Maria heads to the dollar store for materials for a fun Halloween candy container!

Maria takes a look at a great crafty holiday gift idea for kids - Duck Tape!

Maria checks out the new mixed media Seth Apter The Altered Page line from Spellbinders at the CHA Mega Show 2016!

Bangladesh’s export earnings in October this year grew by 20.6 per cent YoY, fetching $4.13 billion. From July to October this year, exports grew by 10.8 per cent YoY to reach $15.79 billion. The readymade garments (RMG) sector contributed $12.81 billion to export earnings during the four-month period. In October, the RMG sector generated $3.30 billion in export revenues—a 22.8 per cent YoY increase.

In October, the US consumer price index for garments rose by 1.1 per cent month-over-month, reversing prior declines in 2023. Current clothing prices are 7.6 per cent higher than 2019 averages. Import prices for cotton-heavy apparel stabilised at $3.70/SME, still above pre-pandemic levels. Consumer confidence rose to its highest since January 2024, with spending on apparel up 1.7 per cent YoY.

The 2024 Laureus Sport for Good Index honours brands advancing the 17 SDGs through sport, highlighting impactful initiatives that address key social and ecological issues. Head of Partnerships Astin Ewington emphasises the Index’s role in showcasing sport's power to drive positive change, inspiring more brands to use sport as a platform for meaningful, sustainable impact.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 substantially expanded the Section 45L tax credit for new energy-efficient homes. This credit offers builders of sustainable homes significant tax savings. Here’s what you need to know to take advantage of these updated credits and maximize the benefits for your projects. Key Takeaways: Key Changes to Section 45L...

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To me, the gaming market is a lot like the EDC market: It's fascinating to see what developmental lengths people will go to, to push the UX of some object with highly specific functions. A case in point is this Elitech Protean Space Quick Control Swap Gaming System.

The idea behind it, is that gamers have multiple task-dependent UI's on their desks: A keyboard for typing, a joystick and throttle for playing flight simulators, a steering wheel and a shifter for driving games. For gaming accuracy these need to be mounted, and juggling the mounts is apparently a hassle. So what this design does is, provide a modular platform on which to securely attach different controllers.

The heart of the system is this keyboard base, with two wings.

The keyboard base slides rearwards, revealing aluminum channels.

The wing pieces can be slid towards each other along these channels, adjusted to your preferred width.

The "X" in the top of the wings is stainless steel. This allows you to attach magnetic controllers.

Furthermore, there are clamping attachments that allow you to attach a steering wheel and shifter.

Thus the gamer can quickly achieve the set-up that they want:

This isn't yet in production; the developer is planning a crowdfunding campaign.

Dorel Juvenile is the world's leading juvenile products company. When they wanted to develop a new infant car seat, they turned to Pennsylvania-based ID firm DesignThink.

DesignThink as the Innovation Incubator for the Ultra Lightweight Maxi Cosi Coral XP

A Cold January Day in 2017

The team at DesignThink was asked to visit Dorel Juvenile Group USA to review a "Special Project". The development team at Dorel JG wasted no time introducing us to their latest infant car seat (ICS) project. They were experimenting with the idea of developing a seat that would reduce the struggles parents faced when trying to transition their baby from the car and carry their baby in the removable seat portion of the ICS. The team at DesignThink has designed several car seats over the years and we instantly recognized the unique opportunity, as well as the challenge that this project offered, and were eager and excited to get started.

Our Role as the Innovation Incubator

We partnered with Dorel to act as the innovation incubator to lead the project team through the fuzzy front-end and define the product's overall features and characteristics of use. Upon successful concept definition, the project would be positioned under the Maxi Cosi brand and ultimately transferred to the Maxi Cosi team in Europe and a European design group to carry the innovation to production.

The Problem at Hand

By removing the seat from the base that is installed in the car, parents can take the baby with them while running errands or visiting people and places. However, a problem associated with this system is that some removable seats can weigh up to 16 lbs. and the baby can weigh up to 35 lbs. for a combined arm-crushing weight of 50+lbs.!!

We established two primary goals: 1) reduce the overall weight of the seat to lighten the load, while maintaining structural integrity as to achieve a top crash test rating, and 2) develop new methods that enable parents to more easily lift the seat when moving in and out of the vehicle and when transporting the child in the seat.

Our Approach (Decades of Experience and User Understanding Put to Test)

DesignThink is one of the leading firms in car seat development having brought several seats to the market and has a long history of creating break-through innovation, but this project pushed our team in new ways. The structure for the project utilized DesignThink's simplified "DEEP" process;

Define that for which we will solve

Express possible solutions as quick thumbnail stories

Explain the "what – why – wow" related to user needs

Prototype to demonstrate the merits of the idea

How the Project Unfolded

A series of innovation workshops were hosted at our studio to enable the team to think and problem solve with product at hand. The objective was to think in the "ideal" (do not worry about cost and construction initially) and to "fail fast" (explore, evaluate, and evolve). The following provided the high-level framework for how the team identified and pursued their ideas.

Established Design Targets

Led by our usability team, along with team members from Dorel, we hosted a several day innovation workshop at our studio. We began with a collaborative defining of the design targets based on use, expectations, pain points, and opportunities, which we affinitized and moved directly into physical prototyping to address and evaluate how well the concepts improved the user experience during day-to-day interactions.

DEEP: Innovation Workshops to prototype your idea. You are encouraged to be chaotic and messy! Fail fast! Dorel made sure plenty of product was on hand to fuel the innovation.

Inutitive Carry

Enhanced Confidence

Improved Transitions

Development of Design Targets

Role-Play is the Best Way

To truly understand and empathize with users, we role-played, exploring typical use-case scenarios to inform our ideation. Placing ourselves in the same situations helps us quickly evaluate and improve our concepts.

Handle-Carry:

Evolution for improved ease when attaching the seat to the base and removing the child from the vehicle

Cradle-Carry:

Exploration to improve how parents can bond with the baby in a more natural holding position

Cross-Body Strap:

Exploration to provide alternate ways to carry the baby while reducing the effects of weight and fatigue on the parent

Iterative User Evaluation Cycle

Our early thoughts and ideas were evaluated by the team and with parents in our research lab. These ideas were then refined to strengthen the evolving direction. The learnings obtained through this method enabled the team to focus on the most meaningful directions and build their value. Listening, understanding, and empathizing allowed our team to develop new ideas in this category that were previously unexplored.

DesignThink presents the refined design direction.

A series of prototypes and user evaluations enabled us to reach a stage of concept definition for an ultra lightweight car seat that provides parents with improved ways to carry, hold, and secure their baby.

Our Results

User-Centered Insights lead to Market Defining Solutions

Having developed many juvenile products such as car seats, strollers, and highchairs, DesignThink understands the day-to-day challenges parents face, both physically and emotionally. We embarked on this project with Dorel to define a new car seat with features that take into account those challenges and offer relevant and meaningful solutions. Exploring innovation that is rooted in user insights enabled our team to quickly define those solutions and overcome technical hurdles to deliver new experiences to address real problems faced by parents when using an ICS.

Defining the Direction

As mentioned, DesignThink was hired as the innovation incubator in the fuzzy front-end to develop and define a new architecture for this seat. Our work was documented and handed off to the Maxi-Cosi team in Europe. The output of our innovation incubation became the driving framework used by the teams in Europe to create a truly meaningful and relevant solution for parents in this category.

The DesignThink team is very proud to have been selected by Dorel to play such an important "behind the scenes" role in setting the direction for, and contributing to the success of, the Maxi Cosi Coral XP.

It takes a Village to Design a Car Seat

Snapshot of the iterative concept development that led to the final product

You can see more of DesignThink's work here.

I have no idea who the target market for these is. Chinese tool manufacturer Arrowmax sells these Black Golden Honeycomb tools: Drivers, Allen wrenches and reamers.

They're sold individually or in sets.

On the company's website, there are literally no product descriptions for any of the tools—no explanation of the handle design, nor even what any of the tools are made out of. The only thing I was able to learn about the tools, was in the company's thin bio: Apparently these were featured, somewhere in the background, in the Marvel movie "Ant Man & the Wasp." Of course they were.

The message from Autodesk and the many companies that presented and exhibited at Autodesk University (AU) last month in San Diego was clear: for the product design and manufacturing (D&M), architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO), and media and entertainment (M&E) industries, AI is a driving force behind productivity.

Autodesk University Mainstage

Data, data, data

AI-driven productivity is customized to the specific needs of each industry, with various generative and multimodal AI models providing solutions for tasks like workflow optimization, manufacturing quality assurance, regulatory compliance, and design visualization. However, the value of AI across these sectors—and beyond—is determined by the quantity and quality of data used.

Quantity matters because more data enables AI systems to learn and improve. Quality, however, is more complex. It requires obtaining relevant data, ensuring data accuracy, and verifying that data usage complies with ethical standards.

Dell demonstrated how their workstations can run generative AI 3D content with NVIDIA Edify trained on Shutterstock ethically sourced content.

Customers are key

The importance of AI and data was evident throughout AU, with presentations and product demonstrations highlighting customer-centric solutions. Hardware providers showcased high-performance workstations equipped with powerful processors, optimized to support AI workloads. Meanwhile, data and asset management providers emphasized AI’s capabilities in extracting valuable information, managing metadata, and monitoring workflows in real time.

Lenovo displayed next generation workstations designed with a customer-centric focus. Partnering with Intel®, NVIDIA and Aston Martin, they offer high-end graphics, memory and processing power.

Autodesk’s Design & Manufacturing team showcased how they are addressing their customers' needs by delivering AI-powered efficiencies through Fusion, a cloud-based, unified platform for design and manufacturing. They also introduced Project Bernini, a research initiative focused on a new approach to generative AI. Unlike many generative models that prioritize the appearance of 3D objects, Bernini emphasizes generating structural 3D data from the inside out, which aligns closely with real-world production needs.

Experimental research project Bernini model generates shape and texture separately and does not confuse or meld those variables.

AI provides a wide range of possibilities based on industry-specific needs. For entertainment and gaming, AI can generate lifelike product and character models, while in manufacturing and design, it lays the foundation for real-world production. With tools like Fusion and research projects like Bernini, Autodesk aims to empower creators and makers to leverage AI for both efficiency and innovation.

Goldman Sachs has lowered its forecast for 2025 eurozone GDP growth to 0.8 per cent from 1.1 per cent. Europe’s economy will be hit by the return of Donald Trump as president, due to the likelihood of new trade tensions with the US, pressure to raise defense spending and a blow to business confidence due to higher geopolitical risks, its experts believe. European companies may also face tariffs.

October US container imports were 2,494,635 TEUs, marking the fourth month in a row of volumes exceeding 2.4 million TEUs, a threshold that has historically strained US maritime logistics, the November Global Shipping Report by Descartes Systems Group noted. For the first ten months of 2024, volumes grew by 13.1 per cent YoY. At seven of the top 10 US ports, transit time delays rose in October.

Turkiye’s overall export unit value index rose by 3.6 per cent YoY in September, while the overall export volume index fell by 5.2 per cent YoY. The country’s overall import unit value index rose by 4.7 per cent YoY in September, while the overall import volume index fell by 5.8 per cent YoY. Turkish trade sales volume rose by 12.7 per cent YoY and by 3.2 per cent month on month in September.

Global cotton markets saw slight declines and stabilisation in recent weeks, with NY/ICE December futures trading between 67–75 cents/lb since June, now at 71 cents/lb. The global A Index dipped from 85 to 83 cents, while China's index dropped from 101 to 97 cents due to a weaker yuan. Indian and Pakistani spot prices also declined, but both rupees remained stable against the dollar.

APTEXPO 2024 has opened at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, gathering over 300 international delegates and exhibitors to discuss industry resilience and sustainability. The event spans three days, featuring keynote speakers, panels, and over 200 exhibitors. Focused sessions address global market trends, digitalisation, and cooperation to build a stronger Asia-Pacific textile network.

As the world begins to recover from 2020 and the economic detriment, what is next on the horizon? Download our recorded webinar discussing the current economic state and the positive uptick in the market. You’ll learn about: Economic impact on business post-pandemic Best practices for moving your business forward How to plan for the remaining fiscal year...

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Anders was named to St. Louis Small Business Monthly’s list of Best Accounting Firms for 2021. The Best Accounting Firms were nominated by St. Louis area businesses and voted to have the top accountants in St. Louis as part of Small Business Monthly’s Best in Business awards. The 2021 Best Accounting Firms will be recognized...

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Anders was approached and selected by the producers of the television show “World’s Greatest!…” to be featured on a segment for the accounting industry. Anders is honored to be recognized on the World’s Greatest! TV Show, an award-winning National Television Series airing on the ION Network. The segment gives a glimpse into the collaborative and...

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Companies and candidates are continually asking, “what does the current hiring market look like?” And many are shocked by the response. The truth is that the market is incredibly short on good quality candidates right now, and many job postings are open for extended periods while companies search for candidates. So, how did the job...

The post Hiring Challenges Back to Pre-Pandemic Levels – 5 Ways to Recruit the Right Hire appeared first on Anders CPA.

Anders was recognized on Missouri Lawyers Media’s 2021 Reader Rankings list for Forensic Accounting Providers. As one of the top three firms honored on the list, Anders was nominated and selected by the readers of Missouri Lawyers Media in an annual ranking of top businesses and firms in the legal profession. The Anders Forensic and...

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Anders received a Marketing Achievement Award for best new website at the 2021 Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM) Summit. Anders won in the Website category which included website projects with budgets under and over $34,999. The nomination highlighted the firm’s newly redesigned website that launched in May of 2020. Anders worked with St. Louis web design...

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Perhaps you’ve noticed how cottagecore has recently become one of the most popular interior design styles. Cottagecore is a design aesthetic that idealizes rural life. It includes homes decorated in earthy colors, nostalgic patterns, and wood tones, it’s a style that’s a nod to the English countryside. Cottagecore is also a lifestyle focused on simple…

This release describes how e-cigarette affect middle and high school students

The latest vital signs report detailing the affects of exposure to electronic cigarette advertisements on middle and high school students in the United States during 2014.

More than 1.8 million smokers attempted to quit smoking and an estimated 104,000 Americans quit smoking for good because of the nine-week-long 2014 Tips From Former Smokers ( Tips ) campaign.

Report on the latest statistical data regarding middle and high school students and tobacco use.

Infographic showing data regarding middle and high school students and tobacco use.

Data regarding smoking, quantity and access to cigarettes by youth in 45 countries during 2013 and 2014.

Data regarding the disparities with tobacco-related cancer incidences and death from 2004 until 2013.

Characteristics of e-cigarette use among middle and high school students in the United States during 2015.

Google's new Learn About tool offers an interactive approach to learning about topics, including heady questions like whether money buys happiness.

Protein powders, yogurts, and bars make hitting our protein targets easy, but can contain UPFs. Here's what happened when health reporter Rachel Hosie quit them for a week.

The "SNL" comedian Chloe Fineman said Musk made her cry when he hosted the show in 2021. On Sunday, he said "SNL" had been "slowly dying for years."

The Japanese conglomerate was part of an investment round unveiled by OpenAI last month that valued the ChatGPT maker at $157 billion.

Several KM leaders offer predictions for the space in 2023

Obtaining contextual knowledge about how users create and interact with unstructured data is an essential business practice to plan for data storms effectively. Enterprises need to understand that it's not enough to know these user activities but also must take remediation action when necessary.

Multinational companies are generally aware of data transfer laws, but smaller ones just embarking on looking beyond country borders may not be.

By enabling greater productivity and accelerated software development timelines, no code/low code is on the rise.

The need for comprehensive data management will always be important, and there are many other benefits of digital transformation, but CIOs don't need to delay GenAI projects until the completion of a giant data centralization effort. By adopting a more flexible approach that incorporates GenAI and next-generation BI tools, businesses can navigate the complexities of modern data ecosystems while driving innovation and maintaining a competitive edge in an AI-driven world.

Together, they empower organizations to unlock the full potential of their data and teams

Tennr, the company automating the messy, manual work holding healthcare organizations back, is announcing the completion of a Series B funding round?led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from existing investors a16z and Foundation Capital?having raised $37 million. Bringing Tennr's total capital raised to over $61 million, the latest funding will continue to support the company's technological breakthroughs in document automation for the healthcare industry.

The investment in Reality Defender demonstrates Accenture's strong commitment to helping clients confidently navigate the genAI driven threat landscape, mitigate financial fraud, and maintain the integrity of their digital communications

Features allow enterprises to gain insight from corporate data with graphical categorizations and support for Sharepoint and NAS Environments

By infusing cameras with advanced AI technology, Video AI Agents enable cameras to identify, reason, and trigger responses to real-life incidents without requiring human intervention

PrestigePEO leverages AI-driven insights for informed decision-making and optimal pricing strategies

Qantm AI will incorporate SQream's offerings to streamline data analytics for complex insights across industries

Atlantic.Net?empowers customers to advance offerings through market-leading AI cloud solutions, helping to speed up the adoption of AI compute for software developers and businesses

University to use the Altair HyperWorks and Altair RapidMiner platforms in groundbreaking electric propulsion digital twin project

The Stravito enterprise insights platform has enabled Delta to democratize its insights and maximize its research potential, improving the flying experience for customers and employees alike