History dept bans citing wikipedia

The History Department at Middlebury College in Vermont has banned the citing of Wikipedia articles in student papers. The NY Times has an article about the academic "love/hate" relationship with the online collaborative encyclopedia.

article at NY Times

Instant sculptures

At the International Toy Fair, a manufacturer showed off a new system that they hope to take mainstream. It uses 3d laser scanning and a rapid prototyping machine to make 3d sculptures at low cost. The initial uses would be for kiosks in public spaces that allow you to have a sculpture of yourself, similar to photo booths. Most analysts expect home 3d prototyping machines to become available in the next few years that would allow users to create 3d models or download them to their computer then "print" them at home.

article and gallery at Wired.com

Commercial lp recorded on an iPod

Singer/songwriter Jimmy Camp has become the first artist to record an entire album on an iPod. He took the output of a simple little stage amp and mixer and input it into a Belkin TuneTalk and just recorded the tracks in his home studio. He has some samples of the songs on his site and a video about making the album; it's worth a look for some insight into how different techniques can be used to get high quality sound from the iPod and TuneTalk.

sample songs and 'making of' movie at jimmycamp.com

Pipes at Yahoo

Pipes is an intriguing new service that recently went online from Yahoo as a
Beta. It allows you to create RSS feeds by taking two or more and combining
them together in creative ways. For example, you might take the daily
headlines from the New York Times and use that as a filter for keywords of RSS
feeds of Flickr photos. Another example I saw at the site was constructed from feeds of real estate listings from Craigslist filtered through Google Maps and other services to show houses and apartments that are available near landmarks or particular types of commercial businesses.

This type of application could have many uses in classes for student research where students engage in activities to construct their own "pipes" to analyze current data on the Internet.

Pipes beta at Yahoo

Podcasting PDF's

I was reminded of a new/old technology today when attending the Podcasting Academy V at Duke University.

Many people don't realize that different types of files can be used for "podcasting" - audio and video files are the most common, but there are a growing number of sites that offer subscriptions to PDF files. The PDF's can take the form of a traditional newsletter or magazine or might include multimedia elements. Apple's iTunes can subscribe to PDF RSS feeds and Adobe Acrobat 8 can be used to subscribe as well.

This blog post at Make magazine includes sample subscription PDF's that are used for museum tours, language instruction and many other types of serial publication.

blog post at Make magazine

Musicians playing together online

A new software package at eJamming, which will be released in March, promises to offer real time audio collaboration for musicians. It allows musicians to play together at a distance either using MIDI or more traditional instruments. The software uses P2P (peer to peer) technology to overcome the issue of latency and synchronization of the audio from different players.

The software could prove promising for doing music lessons online or performing pieces with performers in multiple locations. Some work has been done in this area on Internet2, the super-fast new Internet backbone at major research institutions, but this is the first application for real-time musical collaboration for the desktop.

article at Wired.com