out Kohn’s group by a month. In either case, the ecommerce floodgates didn’t quite fly open. The Unix-based programs required some tech know-how, and computers were a lot slower back then.
While we wait for modem speeds to rev up from bits to megabits, then, let’s review some retail history. Back in the ’80s, shopping largely centered around malls. Post–World War II migration to the ‘burbs had gutted downtown shopping centers and the sprawling department stores that served as their nuclei. Tax breaks and car culture spurred mass development of new big box stores and suburban shopping malls, and these parking-flush spaces recreated sanitized versions of urban retail corridors, writes Vicki Howard in From Main Street to Mall. Giant discount shops devoured local mom and pops. By 1990, Walmart had become the nation’s largest retailer.
Consumers were spoiled for choice, and they could get it on the cheap. But big box shops were laid out to maximize in-store time, turning shopping into a time-gobbling, endurance event. In the 2003 comedy Old School, Will Ferrell’s character Frank the Tank played this suburban ritual for laughs: “Pretty nice little Saturday, actually, We’re going to go to Home Depot…Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll have enough time!”
Online shopping, by contrast, offered the promise of near-limitless choice at relatively snappy speeds. One of the earliest pre-Internet shopping ventures to test the online waters, CompuServe’s “Electronic Mall,” opened in 1984, offering stuff from more than 100 merchants, from JC Penney to Pepperidge Farms. Next to today’s sleek web pages, CompuServe’s command line interface looks positively primitive. But it worked, and it saved a trip to the mall. (As one early adopter told his local newscaster: “I just don’t like crowds.”) When it opened, only eight percent of US households had a computer, and at dial-up rates starting at around $5 an hour, the mall enjoyed limited success. E-shopping was still a decade away from going mainstream.
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In 1988, a CompuServe competitor named Prodigy sprung up, the product of a partnership between Sears and IBM. Alongside news, weather, email, banking, and bulletin boards, the service included a store. Jaunty illustrations accompanied item descriptions, but as Wired noted in 1993, “the service’s cartoon-like graphics proved far less useful to purveyors of items that consumers wanted to see before buying, such as clothing and home furnishings.” A short-lived grocery service folded “because consumers were uncomfortable using a PC to select food.”
Until the World Wide Web debuted publicly in 1991, online shopping remained the province of services like Prodigy. That year, the National Science Foundation, which funded the networks that made up the backbone of the Internet, lifted its ban on commercial activity. Merchants were free to register domains and set up cybershop, but a problem lingered: Shoppers were—rightly—suspicious of handing over credit card data to remote, faceless webmasters. No mechanism existed to verify the sites’ authenticity.
In December 1994, a 23-year-old University of Illinois grad named Marc Andreessen released Netscape 1.0. The web browser featured a protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which let both sides of a transaction encrypt personal information. From there, ecommerce began to take off.
Without the cost of maintaining physical stores, online retailers could offer lower prices and larger assortments than their brick and mortar counterparts, and people could by them in less time than it took to gas up the minivan. A “nice little Saturday” no longer had to entail epic marathons to warehouse-style superstores. If Sting knocked on the floodgates, Amazon was the wave that was about to burst them open.
In July 1995, a hedge fund VP named Jeff Bezos opened an online bookstore. He named it after the world’s largest river, after deciding against Relentless.com. (The domain still redirects to Amazon.) The site carried a million titles, and Bezos billed it “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Within a month, Amazon.com had sold books to buyers in every US state, plus 45 countries.
Bezos recognized that shopping online at the time carried so-called pain points. Gauging quality could be difficult. Shoppers had to manually enter lines and lines of payment and shipping info each time they wanted to buy a nut sampler. High shipping costs could cancel out savings. Such headaches led shoppers to abandon their carts at distressing rates.
Amazon knew these minor irritations could add up, spelling major revenue losses. From the beginning, “Bezos was maniacally focused on the customer experience,” says retail expert and Wharton professor Barbara Kahn. No more cartoonlike graphics: Books were fully digitized, and shoppers could flip through the pages like they could in a physical store. Books were searchable by title, browsable by category, and readers could post reviews. In 1999, Amazon famously patented one-click ordering. This seemingly minor innovation slashed shopping cart abandonment, convinced customers to fork over their data, and helped cement Amazon as the go-to one-stop-shop for hassle-free shopping. Shipping got faster and cheaper, becoming free for orders above $99 in 2002, then for all Prime members in 2005.
Sites like Amazon and eBay, which also opened in 1995 as “AuctionWeb,” proved you didn’t need a physical store to give customers what they wanted. A lot of what they wanted. In 1999, Zappos (since acquired by Amazon) opened one of the first online-only shoe stores, enticing shoppers with free shipping, a generous (and free) return policy, and legendary customer service (one call famously lasted ten hours). The internet promised riches, and investors exuberantly, sometimes irrationally, supplied the funding.
Not every digital store survived that first boom. Cash-flush e-tailers like pets.com and grocery deliverer WebVan poured millions into ad campaigns, expanding rapidly before realizing that customers didn’t always want what they offered. Less than a year after the pets.com mascot soared over Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the company learned that plenty of pet owners in the already crowded space didn’t mind picking up dog food and kitty litter from the grocery store, especially if that meant avoiding shipping costs and long waits. The company closed in 2000. Not long after erecting state-of-the-art fulfillment centers in ten cities, WebVan discovered that the cost-conscious shoppers they targeted weren’t ready for what amounted to an upmarket service: Customers didn’t spend enough to subsidize the trips; they preferred coupons and economy sizes, which WebVan didn’t offer; they often weren’t home during the short delivery windows. The grocery business’s paper-thin margins provided little room for error, and the company declared bankruptcy in 2001, near the height of the dot-com crash. These failures, however, would become instructive for the next generation. “Get Big Fast” gave way to “Minimum Viable Product.”
The Latest Shopping Tech
Stock Bots Walmart partnered with Bossa Nova Robotics to deploy inventory-tracking droids in 50 stores this year.
Virtual Showrooms Hardware giant Lowe’s debuted its “Holoroom” last year, which guides headset-clad DIYers through home improvement projects in VR.
Face Time Gourmet confectioner Lolli & Pops recently installed facial recognition cameras in stores to flag regulars and compile customized shopping recommendations.
Mirror, Mirror Fashion retailer Farfetch unveiled touchscreen mirrors and clothing racks that sense when an item is removed—then beam a virtual version to the shopper’s smartphone.
Cinderella Scanners New Balance and Fleet Feet Sports recently introduced scanners by Volumental that generate a 3D virtual model of your feet in five seconds. An AI algorithm extracts 10 measurements, from length to arch height, to recommend a perfectly fitting shoe. No disposable sock required.
Swipe and Shop Through Instagram’s new shopping feature, users can tap stickers on Stories to display merchandise details and shopping links. The Facebook-owned social media platform is reportedly developing a standalone shopping app.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, “digitally native vertical brands” (DNVBs) like Bonobos (menswear) and Warby Parker (eyewear) spun up their own direct-to-consumer models. By controlling the entire process from factory to sale and reaching consumers directly through websites and social media channels, these brands could keep prices down, collect extensive data on their customers, and test new products. Last year, DNVBs grew three times faster than ecommerce as a whole. The more data companies swallowed up, the better they got at personalizing their recommendations. They burrowed their way into our inboxes and onto our social media pages. Their algorithms knew what we wanted and predicted what we were going to want. It started to seem like brick and mortar didn’t stand a chance.
Indeed, by the mid-2010s, tax breaks and a hunger for growth had led US retailers to build stores at rates that eclipsed Europe and Japan by a factor of six. This “over-storing,” combined with ecommerce competition, set the stage for the so-called “retailpocalypse.” In 2017, an estimated 7,800 US stores shuttered, and 3,600 were forecast to close in 2018.
If big box stores were going to survive, they needed to reinvent themselves. Consumers had grown to expect all the convenience, selection, and low prices of online shopping. To compete, brick and mortars had to act a little more like websites. Hardware giant Home Depot saw its stock price shoot up after integrating its desktop, mobile, and physical stores, introducing options like Buy Online, Pick-up In Store. By 2016, 61 percent of retailers offered some version of the service. Curbside pickup flourished, flying in the face of the old ethos of maximizing in-store-time.
For those that adapted, a retail future exists outside of bits and bytes. The web may know your habits better than any store clerk, but that’s starting to change. IRL stores aren’t headed for the deadstock pile. They’re just going to look a bit different, get a bit smarter. Some may ditch cashiers, or cash registers altogether. Others will employ robots. And those cameras—they’re not just for catching shoplifters anymore, either.
The Future of On- (and Off-) Line Shopping
The retailpocalypse, in fact, has come full circle. In 2015, Amazon opened its first physical bookstore, then followed it up with 17 more (then raised that by a Whole Foods acquisition). The shops aren’t particularly high tech. No holograms, no VR, plenty of good old-fashioned paper. The shops occupy modest footprints, carrying only four star-and-above-rated books. Squint, however, and you can see the future: Prices are not on display, and customers must log onto Amazon’s smartphone app to see them. Prime members get lower prices, of course. “They train you when you go in the store to open your app,” says Kahn. This lets them merge your online and in-store data. More data equals better personalized marketing, tighter inventories, and lower costs.
Of course, Amazon isn’t the only one corralling your digital data to optimize your in-store experience. Personalization companies like AgilOne and Qubit have sprung up to vacuum all our clicks, tweets, and e-communiques and merge them into individual profiles that stores like Vans and Under Armour use to better target their marketing. And some are going a step further.
Earlier this year, gourmet confectioner Lolli & Pops installed facial recognition cameras in its stores’ entryways. The cameras alert clerks when VIPs (who’ve opted in) enter, then call up their profiles and generate recommendations. In the future, face-identifying cameras could track shoppers throughout stores, noting where they linger and where they don’t. Retailers could use this to maximize purchasing by, say, rejiggering floor layouts and product displays. But some businesses fail to disclose cameras, inflaming privacy defenders.
When the ACLU asked 21 of the nation’s largest retailers if they were using facial recognition, presumably for theft prevention, all but two refused to answer. (Lowe’s owned up to it.) The organization warned of “an infrastructure for tracking and control that, once constructed, will have enormous potential for abuse.” Meanwhile, other companies have convinced shoppers to knowingly trade privacy for convenience.
Register-Free Retail
Visitors to the first Amazon Go store in Seattle said it felt like shoplifting: Walk in, grab what you need, and go without ever taking out your wallet. The shop’s balletic system of computer vision, motion sensors, and deep learning renders checkout lines obsolete. Amazon reportedly plans to open another 3,000 cashier-free stores by 2021, but it has some competition.
Zippin
In April, this San Francisco concept store became the first Amazon Go challenger to open in the States. The company aims to offer its cashierless platform to hotels and gas stations.
Bingobox
This company operates more than 300 RFID-powered human-free convenience stores throughout China, with plans to reach 2,000 locations by 2019.
Kroger
The supermarket giant’s “Scan, Bag, Go,” model, already used in nearly 400 stores, lets shoppers scan their barcodes on their groceries and pay straight from their smartphones.
Standard Cognition
This San Francisco startup has partnered with Japanese drugstore supplier Paltac to open 3,000 checkout-free shops by 2020.
This year, Amazon opened its first cashierless stores in the US, followed by a handful of smaller startups. Powered by hundreds of super-smart (but not face-recognizing) cameras and an array of weight and motion sensors, stores like Amazon Go and Zippin let shoppers simply grab what they want and leave. (Once again, Amazon customers must use their app, this time to swipe in.) The surveillance offers unprecedented intel about shoppers’ habits and supposedly prevents theft. Investors see the potential. CB Insights reports that over 150 companies are developing checkout-free technology.
In this new blended, digi-physical landscape, brick and mortar stores will leverage their physical advantages, while rendering unto the web that which is better handled digitally. This might mean smaller stores that act more like showrooms than storehouses. When digital-first brand Bonobos (now Walmart-owned) opened physical “guideshops,” they functioned more like fitting rooms-cum-hangout spots. Shoppers arrived by appointment, were offered a beer, tried on clothes, then had their orders shipped directly to them from an offsite warehouse. Other stores are fashioning themselves into tricked-out lounges and event spaces. Some won’t even sell you a darn thing.
It’s called “experiential retail,” In January, Samsung opened a 21,000-square-foot Experience Store in Toronto. Visitors can test out VR headsets and tablets, chat with tech pros, or partake in autumnal smoothie classes and artist demos. The one thing they can’t do? Buy stuff. Restoration Hardware has begun fusing retail with hospitality, outfitting luxurious furniture showrooms with rooftop restaurants, barista bars, and wine vaults. In a history-is-cyclical turn, Apple’s newest DC flagship will host concerts, coding classes, workshops, and art exhibitions, recalling the multipurpose, live-band- and tea-room-appointed department stores of the early 20th century.
The ultimate fusion of convenience and experience could lie in virtual and augmented reality. As with many things VR, it’s too early to predict the impact. You can imagine it though: endless stores featuring infinite inventory, all for zero rent. Walmart filed two patents this summer for a “virtual retail showroom system.” Headset- and sensor-glove-garbed shoppers would browse digital aisles selecting products, which would be packed and shipped from an automated fulfillment center. Ikea launched an AR app last year, letting shoppers “try” out true-to-scale virtual furniture models at home before buying. And Macy’s is already rolling out VR in 69 furniture departments this year. Shoppers can design their own room on a tablet, then traipse through the space in VR.
Some retailers are going all in on the Star Trek vision of shopping. Lowe’s launched its VR Holoroom last year, leading headset-clad in-store shoppers through DIY home improvement tutorials. A month later, fashion retailer Farfetch unveiled their “Store of Future.” Touchscreen dressing room mirrors let shoppers request new sizes, holograms help them customize garments, and smart clothing racks sense when items are removed, then beam virtual versions to a smartphone wishlist.
But much of the evolution is likely to happen behind the scenes. A lot of innovation will happen in logistics, with robot-staffed fulfillment centers and delivery drones, feeding appetites for ever-faster, cheaper shipment. This year, Walmart rolled out robots in 50 stores; the wheeled automatons scan shelves and notify employees when they need to be restocked.
Stores will seek out shoppers where they spend their time, increasingly cozied up to mobile devices and smart speakers. OC&C Strategy Consultants projects voice shopping in the US will reach $40 billion by 2022, up from $2 billion this year. Given that Echos comprise nearly two-thirds of smart speakers, with Google Home racing to catch up, Amazon is once again poised to dominate. Without infinite pages of cheesecloth to browse, voice shoppers will rely heavily on recommended products (a la “Amazon Choice”). And if the smart speaker company doubles as a private label (a la “AmazonBasics”), you can guess which brand they’ll suggest first.
It all adds up to an unnervingly creepy or fantastically convenient and curated world, depending on your vantage point. Or maybe it’s all the above. On the other end of that cart you casually abandon or that data you impatiently fork over sits a business that translates that behavior into real dollars and cents. Multiply that by thousands of shoppers and you’ve got a make-or-break bottom line. Times that by millions of businesses and you’ve got a fat chunk of the economy. No wonder retailers are doing backflips to make shopping as convenient, pleasurable—and quietly invasive—as possible. It’s up to shoppers to decide where to draw the line.
Learn More
Stepping Into An Amazon Store Helps It Get Inside Your Head Amazon’s new checkout-free stores may represent the future, but they’re just the latest in a long line of retail tech aiming to capture, digitize, and monetize your in-store behavior. One predecessor? Barcode scanners.
Welcome to Checkout-Free Retail. Don’t Mind All the Cameras Roam the aisles of Zippin, the cashierless store of the future, where smart shelves and cameras mean perfect inventory management. (And where you never have to speak to another human.)
The Shopping Malls and Big Box Stores Gutted By E-Commerce A haunting photo essay portrays the blanched wreckage of the retail apocalypse. Photographer Jesse Riser traveled the American southwest, stopping at more than 150 shuttered or near-shuttered shopping malls and big box stores. He transforms eyesores into meditations on the internet’s impact on public spaces.
Your Online Shopping Habit Is Fueling A Robotics Renaissance The demand you’re creating with all your Prime orders and Birchboxes is poised to have ripple effects beyond the fulfillment center. Newer, more advanced, more collaborative robots are coming online, thanks to the packing and shipping needs generated by ecommerce. Before long, these roving, picking, super-sensing bots could move from the warehouse into our homes.
Inside Adidas’ Robot-Powered, On-Demand Sneaker Factory The future of shopping will play out largely behind the scenes, and Adidas is striving to lead the way. The German shoemaker’s on a quest to reinvent manufacturing in the age of 3-D printing, fast fashion, and hyper-personalization, then bring it to America.
Google and Walmart’s Big Bet Against Amazon Might Just Pay Off In its effort to retain the Nation’s Top Retailer crown, Walmart’s been pouring billions into ecommerce, including last year’s purchase of Jet.com. The company’s recent partnership with Google Home marks their foray into an arena Amazon has all but owned: voice shopping.
Turns Out the Dot-Com Bust’s Worst Flops Were Actually Fantastic Ideas Dot-com-era failures no doubt made some ill-advised business moves, but perhaps they were also ahead of their time. Now that the internet’s more integral to our lives, remarkably similar ideas are finding second lives.
The Next Big Thing You Missed: Online Grocery Shopping Is Back, and This Time It’ll Work When Amazon Fresh’s lime-green vans started rolling into neighborhoods, they brought back memories of WebVan’s epic bust. But changing times and hard-earned lessons set the stage for a grocery delivery success story.
Last updated November 19, 2018
Enjoyed this deep dive? Check out more WIRED Guides.
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itsworn · 7 years
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For a GM Guy, He Owns Some Incredible Hemi-Powered Mopars
John Wingle grew up in a loyal GM household and was raised with the dream of one day owning his own GM-branded big-block hot rod. The New Jersey native was surrounded by Chevys and other GM products from as far back as he can remember, with family members flaunting their high-caliber rides in front of him, a young, impressionable car guy in training. So it was only natural that when John grew old enough to drive, a Chevy would occupy his spot in the family driveway.
John was in good company for sure. His dad and brother Rich were big influences on the youngster. The father-son combo owned an assortment of muscle cars, including 409 Impalas, 442s, big-block Vettes, and even some cool GTOs. His sister was fond of Corvettes, driving them since getting her license. And Mom was lucky for sure; she got to drive them all! This all-encompassing environment of GM muscle no doubt had a lasting effect on what John would drive for years to come.
Once out of school and earning a steady living, John started to run through a bevy of Bowties, mostly with big-block power. Over the years he has held title on more than a half-dozen Chevelles, a quartet of C2 Corvettes, and even a Nova and Camaro. If it was fast and brash and built by GM, this guy wanted it. But strangely enough, soon a car would grab John’s attention and change his thinking on what the ultimate muscle car could possibly be.
Pentastar Search
John started to have mixed feelings when he spotted an interesting ride peeking out of a garage on his way to school one day. It was a 1970 Plymouth ’Cuda. He was instantly taken by the aggressive stance and menacing grille of the potent fish. That Plymouth was a model that John rarely came in contact with over the years, growing up behind a wall of GM muscle cars he could hardly see past. It definitely piqued his interest in the Chrysler brand, and was a precursor for what was about to happen.
Over the years, John started straying from Chevy products and seeing what the other brands had to offer. During this time he met Craig Ostertag, a local hot rodder who had recently purchased a 1970 Challenger. Craig was in the throes of a complete resto of the E-Body when they met, and often purchased bead-blasting material from John’s business. He became a major influence in John’s impending muscle car diversification.
Soon after they met, the guys decided to hit the Mopars at E-Town show at nearby Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey. That’s where the barriers were officially broken down for good. You see, an intoxicating green-hued tractor beam grabbed John’s attention at the show and almost instantaneously erased more than 30-odd years of GM loyalty. The new object of desire: a 440-motivated 1970 Dodge Coronet, basted in Chrysler’s alluring Sublime green. That was it. He was hooked.
From that moment on, John was on the hunt for top-of-the-line offerings from Mother Mopar. He was after the models with the biggest and baddest motors Mopar offered, rides that also possessed the typical muscle car add-ons that make them all the more interesting, and thus more collectible.
It’s a Runner
John hit the ground sprinting, and soon found a contact that knew of several Mopars for sale. One was a very low-mileage 1969 Hemi Road Runner. With about 10,000 miles showing on the odometer, it was particularly enticing to John. It didn’t have its original Hemi, but the rest of the car was there.
The Scorch Red Plymouth was sold new in Philadelphia and lived a year with its first owner before being sold off. It bounced around and then sat comatose for almost 30 years on a lift in the back of a truck mechanic’s shop. It was sold to another individual who was ready to pass it on after starting a restoration. New owner John decided to have the current shop finish the work before bringing it home. The car was finally shipped to New Jersey four years later unfinished. It was then that John sent it to Steve’s Garage in Stillwater, New Jersey, where it became the head-turner you see here.
John tracked down several of the previous owners, one of whom (the second owner) told him how the Road Runner lost its original engine. His name is Earl Fennell, and he cared for the car deeply and always told his wife that whenever she filled up the car with gas, she should have the oil checked as well. One night while she was behind the wheel, she stopped for gas and had the oil level checked. Unknowingly, the attendant pulled the dipstick tube out of the motor while checking the oil level. Big mistake!
Oil poured from the engine while she drove down the highway, until the Road Runner’s Hemi went bone dry. The Road Runner ended up blowing the engine a few miles down the road. After that incident, the owner decided to get a replacement block, which seemed like the easiest thing to do at the time. Repairing the damage just seemed out of the question. Wow, how times have changed!
Now, 45 years later, the red Road Runner is a beauty to behold. It is driven sparingly, but whenever it’s out and about it’s a definite head twister. And to top it off, the title John received with the car was from the second owner, Earl Fennell, as the car was flipped several times without anyone registering the car since 1970. Bee Real John’s 1970 Hemi Super Bee came about by accident. Turns out the same previous owner of the Road Runner called John and said he had a really nice restored and rare 1970 Hemi Super Bee for sale. John was definitely interested after he found out it had a Pistol Grip between the buckets. With only 21 Hemi four-speed Bees made that year, this was already looking like one rare ride.
Add in the color options—B5 blue exterior with white guts and top—and you’re looking at possibly the only one in existence. John worked out a deal, trading a few Brand X cars he had for the stunning ride. And luckily this one was a turnkey car, ready to hit the road with just 14,000 original miles.
There is some history on the car. The Super Bee came out of a dealership in Rhode Island, and the first owner traded in a 1967 Camaro for the B-Body. Another interesting fact is this car came pretty loaded with cool options, an interesting diversion from the typical stripped-down Super Bees you usually see out there. It gives this beautiful Dodge another helping of collectability, to say the least.
Mopar or No Car
These two stunning examples of Ma Mopar’s greatest work now sit in a collection of topnotch Dodge and Plymouth rides, including a cool 1969 Mod-Top Barracuda that lived not far from his house. It is still a project, but it isn’t far from being roadworthy.
Looking to the future, John sees possible change on the horizon. “I might start off fresh again, maybe build me a Pro Touring car,” he says. But for now these two Elephant-powered B-Body beauties will be the cornerstone of a bevy of hot rides in his collection, two of the biggest guns from the Mopar Kingdom!
At a Glance
1969 Road Runner Owned by: John Wingle Restored by: Owner Engine: 426ci/425hp Hemi V-8 Transmission: A833 4-speed manual Rearend: Dana 60 with 4.10 gears and Sure Grip Interior: Black vinyl bucket seats Wheels: 15×6 steel Tires: F70-15 Firestone Wide Oval reproduction Special parts: Woodgrain shift knob, chrome exhaust tips, power front disc brakes, N96 Air Grabber hood
John Wingle traded several Brand-X cars to pick up this blazing Scorch Red 1969 Hemi Road Runner. He doesn’t regret it one bit.
A true 10,000-mile car, the Road Runner lost the original Hemi in its first year of life, but everything else survived. The car recently underwent an extensive four-year restoration.
As a budget street brawler, the Road Runner’s interior is basic: bucket seats, Hurst shifter, and a woodgrain steering wheel.
John really loves painted steel wheels. Luckily, both of these Hemi B-Bodies came with them as original equipment. Each now runs on correct repop rubber.
At a Glance
1970 Super Bee Owned by: John Wingle Restored by: Previous owner Engine: 426ci/425hp Hemi V-8 Transmission: A833 4-speed manual Rearend: Dana 60 with 4.10 gears and Sure Grip Interior: White vinyl bucket seat with buddy seat Wheels: 15×7 steel Tires: F60-15 Goodyear Polyglas reproduction Special parts: White vinyl top, power disc brakes, power steering, wood steering wheel, AM/FM stereo, N96 Ramcharger hood
John’s stunning 1970 Hemi Super Bee not only shows only 15,000 original miles on the odometer but also sports a Hemi/four-speed combo (1 of 21 made) and a super-rare white vinyl top with matching interior to contrast with the vibrant B5 blue paint. This combination of engine, trans, and color makes it possibly the only one in existence.
Unlike its Road Runner stable mate, the Super Bee still has the original Hemi drivetrain. Both cars have the N96 fresh air package to feed their respective Elephant motors cool fresh air from outside the engine bay.
The Super Bee has a higher level of appointments than the Road Runner, boasting an AM/FM stereo, white vinyl buckets with a buddy seat, a wood-rimmed wheel, a Tic-Toc-Tac, and a cool-as-heck Pistol Grip shifter.
Some find the 1970 Super Bee’s grille a little bizarre, while others say it’s the best-looking front end Chrysler designed during the muscle car years.
The post For a GM Guy, He Owns Some Incredible Hemi-Powered Mopars appeared first on Hot Rod Network.
from Hot Rod Network http://www.hotrod.com/articles/gm-guy-owns-incredible-hemi-powered-mopars/ via IFTTT
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