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The No-Resolution Resolution: How to Really Be Happy in 2012
GOOD | DECEMBER 30, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/4uFo8
In mid-December, I celebrated my 30th birthday at a little Scandanavian restaurant in a quickly-changing part of DC. I was ... Read more
Codecademy Builds ‘Labs,’ A Web-Based Code Editor
TECHCRUNCH | DECEMBER 22, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/4fFpH
Smoking hot startup Codecademy, a service which teaches you how to program online has launched its Labs feature today, as a ... Read more
This New App Turns Your iPad Into Your Classroom
GOOD | DECEMBER 22, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/4f3On
Thanks to the popularity of the Khan Academy's simple video lessons, millions of people around the globe have learned ... Read more
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Kepler Team Confirms First Earth-like Planet in a Habitable Zone, And Finds 1,094 More Worlds
POPULAR SCIENCE - NEW TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE NEWS, THE FUTURE NOW | DECEMBER 5, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/3LG6z
Kepler 22b Kepler-22b, just 2.4 times the size of Earth, is the first planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone ... Read more
Tim Pool
http://pressthink.org/2011/11/occupy-pressthink-tim-pool/
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Study: More Than 15% of Workers Get Hired Through Social Networks
READWRITEWEB | NOVEMBER 16, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/3dKQd
In a survey released today, recruiting software platform Jobvite noted that more than 22 million Americans used social networks ... Read more
Photographer Annie Leibovitz recommends iPhone as a camera
TUAW - THE UNOFFICIAL APPLE WEBLOG | NOVEMBER 16, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/3dANa
In the world of photography, there's one person who stands out for her classic portraits of such ... Read more
A very interesting and insightful perspective on how we stand just at the brink of a truly networked society.
"We are the last generation that grew up in a dumb society, where things were stupid and uninteresting."
"All of the devices we make today have the potential to communicate with each other and have a reason to do it."
"When the light bulb was the thing, they dug up New York so that everyone could have lightbulbs in their houses. They didn't really see the extension of light bulbs, that you could have other electrical appliances. ...Jeff Bezos of Amazon ... thinks we are at the lightbulb stage of the internet."
Not a lot of "new" technology here, but a step back to look forward.
--Brad
Like many other sites across the web, we’ve benefited from CC-licensed photos at Wired.com for years — thank you, sharers! It seems only fitting, and long overdue, to start sharing ourselves.
But the thinking here has to extend beyond the present and your own self. It reminds me a bit of the people who used to say that they needed a physical keyboard on their phone. And that Apple would eventually have to add one to the iPhone. It was a certainty.
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Are QR codes a form of a web app? I know what they do, my son showed me last night, I've been seeing them popping up everywhere but didnt know how to use them.
Have you ever tried any of the software on this list?
I thought I would answer on the blog, as this could be of interest to a number of you.
I have experimented with two types of scannable tags - the classic QR code (black square pixels) and Microsoft's mobi tags, which are generated using colorful triangles.
Here's an example of an application for mobi tags:
The photo description panels for my iPhone Photography art gallery exhibit have QR codes. Users with smartphones can scan the tags and they take are directed to web pages for more information about the images.
QR codes are not really a form of web app. They are more related to the URL shorteners Bit.ly and others.
The classic QR codes generated by Kaywa (free to use, no account setup necessary) can forward to a URL, display a text message, dial a phone number or send an SMS message.
The Microsoft mobi tag types are URL, app download, free text, vCard and dialer. Microsoft tags are free to create and use, but do require an account setup.
By setting up an account, users can track statistics about how often the tags are scanned and when.
[cid:B5D285F1-D03D-4B03-A922-99220E8BDEA8@edisonohio.edu]
There are three parts to implementing QR tags: Tag creation, tag management, and tag scanning.
Scanning tags
Users download an app, usually to a smartphone, to be able to scan and interpret the codes. Some readers are generic, able to read several formats, while others are specific to a single format. This may be a temporary barrier - a number of technologies are in the works to both make tag scanning an integrated function of the smartphone camera so no additional app is necessary, and to extend the concept to real-world images, not just generated tags.
Creating tags
When a company, organization or individual wants to implement scannable tags, there are a number of questions to answer. First, of course, is who is your audience? If you are implementing tags for an internal audience, then specialized or even proprietary systems may be appropriate.
However, if you intend to use codes in a public forum, then you need to take into consideration what your audience knows about scannable codes and how they will be placed. For instance, I chose the Microsoft mobi tags for the Smartdoor project because it is part of an art exhibit and the colorful tags were more appropriate to the venue, even though I knew few people had the Microsoft tag reader app installed before seeing the sculpture.
However, for the art gallery exhibit, I decided to use the more generic QR tags from Kaywa because more readers are capable of interpreting the codes, the exhibit would be in place for just one month, and black and white worked well with the display's aesthetics.
Tag creation software can be free or paid, depending on the level of customization and management needed.
Managing tags
If you do not want user statistics and the tags are "one use" then a free service like Kaywa may be enough. Microsoft is climbing uphill against the larger QR community, so they are making their service available for free to build market share, but they offer a pretty decent set of tag management and analytics tools.
For the Smartdoor, one advantage to using the mobi tags is that when the exhibit closes I can redirect the tag URLs and repurpose the Smartdoor for other events.
Conclusion
This is definitely something to explore, and thanks for the questions, Barb. Scannable tags and related technologies are strategies for integrating the real world with the online environment, and those who understand and can apply theses technologies will have a competitive advantage.
On Sep 22, 2011, at 7:07 AM, Schwarz, Barbara wrote:
Zuckerberg To Give Teachers $10k Each In Two Year Grant Program
READWRITEWEB | SEPTEMBER 21, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/1MZSw
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be giving $10,000 grants to Newark teachers who come up with innovative programs as a ... Read more
With Version 2.0, Instagram Focuses On Re-engineering The Camera
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/instagram-version-2/
The sender also included this note:
Instagram - a social media tool for images - has just launched a major upgrade!
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10 Creative Bar Code Designs [PICS]
MASHABLE! | JUNE 26, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/oa8A
On this day in 1974, Clyde Dawson made history as the first consumer to buy a product which had been scanned into a till by its ... Read more
Dear Photograph
DARING FIREBALL | JUNE 17, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/95gX
“Take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.” ★ Read more
HTML5 is popular for building rich Web sites as well as cross-platform mobile applications. And it looks like with Windows 8 ... Read more
Kindle E-Books Now Outselling All Paper Books on Amazon
READWRITEWEB | MAY 19, 2011
http://pulsene.ws/1FfKB
Amazon announced a bell weather moment for electronic books today - Kindle e-books now completely outsell hardcover and ... Read more
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Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book
WIRED TOP STORIES | APRIL 28, 2011
http://pulsene.ws/1rIrx
What do you do after working for Apple, a company that disrupts entire industries? Easy. You start a company to create your own ... Read more
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The main reason cited by Cisco for discontinuing the little buggers is that smartphones such as the iPhone 4 are killing off the low end of the market. Wonder if Brutus stood over Julius Caesar's body, holding the bloody knife, saying "What have I done?"
RIP, Flip.
In the meantime, you can get in on the scavenger-feeding frenzy. I scored a Flip Ultra HD at the Piqua HH Gregg store over the weekend for $75. At the time they had two Flip Mino HDs for $75 each, and two Flip Ultras (NOT the HD versions) for $50 each.
Here are some other sources:
http://gizmodo.com/#!5791601/where-to-buy-cheap-flips-now-that-theyre-dead
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/iphone-4-camera/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_m...
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http://m.gizmodo.com//5789263/netflix-nabs-exclusive-streaming-rights-to-mad-...
--Brad
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http://www.visualnews.com/2011/03/23/the-gettysburg-address-in-motion/
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/15/online-news-overtakes-paper-and-nearly-hal...
Much of the power comes from IBM's carefully curated collection of data. Jennifer Chu-Carroll, one of the scientists who has worked on the project since it began over four years ago, says that Watson excels, predictably enough, when the answer is a detail stored in its database.
Lest we get too enamored with our technological prowess, however, the authors make some comparisons with biology. “To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/world-computer-data/
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Are you a tetrachromat? Probably not, but it is possible that the rare person is, with the super mutant power of enhanced color vision. OK – I would rather have Wolverine’s regeneration, but enhanced color vision would be cool.
Color vision in vertebrates is a result of the cones in the retina. Vertebrate retinas have two types of light-sensing neurons: rods see in black and white but have good light sensitivity, and so are specialized for low-light (night) vision. Cones are less sensitive than rods, but they respond to a specific range of wavelengths of light – i.e. color. By combining the color information from different cones with different wavelength sensitivities the brain is able to perceive a wide range of colors.
Different groups of vertebrates have different numbers of cones, and therefore a different range and ability to discriminate colors. Birds, for example, are tetrachromats – they have four different cones and can see farther into the ultraviolet than humans. In fact the common ancestor of tetrapod vertebrates was likely a tetrachromat. Most mammals are dichromats with only two cones. It is thought this reduction occurred during the early years of mammal evolution when our mammal ancestors were nocturnal and burrowing animals, and so needed night vision more than color vision.
Many primates, however, (including humans and our close relatives) are trichromats with three cones, and therefore have rich color vision, but not as good as birds. In fact our understanding of the genetics of cones and color vision provided yet another compelling line of evidence for evolution. Trichromatic primates do not have the same cones as their vertebrate ancestors. They did not regain one of the two cones that were previously lost. Mammals have two cones – an autosomal S-cone (a short wavelength sensitive cone), and an X-linked L/M cone (sensitive to median and long wavelength visible light and located on the X-chromosome).
Sometime after the divergence of new-world and old-world monkey, an old-world monkey ancestor underwent gene duplication of the X-linked cone gene. At first these genes would have been identical, but over time they diverged to become distinct cones with separated wavelength sensitivity. In humans these cone genes are 98% identical. The cones added sensitivity to red wavelengths and resulted in trichromacy.
The research into the evolution of color vision has also led to some interested findings about human color vision specifically. It seems that humans have a significant degree of variability in the sensitivity of the cones. You have probably heard that some people are partially color blind, because it is standard (at least in the US) to test all school children for color blindness. But you may not have known that there is variability in the other direction as well, and that there are cases of tetrachromacy in humans.
One possible mechanism for this is that women may inherit two different versions of an X-linked gene for color vision. Women have two X-chromosomes, and in each cell one X-chromosome is inactivated essentially at random. So the retina would have a mixture (a mosaic) of cones from the two versions on the two different X-chromosomes, functionally producing four different cones in the retina.
In one study they found that most women with this condition did not demonstrate tetrachromacy on color vision tests – they still functionally were trichromats. This is likely due to the fact that the cones were not different enough. Although some hypothesize that the optic nerve or perhaps the brain combines the information from these distinct cones and treats them as one stream of color information. However, going against this hypothesis is the fact that 1 in 24 such women (according to one study) demonstrated four-dimensional (or tetrachromatic) color vision. This means that the optic nerve is capable of carrying tetrachromatic vision and the brain is capable of interpreting it.
There may be other mechanisms as well that could result in true tetrachromatic vision in humans. These cases demonstrate the plasticity of biology and the brain in particular. It also demonstrates that spontaneous mutations can result in the addition of function – in this case expanded color vision. Not only has this almost certainly happened in our evolutionary past, but it is happening today in living humans. This is not likely to result in the evolution of tetrachromacy in humans in general for two reasons. The first is that, in our modern society, there likely isn’t any selective advantage to tetrachromacy. Our primate ancestors probably benefited from trichromacy – the speculation being that it enabled them to forage for fruit and vegetables better. But unless we lived in a world dominated by fashion designers and painters, it’s hard to see how tetrachomacy would provide a significant survival advantaged.
Second, humans are a large out-bred population. This does not mean that we are not evolving, but it makes it very unlikely that such a mutation will significantly spread throughout the population. It could by chance become prominent in an isolated population – the so-called founder effect. This has been demonstrated for inherited diseases, but can also occur with favorable mutations like tetrachromacy.
For now tetrachromacy remains in isolated individuals who are lucky enough to have their own mutant power.
--Brad
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