Tadeu

developed to explore the limits of 3D printing as an art form, the miniature sculptures feature an elaborate network of 64 interlocking gears and support structures.

The post mechaneu v1 3D printed spherical gear system kinetic sculpture appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

omgtakeitofftakeitofftakeitoff!

fierce-imaginings:

So last week me and my friend were trying out a faceswap app

And for some reason it wouldn’t recognise that there were 2 faces in the picture

So we tried it from a different angle and

I was really confused and kind of offended at what it’d done to my face

BUT THEN

I’ve spent a lot of time watching my three- and five-year-old daughters explore, play and read on an iPad. While touch-screen devices are wonderful in many ways, they do a really lousy job in one particular area: deeply engaging kids in narrative. Interactivity is stopping children from falling in love with stories. This, I fear, will have long-term consequences, depriving children of one of the most important benefits of reading for pleasure, the essential inner work of imagination and empathy.

The trouble with tablets

More children now read on electronic devices than read physical books according to a recent survey of nearly 35,000 8- to 16-year-olds conducted by the UK’s National Literacy Trust. But screens don’t seem to be improving their experience of reading. Children who read only on-screen are three times less likely to enjoy reading (12% vs. 51%) and a third less likely to have a favorite book (59% vs. 77%). Other key findings:

• 15.5% of kids who read daily, but only on-screen, are above average readers.
• 26% of those who read daily in print, or both in print and on-screen, read at an above average level.

So why don’t tablets enhance the experience of reading? Most children will not fall in love with reading as quickly as they will get hooked on an interactive game. A touch-screen device makes it all too easy for a child to dismiss reading as boring or “flat” in comparison with the instant gratification of games and apps. There are simply too many distractions just a click away. Children are most likely to engage with stories in the right environment and context, and that means away from a screen.

How interactivity is killing narrative

Interactive stories are designed for young children who may still need guided reading, but that interactivity often creates more of a game experience than a reading experience. Instead of being the focus, the story becomes merely a background.

Best-selling children’s author Julia Donaldson, whose picture books dominate top 10 lists, explains why she vetoed an e-book version of her most famous title, The Gruffalo, in a 2011 article in the Guardian. “The publishers showed me an e-book of Alice in Wonderland,” Donaldson said. “They said, ‘Look, you can press buttons and do this and that,’ and they showed me the page where Alice’s neck gets longer,” said Donaldson. “There’s a button the child can press to make the neck stretch, and I thought, well, if the child’s doing that, they are not going to be listening or reading.”

The typical argument for interactive stories goes like this: Soon enough, children will only read on screens, and where readers are going, publishers must follow. Kate Wilson, the founder of children’s publisher Nosy Crow argues that publishers must create reading experiences for touch-screen devices so that children will continue to read. “We shouldn’t go a little way down the digital path or do it half-heartedly and with reluctance,” she writes. “We should, I think, go to where our readers are going, and make sure that they read along the way.”

Nosy Crow’s apps are favorites of my daughters, but they still fall short when it comes to engaging kids’ imaginations and immersing them in a narrative. Most apps for kids are crammed with interactive inanities, interactivity with no objective apart from getting kids to tap on the screen. This is especially aggravating in storybook apps. The stream of sound and movement signifying nothing does not allow the cognitive and emotional space required to deeply engage with a story in the way that an old-fashioned book does. When we’re engaged in a story, we’re actually feeling the story, imagining how the characters feel and how we would feel in the same situation. That experience is hindered when children are busy trying to figure out what happens next when you tap on the screen.

On books and bonding

Bedtime reading is, sadly, declining and there is some early evidence to suggest that screens are partly to blame. The tablet has become the pacifier of choice in the modern family and both parents and children see using a tablet as a solitary experience rather than a shared activity. A recent poll showed that only 13% of parents read to their kids every night. Interactive stories will never be a substitute for reading a book with a young child. Physical books offer a parent and a child a unique opportunity to bond. During a bedtime story, the only stimuli are the adult’s voice and intonation and the book’s pictures. The best stories require interpretation and stimulate discussion between parent and child.

The reading diet

Reading for pleasure is not instinctual. Unlike the instantly alluring tablet, engaging with stories is an acquired skill that takes time and effort. Parents should encourage a balanced “diet” of online and offline reading—both for older kids reading by themselves and for toddlers who need guided reading—to provide them with the necessary mental space to engage with a story in a deeper way.

The window of opportunity for children to fall in love with reading is shorter than ever. As the author Neil Gaiman recently said: “Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.” We don’t want to lose that.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

liquid-liamm:

what Germans do while waiting at traffic lights

via http://spacecombat.tumblr.com/post/13459216557

cutevictim:

scully being perfect

Você está na pizzaria comendo sua bela meia muçarela, meia calabresa, tomando um choppinho e daí entram os Foo Fighters. Mas não, eles não foram só comer uma pizza, eles foram interromper sua refeição para fazer um show!
Dave Grohl e seus colegas fizeram uma apresentação surpresa dentro da Rock & Roll Pizza, na Califórnia, nessa segunda-feira, 09/02. E não pense que foi uma canjinha à capela com duas músicas não. Eles tocaram 23! Um cara conseguiu filmar 11 minutos desse momento histórico na vida de quem estava lá. Aqui ó, chora:

Mais uma vez eu te pergunto: como não amar esses meninos?

Foto: Frame

Wolverine in the Kitchen

San Francisco-based social media startup Buffer just did something unprecedented: It published the salaries of every one of its employees online, available for the public to see. “We hope this might help other companies think about how to decide salaries, and will open us up to feedback from the community,” CEO Joel Gascoigne wrote in a blog post published on Thursday.

You can see for yourself, right here. Gascoigne makes $158,800 a year; COO Leo Widrich makes $146,800; CTO Sunil Sadasivan makes $137,600. The list goes on, and no one—not even those still in Buffer’s beginner “Bootcamp” period (in which employees are still technically freelancers) makes less than $70,000.

The move is part of Buffer’s more general strategy to ”default to transparency”—meaning making operations as transparent as possible. The startup, which helps users schedule social media updates, already publishes its revenue and user numbers every month. It even allows everyone at the company to have access to email exchanges among other employees.

But publishing employee salaries is just one part of wage transparency; the other is explaining how management calculates an employee’s worth. Buffer makes that public too.

As you can see, there’s only one truly subjective variable: level of experience. That’s established through management’s discussions with each employee, as Gascoigne told 99U.

By creating a transparent formula and paying above market rate, Gasciogne says he hopes to promote long-term commitment from employees. “In Silicon Valley, there’s a culture of people jumping from one place to the next,” he told 99U. “That’s why we focus on culture. Doing it this way means we can grow just as fast—if not faster—than doing it the ‘normal’ cutthroat way.”

It’s unclear what, if any, benefit disclosing every employee’s salary to the public offers a budding startup like Buffer. Disclosing salaries within a company is one thing—it promotes openness and fairness, which is a good for morale—but disclosing every employee’s salary to the public is another thing entirely. If the move is more of a publicity stunt to round up some good will and incite chatter, then kudos to Buffer. That mission has been accomplished.

In November 2000, Hasbro released Monopoly: The .com Edition. The board game came just in time for Christmas—and the dot-com bubble bursting. By the end of that year, the Nasdaq had lost more than half its peak value.

Not to jinx the current boom in Silicon Valley, but now seemed like a good time to revisit this special edition of Monopoly. “Are you ready to to log on and hyperlink your way to overnight fame and fortune in the exciting world of e-commerce?” asked the instruction booklet (pdf), which detailed all the ways in which The .Com Edition differed from the original. For example…

The money was denominated in millions of dollars, so the smallest bill was seven figures.

​

Properties on the board were popular websites like Geocities, Ask Jeeves, and iVillage. The equivalent of Boardwalk and Park Place were Yahoo and Excite@Home.

​

Instead of railroads, there were AT&T, Sprint, MCI Worldcom, and Nokia.

​

The tokens included a surfboard—you know, for surfing the World Wide Web.

​

Startups were the surest path to riches.

​

Banner ads were considered lucrative…

​

…and so was playing the stock market.

​

But storage was expensive…

​

…and connecting to the internet was fraught.

​

Life on the web could be distracting…

​

…but web browsers looked pretty much the same as today.

​

Photos by Gloria Dawson

The Shaman is in a decent position, but he really has to get rid of that frozen Raid Leader ASAP.

Back in middle school and high school, my friends and I got hooked on Magic: The Gathering in a big way. I probably spent a few thousands dollars over a span of eight years or so amassing a fearsome collection of cardboard, and I spent thousands of hours playing the game during countless lunch periods, after-school pickup games, and low-level tournaments on the weekends. I quit the game all-but-cold-turkey when I went to college, finding other outlets for my limited supply of money and time.

Over the few months of its closed beta, Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has become my latest collectible card game obsession, albeit with digital cards instead of cardboard this time around. I find myself squeezing in a few quick games during lunch breaks, absent-mindedly opening the game in the middle of reading lengthy articles on the Web and procrastinating from weekend chores with multi-hour sessions that grow from “just one more match.” The careful balance between luck and skill, the strategies and bluffs and counterbluffs, and the functionally endless deck-building possibilities have hooked me just as badly as Magic: The Gathering ever did, leading me to spend at least 100 hours on the game already.

Here’s the key difference, though: by design, I have yet to spend a penny on Hearthstone.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

impostoralice:

askfordoodles:

smearedlipstick:

ghdos:

illrandomocity:

majin-k:

Did a bunch of dogs breakup a fight between two cats? Am I seeing this right??

Having none of that shit today.

“Ay man, y’all chill the fuck out. Y’all fucking up the party.”

I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT I’M SEEING

Pack animals like dogs don’t tolerate dissent in their group because it weakens the pack’s social structure… There are similar clips on youtube of them breaking up rabbit and rooster fights… They don’t care what species you are, they just want you to CUT THAT SHIT OUT.

They don’t differentiate species because dogs think everything else is just a weird dog. 

Sugestão de Assis Ribeiro

do Brasil 247

leia mais

The tree is up

babiesareyum:

"A member of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition plays the bagpipe for an indifferent penguin, 1904."

Winter has crashed down upon us and settled in for a long stay, but that does not mean nature’s beauty has faded away. As you can see in this series of winter landscape photographs, nature plays no favorites with beauty. She is just as cunning of an artist with ice and snow as she is with green grass. flowers, and trees. She paints the trees with a dusting of frost. She creates icy mirrors from the still lakes to reflect the beauty of her creations. She creates sculptures with her icicles and snow drifts. She intermixes snow covered trees and ground with open waters filled with wild geese. She floats snow through the nighttime air creating twinkling flakes reflecting lights. Nature’s elegance stretches through the seasons. We are thrilled that some photographer dare the cold to capture some of nature’s most dramatic scenes.

Photo above by EarthPix

Photo by Lake Baikal

Photo by Hideyuki Katagiri

Photo by Marcin Ryczek

Photo by Kent Shiraishi

Photo by Jan Machata

Photo by Dmitry Dubikovskiy

Photo by Norbert Maier

Photo by deep21

Photo by Friðþjófur M

Photo by Lars van der Goor

Photo by Thomas Zakowski

Photo by Edwin van Nuil

Photo by Evgeni Dinev

Photo by Mark Geistweite

Photo by Emmanuel Coupe

Photo by Peter From

Photo by oskarpall

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