Don’t miss this month’s Providence Geek Dinner (Wednesday July 25); food, beverages, and great conversation will be all around you. Also, Providence-based Digication will be giving a short presentation; Digication provides an easy way for schools to create online communities and for teachers and students to showcase their work.
Don’t miss this month’s Providence Geek Dinner (Wednesday June 20!); Providence Geeks regulars Public Display will be giving their first public demonstration and you don’t want to miss it! Details and RSVP here.
Don’t miss this month’s Providence Geek Dinner (this Wednesday!); Arnell Milhouse will be giving a sneak peek at his ambitious “Virtual Providence” project. This is going to be very interesting. Details and RSVP here.
I’m not at ETech this year, but I’m following my colleague SarahM’s coverage on Twitter.
Right now, I don’t have Twitter set up to send me notifications via SMS, because that would probably drive me nuts (I use text messages for GCal and Remember the Milk notifications so SMS is basically my todo list). At Brian Sawyer’s suggestion, I’m using Twitteriffic, which is very nice (they have a beta of version 2.0 out that’s worth trying out).
The Providence Geek Dinner is back at AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence, RI) on Wednesday, February 28, 2007. The fun starts at 5:30pm. I hope to see you there. See the Providence Geeks blog for details and RSVP.
The Providence Geek Dinner is back at AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence, RI) on Wednesday, December 6, 2006. The fun starts at 5:30pm. I hope to see you there. See the Providence Geeks blog for details and RSVP.
The Providence Geek Dinner is back at AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence, RI) on Wednesday, November 8, 2006. The fun starts at 5:30pm. I hope to see you there. See the Providence Geeks blog for details and RSVP.
Jim Willis: “It was a bit like surfing the web in that we were jumping from topic to topic very quickly but getting into each topic with a profound sense of depth in a very short period of time.”
Renee Hopkins Callahan: The official IdeaFlow BIF-2 Collaborative Innovation Summit wrap-up!
Chris Flanagan: “Next up is turning those connections into meaningful interactions.”
Alice Wilder is here to talk about listening. In college, she did academic research as an undergrad, where she learned how to interview children. In graduate school, she met a visionary woman, Angela C. Santomero, who was working at Nickelodeon, and they worked on behavioral resonance, specifically looking at the negative effects of TV on kids, and they pondered how TV could have a positive effect on them.
Santomero created Blue’s Clues, and it became as popular as Sesame Street. They do a lot of research on the show (Wilder leads the R&D for the show). They get a lot of feedback from kids; one kid said “you’re making me a headache”, and the writers took it right back to the drawing board. They watch kids watching Blue. She showed a pair of simultaneous videos: the show playing, and the kids watching. I never understood how well some TV is configured for simulating true interactivity.
Kids want to be heard, want to express themselves and be listened to. They are working on an initiative to allow kids to publish as a way to learn writing.
Hugh Herr told us that from the knee down, he’s all nuts and bolts: his legs were amputated below the knee after a mountain climbing accident. He was told he’d never climb a mountain aain. The turning point was when he asked “what does a doctor know about mountain climbing?”
Hugh spent his time in the machine shop to build artificial legs and feet that were optimized for mountain climbing… maybe the ultimate mountain climbing boots! He can adjust his height. If he needs to be seven feet tall, no problem!
Simplicity through biological inspiration
He showed the results of his R&D: an artificial knee that permits a normal gait, navigation over rough terrain. They are active and are designed to behave like the biological components they are replacing.