After seeing the Blade Runner sequel (2049), I was thinking how otherworldly the landscape, technology and job roles (memory designer) still seem. Then I remembered the original 1982 movie was set in 2019. That’s right. Only one more year before Replicants and spinners abound or become reality… maybe? It did make me think about technology – predictions, reality and constraints. 3D printing and its application in the dental industry While delving into a new subject area – 3D design and manufacturing in the dental industry – I was struck by how locked and closed many of the software and hardware systems are, while also purporting to be the next saviour of the industry. I guess someone’s got to put food on the table for their family. While the technology has been around for a number of years, and is used in many industries, 3D printing in particular has almost become mainstream. You can get a ‘mini-me’ printed at Officeworks or buy your own budget printer from Aldi (if you get there early enough when they’re on sale. Maybe camp out). But these don’t quite cut it when you are dealing with the tenths of millimetres required when working on behalf […]
Thinking inside the box
Our brief when building the Certificate III (Individualised Support) was to build rich interactive experiences. After discovering certain limitations in RMIT’s Canvas program that would restrict the choice of technologies available for use; and considering the limited support available to program coordinators following the build process, we elected to build our custom interactivity in an RMIT hosted WordPress instance and drop them in using iframes. Iframes? Eugh. This was supposed to be the future! Yes. Those in the know will regard iframes a contentious methodology for serving content. Forgive them, they have their place. Iframes are a way of embedding content from another site — most users will be familiar with Youtube videos being embedded in Facebook pages, for example. It’s a mature and well established system used throughout website front end services. While Canvas already imbeds content from other sources (ARC, Youtube etc.) we find the Iframe to be a better method: It ensures the content is sandboxed from accidental edits by the program administrators and does not ‘break’ when Canvas updates are rolled out. “Frames allow a visual HTML Browser window to be split into segments, each of which can show a different document. This can lower bandwidth […]
Adults do not argue with their own data
When was the last time you learnt something new? Think carefully! When was the last time you really learnt something new? Have you ever wondered why life was so slow when you were a kid? It felt like an eternity by the time you blew out your 10th birthday candles, yet if you look back at the last 10 years of your life, you would wonder where the time has gone and how it went so fast. One theory explains this phenomenon by pointing to the fact that when you were 4 years old, the last year of your life was a quarter of your whole lifespan! Whilst at 35 years old, the last year was 1/35 of your whole lifespan (a much smaller portion overall). Throughout all that time you’ve built knowledge, skills and experiences that make you go through your life mostly on autopilot. In contrast, when you are 4, every moment counted because you are actively learning and experiencing something new and sponging in information from everywhere to make sense of this new world around you. The point is this; it is this same advantage that adults have over children that is their detriment when they need […]
