Toddlers’ Early Language Skills May Influence Later Anger Management

A new study published in the journal Child Development draws a connection between early language skills and emotional growth and also show a relationship to later development of anger management skills.

“We found that toddlers who have stronger language skills than other toddlers, and whose language skills develop faster over time, tend to be better at regulating frustration when they’re preschool aged,” says the study's lead author, Caroline Roben, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware.

“It’s well recognized these days that emotion regulation is important for success in school,” Roben says. “When you’re doing things to promote [your children's] language skills, their verbal world, you may be doing something to promote their emotional development as well.”

Want to read more? Here's a link to the Penn State Live article where this was featured.

Vision-Restoring Implants That Fit Inside The Eye

This comes from MIT's Technology Review. Apparently, there is much work being done on a coming generation of retinal implants that utilize nano-scale electronic components to dramatically improve vision quality in individuals blinded by degenerative eye disease.

“Smaller materials do have the possibility of giving higher-resolution images,” says Shawn Kelly, a bioengineer at Carnegie Mellon University, who is developing a microscale retinal prosthesis. “Smaller electrodes can get closer to individual nerves, and you can have many more of them.”

A company in Israel and a team at the University of California, San Diego, appear to be leading the pack. See the linked article for details.

Fun Time! How Canadians Take Out The Trash In -32° Temperatures!

From Laughing Squid.

Dogs Driving Cars (yes, you read that right)

In New Zealand, rescue dogs are being taught to drive to address some misconceptions concerning their intelligence.

Here's a link to the Auckland SPCA, where the work is being done. Here's video of the training and driving.

In Oregon, Living Large In 800 Square Feet

Here's a lovely home in Eugene, Oregon which originally was 620 square feet, was completely deconstructed and then rebuilt to 800. Lots of exposed wood and lots of light. It has a 3.36 kilowatt solar system that also heats the water.

Travel Photo of the Week

Bay of Ao Noi on the island of Ko Phi-Phi Don, Thailand

Fun Time Bonus! A Glove and Boots Christmas!

How Children Develop Empathy

At this time of year we are supposed to think about the needs and suffering of others and do something positive about it. The feelings stirred by the feelings of others is called empathy and people who have it developed it as children.

This article from the New York Times by Dr. Perri Klass delves into the mechanisms by which this trait develops.

In a quote from the article: "Parental modeling is important, of course; sympathy and compassion should be part of children’s experience long before they know the words. Don’t offer material rewards for prosocial behavior, but do offer opportunities to do good — opportunities that the child will see as voluntary. And help children see themselves and frame their own behavior as generous, kind, helpful."

But financial rewards undermine prosocial behavior. In the US people can be paid for blood donations, but not in Britain. And the British donate more blood.

Worldometer: The World In Numbers

Are you interested in what's going on in the world? By the numbers?  The Worldometers website give you the run down on world population (births, deaths), government and economics (expenditures, productivity), society and media, environment, food and water and list goes on and the numbers increase and decrease in real time.

It's pretty cool to see the numbers of these things spin as you watch them. Here's a good one: As of December 23, 2012 at 8:34:48 AM the population of the Earth was 7,087,038,972, the number of  undernourished was 905,138,108, 10,951 died of hunger and 11,748,197 hectares of land turned into desert this year.

Fun Time! LEGO Quadrocopter Drone!

Study Links Food Allergies To Pesticides In Tap Water

Why can't we seem to protect our supply of fresh water? Why do we allow pesticides and other contaminants to poison it and then allow it to be consumed?

A team of researchers at the journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology decided to look at whether a rise in food sensitivities was related to the use of environmental pesticides and purifying chemicals.

“We started to look into the question of why in westernized countries food allergies are so prevalent, says lead study author Dr. Elina Jerschow. “Pollutants are so widely available in the West through pesticides, herbicides and insecticides, there may be a link.” While the link does not establish a cause and effect relationship, the study finds an association between pesticide exposure and food allergies.

Key findings from the study:

• In 2007, approximately 3 million children under age 18 years (3.9%) were reported to have a food or digestive allergy in the previous 12 months.
• From 1997 to 2007, the prevalence of reported food allergy increased 18% among children under age 18 years.
• Children with food allergy are two to four times more likely to have other related conditions such as asthma and other allergies, compared with children without food allergies.
• From 2004 to 2006, there were approximately 9,500 hospital discharges per year with a diagnosis related to food allergy among children under age 18 years.

Now can we start to figure out that we need clean water? Here's a link to the study.

IQ Is A Myth

Ah, the ever feared, respected and false Intelligence Quotient score. We have all lived our lives under its tyranny and for no other reason except that we have. Now comes a study shedding light on something I've always known.

Intelligence cannot be scored like a football game with winners scoring higher and losers scoring lower. A study published in the journal Neuron on Wednesday, determined that three factors — reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability combine to create human intelligence or “cognitive profile."

The study’s senior investigator, Dr. Adrian Owen, who is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the university’s Brain and Mind Institute says, “When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth. There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence.”

If you'd like to read the study's abstract, it's HERE. If you'd like to take the test from the study, click HERE.

Travel Photo of the Week

The Inverted Tower, Sintra, Portugal

Why The Universe Is Not A Computer After All

It looks like a long standing science fiction theory about the universe is false after all. For decades, the theory was that the entire universe was a simulation running in a computer somewhere and we only thought it was real because that was part of the program.

Ken Wharton at San Jose State University in California, has thought it out and come to this conclusion: “It’s basically the assumption that the way we humans solve physics problems must be the way the universe actually operates,” he says.

Well, that's all well and nice, but what if that's part of the program, too? I'll let you read the article and sort it out yourself.

Foraging Wild Foods

Wild Harvests is a blog about foraging wild foods in the Pacific Northwest and is an overabundance of wisdom in this respect. It also features recipes.

The most recent post was about their Thanksgiving dinner which included stinging nettles, Copper River sockeye salmon, venison and rice pilaf, all from the wild. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

The 31 Healthiest Foods Of All Time

Want to know what's good to eat? Not just good for you, but good tasting, too? If you trust Time Magazine, here's their list (with recipes).

My favorites? Brussels sprouts, kale, blueberries, salmon, beans...all of them.

And just in case you think Time made it all up, the list comes from the USDA.

Fun Time! Flaming Liquids Being Hurled Through The Air In Slow Motion!

Here's a link to their Youtube channel for more amazing slo-mo stuff.

Build A Laser Microphone

From Lifehacker comes this explanation of how to build a microphone that can be used at a distance, from a laser. That way you can listen in on conversations in the house across the street! And be a real spy! And find out embarrassing things about the neighbors! Or find out they're just as boring as they appear!



I just would like to know if we could just skip all the social decline and go right to the fall or do we have to go through every stage, one crazy technological development at a time?

If you can't resist participating in humanity's apparently inexorable decline, here's a link to instruction on how to build the long-range laser spy system.

I Dream Of Wires

In one of my many lifetimes I was a professional synthesizer programmer and performer. As a young teen I was consumed with the idea of owning and using modular analog synthesizers and as an adult I spent a good deal of time and money acquiring and learning to use these amazing sonic wonders.

I Dream of Wires is an upcoming documentary about the history of the creation and resurgence of these marvelous devices.

Below is a promo for the film and below that an extended interview with Chris Carter, who is interviewed for it.




Chris Carter: IDOW Extended Interview #9 from I Dream Of Wires on Vimeo.

Travel Photo of the Week

Matterhorn, Switzerland

Under $1300 3D Printer

I recently wrote a couple of entries about 3D printers. Now there's one under $1300, the Cube. Here's a link to the company, if you're ready to order and a handy informative video about the device.

How To Publish a "Minimum Viable Magazine" Online

I have always loved magazines. Beautiful, colorful, slick covers enclosing the latest in news, design or other interests limited to a specialized group. And although I prefer magazines in print, there is an overwhelming  impetus to publish online: there are no boundaries that limit a physical publication. You can have as many pages as you want. The normal economies of scale don't apply to your publishing run. You can even leave out advertising if you wish.

But there does seem to be some rules for minimum viability, as this article in Technology Review goes to show.

My favorite rule? Make it simple so you can make it fast. Because no one wants to wait an hour to download a publication they just paid for.

Starbucks Opens Drive-Thru Made From Recycled Shipping Containers

Inspired by the shipping containers that their coffee comes in, Starbucks has created a drive-through in Tukwila, Washington, that is made from four of the containers and built to LEED green building standards. 

Starbuck's Director of Global Corporate Communications, Alan Hilowitz says of this venture, "At this time, this store is one-of-a-kind. However, we are viewing this as a prototype which could be replicated in other locations"

Here's a link to the original article on Inhabit.com.

Fun Time! Star Wars Fans Build Full-Size Millennium Falcon!

What we've all been waiting for!



Going up on an 88 acre site in Tennessee. You can help. Here's their website.

$20 Tablet

With so much interest in tablet computers, it would only make sense that there would be intense competition to make a less expensive (a basic model iPad is $500) and capture more of the market.

Well, now someone's done it: a tablet for $20. Datawind has the Aakash 2, a fully capable Android-based tablet designed for educational use in the developing world.

If you'd like one, it seems that the commercially available model, the UbiSlate that is right around $85.

Snakebots

Just when you thought humanoid robots were getting creepy enough, here come a brand new creepy robot: a robot snake.

Carnegie Mellon University Roboticist Howie Choset and his team weren't inspired by human architecture when they designed their robot.

“A lot of people have this notion that robots are modeled after people,” says Choset, of in Pittsburgh. But “if you have to cross a field, swim a moat, burrow through a little hole in a fence and climb a pole, there’s no other robot that can do all those things,” he said of his serpentine machine.

The intent is for this device to be useful in building collapses and fires, where it's too dangerous for people and too difficult for larger robots to investigate.

Here's a link to the original article on Science News. Hopefully the snakebots won't end up on a plane.

Travel Photo of the Week

Iguacu Falls, Brazil

NYC Schools Teach Farming On Rooftops

The Fifth Street Farm

There's a bit of a revolution going on in urban rooftop vegetable gardens. Here's an article in the New York Times about schools in the Big Apple that are using the gardens to teach not only gardening and nutrition, but also subjects as varied as science, art, mathematics and social studies.

In the past two years the number of school based garden have soared from 40 to 232. Perhaps the biggest is the 2,400-square-foot garden at Avenue B and Fifth Street in the East Village, on top of a red-brick building that houses three public schools: the Earth School, Public School 64 and Tompkins Square Middle School called the Fifth Street Farm.

Its goal "is to create a large green roof farm accessible to children of all ages on the Robert Simon Complex in New York City's East Village. We hope this initiative will lead to greater awareness and understanding for our children of the natural world, especially the vital role plants play in our lives."

Self Filling Water Bottle

Here's a real boon to mankind. We have a problem with fresh water. We are running out. Our use of water, for irrigation, drinking, washing, is beginning to outstrip it's availability.

Deckard Sorensen has developed a technology that extracts water from the air. The device contains surfaces with hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings, and then uses a fan to pass air over the surface. The water then condenses on the surface and fills a bottle or other container.

"We see this being applicable to anything from marathon runners to people in third-world countries, because we realize that water is such a large issue in the world today, and we want to try to alleviate those problems with a cost-efficient solution," Sorensen says. "We are looking to incorporate this in greenhouses or green roofs in the immediate future, and then later on, we’re looking to see how far we can really scale this up to supply maybe farms or larger agricultural goals."

The Rebirth of D'Angelico Guitars

Those of you who know me, know that guitars are one of my passions. I love the sound and feel of a fine guitar in my hands and I'm delighted to see this legendary instrument maker come back.

John D'Angelico is arguably one of the greatest luthiers ever. His handbuilt guitars are regarded as the pinnacle of the art and command the price of a luxury auto all the way up to that of a small house. By the time he died in 1964, at the age of 59, he had only made around 1200.

Guitar collector and businessman John M. Ferolito, Sr has revived the brand and hired Gene Baker and PBG Workshop to build a limited run of D'Angelico USA Masterbuilt Series using MRI scans of original D'Angelico instruments. Click on the link below to have a look.

D'Angelico Guitars.

Fun Time! Best Pizza In NYC!

Because if you're having fun in NYC, you still need to eat.

Self Cleaning Fishtank That Grows Food

Here's an interesting project currently on Kickstarter.com. It is a small aquarium where the fish waste products are used as fertilizer by the plants above. With farmland disappearing, an approach such as this could make a real difference in the availability of quality food.

If you want to invest in this, you have to hurry: there's only two weeks left to go and it's already fully funded. Here's video of the project.

Singapore's Super Solar Trees

In Singapore, a forest of mechanical solar-powered tree structures, Supertree Grove, stands 82 to 164 feet above the city, part of a redevelopment project called 'Gardens by the Bay'.

The video below shows the light and sound show presented every evening featuring the trees.

Travel Photo of the Week

Kusma-Gyadi Bridge, Nepal

Vending Machine For Books

I heard about this on NPR. The Monkey's Paw, a eccentric Toronto bookstore, had hundreds of unwanted, unloved books and decided that people needed to broaden their reading to include books they'd never buy under normal circumstances. That's when Craig Small, creative director at Toronto post-production, design and animation studio flew into action and designed and built the Biblio-Mat, a book vending machine.

Pop in two bucks and after some grinding and whirring, an old telephone bell rings and out comes a book. Here's a video of the machine in action.

Twitter Shows Language Evolves In Cities

I've always been fascinated with the evolution of language. Now comes a new study that points to cities as a hotbed of language creation and it seems that Twitter is being used as a measurement. From the article in New Scientist.....

"Jacob Eisenstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and colleagues examined 30 million tweets sent from US locations between December 2009 and May 2011. Several new terms spread during this period, including "bruh", an alternative spelling of "bro" or "brother", which first arose in a few south-east cities before eventually hopping to parts of California."

The article goes on to give other examples and states that African Americans account for a great deal of the word creation. Again, from the article.....

"Researchers have tracked the diffusion of words like "cool" and "uptight" from black communities to mainstream use in the past. "We have thousands of examples," says Eisenstein. Their data cannot shed light on why the flow is in this direction, but he notes that language is just one cultural area in which traditions have spread outwards from African American communities."

Hovering Moon Base

From New Scientist comes word that President Obama is set to back a hovering spaceport for the dark side of the moon. It would "hover" at the Lagrange Point about 37,000 from the moon's surface and would be essential for missions to Mars or the asteroid belt.

When asked about this new plan, agency spokesperson Rachel Kraft said in an email to New Scientist, "NASA is executing the President's ambitious space exploration plan that includes missions around the moon, to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. There are a variety of routes and options being discussed to help build the knowledge and capabilities to get there, and other options may be considered as we look for ways to buy down risk."

Fun Time! Wooden Muppet Character Toys!

This is from Laughing Squid. Click here to see them all.

Star Trek's Universal Translator Is Here

The tech inspired by Star Trek just keeps on coming! This is from Time magazine's tech page. Microsoft has developed a working universal translator. I won't bore you with details, but I will include a video. Go to about 6:20 to see it in action.

More Star Trek Tech: A Tricorder!

There is an X-prize for building the first Star Trek inspired "tricorder" and many corporations are vying to win it, but it looks like a group of college and high school students have gotten there first.

The students developed their project during a summer internship program at the Wright Brothers Institute and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

From the Scientific American article:

"The device itself looks like a clear brick filled with computer parts and batteries. It is built around an open-source computing platform called an Arduino microcontroller and transmits data via Bluetooth. An environmental sensing pod connects to the controller and collects measurements on variables like temperature, wind speed and radiation levels. Users can view data collection in real time via Google maps or an interactive graph and monitor changes and search for patterns."

I'm still waiting for my transporter.

Travel Photo of the Week

Grand Canyon

Harry Potter Tech! Invisibility Cloak!

This in from ExtremeTech.com. Scientists at Duke University have created the first real, functioning invisibility cloak. Now come the caveats: 1. It only works with microwave radiation 2. It only provides invisibilty from one direction.

Now that might not seen very functional to you, but what this really means is that eventually this research will yield the "real deal," a cloak that works for visible light and from all directions.

I don't think we'll get flying brooms any time soon, but then again, in this age of wonders, who knows?

A Brain For Rhythm

Exploring the brain on rhythm with University of California neuroscientist, Adam Gazzale and The Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart.

Freshwater Fish Are Dying At Alarming Rates

This comes from Scientific American. 57 species and subspecies of freshwater fish have gone extinct in the last hundred years. That number could go up to 86 by 2050.

Many of these fish were from the Great Lakes region and between pollution, overfishing and the introduction of non-native species, the extinct species' populations collapsed. Freshwater fish are especially vulnerable as they depend upon smaller bodies of water.

Isn't it really time to start thinking about how we affect our living space?

Fun Time! Athelete Driven Rube Goldberg Machine!

Think You’re Being Followed? How To Tell and Get Away.

And since we're on a roll about being paranoid, here's another tip from Lifehacker.com. Being followed? Want to be sure? Want to shake the tail?

Here is everything you need to do it. Staying aware of your surroundings. Looking for vehicles in your neighborhood that you've never seen before. Changing your behavior and any patterns regularly.

Here's a short video about being followed. Aren't you glad you're not a spy?

How To Commit Internet Suicide And Disappear From The Web

Have you ever wanted to go to ground and get out of the digital age? Well, from Lifehacker.com, here's the way to erase yourself from the internet.

In five not-so-easy steps, you can make yourself, at least your digital self, go away forever. Careful though, it's just so easy to get picked back up by the internet radar. Guess you'll have to stop using computers all together.

Travel Photo of the Week

Aurora Over Budir, Snaefellsnes, Iceland - Wim Denijs

School Of The Future That Time Forgot

At the Mountain School, in Vershire, Vermont, high school juniors, many from elite New England private schools, spend a semester immersed in nature. Until lately, the school has existed without the so-called benefits of modern information technology. There is no high speed internet in the town. Satellite reception is spotty and weather dependent. Even cell phones have little reception.

With fiber optic cable being introduced this fall, that is about to change and the school is facing the challenge: "how to regulate the use of smartphones and other devices that serve as a constant distraction for 21st-century teenagers, who are here to engage with the rural setting and with one another."

The schools director has been asked to ban these intrusive technologies by many of the students, alumni and faculty. The school has decided to leave the decision to the student body and alumni.

This is the kind of careful and thoughtful way all things should weighed when it comes to our children's education and especially the children themselves should be involved in the process. We want our kids to grow up and be able to make good choices. Perhaps they should be involved from the first day of school.

For more on this, here's the link to the source in the New York Times and a link to the Mountain School itself.

Singapore Builds First Vertical Farm

As more and more people inhabit the Earth, there is less and less arable land for agriculture. For Singapore, a small, crowded country that imports most of its food, increasing the amount of produce grown yearly would be beneficial, so they have developed vertical farming.

Vegetables are grown in multiple troughs, in twenty-seven foot tall, aluminum towers. Although more expensive now, the prices are expected to drop as the farm increases production.

Here's a link to the story on channelnewsasia.com. Here's a video on the farming methods.

A Future Without Potatoes

One of the things we don't talk much about when it comes to our climate changing is the changes our biome will make at the same time. Animals are migrating further north as things warm up. Another thing that we should think about is the changes that will come to agriculture. Many foods that are grown depend on particular environmental conditions to flourish.

Recently the United Nations committee on world food security issued a report on the effects of global warming. The group analyzed the effects of climate change on 22 of the world’s key agricultural staples, as well as three important natural resources in the developing world. While much is still conjecture, the experts agree on one thing: crops may not be able to grow where they had been grown for many generations.

One of the suggestions was that we would perhaps have to give up potatoes and replace them with bananas.

Here is a link to the Time and the BBC articles and the on this.

Fun Time! William Robertson Miniature Tool Chest.

For those really tiny jobs.

Buddhist Monk Rated Happiest Man In The World

Yep, he looks pretty happy to me.

It's one thing to be happy and it's another one entirely to be designated the "happiest man in the world," but it appears that the University of Wisconsin has done the research, developed a means of measuring it and given the title to Tibetan Buddhist monk and molecular geneticist Matthieu Ricard.

Ricard is working to show how meditation can alter the brain and improve one's outlook on life.

"It's a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are."

Here's a link to the NYDaily News article describing the U of W experiment.

Tiny Modern Leaf House

Lloyd's Blog clued me into this beautiful small home and its Canadian builders. It's 20-foot long, with a sofa bed, full kitchen, full bathroom, a dining area and a feeling of luxury in 215 square feet . This baby is also insulated to take the Canadian winter. Cost? About $44,000.

Here's a link to the builders, Leaf House.

Travel Photo of the Week

Chomolungma (Mt. Everest

The Post-Apocalypse Survival Machine Nerd Farm

Awhile back, I featured Marcin Jacubowski and his work to create an open source civilization reboot kit. In case of Apocalypse just open up the kit and build any machine you need from it's modular parts.

In September I did an update on his open source brick press. Well, Bloomberg Businessweek has caught on to his work and has updated us on the progress of his project.

Jacubowski plans to have his entire project completed by 2015 and he publishes progress reports on the Open Source Ecology website.

How To Make A Brick Rocket Stove For $6.08

Here's a great tutorial on making a rocket stove with bricks.

How To Choose A Carribean Vacation

Maracas, Trinidad

With Winter on the way, it's time to think about a vacation and when the cold comes, what better place to vacate than a warm place. My favorite? The Caribbean.

Here's an article from Lonely planet on how to choose the best Caribbean destination. It includes a list of the various islands and their attractions, based on whether they are easy to get to (non-stop flights) or a little more out of the way.

Fun Time! The World’s Strongest Beer? Armageddon!

The Scottish company that brews Armageddon beer describes it as having "lots of flavour. It’s slightly sweet, hoppy, malty and retains much of the yeast present during fermentation."

Ingredients include crystal malt, wheat, flaked oats and of course 100% Scottish spring water. Then they freeze ferment the beer to bring up the alcohol content.

They recommend 35ml doses. It's 65% alcohol.

You can order it here.

Bookalokal - Eat with Locals Worldwide

Lately there have been a bunch of startups that have centered around the idea of leveraging local resources for travelers. Airbnb was one of the early entries into this field.

Bookalokal is all about food. Home-cooked and prepared by folks just like you and I who happen to live all over the world. Currently there are offerings of traditional foods in Zimbabwe and Turkey, an "ever changing global brunch" in Brussels, a classic Parisian lunch (in, of all places, Paris) and even farm-to-table pizza and salad in good old Washington, D.C., plus lots, lots more.

Prices vary, but seem very reasonable to me, especially since you also have a local host to enhance the experience. The best part? You could never get a waiter or waitress to sit at your table all night and give you tidbits about the town your in. Your host can.

You book through the website.

Four Foot Wide House

Now this is what I call a small house. It is three feet wide at its narrowest and five feet wide at its most spacious. Its plans were featured in the Tiny Life blog last year and now it is finished.

The Keret House in Poland is probably one of the most interesting and narrow, adaptations to the problems of limited urban space, but the question remains.....

Could you live here?

Here's some video to help you make up your mind.

Travel Photo of the Week

Bookstore in Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

Big Oil/Coal Censor Art

“Carbon Sink,” by Chris Drury

It seems that oil and coal executives around Laramie, Wyoming are particularly thin skinned. When British artist Chris Drury installed a 36-foot-diameter sculpture, called “Carbon Sink," at the University of Wyoming, a bitter battle ensued.

Local lawmakers and officials in Wyoming’s energy industry, which helps support the university through state taxes, felt betrayed.  State Representative Thomas E. Lubnau II threatened to introduce legislation that would ensure that “no fossil-fuel-derived tax dollars find their way in the University of Wyoming funding stream.” The university removed the sculpture citing water damage — an irrigation line had broken in the area.

“I’m disappointed that the university caved in to that sort of extortion and that sort of implied threat,” said Dr. Jeff Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities. “And I’m angry that this sort of behavior on the part of private industry, as well as their effectiveness in lobbying our elected officials, would lead to an act of artistic censorship on a university campus.”

Here's link to the New York Times article that gives the whole picture.

But Who Watches the Watchers? Predicting Personal Behavior.

This one is right out of the film Minority Report. It's not enough to have our every move monitored in today's surveillance society. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a system that can not only recognize human behaviors, but could also predict what they might do next. The Army funded research would also sound an alarm if it detects "anomalous" behaviors.

The research has been presented in a paper entitled, "Using Ontologies in a Cognitive-Grounded System: Automatic Action Recognition in Video Surveillance" and focuses on an artificial intelligence cognitive engine that automatically detects and interprets a person's actions using its surveillance feed.

The next step will be to tie the software to drones. Careful what you do, Big Data is watching.

A Simple Fix For Farming

The title above is the same as the New York Times article it comes from. We all eat. What we eat matters, to us, the farmers that raise it and the planet it's grown on.

The article talks about being able to grow enough food to feed us all without poisoning our land (and eventually ourselves) to do it.

The sentence that really sticks out to me is:

"In short, there was only upside — and no downside at all — associated with the longer rotations. There was an increase in labor costs, but remember that profits were stable. So this is a matter of paying people for their knowledge and smart work instead of paying chemical companies for poisons."

Paying for people instead of poison. Doesn't that say it all?

If you're interested in exploring a farm already doing what the article suggests, check out the Polyface Farms.

Fun Time! Save The Enterprise!

No, it's not a new video game. Restore the Enterprise Bridge is dedicated to restoring a replica of the fictional starship's bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The original bridge was completely destroyed during the making of the film, Star Trek: Generations.

From the project's website: "It is our Prime Directive to completely restore the STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION D Bridge Set to make it a Fully Interactive, Simulator available for Display, Parties, Movie Showings, Fundraising, Charities, Fan Films, as well as newly created interactive Education Missions, so entire classrooms of students can steer the Enterprise to other planets, galaxies and more!"

The finished bridge will have touchscreen panels and working displays. The founder of the project describes it as an immersive experience, like a video game come alive.

They have a Kickstarter page and an Indigogo page, if you're interested in participating.

This is what it will look like when they're done.

Piano From The Future

I used to have a Peugeot. Fickle, unreliable, finicky. I ended up losing my temper with it once. I won't go into details. Now the company has invaded my professional life. The company's design lab has come up with a piano. Not just any design would do. This would be fitting on the Enterprise and I don't mean the shuttle.

Yep, that's it. It almost looks like a spaceship, itself. Here's a link to the  Peugeot Design Lab page so you can have a closer look. I'll probably stick to Steinway.

The Island Where People Forget To Die

Stamatis Moraiti,s at least 97 years old

Ah, wouldn't we all like to life a nice, long, healthy life? The inhabitants of the Greek Island, Ikaria, abouth 30 miles off the coast of Turkey appear to have discovered the elixir of life. Their home's reputation as a healthy place dates back at least 2500 years, when visitors came to bathe in the hot springs near Therma.  The 17th century bishop of Ikaria, Joseph Georgirenes, once wrote, “The most commendable thing on this island is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”

Well, Dan Buettner, with support from the National Geographic Society, has been studying places where the residents live unusually long lives. His work is due to appear in next month's issue of the magazine, but the New York Times has done a piece on his work.

A quote from the Times article........

"After gathering all the data, he and his colleagues at the University of Athens concluded that people on Ikaria were, in fact, reaching the age of 90 at two and a half times the rate Americans do. (Ikarian men in particular are nearly four times as likely as their American counterparts to reach 90, often in better health.) But more than that, they were also living about 8 to 10 years longer before succumbing to cancers and cardiovascular disease, and they suffered less depression and about a quarter the rate of dementia. Almost half of Americans 85 and older show signs of Alzheimer’s. (The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that dementia cost Americans some $200 billion in 2012.) On Ikaria, however, people have been managing to stay sharp to the end."

What a difference with America, where most lose their wits before the age of 30.