Group items tagged

"Our reporter builds a handcrafted cellphone using widely available parts and online instructions"

"The software that provides it, called AudioFeeds, announces Facebook updates such as friend requests with watery sounds like drips, bubbles and splashes. Bird calls are reserved for Twitter, while musical sounds such as a didgeridoo or wind chime alert you to news stories. It achieves the 3D effect by adjusting the phase, or timing, of the sounds delivered to your left and right earphones."

Here is a thought, what if we had something similar in the classroom to provide audio feedback to the teacher. Fascinating thought.

"Sending small cameras to ultra-high altitudes with weather balloons is a do-it-yourself craze these days and today's activities have more of a "let's see what happens" feel than any rigorous product testing. The team, made up of Google engineers and students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, is mainly curious to see how well the phone's sensors cope with a freezing cold near-vacuum."

Google Nexus now joins the list of iPHones and digital cameras that have been raised into near earth orbit by students. All that remains is to slingshot one into space with a big rubber band .. or for one to land in my back yard :-)

"Wave a Microsoft Kinect sensor around the object you want to inhabit and the new system, developed by Jiawen Chen and his team from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, quickly creates a 3D virtual model of it. Then, by standing in front of the sensor and positioning your body so that it melds with the virtual character on screen, the two are rigged together by uttering the word "Possess". The system performs the transformation by binding the model to you at the points where your joints are attached. Moving your body makes the avatar come to life, allowing you to re-enact Fantasia-like cartoons or to create your own interactive stories. It's also possible to team up with friends to possess more complex bodies, like a four-legged horse."

"Thankfully, there are ways to restore your online reputation. While you might think that reducing your internet presence is the way to go, you'd be wrong. The key to managing your reputation is to spend more time online, not less. The advocates of this approach argue that polishing your online persona could soon join healthy eating and exercise in your arsenal of everyday life-maintenance chores. So how exactly do you go about it?"