Author Archives: infophile

13 Essential Lessons Little Women Can Teach You About Living Well | HuffPost Books

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13 Essential Lessons Little Women Can Teach You About Living Well

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a two-volume novel following the four March sisters through their adolescence and young adulthood, was first published in the late 1860s. Almost 150 years later, the book remains remarkably popular; in fact, the unassuming tale is one of the ten most beloved books in America, according to a poll released recently by Harris International…

…Modern readers would not be alone in finding Little Women a bit fusty. The author herself notoriously described her children’s stories as “moral pap for the young.” She wrote the books not for artistic reasons, but to pay the bills. Yet it can’t be denied that her stories have spoken to generations of readers. Maybe because there are some genuinely good lessons for living in there — as well as some sneaky progressivism, endearing characters, and funny stories of everyday life. All in all, Little Women may not be perfect, but most of us could learn a great deal about how to live today from this old-fashioned novel…

READ: 13 Essential Lessons Little Women Can Teach You About Living Well | HuffPost Books

100 Million Flickr Images for Download | Center for Data Innovation

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Yahoo has released a massive data set of Flickr images and videos that are free to share under their copyright licenses. Yahoo believes the data set, which comprises 99.3 million images and 0.7 million videos, is one of the largest public multimedia data sets ever released. The data set, which promises to be a boon to computer vision researchers, contains metadata including title, description, camera type, and tags. About 49 million of the images are also geotagged. Yahoo is collaborating with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to provide compute resources through the lab’s supercomputer to help researchers analyze the data.

via 100 Million Flickr Images for Download | Center for Data Innovation

Your New Favorite Storytelling Website Is All About Books | BuzzFeed

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CallMeIshmael.com is a fascinating and fantastic new way to celebrate books. The concept is simple:

  • Step #1. Call Ishmael’s number: 774.325.0503. It goes straight to voicemail.
  • Step #2. Listen to Ishmael’s short answering machine message. It changes weekly.
  • Step #3. Leave a voicemail about a book you love and a story you have lived.

Read More: Your New Favorite Storytelling Website Is All About Books | BuzzFeed

High-tech gloves can teach you Braille even if you’re distracted | Engadget

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It looks like a team of Georgia Tech researchers is in the business of making wondrous, high-tech gloves — their most recent one, for instance, can teach you Braille even if youre doing something else. Similar to the piano-teaching glove they designed years ago, this new pair has vibrating motors on each knuckle that buzz in different patterns to correspond with preset Braille phrases.

Read More: High-tech gloves can teach you Braille even if you’re distracted | Engadget

The Genesis of Genius [Bronte Mini Books] | Harvard Gazette

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Flames of childhood passion often die. How many astronauts and ballerinas are among us? Yet some talent is so profound that even early efforts signify genius. The tiny, hand-lettered, hand-bound books Charlotte and Branwell Brontë made as children surely qualify. Measuring about 2.5 by 5 centimeters, page after mini-page brims with poems, stories, songs, illustrations, maps, building plans, and dialogue. The books, lettered in minuscule, even script, tell of the “Glass Town Confederacy,” a fictional world the siblings created for and around Branwell’s toy soldiers, which were both the protagonists of and audience for the little books.

READ MORE: The genesis of genius | Harvard Gazette.

Japan’s New Robot Museum Guides Are All Too Human | Mashable

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Japans New Robots Are All Too Human

If you’re searching for the uncanny valley, look no further than the work of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. He has been creating humanoid robots for years, and his latest incarnation — which is so realistic its scary — will act as robot guides at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Japan Miraikan.

The museum will welcome three robots, introduced in Japan on Tuesday. There’s the youthful-looking Kodomoroid, the adult female Ontonaroid and the baby-like Telenoid. With the exception of Telenoid, these robots look remarkably lifelike, have eerily expressive faces and are designed, in a limited sense, to move and communicate like real people.

Read More: Japans New Robots Are All Too Human | Mashable

Tools to Help Block Out Online Distractions | Gizmodo

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The problem with the web is there’s just so much of it; an endless tide of funny videos, pop quizzes, and social alerts ready to distract you from other, more urgent tasks at hand. We wouldn’t say there’s anything inherently wrong with killing time online, but if you really need to buckle down on an important job then these tools should help.

Overviews of:

  • KeepMeOut
  • StayFocusd
  • LeechBlock
  • Cold Turkey
  • SelfControl
  • TomatoTimer
  • Freedom

READ MORE: Tools to Help Block Out Online Distractions | Gizmodo

This Waterproof Kindle Paperwhite Is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement | TechCrunch

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Sometimes a device comes so close to being perfect that you’d be forgiven for not realizing that with just a single tweak, it can become, in actual fact, perfect. The Kindle Paperwhite is such a device, as an e-reader that Amazon has crafted so well that you pretty much never need look beyond for anything better. But while a regular book ends up with wrinkly pages after being caught in a surprise downpour on the beach, the Paperwhite fizzles – unless you get the Waterfi-treated Kindle Paperwhite.

The Waterfi version is shipped in the original Kindle packaging without any outward appearance of having been modified. It looks and feels like a Kindle, albeit a slightly heavier version, and interacting with its touchscreen is the same as you’d find with an unmodified version. But because of Waterfi’s special treatment process, its Kindle Paperwhite is completely waterproof – submersible to above 200 feet in either fresh or salt water, for any length of time.

READ MORE: This Waterproof Kindle Paperwhite Is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement | TechCrunch

An Ingenious Museum Design That Turns Visitors Into Creators | WIRED

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An Ingenious Museum Design That Turns Visitors Into Creators | Design | WIRED

In the revamped Cooper Hewitt, still in Carnegie Mansion, there will be around 15 new interactive screen displays where users can draw, design, and virtually explore the Cooper Hewitt collection. Much of this will happen via an electronic pen conceived by Local Projects and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and designed by Cooper Hewitt, GE, Sistelnetworks and Undercurrent. Each is paired with a unique URL on the visitor’s ticket, and as guests pass through different galleries they can touch the tip of their pen to wall text next to objects they find interesting, or inspiring. The pen then stores those selections. The museum still is finalizing details, but either way what follows will be a free-flowing, open-ended experience: with their pen, visitors can download all their selected items into a screen, and begin designing.

Read More: An Ingenious Museum Design That Turns Visitors Into Creators | Design | WIRED

Wow, this pen can write in any color on Earth | CNET

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Like the color of that flower? Your friends tie? With this new Scribble pen making a run on Kickstarter, all the hues of the world could be yours.

Read More: Wow, this pen can write in any color on Earth | CNET.