The Cantor Art Museum at Stanford is hosting a new exhibit that is the result of a body of work designed and implemented by a host of medical experts. James Chang MD is the chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery and has long had an affinity for observing the hand conditions he often treated in sculpture by Rodin. In this project, the bronze hands were scanned and the internal structures superimposed digitally, which are then viewed by a museum patron with a smart phone or pad via an augmented reality application. This is a lovely example of the collapse between disciplines - medicine and art - that advances in imaging technology allows.

This website catalogs the growing trend of utilizing animated infographics to convey information. Not only is it becoming necessary to continuously filter the great amounts of data we experience into slick new ways of perceiving, a database that houses these new tools of perception becomes useful. Of particular interest to me is the combination of database with social media on vizualizing.org - the site hosts contests and challenges to better suss out interesting new designs in organizing information.

Tim Berners Lee answers questions from all comers on topics ranging from surveillance to kittens.

Write or Die is a browser based application that encourages the user to set goals when writing and achieve them, or else. The interface is relatively simple: the user defines how long they would like to write, the speed at which they intend to write, and the consequences for maintaining or dropping below these parameters. There are three basic modes: Reward, Stimulus, and Consequence. Reward mode displays positive reinforcement for completing your goals by displaying photos you happen to like in whatever frequency you think would best suit your Pavlovian response. Stimulus mode supplies nice, calming backgrounds and sounds as you maintain your words per minute, but if you drop below, they disappear. You can also include your own music, if you want the extra motivation to keep it playing. Finally, there is consequence mode. This mode punishes the user for dropping below quota by turning the screen bright, angry colors, emitting a horrible, grating tone, and finally slowly dissolving the vowels in your completed text. This mode isn't for the faint of heart. Supply your own corporal punishment! Good art hurts!

Zotero is a plugin for Firefox (or stand alone program for Safari and Chrome users) that integrates bookmarking, old-fashioned note taking, and utilities like bibme.org into a single, user friendly interface. A button imbedded in the corner of the browser saves a website into your Zotero catalog, and does its best to peel off all the available metadata and organize it into convenient, easy to see categories. It enables the user to organize sources with full notations and (very exciting) export them into a bibliography in whatever style you prefer. As an added bonus, it can also catalog media: .pdf, images, audio, video. Your library lives online, affording very easy access. Additionally, there is a group function in the case that research need be shared. This program is a very fine add-on to our more accident prone organic brains and beats the hell out of cocktail napkins and self-addressed emails full of cryptic links any day.

A comparison of the New York Times website between February 18, 1999 and January 15, 2014 reveals more than a few amusing differences: the older site includes "on the Web" in the title, the increasingly user driven results on the modern page (most emailed headlines, personalized weather reports, customized alerts), the search function on the old site buried halfway down the page, almost as an afterthought. Most telling, however, is the great focus on the digitized version of the paper in the modern incarnation. Specifically, there are ten unique buttons on the front page offering unlimited access to the site, with new and improved usability. The shift from paper to digital media is clear here. Sales of the physical paper are low, as more people choose to access media via personal devices. Naturally, when accessed from one of these devices, the site redirects the user to a mobile friendly version - a stark, pithy version perfect for the instant absorption of a few headlines. In this way, the 1999 version of the site foreshadowed the NY Times' decision on March 2008 to use the second and third pages of its physical copy for article abstracts, as Nicholas Carr points out in his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The front page is made up of only abstracts that lead to the longer, less efficient articles. The 2014 site has kept this standard, only now including user defined popularity in articles, as mentioned above. Overall, the trending is as would be expected - greater personalization, monetization of access, and interactivity (a few more imbedded videos). These changes speak to a larger shift in how the user access media - the decline of the paper copy and an old institution rallying to survive modernity.