Researchers are developing technology that can adjust an image on a display so you can see it clearly without corrective lenses. READ: Display Technology Makes Reading Glasses Unnecessary | MIT Technology Review.
Category Archives: Technology
Apple Secretly Acquired “Pandora For Books” Startup BookLamp To Battle Amazon | TechCrunch
I hope this acquisition translates into a viable book recommendation/review community for Apple’s iBooks. It isn’t a good thing that GoodReads is the dominant book recommendation service, specially with Amazon owning stakes in both GoodReads and LibraryThing.
READ: Apple Secretly Acquired “Pandora For Books” Startup BookLamp To Battle Amazon | TechCrunch
A Dead-Simple Tool That Lets Anyone Create Interactive Maps | WIRED
Data surrounds us. It’s everywhere, in the most micro sense small gadgets that track calories we’ve burned, or how much water our plants need to the most macro analytics companies that can monitor, for instance, the health of entire populations. But there are precious few companies actively working on helping us make sense of all that data. One of them is Tableau, a software company that turns heaps of data into visualizations for the common man: teachers, doctors, journalists, you name it. To make those tools clearer and cleaner, they recently partnered with Stamen Design, to release three new map templates, which anyone can play around with by downloading Tableau’s free software.
READ MORE A Dead-Simple Tool That Lets Anyone Create Interactive Maps | Design | WIRED.
Read the books that inspired Darwins theory of evolution | Engadget
Charles Darwins Galapagos expedition is one of the most famous scientific voyages in history and now you can see how he fed his mind aboard the Beagle. Darwin Online, which houses the world’s largest Darwin collection, has now published in PDF format what it believes to be all 404 books that Darwin had access to on the ships library. They comprise some 195,000 pages with 5,000 corresponding illustrations in French, English and Spanish from encyclopedias, history books, literature and even a racy Spanish novel. Darwin called his years aboard the Beagle a crucial a period that helped him create his seminal theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species. Though you may not have as much time as Darwin did on the infamously long trip, its worth a look just for the spectacular hand-drawn illustrations.
Access links here: Read the books that inspired Darwins theory of evolution | Engadget
Bee-Inspired Bots Skitter and Swarm at NYCs Museum of Mathematics | Gizmodo
Dr. James McLurkin has a swarm of robots. Individually, theyre not that smart, but a crateful of them behaves in some very complex ways, like the bees that inspired them. Gizmodo got to see the wee machines in action, and while theyre adorable, they represent some serious future bot capabilities.
Dr. McLurkin, a professor of computer science, runs the Multi-Robot Systems Lab at Rice University. He and his team research distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems. In other words, using the combined abilities of several rather simple robots to perform complex tasks. Dr. McLurkin has spent the past three years developing Robot Swarm, an exhibit of his hive-mind bots set to debut at Manhattans Museum of Mathematics in early 2015. This week, Dr. McLurkin gave a sneak preview of the exhibit, and Gizmodo was there.
READ MORE Bee-Inspired Bots Skitter and Swarm at NYCs Museum of Mathematics | Gizmodo
Free Live Webinars for Librarians [July 2014]| OEDB.org
Librarians are lifelong learners. And we’re always on the look out for exciting professional development opportunities. Fortunately for us, there are a great many amazing, free webinars being offered each month from a variety of sources, there’s bound to be something for everyone.
READ MORE: Free Live Webinars for Librarians | OEDB.org.
100 Million Flickr Images for Download | Center for Data Innovation
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
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
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
Japan’s New Robot Museum Guides Are All Too Human | Mashable
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.
infophile 