Preservativos são uma tecnologia salva-vidas há décadas, e mesmo sendo pouco mais que balões murchos de látex, eles fazem seu trabalho muito bem – se você usá-los. Este é o problema que Bill Gates quer resolver.
Não, ele não vai andar por aí sendo a “polícia da camisinha”: ele vai oferecer US$ 100.000 para quem criar um preservativo menos incômodo de se usar.
O dinheiro é oferecido pela Gates Foundation através do Programa Grandes Desafios em Saúde Global, e qualquer pessoa pode ganhar: “estudantes, cientistas ou empresários” que consigam melhorar a velha tecnologia de segunda pele.
E se você precisa de alguma ideia inteligente para começar, a Gates Foundation dá uma forcinha:
Alguns conceitos adicionais que podem aumentar [o uso de preservativos] incluem atributos que aumentem a facilidade de uso de preservativos masculinos e femininos, por exemplo uma embalagem melhor ou designs que sejam mais fáceis de se aplicar corretamente. Além disso, atributos que abordem e superem barreiras culturais também são desejáveis.
Então pode ser algo que use campos de força, por exemplo. Ou talvez algo com grafeno? Sei lá, você que se vire – um prêmio de US$ 100.000 não sai de graça.
Gates já ofereceu muito dinheiro para criar um vaso sanitário melhor, então não é surpreendente que algo como o preservativo seja o próximo da lista. Mas com um pouco de sorte, a recompensa pode desencadear alguma ótima inovação, e então você terá que agradecer a Bill Gates da próxima vez que você transar. Que emoção. [Gates Foundation via BetaBeat via The Gothamist]
Our user base recently grew 15x (and counting), and this changed everything. In a week we have gone from a personal project ran by three friends to a personal project ran by three friends with about 150,000 users.
Thank you everyone for your kind words, support, critique and active participation!
We are doing everything to bring things back to normal again, and we need your support.
We pay lots of attention to user requests, so we could not ignore the one where you had been asking for a way to donate us money.
We have been looking for a good way to accept donations, and we found Flattr. It is a simple way to manage your micro donations. You can either donate us fixed amount of money, or press the “flattr” button, and then your monthly budget would be distributed it among us and other projects you donated to during a month.
If you feel like donating a significant sum or you find flattr inconvenient, drop us a note (hello@theoldreader.com), we will figure something out.
If it’s a stretch, please don’t feel obligated to send us anything. We will use the money to expand our server infrastructure, which will help us to refresh feeds more often, process import queue more quickly, and even might even allow us to get more external resources to implement new features sooner.
Thank you everyone for your support. Every single contribution is an enormous help for us.
É assim que começa esse infográfico criado pela Vitamin Talent falando sobre UX e como a web ainda tem muito o que evoluir para atingir bons resultados e garantir uma boa experiência a quem a utiliza.
Outro dado de certa forma polêmico (mas que pode te ajudar a vender projetos de melhoria de usabilidade para seus clientes) é que a cada US$1 investido em UX pode gerar até US$100 de lucros ou otimização de vendas.
The GCC developers have, after years of planning, completed the switch to C++ as the implementation language for their software. The new version of GCC also includes performance improvements and a new general optimisation level
Want Animaniacs, Freakazoid and Tiny Toon on Netflix!
Here's TammieRD's compilation of all the alternate endings to the Animaniacs theme song, each better than the last. As I mentioned before the complete seasons 1-3 DVDs are a huge hit around our house. Really some of the best kids' (and grownups') TV of the last century.
The curiously revered world of irrational nonsense has seeped into almost every aspect of modern society and is both complex and multifarious. Therefore rather than attempt a comprehensive taxonomy, I have opted instead for a gross oversimplification and a rather pretty Venn Diagram.
In my gross over simplification the vast majority of the multitude of evidenced-free beliefs at large in the world can be crudely classified into four basic sets or bollocks. Namely, Religion, Quackery, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.
However as such nonsensical beliefs continue to evolve they become more and more fanciful and eventually creep across the bollock borders. Although all the items depicted on the diagram are completely bereft of any form of scientific credibility, those that successfully intersect the sets achieve new heights of implausibility and ridiculousness. And there is one belief so completely ludicrous it successfully flirts with all forms of bollocks.
I have also received the first translated copy of the Venn Diagram produced by Pavle Močilac of the Croatian Society for Promotion of Science and Critical Thinking.
Italian translation courtesy of Andrea Mirra
Spanish translation via @Cienciaaldía
If I receive any other translations I shall post them here with the original.
BTW, Its been awfully nice to have seen the Diagram popping up all over the interwebs in the last few days, but if you could so kind as to link back to here you'll be sure to have the latest version in case I make any updates.
FURTHER UPDATE 27th March
I conceived the Venn Diargram of Irrational Nonsense in the car on my way home from work last Wednesday, and quickly knocked it up when I got home. However, I didn't publish it immediatley as I was pondering the feasability of adding a fifth set.
I spent a few hours the following night attempting to add a fifth set, but the diagram was getting cluttered and the fonts too small, so eventually I reluctantly abondened the five set version and posted the original four set version from the previous night.
I have however, seen a fair few comments suggesting that the diagram might benefit from a conspiracy theorist dimension, however, before I've had a chance to have another crack at it, I noticed dehydrationstation has beaten me to it. I think it came out OK.(although I would have used the word "bollocks" a bit more myself.
Origins The word boteco (or botequim /butiquim) is derived from the Portuguese word botica (bodega in Spanish), which is itself derived from the the Greek word Apotheke – meaning a place or store where goods are sold. However, if in Portugal a botica was a place of storage, in Brazil a boteco evolved into becoming […]
This expression originally quoted by the character Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, is often used to express enthusiasm and approval for scientific discovery on the web.
Virtual talking head “Zoe” uses a basic set of six simulated emotions that can then be modified and combined (credit: Toshiba Cambridge Research Lab/Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge)
Meet Zoe: a digital talking head. She can express a range of human emotions on demand with “unprecedented realism” and could herald a new era of human-computer interaction, according to researchers at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who created her.
Zoe, or her offspring, could be used as a visible version of Siri, as a personal assistant in smartphones, or to replace mobile phone texting with “face messaging” in which you “face-message” friends.
The lifelike face can display emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear, and changes its voice to suit any feeling the user wants it to simulate. Users can type in any message, specifying the required emotion, and the face recites the text. According to its designers, it is the most expressive controllable avatar ever created, replicating human emotions with unprecedented realism.
To recreate her face and voice, researchers recorded British actress Zoe Lister’s speech and facial expressions.
DIY digital assistants
The framework behind “Zoe” could in the near future enable people to upload their own faces and voices to customize and personalize their own emotionally realistic, digital assistants. A user could, for example, text the message “I’m going to be late” and set her emotion to “frustrated.” A friend would then receive a “face message” that looked like the sender, repeating the message in a frustrated way.
The team that created Zoe is currently looking for applications, and are also working with a school for autistic and deaf children, where the technology could be used to help pupils to “read” emotions and lip-read. Ultimately, the system could have multiple uses — including gaming, audio-visual books, for delivering online lectures, and in other user interfaces.
“This technology could be the start of a whole new generation of interfaces which make interacting with a computer much more like talking to another human being,” Professor Roberto Cipolla, from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, said.
The program used to run Zoe is just tens of megabytes in size, which means that it can be easily incorporated into even the smallest computer devices, including tablets and smartphones.
It works by using a set of fundamental emotions. Zoe’s voice, for example, has six basic settings: Happy, Sad, Tender, Angry, Afraid and Neutral. The user can adjust these settings to different levels, as well as altering the pitch, speed and depth of the voice itself.
By combining these levels, it becomes possible to pre-set or create almost infinite emotional combinations. For instance, combining happiness with tenderness and slightly increasing the speed and depth of the voice makes it sound friendly and welcoming.
A combination of speed, anger and fear makes Zoe sound as if she is panicking. This allows for a level of emotional subtlety which, the designers say, has not been possible in other characters like Zoe until now.
To make the system as realistic as possible, the research team collected a dataset of thousands of sentences, which they used to train the speech model with Lister. They also tracked Lister’s face while she was speaking using computer vision software. This was converted into voice and face-modelling algorithms that provided voice and image data needed to recreate expressions on a digital face, directly from the text alone.
Face Works
In related news, at the annual GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA demonstrated “Face Works,” running on their Titan graphics card, Forbes reported Wednesday.
NVIDIA is able to take 32GB of facial data (the bump maps, texture maps, lighting, expressions, etc) and compress it down to 400MB, in a new way of rendering highly realistic facial (and voice) expression.
Applications include virtual actors for animated video and film s.
Imagine explicar para crianças de 5 anos o que é o existencialismo e quem foi Friedrich Nietzsche? Vá um pouco além e tente falar sobre a crise na Síria ou ainda como funciona o mercado de ações. Não que elas estejam muito interessadas, ou que consigam pronunciar alguns dos nomes que acabam surgindo na conversa. Ainda assim, a produção do Reddit, Explain Like I’m Five merece atenção.
A websérie leva o mesmo nome de uma subreditt em que os temas mais complexos são simplificados para que até uma criança possa entender. O objetivo é incentivar que os usuários produzam vídeos e animações originais, usando por base o conteúdo do próprio Reddit.
After lying on the ocean floor for more than 40 years, two
Apollo rocket engines that helped deliver astronauts to the moon
are once again seeing the light of day.
A team organized by Jeff Bezos spent three weeks
fishing at sea to recover the corroded F-1 engines, which sat more
than four kilometres below the surface of the Atlantic
Ocean. Bezos does not yet know precisely which Apollo mission
the engines flew on as the original serial numbers on the objects
are missing. He is hoping they are the Apollo 11 engines that
brought the first men to the moon. On 20 March, his team's
ship was heading back to Cape Canaveral in Florida with the aged
pieces to restore them and perhaps determine which mission they
came from.
