Ten 3D Printed Houses In A Day

2014 is looking to become the year of the 3D printer. There really doesn't seem to be a thing you cannot print. Adding "building a house in a day" to the list of accomplished projects may seem to be pushing it; 10 houses on the verge of impossible. 

However a Chinese company recently proved the skeptics wrong.

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. has printed 10 homes in 24 hours out of recycled materials. The houses, each covering an area of 200 square meters, are printed entirely in concrete.

This isn't the first attempt at 3D printing large structures in a short amount of time. Researchers in California are making a printer that can build a house in 24 hours.

In Amsterdam earlier this month, construction of a 3D printed house began. The house is made out of plastic bricks that fit together like Lego. It's also being printed onsite. The Chinese houses, on the other hand, weren't built onsite. They were printed in pieces and then put together in Shanghai's Qingpu district.

The pieces are made using recycled construction materials and industrial waste to form a concrete aggregate, Gizmodo reports. The 3D printer used to build the houses is 500 feet long, 33 feet wide and 20 feet high. Each home costs around $4,800.

"We purchased parts for the printer overseas, and assembled the machine in a factory in Suzhou," the company's CEO, Ma Yihe, said. "Such a new type of 3D printed structure is environment-friendly and cost-effective."

The final product. Needs some paint but essentially ready to move in to. 

WinSun plans to build 100 recycling factories in the country, one in every 300 km, to collect and transform the waste into materials for 3D printing through special handling, processing and separation technology. WinSun hopes their 3D printer and technology could offer "affordable and dignified housing" for the impoverished.

Do you think 3D printed houses are the way of the future. Please leave your comment below. 

Praising Intelligence might Undermine Development

Yes, you read that right. Praising intelligence may not evolve the thinking ability, but rather have quite the opposite effect, possibly halting it all together. This startling discovery was recently publicized by Claudia M. Mueller, Carol S. Dweck from Columbia University and Sheri R. Levy, Stanford University.

The study compares the performance of children after they’ve been praised for their intelligence (“you must be smart”) versus their effort (“you must have put a lot of effort into that”). The kids were asked to perform a task, and upon completion they were praised in one of the two manners. After this they where then given a series of harder problems to try to solve.

The kids who where praised for their effort increased in the number of problems they solved. However, those who where told that they were smart showed a frightening decrease.

What’s the difference? Those being told that they’re smart are taught that abilities are fixed. If you’re finding a puzzle hard, then it must be because you’re not very good at that, and you should try something else. Kids taught that results are based on effort see the hard puzzles as something they can learn to do, and then they do so.

In a second set of tests, kids were asked what type of puzzles they like to solve, and then given four options. The first three were pretty similar: “problems that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,” “problems that are pretty easy, so I’ll do well,” and “problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart.” 

However the last option is different: “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart.”

The first three options are “performance” options, they’re all about looking good, or getting things right. The last option is a “learning” option, and it values knowledge and growth over performance.

The study concluded that children often selected puzzle-options based upon the type of praise they had previously gotten. Children praised for their intelligence choose tasks which are easy and make them look good, but children praised for their effort choose tasks which are hard, and which will teach them more.

Do you think about praise and feedback, and how you direct it? Comment below...

RoboEarth is up to Speed

In the midst of my series on the possible future of the Internet, an article from BBC falls in my lap, that really brings reality up to speed. As it turns out parts of my article about the future of robots are very much present.

Scientists at the Eindhoven University, the Netherlands, have created the first ever World Wide Web for robots. Sadly not dubbed "SkyNet" these doom bringers decided to call the system "RoboEarth". Playing straight into the fate of the Termintor series they did however decide to set off the robots by run a hospital room. No better way to take over the earth than to start by killing our the weak and discrepant.

I am exaggerating naturally, but I do find the timing comical. The four robots currently working in the mocked-up (I might ad) hospital are designed to serve drinks, dish out pills, or alert to emergencies. At the core of it all is one central system controlling all the robots.

As I discussed previously, a central problem with artificial intelligence is the inability to come up with new solutions to new problems. A computer will be bound to the strict confinements of its programming, resulting in an inability to learn “new” things. This specific problem is something they are now trying to circumvent by having the central computer learn everything. The aim of the system is to create a kind of ever-changing common brain for robots.

"The problem right now is that robots are often developed specifically for one task," said Rene van de Molengraft, the RoboEarth project leader. "Everyday changes that happen all the time in our environment make all the programmed actions unusable. A task like opening a box of pills can be shared on RoboEarth, so other robots can also do it without having to be programmed for that specific type of box."

The system is cloud-based, which in turn means that a lot of the memory capacity can be off-loaded from the individual robots to the central core, allowing for much smaller storage space, and faster processing. A single robot would simply download the script for solving the problem at hand, and then delete said script when the task is completed.

Using this approach, robots are becoming increasingly cheaper to manufacture, something that may result in us having servant robots in our homes in as little as 10 years, experts say. All controlled by the central hive-mind.

I hate to be an “I told you” so but - World, I told you so.

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What do you think? Are robots taking over the world, and if so are they going to let us have a place? Find out my thoughts in the upcoming conclusion of my series “the Conscious Internet”. And as always; please comment below.