Category: techno

StoryCorps

KERA’s “Think” had a great show yesterday with StoryCorps founder Dave Isay.
The StoryCorps project records American stories from all walks of lives by inviting individuals to bring a family member to the booth and spend 40 minutes interviewing them.
Once the session is over, the participants receive a copy of the interview and one copy is sent to the Library of Congress for safe keeping so generations to come can listen and learn from the stories.
From Think:

StoryCorps, the revolutionary project to record American stories, is visiting North Texas and we want you to participate. We’ll spend this hour with StoryCorps founder and MacArthur Fellow, Dave Isay. We’ll also hear a few of the remarkable stories the project has collected since its inception in 2003.

You can listen to the show here
Or find out more and listen to other clips at the StoryCorps website.
Such a great idea. If you’re in the Dallas/Fort Worth area I’d really recommend trying to get a family member to join you during a StoryCorps interview.
Or read the DIY Guide and record stories for your own family.

Google moon goes live

Google Moon is live now – and if you can figure out a way to land a private spacecraft on that big ball of cheese – Google will pony up $30 million.
From the Google blog:

Great things can happen when you reach for the stars. That’s why we’re thrilled to be sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE, which will award a total of $30 million to teams competing around the world to land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.
Why does Google love space? Well, for one thing, we just think it’s cool. More seriously, space exploration has a remarkable history of producing technological breakthroughs, from ablative heat shields and asteroid mining to invisible braces and Tang; the X-PRIZE, too, could lead to important developments in robotic space exploration, a whole host of new space-age materials, precision landing control technology, and who knows what else.
Finally, we hope the contest will help renew public interest in fields like math, engineering and computer science, especially among the young people on whom we’ll all be depending to tackle tomorrow’s technical challenges, whether they’re on the web or among the stars.

So start getting out your schematics, and plans and lets see who can make it to the moon first.

Using Google Earth to search for Steve Fosset

Missing aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett is lost somewhere in 10,000 square miles of Nevada desert. A traditional and comprehensive rescue effort has been in progress for days, but it is difficult to know where to look for him because he did not file a flight plan.
An unorthodox group of searchers are approaching this problem from a non-traditional angle, using updated satellite imagery from Google Earth and a new Web service from Amazon called the Mechanical Turk. They hope to harness the wisdom of crowds to examine in detail images of all 10,000 square miles in hopes of locating the crash site and effecting a rescue of Fossett.
Very cool use of technology and satellite imagery.
Mechanical Turk hypes itself as artificial artificial intelligence where people can complete simple tasks that people do better than computers (and sometimes get paid for it).
Click here to help with the search