English topics for discussion: video

Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

Tuesday, 10 May 2016

Vocabulary: Weather expressions

Sunday, 13 December 2015

TED-Ed lesson with a quiz around the video "Inside Google's Offices"

TED-Ed video lesson with a quiz

Monday, 7 December 2015

Inside Google's Offices - video clip with notes

Sunday, 20 September 2015

Thursday, 12 March 2015

Gorillaz (feat. Lou Reed) - Some Kind Of Nature

Sunday, 15 February 2015

Wednesday, 22 October 2014

Tuesday, 27 May 2014

Look Up' - A spoken word film for an online generation.

'Look Up' is a lesson taught to us through a love story, in a world where we continue to find ways to make it easier for us to connect with one another, but always results in us spending more time alone. Written, Performed & Directed by Gary Turk.

Tuesday, 14 January 2014

The Future of Self Driving Cars

Road rage and traffic jams could become a thing of the past when self driving cars take the wheel. Welcome to the future and innovation behind driverless cars! Roadmaps may become extremely valuable...as antiques! It wasn't that long ago when the thought of autonomous cars were unimaginable to anyone not named Hasselhoff. But lets fast forward to a couple of months ago when Google's CEO Larry Page decided to send a car around to pick up a friend of his. This car had one special feature. There was no chauffeur. No driver at all. The car drove Larry's friend twenty miles to Google, without a driver. We've been dreaming about this for decades. In fact, if you had gone to the World's Fair back in 1939, you might have heard a special promise. That promise is that by 1960 we would all be riding around in our cars going 100 miles-per-hour safely with no one at the wheel. Well we're not there yet. But we're not quite as far away as you might think. Already we've seen a host of advancements to make you a safer driver. Things like lane assist, parking assist, and even collision prevention assistance. Now at first we saw these options in high end models, but as this and even more advanced technology finds its way to a larger fleet, future roadways could become a mesh network of autonomous vehicles. They'd share information with each other and a larger network about speed, braking, and other variables, and move in a coordinated formation. This rolling, hive mind could mean shorter trip times since it would now be safe to pack the lanes to capacity, and tailgating could be a thing of the past! So, need to get some work done in the car? Not a problem. Just hop in the car, let the car do the driving for you. How did we get here, and where are we going now? Go back to the United States Department of Defense. They had the DARPA Grand Challenge. This was an obstacle course, out in the desert originally, and they invited all these research groups to come in and build unmanned vehicles to run the obstacle course. The rules were simple. Once built you could not touch that car. It moved on its own. So no remote control assistance was allowed. In the end, Stanford walked away with the grand prize - two million bucks in 2005! Toyota is working on technologies that will allow a driver to sit behind the wheel of a car, never touch the wheel, never touch the pedals, and go from point A to point B safely. It's doing this with lots of technologies like laser sensors, high definition cameras, accelerometers and more. The upside of all this is that it takes human error out of the equation, which is a good thing. Human error accounts for 93% of all traffic accidents. And in 2010 there were 33,000 deaths on US roads. So maybe in the future we've got a little auto-pilot button on our dashboards - but are we going to use it? Our culture is so car centric. Just getting your drivers license is a right of passage. When you think about it, cars really represent freedom. So would we be willing to get rid of this symbol of free will? Just so we could have fewer traffic accidents, less traffic, maybe even get rid of road rage? Well, I don't know about you, but I'm willing to give it a try.

Smart Clothing: Charge Electronics with Your Shirt

In the future, your smart clothes will clean themselves, keep you from getting sick, and even charge your cell phone. Sunny day outside? Why not put on your solar panel shirt? We could even end up talking to our clothes...and they might talk back! Cell phone dying? Just plug it into your shirt. What have your clothes done for you lately? I mean, sure they keep you warm, and they give you a style, and I guess they help prevent you from getting arrested for public nudity. But apart from that they just kind of hang there. Well not for long. We are entering the era of smart clothing, where clothes will be able to do things like clean themselves, keep you from getting sick, and maybe even charge your electronics. Now if you're like me, and you lack the basic coordination necessary to transfer salsa from a corn chip to your mouth without getting it all down your shirt, then have I got some good news for you. Some Australian researchers have been working on these textile fibers by coating them with titanium dioxide nanocrystals. Now these crystals, when exposed to the sun, will produce hydroxyl radicals, which will actually break down organic matter through oxidation. So steal a couple of electrons from that red wine and bye-bye stains! And if you're tired of smelling like an ashtray every time you go off to the club or go to a concert, don't worry the nanocrystals can take care of that too. "But Jonathan!" I hear you all say. "My skin is made of organic material." Well luckily the molecules of our skin are too large for the crystals to break down, so don't worry about it dissolving you. Meanwhile, this means that we can actually conserve energy. How? Well, if the shirt cleans itself we don't have to put it in a washer and a dryer. And conserving energy is cool, but what about making energy? What if we could turn our style into chic mini power plants. Well we can do that. All you gotta do is move! To create these clothes, scientists coat kevlar fibers with layers of zinc-oxide nanowires only billionths of a meter thick. Each layer of nanowires is paired with a layer of fibers coated with gold to act as an electrode. The nanowires are shaped sort of like circular hairbrushes, and when you move they rub together, which causes them to bend. Now this pressure creates electricity via the piezoelectric effect, and the gold in the neighboring layers conducts the current down to a power adaptor that connects to your cell phone. In time our clothes are going to do more and more for us and that's going to change the way we think about them. And our style choices might go beyond don't wear white after labor day. Maybe we'll be thinking, "Hey! It's sunny outside, I should wear my shirt with a solar panel so I can charge my phone." Or "I am a total klutz, I gotta wear that sweatshirt that cleans itself all the time." They say that clothes make the man. And as out clothes do more and more, maybe we'll have to take that saying literally.