Tag Archives: research

[Top 100] Books that have stayed with us | Facebook

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Favorite books are something friends like to share and discuss. A Facebook meme facilitates this very interaction. You may have seen one of your friends post something like “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. They do not have to be the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.” If not great works of literature, what are the books that have stayed with us?

List of the Top 100: Books that have stayed with us | Facebook

How Being Grateful Can Change Your Life | Fast Company

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Recent studies show that practicing gratitude can positively impact your life–and researchers believe it may help us break our bad habits. Read the Full Story: How Being Grateful Can Change Your Life | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

Library of Congress cooks CDs in quest to save them | CNET

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CDs may not be the first thing to come to mind when you think of the Library of Congress, but it houses more than 500,000. The extensive collection includes everything from music to maps and labs where researchers are destroying CDs to learn how to preserve them, CBS News Jim Axelrod reports.

In 1982, Billy Joels album “52nd Street” was the first commercial compact disc to be released. Since then, hundreds of billions of CDs have been sold worldwide. Once the latest music technology, the CD is now a collectors item, replaced by digital downloads. But those who built up music libraries in the 80s and 90s may wonder how long will those discs work? Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress, is hoping to figure that out.

READ MORE: Library of Congress cooks CDs in quest to save them | CNET

The NSA Is Funding a Project to Roll All Programming Languages Into One | Gizmodo

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Why bother having to learn HTML5, JavaScript, PHP, CSS and XML, when you could just learn one? Well, thats exactly what an NSA-funded project at Carnegie Mellon University seeks to achieve.The “polyglot” programming language is called Wyvern—the name comes from a a mythical dragon-like reature with two legs instead of four—and is designed to help unify the way apps and websites are created.

READ: The NSA Is Funding a Project to Roll All Programming Languages Into One | Gizmodo

AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs | Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project

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The vast majority of respondents to the 2014 Future of the Internet canvassing anticipate that robotics and artificial intelligence will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service, and home maintenance. But even as they are largely consistent in their predictions for the evolution of technology itself, they are deeply divided on how advances in AI and robotics will impact the economic and employment picture over the next decade.

READ MORE: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs | Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project.

Absolutely fabulist: The computer program that writes fables | CNET

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Forget a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, researchers have created a computer program that writes fables by itself.

It might be a long way from “A Tale of Two Cities”, but researchers at Australia’s University of New South Wales have developed a computer program that is capable of writing its own fables.

The Moral Storytelling System, known as MOSS, has been developed by Margaret Sarlej, a PhD candidate at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, led by Australian Research Fellow and artificial intelligence expert Dr Malcolm Ryan.

While humans are capable of creating simple or complex stories without a second thought, Sarlej said this is a skill that computers can’t easily emulate.

READ MORE: Absolutely fabulist: The computer program that writes fables | CNET.

Display Technology Makes Reading Glasses Unnecessary | MIT Technology Review

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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.

Bee-Inspired Bots Skitter and Swarm at NYCs Museum of Mathematics | Gizmodo

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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

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

New Article: “Supporting the Next-Generation ILS: The Changing Roles of Systems Librarians” | LJ INFOdocket

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First Paragraph of Abstract:

This paper compares current responsibilities of systems librarians supporting the traditional ILS with anticipated responsibilities associated with supporting the next- generation ILS.

Read more and access a direct link to the journal article: New Article: “Supporting the Next-Generation ILS: The Changing Roles of Systems Librarians” | LJ INFOdocket.