Brazilian students learning English by chatting with lonely elders in the US

A São Paulo language school has launched an initiative to help it’s students get more talk time with native English speakers. And in doing so they have made a step towards reducing loneliness.

Made possible by technology and video chat accessibility, the idea is to match lonely elders in the US to keen language students in Brazil. Their needs are actually very similar; to talk! About anything!

A live video chat between a Brazilian student and an American elder

The project is called "Speaking Exchange" and is being implemented at the CNA language school in São Paulo with the pilot having been run in the Liberdade branch in São Paulo and Windsor Park Retirement Community in Chicago.

The initiative is a great example of dual learning, going beyond the teacher-learner dynamic in a way that both sides develop culturally and emotionally, making new friendships in the process.

On the back end, videos are automatically recorded and posted to teachers in order for the to evaluate their students and study their conversational development.

São Paulo attempts dual tunnelling a metro line for the first time

Tatuzão and Megatatuzão side by side

As of this week the extension to the Line 5 metro line is being worked on by two giant Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) instead of one. This is the first time ever São Paulo, or Brazil, has ever attempted dual tunnelling on a single metro line.

The extension, which runs from Campo Belo to Chácara Klabin station in Vila Mariana and costs R $7.5 billion, will add another 12km of track and 11 new stations.

However don’t expect it to be open any time soon. The new TBM humourously known as Tatuzão and it’s partner in crime Megatatuzão will only dig at a rate 15metres per day. That means the 1.9 km tunnel between LargoTreze, and the first of the new stations, Adolfo Pinheiro, is expected to be completed only by January next year.

So we can wait a while for the extended Lilac Line 5 to connect with the Blue Line 1 and Green Line 2 . Still, progress is progress.

Blocking cell phone usage of jailed gang members in São Paulo

Anyone who was here last year and witnessed the escalating death toll of policemen knows that the Primeiro Comando do Capital (PPC), the criminal gang which operates in São Paulo, is a hugely powerful force despite having up to half of its 15,000 members in prison. Part of the reason for that is the ease with which mobile phones are smuggled into prisons and used from within. The urban violence which spread throughout the city in 2006 was famously alleged to have been coordinated primarily from inside prisons thanks to mobile phones.

Cellphones being Smuggled into Brazilian prisons is common

All of that, though, may be about to change.

Brazilian firm Innovatech and Israel's Suntech are both vying for the R$1,1 billion ($484million) contract to run cell phone blocking technology across the prisons of the state of São Paulo. The idea being to jam cell phone signals coming from within the prison in order to reduce coordinated crime and victim reprisals.

Both companies were recently involved in secret trials of their cell phone denial technologies at high security prisons and it now seems that this long-promised initiative will finally become reality by year end. During one of the trials at Mogi das Cruzes prison, over 1500 active sim cards (some of which presumably belonged to prison staff) were detected and the cell phone difficulties incurred by inmates is said to have resulted in 23 calls to the customer helplines of major Brazilian operators. Helplines which, once the scheme is implemented, will have very few ways to assist these particular customers.

MAP: Every single tweet since 2009 with a São Paulo geotag

What would São Paulo look like if you plotted every every single geotagged tweet since 2009 on a map?

Thanks to Twitter we have the answer below:

The brighter the colour the higher the concentration of tweets in that particular area. It's interesting to note where these areas lie. In São Paulo's case the match up with main roads and highways is pretty clear. How much of these were made from cars stuck in traffic is not known!

Other maps below:

Tweets from Europe

Istanbul tweets

New York twitter map

São Paulo in Statistics: The 4th most tweeting city in the world

As Twitter reached and surpassed half a billion users, French social media analysts Semiocast released Twitter data from June 2012 split by world cities and ranked.

Whilst the US is the country which most tweets only New York makes the Top 5 cities, Jakarta, Tokyo, London and São Paulo being the global tweet capitals ahead of it. And as social media matures in Japan and UK we can expect São Paulo to move quickly up the ranking this year towards the number two spot.

São Paulo is ranked the 4th most tweeting city in the world

This week Twitter's Adam Bain announced the opening of a Brazilian office, date and location of which is yet to be confirmed. What are the chances they open it in the 4th most tweeting metropolis on the planet?

More São Paulo in Statistics here

8 bit São Paulo on Google Quest

Google Quest screenshot

Google never misses an April Fool's day and 2012 is no exception .

Today we were tongue-in-cheekingly told that in Google's pursuit of new digital frontiers, it has realized that it may have left behind a large number of users who couldn't access Google Maps on their classic hardware. Surprisingly, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was unsupported, despite its tremendous popularity with over 60 million units sold worldwide. 

Introducing, Google Maps Quest, a complete 8 bit map product which as the Google engineers tell us allow you to "search for famous landmarks and sites around the world. Take an epic journey with 8-bit Street View. Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures."

Right.

And what does São Paulo look like on Google Quest? Well, below is São Paulo's 8 bit NES Map:

São Paulo in 8 bits

Microchip operated gun shoots only from owner's hands

Mario Gazziro, shooting a prototype of his gun  (image from Folha de São Paulo)

In the film District 9 the alien “prawns” shoot weapons that work only with alien biology rendering them useless in the hands of humans. It’s a somewhat bizarre science fiction film but is apparently the inspiration for the latest research of Mario Gazzira of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). He has developed a gun which fires only in the hands of its owner thanks to a radio detection feature similar to that used for example on the São Paulo subway system to scan passenger travel passes.

The aim is to reduce accidental and non-accidental deaths by reducing the use of guns by third parties. Here’s how it works:

(image from Folha de São Paulo)

The gun will only fire when it detects a specific and unique chip which muct be embedded in the user's finger.



 The gun has a built in sensor which enables or disables the gun depending on whether or not te radio identification is successful similar to how turnstiles work on the underground system.












For the process to work the gun owner has to undergo microsurgery, something Mario Gazzira already did approximately one year ago in order to prove the technology works.

Not sure this will significantly reduce gun crime in São Paulo but from a technological point of view it's an interesting invention.

In-flight USB hubs on Avianca´s Airbus A319

São Paulo has many airlines providing domestic flights to numerous other Brazilian cities; Azul, Webjet, Gol, Avianca etc. These are not well known outside Brazil as they have a fleet of relatively small jets and only do short haul flights much like Easyjet and Ryanair back in Europe. In fact being well used to Ryanair and having once vowed never to fly Ryanair again I was pleasantly surprised last week when I boarded an Avianca A319 domestic flight from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro and found an excellent onboard service and cutting edge cabin fittings: cup-holder, remote control, individual tv screens, coat hook, adjustable head support, retractable arm rests etc. But the most useful feature which I don’t normally see even on long haul intercontinental flights was the in-flight USB hub for each passenger:

 

Now Ryanair has never given me a complimentary hot sandwich or a the courtesy drink like Avianca did so I guess I can forget about asking them for a USB port...

Bradesco's biometric blood vessel recognition

One of the misconceptions in the so-called industrialised world is that developing countries are necessarily less technologically advanced. Wrong.

Having previously written about their drive through banking I risk sounding like a Bradesco corporate evangelist, but their embrace of new security technologies are worthy of another mention. Due to the inordinate amount of local admin I have endured in my first few weeks I have visited at least one branch of most Brazilian banks operating in São Paulo and noticed that Bradesco's ATMs are a little different. Here's a picture of an ATM on Amazonas street right next to my hotel in Vila Olimpia:

You will notice that there is a red contraption on the right hand side. Take a closer look:

What it does is permit the bank to read your vein signature and depending on whether it matched correctly decide whether to allow the transaction to take place. From a user point of view it's quite a simple process once you have registered your blood vessel pattern. When you go to a Bradesco cashpoint you place your hand in the red area and press the "pulso" button. Infrared light will be emitted allowing the machine to record the blood vessel patterns in your hand and match it back to their database.

Nature and biology plays a helping hand (excuse the pun) with veins guaranteed to create intricate anatomical variations both within the same species and in case you were wondering, between different species (your pet would probably struggle with other aspects of the cashpoint anyway). This means the pattern of veins is much more variable from person to person than arteries for example and can be used as a unique identifier. Interesting, huh?

And for you techies the service itself is called Palmsecure and is developed by Fujitsu which also partners with Bank of Tokyo in its home country, Japan. They mention that as it is the deoxidized hemoglobin in the palm vein which absorbs the infrared rays, "the sensor of the palm vein device can only recognize the pattern if the deoxidized hemoglobin is actively flowing within the individual's veins". Technically true but frankly, if your veins are not taking deoxygenated blood back to your heart, you've got a pretty major problem and cashpoint security is going to be the least of your short term worries..

Presumably if there were a cheap way to expand this technology you could get rid of physical money altogether and scan your hand anytime you needed to identify yourself and pay. Wow, how very new, you might say. This year Brazil has snuck one step ahead of us. Wrong again. Palmsecure has been in use at cashpoints for 5 years already as shown by this article and is therefore already old school technology over here..

Amazing 6D cinema in Guaruja

Whilst at the beach at Guaruja (São Paulo state) I wandered into a local market and observed that 3D cinema is in fact old hat, the big hit now is 6D films. I never new Brazil was so advanced in cinematic production but since this discovery I will be blogging from completely new dimensions so be ready for some mind-bending entries...