Monday, March 30, 2009

loc.alize.us

http://loc.alize.us/#/user:Jon%20Schull/geo:43.165123,-78.112793,2,h/sort:date/

Flickr: Help: The Map

Flickr: Help: The Map

http://www.flickr.com/map/

How do I add my photos to a map?

It's easy! To geotag a photo just click "Add to your map" on the photo page (over on the right ;).

To work with more than one image you can open up the Organizr Map and drag photos from the Findr bar at the bottom, to the location where you took the photos.

There's more information about how to geotag your photos in the Organizr FAQs.

 
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Facebook | IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience

IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience

21st–Century Classroom Experience

Posted February 18, 2009

In recent years, IDEO has spent a lot of time and effort thinking about education. The firm’s work with Ormondale Elementary School, in Portola Valley, California, helped pioneer a special “investigative-learning” curriculum that inspires students to be seekers of knowledge. We spoke to Sandy Speicher, who heads the Design for Learning efforts at IDEO. Her insights provide powerful lessons for architects and designers creating the schools of tomorrow:

1. Pull, don’t push.
Create an environment that raises a lot of questions from each of your students, and help them translate that into insight and understanding. Educa­tion is too often seen as the transmission of knowledge. Real learning happens when the student feels the need to reconcile a question he or she is facing—and can’t help but seek out an answer.

2. Create from relevance.
Engage kids in ways that have relevance to them, and you’ll capture their attention and imagination. Allow them to experience the concepts you’re teaching firsthand, and then discuss them (or, better yet, work to address them!) instead of relying on explanation alone.

3. Stop calling them “soft” skills.
Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability are not just nice to have; they’re the core capabilities of a 21st-century global economy facing complex challenges.

4. Allow for variation.
Evolve past a one- size-fits-all mentality and permit mass customization, both in the system and the classroom. Too often, equality in education is treated as sameness. The truth is that everyone is starting from a different place and going to a different place.

5. No more sage onstage.
Engaged learning can’t always happen in neat rows. People need to get their hands dirty. They need to feel, experience, and build. In this interactive environment, the role of the teacher is transformed from the expert telling people the answer to an enabler of learning. Step away from the front of the room and find a place to engage with your learners as the “guide on the side.”

6. Teachers are designers.
Let them create. Build an environment where your teachers are actively engaged in learning by doing. Shift the conversation from prescriptive rules to permissive guidance. Even though the resulting environment may be more complicated to manage, the teachers will produce amazing results.

7. Build a learning community.
Learning doesn’t happen in the child’s mind alone. It happens through the social interactions with other kids and teachers, parents, the community, and the world at large. It really does take a village. Schools should find new ways to engage parents and build local and national partnerships. This doesn’t just benefit the child—it brings new resources and knowledge to your institution.

8. Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist.
An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating its relics and digging for the truth of what was. An anthropologist studies people to understand their values, needs, and desires. If you want to design new solutions for the future, you have to understand what people care about and design for that. Don’t dig for the answer—connect.

9. Incubate the future.
What if our K–12 schools took on the big challenges that we’re facing today? Allow children to see their role in creating this world by studying and creating for topics like global warming, transportation, waste management, health care, poverty, and even education. It’s not about finding the right answer. It’s about being in a place where we learn ambition, involvement, responsibility, not to mention science, math, and literature.

10. Change the discourse.
If you want to drive new behavior, you have to measure new things. Skills such as creativity and collaboration can’t be measured on a bubble chart. We need to create new assessments that help us understand and talk about the developmental progress of 21st-century skills. This is not just about measuring outcomes, but also measuring process. We need formative assessments that are just as important as numeric ones. And here’s the trick: we can’t just have the measures. We actually have to value them.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Patti Maes: wearable projectors

Warehouse - Subversion Browser

Warehouse - Subversion Browser
Bookmark added by Janos Haits at 02:27 AM CST
Warehouse is a web-based subversion browser with a beautifuly simple design that lets you manage your subversion repositories and permissions on the web.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Bridge Over The River Quoi?: 7.5-Tonne Bridge Made of Cardboard Tubes

Bridge Over The River Quoi?: 7.5-Tonne Bridge Made of Cardboard Tubes
A temporary bridge made of 281 cardboard tubes has been erected over a river in Southern France. Weighing 7.5 tonnes, it can hold up to 20 people at a time. It is just half a mile from the Pont du Gard, an old Roman stone bridge, and was designed by Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect known for his both grandiose and humble paper constructions, as you can see in the gallery. The technical details make it even more stunning.







Shigeru Ban

Plastic Bottle Structure, 01, 2002. Plastic bottles, acrylic, plastic wrap, nylon wire

http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/shanghai/2002/tour/e-tour-16.htm



japan pavilion, hanover expo, 2000, shigeru ban and frei otto
the largest cardboard structure built to date
www.designboom.com/history/aalto/models.html

Saturday, March 14, 2009

The Ideocultural Age


I (Jon) think this is the next thing: creation of semi-autonomous systems that go on to propagate ideas "on their own".

Daniel Pink argues that society, having moved through the Agricultural and Industrial ages is now transitioning from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age in which creative and empathetic skills will be as valuable as technological skills (and the ability to combine them will be most precious).

But perhaps we can see a bit further. The idea of the “meme” has moved from speculative biology to common parlance in the last 25 years, aided and abetted by a growing global network of computer viruses, digital media, viral marketers, and internet-enabled ideologies. New kinds of products based upon artificial life (computational, chemical, and nano-mechanical), engineered genomes and technologies for augmenting nervous systems are coming to market. The “marketplace of ideas” is recognizing the phrase “ecology of ideas,” as a complementary and perhaps more fertile metaphor for the coming era.

I would suggest that future innovators will influence the ecology of ideas by focusing not just on the extraction of material resources from the physical world, not just on the cultivation of existing plant and animal species, not just on conceptual synthesis of ideas and experiences, but on the design and creation of self-regenerating patterns of interaction in physical, informational, and cultural ecologies to create semi-autonomous systems that go on to propagate themselves.

That will be the Ideocultural Age.











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Sunday, March 08, 2009

Home - smtp2web

smtp2web

Home | Demo | About

smtp2web is a service that facilitates receiving emails in web applications such as those built on Google App Engine. It does this by accepting email for an address or domain, and uploading those emails to your application in POST requests to a URL you provide.

smtp2web allows you to register either a single @smtp2web.com email address, or have your entire domain proxied through the service.

Getting Started - ruby-processing - GitHub

Getting Started - ruby-processing - GitHub

Making Your Own

Because every sketch has a setup method, called once at the start, and a draw method, called continuously as it animates; Ruby-Processing includes a sketch creator to get you started on the right foot with the proper (minimal) boilerplate. Using rp5 create my_sketch 800 600, will generate a Processing::App that’s 800 by 600 pixels in size, and just displays a blank window. The generated my_sketch.rb will look like:

require 'ruby-processing'

class MySketch < Processing::App

def setup

end

def draw

end

end

MySketch.new :title => "My Sketch", :width => 800, :height => 600

Create Digital Motion » GSVideo GStreamer Video Library for Processing: Cure for Live Video Ills?

Create Digital Motion » GSVideo GStreamer Video Library for Processing: Cure for Live Video Ills?:

"AndrĂ©s Colubri’s library GSVideo seems to be the best answer for that moment. It’s designed to act just like the internal video library in Processing, so the syntax and operation is absurdly easy. But it relies on libraries that actually work. And best of all, you can couple it with his GLGraphics library to keep processing on the GPU for higher performance. (There are even HD video playback examples in the latter that connect to the GSVideo library.)"

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

DESIGN 21: Competitions

DESIGN 21: Competitions
Rusay_2_550x550_

Ă©L is a Product that can be implemented by city governments utilizing existing electric service poles or new structural poles when needed. eL is lighter and quicker than new wood or concrete bridge construction. Parts are rotationally molded from 100% recycled Polyethelye (LDPE) overmolded on recycled aluminum struts for support.

DESIGN 21: Competitions

DESIGN 21: Competitions
Bike_to_bike-06h_550x550_Bike_to_bike-06f_550x550_

My device includes two connecting bars that clamp onto the frames of two bicycles and stabilize and space them apart, making the two bikes operate as a single four-wheel vehicle. A supporting platform made from either wood or lightweight aluminum tubing is connected to the upper connecting bar and stabilized by the lower one, thereby creating a functional very accessible supporting platform that can be used to carry supplies.

My device can be made using simple materials and may accommodate bicycles that are not exactly the same size or type. In its simplest form, bikes secured together using my device can operated without a linking steering mechanism, but by securing the handlebars of both bikes together, a single user can ride either bike and steer the vehicle as if it were a pickup truck.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Simple elixir called a 'miracle liquid' - Los Angeles Times

Simple elixir called a 'miracle liquid' - Los Angeles Times
It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it.



Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. It has been approved by U.S. regulators. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job.

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid.

That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

Lost world of extremophiles hides beneath Great Lakes - image 2 - environment - 27 February 2009 - New Scientist

Lost world of extremophiles hides beneath Great Lakes

Just 20 metres beneath the surface of some of the largest freshwater reservoirs on Earth are deep brine-filled pockets that support unusual colonies of life

A 'finger' of velvety purple microbes was collected from the Middle Island Sinkhole (Image: Thunder Bay Sinkholes 2008)

Full size image

A diver sets up a respiration chamber experiment near the purple microbial mats at Middle Island Sinkhole in Lake Huron (Image: Tane Casserley, NOAA) A 'finger' of velvety purple microbes was collected from the Middle Island Sinkhole (Image: Thunder Bay Sinkholes 2008) The shallow Middle Island sinkhole can be seen from the surface; a 9-metre boat provides the scale of the hole (Image: Scott Kendall and Bopi Biddanda, Grand Valley State University) Groundwater filters through the nearby geology, drawing its minerals through the sinkhole at the bottom of the lake (Image: Thunder Bay Sinkholes 2008)

Official Google SketchUp Blog: 3D printing from SketchUp with CADspan: Now even better

Official Google SketchUp Blog: 3D printing from SketchUp with CADspan: Now even better

TimesPeople
The New York Times
March 1, 2009
Noah Berger for The New York Times

A defender of consistency in design, Marissa Mayer stands guard over the look and feel of Google’s search engine.


I like the combined message of this photo and caption, but this entire article should be read by everyone by all, for its demonstration of the importance of design sense, design thinking, word choice people skills, joie de vivre--everything that makes technology actually work.