Realitista

Steve Wozniak: Windows Phone is “intuitive and beautiful”

Wow, you couldn’t get a much better endorsement than this. It’s nice to see some real competition heating up in the mobile OS market finally.

Woz revealed how he considered the platform to be easy-to-use, and complimented how apps look “more beautiful than on Android or iPhone”. In fact, he had a great deal of praise for Windows Phone, and WPCentral highlighted a few of his most positive comments:

“Compared to Android, there’s no comparison”

“Intuitive and beautiful”

“Just for looks and beauty, I definitely favour the Windows Phone over Android”

“I’m just shocked; I haven’t seen anything yet that isn’t more beautiful than the other platforms”

“It makes me feel ‘Oh my gosh, I’m with a friend, not a tool’” (referring to UI interactions and graphics)

“I just really like the experience and will be carrying the Windows Phone everywhere”

The Next Web noted that Wozniak later added to his comments: I did give my opinion that the Windows Phone had superior visual appearance and operation cues that were also more attractive. In my opinion, it sets the mark for user interface. …I surmise that Microsoft hired someone from Apple and put money into having a role in the UI and appearance of some key apps. I also surmised that Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at MS due to a lot of what I see and feel with this phone making me think of a lot of great Apple things.”

Descriptive Camera

This is a cool idea. I want this feature in my next camera.

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don’t yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.

Children’s memories: Toddlers remember better than you think.

Last August, I moved across the country with a child who was a few months shy of his third birthday. I assumed he’d forget his old life—his old friends, his old routine—within a couple of months. Instead, over a half-year later, he remembers it in unnerving detail: the Laundromat below our apartment, the friends he ran around naked with, my wife’s co-workers. I just got done with a stint pretending to be his long-abandoned friend Iris—at his direction.

We assume children don’t remember much, because we don’t remember much about being children. As far as I can tell, I didn’t exist before the age of 5 or so—which is how old I am in my earliest memory, wandering around the Madison, Wis. farmers market in search of cream puffs. But developmental research now tells us that Isaiah’s memory isn’t extraordinary. It’s ordinary. Children remember. Up until the 1980s, almost no one would have believed that Isaiah still remembers Iris. It was thought that babies and young toddlers lived in a perpetual present: All that existed was the world in front of them at that moment. When Jean Piaget conducted his famous experiments on object permanence—in which once an object was covered up, the baby seemed to forget about it—Piaget concluded that the baby had been unable to store the memory of the object: out of sight, out of mind. The paradigm of the perpetual present has now itself been forgotten. Even infants are aware of the past, as many remarkable experiments have shown. Babies can’t speak but they can imitate, and if shown a series of actions with props, even 6-month-old infants will repeat a three-step sequence a day later. Nine-month-old infants will repeat it a month later.

The conventional wisdom for older children has been overturned, too. Once, children Isaiah’s age were believed to have memories of the past but nearly no way to organize those memories. According to Patricia Bauer, a professor of psychology at Emory who studies early memory, the general consensus was that a 3-year-old child’s memory was a jumble of disorganized information, like your email inbox without any sorting function: “You can’t sort them by name, you can’t sort them by date, it’s just all your email messages.” By those standards, Isaiah is a wizard of memory—the Joshua Foer of the preschool set.

But it turns out that all children are Joshua Foer: Even very young children have bewilderingly good memories. Twenty years ago, a study on memories of Walt Disney World—the ne plus ultra memorable experience—surprised everyone involved: Children who’d been at Disney when they were only 3 years old could recount detailed memories of it 18 months later. Evidence has piled up ever since. A just-published paper on long-term recall found that a 27-month-old child who’d seen a “magic shrinking machine” remembered the experience some six years later. Far from having no memories at all, very young children remember a lot like adults. In early infancy, the neural structures crucial for memory are coming online: the hippocampus, which is, very roughly, in charge of storing new memories; and the prefrontal cortex, which is, very roughly, in charge of retrieving those memories.

The Domino's iPad Game Could Transform The Way We Order Pizza and Our Lives

People who lack vision might call Pizza Hero a mere video game. If they do, they’re seeing only a slice of—no joke—what could be an extraordinary development in our society. We are talking about Pizza Hero, a pizza-making video game from Domino’s that can be downloaded for free on the iPad. But we are also talking about so much more. We are talking about a piece of software that could change how the American labor force finds work.

In an idea they may have borrowed from the 1984 nerd-classic movie The Last Starfighter, Pizza Hero doubles as video game and job-training tool. If you pass its introductory challenges and its “Two Pizza Throwdown” mission (your task: make a couple of pizzas), you’ll be prompted to apply for a job at Domino’s. The app loads the real Domino’s career page, with links to a job application.

The Domino’s iPad Game Could Transform The Way We Order Pizza (And Get Jobs). In The Last Starfighter, the teenage hero discovered that the spaceship-shooting arcade game he played in his trailer park was actually a recruitment tool for fighting in an intergalactic war. That was fake. Pizza Hero is real and could winnow the field of potential Domino’s pizza chefs to only those who have excelled using pizza-making simulations. It doesn’t technically do that, but it could.

Bucky Balls Could Double Your Lifespan

Buckminster fullerene molecules, the naturally occurring spheres made up of 60 carbon atoms, have long been suspected to have biological benefits.

Now, a study that set out to establish if they were toxic when administered orally has proven quite the opposite—they almost doubled the lifespan of the rats that they were fed to.

The experiments, which were carried out at the Université Paris Sud, France, set out to assess what adverse reactions might be caused by ingesting Bucky balls orally. To do that, they fed three groups of rats differently. Along with their normal diet, one group was held as a control; a second was fed olive oil; and a third group was fed olive oil doped with a 0.8 mg/ml concentration of Buckminster fullerene.

The results, which appear in Biomaterials, took the researchers by surprise. The control group had a median lifespan of 22 months, and the olive oil group one of 26 months. But the Bucky ball group? They stuck it out for 42 months. That’s almost double the control group.

Tooth Tattoos Will Tell When You're Ill

In our inked up future, vibrating tattoos will buzz when your phone rings, and change color when your blood sugar is low. But a new kind of sensor made of graphene could one-up them all—tattooed to your teeth, these sensors will be able to tell when you’re ill, and even possibly what’s ailing you—all from the bacteria on your breath. A bonus: It won’t even hurt to put them on.

“It takes only a few bacteria to make you sick,” Mike McAlpine, a graphene man at Princeton tells Co.Exist. “It’s something you want to be able to detect as quickly as possible and in very small concentrations.”

Poll: Large Majority Of Americans Understand Global Warming Made Several Major Extreme Weather Events Worse | ThinkProgress

Good news it’s moving forward. Too bad they are still way behind the rest of the developed world.

This Yale survey matches a recent Brookings poll that found Americans’ understanding of climate change was increasing with more extreme weather and warmer temperatures. It also matches Yale’s earlier November survey finding. This finding matches the results of September polling by ecoAmerica:

**69% of Americans Know “Weather Conditions (Such as Heat Waves and Droughts) Are Made Worse by Climate Change” **

57% of Americans understand “If we don’t do something about climate change now, we can end up having our farmland turned to desert.”

1970's Study Predictions Are Still on Target for 2030's Decline of Humanity

In 1972, The Limits to Growth modeled the effects of unlimited human expansion on the planet’s finite resources. Now, 40 years later, the predicted models are still a near match with reality.

The Limits to Growth was written by MIT researchers Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III on commission by global think tank, The Club of Rome. It examined five variables of interaction between people and the planet—world population, levels of relative industrialization, amount of pollution, worldwide food production and the rate of resource depletion. It posited that, with unchecked expansion, the world’s supply of resources would falter and begin to fail by 2030. And, as you can see from the graph, humanity is apparently well on its way towards meeting that goal.

This would result in a massive worldwide economic catastrophe and result in an sharp and ongoing reduction in the human population for generations. However, the alternative to this model—austerity measures as we’ve seen in Greece but on a global scale—could potentially spell financial ruin for billions. So do you want to be poor and hungry or poor and hungry during an economic apocalypse?