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The world's first commercially available bionic hand has been recognised as one of the top inventions of 2008. The i-limb hand, created by Livingston company Touch Bionics, was named alongside the Super Hadron Collider in Time magazine's top 50 innovations. The hand took 20 years to develop and has five separately working fingers. This makes it more versatile than previous hands, which have often been hook-like and limited to simple opening and closing movements. The i-limb has a much wider range of capabilities. It has a credit-card grip, for taking hold of narrow objects, and a power hold for larger objects such as mugs.

Welcome to the interactive version of my timeline on the history of information and media. Since publication of a relatively brief static version in my 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet, this timeline has been a work in progress, and as it has grown so has its scope. Reflecting the greatly increased scope of the timeline, I decided to rename it From Cave Paintings to the Internet.

The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a remote access service that allows you to reserve a computer with a desired set of applications for yourself, and remotely access it over the Internet. You can use all your favorite applications such as Matlab, Maple, SAS, Solidworks, and many others. Linux, Solaris and numerous Windows environments are now available to all NC State students and faculty

DataDepot is a set of tools for collaboratively uploading, sharing, and analyzing data. You can use DataDepot to track personal data, to explore public data, and to engage with scientific data. Want to 'datablog' your running miles or your commute times or your grocery spending? DataDepot provides a simple way to track any type of data over time. You can add data via the web or your phone, then annotate, view, analyze, and add related content to your data.

Collection of new interaction devices

Collection of new interaction devices

My jaw hit the floor tonight watching a 60 Minutes segment on the emerging neuroscience of brain-only computer interfaces. In the clip (included in full below), see how a completely paralyzed man, who could otherwise only communicate by moving his eyes, uses his mind to type out thoughts on a computer screen.

Collect information online: from online surveys to job applications. See results as your forms are filled out. Get reports and detailed statistics about your data.

While we've been working to offer captions in as many different languages as possible, there are often only a few translated versions available. To solve this problem, we added a new "auto translate" feature. Google Translate adds real-time machine translation to any caption tracks you upload. Now you can enjoy this video spoken in Italian, even if you don't understand Italian.

The Openlife Grid is a pioneering virtual world all about it's citizens. It's a place to get together meet friends & make new ones, share a virtual cup of coffee or join the crowd & the music in a happenning 'hotspot'. Content in world is created by Openlife Citizens, this is the 'created by users, for users' concept. As a citizen you can take up residence with virtual land as a 'region' or island or join another users. Use your virtual land to support your virtual life, invite your friends over, create a hotspot, hold an event or meeting, or just show off your 3D Skills to other users. All you need is to register & create an avatar free and we'll give you the 'viewer' to connect in world. Your journey could begin in just a few minutes!

The idea behind iTrail is that you should be able to use your phone to track your performance whilst you are out doing physical things, running, cycling, hiking or skiing. Using iTrail you can record the trail you follow, and then plot it on a map. You can record how fast, how far and how high you went and then plot them on a graph. You store many trails and compare you performance between them. iTrail is an application that uses the on-board location-aware facilities on your iPhone or iPhone 3G. iTrail works best on the iPhone 3G as this has a proper built in GPS chip, which can record your location frequently and extremely acurately. Whilst iTrail works on the first generation iPhone, the information it will give will be necessarily inaccurate, this is because it determines location based on the location of the cell tower you are nearest, and these are widely seperated. iTrail will not work on an iPod touch however as this has no location aware facilities.

This dashboard displays the last week of health status for selected remote computing services. This view is dynamic. For services with recent outages, a health bar is shown. Given no recent outages in a provider's services, key indicator charts are shown. Click a Service in the left panel for detailed service health status, metrics, and more history.

eMarketer estimates there will be over 63 million location-based service users worldwide this year, and 486 million in 2012.

Resources collected by Karen Montgomery on cell phones in learning

From local business listings to stock quotes, you can get the information you're looking for with Google SMS.

have a new idea which I think is far more realistic and also a lot more interesting than these. One of the key elements of Twitter that the two ideas above don’t take into account is the real-time nature of Twitter. We’re all familiar with stories told in real-time or near real-time like the TV show 24. Why not try this on Twitter? Of course the core of the story would be text, but Twitter easily supports pictures, taken on cellphones for instance, that can be published instantly. Video could be done in a similar way if desired.

have a new idea which I think is far more realistic and also a lot more interesting than these. One of the key elements of Twitter that the two ideas above don’t take into account is the real-time nature of Twitter. We’re all familiar with stories told in

Stuff's just beginning to trickle in reflecting on our Halloween reenactment of The War of the Worlds on Twitter. Here are some links to what we've found so far.

Swedish researchers from Umeå University, together with Jiong Sun from Ericsson Research, are working on a new technology that could send in-game info via cell phone vibrations. Phones should be somehow synchronized with the ball the game is actually played with. This can be done via video, since there are lots of TV cameras that constantly follow the ball’s movement on the field. So, whenever someone kicks the ball, your phone should vibrate. The vibrations should be of different frequencies and lengths, according to the area where the ball is located. If it’s in midfield, for example, the phone should produce a weak, short-time vibration. When someone scores a goal, the vibration could be long and more powerful.

Swedish researchers from Umeå University, together with Jiong Sun from Ericsson Research, are working on a new technology that could send in-game info via cell phone vibrations. Phones should be somehow synchronized with the ball the game is actually pla

Microsoft announced this morning at its PDC conference that the next release of Microsoft Office will include browser-based versions of some of its main office software products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be "lightweight versions", but Microsoft told us yesterday that they'll still have rich functionality and will be comparable to Google's suite of online office applications. The apps will enable users to create, edit and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents through the browser. The apps will work in IE, Firefox and Safari browsers (no word on whether Google Chrome will be supported).

Myrl is a social gateway for virtual worlds that allows you to share your virtual life on the web. Discover, browse and play across multiple worlds with Myrl.

This site helps you search for errors that other people have encountered. Someone's bound to have run into your error before, right? bug.gd was the first crowd-sourcing community created by Miracle Labs. ErrorHelp.com is the corporate version designed to allow employees to work together over time to solve error messages. The goal is to save precious IT dollars by allowing employees to work together.

What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing -- a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Comsumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education.

After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.

In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks.

There is no official standard for what makes something “Web 2.0”, but there certainly are a few tell-tale signs. These new sites usually feature modern web technologies like Ajax and often have something to do with building online communities. But even more characteristic among these brands is their appearance. Web 2.0 sites nearly always feel open and friendly and often use small chunks of large type. The colors are bright and cheery — lots of blue, orange, and what we jokingly call the Official Color of Web 2.0: lime green. You can see some of these striking commonalities in Ludwig Gatzke’s compilation of nearly 400 Web 2.0 logos. Read on for a breakdown of the fonts used in a few of our favorite brands.

A basic truth of the creative process is that ideas are new combinations of existing elements. So, success comes from continually putting a high volume of high quality “stuff” inside our box, and practicing identifying, breaking and creating patterns between those things. That's what allows us to create new combinations. In a nutshell: Nothing in = nothing out. Thus, "THINK INSIDE THE BOX." It's a metaphor for the creative process, the theme of my presentations and the focus of my blog. This site is the place to learn more about all three.

Rives -- star of the Bravo special "Ironic Iconic America" -- tells a typographical fairy tale that's short and bittersweet.

In addition to our first significant peek at Windows 7, Microsoft also announced at PDC today that the next version of Office will see core components of the suite translated into web-based, hosted counterparts. Featuring healthy doses of integration and collaboration with desktop Office suites and Windows Mobile handsets, Microsoft is finally answering the call to cloud productivity. Related Stories * Love letters from Microsoft Five Office components—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote—will gain "lightweight" web-based components with the yet-to-be-determined arrival of Office 14.