MIT's Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn. The farmers of Compone feed corn to their livestock, grind it into meal, boil it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and stockpile it as insurance against future unknowns. They burn the corncobs, stripped of kernels, in the earthen stoves they use for cooking and to heat their homes. It's the stoves that worry Amy Smith. One morning, the 45-year-old inventor stands on the front lawn of the town's community center, beside a 55-gal. drum packed with corncobs that is billowing smoke, a box of matches in her hand and dressed for comfort in faded jeans, avocado T-shirt and a baseball cap pulled over a thick curtain of dirty-blond hair.
Parents: How to raise a creative genius A combination of heredity and unique characteristics of the individual contribute to creativityParents should cheer on their children but should not be attached to outcomesSome kids will drop an activity if they believe their parents have too many expectations about itCheck out CNN's Geek Out (CNN) -- When Gavin Ovsak started multiplying double-digit numbers in his head in kindergarten, his mother, Cathy, was astonished. "We were like, where did that come from? When did they cover that today?" Today, Gavin is a 16-year-old award-winning inventor who's finishing up applications for two prestigious science competitions. What motivates this passion for learning, and achievement? BLOG: Read more about Gavin's device, the CHAD Gavin is one of five highly talented, self-motivated kids CNN spoke with whose parents have worked hard to encourage the thirst for knowledge, the love of a good challenge and the idea that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. Sparking curiosity
MIT's Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day Amy B. Smith grew up in the Boston suburb of Lexington, Mass., not far from MIT, where her father taught electrical engineering; Smith's mother taught math and Latin in a local school. A childhood year the family spent in India sparked Smith's interest in the developing world. "Seeing that many people living in poverty must have made a lasting impression on me," she says, "because I've known my whole life I'd do this work." As a child, she set aside half her babysitting earnings for UNICEF; then, after completing her undergraduate degree at MIT, she joined the Peace Corps and spent four years working as a beekeeper and teacher in Botswana's Kalahari Desert. Smith returned to Cambridge to earn a master's degree in mechanical engineering. She finished her degree in 1996, and went looking for design challenges, turning first to her contacts in Botswana.
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
REST APIs must be hypertext-driven » Untangled I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API. Today’s example is the SocialSite REST API. That is RPC. What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? API designers, please note the following rules before calling your creation a REST API: A REST API should not be dependent on any single communication protocol, though its successful mapping to a given protocol may be dependent on the availability of metadata, choice of methods, etc. There are probably other rules that I am forgetting, but the above are the rules related to the hypertext constraint that are most often violated within so-called REST APIs.
Does the comfort of conformity ease thoughts of death? - life - 25 February 2011 AS THE light at the end of the tunnel approaches, the need to belong to a group and be near loved ones may be among your final thoughts. So say Markus Quirin and his colleagues at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. The team prompted thoughts of death in 17 young men with an average age of 23 by asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements such as "I am afraid of dying a painful death". At the same time, the men's brain activity was monitored using a functional MRI scanner. To compare the brain activity associated with thoughts of death with that coupled to another unpleasant experience, the team also prompted thoughts of dental pain using statements like "I panic when I am sitting in the dentist's waiting room". Although the threat of dental pain is unpleasant, "it's not a threat of death", Quirin says. Quirin thinks the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger could explain the unexpected result. New Scientist Not just a website! Sentient robots?
What is Global Positioning System (GPS)? - Definition from Whatis.com The GPS (Global Positioning System) is a "constellation" of 24 well-spaced satellites that orbit the Earth and make it possible for people with ground receivers to pinpoint their geographic location. The location accuracy is anywhere from 100 to 10 meters for most equipment. Accuracy can be pinpointed to within one (1) meter with special military-approved equipment. GPS equipment is widely used in science and has now become sufficiently low-cost so that almost anyone can own a GPS receiver. The GPS is owned and operated by the U.S. 21 GPS satellites and three spare satellites are in orbit at 10,600 miles above the Earth. The GPS is being used in science to provide data that has never been available before in the quantity and degree of accuracy that the GPS makes possible. GPS receivers are becoming consumer products. Contributor(s): Moshe Peleg This was last updated in May 2007 Email Alerts By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. More News and Tutorials
Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About - David DiSalvo - Brainspin Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Several great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Below I’ve chosen 10 that I think are among the most noteworthy, not just because they’re interesting, but useful as well. 1. If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. According to a study conducted at San Francisco State University, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A Shiny New Me • HTML5 Native Video Streaming With WebRTC HTML5 Native Video Streaming With WebRTC I did a tounge-in-cheek video response to Web Bos this week who sumbitted this epic video for FluentConf showcasing his all around HTML5 video awesomeness. In this video he streams directly to his browser and applies effects on the fly from the console. If this doesn’t impress you, you may be heavily medicated. Uh - yeah. Now I saw this and had 2 thoughts… 1. 2. In the name of education and also to increase my own chances of getting picked up for FluentConf, I made an HTML5 video video of my own. My video wasn’t nearly as good, but I really enjoyed working with the new methods for capturing native video with nothing but a browser. WebRTC First lets do a little primer on WebRTC. Apparently, WebRTC has been around for a while and according to the WebRTC site is: "Already integrated with best-of-breed voice and video engines that have been deployed on millions of end points over the last 8+ years.". -
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature. This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences. Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters,
RootSmart Android Malware May Be Able To Sneak By Google’s New Bouncer (Update) Remember that Bouncer Google put in the Android Market to act as a goalie for all potential malware attacks? It would seem that Google’s Bouncer doesn’t catch everything as Professor Xuxian Jiang, the same guy who discovered dozens of other Android malware attacks, has found yet another exploit called RootSmart. RootSmart works very similarly to a proof-of-concept app built by Jon Oberheide, by “dynamically fetching the GingerBreak root exploit from a remote server and then executing it to escalate its privilege.” This basically means that a malicious RootSmart app installs itself on the device with virtually no malicious code whatsoever, and the code is then fed to the app/device from remote servers. Since Bouncer works by scanning for known bits of malicious code, it makes RootSmart a very difficult bit of malware to find. However, RootSmart has not been found within the official Android Market thus far.
Edge of the abyss Daddy’s little girl … Michael Schofield with his daughter, Janni, in 2006. The first weeks of Janni's life, my wife, Susan, and I are taking lots of home video, imagining her watching these tapes alongside us and her friends as a teenager, pretending to be mortified, but happy on the inside knowing how important she's been to us from the beginning. About a week into her life, she stops sleeping, aside from 20 to 30 naps within a 24-hour day. We're still recording, though. We don't want to miss anything, although we do need to sleep at some point. She screams constantly when she's awake, but again, she'll probably find this amusing when she's a teenager watching all of this. A couple of weeks go by and she's still not sleeping for even one hour straight. Keeping it together … the Schofield family in 2011. We tell our paediatrician that Janni is getting a total of four to five hours of sleep a day. Advertisement We leave somewhat relieved, but still have to figure out what to do. No.