Use of Implanted Patient-Data Chips Stirs Debate on Medicine vs. Privacy

Well, it's here. We've joked about having chips embedded in ourselves for such purposes. Now it is real and, as expected, also proving to be controversial. I wonder how this debate will pan out over time - it certainly has huge potential social significance.

Fortnightly Mailing: Everyone writes and no one pays - Guest Contribution from Donald Clark

Cross-posted from another blog, here is a short comment on the phenomenon of Wikis. There are more extensive articles on why wikis are successful but for those new to wikis, this gives a taste of what matters. Note the accuracy comparison to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Fortnightly Mailing: "Turning the Pages" of some beautiful resources from the British Library

Here is a link, via another blog, to some wonderful reading resources at the British Library. Using Shockwave (not Sockwave, typo), you can look at some beautiful classic works such as Leonardo's notebooks in really high resolution.

As noted in the other blogs, the books are a bit slow to load, especially if you do not have a pretty good high speed connection.

connect.educause.edu | Technology In Academia -- Connect @ EDUCAUSE

Educause, a wonderful resource on using technology in higher education, has a blog that some of you might be interested in following.

GRID.ORG ™ - Grid Computing Projects - Home

Want to contribute to the greater good? Is your computer being used 100% of the time? (We can guarantee that you are not using 100% of your computer's CPU processing - none of us do)

Some people may be familiar with SETI@home, the project that used spare computer cycles to help search for radio signals from other planets. The project has been enormously successful in harnessing a bunch of unused computer power (although they have not yet found any little green men).

Well, there are now many many projects that you can contribute your unused computing power towards. Check out the projects on this site. The name comes from the concept of grid computing - many computers harnessed to provide enormous computing capacity.

Easy to get onto. And, yes, you might be the one to make a difference.

YouTube - Crazy Multi-Input Touch Screen

Minority Report - here we come! No longer the stuff of science fiction, here we have a truly interactive touch input screen. Watch what this guy does to see how much more intuitively you can interact with a computer. This is way cool!