"Can the wide-open vistas of the imagination that were unlocked by famed authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens really be enjoyed on a 3.5-inch smartphone screen? Will the wit of Mark Twain's Roughing It or the subtle comedy of manners found in Jane Austen's Emma come across well when the device you're reading those books on interrupts you for a phone call? Bookworms who are also Googlehounds are about to find out. The search company announced Thursday that it would begin offering a mobile version of Google Book Search; 1.5 million of the public domain books Google has already scanned for PC users are now available free to those with Apple iPhones and T-Mobile G1s using the Android operating system."
03 March 2009
A Digital Window into the Medieval World
"Thousands of medieval manuscripts have been digitized by libraries around the world. The trick has been finding them. Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, thought up a solution: the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, a centralized online archive of holdings around the world."
Yahoo Search Puts New Research Assistant to Work
"Yahoo introduced a new feature Wednesday designed to help make online research easier. Dubbed 'Search Pad,' the new companion search tool will enable users to keep track of Web sites and take notes when conducting online research. Currently in beta, Search Pad will allow students, information workers and Internet surfers on a mission to do away with cutting and pasting content to a word-processing document or email; bookmarking the search results or a bevy of sites; or simply writing pertinent results down on a sticky pad or notebook. These extra steps, in addition to being sometimes unwieldy, consume a good bit of time and can prove to be a distraction, according to Yahoo."
New From YouTube: Free Downloads of College Lectures
"YouTube began testing a new feature that lets users download videos posted to the site from partner institutions — including colleges — rather than just watching the videos in a streaming format. That means people can grab lectures from Duke and Stanford Universities and several institutions in the University of California system to watch any time, with or without an Internet connection."
Academic Freedom, Christian Context
"Academic freedom at religious institutions has always been a vexed and complex subject. Many religious colleges assert that they have academic freedom, while also requiring professors to sign statements of faith in which they subscribe to a certain worldview -- and there is not necessarily a public attempt to reconcile these principles. One evangelical Christian college has tried to change the conversation – reframing limitations on inquiry implied by signing a statement of faith, for instance, as opportunities."
More Than Half The World Has Cell Phones
"More than half of the world can hear you now -- 60 percent of the world's citizens own a cell phone, according to a recent United Nations report. That increase is due in large part to cell phone growth in poor, developing countries. In 2002, just less than 15 percent of the world's population had cell phones. The report shows that mobile technology is becoming the most desirable means of communication -- especially in poor countries. The numbers show dramatic growth: By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscriptions globally, compared with roughly 1 billion in 2002, according to the International Telecommunication Union, one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations. The study also looked at the Internet, and found that worldwide, usage has more than doubled: Approximately 23 percent of the population uses the Internet, up from 11 percent in 2002. Still, poor countries are far less likely to surf the Net. For example, only 1 in 20 people in Africa went online in 2007."
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