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Archive for the ‘Weekly Digests’ Category

Weekly Digest

02 Oct

Here are some interesting links for the week!

Monday

Ok, like many people Monday is a frantically-paced rush to get back into the swing of the weekly routine after a weekend of mayhem, err…rest.  Like many people I get my coffee on in the morning.  I tell you now that I like coffee.  I often seek out the best coffee houses in whatever areas I frequent so know where to get it.  I may drink it a little too much though and, apparently, get less effect because I’ve habituated my body to the caffeine.  Well, here’s aninteresting article from Alex Holcombe’s blog on how to optimize your coffee consumption.  Happy sipping!

Tuesday

It’s TED talk Tuesday again.  This time it’s a little more of the other side of the brain.  Here’s Imogen Heap singing at TED.  Sweetness.

Wednesday

It is HUMP-DAY!  Right smack in the middle of the week.  It’s a good time to talk about balance.  This Study Hacks article Freestyle Productivity: Balancing Systems and Simplicity When Organizing Your Life talks about using the right tools for the job.  In this author’s recommendation, high-tech tools that that are highly structured are best for capturing information and low-tech, freestyle tools are best for planning.

Personally, I like high-tech, freestyle tools that allow you to make your own structures as you need them, such as Wordpress, Google Calendar (Docs, etc.), Microsoft Onenote – especially those that use tags.

Thursday

Another video for you to watch.  This one, from Make is Heather Knight of JPL talking about sociable robots.  It’s about six minutes and simply talks about her background and some about why sociable robots might be helpful to astronauts on long-haul missions.

Friday

The Quantum Lobe Chronicles provides our Light Reading for the weekend with this article Bye bye modular, hello cognit.  It’s about a paradigm shift in thinking about how the brain is organized.  It talks about postulates of J.M. Fuster who, in 2006, coined the term cognit as a basic unit of memory or knowledge.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

 

Weekly Digest

25 Sep
The weekly digest is a new Design Perceptive feature that brings you interesting bits of news related to Science, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.  We hope you enjoy!

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72A2E048-B20B-0D77-0F8E96BE546D649A_4From Scientific American magazine
5 Future Robotics Expeditions and What They Could Reveal.
This is a slight misnomer.  The only future robot is the Mars Science Laboratory.  The remaining have been already launched.  Yet, they are still on their respective journeys to their destinations.

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This was my Tuesday-morning Ted Talk watching experience this week.  It resonates with my current interests in Computation Creativity.  It’s a brief lecture by Tim Brown running about 28 minutes long.  He talks about play in the form of exploration, building and role-playing and their roles in creativity.  You should take a gander when you have the time.

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troxlerWe here at Design Perceptive are always interested in the way humans perceive things.  It gives us direction and clues in designing towards artificial perceptive agents.  So, the interest here is to ask how and why do perceptual illusions work?  Consider the illusion in this article – The importance of perceptual illusion research from Cognitive Daily.

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The brain is amazing.   I really think many people (members of the medical/scientific community excepted) misunderstand how amazingly robust the brain really is.  This article in this Neurophilosophy blog shows how the brain can just keep going and going and going.

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I love the Study Hacks blog.  This article address the age old problem of procrastination and analysis paralysis.  I’ve run across this problem.  You most likely have as well.  Almost all of the classes in my major have semester projects, but this Ice-bath method could be applied to individual homework assignments as well.