As Inti Einhorn mentioned in his presentation (which was great, man--I've had several conversations based on it in just the past couple of days,) getting the Wii to work requires training. That'll be true of anything we build, too, especially w/r/t anything gestural.

With that in mind, I would strongly recommend that we look into neural networks as a way to train the machines. It sounds a little intimidating, but it really isn't. In fact, it ties in very closely to the reading about logic gates we've been doing so far.

IBM has a pretty good introduction to NN. In particular, read Threshold logic units (TLUs) and How a TLU Learns. The rest is pretty math heavy--though it's still good reading, if you're up for it. You can recreate AND, OR, XOR, etc. gates using neural networks pretty easily.

Hot on the heels of our readings in class are two unconventional examples of how logic gates work.

Arduino Light Meter: Ye olde digitalWrites and analogRead at work.Here's an example of something simple and (potentially) practical you can make with an Arduino: a light meter!

The trick for me, if you look at the photo, was to use a voltage divider for the photoresistor. That is, the analog input comes from the point on the circuit between the photoresistor and a 1K ohm resistor.

The Arduino coding session we had today seemed to go pretty well (though I'll let the other folks blog about what it was like on the student end of things.) We got a bunch of things blinking and buzzing, and we covered most of what you need to do to read and write digitally and analog... analogally... analogly... analogalogally... hmm, don't know the word for that. At any rate, it was fun for me.

The Phone and the Tool: Today, we're taking apart a toy cell phone. All you need, really, is a screwdriver.

Just some quick notes while the experience is fresh in my head:

The Chronicle: 2/9/2007: Caught in the Network - Very interesting development here with academics using Tor, software created for keeping your Internet usage private. A professor at Bowling Green, who teaches about the social implications of authorities censoring Net usage, was asked not only to stop using Tor but to not teach his students about it. Apparently, the university's IT policy doesn't have an entry for irony. [My del.icio.us]

Fresh on the heels of the Boston PD detonating LED displays of Err of ATHF, as well as me listening to Brewster Kahle's talk on information, I notice that the videos of the project, made by the "guerrilla" marketers who dropped these projects onto major cities, have been removed from YouTube "by the user."

I listened to the talk given by Brewster Kahle, a personal hero of mine. I've long been a fan of his work at the Internet Archive. I've made a lot of use of the Open-Source movie area and the Prelinger Archive, two of the projects he mentions in the talk.

A theme he keeps coming back to is the Library of Alexandria. We're going through a period where we could have a tragedy on the scale of that great burning. Kahle covers the technical, legal, and moral requirements that we must fulfill to avoid this catastrophe.

I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's talk at Pop!Tech. I'm blogging in real time as I listen, so this is straight from my head to the blog.

A chair maker decided to use mesh that allowed the chair to breath and yet does not pinch, as well as a bunch of other cool innovations. (I had one of these at my previous job--they're great!)

Anyway, the chair has to be comfortable and look good. It was very comfortable--an 8 out of 10. Still people didn't like the way it looked--in fact they thought it was ugly. Market testing, for this aspect, was abysmal! Even designers weren't keen on it. People said it looked like lawn furniture!