Fun with soldering

Today had some time working on a little project, using a cut up toy from the dollar store, and various parts from Trojan Electronics in Troy, NY.  (They're awesome- old school electronic supply shop- go there and spend money.) Was interesting to find/take out my old soldering iron and assorted wire tools to wire up battery packs, a button switch, and big red LED bulb to make my son a Harry Potter wand of sorts.  The collision between simple science and magic. 


Don't know if it's the remembrance of my first post-college job as an electronics technician, or just the memories evoked by lead fumes, but am thinking about the confluence of AI, eLearning, and a recent presentation on physical computing using Arduino, the open-source design for a bridge between analog circuits and the Internet.

Somewhere between eLearning and AI is a missing bridge- intelligence does have to learn after all.  And between eLearning and the physical world- there are observable phenomena to monitor and analyze. But the gaps are large, and beyond the capacity of the humble little web server built into Arduino to handle. So far, I think. But making a simple embedded sensor that can hook to the Web so easily certainly has interesting implications.  Will have to bookmark that thought for later.

Raised by Interwebs

After a number of discussions with my kids, I've gotten the impression that their friends spend a lot of time online.  A couple of questions that come to mind:

• What does it mean for kids to have fairly unrestricted access to YouTube and other media?

• What does it mean for kids to play computer games with each other more than board games?

I guess you could lump in YouTube with TV, minus the selection and filtering of network programming for pesky things like "age appropriate content".
With board games, you have a set of rules to learn and negotiate, in the course of constructing game play, strategy, and mutually-agreed to boundaries. Computer games? It either lets you or it doesn't. You try to see what it lets you do, with minimal consequences if you guess wrong, no matter how wrong indeed.
Not so promising for the future of human interaction...

BarCampAlbany

Nice lecture about Adurino and physical computing.
Reminds me I have a soldering iron in the basement. Is this going to get people back into analog electronics again? (My kids have been having fun playing with a Radio Shack electronics kit.).
Later sessions included Internet as development platform, Droid app development, and some parallel tracks I didn't make it to. But overall, it was another great effort in building the local dev community in the Capital District.

Copy and Paste

Interesting thing about using Google for finding plagiarism: not only do you get a list of sites that the student could have copied from, but you realize that so many web pages are stealing content from other sites. So much that you wonder if plagiarism has any meaning anymore...

Tangled messes

I'm suspecting that most difficult problems are really multiple issues intertwined.

In what has proven the ill-advised designation of the "power charger drawer" at home, we have a sprawling knot of wires with plugs on one end, and a dangling mass or transformers on the other. This is often resolved by taking the entire mess to the floor or a table and slowly unwinding them, with the foresight to take the found charger and replace it once done and the cable neatly wound and tied  back to the transformer.

Solving only one problem at a time is either a luxury or a waste- depending on how you look at expending the effort of addressing many problems and settling on the solution of only one. And yes, I'm not just talking about battery chargers anymore...

On the Bus Again...

With the death of my trusty Corolla behind me and one car to share in the family, I've started taking the bus again sometimes. Aside from the whole focus of my PhD program was originally on public transportation information systems, it's useful to remember one significant reality of urban living as I move forward with my various streams of research.

You know, the least they could do is post a timetable of when the bus is going to come. Or at least stick a QCode, a number to text for next bus arrival, SOMETHING other than peering down the road, looking for the friendly banner atop the bus headed downtown, for 10 minutes at a time, as if staring harder will make the bus run any faster.

But many people have wi-fi enabled something. Just stick a wireless hub with a few pages regarding schedule- no live Internet at all- and let that be the information kiosk. A few solar cells, and I bet you could get the whole thing running for under $100. not every stop, but just the major ones, notably at schools, stores, and office buildings. I'd even challenge these building owners to just chip in, if for no other reason than to help turn loiterers into customers.