Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His forthcoming books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.
A new and relatively simple method for discovering the date when centuries-old art prints and books were produced has been developed at Penn State. The method could reveal long-sought information about thousands of undated works printed on hand-operated presses before the development of modern printing methods in the mid-19th century, including works by Rembrandt and Shakespeare. "The discovery that the wood blocks and metal plates used for printmaking deteriorate at a clocklike rate means that we can now use the prints as a 'print clock' for determining the date a work was printed," said Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State and author of the paper describing the research, which will be published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
Opera has released version 9 of their feature-laden browser and it really looks good! This latest iteration integrates tabbed browsing, thumbnail previews, integrated search, BitTorrent and much more. Plus, it's a free download!
Library catalogs are at a cross-roads, and it is time to consider a new and improved vision for these tools. If the library catalog and its utility do not evolve, then the utility of a library will increasingly become irrelevant. Libraries and librarians bring a certain expertise to the acquisition, evaluation, and dissemination information. This expertise is not limited to books, journals, and videos, so why should the most significant electronic public face to a library -- its catalog -- be limited in such a way?
"Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has asked that college students refrain from citing Wikipedia as a source of academic research.
Yes, some actually are...and then complaining to him when teachers give them failing grades for doing it.
While speaking at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Wales said that he receives about 10 e-mails a week from complaining college students. While Wales thinks Wikipedia is useful for many things, he said that he would like to make it known that he does not recommend it to college students for serious research.
He also expressed little sympathy for any college student who would still rely on an encyclopedia for academic info. He did say, however, that Wikipedia has considered putting out a fact sheet on the site. It would explain the nature of Wikipedia and why it's not always a definitive source. Teachers could hand it out, he said.
Aside from the obvious accuracy debate, the mere nature of Wikipedia as a constantly changing open source encyclopedia goes against the purpose of academic attribution.
Wales' comments were reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education."
Want to find those IRS forms to get in your taxes on time? Need to figure out where to send your DMV fees, or find the phone number for your local parks and rec department? Google U.S. Government Search launches today -- it's a site on which you can 1) search across a huge index of U.S. Federal, state and local government websites via a single search box, and 2) stay up to date through personalized content feeds from government agencies and press outlets. Off you go.
This will allow the faculty to remain in blissful ignorance, believing that—despite the low pay—they are spreading knowledge in the world, while at the same time convincing your parents to continue to pay for several more years of school, drunken orgies, and Prada bags. Your classmates who do not follow the above rules will constitute the “low hanging fruit,” easily picked off and tormented by mean-spirited unfulfilled teachers for their own amusement. You, however, will rise above the fray, secure in your superious ability to act smart, even if you don’t understand the text you are passing off as your own.
"Put on your seatbelt and prepare for highs, lows and plenty of twists and turns. BMW, in conjunction with Random House, brings you BMW Audio Books, a unique series of specially- commissioned short stories showcasing the work of some of the finest contemporary writing talent. Each gripping audio book is yours to download for free. Listen to them on your MP3 player, your laptop or ideally, in the car. So sit back, hit play and enjoy the ride."
Amazon, the world's biggest bookseller, is in talks with Cambridge company, Plastic Logic, about the end of books as we know them.
Plastic Logic has come up with the ultimate in e-books, overcoming the problem of reading an inflexible page on a screen - something which was never going to usurp the traditional book.
News of the Amazon/Plastic Logic link was given to a Cambridge audience on Thursday night when Hermann Hauser delivered the RSA Lecture at Magdalene College.
His theme was: "What makes a good entrepreneur" and one of Cambridge's hottest entrepreneurial endeavours at the moment is Plastic Logic, which is making microchips cheap as chips by printing them with plastic ink as opposed to etching in silicon.
"The reason why Amazon doesn't sell e-books at the moment is because people don't like reading on a screen, but now they can curl up with an e-book," Dr Hauser said.
This past week, Plastic Logic has been showing off its new product concepts at a trade show in San Francisco, under the heading 'Life is Flexible'.
All the concepts incorporate PL's radical new flexible display technology, and, in the company's words: "They illustrate the inevitable transformation we will see in everyday products as a result of plastic electronics over the next decade."
Adding a deck? Remodeling your kitchen? From simple to detailed, conceptual to realistic, Google SketchUp (free) lets you populate the world with true 3D objects. Want to build a fully dimensioned 3D model that can be used as the basis for your next do-it-yourself project? Google SketchUp's expanded feature lets you build in as much detail as your project requires.
The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it.
By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others. More at the above link.
This year, for the first time, we planted "heirloom" tomatoes - tomatoes from seeds your grandfather might have grown. I can't tell you how wonderful these are! So sweet and flavorful. On the left is a "Purple Giant" and on the right is a "Rainbow".
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