Wonderful Thoughts A weblog about latest news and reveiws on technology,science,computing,software and autoblog. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 0 840

Articles from Wonderful Thoughts

Pop!Tech - Sustainable and unsustainable cities 2007-10-19 08:32:59 To put our current energy situation in perspective, he asks us to think back 100 years. At that point, there were only 144 miles of paved road in the US and 8,000 cars. The US army was 75,000 people, compared to Russia’s 13 million. “We’re only 80 years old as the world’s policepeople. Where will we be in a hundred years?” He invites us to help answer that question, voting on a set of factors about the future on a tool on his website. As a globetrotting businessman, Luebkeman admits that his lifestyle requires 42 planets (if everyone were to use as much energy as he did, you’d need 42 planets worth of energy to sustain it.) One of the reasons he’s spending so much time on airplanes is that he’s trying to build cities for the future that can be much more sustainable than our current ones. He points out that 600 million people are migrating from the countryside to the city in China. That’s the population of North America, Australia, ...

A FRBR-based model for Musical Recordings and Scores 2007-10-19 05:27:11 Via a post by William Denton on the FRBR Blog a few weeks ago, I came across the Variations3 initiative at Indiana University. The project has developed a FRBR-based model for "digital musical audio recordings, bitmapped score images, and encoded score notation", described in a paper by Jenn Riley, Caitlin Hunter, Chris Colvard and Alex Berry. This extends and refines work in a predecessor project by rooting the model firmly in FRBR. From:eFoundations ...

Efficiently Clear Your Windows Registry Clutter 2007-10-19 02:39:03 Just like a web registrar which stores information about various domains, their owners, addresses, phone numbers etc your Windows Registry stores information about each and every software including information about manufacturer, settings, add-ons, tweaks and much more. Handling such a quantum of information for maintaining registration information of websites is very hard and requires a huge dedication of resources. Imagine the same with your PC when you have installed more than 100s of softwares and uninstalled them over a period of time. Most of these softwares leave unwanted traces in the registry without providing the user a easy way to clean it up. Maintaining your Windows Registry is a extremely important exercise and many of us simply tend to ignore it. Here are some tips that will allow you to keep the clutter away from your registry and keep your PC in a very good working condition. The easiest and the most efficient way to perform registry maintenance is to use registry clea ...

Pop!Tech: Acceleration and managing AIDS 2007-10-19 02:15:08 Zolli describes this as the third phase of Pop!Tech - the first was a launch phase, followed by a phase he’s led to professionalize and globalize the project. This new phase recognizes, celebrates and nurtures the projects that emerge from the collaborations Pop!Tech makes possible. He tells us about a collaboration between Neema Mgana and Cameron Sinclair which has led to the establishment of the Ipuli Medical Center in rural Tanzania, with the support of Pop!Tech partners. Other collaborations have included al album, Antibabel, produced by Pop!Tech performers Reggie Watts and Yungchen Lhamo. Zolli wants to refocus Pop!Tech around a new project, the Pop!Tech accelerator. This is a project to support interdiscinplinary, high-impact, worldchanging projects that apply new tools and new approaches to create significant global change. The goal is to make sustainable projects, to make the data generated from these projects extremely transparent (released under open source licenses) an ...

Pop!Tech: Slowing down with Carl Honoré 2007-10-19 01:27:39 Carl Honoré talks pretty fast for a man focused on slowing down. He starts with an (apocryphal, I hope) story about a man who chooses to divorce his wife after discovering her checking her email on her Blackberry while he was making love with her. While this is certainly a commentary on his need to improve his technique, it’s also a refernce to the fact that the world is moving very quickly. “Every day is a dash to the finish line,” Honoré tells us. We speedwalk, speed date, and now we speed network - “You can make 100 meaningful new business contacts in 90 minutes.” There’s a gym near his house in London that offers a course in speed yoga - get all the relaxation you need in twenty minutes. It gets worse - he knows of a person in the US who’s attended a drive-through funeral. “You’ve got 392 friends on Facebook - when’s the last time you spent an afternoon in the park with one of them?” Honoré discovered himself spee ...

Pop!Tech: Ted Ames and the recovery of Maine’s fisheries 2007-10-18 22:50:59 Ted Ames is the only Maine lobsterman who’s received a MacArthur “genius grant”. Listen to him for a few minutes and the reason he’s been honored becomes very clear - he’s doing astounding work in using the knowledge of fishermen over generations to document and understand the collapse of Maine fish stocks. Groundfish - species like cod, flounder and haddock - have seen their stock collapse three times in Maine since 1950. Twelve years ago, there were about 4,000 Maine fishermen making their money from groundfish on a few hundred vessels. None of those vessels fish for groundfish today - “we’ve all become lobstermen.” Ames explains that it isn’t an option for fishermen to stop fishing - “it’s a lifestyle.” The goal, instead, is to understand how groundfish live and breed to understand how stocks might be rebuilt. Ames tells us that his grandfather was able to tow up 30,000 pounds of redfish in a single day in a 43 ...

Pop!Tech: Happiness and Risk 2007-10-18 22:24:18 Dan Gilbert, professor at Harvard and author of “Stumbling on Happiness“, focuses his talk on human analysis of risk. He begins his talk with a story about Dostoyevsky. Annoyed by a young child, Dostoyevsky told the child not to come back and talk to him until he could spend ten minutes not thinking about a white bear. As we all know, this is hard to do. It’s about to get easier for the child, because shrinking ice will wipe out two-thirds of the world’s polar bears in the next forty years. Global warming is a great example of William James’s realization that, “A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissede as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” Gilbert points out that, “If George Bush knows we’re in trouble from global warming, everyone else knows it too.” Gilbert had the opportunity to put a quote on a Starbucks coffee cup - “affecting millions of Americans in that vulnerable mome ...

Pop!Tech and carbon neutrality 2007-10-18 16:56:59 This year, Pop!Tech is working with eBay to create a “carbon market” that lets people offset their impacts from attending the conference. We all have the opportunity to log on and contribute to one of three projects designed both to counterbalance our annual carbon creation and have a social impact. The leaders of these three projects are invited to the stage to explain their work. Stefano Merlin from the Ecological Institute of Brazil talks about his project, a fuel switching project. He’s helping factories in the northeast Brazilian Atlantic rain forest convert from burning local timber to buring sawdust, bamboo and coconut waste. They’re also helping reforest logged areas with eucalyptus and helping local farmers plant sugarcane to create new biomass. From:…My heart’s in Accra ...

NASCAR Nationwide Series Logo Unveiled Today 2007-10-18 15:29:46 I like it, as it is simply stated and apparently that was their goal:“The logo is simple yet extremely effective in delivering a completely new look to the branding of the series,” said Steve Phelps, NASCAR’s chief marketing officer. “It’s good to be able to place a ‘face’ to a name now.”“Nationwide is pleased to be able share the new NASCAR Nationwide Series logo today,” said James Lyski, Chief Marketing Officer for Nationwide. “Over the next several years Nationwide intends to make this series the finest entertainment experience in racing.” - nationwide.comFor more on this go to the above Nationwide link. There is also a Carl Edwards video there talking about Nationwide and it’s sponsorship of the Grand National division of NASCAR. Photo Credit: nationwide.com From:NASCAR Ranting and Raving Blog ...

Pop!Tech: Cellos, Caleb Chung, and cute robots 2007-10-18 14:49:02 Caleb Chung is a very funny man. He introduces himself as German-Chinese, noting, “The Dick Cavet joke is ‘An hour later, you’re hungry for power.’” He shows us a wonderful demo reel of toys he’s created - not the hugely successful Furby that he created, but some less memorable toys, like a set of McDonald’s toys that produce food, like “fries” cut from a piece of bread. He quickly walks us through toy successes and failures in the past. There’s an amazing set of fighting robots, animatronic dinasours, legos controlled by remote control. It requires a great sense of humor to show your past failures in a way that’s this funny… Chung has worked as a toy designer for Mattel, an actor, a street mime, a movie prop-master. But at root, he’s a tinkerer, an investor who builds cool things in his garage. He tells us the philosophy is to blend art and science, “beauty and magic”… and wrap the whole ...

Pop!Tech: Jonathan Harris and digital storytelling 2007-10-18 11:48:03 Jonathan Harris is an artist and storyteller. He shows us his past storytelling, using paint to tell imaginary stories as a child. His main storytelling medium these days is sketchbooks, which he fills with “dead flowers, watercolors, ticket stubs”, interviews with people. The beautiful pages serve as “windows into experiences” that he’s had. The project he shows at Pop!Tech is of a trip he took to Barrow, Alaska, to document a family of ten Inupiat hunting for bowhead whales. He travels from Newark to Barrow, Alaska to live with this family for a week, then moving to a camp on an ice flow, where the sun never set and the temperature was about -22. Throughout the trip, he took photos at a five minute interval, even when he slept (using a timer.) When things got very exciting, he would raise the rate of speed to as high as 37 every five minutes. He’s organized the photograps so they can be searched by character, concept, context, color, time, date an ...

Free video streaming 2007-10-18 09:47:17 Want to offer your own TV channel live on the Internet?  Now you can! Veodia looks particularly interesting because the stream is available in a format compatible with Second Life.  So here, for example, is an image of yours truly live-streaming my office Web-cam into the Virtual Congress Centre on Eduserv Island in Second Life. What makes this exciting is that the costs are so low.  All you really need is a laptop, a Web-cam and an Internet connection and you can be broadcasting into Second Life very quickly and easily.  The possibilities for presentations and tutorials are obvious. Combine Veodia with a cheap desktop video-mixing tool like WebcamMax (yes I know that Mac users can do all of this and more for free!) and you have the ability to do things like streaming a Powerpoint presentation, with a picture of the speaker in one corner.  Again, all very easily done at almost no cost. Well worth a play for those of you interested in this kind of technology.&n ...

Pop!Tech: Paul Polak inspires. 2007-10-18 08:09:38 To inspire projects like Kiva, you need mentors. Andrew Zolli introduces Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises, as one of the key mentors in the anti-poverty and development space. In solving these problems, Polak tells us that we must: - go to where the action is - talk to the people who have the problem - learn everything about the specific context To that end, Polak has been meeting with at least 100 one-acre farmers each year, having over 3,000 conversations with farmers all over the world. This has led him to the Vince Lombardi-like conclusion that “affordability isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” This is part of his “don’t bother” trilogy - rules he gives to design students considering designing for the developing world: - if you haven’t had conversations with at least 25 poor people before you start - if it won’t pay for itself in the first year - if you can’t sell a million of them - afford ...

Pop!Tech: Shelia Kennedy and light for the developing world 2007-10-18 08:07:53 Sheila Kennedy is working on portable light systems for the developing world. She’s an architect who’s become a product designer, looking for ways to build a “self-sustained light engine“. The inspiration for the project came from a talk she hear where someone calculated that meeting the power needs for North America would require solar panels covering half of the state of South Dakota. This seemed wrong to Kennedy, and she started thinking about the smallest units of light that could be created, considering the fireflies that she watched as a child in Woods Hole, MA. “What’s the smallest increment of useful light.” To build useful light solutions for the global south, products should be simple, reliable, durable, lightweight and adaptable. “You can’t just stick these things on buildings. People move.” Wrapped around the light is a soft fabric shell that difuses and reflects the light. The “soft optics” fabric is ... Developing

Second Friends update 2007-10-18 07:23:48 All fixed now I think. Secondly, I wanted to improve the functionality.  I have several ideas for additions that I hope to come back to over the coming weeks.  My first attempt is to introduce a Second Friends ‘status‘ - a place for your avatar to record their current state of mind or activity, as per the normal Facebook status.  I’ve made available a very simple Second Friends status updater, an object that tracks whether you are in-world or not and updates your Second Friends status accordingly.  It’s not much, but it is functional.  You can get one from the box next to the Second Friends kiosk on Eduserv Island. More importantly the API for your Second Friends status is open.  Look at the updater script to see how it works and feel free to build your own version.  Why not build a HUD or wrist-band that you can chat your Second Friends status to?  I plan to offer a wrist-band shortly, but if someone beats me to it I&rsq ...