Ah, WarGames. I loved that movie when it came out, but can’t really believe it was 25 years ago. Probably one of the things that influenced my computer science studies a few years later. Here’s a write up on the movie as it hits its 25th anniversary. See WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars

With all the hype over direct neural interfaces this hi-tech (but also lo-tech) approach looks interesting. See ‘Tongue Drive System’ Controls Wheelchair, Computer | Wired Science from Wired.com.

ACART, the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology, has just released its recommendations to the Ministry of Health to broaden the use of frozen eggs in fertility treatment. (See ‘Babies from the grave’ a step closer – Stuff.co.nz)

They have released a discussion document relating to their advice to the Minister, and is asking for comments from the wider public. Submissions close 5 September 2008 and you can get the document from Consultation on the Use of Frozen Eggs in Fertility Treatment: Discussion document.

Cathy Ross writes on Credo: the average Anglican is a black, female teenager – Times Online.

Damaris have a philosophy and ethics model for schools available as a free sample at the moment, based around The Cosmological Argument. I’m going to have a look because next year I should be teaching a theological ethics course and I’m interested in how other people are approaching teaching philosophical and ethical in engaging ways.

See Damaris Schools: FREE sample lesson for A Level RE (Philosophy and Ethics modules).

This looks interesting Students who use ‘clickers’ score better on physics tests. I’d like to do some in-class polling of students (probably for the large General Education paper I’m teaching next year) – to be able to elicit a poll on a subject in order to spark discussion or emphasise a point, and also to check whether key concepts have been picked up in a lecture.

Now one way to do it would be with ‘clicker’ technology, though that isn’t very widespread at all in NZ (but I stand to be corrected). The other way would be to take an ‘Idol’ approach – TXT/SMS messaging that’s collated automatically and the results put up on an internal web page or such. Different costs, I guess. The one-off cost of the clicker against the ‘micro’ costs of txt-ing. Given the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones in the NZ context, perhaps working towards the TXT approach would work.

In a class of 300-odd doing the non-anonymous survey of hands doesn’t really cut it.

Following on from the ‘Reborn babies’ post recently here’s an article that notes the continuing development of sociable robotics, or at least robots that can learn to detect visual cues from body language and response to that ‘guess’. See Emotional robots in the spotlight.

See also Greenflame · Computer companions: Are they possible?

Paul Walker kicks off a series of posts coming out of his research on theological perspectives on the Internet. Part one can be found at Church 2.0 – Main – Theological perspectives on the Internet part 1.

Looking forward to parts 2 though 99(?).

Article this week on ‘reborn babies’ – very lifelike dolls – sold to people primarily for collecting but also purchased by people like grieving parents. See ‘Reborn babies’ niche for collectors, grieving parents – Stuff.co.nz. I’m wondering if the revulsion some people feel towards them is part of the ‘uncanny valley’ response to human simulcra noted by Masahiro Mori (see Greenflame · Robots: From tools to partners).

Seems similar to the article I linked to in Greenflame · Virtual babies aim to ease parenting pain back in Feb 2004.

Related links:

• Wired 8.09: Congratulations, It’s A Bot!
• Robot Stories movie/DVD, esp. the “My Robot Baby” story.

I (foolishly) assumed the home Acer PC was using NTFS for the file system on its hard disk, but have now found after working on some large files that it is FAT32 and I can’t have files larger than 4GB! How bizarre – way, way back before I started theological training etc. we were using NTFS by default on our old Pentium (I) NT 4 boxes at work. Surely if XP works better with NTFS why was this not the default. Apart from being able to boot from floppy to access the hard disk their should be no advantage?

So, I’m looking at converting the drive over to NTFS – as per the Microsoft instructions here.

I have a big batch of blank DVDs for backup, plus the iPod also for backups. So I will get things back if they turn to custard, but I was wondering if anyone had any experiences of the conversion process first-hand? There’s always something to watch out for.

BTW – on the iBook I’m running the journalling file system which I turned on at install. That seems really good, compared to the old file system that 10.1 & 10.2 had.