Ohrstrom Blog » Technology

New Archives Online Exhibit: Places of Invention

Lisa Laughy — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:35:30 +0000

A new online exhibit, called Places of Invention: Science and Mathematics at St. Paul’s School, is now part of the Ohrstrom Library website. This online exhibit is based on a more in-depth Archives photograph exhibit now on display in the upper level of Ohrstrom Library. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the online exhibit:

With construction of the Lindsay Center for Mathematics and Science now well underway, it is fitting that the St. Paul’s School community reflects back upon the places that have served the study of science and mathematics so well throughout the School’s history.

Photos from the Archives were scanned specifically for the online exhibit including this image of a Biology classroom in the Westinghouse Lab:

The online exhibit features images ranging from the first science lab built on the St. Paul’s School grounds in 1889 to the architectural renderings of the Lindsay Center for Mathematics and Science, now under construction. The main gallery of thumbnail images includes links to individual pages that feature larger images and brief descriptions. There is also a slideshow of the images that can be initiated from any of the pages in the exhibit.

Take a few moments to browse through the gallery of images and follow the development of the places that have helped to facilitate the high standard of education in mathematics and science that has been a part of the St. Paul’s School vision from its very beginning.

Visit the online exhibit by clicking HERE.

Visit the full Archives exhibit in the upper level lobby of Ohrstrom Library.

New Reference Book: Springer Handbook of Robotics

Lura Sanborn — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:00:49 +0000

Springer Handbook of Robotics edited by Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib, Springer, 2008.

Find it in Ohrstrom at: REF 629.892 Si1S

A scientific guide to the principles and methods of designing and controlling robots. This ‘handbook’ is more like an encyclopedia, serving as a comprehensive guide to the fascinating field of robotics.

Read about:
•    Robot Structures
•    Sensing and Perception
•    Mobile and Distributed Robotics
•    Field and Service Robotics
•    Human-centered and Life-Like Robotics

Helpful for: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Robotics Tournament, Science, Engineering, Programming

World Collections Online: Expanding our Global Perspective

Lisa Laughy — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:51:57 +0000

Lura Sanborn – Reference Librarian

The World Digital Library is a partnership between UNESCO and the U.S. Library of Congress. The site aims to provide free access to digitized treasures currently housed in libraries, museums & other institutions around the world.

Search by keyword or browse using different methods including: place, time or topic.

Europeana is collaboration between dozens of European institutions including: museums, libraries, archives and galleries. Currently housing 4 million items, the project aims to have 10 million items online in 2010.

Search for James Bond, Descartes, hippos or Alice in Wonderland. Searches may be further narrowed by item type including: texts, images, videos and sounds.

Helpful for: Humanities III, Humanities IV, Humanities V, Religious Studies, Art, Science, books, Primary Sources

The Physics of . . .

Lisa Laughy — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:57:34 +0000

Lisa Laughy – Archives Assistant

. . . just about everything!

A new book display in the Baker Reading Room brings together over a dozen books from the Ohrstrom Library collection that share a common thread: They all have “The Physics of” as part of their titles. Beyond that connection it is a very diverse selection, covering topics that range from sports, music and sailing, to NASCAR, Star Trek, Superheros, and even James Bond movies.

Did you know that:

A baseball compresses from a round shape to an elliptical one when the bat-ball impact approaches 140 MPH?
When a hockey puck is tilted at a positive angle relative to the ice there is a lift force directed upward?
The idea behind the deflector shield on the Enterprise originated with the concept of a coherent gravitational field that creates a curvature of space?
Spiderman swinging on his web from building to building is a good illustration for the principle of conservation of energy?
Having the ideal tire slip angle on a NASCAR race car can mean the difference between spinning off the race track or speeding across the finish line?
The first watch camera was made in 1886, but James Bond’s ring camera worn in the film A View to a Kill is too small to actually function?

Come check out one of these interesting titles and find out some of the different ways that physics functions in your day-to-day world.

Periodical Picks: Earth Day 2009

FIRST Robotics “Lunacy” at SPS

Lisa Laughy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Lisa Laughy -Archives Assistant

The New Year brings a new first for some SPS students: FIRST Robotics. This will be the fifth year that the SPS team will compete in the Granite State Regional division of the national FIRST Robotics competition. Last year’s team finished 3rd out of 48 individual teams, and took second place in the three-team alliance portion of the competition (read a full article about last year’s competition on the SPS website HERE).

Team leader Terry Wardrop has this to say about the competition:

“The St. Paul’s School Metal Vidsters FIRST Robotics team has just started the 2009 competition. This year it is called Lunacy and involves creating a robot to solve a problem in an environment approximating that of the moon. They have done this by creating a low-friction playing surface – we need to create a robot that can shoot a mini-basketball at a moving target while driving on a surface that is as slippery as ice!”

This year’s competition brings a new set of challenges for the team. Each competing team receives a kit of parts and rules to the game their robot will compete in. It’s up to the individual teams to design the most efficient robot to succeed in the game arena. Take a look at this nifty clay animation video of the game rules for the 2009 competition:

Ohrstrom Library has a strong collection of books on robotics, including FIRST Robots: Rack ‘n Roll (629.892 W64). This book features profiles of 30 award-winning robot designs from the 2007 FIRST Robotics competition, and is itself a tribute to great design with a hidden magnetic closure and a mirror-like metallic finish on the page edges. Other books on robotics can be found on the shelf in the upper stacks, reference, and the DVD collection at 629.892.

Best of luck to the SPS Robotics team over the next few weeks as they build their robot for the upcoming competition.

Periodical Picks: The Science of CAPTCHAs

Lisa Laughy — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:34:48 +0000

Lisa Laughy - Archives Assistant

The September 12th issue of Science, recently out on the shelf in Ohrstrom Library’s periodical room, features a cover article about the combination of new tech and old books. Five researchers have tested the effectiveness of the CAPTCHA web security measure to pick up the slack in OCR book digitization. If you regularly browse the web, you have encountered a CAPTCHA – asking you to decipher a difficult to read section of text and type the letters into a box. Now researchers are finding a way to re-purpose your small efforts into something rather useful. Science describes the project:

“Millions of books written before the computer era are being digitized for preservation. Because the ink has faded, optical character recognition software cannot decipher many words. Through a repurposing of an existing online security technology called CAPTCHA, these words are being manually transcribed by millions of Web users.”

Here is the abstract from the published paper:

“CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are widespread security measures on the World Wide Web that prevent automated programs from abusing online services. They do so by asking humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet perform, such as deciphering distorted characters. Our research explored whether such human effort can be channeled into a useful purpose: helping to digitize old printed material by asking users to decipher scanned words from books that computerized optical character recognition failed to recognize. We showed that this method can transcribe text with a word accuracy exceeding 99%, matching the guarantee of professional human transcribers. Our apparatus is deployed in more than 40,000 Web sites and has transcribed over 440 million words.”

The article estimates that over 100 million CAPTCHAs are typed a day, amounting to hundreds of thousands of human hours. Taping into that resource to accomplish such a useful task as the digital preservation of old books is a fascinating prospect. Come into Ohrstrom Library’s periodical room and read the full text of the article in the September 12th issue of Science, starting on page 1465.

RSS: Feed For Thought

Lisa Laughy — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:30:12 +0000

Lisa Laughy - Archives Assistant

It is likely that many of you are already aware of the organizational bonus a feed reader provides, but for those of you who have never heard of RSS, XML or ATOM, you may be missing out on a convenience that could change the way you browse online.

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication, and is a way for websites like Ohrstrom Blog to syndicate online content. Subscribing to Ohrstrom Blog’s feed through a browser-based feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader lets you know when there is new content available, eliminating the need of having to visit the site. Subscribing to feeds from all of your favorite sites in a feed reader provides a kind of one-stop-shopping convenience for getting information online.

The image above is a screenshot of the Bloglines interface. Once you set up a free Bloglines (or one of the many other feed reader) account you can start tracking your favorite blogs and news sites. A RSS subscription can be added by clicking a feed link on a blog or website. Most sites use some form of this RSS icon to identify their feed, but there are a number of different ways to subscribe, including entering a web address directly into the feed reader. There are several subscription options available for Ohrstrom Blog included in the “Have a Chicklet” list in the sidebar on the left.

In Bloglines, your subscriptions are listed on the left side of the screen, and the title and synopsis of the new blog content is listed on the right. The RSS feed from Ohrstrom Blog contains images and the full text of the blog post. You can use your feed reader to scan the latest posts from Ohrstrom Blog, read the complete text, or click through to the actual entry in its fully formatted state on the Ohrstrom Blog. Other feed readers function in the same basic way, it is just a matter of personal preference which reader you use.

Find yourself a feed reader and then subscribe to the Ohrstrom Blog feed by clicking the “Subscribe” link in the header, or by using one of the chicklets in the sidebar list. Then you will have an easy time keeping an eye out for the upcoming posts on RSS and feed readers during the next few weeks.

For an extensive list of feed readers available click HERE.