Loging in China

LiAn Lodge from forest key on Vimeo.

Li-An Lodge is an ethereal place located among spectacular rice terraces in an ancient Chinese village. The lodge is built entirely out of wood by the traditional Chinese technique of tongue and groove without a single nail. The photos alone of this magnificent place are enough to convince anyone to book a room especially since photos are taken by renowned photographer and Li-An Lodge owner Keren Su. Unfortunately, photos did not have a central role on the pervious Li-An Lodge website and, consequently, the breath-taking natural environment and Mr. Su's photography expertise were not given due justice.

With buuteeq photos play a pivotal role across all marketing materials. The buuteeq BackOffice has an easy to use Photo Gallery for organizing and inserting photos into various slideshows and articles for the website. Photos can be uploaded quickly and easily then cropped, arranged, given titles and short descriptions which enhances Google search. The homepage slideshow showcases large, compelling photos and ensures that guests receive the best first impression possible of the property. Photos appear just as clear and brilliant on the Li-An Lodge Facebook page and dedicated iPhone application which can be downloaded from the Apple iTunes Store. With buuteeq the LiAn Lodge now has a website that takes full advantage of the exquisite photography so guests can fully grasp the grandeur of the property and its surrounding environment.

Yangshuo Mountain Retreat from forest key on Vimeo.

The Yangshuo Mountain Retreat is located on the breath-taking Dragon River in China in a tranquil environment away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Over several years the hotel's website had grown into a colossus, full of interesting articles on the region, activities, food, culture, and the major tourist attractions of the Yangshuo and Guilin areas which are red-hot tourist destinations in China's booming tourist market. However with this breadth of content a really big design challenge emerged that made the information hard to navigate for guests and could be frustrating to use--contrary to the peace of mind and relaxation that are key brand ingredients of this beautiful hotel.

The primary design challenge was the need for a clear information architecture that would organize the layout of the information on the website so that it would be better looking and easier to use. With the new design it was important to highlight certain areas of the site so guests could find the information, get room and location information (two key selling points), and along the way appreciate all the extra content without it distracting from the key goals of promoting guest reservations.

buuteeq clients may initially wonder how the buuteeq DMS can build them a website that’s as unique as their property, especially with a hotel like the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat which had so many custom pages of rich content that they wanted to preserve. The answer is that the buuteeq system coaxes hotels towards great information architecture, while still allowing highly customizable content with the hotel's own brand. Every page reflects the personal style of the hotel and the system organizes the pages in a way that makes sense to the online shopper. With Yangshuo Mountain Retreat's new buuteeq powered website all of the unique content of the old website has been preserved, but with a much easier to use and understand presentation that looks gorgeous.

The company helping independent hotels with the awful name

We sit down with the founder, Forest Key, to learn more and get a demo of how it's helping hotels out.

Get more out of golf with GameBook

GameBook is the first ever live scoring golf app for iPhone and the only one where you can follow friends’ games in real-time. Check out all the amazing possibilities that GameBook creates.

What is Zoho Books?

What is Zoho Books?

Zoho Books is an online accounting application that gives you complete visibility of your finances and helps you manage the money moving in and out of your business. Zoho Books can simply be defined as "accounting for rest of us". You need not be an accountant to mange your business and make informed financial decisions.

Leo Laporte on Regis and Kelly - 1/18/2011 (HD)

A video of Leo Lapore on Regis and Kelly showing off gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show held earlier in the month.

iPad Camera Connection Kit Review by Terry White

Terry White reviews the NEW iPad Camera Connection Kit for iPad, which allows you to download images from a memory card or your camera directly into the iPad. He even shows a tip for Compact Flash users! This video is in support of the written review to appear at terrywhite.com soon!

Video – How Lexar Makes Its Memory Products

Lexar: How We Test



A peek inside the Lexar Quality Labs (LQL) to see how we test our cards for reliability and durability.




Lexar: iPad Demo

Lexar Director of Marketing Jeff Cable demonstrates using the new Lexar Multi-Card 24-in-1 Reader with the Apple iPad.

Emily makes a variety of crafts, baking

Water on the Table (Bullfrog Films clip)

A film by Liz Marshall

Water On The Table is a character-driven, social-issue documentary that explores Canada's relationship to its freshwater, arguably its most precious natural resource. The film asks the question: is water a commercial good like running shoes or Coca-Cola? Or, is water a human right like air?





The Field Museum is out and about online. Use the links listed below to catch up with us on your favorite sites and add us as your friend. You'll be able to know right away about special events

LANCE GRANDE, PH.D.



Dr. Lance Grande's research covers many aspects of fossil and living fishes, including the early development of North American freshwater fish fauna. Over the last 25 years, Lance has led more than 20 field trips to collect fossils from Fossil Lake, a 52-million-year-old lake bed in Wyoming. Thanks to his efforts, The Field Museum currently boasts the world's largest and most extensive fossil collection from the Green River Formation.
Learn more about Lance’s fossil fishing in the 52-million-year-old Fossil Butte Member of the Green River Formation by watching the video below.
For more information on fossil fishing with Lance, visit

http://www.fieldmuseum.org/expeditions



DON'T FLUSH DON'T TRASH





Waterlife

Directed by Kevin McMahon
Produced by Kristina Mclaughlin, Michael McMahon, Gerry Flahive (NFB)

Waterlife tells the epic story of the Great Lakes by following the cascade of its water from northern Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, through the lives of some of the 35 million people who rely on the lakes for survival.

iPhone iOS 4.3 Beta！

Strait talk

Strait talk ep 3



Strait Power is a hydroelectric solution without the dam problem.

The goal of Strait Power: Redefine the motor of the Motor City.

Detroit River has a high water flow of 210,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), a medium water flow of 184,000 cfs, and a low water flow of 170,000 cfs, respectively, with a 2.9 ft drop from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie.

The Detroit River puts out about 370,000,000 foot pounds of force per second. Strait Power is looking to harness this.

Strait Power is a patent pending concept used to harvest energy from flowing water. This concept, born from Michigan native Anthony Reale, can provide a new industry, and power to the motor city.

With Detroit leading the way in this hydroelectric concept, it can again show the world how to empower its people, carbon free.


Strait Talk ep 2





Strait Power is a hydroelectric solution without the dam problem.

The goal of Strait Power: Redefine the motor of the Motor City.

Detroit River has a high water flow of 210,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), a medium water flow of 184,000 cfs, and a low water flow of 170,000 cfs, respectively, with a 2.9 ft drop from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie.

The Detroit River puts out about 370,000,000 foot pounds of force per second. Strait Power is looking to harness this.

Strait Power is a patent pending concept used to harvest energy from flowing water. This concept, born from Michigan native Anthony Reale, can provide a new industry, and power to the motor city.

With Detroit leading the way in this hydroelectric concept, it can again show the world how to empower its people, carbon free.


Strait talk




Strait Power is a hydroelectric solution without the dam problem.

The goal of Strait Power: Redefine the motor of the Motor City.

Detroit River has a high water flow of 210,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), a medium water flow of 184,000 cfs, and a low water flow of 170,000 cfs, respectively, with a 2.9 ft drop from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie.

The Detroit River puts out about 370,000,000 foot pounds of force per second. Strait Power is looking to harness this.

Strait Power is a patent pending concept used to harvest energy from flowing water. This concept, born from Michigan native Anthony Reale, can provide a new industry, and power to the motor city.

With Detroit leading the way in this hydroelectric concept, it can again show the world how to empower its people, carbon free.

Detroit River January 8, 2011





Downbound Canadian Coast Guard Ship Griffon, CSL Assiniboine, John G. Munson, Canadian Coast Guard Ship Samuel Risley. Upbound American Mariner

Testing a shark-inspired hydropower turbine

A new turbine inspired by the mouth of the basking shark was recently tested at the University of Michigan's Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory. It could potentially serve as a safer and more environmentally-friendly way to power remote research camps in Alaska, where U-M researchers involved in the North Slope Initiative go each spring to monitor the ecosystem. Read more about it at LabLog at http://tinyurl.com/4825tqm










What is Strait Power?
http://straitpower.blogspot.com

Strait Power is a hydroelectric solution without the dam problem.

The goal of Strait Power: Redefine the motor of the Motor City.

The State Of Wikipedia (Video + Infographic)

Wikipedia just celebrated its tenth birthday. As a self-proclaimed fan of the site, I wanted to share with you this video, made for the occasion as Wikipedia enters its second decade.

The ‘State Of Wikipedia’ video is part of the ‘State Of’ series made by interactive agency from JESS3, and is narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Today, the English Wikipedia now stands at 3.5+ million articles (up from roughly 500,000 in March 2005), and more than 17 million across all languages.

No matter what you think about Wales, the foundation or the site, that’s an impressive feat.

The Health Care Debate Redux

Meet Milo The Virtual Boy: Cloud-Sculpting The Mind of a Synthetic Human

…demos Milo, a hotly anticipated video game for Microsoft’s Kinect controller. Perceptive and impressionable like a real 11-year-old, the virtual boy watches, listens and learns — recognizing and responding to you.


The demonstration begins with an explanation of how Milo is constructed. A combination of the following three elements allow Milo to exist:


1.A Kinect Camera
2.Artificial Intelligence developed by Microsoft
3.Emotional Artificial Intelligence built by Lionhead Studios.


Milo moves through a synthetic environment predicated on User-directed biofeedback/body gestures: no mechanical controllers are necessary. Unfortunately, Milo’s introductory learning curve [which is integral to the "game" leveling system] involves inherent gender bias: if you’re a girl, your initial game variable is a Butterfly whereas if your a boy, you’ll be presented with a Snail.

The demonstration goes on to illustrate how Milo’s face is comprehensively AI driven. His facial movements include blush response, nostril “flare” size [indicating stress], “body matching” [causing neuro-linguistically driven facial alterations] and responses to verbal cues. Peter then describes how Milo’s personality development is predicated on a Cause-and-Effect dynamic. This causality is showcased via 3 examples:

1.The User can choose to direct Milo to squash a snail: if the User does it will effect “…how Milo develops”. The specifics of the verbal stimulus employed including how the User vocalises [specific phrases and intonations] all contribute to a database that informs and effects future interactions.

2.The User teaches Milo to skim stones over the surface of a river [skewed gender stereotyping is again evident here].

3.The User choosing to clean Milo’s room: Milo’s recognition of the User’s beneficial intervention and verbal engagement promotes sustained developmental interaction based on [what Peter terms] “deep psychology”.


This “deep psychology” [or what is described in synthaptic terms as "augmentology"] encourages a User’s empathy loadings. This in turn allows such games to shift towards complex experientially-defined engagement. These games surpass the hollow reinforcement of contemporary Social Games such as Farmville: instead, the User “levels up” by knitting fictionalised engagement with personality/identity construction and personalised growth variables. The element of cloud-directed learning [coaching synthetic humans whose social and chronological development depends on "crowdsourced" input] creates enormous opportunities for instruction and feedback via these types of “Reality Gaming” systems [highlighted here by Seth Priebatsch]:

Pediatric Adventure

“Aaaarrrr ye ready?” the hospital technologist growls, handing the patient a black-felt pirate hat. “Yer pirate ship awaits, Cap’n.”

The child draws the hat to his head. Skull-and-crossbones sneer through the waiting room, as if proclaiming, “I’m not just a patient. I’m a pirate.”

The 7-year-old’s mother holds his hand as they walk to the CT room. She assures him that he’s going to have a great adventure. They’ve come here— Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC—to have his sinus cavities scanned.

As the mini-swashbuckler nears the room, a set of brown planks extend into the hallway, leading to his ship. Soon there is crisp blue water beneath and the subtle smell of coconut in the air.

“Welcome to Pirate Island,” a nurse says, as the boy enters the room.

On this day, Duncan Auer is a pirate.

Duncan’s boat is actually a specially decorated CT machine. The exam bed has been made to look like a hull. The CT tube: a wooden steering wheel. The water and planks below: brown and blue decals on the floor. The coconut smell: an aromatherapy scent—piña colada—churning from a black vaporizer in the corner.

Watch the video
Go behind the scenes with with the designers of GE’s Adventure Series™.
There are seven other rooms besides Pirate Island, whose themes include a jungle, a campground and an underwater fantasy. They are part of a pilot GE Healthcare program called the GE Adventure Series™, developed in partnership with Children’s Hospital, to help reduce stress in children undergoing imaging scans. The series is currently not commercially available.

“Children are very cooperative,” says Duncan’s mother, Liz Auer, who works as a preschool teacher. “If you can use your imagination and encourage [kids] to use theirs, you can make any experience into something that can be fun or, at the very least, relaxing and not stressful,” she says.

And while all the decals, costumes and role-playing may seem at once whimsical as well as obvious. They are not.

PixelOptics Press Conference: Three Modes of Operation for emPower!

What does it take to build the best iPad interface?

I look at a lot of iPad apps and there are very few that get to a really great interface. http://www.955dreams.com/ History of Jazz' app is one of those examples. Really nice all the way around. What did it take? I sit down with the team to learn more. Their app is currently rated five stars and is high on the best selling list.

Let's Play Minecraft Survival - Dungeon Crawl

monster hunting in a big dark cave

Google Science Fair Experiment - Extended

Introducing the world's first online global science competition, the Google Science Fair! Google has partnered with CERN, LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American to create a new kind of online science competition that is more global, open and inclusive than ever before. Students aged 13 - 18 from around the world are invited to enter and compete for awesome once-in-a-lifetime experiences, scholarships and real-life work opportunities. Sign up today at google.com/sciencefair.





Google Science Fair 2011 - Opening Event (over an hour)