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: Adrian Bowyer breeds machines. 2007-10-18 07:02:48 Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath, is a man who thinks big. He’d like to eliminate factories, trucking and money, but he’ll start with building some very clever robots. Breeding can lead to fascinating sorts of symbiosis, relationships between organisms that are deeply counter-intuitive. Chickens, he tells us, “can’t run, can’t fly and taste good, which is usually a recipe for evolutionary disaster.” But because humans help chickens replicate, they’re the most evolutionarily successful bird species ever, with 15 billion chickens alive worldwide. The best thing about breeding, of course, is that your end products reproduce themselves. Bowyer would like the same thing to happen with technical objects - he’d like them to exist symbiotically with people, “giving us goods in exchange for our help in replicating.” This philosophy informs RepRap - the replicating rap ...

Pop!Tech: Steven Pinker and what language tells us about relationships 2007-10-18 06:22:20 Dr. Steven Pinker can pack a lot into a quick speech. He offers a deep dive into pyschology and language, looking closely at the topic of “indirect speech”. He suggests that there are different ways to understand human behavior, including: - Anthropology, which studies universals and their variations in human society - Biology, which studies evolution, genes and the brain - Psychology, which has laboratory studies of behvaior - Fiction, where we can learn from the recurrance of plots. Bribing through veiled speech can negotiate relationship stypes. We use the literal form - politeness - to convey the safest relationship while relying on the listener to interpret the deeper meaning - the demand for a table. But there’s no presumption of dominance that would come from an imperative. Dominance relationships are one thing we’ve learned to negotiate, evolutionarily, along with communality and reciprocity. Humans discover that behavior in one relationship is not okay ...

Pop!Tech: Daniel Pink’s whole new economy 2007-10-18 04:51:04 Dan Pink is an author, provocateur and business thinker whose book title, A Whole New Mind, shares a topic with the afternoon session. He tells us that his history as a writer of business books and as a speechwriter has taught him that great speeches incorporate, “brevity, levity, and repetition.” (He says this twice. He offers brain specalization as a metaphor - the left and right sides of the brain specialize in different abilities - the left brain is better at analytic skills, the right at more synthetic skills. He suggests that this may be a metaphor for the move from 20th to 21st century economies. In the 20th century, our parents encouraged us to become lawyers and accountants - to have predictable, analytical careers. The move towards the 21st century economy may require very different skillsets. These changes are inspired by three factors: “Abundance, Asia, and Automation.” Profound abundance means that we’re wealthier as middle class people than ...

Pop!Tech: Jessica Flannery explains Kiva 2007-10-18 02:56:06 To explain the idea of bottom-up aid, the first speaker is Jessica Flannery, co-founder of Kiva, a very popular peer to peer microcredit lending site. Flannery leads off her talk with a segment from Oprah, explaining the model and the tool - Oprah quotes a 99.7% repayment rate on Kiva’s microloans - Flannery clarifies that the rate is for all microcredit loans across the industry (which leaves open a question of what Kiva’s repayment rates are.) Kiva’s model, built with her husband, Matthew, brings three groups of people together - lenders (primarily individuals who can lend groups of money in amounts as small as $25), entrepreneurs (the borrowers who use loans to start a business) and partners, organizations on the ground in developing nations who vet partners, monitor loans and help ensure repayments. The Kiva system matches lenders to entrepeneurs through partners. The loans carry interest rates from 10-25%, and partners keep the interest - they’re able to re ...

recycling: iPhone sock 2007-10-17 23:18:41 click to go to the projectpage Well, with the iPhone itself being not too environmentally friendly how about recycling some of our old accessories? iPhone sock From:geek technique ... Iphone

Pop!Tech: Christian Nold’s Emotional Maps 2007-10-17 19:11:36 Christian Nold is a different kind of cartographer, a biomapper, who’s trying to map spaces in an entirely different way. He’s interested in mapping cities in a way that acknowledges that cities aren’t just infrastructure, but accumulations of people. He points out that we’ve hit a point in time when more than half the world’s populations live in cities. This cities, he offers, are fragile things - London has about a three day supply of food. If the rest of the world disappeared, Londoners would starve in a week. He speculates that cities are “consensual hallucinations” where more than half of the world lives. Maps of cities are sterile things - they show roads and structures, but not people or emotions. He shows us a map from the 17th century, showing trees, rivers, people fishing and hunting. He’s hoping to create modern maps that are humanized in a similar way. The maps that emerge are built from the overlay of people’s reports ...

Pop!Tech: Chris Jordan and Imaging Consumerism 2007-10-17 13:23:20 Andrew Zolli, our host and curator, frames the theme of the conference - The Human Impact - with a video that shows the shrinkage of North Pole ice. While some of the shrinkage is seasonal, he tells us that much of the impact is human and was shocking to scientists. (He offers an image of Al Gore with a flamethrower, melting glaciers, with the observation, “He really wanted that Nobel…” Human impact will link together conversations about oceans, sustainability, consumerism and other topics. Discarded cellphones. Photo by Chris Jordan. An early image was of 426,000 mobile phones, the number discarded in the US per day. He bought a few hundred discarded mobile phones, stirred them up and took photos of the arrangements. With a few hundred different photos, he sewed them together into a tableau representing an accurate count of 426,000 phones. (A detail from that image appears above.) These images can be hard to understand - they often need other objects to put them i ...

Get A Free Privacy Policy For Your Blog / Website 2007-10-17 12:08:34 Blogs in general do not have any sort of privacy policy. Even though it is not compulsory it does make an impact on end users if you have some sort of privacy policy for your blog. Many bloggers must have made use of the free Disclosure Policy Creator from http://www.disclosurepolicy.org/ which helps you create a Disclosure Policy whether or not you get paid to write certain content on the site. With regards to Privacy Policy, companies usually hire lawyers or professional copy writers to write up a privacy policy, but in case of bloggers it is not affordable, so here is a simple little service that allows you to create a privacy policy free of cost. Just a note that Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, Disclosure and Terms of Use are totally different things so you should create separate pages for these, you should not mix up all of these. Before I reveal the source for creating a free privacy policy for your blog / website, I would also want to stress few facts with regards to having a simp ...

The "Rookie Of The Year" Curse 2007-10-17 09:27:24 I was doing my daily “NASCAR blogger crawl” today and I came across an interesting posting by fellow blogger Michael over at NASCAR Eclectic about 1973 Rookie of The Year winner Lennie Pond, and how Juan Montoya looks like he might be the winner this year by barely edging out David Ragan. Yep, David Ragan. Who would have thought he would be close enough? But he is.This got me thinking about the whole “Rookie of The Year” thing. To me I always thought that winning The Rookie of The Year title was a bit of a curse. Here’s why: Look who won the title in the 1990’s and where are they now/what they did,1990 - Rob Moroso: Dead due to drinking and driving1991 - Bobby Hamilton: Died of cancer, won 4 races and made more of name for himself driving in the truck series than in Cup1992 - Jimmy Hensley: He made his first ever Cup start in 1972. It wasn’t until he was near the end of his career that he finally had a good shot at Cup and after he won the titl ...

Active Learning - Making Meaning 2007-10-17 09:21:08 Active learning techniques fall into one of the following four categories: 1. Remembering 2. Meaning Making 3. Creating Meaningful Artifacts 4. Connecting This article will focus on active teaching techniques that help students understand what they are learning on a deeper level (higher order thinking). Higher order thinking does not come easily to students, they need to see you role modeling your thinking process and they need opportunities to practice in a safe environament which is non-judgemental, open to alternative viewpoints, respectful of students experiences and beliefs and provides marks for risk taking and creativity. Listed below are some of the options for helping students to delve deeper into your curriculum. Creative Attention Focus Play a quick game at the beginning or middle of the class to open the student mind to creativity and to focus/refocus attention. See Thiagi’s site for examples http://www.thiagi.com/games.html Questioning Asking questions ...

Get Windows Vista Sounds for Windows XP 2007-10-17 08:40:59 This is just an extension of that post but this will make you Windows XP PC sound like Windows Vista. There is a simple way in which you can replace the XP sounds with those of Vista. Backup Copy New Files Copy all the new files from the unzipped folder to the C:WindowsMedia folder. That’s it now your Windows XP PC will not only look like Windows Vista it will also sound like one :-). Have fun. Technorati tags: windows vista sounds, windows xp, windows, sounds Copyright © 2007 Techie Buzz. All rights reserved. From:Techie Buzz ...

Open Wheel Phenom Turned Stock Car Driver Wins First Ever NASCAR Canadian Tire Series Championship 2007-10-16 17:25:44 Andrew Ranger left a struggling CHAMP Car team for a chance to drive a fairly competitive stock car in the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series this year and the gamble paid off as he won the inaugural Championship trophy. Andrew, who will be 21 in November, won just one of the 12 races that comprised the season, but with a bunch of top 5’s (4 second place finishes) he was too consistent for the other competitors. The title win also gets him a ride in this Saturday’s ‘NASCAR All-Star Showdown’, in Irwindale, Calif., which has been promoted as the Daytona 500 of the developmental series of NASCAR. Although he won’t be driving his NCTS car, he will be in a car that has been especially prepared for him. I have read conflicting reports about what Andrew has planned for next year. Some reports state that he is going to remain in the Canadian Tire Series and defend his title, while others have him driving in either the Truck or Nationwide series, or both! What ever Andre ...

Hey Tony Settle Down and Focus 2007-10-16 00:19:05 Tony Stewart is not too happy finishing 7th at Lowes on Saturday. He figures he had a top 3 car for sure, so what happened? In Tony’s eyes Paul Menard happened, that’s what. You see, as Tony was leaving the pits after a “gas’n go” Paul was pulling into his pit stall just in front of the 20 pit stall. The two cars touched, but damage was minimal. Paul then sat there for a second and Tony hit the gas, pulled out in front of Menard and hit Kasey Kahne in the side, nearly spinning Kahne sideways into his pit stall and caused a whole lot of damage to the right side of the nose piece on his own car. Now granted, after everything was said and done and Menard’s and Stewart’s crews were jawing at each other it got a little out of hand. When Stewart came back in for repairs to his car the next time by the Menard crew all stood there at their pit stall wall and cheered and clapped at Stewart and his crew. Why? Don’t know, but I’m quite sure in ...

Things you can do to reduce carbon 2007-10-15 22:36:44 Today is Blog Action Day, a day for spreading the word about the environment. This list is from National Resource Defence Council Unplug Set Computers to Sleep and Hibernate Configure your computer to “hibernate” automatically after 30 minutes or so of inactivity. The “hibernate mode” turns the computer off in a way that doesn’t require you to reload everything when you switch it back on. Allowing your computer to hibernate saves energy and is more time-efficient than shutting down and restarting your computer from scratch. Take Control of Temperature Use Appliances Efficiently Wash only full loads in your dishwasher, using short cycles for all but the dirtiest dishes. This saves water and the energy used to pump and heat it. Air-drying, if you have the time, can also reduce energy use. Clean the lint filter in the dryer after each use. Dry heavy and light fabrics separately and don’t add wet items to a load that’s already partly dry. If availa ...

Automatic Copyright Enforcement Threatens Fair Use 2007-10-15 21:51:15 Yesterday, Google introduced its automatic copyright filter for YouTube. The service will compare user-submitted content against copyright owner-submitted content. Content submitted by users which matches that of the copyright owners will be flagged for either: blocking, promoting or revenue sharing. As I have said before, a binary solution to a non-binary problem is dangerous. The issue of copyright is not black or white - principles like fair use make copyright a subjective matter of which a computer is not the best judge. According to Gigi Sohn at Public Knowledge, a few seconds of matching will not be sufficient to block the submitted video, but because fair use can be much longer than a few seconds (think about the documentary Outfoxed), this places a previously absent burden upon YouTube users. Before these binary solutions, copyright owners needed to challenge reuses they thought were not fair use. Now, citizens need to justify their fair use. From:FreeCulture.org - Students for ...