Remember a few years back when IBM's incredible computing machine Watson appeared on the television quiz show Jeopardy!? Well, like most technologies a lot has changed since then. Watson's system performance is 2400% greater than in the Jeopardy! days and it has gone from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes! Now Watson enters a whole new realm, from simply being a storehouse of vast amounts information to now being able to actually create new knowledge. And one of the areas best suited for this new foray is the food universe. In 2014 IBM teamed up with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICM)...
Eggplant with books served up in this animation
For part of their work on a 2013 campaign for the IGA supermarket chain the folks at SHED served up a pretty amazing book-infused animation. The goal was to show off how knowledgeable the typical IGA employee is, and it is safe to say, they know what to do with an a eggplant! [vimeo width="640" height="300"]https://vimeo.com/65561144[/vimeo] behind the scenes look at creating the library at SHED's blog
Haiku with Strangers: New app lets you create poetry with strangers
Next time you have a few minutes of downtime and are in need of a creative escape you might want to consider a visit to HaikuJAM. HaikuJAM is a new free app that lets you create poetry with strangers. Just hit the "Jam" button and your off, either by starting your own poem or photo story, or by joining one already in progress. That's right, if your not feeling wordy you can create a haiku comprised of three photos! Pretty cool. [vimeo width="640" height="300"]https://vimeo.com/113214410[/vimeo] App is available in the iTunes app store and Google Play. Create beautiful poetry with strangers...
Reference Rot: The dangerous attrition of digital footnotes
Footnotes are a divisive bunch, for some readers they are pure annoyance for others they provide the opportunity to explore the source and offer a potential new window into something of interest. For Noel Coward reading footnotes was like 'having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.' In her piece for History Today, Anna Neima alerts us to the danger of digital footnotes as more and more of scholarly life moves toward the internet. Noting a study by digital library researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who surveyed three and a half million scholarly articles between 1997 and 2012,...
For Your Listening Pleasure: New Technology Rescues Poets from Old Vinyl
The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University just might be the closest thing we have to a poetry heaven on earth. Yes, there is the extensive collection of 20th and 21st century English-language poetry books and "an encyclopedic array of poetry journals and literary magazines" but the crown jewel of the collection is their collection of sound recordings, "one of the largest poetry-specific sound archives in the world". And, as you can imagine, many of the older vinyl recordings are simply to beat-up to listen to. That is, until now. The folks at WBUR, Boston's NPR station, take us behind the scenes and...