Quantified Self

Hey there,

I'm beginning my blog on Quantified Self : http://quantifiedselfblog.blogspot.fr/
Feel free to comment !

Also : this is a video I find very interesting about Quantified Self, recorded at a TED Talks session : http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self?language=en

best,

Lydie

The Surfing Culture

Hey there!

If you wanna know a bit more on the development of surfing/windsurfing/kitesurfing/..., please come and visit my blog! ==> here

Feel free to comment articles!

Thomas

Joi Ito: Want to innovate? Become a "now-ist" | Talk Video | TED.com

Joi Ito: Want to innovate? Become a "now-ist" | Talk Video | TED.com: "





What is creativity...  what is innovation? How are they different? I question that Vincent B is dealing with.  What do you think is the difference...  (hint hint leave a comment!)



hope you're all having a good summer!

james

“Remember before the internet?” asks Joi Ito. “Remember when people used to try to predict the future?” In this engaging talk, the head of the MIT Media Lab skips the future predictions and instead shares a new approach to creating in the moment: building quickly and improving constantly, without waiting for permission or for proof that you have the right idea. This kind of bottom-up innovation is seen in the most fascinating, futuristic projects emerging today, and it starts, he says, with being open and alert to what’s going on around you right now. Don’t be a futurist, he suggests: be a now-ist."

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A few updates on Shaking up education!

Dear fellow bloggers,

Just to let you know that Shaking up education (my blog about how the Internet will change everything in the world of education) has been updated!

For those who don't remember clearly the goal of this project, I invite you to read my presentation of the blog.

• Ever wanted to experience real class-oriented video-conferencing? Take a look at Big Blue Button, Mozilla's software program which will bring online video-conferencing... straight in your web browser! Read more about it here!

•   Have you ever been impressed by this geeky friend who can do almost anything with a computer by typing - often blazingly fast - a few lines of code? Learn to do the same with Codecademy!

• Last but not least... meet Gymglish, your new personal English teacher!

Comments allowed (and recommended!) just below!

Code Conference | Media & Tech Conference | Re/code

Code Conference | Media & Tech Conference | Re/code:





Here's the new event created by the AllThingsD team....

Just in case you couldn't go!

(Have a look at the videos!)





What do you think?

 "Re/code welcomes you to the debut of Code Conference—produced by the same straight-shooting, visionary team who delivered the D: All Things Digital Conference since 2003.
 Code Conference is where top industry influencers in media and technology gather for in-depth conversations about the impact of digital technology on our lives and our businesses, today and in the future. Executive producers and conference creators Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher go head to head with the same caliber of industry luminaries who shared their stage at the D conference. D featured conversations with the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, George Lucas, and the late Steve Jobs—and Code Conference promises to keep pace, while also adding exciting new elements to the attendee experience."

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This San Francisco Artist Is Messing With Wireless Networks At Tech Company Bus Stops | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

This San Francisco Artist Is Messing With Wireless Networks At Tech Company Bus Stops | Co.Exist | ideas + impact:



This looks like an interesting art? project... What do you think?

"Google employees and passersby looking to get some Wi-Fi can now log into a fake network that looks like the real one. They'll be in a for a confusing surprise when they try to use the Internet."

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Drone :)

Hey guys!

I don't know if you followed the recent Drone developpment but once again TED gives us a spectacular presentation :)

Here is the video

Hope you enjoy and... comment! ;)

Dioprezi by Guillaume Papa on Prezi

Dioprezi by Guillaume Papa on Prezi:



for those of you who couldn't come this evening.

have a look at the blog too.



TGIF



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Dioprezi by Guillaume Papa on Prezi

Dioprezi by Guillaume Papa on Prezi:



for those of you who couldn't come this evening.

have a look at the blog too.



TGIF



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Evelyn Glennie: How to truly listen | Talk Video | TED.com

Evelyn Glennie: How to truly listen | Talk Video | TED.com:



maybe you want to listen to the rest of this.... and to leave a comment.... hint

hint.....



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Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration | Talk Video | TED.com

Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration | Talk Video | TED.com:



Here he explains re-captchas and the Duolingo project.



"After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good."












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Consciousness Project 2013-2014

I've chosen to work on consciousness because I find this topic interesting. It is also important to get more knowledge of ourselves in order, for instance, to improve our well-being.

Introduction

There are two dimensions in consciousness:
-wakefulness: it is just a measure of how awake we are. For instance, when you are sleeping, your wakefulness is really low whereas when you're attending an English class your wakefulness is of course at its maximum.
-awareness: it is the ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns.
You can be aware without being awake and vice-versa. To help understanding the difference, you can complete the following exercise:

You can find the answer in the mooc I've followed on udacity and whose link is at the end of this article.

I - Sleep

a- Sleep functions

The first thing that is important to know about sleep is: why do we sleep?
Sleep has important functions:
-during sleep, our body works to restore itself after a long day of neural activity
-sleep aids in memory consolidation and learning activity
-sleep is important for neural growth

b- Sleep stages

During sleep, our body goes through what we call "sleep stages".

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep: your eyes roll back and forth very rapidly under your eyelids. Dreams occur during REM sleep. REM sleep decreases from childhood (50% of sleep time) to adulthood (20% of sleep time).

non-REM sleep: it consists of four stages, stage four is the deepest.

Now that we've seen the importance of sleep, it seems natural to examine the importance of sleep deprivation.

c- Sleep disorders

Sleep apnea: it is characterized by pauses in breathing or instances of shallow or infrequent breathing during sleep. Each pause in breathing, called an apnea, can last from at least ten seconds to several minutes, and may occur five to thirty times an hour. It is quite problematic because it causes the person to go from deep sleep to light sleep. This results in a poor quality of sleep and makes the person tired the next day. This is one of the leading causes of excessive daytime sleepiness.

Narcolepsy: it is the inability to regulate our sleep / wake cycles. This results in an irresistible urge to sleep and occasions in which you fall asleep for several seconds to minutes throughout the day. For instance, a person with narcolepsy may be in the middle of a stimulating conversation and fall asleep on the spot. Narcolepsy can thus be potentially dangerous if, for instance, the person is driving.

Night terrors: it consists of waking up from sleep in a terrified state. It typically happens in the first few hours of sleep, during stage 3 or 4 of non-REM sleep. It happens more often in childhood.

Insomnia: it consists of having difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or both. It causes people to feel irritable, anxious, or even depressed.

Thus, adequate sleep is essential for our physical and mental health.

d- How to improve sleep

We can improve sleep by:
-going to bed at the same time each night
-turn off any gadget (TV, computer, cell phone etc.) before bed
-avoiding exercising right before bed
-avoiding eating a big meal before bed

II- Drugs

There are 4,000 plants that yield psychoactive chemicals, and humans have consumed such substances for 50,000 years. Thus, there seems to be a desire to alter consciousness in each of us... probably in order to reach a state of well-being, or rather "better-being". This idea is reinforced by the fact that other animals seek drugs to alter consciousness.

III- The Machinist (2004)

This is a movie that Guillaume Papa (also in the Internet course) advised me to see and I thank him for that.

a- A brief overview of the plot

The story is told from the main character's point of view. His name is Trevor Reznik, he is a machinist that suffers from insomnia. He is also abnormally skinny.

One day he is disctracted by an unfamiliar co-worker named Ivan, which makes him involved in an accident that causes one of his colleague to lose an arm. We understand that Ivan may be an hallucination, just as many other things that Trevor sees.

b- Insomnia in the movie

At the beginning of the movie, Trevor claims that he hasn't slept for a year. He also states that "no one ever died of insomnia". It occurs that both these statements are false.
Indeed, it is commonly admitted that we can probably survive longer without food than without sleep. Studies on animals indicate that death can occur even after "only" two or three weeks without sleep. Besides, the longest documented period of a human going without sleep is eleven days.
We can thus conclude that even though Trevor claims that he has not slept for a year, he has likely slept for small periods of time unknowingly.

This shows that there is much uncertainty in the movie about Trevor's sayings and his perception of reality. At the end of the movie, we of course get an explanation for all of that.

c- The scene from the movie

I've included a scene from the movie in my presentation. The scene is about Trevor being at Stevie's place. Stevie is a prostitute that somehow fell in love with Trevor, to the point that she promised him that she would stop having sex for a living. This scene involves a picture that Trevor cares about much because it is a picture of Ivan, that he previously lost. Trevor wants to use this picture to prove Ivan's existence to his colleagues, who don't believe in it.

We see in this scene that insomnia is able to lead to extreme hallucinations and paranoia.

Conclusion

I've had a nice experience making this presentation and I learnt a lot!
This is why I encourage you to take a look at the links below.



Click here to go to the mooc I've followed on udacity

Click here to see my prezi presentation

Click here to see the interview about narcolepsy on youtube

Click here to see the interview about night terrors on youtube

Click here to see the video about alcoholic monkeys on youtube

Click to see the scene from The Machinist on youtube

Marco Tempest: The magic of truth and lies (and iPods) | Talk Video | TED

Marco Tempest: The magic of truth and lies (and iPods) | Talk Video | TED:



Is deception a part of business dealings????

Have you ever seen Marco Tempest's work before.  He's at the junction of pure magic and poetry and technology!

whatdoyathink??? don't be a lurker... speak up!

see you tomorrow...





james


PS: Who is coming this evening, between 5 and 6:30? Who is coming to listen to Geoffroy's project report on "Go and Culture" on Friday?


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Has Autotune really ruined music?

Has Autotune really ruined music?          

            Auto-tune is a piece of pitch correction software which was created by Antares Audio Technologies since 1990, but now the word “auto-tune” is widely used to refer to any technology who can correct off-key vocals.

 The Autotune plug-in for GarageBand

            Auto-tune has come to popularity since 1998. It began with a hit called “Believe” by the American singer Cher.  After the success of "Believe" the technique became known as the "Cher Effect".

 

Music video by Cher performing Believe. Notice that especially in 0:43, her voice begins to sound like a robot.

            Intended, in the first place, to correct off-key vocals, many artists, especially pop singers have later found it interesting to create new music styles, like T-Pain, Lil Wayne and Kanye West. T-Pain even released an iPhone application called "I Am T-Pain" to let common people Autotune their singing voices.

 

Music video by T-Pain feat. B.o.B performing Up Down (Do This All Day), featuring a very typical T-Pain-Style autotuned voice.

Audio by T-Pain performing One Night, possibly real voice without Autotune

Autotune is not just used in studio albums, but can also be used real-time in concerts. They are also not just meant for human vocals, but can be applied to musical instruments like guitars.

Autotune has become today an essential tool for today's Pop music industry. Although some of them won't admit, but "Everybody uses it.", every sound studio is equipped with it.
         What's really amazing with Autotune is not how it works, but why people hate it so much, since after all, it's just one of a thousand technologies applied in the music industry today. So I did some research, and I listed some major reasons:

• People think that autotuned singers are making money by cheating. Although I personally disagree completely, but many people still think that singer is someone who sings on pitch. So a singer who sells an autotuned record will be judged as cheating, or doesn't have an integrity as a person.
• People feel that they've been robbed of an authentic show. In fact, contrary to traditional sound effects like reverb, chorus and delay, Autotune is something that doesn't exist at all in nature. So people who think a concert should be "real" get angry about Autotune. This is very similar to people's reaction of lip-synching, both don't deliver "real" vocals in a show.
• A singer's singing ability is challenged if people found out that he/she uses Autotune.

         So if people are all hating Autotune, why artists are still using it? 

         Before Autotune, a singer usually needs to sing hundreds of takes just to get all his notes right, but after a hundred times, his passion has already faded out. So it is important to capture that one emotionally perfect performance since this might be once in human history. And we can fix the pitch mistakes in it later.

        After all, singing is not just about pitch. It's about the style, about the personality, the emotion, the natural quality of voice, and many other things. Beyoncé is about being a strong, beautiful woman; Britney Spears is about being sexy; Taylor Swift is about being a beautiful-minded country girl; Lady GaGa is about being avant-garde; James Blunt is about being vulnerably-beautiful. And Selena Gomez may sing totally on pitch but remains a cracky, non-characteristic voice; and this guy may autotuned his voice but remains a garage singer:

 

Joe Bosso testing Autotune

Reference:
Seduced by ‘perfect’ pitch: how Auto-Tune conquered pop musich-how-auto-tune-conquered-pop-music

How One Of Google's Finest Fosters The Big Ideas | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

How One Of Google's Finest Fosters The Big Ideas | Fast Company | Business + Innovation:



Innovation? Creativity?



What fosters innovation?  Does creation play a role in the life of an engineer?



how about a comment.



Vincent is thinking about working on this theme... Any related articles or TedTalks are welcome.



Soon, happy spring.



james



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Matthew Childs: 9 life lessons from rock climbing | Talk Video | TED

Matthew Childs: 9 life lessons from rock climbing | Talk Video | TED:



For those of us that like rock climbing.....  Why it helps your life!

comments???



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Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days | Talk Video | TED

Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days | Talk Video | TED:



Thomas and I think we ought to try something for 30 days!  How about you?



What would you like to do for the next 30 days!



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Project: Study of the Game of Go

I've been working for some time on a study of the Game of Go and its relations to the oriental culture. Most of the material I used is not available anymore and, to my knowledge, it is the first time the oriental history has been overviewed from this point of view, so in a way, it is an original work.

Here is the link: thegameofgo.blogspot.com

creativeLIVE: Photoshop Week 2014

creativeLIVE: Photoshop Week 2014:


"PHOTOSHOP WEEK 2014 5 DAYS, 40 CLASSES, 60 HOURS"

Free streaming workshops!


Everything you wanted to know and never dared ask about PhotoShop and Lightroom!

Do you know the creativelive online workshops? Their real-time (free) broadcasts are in the evenings and nights here in France, and are rebroadcast (streamed for free) for a day or two after the workshop. (Their business model is to encourage you to buy them to watch whenever you want.)

Do you use PhotoShop or Adobe Lightroom? This week's workshop program might "enlighten" you to new features or workflows...  (On channel B he's showing advanced image retouching at right this minute...)

Hope all is going well for you! Looking forward to seeing you soon.

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Some links: physicists popstars & old ads

Add the CERNettes and the Canettes to your favorite playlist! Who would have thought that physics researchers could be popstars as well?

When you're done with their playlists, have a little break with an old ad (related videos on the side pane are interesting as well). How well do you think AT&T guessed their future, our present?

And one extra website for oldies lovers (or merely curious amateurs)! Once more, the ads are really fun to see.

Have a nice week-end!

Fun facts about Internet

Dear fellow students,

Here are some fun facts I gathered about Internet, during my research:

- There was an Internet before Internet! From ARPANET to BITNET and NSFNET, in the 70s and 80s, the way was quite long before reaching the modern Internet we know at the end of the 80s.

- Did you know there are parallel worlds to the Web? I was shocked to discover the existence of Gopher, an alternative protocol (and associated browser) which could well have won the 21st century, if only things had turned out a little differently.

- Robert Cailliau, co-inventor of the World Wide Web and of HTML... hates HTML. He really dislikes its syntax, but he designed it as a quick way to prototype browsers for the Web. By the time he had some free time for dealing with the language issue, it was too late, people had already adopted HTML.

- Brendan Eich, who created JavaScript, is totally aware that JavaScript is mainly used for annoyance (like blinking texts or scrolling ads). He even welcomed the browser function to disable JavaScript!

- The Web has been popularized by physicists. Paul Kunz set up the first web server in 1991, and it was a database of 300,000 physics research papers. Success for the Web began when Paul Kunz did a demo of this server at a nuclear physics workshop in Southern France.

- The teacher of the MOOC I followed on Coursera, Dr Chuck, states that Microsoft saved the Web! As a petty vengeance against Netscape, whose $50 web browser was becoming far more successful than Internet Explorer, Microsoft started to give Internet Explorer away for free, which opened the way to free web browsers as the normal case. Would so many people have used web browsers so quickly, if they hadn't become free? In addition, Dr Chuck points out that Microsoft is a fierce supporter of standards and their development, and they worked hard at W3C to keep the Web open.

Project: Internet and Computer History

Why do developers still use black and white terminals, when operating systems provide them with such wonderful graphical interfaces?

Have you ever wondered how remarkable spreadsheets are and how many lives they changed?

Had you ever done this calculation, maybe just once: with Gigabit Ethernet, you may transfer in one second 200 times more data than the whole capacity of a $3499 hard disk drive in 1981?

My project aims at answering all these questions: I'm currently working on Internet history and, generally speaking, the history of computers, and their evolution since the very beginning.

Using Coursera's amazing 'Internet History, Technology and Security' course given by Charles 'Dr. Chuck' Severance as a guideline, I discovered the Internet success story through valuable documents and interviews. I actually discovered names, people and facts I had never heard of, but that are in the center of the whole Internet revolution. A new session of the class is opening right now, don't miss it!

Then James provided me with his copy of the 'Triumph of the Nerds', a 3-part and 18 year old TV show about who and what made modern computers, more or less the same facts indeed, but this time from the people point of view. Was Steve Jobs a good boss? Did Bill Gates have a shower when he was working under pressure before an important demo? Really, don't hesitate to ask James or myself for a copy of the show. You won't be able to see it in HD, of course, but I hope it doesn't stop you from watching it, as it provides really valuable points of view and quotes.

And now I am diving into the world of hackers, with Katie Hafner's book 'Cyberpunk' (thanks to James again!)... What will come out of this experience? Will you dare to lend me your computer again afterwards? Who knows...

Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction - YouTube

Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction - YouTube: "Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction"





this is a pretty good presentation.... have any of you ever seen one of the original iPods?



happy Chinese New Year!!



how about a comment??? (or is nobody reading this????)



james & victor

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Project : Ronnie James Dio

 Hi guys !

Here is a link toward the blog i have been working on dioenglishprojects2013.blogspot.com.

Do not hesitate to leave comments!

The power of zoom: László Laufer at TEDxESCP - YouTube

The power of zoom: László Laufer at TEDxESCP - YouTube: "The power of zoom: László Laufer at TEDxESCP"



some of you will be presenting using Prezi.... ZUI's are interesting... here's a talk by the User Experience lead at Prezi... what do you think?








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