Who are your neighbors and how do you measure up to them? This site allows you to try some of the tools used by marketers to classify your zip code. Whether you're a Young Influential, Boomtown Single, or New Homesteader, this site will let you know what maket researchers think of you and your neighbors.
Maintained by artist and composer Rodney Berry, this site introduces users to the integration of artificial life and music composition. By using evolutionary methods and genetic algorithms in the generation of sound experimenters all over the world are creating complex and wonderous soundscapes. The links here range from downloadable software (PC only), recordings of compositions, and sophisticated technical and theoretical papers. Among these links, those leading to resources developed by Rodney Berry himself, Shawn Bell, and Palle Dahlsted, are most highly recommended.
Exactly forty years ago J. L. Austin published his highly influential How to Do Things With Words. Had he read a new study by British researchers, he might have added another chapter on the impact of brand names, which researchers have discovered actually work differently on the brain, invoking unusually deep emotional responses in their subjects.
The future is closer than you think. Designed by the MIT artificial intelligence laboratory Kismet is an experimental sociable machine designed to recognize and produce interpersonal signals such as tones of voice and facial expressions. The site contains an overview of the project and informative videos explaining Kismet's abilities and possible applications. Kismet's designers hope it will be used for educational purposes, which you might find either frightnening or fascinating.
Never ceasing to amaze, nature has produced yet another example of why humans aren't so special. By discovering a crow that fashions tools to do its handywork, scientists prove once again that the animal kingdom stills holds many surprises and challenges to what was thought to be a unique place of privilege based on special skills and know how.
In the summer of 2000 Stanford University hosted a conference on whether computers will outstrip us [humans] intellectually and spiritually, becoming not only deeply creative but deeply emotive. Major thinkers within the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, and philosophy gave their analyses of how close we might be to this posibility. Thinkers such as Douglas Hofstadter, author of Goedel Escher Bach, Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines are featured here within a video archive covering nearly five hours of conference time.
Tyorganism's Flash powered ASCII-O-Matic converts 60x50 pixel jpg images into ASCII (black and white or color). The resultant ASCII can be viewed in Flash format or output as HTML. (Site requires Flash Player 6)
What more needs to be said? See for yourself whether these animal creations are art. This site does sell the artists' work in order to support their upkeep and aid in elephant conservation.
Since 1995 researchers at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have sought ways to use computers to model animal motion. This page traces the progress of these researchers as they have used more and more sophisticated techniques to account for every aspect of animal movement, down to the basic interactions of bone, muscle, and skin. This record of progress is a capsule history of computer graphics, of the interactions between computers and the life sciences, and a very cool archive of animations modeling animal and human movement.
Researchers in Florida have discovered an ancient, intricate, even ornate system of man-made waterways, leading from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly two millennia old, the waterway was an early engineering feat that still gives researchers occasion to pause and wonder.