High Tech Home Security

Starting Wednesday, Canary will be selling its new home security system. This new, simple security system is good for apartments and single family homes. This new product is supposed to be unlike other products (including the products with the word "smart" in it), its supposed to be less complicated than other security systems. The company has put a lot of time and effort into this new product. This system learns your habits and behaviors and will send you meaningful alerts. There is a privacy mode that you can turn on and the cameras will shut off. This also allows you to record certain moments that you might miss if you aren't at your house. Its as small as a hard drive so its barley noticeable and has a motion detector and night vision. Read the article to get the full description!

Bullet Proof Suit

This bullet proof suit is a new way of being "stylish," and safe. It was created for people who travel to unsafe regions in the world, or for people who just want to feel safe. The man who created this put a skinny piece of bullet proof material in between the fabric of the suit. When shooters at gun ranges tested it out, they found that the bullets did not go through the suit. The creator not only created a nice suit, but he created a suit that could save a persons life. It is priced at twenty thousands dollars as of right now. For people who can't afford it, they have come up with a bullet proof bag as well. The bag is priced at nine hundred dollars.

Laser Procedure Can Turn Eyes Different Colors

Laser Procedure

There is a new medical procedure that allows you to change your eye color from brown to blue. They decided to come up with this procedure when they noticed that blue eyes are one of things most people notice. The procedure is based off the amount of pigment the eyes have on their surface. The brown eye has more pigment than the blue eye has. The company has found a way to disrupt the pigment, which causes the body to automatically remove tissue. It only takes about twenty seconds to do this, but you have to wait a few weeks to start seeing results.

Zoom Contact Lens

Swedish scientist are trying to come up with a new contact lens that will zoom in on objects, books, faces, etc...So far they have a prototype lens that can magnify up to 2.8 times. They are hoping to find a way to make it zoom in even more than it already does. In the future they are hoping that the contact lenses will help people with macular degeneration which is an eye disease that causes vision loss. A simple wink will activate the lens causing it to zoom in. The process of making these lenses has been very hard. The very first prototype they created wasn't exactly ready to be put on someone's eye. The magnification wasn't able to turn off unless you took it out of your eye. You also couldn't wear them for long because they weren't gas permeable. The newer prototype is capable of staying in your eye for a longer period of time. The creators of the contacts are still trying to find a way to make the lens better. To find out more info you can read this article or you can watch this video.

Web 2.0: Multimedia Blog Pre-Posting

 

One class I'm taking this year is Spanish ll which is taught by Senora/Mrs. Daniele. Like any teacher she expects us to get all our work done and try our best at everything. The one thing I like about her is she doesn't like to see us fail. She is always willing to give us a second chance to get work done. Sometimes she will give us extra credit work and we can either add the points to a test grade, or use it as a homework pass. In the beginning of the year she told us all the things we would eventually be learning. Most the things she said we would be learning, I have learned in the past. We have learned how to have conversations about how we are feeling, how to greet people, what sports we play, and how to talk about past events that have occurred. Every week we have something called a "Biographia." She will give us a name of a famous Spanish actor, singer, athlete and other famous Spanish people. We will have to look up when the person was born, where they were born, and when they died. The biographies are counted as quiz grades. Another thing we have every week is a spelling/translating test. She will give us a list of five words. We need to be able to pronounce them, spell them correctly, and know what each one means. This is also counted as a quiz grade. We don't take too many tests in her class. One of the big things I like about her class is she rarely gives us homework. The only time we will have homework is when we weren't able to get it done as class work. She will often let us partner up, and we will  have to create a dialogue and present it to the class. In the dialogues, we will have to talk about the topic we are learning at the time. These are normally counted as project grades. During class, we will go on to the computer and look up videos of the famous people and learn about their lives. We also watch a show called "La Llegada De Sam." It's about an American guy who goes to a Spanish country and meets a group of Spanish friends. We only watch this if we don't have any work left. If you want to learn more about her class she has her own website. There is also a list of all her class rules. I look forward to learning more!

IBM's Watson

 IBM (International Business Machine) has been working on a project on "Watson." Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions in a "natural language." It is designed to learn from examples, understands requests and questions that are being asked, and it can read the internet and other database to find answers. Watson first became famous when it won the game Jeopardy against human players in the U.S. in 2011. IBM recently announced that Watson would be working with the Japanese company Softbank to make apps. Softbank is one of the third largest wireless telecommunication network in many Asian internet companies. Thanks to this company, the Watson driven apps could start appearing in a number of things Japanese people use. Watson could hopefully help with banking, insurance, health care, and auto industries. The bankers are hoping that Watson will eventually get put into a robot named Pepper. Pepper is already programed to read people's emotions, from facial expressions to the tone in someone's voice. Watson still has a few things that it needs to learn, like the Japanese culture and language. That's the next step in making Watson a helpful Japanese banker.

You can find the article on IBM's Watson on this website.

Educational Technology and Copyright Law

Copyright is a federal law in the United States that protects someone's original work. Original work authorship is literary, written, artistic and musical works. When ever someone comes up with something or creates something on their own, it is immediately copyrighted. When doing school projects, or presentations, most people use pictures that are not theirs. Copyright laws state that sharing a picture you found and making copies of it is not an infringement of copyright. The picture will follow under fair use unless it is licensed. If a picture is licensed, all you have to do is give credit to the photographer that way people will know it is not your own picture.