Slashdot Mirror
Demo of a New "Sixth Sense" Technology
TEDChris writes "Here's an intriguing attempt at a versatile new tech device that tries to augment the wearer's five senses. It comes out of Patty Maes's group at the MIT Media Lab. By combining a computerized personal projector with a camera and linking both to the Net, a host of surprising new applications becomes possible. This 8-minute demo created a lot of buzz at TED last month and was posted online today. Would love to know what the Slashdot community makes of it."
Who would have thought that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Oh, damn it! I've never seen Star Wars! Now you've gone and ruined it for me! Now I'll never understand references like "That's no moon!"
My blog
"I met a five-year-old child once who had managed to learn to speak German. And that's a hard language to learn."
And hey, I met a dog who took commands in Chinese. It was impressive because I'm in Canada. It's not surprising because the dog grew up in China.
Children, and dogs, will learn whatever you teach to them. Stop teaching them crap. I know many adults who can't conceive of any more than five senses. They don't even realize that field sobriety tests -- in any movie pre-dating breathalizers -- doesn't test ayn of those five.
If you tell a five-year-old about his sense of vision, she won't understand either -- unless you said the word "vision" before.
"Equilibrium" is not a difficult word. You simply have to teach it -- five-year-olds lack two very important skills, they aren't psychic, and they don't tend to initiate cognitive learning.
But hey, as an adult, the number of times I talk to clients or people and have to say "emplain it to me as though I'm six" is very large. A lot of people like to say things, having no idea what they mean. And when you ask them to explain to you what they mean, it becomes very apparent that they have no idea.
I have one client (to make this relevant here) who likes to refer to her new web-site as being in "beta". She also likes to discuss features in terms of the "database". But what she says makes no sense. So I'd ask her "what do you mean by 'beta'?". And she'd say "you know, 'beta'. I don't know, 'beta'. it's your industry, you know what I must mean." And I'd ask "what do you mean by 'database'?", and she'd say "you, database, like, the whole thing."
It turns out that she used 'database' to mean any part of her web application that allowed her to see information. And she meant 'beta' as the first launch. Clearly, those are awy off. 'database' means the storage and manipulation of the data, not the reports and the presentation. 'beta' means it's still broken and has bugs, and we're letting external users find them. The confusion, of course, came when she said things like "we need to change the formatting of the database" and "it has to be bug-free for the beta launch".
So now we have an agreement. If she can't define a word, she can't use it.
Children aren't stupid, and they aren't ignorant. They're simply inexperienced.
You say many adults can't conceive of any more than ten digits. Well, they also can't conceive of any fewer than ten digits. And it's purely because no one ever told them, and they never tried. Children haven't had a chance to try, and most adults don't know enough to tell them.
Teach children about "equilibrium" and they'll understand. Don't and they won't. It's that simple. But I promise you one thing: if you don't know what the word means, you won't be able to teach it; not to children and not to adults. All you'll be able to do is to spread the confusion.
So, who taught you?
First, wikipedia is like asking 2'000 people on the street. It's no where near correct. It's just good enough most of the time.
Second, "dictionary" means how to pronounce words (i.e. "diction"). If you mean a "lexicon" then say so.
And things like hyphenation have been destroyed over the decades. Your "dictionary" probably has the word "mentee". It may be defined as the subject of a "mentor". As in "employee" and "employer". Of course, first "mentor" is "or", not "er". Second, not every word that ends in "er" does so as a suffix. Third, "mentors" have "protoge", not "mentees". Fourth, "back-formations" are rediculous. Fifth, a word accidently 'invented' due to an error is not a word. If anyone got up and said "I want to say 'mentee' to mean this because I think it's missing from the language" then I'd support them. If they're simply an idiot one day and said "mentee" because they forgot the word "protoge" as we all often do, then it's not a word.
The hyphenation rule you mention about using the compound as an adjective is required because there is yet another noun following. For example, "Giant book sale" is a giant sale and a book sale. "Giant-book sale" is a normal sale of giant books. "Drunk driving lawyer" is a drunk lawyer and a driving lawyer. "drunk-driving lawyer" is a lawyer for "drunk driving". You don't need to hyphenate "drunk driving" because in that case "drunk" means drunk and "driving" means driving. But when it doesn't, you have to hyphenate it. In programming, we'd say "(drunk driving) lawyer" to indicate that the sentence/phrase parsing is inside-out and not left-to-right.
Yes, in elementary-school you are learning "elementary knowledge" and "grade school" can be the type of school in which students are identified by numbered grades. But the point is it doesn't have to be. Those are simply one of the very many matching cases. Because you need to defined "grade" in "grade school" in order to narrow down which one you mean, writing "grade school" would necessitate an emdash or parenthetical definition or footnote.
The guiding problem with all of this, and the reason hyphenation gets worse with each generation, is that industry-specific terminology used to be jargon. You'd write it in quotes, define it as a term that no one had heard before, and move on. The only people that would read your term were others in your industry, so they'd know what you meant and they'd like your term, and it wouldn't conflict with anything else.
But today, we converse across multiple industries in a single sentence. So industry jargon gets lost very quickly when tow industries use the same word to mean different things. When I was a pip-squeak web developer, and we had a meeting with the web advertisers, it took thirty minutes to figure out that I.P. meant something very different to the ten people in the room. To half it meant interten protocol, and to the other half it meant impressions per page. It was a very big waste of time.
Certainly, when you're talking to a teacher, "grade school" will not be misunderstood. And to anyone in the academic world, "grade school" would be correct industry jargon. But if you were to ask an arcitect to build your "grade school" you'd have a problem. Because in his mind, it would mean a school on a grade. And the word "grade" means the same thing in his industry as it does in yours, but the manner in which it modifies "school" is very different.
Of course, the moment you cross language boundaries, you get into more hell. And you don't have to leave English to do it. Think of all of the synonyms of the word "school". (English doesn't actually have two words that mean the same thing, as you'll soon discover.) Now say "grade " and watch how the meaning changes drastically.
"grade teaching", "grade training", "grade collecting", "grade gathering" -- remember, fish school too. "school" doesn't have anything to do with education, just like "class" doesn't.
But hey, people like to say: "I can't tell y