http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/technology/personaltech/19pogue.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=grocery%20shopping%20made%20easy&st=cse&oref=slogin
New York Times
June 19, 2008
State of the Art
Grocery Shopping Made Easy
By DAVID POGUE
On “The Jetsons,” when George got hungry, he just pushed a couple of buttons on the Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle on the kitchen counter. In seconds, a freshly synthesized meal appeared on a plate, prepared to his exact specifications.
In the real world, food-synthesis science is only in its infancy, as you know if you’ve ever tasted fake blueberries in a muffin. But there is a machine that could be the Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle’s great-great-grandfather: a new countertop appliance called the Ikan.
The mission of this $400 device is to eliminate trips to the grocery store. The hardware component is a bulbous bar code scanner, dressed up in Any-Décor White and mounted on a countertop stand, an undercabinet bracket or a wall mount. It offers a color screen on the front, a laser scanner underneath and a Wi-Fi antenna inside that connects to your home wireless network.
Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.
In a clear, friendly font, the screen might say: “Nabisco Reduced Fat Ritz Crackers 14.5 Oz.,” for example. Now you can toss the box, content that its replacement has been added to your shopping list.
After a few days of this, you can review the list online at Ikan.net — and if everything looks good, click once to have everything delivered to your house at a time you specify.
Maybe it’s not exactly a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle. But at least it’s the Netflix of groceries.
Reactions to this gizmo are all over the map. Old-school homemakers may consider it a silly redundancy. How much more effort is it, they ask, to maintain a handwritten list? And isn’t going to the grocery store more than just a time drain? Isn’t it also a little outing, a small source of pride and accomplishment, an opportunity for social interaction?
Other people can’t believe the amount of time this system saves. You’ve just compressed a two-hour weekly errand into about 10 minutes. All you have to do is approve the illustrated, error-proof online shopping list, and then let somebody else battle the traffic, haul the bags and pay for the gas.
The Ikan company has found that customers’ reactions also depend on age, income and location (city vs. suburb, for example). But before you decide, consider some of the less apparent aspects of the Ikan.
First, there’s an environmental benefit. A big green Recycle log appears on the Ikan’s screen whenever you scan a package that’s recyclable in your town, warning you not to throw it away. (The company researches each municipality’s recycling policy individually as Ikan units are purchased, so the logo may not appear the first day you own the Ikan.)
Furthermore, consolidating many deliveries on a single truck removes a number of cars from the road, providing an additional green benefit.
Above all, though, your happiness with the Ikan will depend on what grocery delivery is available in your area.
The best situation is to live in Manhattan or certain surrounding suburbs, where Ikan is smoothly integrated with the D’Agostino grocery chain. For example, if you want something that has no bar code, like fresh fruit, you can press a Voice Reminder button and simply speak it: “Six green bananas.” A D’Agostino representative on the other end will manually add the requested item to your order.
Furthermore, if you scan something that D’Agostino doesn’t carry, a rep will call you to discuss a substitution. That speed bump eventually goes away, of course; over time, your standard list fills with those substitute items that the store does carry.
If you live beyond New York City, you may be able to get delivery from a company like Peapod, which offers service through Stop ’n’ Shop and Giant stores in 10 states. (That’s the service I tested.)
At the moment, the Ikan isn’t quite as well integrated with Peapod. For example, those spoken fresh-fruit recordings are not transmitted to your Peapod.com list. They show up on your page at Ikan.net, neatly typed out when possible (the system offers speech recognition of 800 terms, like “limes” or “bananas”). But you have to add them to your Peapod.com list manually.
You don’t get a phone call about substitutions, either. Items that Peapod doesn’t carry congregate in a special section of your Peapod.com list; choosing substitutions is left to you.
Most of the Ikan’s weaknesses stem from its fledgling status, not from design or concept problems. It’s incredibly solid and speedy in performing its central functions: recognizing your home network, identifying products you’re scanning and transmitting them instantly to the Web. Even teenagers won’t forget to add things to the list, since it’s so much fun to scan them.
But the Ikan’s appeal will grow as the company develops partnerships with more store chains, as the features grow and as the steep price goes down.
The Ikan unit is a little bulky for a kitchen counter. The next version, the company says, will be far smaller; it will incorporate a digital camera instead of a laser apparatus.
It’s also a little alarming that the thing is perpetually on. Sure, it uses only a trickle of electricity, but seeing that screen lighted day and night, ready for the next scan, will bug the environmentalist in you.
Finally, you’ve got a wireless Internet-connected machine with a color screen right there on your counter. What a waste not to have it fetch news, sports scores, weather and other Web info for you — or, at the least, to offer recipes and how-to cooking videos. The company says that it plans to add all of these features.
Incidentally, if you’ve never tried home grocery delivery, you’re in for a treat; at least in my Peapod experiments, the system is extremely refined. The Web site is exceptionally well designed for quick list-building — you can search by category, by name, by aisle or by items you’ve ordered in the past.
You can specify a two-hour delivery window, leave instructions like “If no answer, leave in garage,” use store coupons (just hand them to the driver), use your store loyalty card, view all of the store’s specials and so on. Frozen items come surrounded by little dry-ice packets, which produce huge volumes of white cloudy steam when dropped into a bucket of water — hours of fun for my whole family.
My one disappointment: nearly every item in my test orders came, pointlessly, in its own white plastic bag — every jar of pickles, every package of bacon. After unpacking, I put all 30 bags back into the large insulated delivery coolers that the driver had dropped off, hoping that the store would get the message. Or at least reuse the bags for the next customer.
Still, the time savings are truly gigantic. For a delivery charge of $6 to $8, you save a couple of hours a week and you gain incredible convenience. At the very least, you can use the home delivery option for staples — the stuff you always buy — and visit the actual store just for the elective items, or things you want to hand-pick.
All right, Americans don’t really need another way to avoid moving their bodies or leaving the house. But think of it this way: with all that time you save, you can get to the gym more often. That’s the way of the future, isn’t it?
E-mail: [email protected]
Small Projects Assignment { Math 150B, Spring 2014 Show all your work. Correct answers without full justi�cations receive no credit.
Only typed solutions will be accepted. Only one (can be double-sided) page is allowed for each problem.
Warning: Sharing the solutions is strictly prohibited and will result in no credit.
Problem 1. (10 points) The Outer Banks consists of a 100-mile (160-km) long string of beaches and narrow barrier islands on the East Coast of the United States. The Outer Banks form approximately the northern half of the state of North Carolina's Atlantic coastline, and separate the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds from the Atlantic Ocean. (see, Wikipedia for more information, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer Banks .)
The Outer Banks was the site of the Wright brothers' �rst ight in a powered, heavier-than-air vehicle on December 17, 1903. The site where they ew is now located in the beachfront town of Kill Devil Hills, where the Wright Brothers National Monument commemorates the historic ight. Kill Devil Hill is a broad sand dune that peaks at 66 feet above Albemarle Sound, which lies due west.
Imagine that you on the top of Kill Devil Hill (see the �gure below) on a calm day with no waves. Through a telescope, you are watching a friend swim across the sound toward the mainland. Because of the curvature of the earth, she will eventually disappear across the horizon. How far away (in feet) can your friend get before she disappears from view? Provide your results using 4, 5, and 6 digits arithmetics.
Note: Assume that the height of the telescope is zero, while the radius of the earth is 2:09�107 feet, signi�cant to three digits.
Problem 2. (10 points) A stone was thrown into air from a roof of a building 100 feet high, with the speed of 20ft
s and 30� angle (from
the ground level). While neglecting air resistance, �nd:
(a) The position (x(t);y(t)) of the stone at any time t � 0.
(b) stone's highest altitude,
(c) the time needed for the stone to reach the ground,
(d) stone's position (from the building) when it hits the ground, 1
2
(e) stone's velocity (it's a vector !) and speed when it hits the ground.
Note: Provide exact results. No approximations !!! Assume that the acceleration due to gravity is 32 ft/sec2
directed downward. Choose upward direction as the positive vertical axis.
Problem 3. (20 points) A spherical tank of radius R meters is to be used to hold uid. You are given a stick to dip into tank, and you want to calibrate the scale on it such that it reads the volume of uid in the tank. (a) Find the equation whose solution determines the height of the uid for a given volume V . Provide details of your work.
(b) For R = 3 and a sample volume V = 4 3 �, use Newton's method to determine the height of the uid with
accuracy of 10�3. Provide details of your work.
Hint: Consider Figure 1.
Figure 1. A spherical tank of radius R �lled with a liquid to height H above its bottom.
Problem 4. (30 points) A man wearing a parachute falls from rest toward the earth. The combined weight of man and parachute is W = 161 lb. Let V(t) denote his speed at time t seconds after the fall begins. During the �rst 10 seconds, the air resistance is V=2. Thereafter, while the parachute is open, the air resistance is 10V . The gravitational acceleration g = 32:2 ft=s2.
(a) Find an explicit formula V (t) at any time greater than 10 seconds. (b) What is the terminal velocity of the motion ? Give the result using the mile/hour unit.
(c) Find the terminal velocity in the case when a parachute does not open ? Give the result using the mile/hour unit.
Problem 5. (30 points) In a series of experiments on a planet (not necessarily Earth) projectiles were shot vertically into space. The data from the those experiments include initial velocities v0, impact velocities vi, and the total times of the projectiles in motion, i.e., tup + tdown.
These motions were described by the pair of di�erential equations
m dv
dt = �mg � kv; k > 0; m > 0; g > 0;
positive y-axis up, origin at ground level so that v(0) = v0 at y = 0, for the \up" motion, and
m dv
dt = mg � kv; k > 0; m > 0; g > 0;
positive y-axis down, origin at the maximum height hmax so that v = 0 at y = 0, for the \down" motion. These equations describe the motion of the projectile when rising and falling, respectively.
Determine the acceleration of gravity g for the planet in terms of v0, vi, and tup + tdown.

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