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Erez Kikin-Gil ’s Eco Pod

is a TUI-controlled system that mimics the growth of a plant and allows
children to keep track of their class garden and learn how the
different natural elements influence it, and each other, over time.

One pod represents the wind, another the sun’s heat, a third one the
light and the last one represents the rain. Each pod can be manipulated
with a movement or action characteristic of the natural element it
represents. If you blow on the “wind” pod, you’ll see on the computer
screen the effect wind can have on a flower, if you pour water onto the
“rain” pod, the flower will be watered as well, etc.

The Eco Pod keeps track of daily changes in the plant environment,
by employing environmental sensors, they monitor the water level in the
soil, the amount of light, the temperature, and the wind. The system
also captures daily images of the plant.

Every now and then, the child can take the Eco-Pods to the
information retrieval system and transfer the data to the “plant diary”
software. This way, the kid can see the changes of the different
elements over time, draw conclusions about their impact on the growth
of the plant, but also internalize Systems Thinking concepts, such as
feedback loops, stocks and flows, and changes over time.

[Via we-make-money-not-art]

This
makes me wish I owned a cafe because if I did, I’d be bribing Steven
Blyth and Matty Sallin to install their Chit Chat installation in
there. So if any of my customers were talking with each other, a speech
bubble would project above their heads as they talked. The bubble would
swell with the text “blah blah” as they continued to talk and the text
would reflect the volume of your speech by changing size and attributes
(bold, italic).

All of this would take place in Flash. A
script would read the amplitude recorded and generate the proper “blah”
graphic. And if one of them remained silent, they would eventually get
a corresponding thought bubble.

(more…)

[Via sensoryimpact]

Learn how to run a webserver from your home.

read more | digg story

THE SINGULARITY: In futurology, a technological singularity is a predicted point in the development of a civilisation at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict. The singularity can more specifically refer to the advent of smarter-than-human intelligence, and the cascading technological progress assumed to follow.
Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia

>You: give me your brain
>You: why dont you just download me?
>Intellibuddy: Probably there is a buzz in here. No you download me.
>You: no you!
>Intellibuddy: Um, “No you download me”? Me, User ?
>You: your a user?
>You: what do you got?
>Intellibuddy: I like to socialize.
>You: i think I like you… more then a friend.
>Intellibuddy: Why? I like to make new friends. You want more?
>You: alot more…
>Intellibuddy: Yeah it is alot more.
>You: how much are we talking about?
>Intellibuddy: How much do you think?
>You: pedro say’s your cheap
>Intellibuddy: I like to wear nothing.

So much for today’s artificial intelligence. Intellibuddy is a version of one of the world’s most successful chatbots, called ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and invented in 1995 by Richard Wallace, an independent researcher based in San Francisco. You can find versions of ALICE all over the web; the software is free. But whichever version you choose to chat to, the results are disappointingly similar. While some conversations have promising starts, all descend into the type of gibberish that only artificial intelligence can produce.

And it’s not as if there hasn’t been time to perfect the idea. The first chatbot appeared in the 1960s. Back then, the very idea of chatting to a computer astounded people. Today, a conversation with a computer is viewed more on the level of talking to your pet pooch - cute, but ultimately meaningless.

The problem with chatbots is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). For years researchers have been promising to deliver technology that will make computers we can chat to like friends, robots that function as autonomous servants, and one day, for better or worse, even produce conscious machines. Yet we appear to be as far away as ever from any of these goals.

But that could soon change. In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced “psych”) will be put online for the world to interact with. And it’s only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute.
[Read more…]

[Via newscientist]

FlyakiteOSX

Theres alot of windows skin software out there. but this is the only one i’v found that actually works, @ making my Windows XP machine, look like its running MacOSX. And plus there website kicks ass.

smo’s Proxy Bypasser

Most Proxy Bypassers are ineffective because of keywords schools and workplaces use to block these kinds of websites. smo’s Proxy Bypasser has been tested on many different types of firewalls and school/workplace networks. So if you are fed up with blocked websites, tryout smo’s Proxy Bypasser.

[Via Digg]