This week we are installing a number of new technology-based exhibits for the Wonders of the Universe | Space Chase Gallery exhibition at Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee. One the exhibits we collaborated on includes a large-scale multitouch table that allows visitors to explore and learn about the Electromagnetic Spectrum in new ways. Taking advantage of a super-wide screen format, we’ve created a digital representation of the EM Spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays. Visitors can move images across the table to see how they are imaged in each waveform and access information about what they are seeing.
With a 100″ surface and an 86″ viewable area is it one of the largest contiguous multitouch tables yet developed. The screen has a 16 x 5 ratio aspect and a 2304 x 800 pixel, high-resolution screen. The table can support over 50 simultaneous touch points, allowing several people to interact with the table at the same time.
The exhibit displays a variety of celestial and terrestrial images in a variety of wavelengths. For example, NASA images of the sun and various nebula can be seen in all wavelengths.
In addition, common and iconic objects were photographed in a variety of wavelengths. For example, a birthday cake with lit candles, a toy robot, an alarm clock, and even a hand holding an iPhone are seen in visible, infrared, ultraviolet, and x-ray. The images that appear here along with high-resolution images of the 100″ table can be found on the Ideum Flickr site.
The custom software was developed with Adobe Flash and Ideum’s own GestureWorks framework, which allows Flash developers to easily develop their own custom multitouch applications. GestureWorks will be available for sale to other developers in early December. The table design is based on Ideum’s commercially available MT-50 multitouch table.
The Space Chase exhibition opens to the public on November 7th at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
… who have run a succesful and well-visited blog for a year now and
waxed lyrical about the Library’s collections in the areas of cataloguing and digitisation projects, new accessions, and new discoveries about existing items in the collections; bragged about the use of Library material in the media, news topics about the Library’s activities, and events and workshops going on at the Library or involving Library staff, or pontificated to the wider world about so many other areas of relevance to the Library and the History of Medicine that [they] can’t possibly list them all here.
That’s the spirit!
Nina Simon, best known for her awesome museum 2.0 blog, is visiting Medical Museion tomorrow to give a lunch seminar on her ideas on the participatory museum. Her visit fits very well into our current plans for engaging both the health sector and the public in re-organising the collections and permanent exhibitions — more about these plans in the next couple of weeks. If someone wants to attend, send Carsten a mail (holt@sund.ku.dk).
Here are some images from last month’s show with Phillip Warnell swallowing a pill camera in Medical Museion’s anatomical theatre:
See more images here (the event was originally announced here).
(thanks to Bente who published the images on our Danish blog the other day)
Big Copyright’s History of Anti-Innovation — Ars Technica has an interesting account of the movie studios, music companies, and other large content owners’ historical antipathy to new content delivery mechanisms. Some of the new technologies on the list: the player piano, the television, the .mp3 player, and the digital video recorder.
What the $%@! is Net Neutrality? — Confused about the “net neutrality” issue. The Public Knowledge website has a good intro video. Via @james3neal.
White House Switches to Drupal — The Obama administration has made the switch to Drupal, the open source content management system, for WhiteHouse.gov. Hat tip Rick Shenkman.
Laboratory equipment for rats or mice have begun to fascinate me more and more. Not in the way the rat guillotine was fascinating, but more in the way of how lab equipment can show so many things about biomedical practices, contexts and knowledge production.
The picture above is from an article in the October issue of The Scientist, which Thomas has referred me to, called ‘Lab Toys – How does cage enrichment affect rodents?’. It is a really interesting article (as he knew I would think) about, well, lab toys – and their consequences for lab practices.
For instance the article illustrates one of the aspects about the use of laboratory animals that you seldom think about: the everyday life in the lab where humans and animals interact. Rats, for example, are not only instrumentalized in an experimental setting but must also, like any other domesticated animals, be cared for and nurtured. And offered toys. As the article describes there is a growing interest and market for this special kind of lab equipment, combined with a growing concern about animal welfare both in public as well as in a biomedical research context.
Another often overlooked aspect (seen from the humanities, at least) about biomedical laboratories that the article shows, is the amount of creativity involved, not only in coming up with new experimental setups, but also in designing facilities for animals. Innovative lab workers apparently do a lot for the well being and the shaping of lab animals’ environment using simple things like cardboard or shreded paper.
The article also had some more critical points about lab toys.
In the 1940s, the famed neuropsychologist Donald Hebb decided to bring home one of his experimental rats, letting it run free in his house and play with his children. The increased variety in the animal’s environment compared to a small bare cage, he found, improved its ability to learn. Psychologists since then have examined the effect of environment on cognitive processes such as learning, fear and addiction.
This and other examples are given to illustrate the fact that the living conditions of lab animals — from materials used for nesting, gnawing or hiding, to temperature and access to other animals — affect their behaviour, stress level, immune system and physical condition. Wheels, gnawsticks and hiding places can therefore in a more or less subtle way influence the results of the experiments the animals are used in.
So if you want to know if your lab’s results are comparable to the results from other labs you have to take these aspects into account and maybe even standardize your lab animals’ living conditions (just like the standardized units, setups or even what you could call standardized mouse like the oncomouse that are used today). As the Dutch researcher Vera Baumans says in the ‘Lab Toys’ article: “The effects of different types of enrichment are often strain-specific and gender-specific, and are even sensitive to the statistical method used in any given study”.
Allthough this is only a relatively small part of the field of modern biomedicine, the living conditions of laboratory animals can, in this way, reflect many of the central aspects constituting the field. One important aspect shown in the lab toys discussion is the way medical sciences attempt to manage complexity by creating controlled lab settings.
But it also becomes clear that the laboratory is a setting for animal and human interaction beyond a simple ‘exploiting the animals’. It is a setting where you cannot separate lab practices from their political and social context — in this case in the form of regulations and concerns for animal welfare. And as the article ends by pointing out, the investment in animal welfare made by Pharma companies like Novo Nordisk can also have a positive effect on the image of these companies as moral entities.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any laboratory toys in the collections of Medical Museion, but they would definitely be items worthy of a museum exhibit. Imagine a rat toy and a rat guillotine next to each other to illustrate some of the paradoxes and themes in recent biomedicine. More lab toys on display, please!
I was very pleased to be invited, a month or so ago, to be a contributor to the Critical Code Studies blog (maintained by Mark C. Marino at USC). In fact, I was so pleased that I actually wrote something, which, although it probably diminishes the overall quality of the discussion considerably, nonetheless expresses my hope that just as literary studies began (according to one pataphysical genealogy) with belles-lettres, so critical code studies might have its own tradition of bit-lettristic writing.
I have a lot more to say on that subject, actually, but it will have to wait. I am so very, very far from inbox zero.
The essay is called, “Tim Toady Bicarbonate.”
Apparently Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr was a philosophy major. He got his BA in philosophy from the University of Victoria and an MA from Cambridge. Did philosophy make a difference? Hard to tell, but he gives a talk on How to Make a Fortune with your Liberal Arts Degree according to the Lavin Agency that represents him. The site quotes him to the effect, “You can always pick up how to figure out profit and loss, but it’s harder to pick up the other stuff on the fly.”
His co-founder and partner Caterina Fake, now working on Hunch, studied English and has a thoughtful blog here.
Just goes to show how useful the humanities are.
The Guardian online has a story about how novelist Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult. According to the story by Alison Flood (Monday 26th of October, 2009),
He said it was “the print that’s the problem, it’s the book, the object itself”. “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities,” he said.
I wonder if it true that screens take less concentration than books. I can believe it about television, but not about doing things on the screen like programming or even playing a console game. I can finish most books much faster and with less hard work than playing a console game (which may say something about my gaming skills.) Is it really the form of the object (screen vs book) or the content (typical TV show vs difficult novel)?
Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London.
The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and personal papers, films and photographs, forensic evidence and physical remains, etc. Speakers include Georgina Ferry (science writer), Julianne Simpson and Helen Wakely (Wellcome Library), Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons), Tim Boon (Science Museum), Paul Carter and Natalie Whistance (the National Archives) and Allan Jamieson (Forensic Institute).
The programme seems a bit unfocused, however — and the ‘researching lives’ theme a fairly loose umbrella for six talks that point in quite different directions. I mean, these are all smart and knowledgeable people and it would have been great if the organisers had created a meeting format that turned this mix of professional backgrounds into a sparkling discussion about the ‘researching lives’ issue, instead of letting them loose 40 minutes each on six different topics.
Anyway, I may be wrong — go and listen for yourself. Further details and a booking form are available from the website of the British Records Association.
The Material Culture of Mad Men — Via Steve Lubar, an intriguing interview with the prop master of Mad Men, a hit television drama set in early 1960s New York and acclaimed for its realism and attention to historical detail.
Enough Wave, Improve Google Docs — Google Wave may be all the rage among the trendy kids, but I agree that Google Should Stop Playing Around With Wave and spend its energy improving Google Docs … both for its own sake and ours.
Real Time Web Search is Here — You may have read that both Microsoft’s Bing and Google have reached agreements with Twitter to make user updates (”tweets”) searchable. (The Bing Twitter Search is live; Google’s effort is on the way.) The O’Reilly Radar blog has a good overview of why this is important news.
Utah State OpenCourseWare in Trouble — Budget cuts at Utah State have put the University’s OpenCourseWare program in jeopardy. Other outlets have reported the story as the “closing” of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare project. But the Univeristy’s OpenCourseWare website is still live, and just because the project has formally ended, the program doesn’t necessarily have to go away. It’s my hope at least that the site can remain up and running through central IT and faculty efforts, despite the project’s $120,000 annual budget line having been eliminated and its director having been let go.
Christopher Wink writes up some interesting thoughts on defining hyperlocal news:
hyperlocal news (n): information gathering about a geographically-specific community that is part or was once part of a broader coverage area or focus.
(to which Max continues to find distraction in the elements composed in the term - ‘hyper’ ‘local’ ‘news’). Christopher’s definition is somewhat limited in that it is relative (and subservient to) all the other media stuff. As it focuses on the news part, it is constrained to information gathering (though surely it would include the dissemination of that information as well). My own thinking on the topic has focused on the term ‘hyperlocal’ in general with the following thoughts:
Thus: Hyperlocal is [data, behaviours, technologies] supporting the business of being a resident in a community. In other words, I no longer think of hyperlocal in terms of news alone.
Open Access to AHA Directory Until End of October — The American Historical Association’s (AHA) Directory of History Departments and Organizations is now online and available to all until October 31, 2009. After the trial period, the full directory will be available to members and institutional subscribers. A limited version will remain available to the general public.
Museum in a Day — Mike Ellis and Dan Zambonini are trying to build a Museum In A Day. Follow their progress as they document the work of building a fully functional museum website in 12 hours. At press time, the two had collectively spent £6.39 and about an hour building the project. I’m happy to report that Omeka (along with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress MU) is still in the running to serve as the site’s content management platform.
Yesterday I received a letter from Google addressed to Robert T. Gunther at Found History (photo below). As founder of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, where I did my doctoral work, and a major figure in my dissertation, I am very honored to welcome Dr. Gunther to the Found History staff. Despite having passed away in 1940, it is my hope that Dr. Gunther will make significant contribution to this blog’s coverage of the history of scientific instrumentation.
For those who are really caught up in the on-going saga known as the Google Books Settlement (by far the best reality show now running) and the impact of book digitization on our culture in general, here are the links to Peter Hirtle’s extensive summaries of the D for Digitize conference at NY Law School, Institute for Information Law & Policy, October 8-10. And to full video of the conference.
Among the distinguished panelists were past MCN conference speakers Jonathan Band and Wendy Gordon
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2009/10/d-is-for-digitize-day-1.html
Full video of the conference is now also available:
Links are on our program page at: http://www.nyls.edu/centers/harlan_scholar_centers/institute_for_information_law_and_policy/events/d_is_for_digitize/program
