A friend of mine sent me a link to some research at Microsoft that would let you bend/twist/stretch or even squeeze your computer as an input. Sounds pretty sweet…
Not quite haptic, but still a step in the right direction with more natural input method’s!
This morning a colleague of mine, Derek Rodriguez, e-mailed about the launch of a new Triangle Research Libraries Network Search Engine he has been working on for quite a while. It has some really cool features enrichment features for each search:
Right now there are 1.48 million unique chapter authors and 9.5 million unique chapter titles so you can search for chapter authors for proceedings and book chapters.
There is an awesome tie in with our interlibrary loan system that works like a charm. It finds the items that are available and auto-populates them in our systems to order it. I ordered a couple of things in a few second this morning for pickup in a couple of days at the library here on campus.
Oh, and the entire index resides in memory…. all 18 GB of it… so it can be accessed super fast.
The search uses a platform called Endeca… I don’t think it’s cheap, but it looks awesome!
On a personal note… as many of you may know, I am a TarHeel… that is to say I work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Our beloved basketball team had a great year, but fell at last to a great Kansas squad this past weekend. This past week we were sitting around breakfast and he asked if I wanted to hear a joke. It was so good, I went to get my camera.
Go Heels! Thanks for another great season!
Okay, technically it is only a subcommitte of Congress… but still… a meeting in second life. I’m not sure if I should be afraid, or excited… what do you think?
This morning I came across an interesting article about book publishing in the future. Apparently Penguin Books is doing an experiment called “We Tell Stories” with delivering six different books through six different medium channels over the next six weeks. The first two are already done… Google Maps for the first week and a Blogging/Twitter combination for the second. The third is an interactive writing of a fairy tale…
The google maps mashup, “The 21 Steps” is very creative. There are certainly stories that would benefit from something like this.
I like the blogging/twitter combination book “Slice.” Blogging is a pretty good way of reading a book. RSS and twitter for little extra’s. That seems cool to me.
The third one “Fairy Tales” is interesting because there are many, many different outcomes to the story. Very clever… and interactive. Should keep our attention.
What do you think? What other mediums do you think they will use? Is this progression, or regression?
Neil Hokanson tagged me for a Meme to create a digital quilt of our passions. The rules for this Meme are as follows:
My Passion for kids to learn is Programming! When I think of what I want my own kids to learn, I want them to be able to program. Computers are becoming more and more integrated in our lives and if they have this skill they will not only be able to always find work, they will be creative in thinking outside the box and creating their own solutions! That is why I love programs like Alice!
I’m running out of time so I tag the following three people:
EduTechie.com 
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