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Tag Archives: technology

It’s Not About the Robot

The 19th annual FIRST national robotics championship was held in Atlanta last week, with teams from Redondo Beach, CA; Milford, MI, and South Windsor, CT taking top honors. More than 500 teams from 30 countries competed. FIRST founder, inventor Dean Kamen, presented awards to winning teams, joined by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. (Obama, Kamen […]

Where Are You, Right Now?

SimpleGeo used their new tool Vicarious.ly to create this visualization of location-based data — Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter — logged over 8 days of the South by Southwest conference in Austin. The patterns of people’s movements, day and night, are fascinating — and it’s easy to […]

You Are Not a Gadget

By far one of the most interesting sessions I attended at South by Southwest Interactive last week, was a refreshing talk by Jaron Lanier, whom can I remember being a sort of techno-guru back when all this stuff was new. Anyway, he has a book out now called You Are Not a Gadget, a deeply […]

Robots in Vermont

Hey, everyone loves robots. Recently I learned that we have one of the foremost researchers on robot learning, Josh Bongard, working right next door at the University of Vermont. He spoke the other night as part of the Echo Lake Museum and Science Center’s Cafe Scientifique series. I missed it, but they did post a […]

Fresh, Hot Tweets!

One of the cooler little innovations I stumbled onto last week, a creation of the interactive group POKE. BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo. No laptop or cell phone required — just twist the knob on the device until the baked good you’re taking out displays on the screen, then hit the button to send out […]

Bill Gates, Showman

This has gotten a good bit of coverage — which is the point. In his talk at the TED conference this week, about his efforts to eradicate malaria in the developing world, Gates releases some (non-malarial, I suppose?) mosquitoes while onstage, saying, “There’s no reason only poor people should experience this.” Because of its size […]