Closing some gaps...

Watch the clip and read the transcript - - > TED India Talks - Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology.

This is really walking the talk...

The clip is just over 13minutes, and at the very end he shares an uncommon vision of how things could evolve with humans and machines...

"So, as a last thought, I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. And it will help us, actually, not be machines sitting in front of other machines."

Kudos to him and his team.

Lemonade happening and park

Via Cool Hunting a 2:08 min. clip showing the world's largest lemonade stand, an incredible park built on an elevated railroad track, sharing the story of a traditional workshop based in NYC.

Direct link to the clip on YouTube

Transcript:

"The tank goes on the top of the building and the water is fed down through gravity to provide the people of New York ... to wash and shower with, to fight fires, and tack life and property.

Today we are erecting the world's largest lemonade stand, which will serve for the grand opening of the High Line.

The High Line is the City's newest park, an incredible park built on an elevated railroad track, that had been abandoned for many years and it stretches the west side of Manhattan.

We were opening the High Line just a few weeks ago, and this is sort of the first big public celebration. We have all kinds of stuff in this happening, this is just puppet festival. Behind me you'll see, a construction of what will be the world's largest lemonade stand. A lemonade tank containing 15 hundred gallons of natural lemonade

When we had this idea of a lemonade stand and when we took it a step further and started thinking about the water tanks there was really only one person to call, which is Rosenwach. They are the company, they've been doing this for generations.

We've been in business for over a 100 years ... I'm the fourth generation and my son is the fifth generation, and we started in the late 1890's here. Our buildings are over 20 stories and they really require an artisian well top with scrubby fed down and best we have in wooden tank.

But the tanks that we make on the roof obviously hold water, and the tank here will hold lemonade, and it goes together like a traditional barrel.

The water tank after the walls is an icon of New York, and what better than to provide the lemonade for the grand opening than a traditional New York water tank."

>

Learn more about the High Line Park Project: according to wikipedia this started as a project in 2004 with the New York City committing $ 50MM to establish the proposed park, which was inaugurated and opened to the public in the summer of 2009. (June 8)

Smos has launched!

Yesterday I came across this inspiring BBC News, science article: "Mapping the great wheel of water", posted November 1, 2009 by Jonathan Amos, Science reporter.

To learn more on ESA's water mission: SMOS official site.

We hope they don't mind we've uploaded here a light version of the clip for students to watch and follow the transcript:

Transcript on Google Docs (Top menue: File / Download as / pdf)

Direct link to BBC article (interesting graphs & clip)< - - LINK FIXED

Maths without learning restrictions

John Mighton shares amazing ideas... on what kids actually do (when the system allows...)

www.jumpmath.org is dedicated to improving the teaching of mathematics in public schools.

Direct link to transcript Direct link to site.

Brazilian project

Take a good look and listen... serious business and a beautiful place, fun people and great things to actually "do" in a design mix of settings and buildings, with plenty of water inlets, lots of green and a lake. Main structures seem to be already in place together with the promise of transport integration, which shows quite daunting on the clip. The place is a spectacular combination of sites: clusters of hills, the nearby sea and water spaces, ... the complexity of how to integrate the different nearby scenarios through and around the hills makes it much more challenging and fun.

Unbeatable discourse: the olympics and para-olympics mix, the stadiums, the transport plan, "a place to live your passion" with the Corcovado Christ as an oversight ... "a Brazilian celebration" ... " to inspire a continent"... this was not just about a city.

While the London clip of the previous contest was also tops, we also recognized that the show offered as an advance last year in China, was rather dis-connected to the sophistication of the flowing strings of dancers and athletes selling the promise of a multi-dimensional city in Singapore. The reality check and actual performance of the British in China brought to life a double-decker bus (do they still run?) a gang of average people dancing, a football star and a pop singer. The question now is, what will eventually take place when the curtains are drawn in 2012? We hope they re-connect again with what they'd shown before in order to become a winner.

A lot of what you see on the Brazilian clip is already there and just as beautiful as it shows... the issue might be with the coordination and the overall security, but they've already proved with the Rod Steward and Rolling Stones concerts drawing crowds of circa 3.5m (1994) and 1m (2006) respectively at the Copacabana beach, that they can do this and ... a lot more.

Ubuntu Cola

Ubuntu Cola from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Via network this amazing contribution to a good design contest ... watch and learn yourselves.

Real problems and Common Knowledge

The problem with real problems, is who gets to define what those really are.

How to minimize the impact of lobbies taking advantage of public money unless the outcomes respond to public real benefits?

How to foster the networks and ideas that could either "respond to real problems with simple solutions that can evolve with time" ?

I came across this ScienceBlogs and it brings forth interesting points to reflect and think on examples. The heading of the blog is Common Knowledge.

The case of digital public TV in Spain now open to private entities for marketing sports and entertainment by business groups that contribute to soccer becoming almost a religion in some countries, could be one case to follow closely. What kind of role model(s) are the leaders and administrators of public funds offering the young? And what mass media are offering here today makes you hope that more and more kids may prefer to entertain themselves with video games and other informational skill building activities, via web or other, building their own social media networks and learning something of value along the way.

The integration between soccer, media and business, the trade with professionals and all the publicity that goes with it, I fail to understand how any of that should be subject to public interest, and draw laws that benefit any. It may be not as bad as pushing a stupid war move following lousy decision making in international centers, but it's also not heading in the right direction.

Moving on to another hot subject drawing amazing amounts of public funds and attention, in Asturias as in the US: public health systems: standards, administration and information. What is public, what isn't, and how to better integrate both with fair policies and rules. Not an easy subject by all means, where the mesh of standards, underlying assumptions and beliefs, not to mention the private interests are highly complex. Yet, we tend to expect simple positive outcomes, responding to what multiple opposed players define as "real problem", and that they are implemented fast.

My chosen take away of all this from the above quoted post by John Wilbanks, dated August 5, 2009,

"the real issues underpinning what it would take to generate real disruptive innovation in health technology and health costs."

"If we're going to bring that level of innovation potential to health IT, we need to keep the lessons of the simple standard in mind. Because right now, if you're a bright young entrepreneur, you don't get into health IT. And the lack of not just standards, but the right kinds of standards, is the first barrier we have to knock down to change that reality."

London is the capital of Twitter

It seems to me many of the questions were a bit dis-connected from actual action on the Twitter social medium... It's fun to learn London "is the capital of Twitter"... imagine what this could be like with the Olympic Games! Who knows what other wonderful tools we me have in 2012? Thanks UK TechCrunch for bringing this up. The link on YouTube.

Transcript for students coming soon. Stay tuned! ... the post on UKTechCrunch also quotes the best.

Turning Cars and Computers into Art

Rocketboom interviews Zach Lieberman on his latest projects. (3:57min video)

Transcript:

-I'm here with Zack Lieverman and I don't know exactly what to call you... What would you title yourself as?

-Like nerd, artist, researcher, hacker, yeah... I don't know.

-Renaissance man of technology?

-I guess so maybe.

-So how did you get your start in the field that you're doing right now?

-I discovered this community on-line, especially through Flash, people writing code to animate, and I've always loved animation... And for me it was just really beautiful this idea that you could write some lines of could and you could see something move, and then you could make really elegant types of motion.

One thing that I'm involved with now is an open source project called open frameworks, which is the C++ toolkit so... I said before I'm sort of a nerd artist, I you know, re-write software, we do sort of low level hacking, and this is making a tool for other people to make stuff with.

-For each individual use you're creating a brand new kind of software...

-Yeah, every time we have a new problem, a magician comes and says I want to do augmented reality card trick and then it's like, OK, let's make new software, about, you know, how do we track a playing card... we have a new problem and we come up with software to solve it.

-So I saw a really cool video on ... I think that it uses the open frameworks software with a car...

-Yeah, the project was in Belgium, and it was an advertising company that has the Toyota account and then, once they had the idea of driving and making a type face they contacted me through that... they needed to use software kind of real time software, in order to track the car to get a good sense of what the outcome would be. They did some experiments here, with, kind of , imagining on paper what the movements would be like. The driver would then take those drawings and try to interpret it driving, he would drive slowly at first and then drive faster, cause some of the things are really... involved wipe outs ... I software outputed in image and then the software designers took that image traced it and cleaned it up a bit, and then made the font.

We were making an eye tracker for a disabled graffiti writer, named Tempt, and Tempt has "Lug...ris" disease, and we were making a tool to help him retro feel again with his eye... Ok let's hook this up...

We're actually tracking the pupil, so as the pupil moves around we're following it, so we're like using open frameworks... write some code in order to find it and fitting and ellipse through it. There is data coming from the camera, and then we have some illumination from this infrared LEDs, your eyes are very good input devices, not a very good output device, and when you actually start to hook it up to draw, it's a little bit tricky.

And so we have to do a lot of work to make it easy for ourselves, and also easy for Tempt, it's all Tempt can use to communicate

-I guess this takes a bit of a learning curve ...

-It's a little quirky right now...

-I just closed my eyes that's the weirdest thing...

-So if anyone wants to look into using your software, how do they do that?

-Sure, so they can join the main list, it's at frameworks.cc and then we have workshops and events all the time.

-Somebody could learn from the master..

-No no, we're all learning so that's the exciting...everybody is in it together and learning and growing and evolving together.

-Very cool, thank you very much, that is cool stuff.

Have a look at Funky Forest

On social networks and information

Social Networks as Information Filters

View more documents from Lee Bryant.

Presentation via @leebryant ... quote from the Headshift Blog: go there to read-learn more!

"The affordances of social web allow us to build a new relationship with each other and with information. New forms of media consumption and architecture of participation hold important implications for information management:" via #RebootBritain event ongoing flows on the web :)