Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse. VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all — enough to fill “a big closet.” I started…
—The Song Tapper Tap out the rhythm of the lyrics on your space bar, and this website will try to guess the song. It will serve up a set of pre-loaded links to where you can buy the song. I was unsuccessful in getting it to recognize “Lola,” but I had more luck with “Happy…
The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do: 1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting. 2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant. 3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the…
The robot in the classroom, which displays a live picture of Achim, provides what its inventors call “telepresence”: It gives the boy an actual presence in the classroom, recognized by teachers and classmates. It can move from class to class on its four-wheel base and even stop at the lockers for a between-periods chat. “The…
The codes, called captchas, are also showing up more often amid a boom in new Web services, ranging from blogging tools to social-networking sites. The trickiest ones “make you not want to go to those sites anymore,” says Scott Reynolds, a 29-year-old software architect in Ocala, Fla., who lambasted the devices on his blog last…
Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the…
IRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle said one group of soldiers even named its robot “Scooby Doo” and grieved when it was blown up after completing 35 successful missions defusing improvised explosive devices. “Please fix Scooby Doo because he saved my life,” a soldier told repair technicians, according to Angle‘saccount at last week’s Future in Review…
—$100 Laptop Working Prototype Unveiled (One Laptop Per Child) Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Students are trusting software like this to do their work.A former student working in SEO shared this. I miss Google classic.‘People are rooting for the whale’: the strange American tradition of Moby-Dick reading ma…Googling Is for Old People. That’s a…
— Bob Coyne and Richard Sproat —WordsEye: An Automatic Text-to-Scene Conversion System (PDF)AT&T Labs — Research) The text in the caption is what told the computer to assemble these objects in this order. Of course, someone had to tell the computer how to draw these objects, tag each object so that the computer knows where…
Youth and alienated populations are inclined to spend more time going through identity development processes because they are trying to “figure out who they are.” Blogs and profiles are particularly supportive of this. Of course, blogs require having something to say while profiles let you write yourself into being via collage. People do grow out…
“Students have told us that eMail is still valuable–mainly for storing and transmitting documents and for communication with adults,” said Julie Evans, chief executive officer of the nonprofit group NetDay. “IM is more valuable to them because it is instant, and they can speak with multiple people at the same time. I believe that this…
In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist’s zillion competing ideas?an internal, self-contradicting mob?and focus them into a coherent work. Mind you, online collaborators are finding…
Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. “The language is created by the culture,” says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: “Live here and now.” The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being…
Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it’s curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I’ve ever created. I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.…
It’s an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses–if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It’s a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite…
The gathering was the monthly meeting of “Dorkbot,” a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world. […] Repetto has finished a project called “foal table.” The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that…
Email as a collaboration tool sucks. Everyone knows this. Everyone says it. Everyone writes about it. And everyone agrees that its inefficient, it’s chaotic, its silo’ed and its full of spam. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, we can assume with confidence that email is still the preferred method of “collaborating” and sharing information with…
Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don’t use things they don’t understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. Jakob Nielsen —Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Alertbox) Similar:Quick visit to see my mother…
The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. —Julie Schlosser —Cubicles: The Great Mistake (CNN Money.com) Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Students are trusting software like this to do their work.A former student working in SEO shared this. I miss Google classic.Googling Is for Old…
By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia’s latest information on the storm and recovery efforts…