Virtual study for real education...

Kids learn in Web worlds

London: Virtual worlds can be valuable places where children rehearse what they will do in real life, reveals research.
They are also a “powerful and engaging” alternative to more passive pursuits such as watching TV, according to a BBCsponsored study.
The research was done with children using the BBC’s Adventure Rock virtual world, aimed at those aged 6-12. Carried out by Professor David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson of the University of Westminster, the research surveyed and interviewed children who were the first to test Adventure Rock.
Children explore the world alone but it uses message boards so children can share what they find and what they make in the various creative studios dotted around the virtual space. The research looked at the ways the children used the world and sought feedback from them on its good and bad aspects.
Gauntlett said the research revealed that children assumed one of eight roles when exploring a virtual world and using the tools they put at their disposal. At times children were explorers and at others they were social climbers keen to connect with other players. Some were power users looking for more information about how the workings of the virtual space.
Gauntlett said online worlds were very useful rehearsal spaces where children could try all kinds of things largely free of the consequences that would follow if they tried them in the real world. For instance, he said, children trying out Adventure Rock learned many useful social skills and played around with their identity in ways that would be much more difficult in real life.
Gauntlett said what children liked about virtual worlds was the chance to create content such as music, cartoons and video and the tools that measured their standing in the world compared to others. “Virtual worlds can be a powerful, engaging and interactive alternative to more passive media,” he said.
He urged the creators of virtual spaces for children to get young people involved very early on. “They really do have good ideas to contribute and they are very good critical friends,” he said. AGENCIES

The sound of music...

ISC topper has music on mind

Jaskiran Chopra | TNN

Dehradun: Gaurav Sood, a student of Doon School, loves western music and wants to have a band one day. Incidentally, Sood topped the national charts of ISC exams by scoring 99%! Clearly not a bookworm, Sood, who scored 100% in Maths and Chemistry and 98% in English and Physics, was in Mumbai jamming with some friends when the results were declared on Tuesday. This is the first time that a student of the region has topped.

“He is expected back home soon and we will give him a grand reception,’’ say proud parents Amar and Jyoti Sood. “He plays the guitar extremely well,’’ says younger brother Rishi, also a student of Doon School. Though Gaurav wants to be an engineer, he will be a musician at heart always, add his parents. They say he is still contemplating whether to do Economic Hons or Engineering.

In Mumbai, Gaurav and his friends were meeting with various musicians including ones from Bollywood. Jyoti says the group had last year recorded an album called Hiatus.

Skand Goyal, another Dosco, topped the school in the Commerce stream by scoring 97.83%. Skand says he is not yet sure about the career he should pursue but it would definitely be something that will contribute to the knowledge economy. He writes poetry in Hindi and was the chief editor of the school’s Hindi journal.

Despite being in boarding school, Skand says he got a lot of support from his entire family.

Third generation Solar cells

Cheaper solar cells from fruit dyes

WASHINGTON: Chemistry students at Rowan University (RU) in the US are developing a process by which dye from fruits can be used to create solar cells to capture the energy from the Sun.
The team plans to use dyes from fruits like blackberries, blueberries, oranges and grapes to create the solar cells, under guidance of Dr Darius Kuciauskas, an assistant professor of chemistry at RU.
Currently, commercially available solar cells are efficient and robust, but expensive to produce.
“To develop efficient and inexpensive solar cells, scientists are following the design of photosynthetic systems,” said Kuciauskas. “We are researching on the so-called ‘third-generation’ solar cells.”
The Rowan researchers are working to refine a process in which they extract dye from a range of fruit and blend it into a kind of scientific ‘smoothie’.
The process leaves the researchers with sugar and a dye. The components are then separated to obtain pure, brightly coloured dyes in an acidic solution.
From there, they place the dye on a conductive glass coated with a porous film of titanium dioxide, which bonds the dye to the glass.
Finally, they add iodine and potassium iodide electrolyte for dye regeneration.
When light hits the processed fruit dye on the glass, it “excites” the electrons, which mobilises or “frees” them. The electrons then travel to a conductive glass electrode, which, in turn, produces electricity.
According to Green, though there is less output from these organic solar cells than a traditional silicon cell, the production from fruit is quite cheap.
“Construction of the cells is so simple and inexpensive that anyone can build his or her own using fruit, white paint, iodine and glass,” said Antonelli. ANI

The latest Indiana Jones....

Secret of skulls: Story behind latest ‘Indiana Jones’

Cannes: A tale of archeological intrigue as captivating as any Indiana Jones plot is behind his new deathdefying adventure in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, premiered at Cannes on Sunday ahead of its release on May 22.
“We always find an artifact that is real, that people believe in, that archaeologists have looked for or already found and that has a supernatural aspect to it,” George Lucas told journalists at Cannes.
The story began in 1924 when famed British banker-turned-adventurer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, then on a search for the lost continent of Atlantis in the Central American jungle, turned up a sculpted human skull carved in a block of translucent quartz crystal.
His daughter, who toured the world with it until her death at 100 in 2007, claimed experiencing strange sensations on touching it and having dreams of ancient Mayan rituals at night.
Dubbed the “Skull of Doom” due to its supposed supernatural power to bring misfortune, the artifact , Mitchell-Hedges said, was close to 3,600 years old. Subsequently other crystal skulls turned up, some finding their way into prized museum collections, others privately owned — and all giving rise to speculation on their origins and use.
“All of the artifacts that have been looked for have never been proven to exist or have been proven to have the powers that have been ascribed to them,” Lucas added. “But there are a lot of people who believe in it.”
But over the past decade experts voiced growing doubts over the Aztec origin of the crystal skulls, one of which is in the British Museum, another at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute. And last month, a Paris museum acknowledged its own star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be.
One of only a dozen such skulls known to exist, the Quai Branly museum’s piece was acquired in 1878 from another Indiana Jones-type explorer, Alphonse Pinart, as an Aztec masterpiece believed to be hundreds of years old, the remnant of an ancient and mysterious civilisation. The museum now says that rather than dating from the Aztec period, it was probably made in the 19th century.
From May 20 the Paris skull goes on view to coincide with the world release of the fourth installment in Harrison Ford’s archaeologist’s adventures. Legend has it that the Paris skull represents the Aztecs’ Mictlantecuhtli, who reigned over the land of the deceased, Mictlan. Reuniting all 12 existing skulls plus a supposedto-exist 13th could prevent the earth from tipping over, according to fable.
The Quai Branly said results of an analysis of its skull in 2007-2008 by the country’s C2RMF research and restoration centre “seem to indicate that it was made late in the 19th century.” The London skull was examined twice, in 1996 and 2004, and both studies tended to prove it was a fake, though the final conclusions have not been made public. But though no crystal skull yet found at archeological digs has proved to be authentic, the 12 located around the world continue to arouse interest and speculation. AFP

SKULL OF DOOM: A sculpted skull carved out of a block of translucent quartz crystal. The Aztec masterpiece is believed to be the remnant of an ancient and mysterious civilization

Different people different views...

‘Giraffe’ women on show at Thai ‘human zoo’

Bangkok: Thai provincial officials have allowed a new “human zoo” featuring “longnecked” or “giraffe” women to open in Sattahip near Bangkok despite mounting international criticism of the exploitative tourism practice, media reports said on Monday.
The residents are part of an ethnic group whose women wear brass rings around their necks as status symbols and for beauty enhancements. They are called the Padung or long-necked Karen in Thailand, but they consider those terms denigrating and call themselves Kayan.
Seven Kayan villages are already marketed as tourist attractions in Thailand’s northern provinces of Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai, where there is a sizeable population of Kayan, some of whom are refugees from neighbouring Myanmar. But for the first time, a new “village” of Kayans was recently opened in Sattahip in Chonburi province, 100 km south-east of Bangkok and a few kilometres from Pattaya beach resort, the Daily XPress newspaper said.
It charges an entrance fee of 25 baht for Thai visitors and 250 baht for foreigners, the newspaper said. Sattahip district chief Narong Thirachantarangkoon brushed off accusations that he had allowed the establishment of a “human zoo” in his district.
“I don’t think so because the Karen are willingly living here,” he said. “This is better than staying in their home region and starving.”
The rings worn by the Kayan women can weigh 10 kg or more, and over the years, the weight pushes down their collar bones and shoulders, making their necks appear longer and giving the women their nicknames of “long-necked” women. The women, who had originally come to Thailand as refugees, were reportedly lured to a border camp where Thai businessmen created a village to serve as a tourist attraction, or “human zoo”. AGENCIES

HUMAN EXHIBIT: The residents of the province opened for ‘human tourism’ are part of an ethnic group whose women wear brass rings around their necks as status symbols and for beauty enhancement.

Re-evolution

Dramatic reverse evolution found among fish species

Washington: Scientists have discovered a process of “reverse evolution” among tiny fish species living in Lake Washington, a finding that is being linked to a pollutioncontrol effort in the United States.
The study showed that evolutionary process was taking place in relative warpspeed reverse in the case of the threespine stickleback fish, which live in Lake Washington. Thanks to a $140 million cleanup effort in the mid-1960s today the lake’s transparency has reached a depth of 10 feet.
Lacking the cover of darkness they once enjoyed, about half of the lake sticklebacks have evolved to become fully armoured, with bony plates protecting their bodies from head to tail. Experts at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre found that while in the late 1960s, only 6% of sticklebacks were completely plated, today 49% are fully plated and 35% are partially plated.

Get Real!

A ‘Second Life’ avatar gets a mind of his own

Troy (New York): Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life”. A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.
But Edd is different.
His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.
“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory. Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.
But first, a virtual reality check. Edd is not running rampant through the cyber streets of “Second Life”. He goes only where Bringsjord and his graduate students place him for tests. He can answer questions like “Where are you from?” but understands only English that has previously been translated into mathematical logic.
“Second Life” is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don’t have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills.
And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems — like, say, creating a virtual human — right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Researching in virtual realities has become increasingly popular the past couple years, said Mateas, leader of the school’s Expressive Intelligence Studio for AI and gaming. Operators of “Second Life” don’t seem concerned about synthetic agents lurking in their world. John Lester, Boston operations manager for Linden Lab, said the San Francisco-based company sees a “fascinating” opportunity for AI to evolve. AP