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Monday November 13, 2017 02 x shenzhen
At a Glance
Zhang [email protected]
IT might sound unrealistic if someone says he can control a drone with his mind, but that’s what really happened at Maker Faire Shenzhen, which was held at the Shenzhen Polytechnic between Friday and yesterday.
Many visitors were stunned when they saw a young man who was wearing a head controller to fl y a drone with his mind. The mind-controlled drone was one of the products being displayed by a Nanjing-based company called Glarun Innovation at the Maker Faire.
Zhou Yang, spokesperson for Glarun Innovation, said the drone was actually controlled by the user’s brainwaves. According to him, the head controller has multiple sensors that can recog-nize a user’s brainwaves when the user gives different orders to the drone, such as fl ying forward, backward or making a turn, after it completes a process to learn the user’s brainwaves.
“We’ve been developing the product for one and a half years. It is expected to go on to the market next year,” he said, adding that the technology can be applied to drones produced by any brand.
Another product showcased at the booth of Zhou’s company was a sign-language translator, which can recognize the sign language gestured by deaf people and translate it into Chinese. The device can display the translated sentences on its screen and read it out for users.
Zhang [email protected]
A NEW challenge for Amanda Beepath, a Caribbean teacher from Trinidad and Tobago, after teaching in Shenzhen for almost three years, is to assist new for-eign teachers in adapting to their new lives and work in the city.
Beepath has been helping eight fresh teachers deal with challenges of both working and living in a for-eign city since the new school year began in September.
Beepath now works as a mentor at a local personnel training center that recruits and
trains foreign teachers. She is also a teacher at a primary school in Bao’an Dis-trict.
Although all of the
new foreign teachers working at public schools in Shenzhen are required to have college degrees and TESOL certifi cates, they have to also go through various training programs in different countries to become teachers.
“What we mainly do is to offer
these new teachers some unifi ed guidelines to settle in their work at schools. For instance, we pro-vide a unifi ed lesson-plan format to guide the teachers to plan their lessons,” said Beepath.
In between her busy life teach-ing 12 classes per week, Beepath arranges face-to-face meetings with members of her group and solves problems for them.
“Teaching in China is very dif-ferent because these new teach-ers did not usually teach students at such a large amount (around 60 students in every class) in their countries, so there is a lot to adapt to,” said Beepath.
“Now they speak slower with more body language to help the Chinese students understand.”
Beepath thinks it’s important for foreign teachers to stay at the same school for longer peri-ods in order to connect with the students and help them learn.
Extending contracts with the same school is not the foreign teachers’ choice and the Chinese students often have to adapt to new foreign teachers every year or even every semester. Beepath hopes that more for-eign teachers will be able to stay longer at the same school.
A CONSORTIUM of Shenzhen Metro Co., China Civil Engineer-ing Construction Corp. (CCECC) and Israel’s Egged Bus Coopera-tive will operate and maintain the future light Metro Red Line in Tel Aviv, Israel, according to an agreement signed Thursday (local time) in Israel.
The Red Line, which will be put into operation in 2021, will run 23 kilometers from Bat Yam in the south to Petah Tikva in the northeast with a signifi cant por-tion going underground. It will be the second underground rail ser-vice in Israel, after the Carmelit in Haifa. The line is expected to see an annual passenger fl ow of around 100 million.
This is the fi rst Metro project in a developed country in which a Shenzhen enterprise has par-ticipated in the maintenance and operation, according to Peng Haibin, director with Shenzhen State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, at the signing ceremony.
Shenzhen Metro will set up a joint company, Sole Purpose Co., with other consortium members for the operation and mainte-nance of the rail, according to a release by Shenzhen Metro Group on Saturday.
Shenzhen Metro will be responsible for providing safe and high-quality light-rail ser-vices and mechanical mainte-nance and building a complete and systematic light-rail system.
The Red Line project is the third overseas contract Shenzhen Metro Group has secured follow-ing agreements to operate a light rail in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, and the Cat Linh-Ha Dong urban rail transit system in Hanoi, Vietnam. Shenzhen Metro Co. is negotiating with Nigeria and Egypt to operate their rail projects.
“The technologies and services of Shenzhen Metro have been recognized by the world mar-kets. We are trying to improve our capabilities in market expan-sion, technology innovation and service industrialization,” said Xiao Min, general manager with Shenzhen Metro Co.
Facial recognitionSHENZHEN North Railway Station has installed 14 facial recognition dispensers where travelers can check in before taking trains. Travelers can scan their IDs and face the cameras to complete recognition. Those who buy tickets with other doc-uments will need to go through the manual check.New museumSHENZHEN is preparing for the construction of Guangdong
Reform and Opening Up Commemorative Museum, which will open in 2018 to mark the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up, Shenzhen Cultural Relics Work Meeting announced Friday.
The city now has 47 regis-tered museums, including 16 funded by government and 31 private museums.
The city has 1,116 historic and culture sites, including one State-level protection site and 13 provincial-level protection sites.
Huang Qijian (C), director of the Public-ity Department of Longhua District Com-mittee of the CPC, Mission Hills Group Chairman Ken Chu (2nd R) and others inaugurate the Mission Hills branch of the Longhua Public Civilization Associa-tion at a ceremony in Longhua on Friday. The branch, the fi rst of its kind in a 5A scenic spot in China, will regularly hold activities to promote civilization con-struction at Mission Hills.
Mission Hills, a scenic spot with a 5A ranking, which is the highest level in China, hosts more than 6 million foreign and domestic tourists every year. The branch will help promote civilized tour-ism there, according to Chu.
Courtesy of Mission Hills Group
Mind-controlled drone at Maker Faire
According to Zhou, they have been developing the translator for over a year and it is not fully developed yet because the algo-rithm for sign-language recogni-tion is very complicated.
Over 200 exhibitors from nearly 30 countries attended this year’s Maker Faire. Nearly 30 globally renowned makers were invited to the event as guest speakers, including Davide Gomba, an Italian maker and founder of the fi rst Italian Fab Lab.
Gomba runs a project called Casa Jasmina in Italy, with the goal of integrating traditional Ital-ian skills in furniture and interior design with open-source electron-ics to create a smart home.
According to Gomba, makers
in Italy are willing to spend more time designing and researching a product before getting it on the market, as the country has a long history of product design.
He said things are different in China because Chinese makers are building their products in a very effi cient way. “The maker companies in China are really benefi tting from the fact that you have a super short produc-tion chain.”
Gomba feels that many makers in Shenzhen have a lot of knowl-edge about how and what to do, but they sometimes can’t fi gure out why they are doing it and fail to solve the users’ real prob-lems.
The fi rst Maker Faire event
was hosted in the United States in 2006, followed by more events in countries across the globe. Chaihuo Maker Space, a maker space created and sponsored by Seeed Studio in Shenzhen, has organized Maker Faire Shenzhen for the past fi ve years.
In 2014, 119 independently produced Mini and 14 Featured Maker Faires occurred in cities around the world, including Tokyo, Rome, Detroit, Oslo and Shenzhen. Maker Faire Shenzhen upgraded from the Mini level to the Featured level in 2014, becoming the seventh in the world. It was a highlight event of the Maker Week orga-nized by the Shenzhen Municipal Government last year.
SZ Metro wins Israeli contract
Caribbean mentor helps new foreign teachers blend in
Civilization association
Amanda Beepath
Expat and local residents try an electric music instrument at Maker Faire Shenzhen yesterday at Shenzhen Polytechnic.Sun Yuchen
