Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

Those who remember the television show, Mission Impossible, with its self-destructing messages may appreciate Vanish - a new software tool still in development at University of Washington. In essence, it creates a shelf-life for e-mail and other forms of digital data, by assigning it a deletion time frame. Thus, it helps with the problem of internet data living indefinitely. Vanish can be downloaded while it is still in its development phase. To download and/or review licensing terms of use, go to http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/index.html

Want to expand your horizons? The Library of Congress has a number of podcasts available. The topics vary from interviews with popular authors from the 2009 National Book Festival to Slave Narratives, “oral histories and interviews with African Americans who endured the hardships of slavery,” to a series on Music and the Brain. There are also links to webcasts from the library and motion pictures and sound recordings from the American Memory Project. To find out more go to: http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/

Penn State has created a new Scientific Search Engine call CiteSeerX. The beta version was released earlier this summer, and it can be used to search scientific literature including: algorithms, data, meta data, services, techniques, software, and even tables. With more than a million journal articles and other scholarly works, this resource, developed by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences & Technology (ITS), is accessible to anyone. It is funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, NASA, as well as ITS. To access click on CiteSeerX or the link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Planning on visiting a museum this summer or would you like to see one virtually? Download a podcast tour to your iPod from home and whet your appetite for the upcoming excursion.

Many museums offer virtual tours - such at the Louvre at http://www.louvre.fr/llv/musee . The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History also offers a vitual tour at http://www.mnh.si.edu/panoramas/ .

However, Apple offers free podcasts of a variety of museums. To view the complete list, click on the link http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipodtours/ and then select The Museum Room.

According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project study from April 2009 56% of adult Americans have accessed the internet by wireless means, such as using a laptop, mobile device, game console, or MP3 player. The most prevalent way people get online using a wireless network is with a laptop computer; 39% of adults have done this. For more information you can find their report at http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/12-Wireless-Internet-Use.aspx

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine and this one is worth checking out. Specializing in Health, Shopping, Travel, Local Information and Images, it contains many innovations. One outstanding feature is the presentation of the search results. The left column offers related search suggestions as well as search history. The center area is reserved for search results. The innovative feature here is the mouse roll-over for additional information. By rolling the mouse over a search result, an orange dot appears. Roll over this orange dot to view text from the suggested webpage; this provides users more information before having to actually select the page. A tour in the Look Before You Leap section demonstrates how easy Bing makes comparison shopping. The demonstration I viewed focused on cars, listing car facts – price, MPG, reviews, and safety ratings.

Additionally, it is one of the first search engines to index twitter postings. A fun element of the home page is its dazzling image of a location from around the world. The image changes daily and it contains several information points regarding the setting. Simply roll-over one of these points with the mouse to learn more about the displayed location.

To try out Bing, click on the following: www.bing.com or click on the Bing image above.

It seems like at least once a week, someone tells me about another new internet tool I should be using. Since there’s never really been an easy way to keep track of all these nifty tools, I always felt left behind, a victim of “technoshame” (and sometimes even “technophobia). I thought this would just be something I’d have to deal with throughout my career. But now, an answer has appeared in the guise of a nifty-looking website called Go 2 Web 2.0.

This website lets you browse the whole gamut of web 2.0 applications using a convenient search structure. For example, are you interested in online social communities for sharing news? Click on the “news” tag, then click on “social”, and then “communities”. Three sites are listed, and you can click on each for a description before visiting!

Thanks to Go2Web2.0, I’ve dodged past that old foe technoshame. Now I’ll have to watch out for technolust (trying to use more tools than I can realistically manage)!

All the best,
Pete | Reference and Instruction Librarian | tpeterr@psu.edu

Google Squared is a search tool which presents analogous results in a square or spreadsheet format. Users can update results by entering their own customized columns or rows. This is an easy way to review search results if a user were, for example, interested in comparing cell phones. Google Squared displays rows of various brand names with columns for image, description, price, etc. Users can customize the results by adding or deleting rows and/or columns. Results can be saved by signing in. However, registration is not necessary to use this search engine.
http://www.google.com/squared

Have you ever just wanted a quick overview of a topic of the day?
Addict-O-Matic is a website which provides a simultaneous search of the top results from the latest news, blog and information sites for your specific topic. This is the easiest, fastest and most convenient way to keep informed of the latest buzz. Users can run one search on any topic and instantly read the top results from Live.com News, GoogleBlog, Digg, Twitter, You Tube, Flicker, Friendfeed, Delicious, Ask.com, Bloglines, Truveo, and Technorati, to name a few. This page can be customized for news, politics, entertainment or a variety of other areas. Users do not need to register to use the preset options; simply enter a topic, for example, “Iranian Election” and view results. To try out Addict-O-Matic, click on the link http://addictomatic.com

Management students may be interested in the latest way to promote a company - virtually with cell phone applications. “Sell the Apps, then sell your company”, according to Jenna Wortham, technology writer for the New York Times. Wortham contends when a company offers a phone application in Apple’s iStore, it is tapping into a fan base of millions of users. This is a fast way for a company to break into the virtual market. This is so lucrative other mobile phone companies are expanding into Apps for their cell phones operating systems. To read more about cell phone applications and their marketing capabilities click on the link, Apps are Booming: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/08/technology/start-ups/08phone.html

There’s no limit to what students can do if challenged. In a quest to study the Earth’s stratosphere, four Spanish high school students and their science teacher captured this image of space (and others) with a $100 camera and a balloon. Making all their own weather equipment, they attached it and a camera to a helium balloon. The balloon traveled 20 miles above Earth before it began to descend. The equipment was recovered approximately 6 miles from the release site. The weather sensors and photo card were recovered. To read the full story click on the following link http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005022/Teens-capture-images-of-space-with-56-camera-and-balloon.html .
To see additional photos, click on the highlighted word photograph within the text of the story or click on the following link
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meteotek08/sets/ .

According the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life project “some 39% of Americans have positive and improving attitudes about their mobile communication devices, which in turn draws them further into engagement with digital resources – on both wireless and wireline platforms.” More information about these trends can be found at http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/5-The-Mobile-Difference–Typology.aspx

Penn State Researcher & Electrical Engineering Professor, Craig Grimes, leads a team which is working on a device that converts carbon dioxide into methane using water vapor and sunlight. Methane or natural gas is a common fuel. By converting carbon dioxide into methane at unprecedented rates, this sun-powered machine has the potential of reducing our carbon footprint (a contributor to global warming) as well as creating fuel. A provisional patent on this work has been filed. For more details read Penn State Live – Sunlight turn carbon dioxide to Methane at http://live.psu.edu/story/38108 .

The website All About Explorers is a different kind of web-tool for teachers. This site appears to provide credible information for elementary school students about explorers through the ages. However, there are intentional fabrications to teach kids about the importance of verifying internet sources. For example, there is a reference to Columbus discovering America which also describes how excited the Indians were to see him since he brought them computers and cell phones. Through the use of All About Explorers, students learn the necessity of finding multiple sources of information to confirm accuracy. The website provides lesson ideas for teachers and can be found at http://allaboutexplorers.com/.

The Pew Internet project has released a report on the use of Twitter by adult. According to the report “nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter.” For more information you can go to the report at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/276/report_display.asp