If you’d like to try playing a guitar that uses lasers for strings or drawing on a giant 3-D Etch-A-Sketch, now is your chance. The Gizmodo Gallery is a temporary interactive museum in Manhattan (267 Elizabeth Street) that pays homage to the 80 coolest gadgets from today and years past. The Gallery, open September 23-27, is presented by the popular tech blog Gizmodo.
In addition to a $3,500 pancake machine that whips out a flapjack in 14 seconds, you will find a one-of-a-kind model of the first Apple phone prototype, man made lightning machines, and a 103-inch plasma screen TV on which you can play “The Beatles: Rock Band.” Oh yeah, and free pancakes.
Is it possible to determine which 30 innovations have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years? What would you suggest - computers? solar energy? eBay??
This is the question that Nightly Business Report, the Emmy Award-winning PBS business program, and Knowledge@Wharton, the online journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, set out to answer. After receiving some 1,200 suggestions — including eBay, the mute button, and suitcase wheels — a panel of eight judges from Wharton reviewed and selected the top 30 of these innovations.
Here’s the final list, in order of importance:
Internet, broadband, WWW (browser and html)
PC/laptop computers
Mobile phones
E-mail
DNA testing and sequencing/Human genome mapping
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Microprocessors
Fiber optics
Office software (spreadsheets, word processors)
Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)
Open source software and services (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia)
The march of Moore’s Law takes electronics to the molecular level, and indeed molecules are likely to be incorporated in future hybrid computer chips. This self-contained text guides students as well as professionals to the new possibilities presenting a treatment of Quantum Computing, a promising new approach which is based on Quantum Mechanics. This essential new title also covers topics which connect to alternative energy technology, for example solar cell design, photocatalytic conversion of water to hydrogen, and high performance batteries.
The author, Edward L. Wolf, is Professor of Physics at NYU-Poly. Professor Wolf’s experience ranges from teaching undergraduate courses to conducting industrial research. In 2007, Professor Wolf was honored with Polytechnic’s ”Jacobs Excellence in Education Award.” He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has authored over 100 refereed publications. The second edition of his successful textbook Nanophysics and Nanotechnology has been published recently.
What do you get when you combine a smart phone, a tiny projector, and a camera? Seamless access to information that makes the iphone seem quaint.
There is no simple way to describe what the “Sixth Sense” is. The Sixth Sense website states it’s “a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.” In other words, it’s a cool gadget that brings to life the gesture-based interfaces of Minority Report.
To really appreciate the amazing capabilities of this technology, you must watch the video below. If you have the time, watch the whole video for an explanation by Pattie Maes. If not, go to minute 3:00, where Pranav Mistry—the MIT student who developed the Sixth Sense—shows how it works.
By now you’ve probably noticed those little orange icons that appear on websites. And hopefully you’re using RSS to keep up to date with all your favorite websites and blogs (including this one!). But are you taking full advantage of the power of RSS feeds? Not only is RSS a great tool to stay informed about news and other interests, it can also be a real time saver when it comes to conducting research. Did you know that you can use RSS feeds to:
get alerted when new items of interest are added to the library catalog
receive table of contents updates from journals you read
get notified every time an article is added to a database that meets your search criteria
find out about new job postings in your field
Check out our brand new RSS Guide to learn how to do all of the above and more. And if you happen to think RSS stands for Really Stinky Socks, don’t fear - the guide contains a basic introduction to what RSS is and can get you up and running in no time. The guide also includes a section on Popular Feeds to get you started.
Before you read the guide and become an RSS expert, answer the quick poll below:
Open Source fans rejoice - Open Source Living is here. It’s a huge new directory of open source software and offers a forum for discussions about open source products as well as other OS-related issues.
From the site:
“Through a simple, elegant and efficient presentation of resources and information, OS Living aims to highlight small and large OSS projects, to inform and raise awareness to OS ethics, and to reinforce the credibility of OSS as a viable alternative to corporate funded, closed source software.”
As a community-driven site, it continues to expand with more and more resources daily.
The new SciTopics is a free, online expert-generated knowledge-sharing service for the research community that offers scientific, technical, and medical knowledge on a variety of subjects. Designed to complement the traditional peer-review process, the site allows invited experts to develop topic pages offering research summaries with the content moderated through 14 subject editors to ensure high standards and relevancy. The easy-to-use, wikilike resource aims to give authors a platform to showcase their works and to facilitate scholarly debate.
Elsevier, a leading publisher of science and health information, developed SciTopics to offer authors a faster, more informal, dynamic, and interactive ways to publish their thinking on issues and highlight their research. The newly released tool takes advantage of the speed and interactivity of sharing information on the web, but it also addresses the problems of data overload and quality and accuracy of information. [Read more →]
Dibner Library is pleased to announce the addition of Safari Books Online to its expanding electronic resource collection. Safari offers a wide selection of nearly 300 popular computer programing and information management books covering topics such as operating systems, programming, networking, and much more.
MiBook takes a different approach from other e-book readers. In contrast to some that have tried to duplicate the look and feel of the printed page, the designers and marketers of MiBook are fully aware that it is an electronic device. It eschews the E ink technology found in many recent e-book readers that attempt to mimic the appearance of a black and white printed page, instead opting for a standard LCD display that can display colors and refresh quickly, but also drains energy faster. ”Books” pre-formatted for the device are not the usual software files you download and transfer, but memory cards you plug in. However, the memory slot accepts standard sd cards, so instead of purchasing one of the preformatted books on card, you can load your own card with text and multimedia files. One big advantage MiBook has in in price. It is significantly less expensive than other e-book readers.
If you have a specialized e-book reader, or any kind of device that can read digital books, be sure to check out the Dibner Library’s guide to free books online for good sources of reading material.
You can now access Books24×7, a leading provider of business, technical and engineering content, via Dibner Library. Books24×7 contains thousands of digitized “best-in-class” books, book summaries, research reports and best practices.
Search for content in fields such as networks & protocols, software engineering, web development, and multimedia. You can also use the Browse Topics tree (pictured above rightside) to drill down the list of topics and subtopics to find lists of titles.
Books24×7 has many useful features such as saving titles to folders and sharing bookmarks with others. For a quick overview, look for the “Take the Virtual Tour” button on Books24×7 homepage.
It eschews the 
