Student Video Contest

Herman Miller (furniture) has a student video contest to answer the question "What Makes Your Campus Green." I'd sure love one of our student assistants to win one of the cash prizes --$2,500 for first prize! You have till April 6.

Technology in the Classroom

Do you remember studying Shakespeare in school? I do. Tons of reading and tons and tons of papers! Classrooms today are taking a very different approach. In Arizona one seventh grade teacher is making her students use A LOT of technology to learn. They work on laptops in the classroom making blogs and even facebook pages from the perspective of one of the characters. They also picked a Kanye West song to express the emotions of one of the characters. The teacher affirms that this type of learning will be very productive and successful. The school district support technology in the class room has spent $33 MILLION dollars on these new technologies and as a result reading and math scores have improved since 2005, when they started using technology in classrooms.

2012 World Press Photo

Here's the winners of the 2012 World Press Photo competition. The organization holds a yearly juried contest for photographs taken by press photographers, such as photographers working for AP or Getty images. A lot of the photos really express the humanity behind the news stories we've all heard about in the past year. For example, there's a mother holding her wounded son in a mosque during the protests in Yemen. But this photo is my favorite for aesthetic reasons is this one, shot underwater.

Impressive Halloween Costume

I know that Halloween is still 8+ months away, but it's never too early to start thinking about your costume and I came across this gem and couldn't help but share it.

Tyler Card of Grand Rapids, Michigan made this fully functional Nikon D3 DSRL Camera costume from cardboard, a paint bucket, plexiglass, a laptop screen, strobe light, and an actual camera (along with I'm sure some more advanced technological savvy). Here's a video of its basic functionality, and he also features a "making of" video on Vimeo.

Fully Functional Camera Costume from Tyler Card on Vimeo.

So who's making the T2i Rebel for Halloween this year?

Robert Adams' Photographty Exhibit

Hello, all photographers and web designers! It's always a treat to find a web portfolio that really "works."

So, if you're not familiar with Robert Adams' work, I highly recommend a visit to his exhibition page at the Yale University Website.

Robert Adams (http://artgallery.yale.edu/adams/)

What we encounter is a very skillful combination of minimalist design and just enough coding tricks to draw us into Adams' photography and the accompanying stories. Notice how all but one thumbnail fades on a "mouseover"? Personally, these details do much to draw me into Adams' world, but they don't do so much that they distract from his actual photography. How else does this site's design and usability "succeed" in this way?

Google's Privacy Changes

Google announced mid-January that it is going to start combing nearly all of the information it has on its users, under a new privacy policy. The new policy will become effective March 1.

 Under the new policy if you use services such as Gmail, Google Plus, and Yahoo, Google will be able to take your information from one and combine it with information from another. This could mean that you'll search for something on Google and see ads for a subject you've just been discussing with a friend over email. It could also allow Google to notify you that you are late for a meeting, because it is able to get your location from your phone and can see an appointment scheduled on your calendar.

Google has depicted the switch as an improvement that will make its privacy policies easier to understand and help deliver more helpful information to users. However the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) contends that Google's new policies will violate restrictions imposed in an agreement reached with the FTC last year. The EPIC filed a lawsuit Wednesday stating that the agreement gives the FTC the power to stop Google from implementing the planned privacy change.

This article discusses the lawsuit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/epic-ftc-google-privacy_n_1263844.html?ref=technology

 This article discusses what the privacy policy changes mean for users: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/01/25/what-do-googles-privacy-changes-mean-for-you/

"Why Your MP3s Sound Bad: High-Resolution Audio Explained"

PC Magazine recently came out with an article titled "Why Your MP3s Sound Bad: High-Resolution Audio Explained." It's an informative read on digital audio, file formats, and what you can do to get a better audio experience.