The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)is requesting information on technology areas for the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses. A limiting factor to un-tethered augmented and/or mixed reality applications is the bulkiness, power consumption, cost, limited resolution, and limited field of view of head-mounted displays. DARPA seeks to leap beyond incremental, evolutionary enhancement of head-mounted display technologies to a see-through contact lens on which images can be displayed. This information might be command-and-control information, not unlike information provided to players of first-person, shooter-type video games or synthetic entities and effects in a live training environment.

Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University.

First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

attached photo by ANDREW WALLACE/TORONTO STAR

"To any thoughtful person, the Singularity idea, even if it seems wild, raises a gigantic, swirling cloud of profound and vital questions about humanity and the powerful technologies it is producing," ~Douglas Hofstadter, Singularity Summit at Stanford 2006

 Get your fill of AI via the 2007 Singularity Summit online [recorded at the summit in September].

Vassar College has recreated the Sistine Chapel in Second Life.

The Sistine Chapel was built in the 15th century and is decorated with frescoes by Michelangelo and other great painters of the Italian Renaissance.

In this Second Life recreation, the interior is depicted in great detail, while the exterior is an approximation. Unlike in the real-life chapel, here you can fly up to the top of a wall for a close inspection, look down at the inlaid floor, or even sit on a window ledge!

The lower tier of the chapel normally displays panels with painted draperies. On special occasions, these panels are covered with tapestries designed by Raphael. Here, you can click to show or hide the tapestries whenever you want.

From Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica—"the world's most powerful mathematical software system"—comes The Wolfram Demonstrations Project.  The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an "open-code resource that uses dynamic computation [i.e. Mathematica] to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art,  finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.” Although Wolfram's most recent version of his computational software (Mathematica 6) is  required to author, modify, and publish Demonstration source code,  web previews of the Demonstrations are available online.  Alternatively, the free Mathematica Player allows anyone (with or without Mathematica 6) to "download a live version with active controls.”

A Map of Online Communities and Related Points of Interest by Randall Munroe.

This site is intended to help students, collectors and researchers to better understand the Ukiyo-e technique. Photographs and video clips show demonstrations of the techniques by master printmaker Keiji Shinohara. These demonstrations are accompanied by traditional prints from the Davison Art Center collection at Wesleyan University, and contemporary prints by Keiji Shinohara.With its impressive depth of information, captivating visuals and easy navigation, the Ukiyo-E Techniques website highlights the level of collaboration that is required to produce these sorts of materials.

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use open source research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize and share the results of your research. It combines the best parts of older reference manager software such as EndNote with more "modern" features like sorting, tagging, advanced searches and more.

Open Context, a free, open-access online database resource for archaeology and related fields, is a highly-generalized tool that pools and integrates individual researcher datasets and museum collections. To help make sense of this widely varying body of material, we have developed a user folksonomy system. Individual users can add value to the pooled content by identifying and annotating items of interest using a tagging system. Open Context has a variety of demonstration datasets now available for exploration and testing. These include field archaeology contextual records and finds registers, geo-archaeological samples, and a variety of zooarchaeological analyses. Some projects have rich image collections and narrative material, and others are of primary interest for specialist comparative analyses. 

This website is home to an ongoing study of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) players. MMORPGs, or MMOs, are a video game genre that allow thousands of people to interact, compete, and collaborate in an online virtual environment. Over the past 6 years, more than 40,000 MMORPG players have participated in the project by completing surveys about their playing style, habits, and preferences. Various topics have been examined, from gender-related motivation factors to the effect of running an in-game guild on one’s real life experiences. The results of the research are available as reports sorted by topic.