PSU TLT

"Hoping to give its users a more intimate way to stay in touch, Facebook on Wednesday introduced video chatting inside its online social network through a deal with Skype, the Internet calling service. "

Interesting partnership between two communication giants. Much of the rest of the article discusses this as a counter-attack on Google+. Honestly, this must have been in the works for a while, but it's also okay if it is true. When companies feel the need to innovate to stay competitive, users win.

story about release of new platform from one of david wiley's projects.

Example of online publishing as part of a grad program. 

This is crazy...one of the top developers (Valve) building an 'educational layer' on top of Portal 2's authoring environment specifically for education, likely physics education. Even crazier...Gabe wants the implementation ASSESSED! We already have a great relationship with Valve, being an early adopter of SourceU that runs our Steam installs. Anyone know science/physics profs we can approach for this? I plan on sifting through the Institute's database to see if we have any contacts that might want to play in this space.

apropos of shirky's talk, the story of a faculty member whose participation with wikipedia helped him to achieve tenure.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

Link to the panel discussion on DS106 Radio from Northern Voice.