Check out makershed.com for a complete line of Arduino products. This is the 3rd installment of my Aduino How-To Tuesdays. This week I am going to cover using another basic part, the potentiometer. I will also cover connecting a servo to the Arduino. Servos can be hard to control, but not with the Arduino! That’s just another reason why I love this little micro-controller.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Jay Lund [Professor of Environmental Engineering, UC Davis] Abstract: Most water in the West is used for economic purposes and managed using a wide range of facilities and activities, but must obey physical laws. In California, these aspects of water management have been integrated in a hydro-economic model (CALVIN) to explore the capabilities of these water systems to respond economically to changes. Changed conditions include combinations of institutional conditions, population growth, climate change, failure of facilities, new technologies, and environmental restoration. Even simple hydro-economic models, despite their limitations, can produce an integrated understanding and significant policy insights. Biography: Jay Lund has research and teaching interests in the application of systems analysis, economic, and management methods to infrastructure and public works problems. His recent work is primarily in water resources and environmental system engineering, but with substantial work in solid and hazardous waste management, dredging and coastal zone management, and some dabbling in urban, regional, and transportation planning. While most of this work involves the application of economics, optimization, and simulation modeling, his interests also include more qualitative policy, planning, and management studies.

Mental phenomena are nothing but phenomena of the physical brain, says Patricia Churchland. It’s “an illusion of the brain” to think that we have a “nonphysical soul that does our feeling.” But how the brain creates constructs of itself and things in the world remains a major puzzle. For instance, how does a brain “habitually represent goals, plans and projects — things that don’t yet exist?” And what about the huge amount of spontaneous activity in the brain that occurs while we’re resting? We don’t understand how the “organization of a motor response is achieved,” nor how these responses are integrated across sensory systems together with memory. Churchland anticipates a fundamental shift in looking at the brain that will merge philosophical and neurobiological issues. From the MIT “Expand Your Mind: Getting a Grasp on Consciousness” conference. This is Part 1 of 3.
Video Rating: 5 / 5

This video was created for our ENDS 101 class at Texas A&M University. We were asked to speculate on how our lives might change by 2030 due to “singularity,” or the idea that knowledge growth will continue to accelerate due to technology improvements.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Search for the Chimera, A Lecture by James “The Amazing” Randi. Presented at The Center for Inquiry / Transnational in Amherst, NY, 12 September 2008. Recorded before a live audience by Inquiry Media productions. Cameras: Lauren Becker Debbie Goddard Henry Huber Directed by Tom Flynn

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Raymond Kurzweil in conversation with IEEE Spectrum Editor-in-Chief Susan Hassler at Fortune Brainstorm TECH 2009.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

“As Hitachi GST embarks upon its latest educational campaign and debuts a new market vision which it encapsulates as “The Dawn of the Tera Era,” the company knew the time was once again right to produce a new video animation, given how successful these have always been in the past. This amazing collision of Capacity, Content and Culture has resulted in explosive growth of the amounts and types of information people are now storing. Megabytes are long forgotten. Today, gigabytes are being replaced by terabytes, hence the Tera Era. It’s happening now. This is the Tera Era.”
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Water can act as an electrolyte, as in the case of the potato clock. Learn adding acid to electrical circuits can affect conductivity in this free science experiment video from a professional audio engineer.

Incoming search terms:

• potato clock experiment

www.timesofearth.com Washington – Scientists, for the first time, have created an organism controlled by man-made DNA. Craig Venter, an American biologist, announced at a press conference on Thursday that he had synthesised an artificial strain of DNA and used it to take control of a cell. “[It's] the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,” Venter said. “This is a philosophical advance as much as a technical one.” Venter and his colleagues modified the DNA of a Mycoplasma, a kind of bacteria, creating a final strand composed of roughly one million “base pairs,” the components which make up DNA. The human genome, by comparison, contains more than three billion base pairs. The scientists then injected the synthetic DNA into another Mycoplasma bacterium, which had already had its DNA removed. The bacterium began to grow and reproduce, though some of the synthesized genes didn’t work properly. Venter hopes the technology could eventually be used to make new and less expensive vaccines, pharmaceutical drugs and biofuels. The energy giant Exxon awarded Venter’s company a contract, worth up to 0m, to use the technology to generate biofuels from algae. Similar research has been conducted in the past: Scientists have constructed viruses using synthesised DNA. But Venter’s work is the first to replicate such a long strain of DNA. Environmental groups, concerned about the widespread adoption of biofuels, are wary of the synthetic DNA …
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Incoming search terms:

• artificial life craig venter

[Recorded: May 8, 2009] The solid circuits built originally by Jack Kilby established that all the components required to make general-purpose electronic circuits could be fabricated using a common semiconductor material. However, their hand-wired interconnections made them difficult and expensive to produce in high volume. Seeking to solve reliability problems with transistors at Fairchild Semiconductor, co-founder Jean Hoerni invented a new manufacturing approach: the planar process. Fairchilds Director of R & D, Robert Noyce, realized that the Hoernis process would allow interconnecting multiple transistors on one chip in a batch process that also made them more reliable and lower in cost. The planar integrated circuit, first created by Jay Lasts team at Fairchild, remains the basis of the modern semiconductor industry and ranks with the printing press, the steam engine, and wireless communications in terms of global social impact. In this lecture, four speakers describe the personal, technical, and business stories associated with bringing Fairchild Micrologic, the first planar integrated circuit family, to market: Christophe Lécuyer, author of Making Silicon Valley, on Jean Hoerni and his development of the planar process. Leslie Berlin, author of the biography of Robert Noyce The Man Behind the Microchip, on Noyce and his conception of the planar integrated circuit. Gordon E. Moore, Fairchild and Intel co-founder and director of R&D on the early days of the industry …
Video Rating: 4 / 5