Perhaps Apple’s subtle emergence into the ebook market will drive Amazon’s incentive to make a more functional, and less expensive reader.
The talks come as Apple is separately racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution. The device could be launched alongside the new content deals, including those aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project.
…
Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer, which could provide an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle.
The University of Nottingham is definitely on to something. What with their wildly popular and scientastic Periodic Table of Videos, it looks as if they’ve unveiled a new venture that’s rampaging through the Interweaves. It’s called Sixty Symbols, “a channel devoted to those funny letters and squiggles used by physicists and astronomers.”
As evidenced by the rejuvenated popularity of Star Trek, I think people’s minds are melding to the idea that the 21st century is more about learning than it is about greed. Huzzah.
A colleague just passed along a link concerning FORA.tv, and I must admit it looks exceedingly captivating. Like academia.edu, FORA.tv is another piece of the academic’s puzzle for marketing ideas by and for those in the academic world, or rather anyone who wants to learn for learning’s sake. What is FORA.tv all about?
FORA.tv helps intelligent, engaged audiences get smart. Our users find, enjoy, and share videos about the people, issues, and ideas changing the world.
We gather the web’s largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world’s top universities, think tanks and conferences. We present this provocative, big-idea content for anyone to watch, interact with, and share –when, where, and how they want.
I’m not sure, but it looks as if FORA.tv gathers its content from institutional organizations themselves rather than indexing from sites like YouTube or Google video, etc.; still a little uncertain on this one. Uploading video also requires a submission process, obviously for weeding out the less educational content. But if you wanted to find the latest high-profile speech on the economy or were even wondering what it would be like to die via black holes, FORA.tv is the place to be.
It’s an easy speculation to say that without humans, the earth will restore, recleanse, rectify itself. Indeed, in his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman repeatedly hints to the reader that the world doesn’t need us as much as we need it. But Weisman goes beyond the obvious implication and details just how incredibly short-sighted we humans have been in just a brief time on this planet.
Weisman thoroughly stresses home the point that despite our tendencies toward toxicity, life will indeed find a way, whether it be millennia or billennia. There are a whole lot of ideas to take away from this thought experiment, for example the futility of our marvelous infrastructure once we are no longer around to monitor it; what will happen when wonders like the Chunnel, the Panama Canal, our volatile oil refineries and nuclear reactors/repositories as well as our subways have no one to flip the off switch or close the valve? How will the unmeasurable amount of polymers (plastic) dumped in our oceans annually begin to degrade, and what are the hopes of a hungry microbe that evolves the ability to feed on them?
Of the many thought provoking speculations and projections Weisman so meticulously researches and thoughtfully relates, he proposes the irony that the realization of our collective death may just perhaps contribute to the saving of ourselves. Interviewing the organizer of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and yes it it’s a real organization, he postulates that if humans were really serious about curbing overpopulation, thereby eliminating juvenile delinquency among other issues, we might just have an epiphany:
…spiritual awakening would replace panic, because a dawning realization that as human life drew to a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn’t be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.
…Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we’d once swapped something alive and lovely.
As improbable it may be that people would go to such extremes or even somehow suddenly become extinct, Weisman’s book is an ambitious and enlightening experiment that brings us closer to acknowledging our impact upon and responsibility to the world, while we’re still with it.
Here’s a resource for all you neophytes, ahem, out there looking for information on pretty much any type of plant in North America and elsewhere. Plant Information Online, a venture initiated by the University of Minnesota and its library system, freely offers numerous databases available for searching the green, including several on plant nomenclature as well as seed and nursery firms. It’s a veritable, virtual library of of the good green stuff, searchable by scientific or common name, nursery and seed provider, and images associated with the desired plant. Initially I tried some simple common name searches, and found the interface a little clunky.
It’s more of an index with quick links to your search results, but after some patient and clever searching, you’ll find some interesting pics and info. It’s probably worth delving into the nomenclature first before searching willy-nilly, but it’s definitely an ambitious project for anyone interested in plant info.
I’ve been hearing a lot about the new game called Spore, and though I haven’t played it, there seems to be definite academic potential. What is Spore, you say? Basically, it’s a creation by Will Wright, the creator of all the SimCity enterprises, and it’s billed as the ultimate SimEvolution game. Create a creature, watch it evolve, determine its path to civilization.
There’s a whole lot of potential to explore here. Biologically speaking, I can see a tool for extrapolating, hypothesizing animal/organism behavior based on how an organism is constructed. Described in this Wired article:
Before you even begin the Cell stage, you have to make a decision: Is your little guy an herbivore or a carnivore? This can have lasting repercussions throughout the rest of the game. As a carnivore, the easiest way to get meat is to attack your fellow creatures. This turns your bacteria into kind of a jerk, and when he evolves, he’ll be more suited to being an aggressive land animal. Establishing dominance with violence will be easier than trying to reason with other creatures. And if you take this path of least resistance throughout the rest of the game, you’ll be a warlike, spacefaring race of jerks in no time, just because your aquatic ancestors went on the Atkins diet eons ago.
What’s cool is that some researchers already have their game on. This video from National Geographic shows us just how geeky us academics can be in creating the “ultimate animal”. Can spore be partially integrated into the life science curriculum?
I guess Spore isn’t just for science freaks as well. Like all Sim(…) games one must carefully decide the social science angle in determining the anthropological, sociological and political ramifications in the civilization stage, even if such a term can be said to exist in real, non-virtual life. My guess is that this segment of the game will devolve into the typical hulk-smash warmongering typically seen in most Sim games.
Even though Spore may try to be everything for every player, it does seem to set up an interesting template for game designers, simulation programmers to share with scholars in the academic sphere. I’m curious to find out where on the evolutionary scale librarians enter the picture.
While working on my libguides I’ve come across a pretty cool resource for chemistry enthusiasts. The University of Nottingham has produced a fun and interesting set of videos detailing each of the elements contained within the periodic table. The periodic table of videos is a good way to introduce students to chemistry through an interesting 3-10 minutes worth of background info on a chosen element and maybe an experiment or two detailing the properties of said element.
Ever wondered about bismuth? Well, here’s your chance to learn:
Honestly, other than the educational value, these videos are worth posting for the professor’s hair alone.
I’m starting to get the hang of this conference thing. Not so much the schmoozing and networking aspect, but corralling all the ideas that tend to congeal when driving home from an intense day of presentationing. After attending the Independent Colleges of Indiana Tech Summit at the picturesque DePauw University, my band of brarians were introduced to a couple of new and exciting technologies that are worth exploring for the library.
One particularly innovative application caught my absent-minded gaze. A company based in my neck of the woods, DyKnow offers a product that offers nearly limitless possibilities within the classroom. Dyknow Vision is like an electronic etch-a-sketch, allowing complete interactivity within the classroom. They summarize:
Instantly transmit prepared or extemporaneous content to student computers for annotation
Spark discussion by broadcasting a student’s screen
Empower students to lead class and share work from their seats
Poll students to quickly assess understanding and receiving immediate feedback
Save class notes and audio recording on a central server where students can access and replay them anytime, anywhere
Here was the scenario…we all enter the presentation and take our seats, in front of which is placed a tablet PC. Then the instructor tells us that we don’t need to take any notes with our notebooks, as we will be writing and saving them on our computers. We have a mock presentation in which the instructor delivers a lecture and we take notes on the tablet (with fake pen), answer electronically submitted polls, submit work to the professor, and email our notes to ourselves.
The possibilities are endless. Here are just some ideas for use:
physics lectures are delivered instantly to students and their thought patterns are recorded while solving problems on the tablet PC while taking notes
language instructors – analyze how students conceptualize writing Asian characters stroke by stroke…and correct their mistakes
students ask questions anonymously, reducing embarrassment
Deliver quizzes, class polls, homework all via the software
The issue of privacy does surface, as the software does monitor the work performed on the PCs; however, depending on the policies established by the institution/department, monitoring can be limited or extended to the classroom, building, department, etc.
From the library side, I can see potential for information literacy sessions, classification outlines, even web design principles using DyKnow. Rather than being social networking oriented, it is more socially collaborative. Something perhaps innovative enough to pry your students away from facebook.
Great new resource for all you scientastically curious infomaniacs. The EOL looks to be a great new reference guide to help classify and understand life, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe just life.
In a nutshell:
Welcome to the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life portal. This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth.
Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:
Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.
Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.
Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth’s species.
Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.
Chock-a-block full of images, species overviews, a massive table of contents of each species, it’s taxonomic outline in multiple formats (text, graphical, source), and extensive references to all cited material, this online project, now in its beginning stages, is shaping to be an immensely useful and accessible resource for all future biologists and lovers of life.
One concern is that it may end up something similar to wikipedia, in which anyone can submit anything of questionable quality. I suppose submission won’t really be the problem but rather the means by which the material is reviewed and approved by the administrators for scientific acceptability. As one can see, the institutions involved in this undertaking are rather scientifically serious about what they do, so getting this right is fairly important. But as it already has established data partners to aid in verifying, safeguards are presumably in place.
Think of this as a renewable source of information and info-seeking behavior. We are only aware of approximately 1.8 million species on earth. How many more millions are still undiscovered and in desperate need of cataloging and classification?
I’ve been meaning to write something about LibraryThing for awhile; it’s a very cool site that brings together people who share an interest in captivating stories. How to find them, those who read them, the ways we catalog and organize them, and simply appreciating them.
LT is self-described as “the world’s largest book club”. That may be so, as it is undeniably a social networking site connecting readers and librarians and publishers the world over. The vast amount of members connecting through the interesting libraries, friends, groups and comment options to which one can subscribe enable limitless interactivity with members and their representative collections. This would be LibraryThing’s strength.
LT is countering this strength by embracing a new challenge. It is seeking to replace, gradually, the Dewey Decimal System by developing a scheme called the Open Shelves Classification, a modern, collaborative, and free organization of published works. Certainly it is an ambitious, long-term project requiring great innovative thinking, though it’s not meant to be the end-all-be-all solution for classification but rather simply a newer, better method to be replaced by future classifiers.
I have no doubt that LT will summon the people power to think out and deliver such a lofty goal; indeed, I think it should be attempted in the old tried-and-true interest of simply seeing if it can be done. I do have, however, a slight pinch of skepticism which I admittedly cannot yet find the source. Maybe it’s because LT has got such a good thing going already. Is it trying to be everything for book fans too quickly? Has it developed a strong enough membership of librarians/organizers/catalogers/OCD-ers to lend sufficient and adequate input for achieving such a goal? Can being too collaborative actually prevent the OCS from taking flight?
Since this is an experiment, I suppose that my questions will be buried within the OCS pudding that will eventually manifest itself. All in all, I like the audacity LT promises with itself in simply being an experiment. I think that’s where where the success is seen…asking questions and seeking answers…not necessarily the answers you want to see, either. See, librarians can be scientists too…right?
