A Briefer History of Time Part II

There is a  theory that the universe is forever expanding. Based on data scientists, have discovered that all the galaxies are moving away from us with the ones farther from us moving faster. Now we are not going to make the same mistake of assuming that we are the center of the universe again, but think of the universe as a balloon with dots on the balloon representing galaxies. As the balloon expands all of the galaxies move away from each other. Scientists believe that there are three different theories about what will happen as the universe continues to expand. They also have discovered black holes, which are places in space so incredibly dense that escape velocity to get out of its gravitational field exceeds the speed of light, so even light cannot escape. These black holes simply look like that, a black hole in space with objects orbiting the outside of the event horizon.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson believes that schools kill creativity. He explains in this ted talk that schools focus more on the academic subjects such as math, science, english, etc and less on the arts such as painting and dance. The most impacting story that he told during his talk was the one of the lady who choreographed Cats. She was considered a bad child and had bad grades in school because she couldn't stay still. The school told her mother that she simply needed to calm down, instead she simply needed to dance and emit her en ergy in the arts. Schools today don't focus on the arts because they feel like they will not be beneficial in the future.

David Hanson: Robots that "show emotion"

David Hanson has been working on creating robots that are capable of reading emotion and showing empathy. Over the past ten years they have built about 20 robots using frubber to create the face that can portray emotions. Here is a picture of one of the robots mimicking Hanson's frown,

The robots are able to respond to you as well as picking up and reading your own emotions. They are also working on an animated robot that can one day possibly be a companion for children. It is able to form relationships because of its perception of people and the natural form of its interface that allows it to interact with humans, so people can believe the robot is actually a person.

Margaret Gould Stewart: How YouTube thinks about copyright

YouTube receives a hundred years of video each day. Every single one of these videos is determined if it matches any other type of video such as a TV show, music video, movie, etc. These videos have all copyright policies, either allowing or not allowing the video to be posted. The vastness of the files they must check to see of there is a match and the amount of videos being posted daily is an incredible amount of information, and youtube processes all of this information extremely fast. By allowing people to post other people's videos, the owner's of the videos can get free publicity, new audiences, revenue, and  recognition.

John La Grou plugs smart power outlets

John La Grou and a group of other brilliant people designed a smart plug, which will help prevent electrical fires from starting. There is an alarming amount of fires and injuries caused from electrical outlets. These are intelligent plugs that are able to determine if there is too much electricity flowing through the cord, which causes fires, and shuts off the flow of electricity. It also prevents children from being burned if they stick their hands in the socket because no energy will be generated in the socket until a smart plug is plugged in. These will reduce the costs and use of energy and also decrease fires and injuries due to plugs.

Stumbleupon.com

Stumbleupon.com is a fantastic website that I discovered early this school year. You create an account, pick topics that you find interesting or fun, and stumble. It attaches a stumble bar to the address bar on your screen and allows you to stumble upon countless websites, pictures, articles, videos, games, etc. You can also like or dislike a stumble, if you like it then you can go back to your account and actually see everything you have like in the past. If you dislike it, stumbleupon takes that into consideration when finding your next thing to stumble on. You can also narrow down your topics to one thing, such as humor, or as broad as all. Stumbleupon is very entertaining because you are able to discover things you would have never seen without it.

Calculator Part II

For the functions of the buttons the Calc engine is used. In the Calc engine we used preset mathematical buttons and applied them to what buttons we wanted to perform the function. Then we had to create private static final int such as MULTIPLY = 4, so when applying the function later we can use 4 to represent multiplying. We did this for squareroot and exponent. We also had to add the action listener to all the newly added buttons. There is also a series of long and complicated phrases and numbers to determine the text on the screen versus the last on screen and what needs to be on the screen. Then we added the operations squareroot and exponent to the list of operations and told teh calculator to get the function from the Calc engine.