I’m impressed at how the FAA decided to educate would-be drone pilots. They partnered with The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), to release this video.
It sure doesn’t look like a government agency production.
It’s mainly about the 400-foot rule, but also ‘gently’ warns about invasion of privacy.
Just putting the final touches to an article on the biggest, hyped concept –the Internet of Things.
It’s not difficult to grasp what this is supposed to mean –after all the Internet as we know it is nothing more than a collection of billions of things such as servers, routers, ATMs, satellites, and devices that send and receive data.
But I came across a few interesting ways this IoT space is developing, sometimes in a quiet, boring way. By invitation, or by accident we subscribe to (and nurture) the Internet of Things. Not many people have heard of the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) by some hotel chains in (get ready for this…) bed-sheets and pillowcases! Soft, fluffy things, in other words, can provide data.
Sure, in the post-WikiLeaks world, many of us are extremely skeptical about where this data will end up. There’s a bumpy spot in our passport cover that I am told is an embedded device. It is one of those ‘things’… But what about biometric wristbands? How about license plates with RFID tags?
You would be surprised what people surveyed (by Pew Research) have said about what to expect.
Those who know me, know I’m a follower of all things in space – from watching the International Space Station fly by, to the latest maneuvers of the latest Mars Rover.
So this week, it was a chance to communicate with Jocelyn Dunn,one of the 6 inhabitants of a Mars simulation mission, going on in Hawaii. The project, is called HI-SEAS (which stands for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation).
The reason: I’m putting together Mars Day a now-annual event at my school. I thought my students would get a kick out of talking to the folks who are paving the way for humans on the red planet. Or, to put it another way, they’ve seen a lot about the bot that got there; now it’s time to communicate with Homo sapiens!
Jocelyn and the rest of the HI-SEAS crew began their ‘analog simulation’ last Friday, inside a 1000-square foot geodesic dome.(Another crew member, Zak Wilson is also blogging the stay.)
Image, courtesy hi-seas.org
So what is it like to be practically isolated from the rest of the world? Isolated as in no phone calls. Now they do have access to the Internet (!) so I will be asking her these questions in a few days. Yet, to simulate the real thing, the crew’s email is subject to a 20-minute delay.
The fun part is planning for Jocelyn and her crew to answer questions from my students. After a couple of back-and-forth (time delayed) she came up with a good solution: We would send her the questions via email, and they would record their answers on a video, and send it back to us in time for Mars Day!
It will give new meaning to ‘Text-to-Speech’!
Here are links to other crew members
This was an event at my school last Fall. An evening focused on STEM – science, technology, engineering and math.
The theme was on flight.
While many of you are staking bets on whether to back Germany or Portugal, I’ve been wrestling with another tough choice: Extend my content to other screens using Chromecast, or go with a media player such as Roku.
Chromecast is a slick little piece of engineering, with some issues not well explained when you open the delightful little box. One needs to figure out which platforms support Chrome and find a workaround those that don’t. To make matters worse, the Kindle does not support some apps that are available on other Android devices.
Which made me long for something quicker and needs no workaround. Roku has raced ahead and given us about three choices, so this week it was one hearing on my bench: Roku original, Roku 1, or Roku 2. Actually there are four choices: One’s a ‘streaming stick’ (just like Chromecast), and the other three are nifty little media players.
All this about the same week that the Supreme Court ruled against streaming television content via that other little rogue box, known as Aero. In an earlier hearing, some of the judges wondered if this was not what streaming media from the so-called cloud’ was all about.
Every time I overhear someone talking to Google to do a voice search, I am reminded the usual crop of techno futurologists from Asimov to Arthur C. Clarke to Ray Kurzweil who alerted us to the potential of AI. Just for the record I don’t buy Kurzweil’s funky ‘singularity‘ theory is about how around 1945, we will augment our bodies with super-intelligent machines…
Yet, AI is becoming more relevant. Consider what’s happening around autonomous cars. Hint: Google isn’t the only one in this race.Or consider the pace of robotics.
Sidebar: A few weeks ago I asked some students (2nd through 6th graders at a Montessori school) to design and build robots from assorted parts. Many of them gave them names, though that was not the requirement! They have no qualms about machines that might live’ alongside us. I once took some older students to visit a hospital and see a da Vinci surgical robot. They loved it! A bot that can cut and suture one of your body parts!
Back to AI. That famous ‘machine’ known as Watson, which beat humans in that game show Jeopardy, was able to search a massive databases and respond faster than Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But that was not all. It also outsmarted them in strategy – that is in picking the categories that would win bigger. It is eerie to watch those rounds and see how a computer sitting in between two humans looks like. (It sounds human too, as it calmly picks a category such as ‘chicks dig me’ to the nervous laughter of the live audience.)
I was intrigued to read about how JWT, the agency that handled IBM and this show, was briefed on how to present Watson. At one time, the inventor behind it, specifically asked that Watson should not bear any resemblance to…HAL. If you know Stanley Kubrik’s and Arthur Clarke’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, you’ll know why. That softer logo ‘Smart Planet’ logo, derived from IBM’s larger project about a smarter planet was not supposed to look humanoid, or scare people.
Even those people who talk to their machines (Siri) or instruct them where to go (GPS).
No, this is not about Facebook, and how we seemingly interact with text that sometimes seems like a bunch of posturing and talking at cross purposes!
This is about a performance I went to last Saturday at ASU, brought by the School of Arts, Media and Engineering.
The key ‘performance — a semi-choreographed interaction of two women –was to demonstrate how conversations (and text) can ‘make’ people, and their reality. Meaning, how language doesn’t just represent us, but shapes who we are, even while we use it. Here’s how they describe it. The art form:
interrogates these questions (using) 3D infra-red motion tracking, voice acquisition, speech recognition, multi-screen video projection and multi-channel surround sound to create an immersive multimedia environment.
As the dancers move and speak, speech recognition software reveals sentences (and sentence fragments) on two screens at right angles to each other. Then these texts begin to intersect, and create some interesting visual ‘performances’ – dropping off, angling, growing, and interacting with the other person’s texts.
The event was the work of visual artist, Simon Biggs, and composer, Garth Paine, both of whom dabble in the algorithms that work behind the scenes.
Why I found this fascinating was that it is in an oblique way related to my work in Chat Republic, and how our conversations determine our realities. We are, whether we like it or not, immersed in a digital landscape, and what we say to each other lives in a textual sense out there.
One does not have to be steeped in social media to be part of this Web 2.0 world, where much of what we do is cross-referenced by algorithms –when we sign on to purchase something, do a Google search, or leave a comment –that build profiles of us, and builds identities of us.
Just check what Facebook appears to be doing, sneakily boosting your ‘Likes’ when you message someone.
The things you can do on ‘Mars’ now includes 3D printing, and video editing.
I’m talking about a simulated Mars Mission – the crew I have been in touch with for a project.
Sure they live on rations, since this is an 8-month stay in an isolated dome. But Zak Wilson even printed a star for their Christmas tree. Impressive with the video editing, too!
In case you are interested, this NASA-sponsored mission, known as the HI-SEAS Mission, is an 8-month research project to “determine what is required to keep a space flight crew happy and healthy during an extended mission to Mars.”
Related to this, is a very real NASA experiment to study the effects of someone living in space for one year, while comparing him to his identical twin, back on earth. This involves astronauts, Mark and Scott Kelley. The story broke this week in TIME magazine.
It has been a few months since I launched Chat Republic in Asia. It’s now time to roll it out, State-side.
So on November 7, Chat Republic will be launched at Gangplank.
Never been there? Gangplank has the fitting ambiance –a cross between a very spacious coffee shop and a technology incubator. I have previously written about it, conducted a live radio show from there.
If you like to attend this launch event, leave me a note here, or use this link to RSVP.
Address: Gangplank, Chandler
260 South Arizona Avenue, Chandler, AZ 85225
Time: 6.00 pm
Is Tool Literacy overshadowing the need for Media literacy?
I’ve registered for one of those so-called MOOCs, and the topic of Media Literacy* is the subtext of a lot that is being discussed when it comes to technology in education.
In one of the forums, the question on ‘digital natives’ (a.k.a. students) comes up, and many educators are wondering how to best engage these tool-literate natives.
Because I teach a computer and technology class I see a large cross-section of tool literacy alongside media illiteracy. This is in no way meant to blame the digital natives as much as put the ball back into the court of educators. There are no Media classes in a typical elementary school because we always thought that Media was something people opted in to learn later.
Today the very concept of what Media constitutes has been muddied. We create lower-case ‘media’ (content) that happens to hitch a ride on upper-case Media (channels), but this gets complicated when we begin to also own some of these media channels.
No wonder the kids are confused.
Educators, too. When did someone update teachers with the new ‘rules’ of creation, curation, fair use etc? This cannot be done in a one-off professional Development seminar, but has to be something done on an ongoing basis.
If our students have mixed (or rigid, or even outdated) ideas of what they could do online, if our students think that all the information in an article on The Economist could be gleaned by a 140-character summary…we have ourselves to blame.
Before we address technology in Education, we need to take a deep breath, back up, and address media literacy. (Like we have time for all this – considering our super-busy lives that involve non-stop status updates.)
Hoipolloireport 