William Kamkwamba talks windmills with Jon Stewart

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Last night [Jon Stewart] interviewed [William Kamkwamba] on The Daily Show. [William] is the young man from Malawi who at the age of 14 built a windmill generator out of discarded items. Now at 22 years old, [William] is working on his SAT scores in hopes that he can attend college in the US. We get a bit more … Read the rest

Nokia: destroying phones for fun and profit

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No matter how grumpy you are in the morning, this video should make you smile. This is one of the jobs many of us dream of. Take a tour around Nokia’s product testing facility with Engadget. Watch in the video as phones are squashed, pinched, smacked, baked, shaken, dialed, slid, opened, and closed repeatedly. Sure, we don’t get to … Read the rest

Software Auralization

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Have you heard the latest track by gzip? Maybe it’ll end up on a “Greatest Hits” album alongside Philip Glass.

Visualization techniques such as animated algorithms can help programmers better grasp the abstract theories that make software work. Could auralization, the sound equivalent of visualization, provide similar insights? Postgrad student (and J. S. Bach fan) [Cessu] developed a program to Read the rest