Collection History The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s. Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 55,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Maps are uniquely suited to high-resolution scanning because of the large amount of detailed information they contain. With Luna Imaging's Insight® software, the maps are experienced in a revolutionary way. about the technology Insight client/server and browser software by Luna Imaging, Inc.
Google Académico Expands xConsortium to Asia and Doubles in Size with Addition of 15 New Global Institutions EdX Expands xConsortium to Asia and Doubles in Size with Addition of 15 New Global Institutions CAMBRIDGE, MA – May 21, 2013 – EdX , the not-for-profit online learning initiative composed of the leading global institutions of the xConsortium, today announced another doubling of its university membership with the addition of its first Asian institutions and further expansion in the Ivy League. The xConsortium is gaining 15 prestigious higher education institutions, bringing its total to 27, including Tsinghua University and Peking University in China, The University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in Hong Kong, Kyoto University in Japan, and Seoul National University in South Korea, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The expansion reflects edX’s rapidly growing global student body and supports its vision of transforming education by bringing the power of learning to all regardless of location or social status. Asia – Australia - Europe - United States -
Res Obscura The Science of "Chunking," Working Memory, and How Pattern Recognition Fuels Creativity by Maria Popova “Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view… We are forced to contemplate a new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.” It seems to be the season for fascinating meditations on consciousness, exploring such questions as what happens while we sleep, how complex cognition evolved, and why the world exists. Joining them and prior explorations of what it means to be human is The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (public library) by Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and our entire experience of life. To illustrate the power of chunking, Bor gives an astounding example of how one man was able to use this mental mechanism in greatly expanding the capacity of his working memory. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Discussion Forums - Tamgas or not? Extraneous motifs on weavings Posted by James Blanchard on 03-30-2006 12:44 PM: Yomut mafrash - eagle symbol? Hi all, I recently picked up this Yomut mafrash in a small shop in a bazaar in New Delhi. I was initially drawn to its colours -- nice rose-red field, "royal" blue, teal blue and a saturated aubergine. I was initially put off by some red staining of the white, though on closer inspection I think that some of that (especially highlights in some of the light elements of the kepse guls) is actually a light rose, not a stained white. In the end I decided to get it partly because it still has a back and therefore retains some appeal for me as a "utilitarian" piece (and the price was now very good for me, about 18 months after I first saw it). Structure: symmetric knotting (approx. 8h x 18v = 144 kpsi), warp looks mostly like fine, dark goat hair, with some lighter hair mixed in. James. Posted by James Blanchard on 03-31-2006 03:15 AM: One more thing... Posted by R. Hi James - Just my view. Regards, R. Hi James, Hi Chuck, Tim
Margaret Wertheim – The limits of physics Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two different categories of being. But there is another paradox in play. Physics itself is riven by the competing frameworks of quantum theory and general relativity, whose differing descriptions of our world eerily mirror the wave-particle tension. When it comes to the very big and the extremely small, physical reality appears to be not one thing, but two. Where quantum theory describes the subatomic realm as a domain of individual quanta, all jitterbug and jumps, general relativity depicts happenings on the cosmological scale as a stately waltz of smooth flowing space-time. Many physicists are Platonists, at least when they talk to outsiders about their field. Explore Aeon
The Great App.net Mistake | Gadget Lab Before the great gold rush of venture capital and public offerings, there was an idea that the Internet should not just change the world, but actively make it a better place. Profit and empowerment, the voices said, should coexist. This idealism seems increasingly quaint -- and to some extent, we pay for its death with things like the NSA's PRISM surveillance program -- but pockets of it remain. Change.org harkens back to a time when Internet services paid more than lip service to the notion of changing the world. So does Project Gutenberg. But those are merely the obvious examples. Conceived and launched a year ago, App.net is a platform for social applications, a place where users can log in and do a bunch of stuff all on one connected network. Maybe you've heard it called an elitist version of Twitter, where anyone willing to pony up the cash gets a private place to chat without being bothered by riff raff with @ signs. Imagine this.