Technology with personality / role playing?

The Huggable robot teddy developed by MIT Media Lab seeks to interact with user by using the characters (possibly in the future, but teddy bear for now) to overcome the coldness of technologies. The robot teddy is loaded with 1500 sensors on its skin, video cameras on its eyes, microphones in its ears, speaker in its mouth, and above all, an embedded PC with 802.11g wireless networking!!!

The suggested use for this robot teddy is for long distance communications between grandparents and kids, patients and doctors and so on - With its gears, the teddy is like a portal of intercommunication between two, and possibly some sort of role playing from one side to the other.. for example, the grandparents teaching a life lesson to their teenage grandsons or daughters can hide or transform their figure through the teddy -

This article reminds me the book Diamond Age, which I am reading right now and having great fun with. The story evolves around a piece of technology, the primer, which is a form of book that can interact with reader, usually little girls between age 4 to 8. The book tells the story customized based upon the reader's level of knowledge, environment and so on. On the other side of channel, there are people called Ractors (modern day actors, who embedded bunch of cells on their body to transform themselves into whatever characters in digital world), who reads the book for the kids as the script automatically updates from the reaction of the readers on the other side.

Here is the original article.
http://www.physorg.com/news148727070.html

New mammal species found at Blue Oak Ranch?

On November 11th, U.C. grad students reviewed a flagged image from one of the weather station web cameras, which automatically tripped when large moving objects were scene near the main barn. The researchers later identified that it was unfortunately not the next zoological discovery slated for the pages of Nature or Science, but simply the greenmeme team exploring Blue Oak Ranch with reserve director, Mike Hamilton.

Blue Oak Ranch Reserve
Alpha Node Weather Tower
November 10 2008

Greenmeme spent a weekend at the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve with Reserve Director, Mike Hamilton.

Link

Manifesta: Caring for Fungi and Pollution

Architects Stangeland and Kropf decided to engage with this transitional state. The Naked Garden is generated by the mediation of different modes: biological propagation, mathematical abstraction and technological execution. A robot, programmed with the rules by which the fungi grow, engraves and perforates the wall already inhabited by fungi, thereby allowing light, water and wind to enter and to facilitate the basic conditions of life.

Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect and theorist specialized in experimental forms of preservation. His contribution to Manifesta is The Ethics of Dust, an installation intended to preserve pollution and the dust that has to be swept away from the building during the renovation process. Pollution has negative connotation. Yet, it can tell fascinating stories about our social, cultural and industrial past.

we-make-money-not-art
By Regine
on August 30, 2008

link

Biodiversity Hotspots

Conservation International
Biodiversity Hotspots

"Life on Earth faces a crisis of historical and planetary proportions. Unsustainable consumption in many northern countries and crushing poverty in the tropics are destroying wild nature. Biodiversity is besieged."

"To qualify as a hotspot, a region must meet two strict criteria: it must contain at least 1,500 species of vascular plants (> 0.5 percent of the world’s total) as endemics, and it has to have lost at least 70 percent of its original habitat."