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“Building an Android app is easy, but building a great-looking Android app is not.”
- Ivan Mitrovic, uLocate’s vice president of engineering in Forbes, describing the Android operating system; the latest version “Cupcake” gets pushed out today and includes video support, enhanced speech recognition tools, live folders, and a virtual keyboard.
Sent by a Directions Magazine subscriber…
My 5th grade daughter just took a standardized achievement test. Well they got back results today and the teachers were talking to the class about the good and bad from the test. It seems that there was one question that 100% of the students got wrong, “What are the 3 states of matter?” Every one of the 44 students from the two 5th grade classes gave 3 states, as in the United States, for answers. It seems that Texas, Alaska, and California were the most popular answers, because as my daughter just informed me, those are the biggest states of matter.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!
The robot called ACE - for Autonomous City Explorer - was developed at the Technical University of Munich. It was instructed to gather information from pedestrians to allow it to travel from the university to the Marienplatz, about 1.5 kilometers away. First it asked pedestrians if they were willing to help, and if so, asked them to point the way (not speak directions). It then said “thank you.” When it ran into obstacles, it repeated the process. ACE did get to the finish line - some five hours later.
While the novelty of the talking robot may have gotten in the way, researchers suggest these helpful hints on asking for directions:
- ask if people are willing to help
- ask for a specific type of directions - step by step, pointing, map, etc.
- say thank you
PublicTechnology reports the One Scotland Mapping Agreement replaces two older ones:
The new agreement allows Scottish councils, government departments and other public bodies to use Ordnance Survey’s mapping information for a wide variety of purposes, and to exchange map-based information about their work. It will result in savings across Scotland’s public sector.
