Category: Resources & Technology

Web Surfing Made Simple

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April 20, 2010

6:14 pm

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While surfing the Web I came across a website which makes focusing on your work all that much more difficult.

StumbleUpon is a website which leads you to other websites.

The webpages you stumble upon could range from Government Fact Sheets, National Geographic Images, YouTube Videos, Flash Games, News Articles, Blog posts, just about anything you can imagine.

My first result was a great set of images which help to scale galactic objects in comparison to one another… http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/9LspdV/www.rense.com/general72/size.htm

After that I stumbled on a game where you try to tranquilize sheep running from your herd. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1F2W83/www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/sheep/reaction_version5.swf

Then an extremely interesting video from YouTube. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1mWEMo/www.youtube.com/watch%253Fv%253DlUMf7FWGdCw

Lastly, a photo of Earth at Night from NASA. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2hI6DU/antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg

You do not need to sign-up in order to use this site, but for people who do a lot of surfing I would suggest making a free account. Account members can chose what kinds of websites they most frequently enjoy. As you are lead to a new site you can decide if you Like or Dislike the site. The more you rate websites the more likely you are to be lead to sites that you’ll enjoy.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Happy stumbling!

Wonderful Gmail Labs, pt. 1: Nested Labels

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April 15, 2010

7:55 pm

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Here is Part 1 of a series of posts I plan to do, in which I share about the latest and (in my opinion) greatest features available in Gmail through Gmail Labs.

(Image borrowed from the Gmail blog post about Nested Labels, linked in the body of this post)

To all the Gmail users on campus…

Ever wish you could organize your thousands of archived emails into folders, like most other email clients allow? Well, now you can. Or, at least, you can do the equivalent, with a new Gmail Lab called Nested Labels.

Nested Labels allows you to create custom labels and sub-labels (which can even be color-coded), where the parent label, as viewed by default to the left of your inbox, can be expanded and collapsed to reveal (or hide) the sub-labels within that parent label.

I find this incredibly useful, since it allows me to categorize my huge archive, thus making older emails easier to find. It takes a little bit of time to set up, since you’ll need to go back and categorize all of your old emails from the past, assigning custom labels to the emails you want easy access to. But, if this is something you’ve wished Gmail had (or if you’ve been using the folders4gmail browser extension as a work-around, like I was), check out the Gmail blog post, linked above, for instructions on how to get started with Nested Labels.

Free Rice

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March 9, 2010

7:42 pm

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What’s more fun than playing a game?

Free Rice

Playing a game that matters…

http://www.freerice.com/ is a multiple choice website which quizzes your general knowledge.

People spend hours wasting their time on games similar to this one, but the difference here is…

When you answer correctly on FreeRice.com a Sponsor pays for a donation of Rice to the UN World Food Programme.

The more you play, the more you get correct, the more rice gets donated.

According to FreeRice’s FAQ section, FreeRice has:

Fed 27,000 Myanmar refugees in Bangladesh.
Provided take-home rations of four kilograms of rice for two months to 13,500 pregnant and nursing women in Cambodia.
Fed 66,000 school children in Uganda for a week.
Fed over 108,000 Bhutanese refugees for three days in Nepal.
Fed 41,000 children for 8 days in Bhutan.
Fed 750,000 cyclone affected people for 3 days in Myanmar.

The website defaults to English Vocabulary words, but you can click on Subjects at the top of the page to change it to something more to your liking, such as: Famous Paintings, Chemistry, Geography, Mathematics, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.

If you are going to burn time on the internet doing something similar, why not do it here? I guarantee if you spend an hour at this website you’ll feel a lot better than you would if you spent an hour at another website.

www.freerice.com

Indie Magazines for Everyone

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March 2, 2010

8:54 pm

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Issuu

One of my favorite websites to kill some time on is Issuu.

Issuu is a website which allows you to “Publish yourself.”

I think it’s pretty cool that you can publish your own work on this website, but that is not the reason why I enjoy it so much.

Issuu has a large collection of magazines which are all free for you to peruse. The only difference is that these magazines are not the ones that you usually see at the grocery store.

Because Issuu is free to publish on, a lot of magazines which are not mass-produced and are uber-popular in America use it to increase their readership.

The magazines are mostly Independent, Student run, or from outside the U.S.A. The content of these magazines ranges from Poetry, Photography, Art, Graphic Design, Film Reviews, Popular Culture, just about everything…

Issuu is a great way to get your daily dose of culture and to read something a little different for a change.

Check it out at http://issuu.com.

Olympic Gold

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February 25, 2010

3:29 pm

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Image from the winter2010olympics.net/

The United States is still leading the medal count in the 2010 Winter Olympics.

View the vancouver2010.com medals’ table.

In Men’s Ice Hockey, Canada knocked out the Russian Federation yesterday and will be playing Slovakia in the Semi-Final Round tomorrow. The undefeated United States team also plays tomorrow against Finland.  I’m looking for a rematch of the United States and Canada in the Men’s Ice Hockey Gold Medal game, which is scheduled for 3:15 EST on Sunday, February 28. NBC will be broadcasting the game live.  The US beat Canada in the Preliminary Round so if they meet again, it’ll definitely be an exciting game!

In Women’s Ice Hockey, the United States faces off against Canada tonight at 6:30 EST. The game will be broadcast live on MSNBC. Canada has the home team advantage, but the US team is coached by Mark Johnson who played on the 1980 Miracle on Ice team. If you like ice hockey, you won’t want to miss this game.

Compare and Contrast

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February 22, 2010

10:43 pm

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About.com vs. Wikipedia

About.com is a free information resource tool which shares a few similarities to it’s widely popular colleague, Wikipedia.

Some of the similarities are that they are both free resources and they’re extremely easy to use… Another one is that they don’t look great when citing them in a research paper.

Wikipedia is undoubtedly the more popular resource and almost certainly has more articles in its collection.

However, the biggest difference between the two is the way articles are written.

As most everyone knows, Wikipedia uses “group intelligence” to compile what many consider to be highly accurate and extremely accessible information; whereas others consider it to be riddled with erroneous information, typos, and consider it poorly written.

About.com has each article written by a single author. The authors of the articles are known as About.com Guides. These Guides are hired by About.com solely to be their resident expert in a given field. At first glance About.com sounds like it has an advantage over Wikipedia in so much as it could provide more reliable information. However, not all of the About.com Guides live up to the standards that are required in Academe. Most guides are not scholars, they do not have a Ph.D., and haven’t dedicated their lives to their given field.

Many guides on the other hand are very well informed and highly trained, so another similarity between About.com and Wikipedia is that they are mixed bags. You could be getting high quality information from both, but by the next paragraph you can be reading something that simply isn’t true.

The fact is that you are going to get information from website such as About.com and Wikipedia (I do it too), but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from websites like these, depending on the accuracy of information that you need, it’s OK to read these articles.

The important thing is that you cross reference the information provided with a more reliable source (i.e. encyclopedia, handbook, reference manual, etc.).

Please know that I am not saying its OK to cite Wikipedia and About.com in your homework assignments (I am 100% against that), what I am saying is that it’s OK to check information resources like these, but you should always check more than one resource to make sure the information is accurate. Lastly, make sure those additional resources are highly reliable — those are the resources you can cite!

Curling

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February 21, 2010

4:09 pm

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Copied under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Curlingrock.jpg Author: Earl Andrew

The sport of curling dates back to 16th century Scotland. The object of this game is to slide a round stone over a stretch of ice toward a target circle. Players often use a “curl” (hence the sport’s name) to alter the stone’s trajectory. Teammates use a broom to sweep the ice ahead of the oncoming stone in order to facilitate a longer slide or to adjust the arc of the curl. Blocking and knocking out an opponent’s stones are important strategies of the sport.

Curling was added to the Winter Olympics in 1998. Currently leading the standings, Canada’s women’s team appears headed to the medal round after winning all five of the preliminary games played to date.

Take this quiz to find out how much do you know about curling.

2010 Winter Olympics

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February 18, 2010

4:08 pm

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Olympic rings

(This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Even if you’re not a sports fan, you probably have seen some of the 2010 Winter Olympics being held in Canada, specifically Vancouver, British Columbia. The United States is currently leading the medal race with 14, followed by Germany with 10, and France with 7. Last night I watched Shaun White win the Gold Medal in the Snowboard Men’s Halfpipe. WOW! His first run earned him 46.8 points (out of a possible 50).  No need to make a second run, but he did. Why? For some people, it’s not just about winning. Listen to what Shaun said after the run.

I’ll be posting about other events as the games continue.

Let me know which event is your favorite: [polldaddy poll=2721283]

Wolfram | Alpha

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February 14, 2010

9:58 pm

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By now Wolfram|Alpha might already be old news, but just in case you haven’t heard about it, you should really check it out…

Caffeine Vs. AspirinWolfram|Alpha is set-up to look like a Search Engine similar to Google, but it is actually a “computation machine.”

This resource is a good tool for finding statistics, socio-economic data, information on a date, figuring out equations, and has data on specific locations.

You’ll see on their Examples by Topic page that Wolfram|Alpha could be useful for the following Subjects — Math, Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Education, Sociology, Criminal Justice, Engineering, Geography, and a lot more.

Just to get a feel for it, I suggest plugging in your Birthday to see what you get, then try doing a comparison, for example: Scranton, PA vs. Philadelphia, PA.

I’m sure you’ll at least find it to be interesting. Those of you who work with numbers, facts, and data might find this “computation machine” to be downright awesome.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/