AI

After watching both those movies, it really makes you think of how far that technology has brought people. Not only with work and school, but also for the fun and pleasures in life. People have gone from scrolls to laptops, atari systems to XBox360, the world of technology is never ending. In the newest video for technology there were many more features that are still not offered as of yet, and if they are than it is still so far away from the shelves for consumers to buy no one even thinks about it. Some of the technologies were the touch screen and the voice activation. Being able to walk across the room and do another task while still doing your research and what not on the computer would make a lot of people happy, they would be killing two birds with one stone.

My website that I found had a lot of interesting information in it about AI and where it is coming from and is going to. As stated, "the approach of artificial intelligence researchers is largely experimental." Still going through many different stages but before long there will be more AI on the world than people could imagine. There are movies, video games, books, and much more just about AI and how it has come to be.


http://www.answers.com/topic/artificial-intelligence?cat=biz-fin

TED Talk: Thomas Barnett-The Pentagon's new map of war and peace

Barnett made some very clear statements throughout his speech about war and the changes that have taken place and that need to be taking place. I completely understand where he is coming from when trying to seperate the soliders and make the US a stonger country, but he makes it seem as easy as buying candy in a gumball machine. Making peace and stopping war is much harder than Barnett is saying. Everyone has their opinions and very rarely will you find someone that agrees exactly with what you feel. Since the war with Iraq began, everyone has had something to say, but there is only a very few that will make the changes. People can potition everything they want but at the same time no one is there to listen. The president and his crew decide what should be done. I'm not sure where Barnett was taking things, he seemed to be making jokes of the whole war situation when he refered to the Twin Tower attacks and the US going over to Iraq as "a home game and an away game." This talk completely shocked me that someone would joke the entire time while trying to get people to be convinced with his thoughts and values.

TED Talk: Sheila Patek clocks the fastest animals

When given the topic of the environment to blog on this week I decided to look for a talk dealing with animals in the environment. I found that Sheila Patek did research on the fastest animals. During her research in 2004, Patek and her crew members found that the peacock mantis shrimp had the fastest feeding strike that she had studied. That animal held the fastest clocked speed for around 2 years until Patek continued her research and found that the trap-jaw ants could snap their jaws between 75 and 145 mph. Now that is some extremely fast eating if you ask me!! I found this talk to be interesting towards the environment because it shows that there are many more creatures in the world that you have never heard about. I had never heard of either of these two animals and to learn that they were clocked as the fastest eating animals baffled me. I have not yet, but am going to do more research on these two animals to find out what areas they are found in and what they look like. In such a big environment, people find that they don't ever know the entire atmosphere until they begin to explore, as Patek has done.

People Poisoning Their Own Land

Isn't it amazing to think that in the only place you have to go, you throw trash on it, put debris on it, and leave it as messy as you would a trash disposal? This one place is our world, our environment, but yet people treat it as one large waste basket. You can not drive half a mile, shoot, not even a quarter of a mile without seeing over a load of trash on the sides of the roads, in the woods, on the road, and everywhere in between. It seems to be ridiculous that people would poison their own beautiful environment with disgusting ugly trash all over it. I have helped through community groups and what not to do community and environment clean up several times and I feel that if more people would help with these clean ups that the world would be a much prettier place. Think of how you would like to hang up a picture in your new home of you and your significant other on a beautiful beach in Nags Head....and then to the right of your foot... an empty soda bottle and to your left a beautiful sandwich bag, how attractive! In order to help this environment be a cleaner and better place, the solution would be to stop poisoning it with our pollution, but since not everyone cares about the looks, well being, and health of our one and only planet Earth, not everyone is going to feel the same way about not throwing that empty McDonald's bag out the window of your new vehicle to keep the inside clean. If only everyone thought of the world as their new vehicle, or house than maybe it would be a better place. The world is a huge place, and there is nothing that little old I could do to change the entire situation of the worlds well-being, but in my town and surrounding areas, I think that putting together a community cleanup would be the first place to start. Slowly, people will begin to see the beauty behind all the filth and maybe will respect the only place they have to call their hometown.

TED Talk: Carl Honore-Slowing Down In A World Built For Speed

Carl Honore spoke of the ways of our fast paced world. Whether your calling someone, reading, walking, or exercising in the modern world you are now doing it with speed. We are living in "a world stuck on fast forward" as Honore states. And to every degree, I believe his statement is true. Too often we as humans are worried about losing time, wasting time, or missing something and for this reason, we feel we must always be living in a race against time. Never thinking of the tolls that this race is burdening our lives with, whether it is dealing with your relationship, work quality, health, or happiness always running around from one situation to the next puts an extreme burden on a persons well-being. I personally have never took the time to think of the world being so fast that everyone is missing the enjoyment from life, but after listening to his speech, I see more now so that there are more people that think this same way about life being held on the fast track, but others do not think it is a bad thing all the time, such as Kenny Chesney's 'Living In Fast Forward' song, he is putting it into a text that he doesn't mind that his life is held on fast. A question that Honore posed was, how did we get so fast? I pondered on that for most of the speech there after and came to the conclusion that as technology progressed so did the speed rate of the world. The Internet was too slow, so technology made it a thousand times faster with high-SPEED. The world revolves around the different technologies and the more advanced the technology becomes, the faster this world is going to spin. Another question that was posed was, is it possible to slow down? I believe it is possible for a single person to slow down with their own life, but for the entire society I do not believe it can be slowed down at this point simply because the advancements in technology, speed dialing will never go away, high-speed Internet will never go away, Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals aren't going off air. The world is not going to regress because a couple people feel that everyone is missing out on life. Although this may be true, people are missing the greatness of their lives by watching the clock for 5 o'clock everyday Monday-Friday, and at the same time praying that Friday will come as quick as the weekend is over. Time is only what you make it, either its a race against life, a short memory track that you take slowly and enjoy, or its just that...time whats kept on a clock. Everyone has different views of what time can be and it's all in how you look at it.

People need to do like Carl Honore did "find the inter-tortoise in yourself."

RSS Feed

For my RSS feed, I chose to subscribe to Yahoo. I only subscribed to one website so far because beings it is only my first time using a reader I wanted to get used to it. I must say, it is very helpful in reading up on the top news stories. I picked to subscribe to Yahoo's most viewed stories. It does seem very addicting as the video mentioned because when you start reading into one story, you see a headline for another story and want to read more into that one. Seems very time consuming! But, it is a very helpful tool.

The link that I subscribed to is http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/mostviewed. Check it out! :)

TED Talk-Theo Jansen:The Art of Creating Creatures

Theo Jansen created what is called the "Strandbeests". Simply made out of electrical tubing and lemonade bottles, but are called mechanical beast that roam on the shore lines of beaches. Seems crazy to think that someone would be creating a creature with no blood, no brains, no vessels, or veins and yet can consider it a creature. Jansen's creation is both remarkable and interesting but at the same time it is nothing more than materials. Can one consider it to be a living creature? It has a mechanical brain that simply tells it where the water line is and where the safe dunes are, but is that enough to call it a brain? To me, Jansen has come up with a very interesting creation but I would not consider it a creature. Although it has life-like forms, it knows that water kills it, it can "die", it turns away from enemies, but it truly is not real or living. It doesn't "die", it only gets washed away and would never be thought of as missing. To me, the creation would be more of a beach toy to watch walk around during the day, but to imagine it walking down the beach while making a sand castle seems absurd to me. If anything can be made to move and do things on its own, than who is to say the robotic vacuums are not "living creatures"?