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Shakespeare in original pronunciation

Paul Meier, a theatre professor at the University of Kansas, has been researching the original pronunciation of Shakespeare, enabling audiences to hear what the plays would have sounded like in the Bard’s time.

“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”

The clip above features an interview with Meier, and some examples from an OP production at the university. For a longer scene, check out this video for a longer scene.

Robot arm picks up anything

A team of researchers from Cornell, University of Chicago and iRobot, have created a robot gripper that can pick up almost any small object. It uses the jamming of particulate material inside an elastic bag to hold on to things, as opposed to traditional designs modelled around the human hand.

The gripper consists of a rubber membrane around a granular material that can form around objects, then grab them when a vacuum pump is used to harden the material. The gripper was designed to allow robots to pick up various objects without a lot of computational overhead.

Hockney’s iPad art

David Hockney is showing his iPad artwork at an exhibition in Paris. He’s not adverse to using technology to create art, but found that computers were too slow.

It has given him a new way of sharing his creations. Fleurs Fraiches has its origins in smaller drawings that Hockney made on his iPhone and then e-mailed to friends. After a short while he’d produced hundreds of drawings, loving them for their immediacy, and for the instant responses and critiques from those who received them.

“You can make a drawing of the sunrise at 6am and send it out to people by 7am.”

Yup, the iPad is only for consumption of media, you can’t use it to produce content.