Group items tagged

"Programmers, roboticists and tinkerers...are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it outfitted with cameras, sensors, and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body"

Be sure to check out the reader's comments. Online education is best known for serving older, nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. But the same technologies of "distance learning" are now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses, especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds.

Good discussion of different types of card used throughout the world."Cards containing chips, called smart cards, simply cannot match something that's supposedly dumb and has been around since the 1970s: ordinary credit cards with magnetic stripes running across their backs. The dumb cards don't need a brain of their own: the network supplies the necessary smarts."

Despite the advantages of buying online many problems can occur.

Knowing that NYT articles go behind the paywall after a while, I'm re-posting this as a cached single page

This story is long, but an amazingly good read. Takes e-commerce to new frontiers. :-)

Computer generated time-lapse of the Stonehenge site over a 500 year period, proposing the order and sequence of its construction all the way to its eventual decay after 1900BC.

Satellite technology has enabled us to understand the importance of the oceans in storing heat energy and regulating climate. Research scientist Lee Lueng-Fu explains how a satellite was able to track the development of the El Nino affect for the first time. El Nino caused weather events around the world - droughts, bushfires, storms. The latest generation of satellites are now used to improve climate change models. Computer graphics of satellite images show effects of climate change.

Long list of short PDFs describing a wide variety of data logging systems in a variety of areas.

"The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. " A nice example of educational simulation software, the standard Celestia is a reasonable download (33MB). There is also a special educational set that can be purchased or downloaded for free (1.3GB).

This page explains with in quite a lot of detail the types of systems that climate models simulate. Clear explanations. The page also covers the accuracy of models and explains how accuracy can be tested.

Shows with simple diagrams how climate models have developed from the 1970s to the present day. Useful for a discussion of what items might be missing from a model/simulation, the reasons for this, and the way our improved knowledge hopefully brings improved simulations.

This is a project that will allow researchers to explore the breain by recreating brain structure within a computer

The beginnings of digital art, before photo editing

Includes classroom activities, a timeline. One section of particular interest is 'Machines and Man: ethics and robotics in the 21st Century'.

New York Times review of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) machine (aka $100 laptop). Contains good details on the design and specifications. An older article (2007) but still a worthy look at one of the biggest and most famous projects of this type. Includes a video where David Pogue demonstrations throwing water over the machine and dropping it from 4ft (students always like that bit :D)