Four short links: 19 October 2015

Academic Robot Kit, Countertop Biolab, Generous Interfaces, and Universal Design

  1. Open Academic Robot KitA common set of parts, specifications, and software to catalyse the design, construction, dissemination, and re-use of robots in an academic and research environment. (via Robohub)
  2. Amino: Desktop Bioengineering for Everyone (Indiegogo) — a counter-top sized biolab that enables anyone to grow living cells to create new and interesting things – like fragrances, flavours, materials, medicine, and more.
  3. Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections (Mitchell Whitelaw) — Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. Yet search — the dominant interface to these collections — is incapable of representing this abundance. Search is ungenerous: it withholds information, and demands a query. This paper argues for a more generous alternative: rich, browsable interfaces that reveal the scale and complexity of digital heritage collections. (via Courtney Johnston)
  4. The Universal Design (Christine Dodrill) — there need to be five basic primitives in your application: State – What is true now? What was true? What happened in the past? What is the persistent view of the world? Events – What is being changed? How will it be routed? Policy – Can a given event be promoted into a series of actions? Actions – What is the outcome of the policy? Mechanism – How should an event be taken in and an action put out? […] All you need is a command queue feeding into a thread pool which feeds out into a transaction queue which modifies state. And with that you can explain everything from VMWare to Google.
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