h/t Laura via Jon

h/t Jon Becker

Pretty interesting example of public undergrad research writing about the impact of depleted uranium in Iraq and Kuwait.

"So give me an A-, because my dreams overshot my constraints, and my vision for the final project didn’t come in on time. But I came to class prepared for every discussion, and led it in fact. I read every assigned reading, and listened to the commentary of my classmates. I did the blogs that were required, and I wrote every paper on time and with gusto. I stopped wasting my time and I stopped wasting the classes time, of which I am also proud. And I opened myself to the possibility that I am wrong sometimes, which unbelievably only took me 22 years. I want an A, and I believe I just explained why I deserve as much. But I realize only after having done the work required to become an A thinker how little an A really means to me, and how much better I feel knowing that."

This might come in handy.

I really liked this post.

On the function side, Google intends to make the news as balanced and objective as possible with options including comparisons of the same story from multiple, competing news sources, news only from eyewitnesses, and a graphic coverage timeline to track the progress of reporting as well as the events of the story.

" And here is what those 6,341,973,478 tweets look like on a map, at any scale you want."

"Meet Diigo Outliner - the best way to structurally organize your information and thoughts "

"Traditional artworks like paintings, photographs, or films can be reproduced by conventional media like printing or video. This makes visitors of museums possible to purchase postcards, posters, books, and DVDs of pictures and/or movies shown at the exhibition. However, newly developing arts so called interactive art, or new media art, has not been able to be reproduced due to limitation of functionalities of the conventional media. In this article, the authors report a novel approach of sharing such interactive art outside the exhibition, so that the visitors of the museum can take a copy to home, and even share it with non-visitors. The authors build up their new projector-and-camera (ProCam) based interactive artwork for exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) by using Apple's iPhone. The exactly same software driving this artwork was downloadable from Apple's App Store -- thus all visitors or even non-visitors could enjoy the same experience at home or wherever they like. "

Some additional tricks beyond the standard oembed

60 second adventures in thought from The Open University.

"My friend had filled the day. He was busy. But the things that made him busy were the result of his own decisions. He didn't lack the time to read. He was simply choosing not to. Throughout the day, we face a number of decision points about how to spend time. Too often we approach these decisions passively, as if our hand were being forced, our free will compromised. Let me add one caveat: if you have young children, a brutal commute or juggle several jobs to make ends meet, you are exempt from everything I write in this piece. You are truly busy."

"Hi, my name is Nikolaj Cyon and I am an artist from Sweden who has worked with precolonial Africa as a theme in my art for over a year. I have, as a mind experiment, made a map of what Africa could have looked like in the mid 19th century if Europe had never  become a colonizing world power. In order to do this I have tried to construct an alternative historical time-line in which Europe was much harder struck by the plague in the 1350's and never recovered. Therefore  African nations would have gotten the opportunity to flourish unhindered. "

An entirely different level of the super secret crush page "so, although it looks very simple (it begins with just three short sentences and a small logo), you can spend a lot of time clicking to expand the text out, further and further, each version you expose being by itself grammatical and meaningful but containing within it the possibility of more (more text, more information, more narrative). At the moment there are about 800 links you can click; it can expand from eight words to about 6,800. "