You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
If you haven’t already given it a whirl, plug a couple searches into Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine that launched today.
See what computations Wolfram Alpha can do with queries like these…
- green + yellow
- apple microsoft (and don’t overlook all the drop-down options under Fundamentals)
- 2 cups orange juice
- gene FASTKD2
- 0.4 molar sodium hydroxide
- derivative of x^4 sin x
Its goal is a lofty one:
To make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
Read examples of the myriad of computations possible already or watch a 13-minute introductory screencast.
This summer, as in summers past, several MLWGS teachers will be participating in educational seminars and workshops through the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and similar organizations. They’ll be as close as UVA and as far away as Cambridge, England.
I’ll update the map between now and June 13, but this initial draft already includes six teachers. Explore this Google Map to find out who will be where and what they’ll be learning about…
In response to student and teacher feedback, I’ve simplified and reorganized the menus on the library’s blog and moved some of the content to the library’s Research and Reading Wiki.
Highlights include…
- The link to the VCU Libraries page has moved to the top navigation menu.
- The link to the About page has moved to the left navigation menu.
- The links to search the MW Library’s online catalog have been renamed Catalog search (off-campus) and Catalog search (on-campus) and are still located on the left menu.
- Links to the MLWGS official school web site, PenDragon, and Jabberwock, have been consolidated on a MLWGS school links page.
- The following pages have been moved to the library’s Research and Reading Wiki: parent resources, teacher resources, research tips, and research tools.
If you have trouble finding anything, please stop by the library or email me.
Here are two web sites to help you stay current on what’s happening in Congress…
GovTrack.us (a civic project to track Congress) – This is not in the .gov domain, so it’s not an official government site; however, the site, a pet project of Joshua Tauberer, a UPENN grad with great personal enthusiasm for improving government transparency, repackages data from Thomas, the official Library of Congress web site for legislative information, in a user-friendly manner so that it’s easier to stay up-to-date on the latest action related to bills you care about. Here’s the page for S.797 – the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009 (mentioned yesterday in an NPR story).
MAPLight (Money and Congress: Illuminating the Connection) – In a similar way that GovTrack displays existing data in a more user-friendly way, MAPLight (a nonprofit whose largest contributor is the Sunlight Foundation) aggregates data from GovTrack and Open Secrets (Center for Responsive Politics). They also have a section for California politics. Here’s the page for H.R. 627 – the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act 2009.
Happy tracking!
