Interview with Internet Archives founder

News.com has an interesting interview with the founder of the Internet Archives. Recently, the organization had a setback in court when they attempted to clarify that they could, under Fair Use, add so-called "orphan works" to the Archives.

"Orphan works" present a challenge in the transition to online digital research materials. They are still under copyright, but essentially out of print and abandoned by the copyright owners, making them difficult or impossible to find and access.

Honestly, I'm surprised that school teachers and faculty members in academia aren't up in arms and organizing campaigns to educate the public about the erosion of Fair Use and how it impacts their own research and teaching. With Congress passing extended copyright periods to owners and making it impossible to use any digital material protected by DRM useable for classroom or research purposes because of the DMCA, it's getting tough to find something you can do with copyrighted material in education.

article at news.com

Snipshot online photo editing

A new entry in the many web-based applications that are becoming available is Snipshot. The application allows you to do Photoshop-style editing on your images without buying a copy of Photoshop.

Snipshot website

Adobe Lightroom released

Adobe has finally taken their photo management tool, Lightroom, out of Beta. It will be available as a commercial product for $300, mirroring the pricing of it's competitor, Apple's Aperture. Lightroom will be released for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms in mid-February.

webpage at Adobe

Queer silents website

A website devoted to LGBT silent cinema could be useful in classes dealing with LGBT history or film studies. The information can be a little sparse at this point, but it may develop further in the future.

Queer silents website

Social hygiene exhibit

The University of Minnesota Library has an interesting and useful online exhibit of social hygiene advertisements. The collection ranges from 1910 to 1970 and users can search by keywords or browse topics.

link to exhibit

Second Life - class and race

An editorial at The Register looks at race and class in Second Life, the author noting why there's a dearth of Black characters in the virtual world and how it impacts its community.

commentary at the UK Register

DaVinci notebooks online for six months

The British Library, in cooperation with Microsoft, has put two of Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks online that can be accessed for the next six months. One of the notebooks is owned by the Library, the other by Bill Gates and the effort was produced in conjunction with the launch of the new Windows operating syste, Vista.

The site is tailored for Windows viewers; excerpts are available using the Shockwave plug-in for non-Windows users.

artcle at the UK Register

Update on Google's book project

The New Yorker looks in on Google's book project, which is attempting to scan every book ever published in the next ten years. A major challenge to the project is a lawsuite by publishers who contend that Google's wholesale scanning of books in participating libraries is a violation of copyright law.

The outcome of the case, and the results of Google's project, could have a significant impact on academics and libraries and how researchers will find material in public domain, out of print, or in-print books in the future.

article at The New Yorker

Palm sized photo printer

A start up company, working with Polaroid, has developed a photo printer that's about the size of an iPod.

The printer uses special paper and heats different layers of the paper to produce an image - perhaps a variation on dye-sublimation technology that has been around for several years on photo printers.

article at news.com

Immortal computing ... from Microsoft

Microsoft Research has applied for a patent for what it calls "immortal computing".

The effort seeks to find ways to store information for users in more permanent forms that can be retreived in future generations; the system would also allow for actions to be taken with the data (sending an email at certain intervals to your descendents, for example) and could be "virtual representations of our personalities" (whatever that means).

"Maybe we should start thinking as a civilization about creating our Rosetta stones now, along with lots of information, even going beyond personal memories into civilization memories," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft principal researcher who also is working on the project.

article at Seattle PI

Hum into the search engine

A new search engine, midomi, is taking an interesting approach to music.

You simply hum or sing a few bars of a song into the search engine and it can retreive recordings of other users who have hummed the same tune. The site also allows for more traditional text-based searching as well.

link to midomi

iPod sustainability

The university where I work, Duke, gained considerable press for it's adoption of the iPod for class activities. One issue that plagues the device, along with many other current technology gadgets, is how well they hold up over time.

The magazine Stay Free has started a campaign to raise awareness about the issue, urging companies to build more robust electronics equipment that isn't so breakable and disposible.

iDud at Stay Free

It's something to think about both for faculty members and administrators seeking to integrate technology into teaching. Many analogue devices, such as rugged Tascam portable cassette recorders designed for fieldwork or even early portable GPS devices, are still useable today. The trend towards less rugged electronics could be chalked up to the drive for cost savings among corporations or planned obsolecence, but the end result of less reliability is becoming a major factor in deciding on whether to use a tool in class or how to pay for a comprehensive program that puts technology in the hands of a large number of students.

Visualization table

Visualizing data for better comprehension has been greatly enhanced in recent years through the use of computer graphics, giving new life to the idea of "concept mapping" among teachers.

If you are interested in trying concept mapping for the first time, there are several great overviews and tutorials to get started. But, if you're "stuck", thinking about the best approach to use for visualizing some information, the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a good idea generator. Moving your mouse over each type of visualization will pop-up an example

Cell phones and novels in Japan

The LA Times uses the announcement of the iPhone as an opportunity to talk about how cell phones are integrated into everyday life in Japan.

Keitai form a cyber social network in a highly mobile society. To wait for a light on a Tokyo street corner or to ride a train is to see crowds of people with their heads down, thumbs pumping as they send photos, write text messages or play online games on their phones. Increasingly, they are reading books and manga, or comic books, on their phones too.

article at LA Times

The piece is a good reminder to anyone about how different forms of communication and types of text are emerging as technology changes the way people interact with media and each other. A course on writing fiction might benefit from a short activity where a short novella written for a non-traditional publishing medium, such as a cell phone, is written by the students and compared with a short story written for the web or print publication.

Wired.com also recently featured an article specifically on cell-phone novels as an emerging text form in Japan; the novels are sometimes written on cell phones. Most are around 200 to 500 pages (or screens), each containing 500 Japanese characters.

Last month, the site held the world's first mobile phone novel award -- with the cooperation of heavyweights like NTT DoCoMo, D2 Communications and video-rental giant Tsutaya.

While most of the 2,400 entries were romance novels written by women in their teens and early 20s, other popular genres included horror, sci-fi and fantasy. The Outstanding Achievement Award went to a man pushing 40 who told an apocalyptic tale of the last 24 hours on Earth.

"A mobile phone novel boom is definitely in place," said Magic iLand spokesman Toshiaki Itou. "And these are people who hardly ever read novels before, never mind written one."

Next summer, the company will debut software that allows mobile phone novelists to integrate sounds and images into their story lines.

article at Wired

Undergraduate research online

The Institute for Undergraduate Research at Dartmouth has an online database to house Senior theses: http://www.ugresearch.org/ . The site, which currently houses about 1,000 papers, was created in 2005 by two former Dartmouth students.

As undergraduate research becomes a larger focus in many institutions, sites such as this one could prove valuable for students to feel a larger stake in their work. Some libraries and individual institutions are creating online portfolios of local student work, but placement in a larger database open to other universities create opportunities for student theses to be viewed by a much larger audience. Sites centering around undergraduate research that integrate some social networking tools could open dialogue between students at different institutions with similar interests.

Windows Vista and DRM restrictions

This is an interesting analysis, put together from various email lists and discussions, about aspects of the Windows Vista operating system that are designed to protect commercial content. One point worth noting is that Vista will "downgrade" output (sound or video) if material is protected by Digital Rights Management and you are attempting to display or hear it using certain types of hardware. It notes a scenario where uncompressed medical images would be downgraded for display at a lower quality, without any warning, if the user is playing DRM protected music or other material at the same time they are attempting to look at the image. There are also other notes about Vista potentially closing certain types of hardware, making it incompatible with Linux, Mac or even certain types of Windows software.

The article is worth a quick read for potential issues it raises for possible Fair Use scenarios in content use or other problems that might crop up in an academic environment using Vista.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

iTunes, DRM and regional content

Faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences who increasingly deal with global culture in their courses constantly face challenges in using material from other countries in their courses - from region codes and different TV standards with video to streaming content at commercial or non-commercial sites that might be restricted to IP addresses in a particular country or region.

Slate has an article on the licensing restrictions that prevent US iTunes users from purchasing content from iTunes stores in other countries. A good explanation of why the restrictions are in place and how users work around the restrictions through purchase of gift cards from other countries.

article at Slate

IBM's future world of virtual offices

At a recent conference, IBM discussed their interest in Second Life and virtual worlds. They've purchased several Second Life islands, experimenting with virtual storefronts and areas where IBM employees can connect with each other and share ideas. The company sees virtual worlds as a way to hire and keep talented young employees.

A generation of kids reared in virtual worlds like Second Life or MTV's Laguna Beach are eventually bound for a work force that will need to cater to their experiences by creating virtual worlds for the corporate intranet.

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that the hype for Second Life is warranted, at least at this stage. There seems to be a great deal of curiosity about "virtual spaces" and the possibilities for collaboration and interaction they create. However, we had one really big "virtual space" for about a decade - the Internet - and I don't see American workers staying home in droves, reporting to work through their broadband connection. The Internet, for individuals in close proximity in "real" space, acts as a more efficient way to exchange information or organize life; it really only acts as a primary means of interacting for colleagues or friends who are dispersed geographically. Perhaps Second Life and similar tools will settle into similar patterns.

article at news.com