We are Monkeys

Don't you ever look at what the Japanese make and then feel as if you're a backwards monkey? I know I do.

Flexible OLED

Sony Revolution

Sugar Battery

Sony Interactive Room
(sorry, I don't know why the sound on this video is so bad, I've seen a better version of it somewhere else)

In addition, I also saw some really cool things in Japan when I visited there about 7 years ago:

1. They had already come out with (or were planning to come out with) taxis with cell phone docking gadgets that would pull your destination location from your cell phone (yes, Japan already had GPS built into a lot of phones in the year 2000). So, you didn't have to even tell the taxi driver, he would just look at his little gps monitor that he has and go to where ever your destination was located.

2. Vending machine cashiers - There were several semi-fast food places in Japan where you ordered your food via vending machine and when you finished the purchasing transaction, you would take the receipt to the back kitchen. I thought this was brilliantly convenient since there is generally less error in machines (compared to humans) and the restaurant only needed to maintain a machine, they didn't even need to pay a person to deal with the whole thing

educamp - new way to teach kids

I went to educamp on 9-15 and the general discussion was over the new way to teach students.
One of the points that was brought up was that the majority of people in the next generation will predominantly use computers. Therefore, it would make sense to train kids to interface more efficiently with the computer. There was much debate over whether things like basic arithmetic and the 5 set sentence structure could be taken care of by software and we would only teach the students to interface with them. However the point was brought up, why do we need to teach children to accommodate computers?

Unfortunately, the session ended early because we were only allocated an hour. But I think they will do this more often in the future.

http://educamp.pbwiki.com/

Testing

I decided to get a jump start and just make the blog required by Sunday for Cogs120.

I will post more after the 1st lecture, since instruction has not started yet.

Chris and Kenton really liked this class and I always get all excited over new human computing interface stuff I find, so I think I'll enjoy this class too.