A 13-year-old boy from New York conducts an experiment using the Fibonacci Sequence to place solar panels in a geometric pattern, mimicking the strategy of nature. Proves that it is effective.
We were all 13 years old, once!
http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html
A lively commentary from Eli Pariser, founder of Moveon.org — on the perils of too much personalization.
The unintended consequences of web services that try to algorythmically guess what you want to see, based on who they think you are and the patterns of what you do…
Some clear, simple thinking on the changes to human psychology through history…and what may be required to take the next step.
Offered by author Jeremy Rifkin; more about him here. Illustrated talk to the Royal Society for the Arts, London.
This company is interesting because it attempts to break out of the box of search-as-we-know-it. In a quite different way from Search Visualizer; perhaps a complementary way:
“We build search technologies that make it possible to discover information that is difficult to describe.
Words like cool, modern, hip, romantic, retro and timeless mean different things to different people. So until computers can read your mind, Keywords don’t always work.
With Sortuv technologies you discover places, events, products, people, ideas and experiences that matter to you by comparing and connecting them to things you already know and like.”
Their initial application is interesting things to do in major American cities, and popular culture. I can understand why, if they’re seeking to build an early business model. But the technologies could have broader application, and combined with SV could be significant.
“Though it sounds odd, the technology could go so far as to find a bottle of wine that is like a Monet painting.”
“…the technology could be applied to human resources in order to help companies find job candidates who resemble other successful employees. Or, he said, it could be used to find patterns in legal documents.”
The human eye, mind and heart…the ultimate camera.
Autistic? Not.
This video describes an interpretation of the meaning of the Voynich Manuscript by Dr. Gordon Rugg, one of the founders of Prevocative and a professor of knowledge modelling at Keele University, Staffordshire U.K. Professor Rugg demonstrates how the Voynich, a classic problem that has fascinated linguists and encryption excerpts for centuries, could be a hoax. An edited excerpt from the “Weird or What?” documentary, first aired May 2010 on the Discovery Channel. Details from the original producer, see http://dsc.discovery.com/
A journey from Earth, just above the high Tibetan plain — to the edge of the known universe, moving back in time billions of years…and back home again. All based on current scientific data.
From the Museum of Natural History, and their partner across the Park, the Hayden Planetarium, with funding from NASA. If this isn’t enough — you can download the data and tools used to make this video and make your own — lots of teacher resources and academic depth here too, if you want it:
Arthur Lipper comments: This is the most fascinating thing I have seen in a long time. Felt slightly dizzy just looking at it.
Michael North adds: Play this in hi-def if you can — a six minute tour of the most advanced technologies ever deployed. And one of the greatest examples of international co-operation, too. Where else can you find the top 15 countries in the world all collaborating smoothly on something this complex and important? Let’s hope that, together, they can find a way to keep it working and growing.
Creativity, iteration, ambiguity, time — reflections from innovators at Google and GE.
From a worthy source, http://fora.tv — subscription to their bi-weekly updates almost always nets a useful video or two.
This is an excerpt from a United States Air Force training tape about missile guidance systems.
It describes how guided missiles locate themselves, and get to their target.
“The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t. By subtracting where it is from where it isn’t, or where it isn’t from where it is, whichever is greater — it obtains a difference, or deviation….arriving at a position where it wasn’t, it now is.”
audio courtesy, Arthur Lipper
Bouncing a focused beam of radio waves off the moon, and listening for the echo. Pretty cool, you can send data, audio and still photos that way.
The first to do it were the Apollo astronauts. Since then, it’s been a project that many HAM radio enthusiasts enjoy, because it involves some nicely sophisticated targeting, a big dish, noise-reduction technology…
Last year there was a rather large citizens’ Moon Bounce festival, drawing kids into it from all over the world to learn about the space program, about physics and radio technology.
A radio telescope operated by the Stanford Research Institute was one of may which participated in the first Echoes of Apollo event.
One of the founders of Prevocative, Michael North, is also a founder and adviser to Echoes of Apollo. In fact, their wonderful website is hosted on the same server as ours:
One of the leading HAM journals, CQ, tells the whole story in an entertainingly geeky way…the website tells about upcoming events, one of which will involve the world’s largest radio telescope at Mt. Arecibo.
Wry observation from the editors of Big Think about the recent spectacular experiments at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva: “We are grateful that, improbable as it seemed, the collider did not create a fatal black hole.”
Other quotable quotes from this article in The Atlantic Monthly (where there are links to videos):
“I value the spirit of curiosity and discovery that leads scientists to spend $16 billion to build something that may (not will, but may) give us an inkling about how the universe works.”
Virtual Reality (VR) photography has come a long way. The technology for taking a series of related photos of a scene, stitching them together and then placing them in an animated, navigable framework has been around for some time — it just keeps getting better.
Three current links:
http://www.utah3d.net/SulpherCreek_swf.html
http://www.utah3d.net/DoubleArch1_swf.html
http://www.utah3d.net/PaysonC_swf.html
Rotate all the way around, zoom in (shift) and out (ctrl) , tilt up and down, or any combination of the above. The potential for using this type of technology for non-photographic purposes — for example, to visualize large, complex sets of data — is intriguing.
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/
Unused cycles on your computer go to building a complete 3D model of the Milky Way. The newest addition to the boinc open source project, which has hundreds of thousands of computers around the world working on problems in the medical, climate, cryptology, physics, genetics, astronomy…and the original, search for extraterrerstrial life.
Downloads, info: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Available projects: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
