the latest
venturing in nc
The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies is a unique consortium of programs committed to revitalizing notions of how knowledge is gained and exchanged.
Participants from a broad range of disciplines converge to explore intellectual issues, including some of the most pressing social and political themes of our time: race and race relations, the legacy of the African-American experience, equality and opportunity among diverse populations, the implications of accelerated globalization. At its core, the Center claims an intrepid and daring mission: to bring together humanists and those involved in the social sciences in a setting that inspires vigorous scholarship and imaginative alliances. In this way, historians, artists, literary scholars, and philosophers contribute to a rich understanding of moral and ethical issues.
change masters announced
The amazing organizations that received the Fast Company /Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards have found a better way to do good: They're using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems. In our second exclusive ranking, we used a similarly hard-nosed approach to find the 25 best social entrepreneurs.
This special section builds on the article in the January 2005 issue and includes details about our methodology, profiles of our various advisers, position statements contributed by the winner and finalist organizations, an interactive SlideShow focusing on business lessons -- and ways to donate to the organizations involved.
sound + engineering
soundSense is an exploration of the possibility of representing human identity and motion through sound. The fundamental goal is to understand how computers understand and communicate with people. Imagine that a computer senses “Jane Doe is walking across the room.” It may be hard to program the computer to recognize and articulate this fact. Through soundSense, researchers hope to program computers to communicate complex states to people without directly programming the articulation.
The soundSense experiments take place in a studio instrumented with infrared motion detecting sensors. As people move around the room, the sensors record information such as speed, trajectory, groups, swinging arms, turning heads, moving legs, etc. The sensed information is translated into tones that incorporate many different perspectives. In combination, these tones simultaneously communicate the range of activity. photo galleries | streaming video [1, 2]
