Electronic Countermeasures is a project by Liam Young of think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, working with design studio Unknown Fields Division, and Eleanor Saitta and Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu of Superflux. The project is essentially an autonomous, roaming Internet swarm, constructed from repurposed UAVs.
LITA has amazing people on its ballot this year, but you don’t need to take my word for it…you can help make sure that the issues you think are the most important for LITA and ALA at large are put directly before the two candidates for President, Cindi Trainor and Aaron Dobbs. How, you ask? Go to this Google Moderator page and put your question there…Andromeda Yelton will be organizing these and getting them to the candidates to be answered. All of their responses will be put up on LITABlog.
Help us make these elections the most transparent and communicative in LITA’s history…ask your questions!
Legislation just signed by President Obama directs the Federal Aviation Administration to open the skies to remotely controlled drones within the next three years. It will begin in 90 days with police and first responders having authority to fly smaller drones of less than 4.4 pounds at altitudes under 400 feet. Gradually, all drones are to be allowed by Sept. 30, 2015.
via Police agencies in the United States to begin using drones in 90 days
In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more.
via Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate | Video on TED.com.
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TV Is Broken
I turn to that, Beatrix approves, and we watch. Then, a few minutes later, a commercial comes on. The volume difference is jarring to say the least. I would safely guess it is fifty percent louder than the show. I hurriedly reach for the remote and turn it down…
“Why did you turn the movie off, Daddy?”, Beatrix worriedly asks, as if she has done something wrong and is being punished by having her entertainment interrupted. She thinks that’s what I was doing by rushing for the remote.
“I didn’t turn it off, honey. This is just a commercial. I was turning the volume down because it was so loud. Shrek will come back on in a few minutes” I say.
“Did it break?”, she asks. It does sometimes happen at home that Flash or Silverlight implode, interrupt her show, and I have to fix it.
“No. It’s just a commercial.”
“What’s a commercial?”, she asks.
”It is like little shows where they tell you about other shows and toys and snacks.”, I explain.
“Why?”
“Well the TV people think you might like to know about this stuff.”
“This is boring! I want to watch Shrek.”
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Smithsonian turns to 3D
A new effort under way at the world’s largest museum and research institution could eventually mean more of its 137 million objects will be publicly available, even if just via 3D digital models.
via Smithsonian turns to 3D to bring collection to the world | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.
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VALA 2012 Encore
I presented an encore of my VALA2012 presentation to librarians in Perth as well, at Curtin University. Here’s a recording of that particular presentation, where you can better see some of the slide effects and design choices that I talked about previously. The audio isn’t fabulous, but is serviceable and the video came out quite well.
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Visigoths Unite!
I re-tweeted Roy Tennant to try and bring some more eyeballs to this exceptional blog post by Nicolas Morin, entitled Engineers Crashing Our Gates, but had to follow it up here. So much goodness to be mined from this post!
I was lucky enough to interview Jason Chen via email about his new ebook startup Storybundle. He had some interesting things to say about the ebook market. Unsurprisingly, as a new ebook startup, he didn’t even consider libraries at first.
As to whether or not this is good for libraries, at the current time I hadn’t even considered libraries, so I’m going to aim for personal use for the first few bundles and see where things go from there. It depends heavily on the author, because the promo is a limited time thing, and making a sale to a library becomes a forever thing.