In an effort to streamline the process of scanning hundreds of millions of titles, Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh has designed a $1,500 automated scanner from sheet metal, dissected electronics, and a household vacuum. It can chew through a 1,000 page odyssey in about 90 minutes, and you’re welcome to build your own since Qumsiyeh has made his Linear Book Scanner open source . More »
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Open Source Book Scanner Uses a Household Vacuum To Turn the Page
Following a similar service from Dominoe’s Pizza, GrubHub has a new feature called “Track Your Grub.” As the name implies, you’ll now be able to track your order every step of the way. More »
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Impatient Lazy People Can Now Track the Progress of Their GrubHub Orders
The glassfrog couldn’t be more aptly named. After all, his entire underbelly is translucent like glass. Amazingly, that’s not the only unique thing about these beautiful creatures. They’re also one of the handful of critters where the father actually handles all aspects of parental care. “Females flee as soon as they have delivered the eggs. Then males stay during weeks in close proximity of the egg clutch, improving its survival probability by maintaining it wet and, sometimes, scaring away predators,” says evolutionary biologist Juan Manuel Guayasamin. As a result, the males are also highly aggressive with one another, often fighting for hours. Link
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Who Needs to Dissect Frogs When You Can See Right Through Them?
Back in 2010, neuroscientists confirmed that it was possible to communicate with some patients locked in a vegetative state by using an fMRI scanner . Though limited, the breakthrough suggested that more meaningful dialogue with patients in a coma could someday be possible. And now, two years later, it has finally happened. A Canadian man in a vegetative state has used his thoughts to tell scientists that he is not in any pain, marking the first time a patient in such a condition has relayed information relevant to their care. More »
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Man in coma uses his thoughts to tell doctors, ‘I’m not in pain’
Most have been so excited to get their discs open they haven’t been noticing, but Engadget have spotted something weird on the Wii U’s proprietary disc format: the discs’ edges are rounded. More »
mask.of.sanity writes “Hardcoded usernames and passwords have been discovered in a recent line of Telstra broadband routers that allow attackers access to customer networks. The flaws meant customer unique passwords could be bypassed to access the device administrative console and LAN.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Australia's Biggest Telco Sold Routers With Hardcoded Passwords
Zooming in on the map, the Web giant introduces a new tool for its crowd-sourced mapping app that lets users share and learn more information about their neighborhoods. [Read more]
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Google Map Maker goes hyper-local with Activity Stream
Keyboards continue their slow march to domination, overthrowing pens and pencils in schools across the nation. [Read more]
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Curtains for cursive? Typing replaces handwriting in schools
Evolutionary theory teaches us that life never remains the same. It is constantly changing and adapting. So what might be the next stages in the evolution of humanity and our planet? Here are 20 books, both fiction and nonfiction, that try to answer that question. More »
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20 Essential Books About the Next Step in Human Evolution
theodp writes “Online education has had a fifty-year road to ‘overnight’ success. MIT Technology Review calls the emergence of free online education, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years. ‘If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years,’ writes Antonio Regalado, ‘you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on. Now answer this one: what’s been the single biggest innovation in education? Don’t worry if you come up blank. You’re supposed to.’ Writing about MOOC Mania in the Communications of the ACM, Moshe Y. Vardi worries that ‘the enormous buzz about MOOCs is not due to the technology’s intrinsic educational value, but due to the seductive possibilities of lower costs.’ And in MOOCs Will Eat Academia, Vivek Haldar writes, ‘MOOCs will almost certainly hollow out the teaching component of universities as it stands today…But all is not lost, because the other thing universities do is research, and that is arguably as important, if not more, than teaching.’ So, are MOOCs the best thing since sliced bread, or merely the second coming of 1920s Postal Course Mania?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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MOOC Mania