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Category: education – Page 198

Math isn’t everyone’s strong suit, especially those who haven’t stretched that part of their brain since college. Thanks to the wonders of image recognition technology, we now have Mathpix, an iOS app that lets you point your phone camera at a problem and calculates solutions in seconds.

The interface looks like any standard camera app: simply drag the on-screen reticle over the equation and the app solves it and provides graph answers where appropriate. More useful is a step-by-step guide offering multiple methods to reach a solution, making this a bona fide educational tool. It uses image recognition to process problems and pings its servers to do the mathematical heavy lifting, so it likely requires an internet connection to work.

Mathpix was envisioned by Stanford PhD student Nico Jimenez, who was advised by Stanford grad Paul Ferrell. The app’s other developers are high schoolers Michael Lee and August Trollback, which is impressive for an app that claims to be the first to visually recognize and solve handwritten math problems.

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Ever dream of becoming a dentist? Or, have family members needing new dentures? Or, know that one person who would look good if they only had some teeth. This 3D Printer is your answer.

An undergraduate at New Jersey Institute of Technology made his own plastic braces using a 3D printer, $60 of materials, and a healthy dose of ingenuity — and they actually worked.

Amos Dudley had braces in middle school, but he didn’t wear a retainer like he was supposed to, so his teeth slowly shifted back.

He didn’t want to shell out thousands of dollars for a whole new round of braces, so the digital-design major decided to make his own.

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Michio Kaku and Ray Kurzweil explains the exponential rate at which Technological Singularity is approaching and the future is far near than we can Imagine!

2029 : Singularity Year — Neil deGrasse Tyson & Ray Kurzweil — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyFYFjESkWU

Life Changing Future Technologies [Full Documentary] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRSlkx5qaSk

The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which artificial general intelligence (constituting, for example, intelligent computers, computer networks, or robots) would be capable of recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect—an intelligence explosion—that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence.

Other related resources
https://www.singularityweblog.com/17-definitions-of-the-tech…ngularity/

Technological singularity.

Continue reading “Singularity is Near! Full Documentary Michio Kaku | Ray Kurzweil” | >

A documentary film just had its premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. How To Build A Time Machine, the work of filmmaker Jay Cheel, is a strange and incoherent little document of two middle-aged men with loosely related obsessions: One of them wants to build a perfect recreation of a movie prop – the machine from the 1960 movie The Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel – and the other is a theoretical physicist who thinks he may have effected a kind of time travel in a lab, on a microscopic scale, using lasers that push particles around. The weak connection between the two men is that they both regret a death in their past – a best friend, a father – and are preoccupied with what they might have done to prevent the death; they both wonder if time travel to the past might have been a remedy for death itself. (Compared to the protagonist of Zero K who seeks immortality as a way of avoiding the loss of a loved one.) The 80s synthpop song Forever Young by Alphaville booms symbolically at one point.

Why this sudden ascendancy of yearning for immortality now? Is it simply because immortality of a medical sort might be imminent, a result of technological advances, such as nanobots, that will fight disease in our bloodstream? Or is it because, as Ray Kurzweil implies, digital technology is now so advanced that we have already left our bodies behind? We already live outside them, and our digital selves will outlive them. (“I mean,” says Kurzweil, “this little Android phone I’m carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction.”)

The frequently quoted axiom of Arthur C. Clarke – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – is pertinent to this current fascination with life without end. We are now perceiving technology as not just magic but as god-like, as life-giving, as representing an entirely new plane of being.

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New reports that Russia is considering lava tubes as habitat; here’s one from my lava tube archives…

Nearside of Moon, by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With only a trace of an exosphere, future lunar astronauts working nights outside will likely feel as if they are walking a catwalk through space itself.

But night or day, they will be totally exposed to whatever the cosmos can throw at them; from solar x-flares and coronal mass ejections to galactic cosmic rays. As a result, radiation shelter on the lunar surface will become as paramount as the underside of a school desk in a 1950s-era “duck and cover” civil defense film.

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Again, we all must ask ourselves “What is it that we all need and want v. being told what we need and want by a 20 something old who gets take out or heats up a tv dinner, etc. And, truly what makes sense from an investment, ROI, and security risk adverse investment approach.” 1st, I like making and having my own choices in how I run my house, and operating style at work and private life. 2nd, I don’t trust our out dated digital infrastructure to warrant a great investment in all things AI.

Until I see AI that assist me instead of trying to work against me or replace me as well as having security; then not bought in 100%.

The U.S. manufacturing sector has changed rapidly in the last decade and continues to change as new techonolgy innovations emerge. Daniel Araya and Christopher Sulavik discuss how schools can react to educate a skilled labor force for this new era of robot technolgies.

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Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a set of algorithms that will help teach computers to process and understand human languages.

Whilst mastering is easy for humans, it is something that computers have not yet been able to achieve. Humans understand language through a variety of ways for example this might be through looking up it in a dictionary, or by associating it with words in the same sentence in a meaningful way.

The algorithms will enable a to act in much the same way as a human would when encountered with an unknown word. When the computer encounters a word it doesn’t recognise or understand, the algorithms mean it will look up the word in a dictionary (such as the WordNet), and tries to guess what other words should appear with this unknown word in the text.

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Nice

J.E. Moss Elementary School, a Title I school in Nashville, TN, has adopted an augmented reality program to help improve reading skills in one of its kindergarten classes.

Letters alive, a supplemental reading software kit from Alive Studios, has aided teacher Greg Smedley-Warren and boosted his kindergarten class’ literacy scores above all the other kindergarten classrooms in his school, according to a prepared statement. His class includes several ELL and “at risk” students.

“When I first saw Letters Alive I was in awe of the 3D technology and I knew I had to have it,” Smedley-Warren said in the statement. “If I was excited about it, I knew my students would love it.”

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