Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!

“Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language. Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes.” Full story.

Interfering With Flight? (Personal Electronics on Airliners)

The announcement over the plane’s speaker seems as much a part of the routine before takeoff as the demonstration of how to buckle a seat belt: Please turn off all electronic devices.

But some passengers invariably ignore the request, perhaps thinking that their iPods or e-books do not count. And really, does it matter if the devices are left on?

The answer, it turns out, is that sometimes it may.

Full story continues here.

Transparent Boxes and Signs are Street Art, Not Invisibility Cloak

Artist Cayetano Ferrer creates optical illusions with transparency.  While these boxes and signs appear translucent, the effect is actually created with doctored photographs, superimposed on objects in the correct perspective.   View more

Vertical Glider Takeoff – With No Vehicle Assistance

Google Tool, Steps Toward Ending Spoken Language Barrier

“Google announced Wednesday that its experimental Conversation Mode is rolling out to users of its Google Translate app on Android phones and tablets.  Conversation mode is “still in its earliest stages,” wrote Awaneesh Verma, a Google product manager in a statement. “This is a new interface within Google Translate that’s optimized to allow you to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language.”

The feature, first shown off translating from English to German and back again in September, will allow two people, who speak two different languages, to speak into a phone with the phone translating back to them so a conversation can be held.  The Google Translate update released Wednesday allows for Conversation Mode to only translate between Spanish and English, Verma wrote. Google does however plan to add more languages in the future as the feature moves out of its early public “alpha” stage.”    Full Story

You Tube Time Machine

Pick a year between 1860 and 2010 and YTTM begins playing videos from that year.  While it’s fun to take a stroll down memory lane (You Tube style), you can also specify a category of video for a given year, including: Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies and Music.

Try YTTM.tv

Photo of the Day (from photomediaworld)

Survivor Tree Replanted at Ground Zero

Courtesy of NPR and the Associated Press.
Read the story and view the short video here.

Get ready for some more snow

Library Of Congress to Stream 200,000 Vintage Masters Donated by Universal

“Universal Music Group has announced it’s donating over 200,000 master recordings of early 20th century music to the Library, which will be cataloged and digitized — for future safekeeping and in order to be streamed online starting in the spring. It doesn’t seem, however, that the intellectual property rights will be passing with these recordings, as the press release states this agreement continues the Library’s “unprecedented authority to stream commercially owned sound recordings online.” Either way, it’s good to know that the original copies of works by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald will reside in the hands of an organization dedicated to their preservation.”  Story & Press Release