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Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions. Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information abo...  show all text

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Illustration: Mister Mourao Sometime in early 2004, as Mark Zuckerberg was furiously coding the first iterations of The Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, the Internet passed what then seemed to be an impressive milestone: 750 million people worldwide had become connected. The exact birthdate of the Internet is difficult to pin down, but it’s fair to say that it took at least three decades for the net to reach a population of that size. Today, after just eight years in existence, Facebook now h...  show all text

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MAKE will present a hands-on showcase of compelling devices, products, and platforms that are shaping the future of manufacturing and the global economy. Get up close and personal with the makers of these pioneering innovations that have the power to make and move markets.

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Announcing the next Knight News Challenge: Data Photo Credit: Flickr user Koen Vereeken The Knight News Challenge is being offered three times this year, in short, focused rounds to better mirror the...

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I recently created a Twitter bot that tweets one randomly generated metaphor every two minutes. I’ve decided to make the source code available. Get the source on Github here. Read the README.md, as it requires installing some software and getting your own API keys. The whole thing is pretty simple and hacky. The program is pure JavaScript, running in node.js, which lets you run server-side JavaScript totally distinct from a web browser. I host the bot over at Nodejitsu — you can actually see the  show all text

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Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just ...  show all text

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Consider this digital photo I took of the face of the Albert Einstein Memorial outside the National Academy of Sciences. Although my photo tells us something about what the memorial looks like, I don’t think anyone would say that I “digitized” it.  We think about this kind of photo as a creative work (albeit not particularly creative) but it has a creator (in this case me). In contrast, when someone scans a document in a flatbed scanner, or takes a digital photo of a page in a book, we talk of ...  show all text

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When an academic term comes to a close, there’s often a great deal of chaos: committee reports are due, final projects need to be graded, panicked students need to be reassured, work-related paperwork needs to be submitted. Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published a number of things about how best to handle this busy time of the year. Ethan provided us with an end of semester checklist. Natalie has advised us about wrapping up the semester. And we’ve published two relevant collections of posts about...  show all text

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Through ventures like Coursera, world-class learning is coming at bargain-basement prices.

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[This has been cross-posted at Adeline Koh’s website, http://www.adelinekoh.org/.] Adeline and I are thrilled to announce that we’ll be holding an “unconference” on digital pedagogy as a preconference workshop for the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in 2013. What are “Unconferences”? The ten-year old unconference format emerged as a response to weaknesses of the traditional conference presentation. Unconferences are participant-driven gatherings where attendees spontaneously generate...  show all text

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A Ruby programming tutorial for journalists, researchers, investigators, scientists, analysts and anyone else in the business of finding information and making it useful and visible. Programming experience not required, but provided.

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Stanford professors have plan to halve degree time and link student programs to varying career goals. Efforts at Harvard, Minnesota and Colorado reflect growing interest in real reform of doctoral education.  

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The associate editor of Genomics says its publisher Elsevier effectively denies developing world access to research findings Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field – Genomics.  No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings. It has not been an easy decision to make. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And  show all text

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On Thursday, author Calvin Trillin and comedian Seán Cullen will join Charles Foran for an onstage discussion about the life of the late Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler

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The Atlantic covers breaking news, analysis, opinion around politics, business, culture, international, science, technology, national profiles on the official site of the Atlantic Magazine.

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This is the third in a weekly series of posts leading up to the mini-conference The War of 1812: Whose War was it Anyway? being held at the University of Waterloo on May 30th. By Ian McKay and Jamie Swift Warmonger politicians customarily indulge in high rhetoric, attempting to rally the citizenry round the flag and boost the bloodletting. Or when invoking the glories of past wars. The War of 1812 was no exception. Those who witness war’s gruesome reality often remember things differently, as do  show all text

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If you're in college, or happen to be about to graduate, and you've been mocked for getting a liberal arts degree, here's a piece of welcome news: You're actually in more demand than those who are getting finance and accounting degrees.

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Blog:  GradHacker   Myra Ann Houser is a doctoral candidate in African History at Howard University in Washington, DC. She blogs about the dissertation-writing process, current events, life in Washington, DC, and related issues at myraramblings.wordpress.com and tweets as @myramt. Navigating the internet as a doctoral candidate becomes a bit more difficult than it did for some of our straight-to-work peers.  Seven-ish years in school provides for a lot of time for status updates that might offe...  show all text

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“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” -Jorge Luis Borges My PhD discussed how technologies had helped define the formal characteristics of the medium of comics. An important contingent within the … Continue reading →

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T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet.  lisaquinn565.wordpress A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe f...  show all text

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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