Thursday, December 01, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Steve Jobs and NeXT: Rare PBS Documentary circa 1986
In 1985, shortly after being fired from Apple, Steve Jobs founded NeXT, the somewhat short-lived but revolutionary company focused on higher education and business services. It was there that Jobs honed his visionary approach to computing and design, and crystalized his lens of priorities — the very qualities that made him not only a cultural icon but also a personal hero.
This fascinating PBS documentary, titled The Entrepreneurs and filmed in 1986, offers a rare glimpse of Jobs’ original vision with NeXT, from his aspirations for higher education and simulated learning environments to his decision-making process on price point and product features to his approach to company culture and motivational morale.
Merely 48 months later, Jobs stood up in front of a riveted audience at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall and introduced four fully crystalized, groundbreaking NeXT products, including “some of the neatest apps that have ever been created for any desktop platform,” “the best color that’s ever been,” and “the most important new application area in the 1990s…interpersonal computing.”
Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment
ABOUT THIS TALK
Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.
Grow it Yourself: Hydroponic Gardening in Your Home
http://www.marthastewart.com/article/windowfarms-hydroponic-gardening-in-your-home#ooid=ZpZnBlMjpP8-DVwvtRD11JrFrH-06OSP
I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days -- I don't know about the rest of you guys -- but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article -- was it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.
Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers.
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. (Laughter) So to bring on more co-developers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world.
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or research and develop it yourself. So for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project.
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.
So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems.
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers.
(Applause)
Windowfarm Timelapse
Lincoln's Windowfarm - 2011-07-29
Indoor Gardening
Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.
Grow it Yourself: Hydroponic Gardening in Your Home
http://www.marthastewart.com/article/windowfarms-hydroponic-gardening-in-your-home#ooid=ZpZnBlMjpP8-DVwvtRD11JrFrH-06OSP
I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days -- I don't know about the rest of you guys -- but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article -- was it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.
Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers.
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. (Laughter) So to bring on more co-developers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world.
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or research and develop it yourself. So for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project.
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.
So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems.
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers.
(Applause)
Windowfarm Timelapse
Lincoln's Windowfarm - 2011-07-29
Indoor Gardening
Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Louie Schwartzberg
Louie Schwartzberg is an award-winning cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.
交大材料宣傳影片
交大材料宣傳影片
00 前進交大 01 簡介 02 關於交大 03 就業工作 04 交大材料研究方向
05 關於金屬材料 06 關於電子材料 07 關於高分子材料 08 關於陶瓷材料 09 關於奈米科技
10 工學院長談話 11 材料系主任談話 12 陳智教授談話 13 材料所學生感想 14 材料系學生感想
15 結尾
00 前進交大 01 簡介 02 關於交大 03 就業工作 04 交大材料研究方向
05 關於金屬材料 06 關於電子材料 07 關於高分子材料 08 關於陶瓷材料 09 關於奈米科技
10 工學院長談話 11 材料系主任談話 12 陳智教授談話 13 材料所學生感想 14 材料系學生感想
15 結尾
Home > Courses > Materials Science and Engineering > Introduction to Solid State Chemistry > 1. Introduction to Solid State Chemistry OCW Scholar 1. I
This lecture is an introduction to the class.
Professor Sadoway begins with important information about the course objectives, organization, and expectations, and proceehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifds to introduce the subject of solid state chemistry. 3.091 integrates thorough coverage of the principles of chemistry with various applications to engineering systems. The thesis of 3.091 is that electronic structure holds the key to understanding the world around us.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/materials-science-and-engineering/3-091sc-introduction-to-solid-state-chemistry-fall-2010/1-introduction-to-solid-state-chemistry/MIT3_091SCF09_lec1.pdf
Monday, November 28, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
What If You Are…
When I started my career, all I ever heard was no. So many doors never opened, and the number of times I felt I wasn’t good enough were endless. But still something inside me kept trying. I kept asking myself, “How can I get better? How can I grow?” And my answer to that never changed – and It still hasn’t changed:
Keep trying.
Work harder.
Stay out of your head.
Ask for advice.
Ask for honesty.
Stay open.
Listen.
And no matter how bad the criticism or the word “no” feels, don’t stop believing in what you have to say photographically.
So, I say to all of you: What If you are good enough?
Whatever it is you want to do, you can do it. Whatever it is you want to be, you can be it. So go do it. That is your final assignment.
There is no way I could have ever anticipated what an online, live-streamed food photography workshop would have ignited in the thousands who watched this past weekend.
I couldn’t sleep a wink Sunday night after it was over, I was stirring so much; the energy, the adrenaline, replaying moments, thinking about the different scenes we created in one weekend, all in the name of food photography. But still, that wasn’t what kept my mind racing. It was all the tweets, Facebook messages, comments on this blog, and the hundreds of personal emails I received over the past 72 hours.
Many of them were thank you notes, others heartfelt words of gratitude – and some were very personal accounts of lost dreams that people have decided to reclaim and believe in again.
These words from you all have moved me beyond anything I could have ever imagined. Something changed for me personally, too. I have no idea what all of this means, but I do know one thing: we walked through a threshold this past weekend. No one knows how or when that will materialize or manifest, but I personally can’t wait to see what happens.
Thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart for the support and kind words.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from an email that especially touched me when I read it early Monday morning. I think it says everything:
“I turned forty years old a few months ago, and out of nowhere, someone just showed me how to find the passion I had when I was fourteen. What the hell, Penny? It’s a tremendous gift, and maybe I deserve it, maybe I don’t. But if I fail to do anything with it, then I would have answered that question.
Someone just took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye, and laid out the simple truth: “If you’re not doing what you love, why not?” I have no answer for you, but that was the point, wasn’t it? There’s just no acceptable answer.
The last three days—and most especially the final hour of those three days—I heard my muse give me the ultimatum. And I don’t care that I’m forty; this fire within feels ageless.
I’m not going to say that you showed me the career I always wanted, because I’m not looking for a new career. What you showed me is much more than that: you showed me who I was, who I’ve always been. I never realized how much I needed to see myself again. I’ve lost so much recently, and I’m still listing the things I’ve lost in an endless parade of spreadsheets. But no one makes you list the dreams you’ve lost, the hopes you’ve abandoned, the passions you’ve pushed into the background.
So thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart—a heart much larger now because my muse has finally reclaimed her rightful space in it”
Friday, November 25, 2011
The Power of Food Photography
The Power of Food Photography from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
When you think about food photography, it's not just about what's on the plate. It's about everything around it. The details, the scenes, the people, the culture, the history, the geography, and especially the moments. Food connects all of us. Food photography is the crossroad, where culture, food, and people come together.
On Assignment with Penny De Los Santos: Chef Joanne Chang, Boston, MA from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
In Boston a few weeks ago the three of us fell in love with Chef Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery and Myers & Chang Restaurant. After a few meals and meeting her, we decided she needed to be a subject. Our subject. We found that her energy, grace and incredible food inspired us. By the end of our shoot we didn’t want to leave. I personally wanted to spend the rest of my days in a bowl of her wok-roasted mussels. Wow!
"On-Assignment with Penny" video: The Barbacoa Lady from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
This is a video series called "On Assignment" with professional food and travel photographer Penny De Los Santos. Each short episode is an intimate look at being on a photographic assignment with Penny as she visually explores a subject, inspiring people and locations throughout the country. In this third episode Penny goes back to visit a very special subject in east LA. She takes you along as she shares a meal and recounts the story she did for Saveur Magazine with Flor and the lost art of barbacoa.
On Assignment with Penny De Los Santos: Austin Food Trailers from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
This is a video series called "On Assignment" with professional food and travel photographer Penny De Los Santos. Each short episode is an intimate look at being on a photographic assignment with Penny as she visually explores a subject, inspiring people and locations throughout the country. In this second episode Penny goes to her hometown of Austin, Texas and talks about what she does to connect and feel at home again when re-enterring her life in Austin. She explores on bicycle her favorite food scene in Austin, food trailers, with a group of food blogger and twitter friends from around the country.
Blog: pennydelossantos.wordpress.com/
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
AMG Performance Media Track Monitor Shown
AMG recently showed its AMG Performance Media module for its cars. The video below shows the data that can be accessed via the APM. These include 0-100 km/h acceleration times, a G-meter to measure acceleration, braking and cornering forces, throttle and brake inputs, lap timer, engine output, tire pressures, engine temp and a history function for comparing your and the car’s performance across various tracks. For the enthusiast, monitoring these functions enables one to use the data to improve the performance of the car and driver combination.
These real-time data logging functions have been available for some time now from aftermarket companies. But by allowing this data to be accessed through the multifunction display, the interior of the AMG vehicle retains its look without having a tacky add-on mar the availability of the additional data.
By the way, the demonstration run you will see was done on an SLS AMG at the Hockenheim circuit in Germany.
Mercedes-Benz Classic Center
by Emmanuel (RSS feed) October 19th, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Vintage race cars, pre-war models, one-off custom cars. Any one of these cars would fetch a commanding price if it were to find itself at an auction. But for the technicians at the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center, finding themselves in the middle of this rich automotive history is all in a day’s work. Entering the shop as rusting hulks, these cars each have a story to tell and the people in the Center are justifiably proud when what was once a heap of rusty metal components is turned into a concours-quality masterpiece.
As you will see, what these master craftsmen strive for is perfection in all aspects of a restoration. Whether it is in the exact tolerances of the mechanical parts, or the authenticity of the look or even in the way it’s put together. Because of this goal towards authenticity, the cars that come out of the shop don’t look restored but are instead presented as timeless pieces of automotive history.
CLS63 AMG Design Process Time-Lapsed
We all know that Mercedes-Benzes are highly complex cars that are masterpieces from the minds of designers and engineers from the company’s tech centers. Unlike the sometimes overwhelming feeds on new models and spyshots that we get on a weekly basis, the design process is not as readily available. But now, a time-lapse video has hit YouTube, showing some elements of the design process, from the proverbial clean sheet of paper, to a digital rendering on a computer, which will become the basis for CAD/CAM processes that make up the steps in automobile production.
As you will see, the video is a demonstration of the design process and not an actual work in progress. For one, the computer has obviously been set up in a conference room and, as we said, some steps are apparently skipped. Some commenters have also noted some faults in the original sketch. But as AMG says, this is a demo of how a great car like the CLS is made into a reality, and for most of the world, it is highly informative.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Former VP and Apple Director Al Gore on Steve Jobs and More: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video)
We’re following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Al Gore, former Vice President, Nobel Prize winner, environmental activist, sometime VC, occasional entrepreneur and all-around busy dude.
Of course, Gore talked about a wide range of issues, from the legacy of Apple’s Steve Jobs (Gore is on the company’s board), to being an adviser to Google, to the “broken” U.S. political system, to alternative energy.
Here’s his onstage interview with Walt Mossberg:
AsiaD: Jonney Shih Full Session
AsiaD: Jonney Shih Full Session
Asus chairman Jonney Shih talked with Walt Mossberg about the blurring boundaries between tablets, notebooks and smartphones at AllThingsD's AsiaD conference last month.
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