Tenori-on... release?

Jane on Game Girl Advance mentioned an April, 2008 release party for Tenori-on, a new tablet / drum machine / sequencer-like instrument designed by Toshi Iwai for Yamaha:





J-Fav, can I have ten of these, to go with the DS that Iwai-san signed at SIGGRAPH? Hmm, it looks like it's only sold in shops in the UK. Over 600 Pounds? Yikes!

I think it would be fun if you could play "go" on something like this, too.

G-Fav

DoD money for bio-inspired urban "insects" - and...

The Department of Defense SBIR program is now accepting grant applications for the current cycle.

One of the solicitation items, A08-056, grants Army money for "Bio-Inspired Battlefield Environmental Situation Awareness." That is, human engineers haven't been able to design something as tiny and versatile as a hummingbird or dragonfly yet - and it would be a useful wartime tool to have something like that under our control: "PHASE 1: Develop a conceptual bioinspired navigation system for micro-air vehicle situation awareness in complex urban terrain. The Phase I report should discuss the environmental awareness challenges for such a system and detail a conceptual design for coping with those challenges."

Anyway, you can learn more about how to apply to this or typically 100s of other DoD requests here, like A08-078, "Detection and location of home made electro-optical booby traps."

-g

ps And... A new sci-fi book, Daemon, has been getting great reviews for realistically mixing computer science, private equity, and... well, hey, one Amazon comment is: "Buy it. Read it. Give it to a friend. I actually slapped myself on the forehead twice reading this thing."

Call for Abstracts: Stereoscopic Displays & Applications... 20th Anniversary!

3-D displays, stereoscopic movies, perceptual science, and Hollywood

January 2009 will mark the 20th Anniversary of the annual Stereoscopic Displays and Applications (SD&A) conference. Submit an abstract for presentation at the conference to be a significant contributor to this important event. SD&A 2009 will be held as part of the IS&T-SPIE 21st Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging, 18-22 January 2009, San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, California, USA. This is widely considered to be the key conference for stereoscopic technologies, drawing researchers and industry representatives from around the world.

Topics include:

• Stereoscopic display and stereoscopic capture (including 3-D movies)
• Autostereoscopy (volumetric, holographic, and multiview / lenticular)
• Multiscopic image processing & rendering
• Applications: medical, military, and entertainment
• ...and a really great demonstration session where you can see current advances in 3-D display - this usually includes the latest breakthroughs in autostereoscopic cellphone technology.

Abstract (500 words) Due Date: 16 June 2008

Final Summary (200 words) Due Date: 17 November 2008

Manuscript Due Date: 22 December 2008

Conference Dates: 19-21** January 2009 (est.)

If you are interested, please take a moment to visit the conference website, at http://www.stereoscopic.org/. See photos of the 2007 event here.

-Gregg

p.s. We regret that the session regarding gin culture may be replaced by advances in lenticular display.

Happy Mother's Day!

...from the Fav-inghams.

-g

Going for it

Do it already!
Designer Alexandra von Feldmann's "Birth Clock" looks like a glass dome with a digital clock inside - turned off. When you smash the glass, though, the clock becomes active, and starts ticking upwards. "...it is designed to help you come to a decision when you're stuck at a specific point in life." See it here. (Found it via Godin's blog.)

From the Quantitative Trading Blog
Regarding stock pricing and earnings announcements.

Physically pixelized art
Devorah Sperber's work is now at Mass MoCA - her arrangements of (for example) spools of thread become recognizable works when viewed through simple optics. Here's a photo, and here's her exhibit at Mass MoCA.

International Dialects of English Archive
Hear clips of people from different states and countries reading specially-designed texts. Here's one from Massachusetts. Here's the top-level menu, from which you can listen to Saskatchewan, Maine ("downeast farmer"), and a guy from the Bronx born in 1940.

I just returned from a business trip to Saskatchewan, actually, which was really great - everyone I met was so friendly, amplified by many sentences ending with "for sure - you bet!". (I don't know, Jenn, could I have been sensitized by our watching clips like this?) Also, I managed to bring a Japanese geocaching travel bug from Waltham, Mass. to Regina, SK!

For Douglas Coupland Fans
In the NYTimes (2006).

-g

Robot self-reassembles after being kicked apart

This is from TR-100 award-winner Mark Lim's work at the GRASP lab @ U. Penn. (Found this on Valleywag, whose headline was, "Scientists create self-regenerating robot that's obviously going to kill us all.")

-g

A note about children's toys

Hi -

Doesn't the world need some more inventive, higher-quality, thoughtfully-created toys for 1-2 year-olds? I am satisfied with many children's books, and with time-tested things that result in long-term, "deep" play: dolls to dress up and feed, pretend kitchens, train sets, tricycles, blocks, gears... But outside of that collection, I think we're wanting. Sauntering into K-B Toys I couldn't help but think, "This place is all cheap plastic in different shapes."

Engineering-esque comment: some manufacturers, like VTech, embed electronics in toys to make them talk or help toddlers learn the alphabet or names of animals. But many of these toys use circuitry that omits the high-frequency components of sound. Or, that's not quite it, they're aliased. What I mean is that "bee" and "dee" sound alike, as do "eff" and "ess."

Here's a spectrograph. See how "s" is way up high? Click it.


(from here)

Is this harmful, developmentally? I suppose not, since kids are around talking people all day. But c'mon, would it really blow the bill-of-materials to spend another quarter on a better DAC and a touch more RAM? Believe me, this stuff can be had CHEAP.

On the other hand, there are pockets of innovation. We couldn't guess what one toy's function could possibly be (a gift to Toby last year.) Here's a photo: the Playskool Busy Basics Busy Ball Popper. This thing is amazing! The 1 year-olds and adults all want a turn. When you press the button, silly music begins to play, a fan turns on, and hollow plastic balls either shoot out of the toy or hover in the air. When the song ends, the balls fall back in (except for the ones you chase around the room) and it begins again. Anyhow, it's one example of a toy whose function isn't obvious from its form. In a good way.

Come to think of it, Playskool / Hasbro's products strike me like the result of significantly more play-testing than others. It is worth it.

A final thought: do any of you recommend toys that do a deceptively simple job of teaching basic scientific principles? For example, we got Toby the "optic wonder" at a boutique toy store in Saratoga Springs. It is a little green gadget with four lenses on hinges, a mirror, and a compass. Toby and I can look at the TV pixels close-up, project an image of the ceiling lamp onto the table, and swing out all the lenses to make binoculars. [Woah, discontinued!? Figures.]

-g

Props to 07052

Okay, that was a bad play on words.

This is just a note to folks from my home town of West Orange, NJ that the local mall up here off the Route 128 corridor is the set for a movie produced by Adam Sandler starring Kevin James ("King of Queens"). Yes, while one wing of the local Burlington Mall is ascending into 1980s-style materialistic yuppiedom a-la Nordstom, the rest is set up with faux winter props several stories high. It's weird. The movie, "Mall Cop," is... well, that's all I know, actually.

Oh, 07052? The fake mall signage props refer to the place "West Orange Mall." Actually, it's neat to see the extent to which they make the temporary changes so realistic. (Except for the Nordstom, which is unfortunately real, as is the new Ruehl clothing store, with pulsing music, mirrored walls, and disaffected teen service staff.)

Hey, look, I'm from NJ, okay? Malls are, you know, like baseball games to Bostonians or (gosh, insert pseudo-intellectual finisher here...)... or... ah, like Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop. Or, ah that's enough. I have expended my one-trick-poet reference annual budget. (Note to my wonderful wife: hey, look, someone's heard of Yaddo other than you.)

-g

Business: Stopping the Western Migration

Tonight, as part of an ongoing mission to strengthen New England businesses, journalist Scott Kirsner assembled a group of entrepreneurs, students, venture capitalists, and folks from business schools and other organizations at a cozy Cambridge restaurant. Why? We picked each other's brains & explored:

• How do we stop the "brain drain" of students and entrepreneurs from New England schools and businesses to the west coast?
• What's causing this?
• What programs are good at connecting students to start-ups, VCs, and internships?
• ...and are there ideas for new ways to reach students?
• Why are start-ups moving west? I mean, there's "early stage venture capital" here, right?
• Did you notice that New England firms still rely on noncompete agreements, whereas they are out of favor in the Valley?
  

The 14 of us chatted about these issues for a couple of hours. Sure, the BHAG of duplicating MIT's many successes as a wellspring of entrepreneurship at other schools is a many-year project. But we honed in on a few themes. I'll keep people's names out of it:

• A BC sophomore noted several things: (1) internships are a very powerful magnet for students, and (2) BC has a successful class that takes students on a tour of 10?-30? companies - from start-up to blue chip - in Silicon Valley, after each student spent the semester doing a deep-dive on each, so as not to waste the CEO's time with naive questions.
• Folks from nearby business schools and their career services offices expressed a desire to provide their students with excellent job opportunities, but (1) didn't want to spam local companies, and (2) didn't know how to get assurance that a given job was of high quality. (We told them not to worry about (1). Companies appreciate being reminded by universities about the availability of a fresh labor pool! For instance, the University of Rochester's optics program pings me a few times a year. That's helpful.)
• There's more to business than high-tech and biotech, but perhaps we should focus on our strengths.
• Some commented on how palpable the excitement of entrepreneurship is in the Valley, as opposed to here. I'm not sure I agree -- I feel like the cafes along Mass Ave are the birthplace of many a business plan. But it's a common viewpoint.
• I expressed the view that many Boston entrepreneurs complain that early stage venture capital really is hard to come by. The venture capitalist across the table from me pointed out several funds that are "early stage," e.g. Bain, Polaris, etc. I'm sure we could have argued that for many hours. At the end of the day, the VCs feel they are truly early-stage, and entrepreneurs feel otherwise. There is a gap between Y Combinator, angels, and Series A.
• Lots of love for Y Combinator.
• Smart companies are finding employees - and vice versa - on LinkedIn.
• Some schools have network "nodes" - some folks at MIT come to mind - who know all of the entrepreneurs, the local success stories, and the professors pushing the envelope. How about if universities or corporations do a little guerrilla marketing & discover these empassioned nodes & give them some money to hold social events?
• The existing technology mixers need more publicity so they can reach critical mass. (E.g. Tech Tuesdays, OpenCoffee...) By the way, here is Don Dodge's compilation of Boston startup events.
• I framed the mission as an engineering problem: what is the most effective way to connect opportunities (internships, course credit, jobs for equity, business plan competitions, money to "nodes") to students through each of the available channels (class announcements, assisgnments, "nodes", advertising in student newspapers or table tents, or sneaky methods like TellMe's 2000-era recruiting method of descending upon the software labs at midnight with a stack of 10 pizzas)?
• Some schools are effectively walled-in -- Harvard undergrads are unlikely to stray far from campus to take advantage of, say, MIT's community.
• Unanimously decided: Scott should begin an East coast version of Valleywag.
  

I am certainly forgetting 50% of people's contributions, but perhaps they'll blog about it, too. I think Scott is doing a real and sincere service to the community with this. Perhaps the key entrepreneurial events will reach critical mass. Perhaps one or two particularly passionate undergrads and B-school students will take the lead & become the official "Chief Entrepreneurial Evangelists" to the outside world. Perhaps more early-stage sources of capital will emerge.

Scott's blog, by the way, is here: Innovation Economy.

[edit: 23 Apr 08]

-g

Art ("Art"?), the world's worst song, and caching

Hello -

I suppose I'm late to the game, but I've been hearing about an art project of a Yale undergrad that is generating significant attention - I'll leave the details for the clickthrough. The university even declared it a hoax: "The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." If you can stomach it, here's a recent story in the Yale Daily News, and a response by the artist.

I defy you to listen to this whole thing. Here is a piece of music that is calculated to be the most "unwanted" piece of music, with characteristics optimized to be nearly-universally disliked. (Think banjo, accordian, children's chorus, holiday lyrics, rap, and bagpipes.) See "Yo, Yo, I'm a Cowboy Now" at Quick Study. And turn the volume up.

"2,000 Microsoft fans convince Steve Ballmer no one uses Yahoo search." [Valleywag]

Nice weather? Go geocaching. J-Fav, Toby, and I headed out to a woodsy hill in Acton for an easy first cache of the year:





J-Fav finds it, as usual! (Great Hill Cache: GCBC31. Free registration required, but hey, c'mon - this is fun.)

-g

ps Happy 2nd Birthday, Toby!