Monday, January 17, 2011

Top Five Kids Favorite Art Standing Easels

Little ones who love paintings and other art works will most probably love art standing easels designed to reveal their own creative imagination. An easel allows cultivate the artistic side of children as they utilized their imagination in making arts. There aren't any rules in making use of an easel, by doing this it offers independence of creativity and enable them to create and think with their unique.

There are different designs and types of easels that could be found in the market today A lot of the easels in the market are made of wood, metal or plastic. Several comes with a chalkboard, dry erase board, paper and magnetic board. It is possible to pick a desktop easel or a standing easel, depending on your kid's choice.

Consider an easel with containers that hold paint, brushes,crayons, pencils,chalk and other accessories. Probably the most well-liked standing easels that kids and parents love is:


1. Melissa and Dough Standing Easel: It's the most favored of all. This is a wooden easel that has a bi-fold wood frame feature with two art stations allowing two children to work at one time. One side is a cahalkboard while the other side is dry erase board. A dowel and an extra large tray can be found between two easel sides that holds a paper,erasers,chalks and clips.

This wooden easel is big enough to complete children's work both bigh and small. Having its sturdy design,it helps to ensure that it won't fall and it can even be stored easily.


2.Crayola Magnetic Double Easel-a 3-in-1 easel. A Dry Erase Board on one side and second board is a magnetic board. A Chalkboard is on the other side. There are 4 detachable bins that can hold chalk,markers and other art accessories and tools.

It can easily stored in a closet or underneath the table or bed simply because this easel folds flat. Folding this easel is easy,you only have to lift up the arm braces that are located into the plastic pegs.


3. Little Tikes Easel: Two sided easel with safe and unbreakable bright colored plastic. On one side is a chalkboard while the other side has a clip that can hold a 5-sheet paper. It has wide trays on both sides which is good for storing art supplies.

Storing this easel is easy for parents because it is made of plastic which is light enough to take and carry the easel anywhere your kids like.


4. Rose Art Smart Easel: Portable and lightweight design easel. It has a dry easer board and paper roll that attaches to top. There are two holders with pockets and pen holsters on the sides. There is a plastic tray at the botto that holds small paint jars, brushes and other easel accessories.

This easel includes an easy to read setup manual and can easily snap together using hands.


5. Step2 Easel for Two: Double sided art easel-chalkboard and magnetic dry erase board. It has an easy to reach tray that holds art supplies and pen,brush,markers and chalk holders. It comes with 77 foam magnetic letters, numbers and signs to use on the magnetic dry erase board.

It may be build easily and folds flat for easy storage without using any tools.

Pick an easel for your kids carefully either Standing easel or desktop easel.
For more info- http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-Five-Kids-Favorite-Art-Standing-Easels&id=5650765

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Fruit flies teach computers a lesson

Fruit flies have solved a computing problem that has vexed computer scientists for decades. Mimicking how some nerve cells in flies pick a leader to make decisions has led scientists to a computer algorithm that could make wireless sensor networks, such as those used for monitoring volcanic activity or controlling swarms of robots, much more efficient.

In such smart networks, some sensors can act as leaders to alert headquarters if, for example, a certain number of them detect rumblings indicating that a volcano might be waking up. The new approach, published in the Jan. 13 Science, achieves the same leader-follower relationships but eliminates a lot of cross-talk among sensors, saving energy and computing power.

A colleague’s presentation on how nerve cells in fruit flies take on different jobs struck computational biologist Ziv Bar-Joseph as being very similar to a distributed computing problem. In distributed computing, many computer processors work together toward a common goal, but with minimal leadership. A handful of processors — typically ones with many neighboring processors — are designated leaders and set up to receive information from the processors around them and pass it on.

“People in computer science made assumptions about what sensors need to know,” says Bar-Joseph, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who led the new work. But developing cells set up their networks without knowing much about their neighbors, he says. “They work in a much more constrained environment and still come up with solutions.”

Similarly, when fruit fly larvae are developing, some cells take on particular tasks, such as becoming a precursor of the sensory bristles the flies use to read the air around them. Each bristle ends up surrounded by nonbristle cells. This layout, where there are enough specialized cells, or leaders, but no two are right next to each other, is very similar to how tasks are divvied up in distributed networks, says Bar-Joseph.

For 30 years, computer scientists had thought that to most efficiently designate a handful of processors as leaders that can quickly communicate with the rest of the network, each processor had to take stock of its local neighborhood. Then some processors would identify themselves as leaders, based in part on how many connections they have with other processors.
For more info- http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/68790/title /Fruit_flies_teach_computers_a_lesson