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POPSThe New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online A worthwhile article , KK explores the newly arising power of social networks, adhocracy and the newly emergent cyberculture. Though I do not resonate with his use of the term 'socialism', a deep forray into the web event of collaboration provides a different view of the potential for a change we all hope for. Open source is definitely the way to go.
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POPSMillsberry - Virtual World For Kids Tour for Millsberry Virtual World for Kids http://www.millsberry.com/tour.phtml Each kid may select & design a buddy with personality check lists. You design your house & are given an address in a subdivision of your choice. You must play free games to get Millsbucks in order to buy food clothes and "stuff". Each member can also use the mixing studio to make music they can download or play in the mixing studio This virtual world designed especially for kids teaches the importance of balanced meals, fitness, and mental awareness. Free games and individual houses in this virtual environment for each member. Strict rules of behavior help make this a safer online experience for children.
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POPSThe New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online From the article: "We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections." Interesting thought.
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POPS How Cellphones Will Enhance Reality An application called Enkin developed by two German researchers for phones using Google's Android operating system provides a straightforward example. It acts like an enhanced satnav system, helping you to find nearby services or points of interest. Nokia's Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project does a similar thing, drawing its annotations from known points of interest in the satnav software found in Nokia smartphones. And now Nokia is taking this further by getting your phone to augment people as well as places and objects. Users will be offered a service similar to Google's Latitude software. When the software is running on the phone, icons will appear next to anyone nearby who is also running the program to show if you have mutual friends or common interests. By seeing what we see and adding to our knowledge of the world around us, AR-capable phones offer real benefits that are only just starting to be explored.
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POPSBuilding 'The Matrix' Feynman envisioned, a general purpose, programmable quantum computer could itself carry out quantum simulations. But such machines are still decades away, most researchers say, while machines designed only for quantum simulations may become available sooner.
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POPSTrying To Catch A Phish. There are so many dangers out there on the Internet, just like in the world of reality. One cannot be naive. you must always be vigilant and on guard for those who wish to hurt you. The two worlds of virtual reality and reality are mirrors of one another. You would not walk down an unfamiliar street late at night because an inner voice tells you this is unwise. Well even when you are secure feeling safe and sound in your home that inner voice must be trained to warn you of the dangers that lurk on the Internet. Educate yourself, if something seems a bit phishy, it probably is and will do you harm. Please click this link for information and a video about phishing on the Internet. http://www.thethinkingblue.com/other/phishing.html thinkingblue
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POPSSuddenly a mundane interaction becomes memorable "I don't like heights," Feather said. "The first couple weeks I was here . . . I would get to the edge of some of these things, and my stomach would turn. Now I jump off . . . just because I can. You crash land, get up off our stomach and dust yourself off."
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POPSClassrooms will not look or be the same in the future "Unlike lectures, games can be adapted to the pace of the user," Mayo writes. "Games also simultaneously present information in multiple visual and auditory modes, which capitalizes on different learning styles." While no one is saying that an experience akin to Call of Duty or World of Warcraft will ever replace more traditional lessons, research into the effectiveness of video games as learning tools indicates that classrooms of the future will certainly include a virtual component.
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POPSArtists stage street scenes to lurk in Google maps Like many first-time Street View users, Kinsley and Hewlett, then roommates, typed in their address and found their house. Kinsley and Hewlett soon found themselves discussing surveillance and virtual reality, and began considering how they might explore those issues and Street View through art. "But instead of dwelling on the darker undertones of these issues, we began to think about ways of playing with the system," Kinsley said in an e-mail interview from Iceland, where he is participating in an artist residency. The "Street With a View" project was his master of fine arts thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University. "We were interested in interjecting something staged, something fictional, into Street View and playing with - and subtly questioning - the notion of reality in something that we perceive as a factual representation of our world," said Kinsley, 26.
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POPSAll there in my parallel universe another example from the article: "China, which is planning a series of different virtual worlds able to host not tens but hundreds of millions of avatars. The idea is to attract people (as avatars) from around the world to come and buy Chinese goods more cheaply from source. In this way they plan to capture the value added to a shirt that leaves a Chinese factory for a dollar but is sold in London for $20."
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POPSAugmented Reality Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data; some applications and demonstrations.
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POPSBeth Kanter - Using Social Media for Good Causes Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to "digital immigrants" in the personal mastery of these tools.
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POPSVirtual worlds carve out new path "The first step is to have virtual worlds as a common medium for ordinary people. It has to become far more ubiquitous, more like a toaster than a DVR," What virtual worlds do well is contextualise social encounters in a way that social networking cannot do, he thinks. "Without places it is hard to have activities. The bowling alley or the alcohol does not matter as much as the people but if you do not have the bowling alley or the alcohol it's just an empty room and no-one comes,"
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POPSWe'll all be citizens of virtual worlds What is the point of all this? It is quite likely that it will be a natural thing for future generations to meet their friends in worlds such as these, where they can watch the same music or videos while chatting to each other. And if that is where youngsters will be hanging out, then brands and media, including newspapers, will have to be there. Other life-mimicking worlds about to be released include shopping malls such as themall.tv, which aims to emulate an entire shopping mall with scores of high street shops. It claims to have signed up 500 brands.
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POPSGames and reality, Which affects which? on the other hand, "some biologists think the game could have educational value just by making users think about science, like an entertaining hook into evolutionary biology." "Ultimately, games are made to engage the people who play them. Provoking wonderment or debate is a good thing. Wright abstracts grandiose topics, and he does it well. Not enough game designers have the stones or the vision to try the same, which is why we get battered with endless versions of Madden NFL (also put out by Electronic Arts). In the end, that's also why Spore leaves such an impression. It's more than just fun. It's worth arguing about."
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POPSIntelligence and Empathy He stresses that the human mind does not qualify as a completely ‘General Intelligence’ but lies somewhere on the spectrum between AGI on one end and ‘Narrow AI’ on the other. This is one of several reasons why he does not expect AGI to be achieved by mimicking the workings of the human brain. He describes how our brains fool us into believing that we understand our actions and decisions when we don’t. And why modeling an AI too closely on the human brain might make it too, vulnerable to false notions. He also says, ‘I think virtual worlds are going to be absolutely critical to the development of Artificial General Intelligence.’ As well as ‘Right now connecting AI’s to virtual worlds is probably the best way to get an AI to have a general human-like embodied experience.’
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POPSFrom Snapshots, a 3-D View - Amazing New Technology In a Photosynth demonstration at the annual TED conference last year, the presenter blew the crowd’s mind with a photosynth of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, made up of photos mined from Flickr.com. In other words, Microsoft had created a seamless, successful photosynth using hundreds of existing photos, taken by different people at different times using all kinds of cameras.
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