academia

Shirky: Napster tapped into our primate instincts

AUSTIN, Texas--Author and New York University professor Clay Shirky thinks he's getting old, or in other words, "my average age has been going up at the alarming rate of about one year per year." Recently, he said, he had to explain Napster to a class of his students because they were too young to have known much about the groundbreaking music-sharing service in its heyday.

But that wasn't the point. Shirky's talk on Sunday morning at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival was called "Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,&… Read more

Facebook turns to the ivory tower

Its CEO might have famously spurned college in favor of Silicon Valley, but Facebook announced on Friday a new outreach to academia: a "Facebook Fellowship Program" for Ph.D. students, designed "to foster a strong relationship with the academic community and help solve some of the complex technical problems facing the social Web."

In other words, Facebook is looking to align itself with some top-notch academic talent.

Until February 15, full-time Ph.D. students for the 2010-2011 school year in U.S. universities are invited to apply for the program, which will ultimately award five selected … Read more

Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut

NEW YORK--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the much-anticipated large-screen Kindle e-reader in a lecture hall Wednesday at the downtown Pace University. Called the Kindle DX, the new device is geared toward readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers, and magazines--and textbooks, a potentially huge target market.

The debut of the bigger Kindle wasn't exactly a secret: rumors of a larger-screen Kindle had been around for quite some time, and concrete reports began to surface earlier this week.

According to Amazon's Kindle DX page, the device has the following:

A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of gray. (The standard Kindle has a 6-inch display.)

Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents.

An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views.

A built-in PDF reader.

3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts.

Battery capacity to "read for days without charging."

Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud.

Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that doesn't require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen. … Read more

Is Kindle a newspaper savior? Not quite

Newspapers hoping the next version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader will be a savior for their beleaguered businesses are likely to be disappointed when it's unveiled Wednesday. But this Kindle could win plenty of converts in academia.

Amazon is slated to unveil a new, larger-screen version of the Kindle, which it originally launched late in 2007. Possibly called the Kindle DX, the new device is designed for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, and it's expected to be part of new electronic course material test-runs at six universities this fall. The list, according to The Wall Street Journal, … Read more

Shocking research: Narcissists drawn to Facebook

A team of researchers from the University of Georgia has come to a conclusion that will undoubtedly turn the tech world on its side (ha): if you use Facebook to promote your lovely self, it shows through. Narcissists, or those psychologically defined as "excessively egotistical," will inflate their profiles on the social network with more photos, massive friends lists, and packed activity feeds.

As we used to say on the playground in third grade, duh.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," study leader … Read more

'Google Moderator' tool takes on lecture-hall chaos

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "… Read more

Microsoft hires social-net scholar Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd, a researcher best known for her ethnographic studies of social networks, has been tapped to be part of Microsoft Research New England, the company's new research facility in Cambridge, Mass.

"Going to (Microsoft Research) will allow me to continue the research I do and it will give me a productive, collaborative, interdisciplinary environment in which to do it," Boyd wrote in a post on her blog on Sunday night. "There's amazing work at MSR concerning social media and even those at MSR-NE who are not working on social media are more than open … Read more

Funding, bandwidth awarded to lay new series of tubes

It might sound very Noah's Ark, but this is not a joke: $12 million in government funding, as well as bandwidth from two research hubs, has been awarded to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a project from BBN Technologies that literally wants to rebuild the whole Internet.

The funding comes from the National Science Foundation, and it's in the form of a three-year grant that will span about $4 million per year. More specifically, it's for GENI's "design and risk-reduction prototyping," and will involve contracting 29 university research teams. The Internet has … Read more

HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud computing research

This post was updated at 10 a.m. PDT to include further comments from the companies.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they've teamed up to create a "test bed" project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.

With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe "to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in … Read more

Has Microsoft become too corporate for its own good?

I found this article on O'Reilly's (Microsoft-sponsored) Port 25 page fascinating. For all Microsoft's attempts to own the budding minds of students, it may well be that Microsoft has become too corporate, too sterile to be of interest to the creative mind:

Even back in my day, you could go to a "Windows lab" and work with Visual Studio or go to a "UNIX lab" and use vi and gcc. And you know what? All the fun was in the UNIX lab. And not just for me. There was just a difference in the attitudes and ethic across the two lab environments. People in the Windows lab were trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM, while people in the UNIX lab were goofing off, playing with code, and... trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM.

What is it about UNIX, vi, emacs, gcc, perl, and INSERT-HERE that makes it fun to play with, while Visual Studio just makes you want to... well, work?

In the enterprise, this alleged Microsoft attribute might be considered a Very Good Thing. But is it? Do enterprises really want automatons that punch in and code to spec? Or do they want innovation that changes the game?… Read more