White House Barred Negroponte From Saying ‘Global’ And ‘Warming’ In Same Sentence

During today’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the political manipulation of climate change science, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) revealed the Bush administration has barred Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte from saying the phrase “global warming.”

Cooper said he recently attended a dinner party at which Negroponte was speaking, and “word slipped through the crowd he was not allowed to utter the words ‘global warming,’ at least not in the same sentence. Apparently, he was allowed to say the word ‘global’ in a separate sentence, and ‘warming’ in a separate sentence, but not together.” Watch it:

Dr. Cats on YouTube

Click here to watch movie

Apple's Next Product

(link)

Apple Inc. made their mark in the computer arena. They revolutionized the music player industry, and now they're poised to take over the phone market. What will Steve and the gang come up with next? For this contest, you're required to sneak us into Apple's R&D facility and show us what new products they are currently giving the patented "Apple" look. iToaster? iFork? iBus? iPencil sharpener? You tell us. As always, have fun, be creative!, avoid cliches, and follow the guidelines please. You will have 48 hours to submit so make your entry count!Note: Apple-style advertisements are allowed.

In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice

By JODI KANTOR
Published: January 28, 2007
Barack Obama arrived at Harvard Law School as an unknown; by the time he left, he had become a political sensation.

Researchers build tiny batteries with viruses

MIT scientists have harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small "nanowire" structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries.

By manipulating a few genes inside these viruses, the team was able to coax the organisms to grow and self-assemble into a functional electronic device.

(link)

George Bush and Charlie Rangel

New Flatland Flick

Revealed: how eBay sellers fix auctions

"CUSTOMERS of the internet auction site eBay are being defrauded by unscrupulous dealers who secretly bid up the price of items on sale to boost profits.
An investigation by The Sunday Times has indicated that the practice of artificially driving up prices — known as shill bidding — is widespread across the site.

Last week one of the UK’s biggest eBay sellers admitted in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that he was prepared to use business associates to bid on his goods for him.

Our inquiries found evidence that a number of businesses — ranging from overseas property agencies to car dealerships — have placed bids on their own items using fake identities.

The cases raise questions about whether eBay, the world’s biggest auction site, is doing enough to protect consumers."(link)

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

Latest acquisition - Jan 07

11" high. Real cheap because his neck was broken,
but really nice I think. From Colima, Mexico. Could be 2000 years old.

Anthrax guitarist fails his own song when trying out Guitar Hero 2

Legendary Ian of Anthrax attempts to play his song on Guitar Hero....Hilarity Ensues

The Declining Quality of Mathematics Education in the US

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/1/25/174426/953
"Mathematics education seems to be very subject to passing trends - surprisingly more so than many other subjects. The most notorious are, of course, the rise of New Math in the 60s and 70s, and the corresponding backlash against it in the late 70s and 80s. It turns out that mathematics education, at least in the US, is now subject to a new trend, and it doesn't appear to be a good one.

...

A couple of prime examples, in terms of textbooks and material for instructors, are brought up and suitably lampooned in a YouTube video by a Washington state weather presenter who encountered, and was appalled by, these particular teaching programs. The material in question is the TERC Investigations "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space", and the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project "Everyday Mathematics".

The focus of the YouTube video is on these math programs complete aversion to teaching students the classic methods for performing multi-digit multiplication and division. Indeed, these programs not only fail to teach such a method, they go so far as to actively discourage the method ever being taught, preferring that students didn't learn it outside class either.

What sort of methods do they teach? Well, for example, to solve the problem 26×31, a student might use the following approach: we can write 26×31 as 20×31 + 5×31 + 1×31 since 20+5+1=26; Now we know that 10×31=310, and 20×31 should be twice that (620) and 5×31 should be half that (155); so the solution is 620+155+31=806.

Note that the student could break the problem up differently, and thus there is no single approach that consistently works on all problems; each new multiplication is an entirely new problem. To be fair the methods they do teach, such as the above, are interesting, and I myself tend to use them (or variations thereon) for quick mental calculation. My complaint is not so much to the methods taught, but to the failure to first provide a solid grounding in traditional systematic algorithms for performing multiplication and division. Indeed, in my view, the real problems run much deeper than this particular symptom."

Evolutionary Musical Organism / Interactive Architecture

"Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism made of audio cells. Every cell -consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker- listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole.

Every cell is born with a unique set of characteristics (its DNA) that control the way it will react to sound. If it’s not fit enough, the cell dies and is reborn with a new DNA (you can also adopt a cell, btw.)

The result is a musical organism adapting to its environment, evolving with neighbouring cells and spectators and becoming musically smarter and smarter." (link)

Interactive Architecture dot Org is a weblog about the emerging practice within architecture that aims to merge the digital virtual with tangible and physical spatial experience. Instead of defining a fixed architectural product it is an architecture in constant flux best suited to prototyping and semi-perminant installations. It is maintained by Ruairi Glynn. Bartlett School of Architecture.

HMC MediaLab: You have been writing regularly on the subject of interactive architecture for many months now, but how do you categorise it? How do you decide what is interactive architecture and what is not?

interactivearchitecture.org has a life of its own. Initially when I started it was very focused reporting on what could be easily identified as interactive architecture, i.e. interactive installations for large scale architectural projects such as BIX, at the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria, Toshio Iwai’s ICE (Interactive Communicative Experience) for the Bloomberg Headquarters in Tokyo, NOX’s Son-O-House or Jason Bruges’s Memory Wall at the Puerta America Hotel.

Since then I’ve begun to widen the focus to include interactive furniture, experimental projects at universities and research groups, and interesting new materials that I believe will transform how we apply technology into the built environment right down to nanotechnology such as the Buckymobile - Nano-Car. Scale is an enormously interesting facet of interactive architecture because increasingly this technology is becoming invisible to the naked eye. One guy at the moment whose work I really like is Usman Haque.

His project Haunt has no visible technology but using humidity, temperature, electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces, he’s attempting to make a very powerful experience within what seems an unexceptional space. As a whole I find projects that suggest a future where integration of digital systems into the fabric of the built environment, rather than having computers as distinct objects embody what interactive architecture is about. Hopefully this will enable people to move around and interact with computers more naturally than they currently do.

"My time is being squandered online because I'm not getting experience points,"

"'My time is being squandered online because I'm not getting experience points,' Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. (link)

Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online -- and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can't the whole thing be a game -- a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day's surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix -- making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do? What if you could add social media for p2p and many to many communication, add your location-aware mobile telephone to the mix, and add a productivity function that generates and displays to-do lists? We're already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveill each other and make a game of it? ("I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there," Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)"
http://www.passivelymultiplayer.com/ is Justin's website. Pretty sparse, but it's a neat idea.

I found out about it while checking out me.dium, a Firefox plugin that somehow (a) lets you chat with people who are on the same website you are, and (b) lets you see what websites your friends are visiting, and I found me.dium through this site.

It's a cool concept, I think - this sort of social networking while you do other stuff, combined with some kind of gamist scorekeeping for what you're doing.

Finally, check this out: http://packetgarden.com/ models your internet usage as a garden planet, based on the data uploaded and downloaded from various IPs around the world.

BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype

Bumptop Prototype

This is the future of GUIs, I kid you not. It's totally amazing and I want both to buy stock in this company *right now* and to download that prototype and buy or make myself a Mac Tablet.