The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia also have their own channel. They use it for similiar purposes as the museum but also to give overviews of each faculty and the research they are doing.
I think this is an excellent way for these institutions to present themselves. It's much more convenient just watching a movie on Youtube than reading the "About Us" section on their websites.
Furthermore, it's much easier formming opinions and attitudes when you see something visual than when you a webpage or two.
This is pretty amazing. The technical aspects of how flawed this helicopter is does not really go with the intent of the article. He obviously wanted a challenge, as I can imagine that being a physics student in Nigeria can't be too fulfilling, and building a helicopter and succeeding is a great accomplishment. Just reading what parts he used shows that he made something from nothing.
I think this is an excellent advance or improvement of previous technologies. Surveillance is already a part of modern living in most cities. In most cities there are surveillance everywhere - from highways to known criminal areas. This is not a surprising new discovery with a load of privacy infringements. It is merely that they are taking the surveillance to a next level.
Arguably, a video camera taping a murder in the streets is rather useless. It is only good to find the perpetrator later. It is good that they can now actually implement new technologies (such as hear-rate sensing) in previously quite useless surveillance technologies. The ideas in Minority Report do have a striking resemblance to this article, but maybe not in such a caliber as portrayed in the movie. This is an excellent way of being one step ahead of criminal activity.
A little case study: In Johannesburg, South Afica they have CCTV camera installed all over the city. The reason for this is that the police do not enter the area as it is too dangerous. They rather wait for some criminal activity and then respond to it which is most of the time too late. These new technologies will allow police to act pre-emptively to stop any activity.
About the Big Brother parallel - Big Brother have been watching us for quite some time. In most cities, actually. However, before he was looking at us some Pharmacy bought glasses. Now he will have a chance to view us with an electron microscope - seeing what's happening inside. This is clearly an invasion of private space but then again it is just the expansion of a concept that has been with society for quite some time.
Being an expatriate currently living in China, I must say that this really not that unexpected. Everything gets censored here, even the TV. I often watch the BBC news channel, and as soon critical talk about China arises the signal is "lost" and there is a whole lot of snow of the screen.
I must agree with most people's comments about how this limits the free flow of information in China. For instance bbc.co.uk is blocked, images.google gets blocked randomly and Wikipedia is permanently blocked. And this extends to far beyond just the internet, the only hard copy source of "critical" news (in English) I can get my hands on is the daily China Daily, who, yesterday published a front page article about how government officials are delighted about how their country grant everyone religious freedom and also how they do not have any knowledge of anyone ever being persecuted because of their religious beliefs.
Luckily there are ways other ways to access services that are mostly blocked, but most Chinese people have no idea how to access it and even more frightening, they do not know that news critical of a country EXIST.
There is a LARGE difference between developing and implementation. Technology is cool, but ultimately it is the way of life of a people that contributes to pollution.
At the very very worse we'll have famine and violent storms. It wont' kill us all, and I'm certain we can deal with it. Wow, that is so ignorant I don't know where to start with a rebuttal. Because it won't kill us all, it is okay? That is like saying that if people are living in an area with a ridiculously high crime rate start petitions about lack of police and how there should be more police in the area, that they are "annoying" because I mean, WE, don't get affected by them.
The reason people are getting so upset about global warming is because it is a natural process being negatively affected by human industries. Also, the "global" in global warming means EVERYONE - which means that some people will be able to deal with it more efficiently than others. Again, this can be illustrates using the crime neighbourhoud analogy - crime is prevalent EVERYWHERE but when there is a global increase in crime rates some neighbourhoods will be able to deal with it better than others - but essentially it is still a reason to get upset about.
This happens the whole time - it is a combination of politics and the nature of statistics. Is it not obvious that a goverment will accept a study in favour of what they are preaching in the political arena rather than accepting a study that openly criticises them - it would rather stupid not to.
Also, I'm sure that the US government would be satisfied with a study on a 5% significance level so that they can just say "We are 5% certain that the USA's pollution rates are lower than Europe's"
I think that this statistic just shows the course of modern society. More and more people are seeking "better" lives, and arguably this is what the city symbolises to someone from a rural community. Furthermore, I doubt that there will be food shortages if this trend continues rapidly in the favour of urbanisation because agriculture is an industry, and a heavily modernised industry at that. Our food does not come from poor little people working barefeet in harsh environments - it comes fat, rich bosses who owns agricultural industries. However, yes, it can be said that the actual workers are quite poor.
Thinking about it, the growth of urbanisation and the decline of the rural populations will actually boost the industries dependent on it because the demand for products will become higher and the supply will have to be matched - and working for these firms will probably prove more profitable than cleaning tables in the urban areas.
Just a few thoughts...
There is a Google Techtalk with "this scientist" available here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-824646398 0976635143.
This way of using simple techniques are so innovative, because it can perform really complex tasks that no one thought about before. Some of his other projects include online "games" (Peek a boom) which collects relevant data from the users playing it so that a computer can determine what kind of object is in a digital picture, and where it is located. It is really a big step for innovative and smart computing...
Slashdot Mirror
The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia also have their own channel. They use it for similiar purposes as the museum but also to give overviews of each faculty and the research they are doing.
I think this is an excellent way for these institutions to present themselves. It's much more convenient just watching a movie on Youtube than reading the "About Us" section on their websites.
Furthermore, it's much easier formming opinions and attitudes when you see something visual than when you a webpage or two.
This is pretty amazing. The technical aspects of how flawed this helicopter is does not really go with the intent of the article. He obviously wanted a challenge, as I can imagine that being a physics student in Nigeria can't be too fulfilling, and building a helicopter and succeeding is a great accomplishment. Just reading what parts he used shows that he made something from nothing.
I think this is an excellent advance or improvement of previous technologies. Surveillance is already a part of modern living in most cities. In most cities there are surveillance everywhere - from highways to known criminal areas. This is not a surprising new discovery with a load of privacy infringements. It is merely that they are taking the surveillance to a next level.
Arguably, a video camera taping a murder in the streets is rather useless. It is only good to find the perpetrator later. It is good that they can now actually implement new technologies (such as hear-rate sensing) in previously quite useless surveillance technologies. The ideas in Minority Report do have a striking resemblance to this article, but maybe not in such a caliber as portrayed in the movie. This is an excellent way of being one step ahead of criminal activity.
A little case study: In Johannesburg, South Afica they have CCTV camera installed all over the city. The reason for this is that the police do not enter the area as it is too dangerous. They rather wait for some criminal activity and then respond to it which is most of the time too late. These new technologies will allow police to act pre-emptively to stop any activity.
About the Big Brother parallel - Big Brother have been watching us for quite some time. In most cities, actually. However, before he was looking at us some Pharmacy bought glasses. Now he will have a chance to view us with an electron microscope - seeing what's happening inside. This is clearly an invasion of private space but then again it is just the expansion of a concept that has been with society for quite some time.
Dead language?
Most legal terms and medical terminology are 100% latin.
Being an expatriate currently living in China, I must say that this really not that unexpected. Everything gets censored here, even the TV. I often watch the BBC news channel, and as soon critical talk about China arises the signal is "lost" and there is a whole lot of snow of the screen.
I must agree with most people's comments about how this limits the free flow of information in China. For instance bbc.co.uk is blocked, images.google gets blocked randomly and Wikipedia is permanently blocked. And this extends to far beyond just the internet, the only hard copy source of "critical" news (in English) I can get my hands on is the daily China Daily, who, yesterday published a front page article about how government officials are delighted about how their country grant everyone religious freedom and also how they do not have any knowledge of anyone ever being persecuted because of their religious beliefs.
Luckily there are ways other ways to access services that are mostly blocked, but most Chinese people have no idea how to access it and even more frightening, they do not know that news critical of a country EXIST.
There is a LARGE difference between developing and implementation. Technology is cool, but ultimately it is the way of life of a people that contributes to pollution.
This happens the whole time - it is a combination of politics and the nature of statistics. Is it not obvious that a goverment will accept a study in favour of what they are preaching in the political arena rather than accepting a study that openly criticises them - it would rather stupid not to.
Also, I'm sure that the US government would be satisfied with a study on a 5% significance level so that they can just say "We are 5% certain that the USA's pollution rates are lower than Europe's"
I think that this statistic just shows the course of modern society. More and more people are seeking "better" lives, and arguably this is what the city symbolises to someone from a rural community. Furthermore, I doubt that there will be food shortages if this trend continues rapidly in the favour of urbanisation because agriculture is an industry, and a heavily modernised industry at that. Our food does not come from poor little people working barefeet in harsh environments - it comes fat, rich bosses who owns agricultural industries. However, yes, it can be said that the actual workers are quite poor. Thinking about it, the growth of urbanisation and the decline of the rural populations will actually boost the industries dependent on it because the demand for products will become higher and the supply will have to be matched - and working for these firms will probably prove more profitable than cleaning tables in the urban areas. Just a few thoughts...
There is a Google Techtalk with "this scientist" available here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-824646398 0976635143.
This way of using simple techniques are so innovative, because it can perform really complex tasks that no one thought about before. Some of his other projects include online "games" (Peek a boom) which collects relevant data from the users playing it so that a computer can determine what kind of object is in a digital picture, and where it is located. It is really a big step for innovative and smart computing...