Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
No, this is not a commercial for Dove. And no, I do not get a cut of sales.
But my photography classes have been watching a short documentary produced by Dove showing off the abilities of the Photoshop photo editing suite.
The next bit, then, is interesting. It comes from ArsTechnica.
The French parliament has held its first hearing of a proposed law that would require every advertisement to display a disclaimer telling the public that images of people were manipulated. The goal is to help cut down on body issues in adolescents, and violating the law could be costly.
Today on Random Technology Friday ™, my robotics classes watched a TED Talk by Chung in which he showed his process of design, moving from concept to a final product.
His newest toy is an animatronic robot called PLEO. Here it is.
But it’s much more than just a robot. From the Wiki:
Pleo is an animatronic dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and (imagined) behavior of a week-old baby Camarasaurus. It was designed by Caleb Chung, the co-creator of the Furby, Chung’s company Ugobe sold pleo and was manufactured by jetta. Chung selected this species of dinosaur because its body shape, stocky head, and relatively large cranium made it ideal for concealing the sensors and motors needed for lifelike animation. According to Ugobe, each Pleo would “learn” from its experiences and environment through a sophisticated artificial intelligence and develop an individual personality.
Everything about this company smells of “fun”. Take a lok at their news release that addresses issues about Plea’s durability and waranty:
The evolution of Pleo progresses – just like in nature, Pleo occasionally suffers from life’s minor ailments.
At times, Pleo’s skin suffers from fading and cracking – ouch!
Pleo’s “wake-up” mode can be too short and Pleo can get exhausted much too soon.
Some of the neck and tail tendons can break after rough play which can result in restricted motion and cause Pleo pain.
To address these issues, Innvo Labs “Life Form Scientist” began work in June to improve Pleo’s physical condition. And, after a few months of concentrated effort the Innvo Labs Team has made great progress to cure Pleo’s ills.
The “Dino-Skin” specialists have successfully modified Pleo’s skin to improve its texture, pigmentation and toughness. Now Pleo is thrilled to have new improved skin to show off.
The “Food-Energy” specialists have implanted a new “Revival Power Recovery System” in the form of a high efficiency charger. Now after one 16 hour recharging, Pleo is ready to resume normal activities at a much higher level.
The “Dino-Orthopedics” specialists have redesigned the neck and tail sections to remove a previously detected “spur” that was causing wear issues so Pleo’s range of movement and toughness is greatly improved.
Afewblogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab’s high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!
Team Canada paid David Thompson School a visit today in advance of the World Skills Competition being held in Calgary. DTS and Acadia students welcomed the team at a Pep Rally, and number of dignitaries spoke to the assembly, wishing them good luck.
The event was ably MCed by Chantal and Lauren. They even made it to the local news!
And the kids seemed pretty excited.
The day began with the pep rally, but continued with a rotation of student through a mini skills competition in the areas of math, construction, design, technology, and foods. The morning ended with a BBQ lunch for students…
… and then an impromtu bridge building competition between teachers.
Please take a look at the DTS Flickr page for larger versions of these, and more photos form the day’s events.
Siftables are cool. They’re small, block-like, wireless, and interactive computers. They look like this:
And you can do many things with them beyond playing games… like sequencing music, or creating interactive stories.
I introduced my grade 6 students to siftables during my InfoTech classes recently, and they were very impressed by the cool things they can do. So impressed, in fact, that many of them chose to write David Merrill, the inventor of Siftables, a short email note letting him know as well.
Many of my students received a response from David Merrill, including David B, in grade 6. Here’s his response:
Hi David,
Thanks for your message. I have been hearing from many of your classmates
also — it seems like my video was a bit hit.
I invented Siftables because I thought that the world needed a more
physical, hands-on way to use computers. It took a few days to come up with
the specific idea, but I have been thinking about this kind of thing for a
long time. Here is a longer answer, that I wrote in response to an email
interview request: http://tinyurl.com/dh4oog
We are working to make them available to the world, so please stay tuned!
I’m not sure yet how much they will cost.
Take care,
-David
A social experiment: in big, bad New York City, will the average person on the street help a little robot find its way across the park? Kacie Kinzer aimed to find out:
In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.
Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
A class of undergraduate students at MIT has created a set of robots that can water, harvest and pollinate cherry tomato plants.
Small, custom built, $3,000 robots, move through the garden on a base similar to a Roomba vacuum, and are networked to the plants. When the tomatoes indicate that they need water, the robots can water them using an onboard pump. When the robots identify a ripe tomato, it uses a mechanical arm to pluck the fruit.
A few weeks ago, I led a group of our students on a trip to a Science Cafe, hosted by Winston Churchill High School. The topic, presented by Dr. Naweed Syed, had to do with the interface between the human brain and the silcon chip.
On a not unrelated topic, researchers in Germany and Switzerland, have built a full scale simulation of the human brain on a silcon chip.
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain’s ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.
I’ll be sending an email to Dr. Syed with this link to see how this research might influence his own work. Stay tuned.
