The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader's google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries including:

* jQuery
* prototype
* script.aculo.us
* MooTools
* dojo

Google works directly with the key stake holders for each library effort and accept the latest stable versions as they are released. Once we host a release of a given library, we are committed to hosting that release indefinitely.

The AJAX Libraries API takes the pain out of developing mashups in JavaScript while using a collection of libraries. We take the pain out of hosting the libraries, correctly setting cache headers, staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes, etc.

AJAX Libraries API

Fast Interview: Earthmine co-founder John Ristevski talks about competing with Google and the first consumer applications for this space-age technology.

Just Around The Corner: The First 3D Map | Fast Company

Most 2D-maps are used to represent topographic metrics: distances and areas measured on the map (multiplied by the map scale) give traveling distances and land surfaces. In some cases, this information is irrelevant or even misleading [see an example]. As a cartographer, you may wish to use map metrics to represent other data, such as human populations or amounts of produced resources. This is what ScapeToad is for.

ScapeToad - cartogram software by the Choros laboratory

Freely available.

Excel .NetMap - Social Network Add-in for Excel 2007

Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write. Egyptian hieroglyphs go back to about 3200 BC, alphabetical writing to 1000 BC. According to scholars like Jack Goody, the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity. It transformed mankind's relation to the past and opened a way for the emergence of the book as a force in history.

The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll—became crucial to the spread of Christianity. It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs, and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader's aids.

The Library in the New Age

ImageMagick gets seam carving.

Just as Sampling an image resizes by directly removing or duplicating whole columns and rows from an image, the special IM operator "-liquid-rescale" also removes or duplicates columns and rows of pixels from an image to reduce/enlarge an image. The difference is that it tries to do so in a more intelegent manner.

First the instead of removing a simple line of pixels, it removes a 'seam' of pixels. That is the column (or row) that could zig-zag through the image, at angles up to 45 degrees.

Secondly it trys to remove seams that have the 'least importance' in terms of the images contents. How it selects this is in terms of the images energy, or more simply, the amount of color changes a particular 'seam' involves. The 'seam' with the least amount of changes will be removed first, followed by higher 'energy' seams, until the image is the size desired.

Resize or Scaling -- IM v6 Examples

Imagine a high-speed rail line that could get you from San Francisco to LA in 2 hours and 40 minutes.

California Building 220 MPH High-Speed Train from San Francisco to LA

Computer science research results in new technology that can outperform standard microprocessors up to 1,000 times.

Research Leads to Self-Improving Chips with Speed ‘Warping’

Let’s check our common-sense understanding of the word social. It’s mostly about people talking to one another. Sometimes it’s about dancing, bowling or doing other stuff with people.

This gets lost in the meaning-destroying repetition of the word by a bunch of Internet companies.

Steering Between Unsocial Networks and Social Spam

GPUs continue to evolve rapidly, but toward what?

Future Graphics Architectures