Zinken

Center for Art of East Asia leads project to create 3-D digital renderings of scrolls

Though much of the art they study dates back more than a thousand years, the faculty, staff and students associated with the Center for the Art of East Asia also are becoming adept at applying the latest technologies to their research.

Not only are they using scanning tools to create 3-D digital renderings of sixth-century Buddhist cave shrines, but they also have digitized handscroll paintings, which are too old and delicate to be viewed by hand—the way they were originally intended to be viewed. With just the click of a mouse, students studying East Asian art can view scrolls on a computer screen ... Chicago Chronicle

Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr

Yahoo has purchased online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after the Internet giant launched a beta test of a new blogging tool.

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things ... CNET News.com

Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage

InformationSage writes "According to Information Week, Firefox usage is now over 6 percent, pulling Internet Explorer usage down below 90 percent. 'Firefox is currently the only browser that is increasing market share on a monthly basis, and it is growing at the direct expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer'" ... Slashdot

Reference revolution

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales offers a whole new species of information online.

Inspired by the power of the web, Jimmy Wales co-founded the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia in early 2001. The reference tool takes advantage of Wiki technology, which allows Internet users to modify websites other than their own. As a result, they can change content and add entire new pages to the collaborative, multilingual project ... news @ nature.com

A Scottish interactive dig

Archaeologists working in Skye (Scotland) have secured funding to begin an innovative interactive project. Excavations of a cave at Kilbride in the south-west of Skye are turning up exciting finds, including bones, early Iron Age tools, evidence of cooking and even what is thought to be Bronze Age pottery. Most startling the archaeologists have found evidence that the floor of High Pasture Cave was laid with flagstones, suggesting that the cave was used for a specific purpose.

From March the team working at the project hope to launch Scotland’s first live archaeological website. This would allow people to see their work as it happens and learn more about their discoveries ... Stone Pages Archaeo News

Comparing traditional scientific journals and newer Open Access journals

Georgia Institute of Technology researcher will talk about the economic viability of new approach to academic publishing – Open Access – at the 2005 AAAS Annual Meeting. ... EurekAlert!

You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention

Potential distractions at the computer are ever present and enticing. So research is aiming at ways to keep you focused ... The New York Times

High Noon approaching for Google and academic publishers

Google is heading for a possible showdown with academic publishers according to an article in the latest issue of Nature. It seems that while Google has committed itself to putting the contents of the world's great academic libraries online, it has yet to get the agreement of the publishers of copyrighted works ... MacUser

Egyptology Blog

Mark Morgan's weblog concentrates on news in the world of Egyptology and ongoing research ... Egyptology Blog

Via About Archaeology

The Encyclopedia in Cyberspace

Wikipedia Makes Every Man an Editor.

Since the Internet’s early days, there has been much speculation over the future of the encyclopedia. For the most part, it seemed the boundless potential of the information revolution would largely improve the existing format—making encyclopedias more comprehensive, interactive, and accessible. But some of the more interesting advances in recent years have entailed enlarging not only the realm of information resources but the sphere of information producers ... The New Atlantis