New Vision for the Monograph
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/06/13
Now that we have the World Wide Web, a technology that puts digital content into the hands of everyone, academics and publishers are turning their attention (once again) to book platforms. One wonders why. But instances abound. This article profiles a tool called Topicgraph That "is part of a JSTOR project to take the digital scholarly monograph from a PDF to something more useful for researchers." Read their white paper (54 page PDF). More...

Sony’s New toio Wants to Inspire a Future Generation of Robotics Engineers
Johnny Strategy, Spoon & Tomago, 2017/06/12
According to this article, "Toio is the result of 5 years of research into developing a toy that’s simple enough for kids to use, but also sophisticated enough to create a figurative sandbox where kids can explore the inner-workings of robotics engineering." How simple. More...

The Silicon Valley method isn’t enough: A better way to build products
Phil Libin, LinkedIn, 2017/06/05
This is a launch announcement by former Evernote founder Phil Libin for All-Turtles, a company he described yesterday on TWiT as "a Netscape for artificial intelligence." More...

Google prepares publishers for the release of Chrome ad-blocking
Joe Mullin, Ars Technica, 2017/06/05
Joe Mullin writes, "At first glance, it's surprising that Google, the world's largest Web advertising company, would want to promote ad-blockers." More...

Facial recognition tech makes it official: There is no privacy anymore
Cate Lawrence, ReadWrite, 2017/06/02
This has actually been going on for a while, but now it is becoming commoditized and widespread: "electronic billboards in restaurants and shopping precincts that utilize advanced facial recognition techniques to not only provide personalized advertisements but also measure and record the consumer and their response." Of course the proprietors don't tell you that they're doing this, but sometimes their actions are exposed by accident. More...

Platform Capitalism in the Classroom
Ben Williamson, DMLcentral, 2017/06/01

According to this article, 'platform capitalism' is "a business model based on the extraction of value from connecting people into networks and mining their data. More...