Day: February 27, 2013

Education

A School in the Cloud and the Future of Learning

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As reported on Wired. BY MICHAEL V. COPELAND Sugata Mitra, TED 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson Sugata Mitra is the kind of guy every kids wants to be their teacher. Unbelievably energized, always ready with a smile, and always ready to leave you and your classmates to your own devices.  Mitra calls his approach to education “self-organized learning.” At its core it’s all about sparking curiosity, about asking smart questions and then sitting back and letting kids…

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Culture

The Strange Beauty of Historic Computers Brought Back From the Dead

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As reported on Wired. BY CADE METZ When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren’t cars you smell. Those are computers.  This is the “1401 Room” on the first floor of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — the room where Robert Garner and his motley crew of amateur technicians…

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Culture Imagery

The ghostly photographs of President Truman’s White House renovation

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As reported on The Verge. By Amar Toor In the late 1940s, then-President Harry S. Truman called for a massive renovation of the White House, which, at 150-years-old, was in dire need of an upgrade. The result was a comprehensive overhaul, as workers completely gutted the interior, leaving only the mansion’s exterior intact. National Journal has compiled some of the most stunning photographs from the project, providing a rare glimpse at one of America’s most iconic buildings in a…

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Entertainment

CBS considers producing original content for streaming services

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As reported on The Verge. By Jeff Blagdon CBS is thinking about creating original content for streaming video on demand services like Netflix, an executive told a group of investors today. Asked if he could see CBS producing a studio-caliber show along the lines of Netflix’s House of Cards, Global Distribution Group CEO Armando Nuñez said, “it’s definitely a possibility,” adding, “we view Netflix, Amazon and all these SVOD platforms as new players. If you can get the right…

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Environmental Science Story

Infrared holography lets firefighters see through fire and smoke

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As reported on The Verge. By Jeff Blagdon It isn’t easy to see through the smoke and flames in a burning building, but it’s crucial for emergency responders like firefighters, who need to be able to tell if people are trapped inside. To solve the problem, researchers at Italy’s National Institute of Optics have come up with a technique that one-ups conventional infrared camera technology by ditching an optical lens in favor of a laser, using…

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Application

Adobe Debuts Photoshop Touch For Phones, Bringing The Full Power Of The Tablet Version To Your Pocket

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As reported on TechCrunch. by DARRELL ETHERINGTON Adobe’s mobile Photoshop strategy has so far kept more heavyweight editing capabilities to tablets with Photoshop Touch, and left the iPhone with Photoshop Express. But today the company has officially released Photoshop Touch for iPhone and Android smartphones, which inherits virtually all of the functionality of the more powerful tablet app, with an interface tailored to the smaller screens. Photoshop Touch for phones brings layers (which decrease to three if you’re editing…

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Education

Computer Science Education Had A Good Day In America

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As reported on TechCrunch. by GREGORY FERENSTEIN America’s elite institutions came out in full force for computer science education. First, the House of Representatives voted to update its traditional students arts competition to include anationwide mobile apps competition. Then, to top off the day, the nation’s leading geeks, from Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates,helped launch a national nonprofit to encourage young programmers. For now, the congressional competition will include students from each congressional district and “initially focus on developing…

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Hardware Dev

Freescale fashions world’s smallest ARM-powered microcontroller

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As reported on Engadget. By Alexis Santos If you’re looking for an exceedingly tiny ARM-based microcontroller, Freescale says it’s just cooked up the world’s smallest. Dubbed the Kinetis KL02, the piece of kit is 25 precent smaller than the previous record-holder and measures up at a 1.9 x 2.00 x 0.56 millimeters. Having trouble visualizing exactly how small that is? Just take a gander at the photo above. A 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ processor has made it onto the wafer-level chip-scale…

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Education Microsoft

Gates, Zuck and crew entice kids into programming through a short film

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As reported on Engadget. By Jon Fingas Kids in many parts of the world are growing up surrounded with technology, some from a very tender age. Many schools aren’t teaching much if any programming, though, which has led Code.org to make a short film spurring young techies into action. We have a hunch that it might work — the video has quite possibly the most star-studded collection of men and women explaining how they got into coding…

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