Fiacre O'Duinn

At universities across the country, you’ll find soda and snack vending machines in the hallways of higher learning. I wouldn’t doubt you might also find some machines selling beer. But, here’s something different: in the lobby of Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, they’ve got a vending machine that is one of the coolest things I’ve seen: it delivers creations, 3D printed ones.

It’s called the DreamVendor, a mysterious sounding name, which actually pretty accurately describes it. It’s a one-of-a-kind, interactive 3D printing station to enable Virginia Tech students to freely and quickly fabricate prototypes for their academic, and even personal, design projects.

I think this offers an excellent example of how 3D printing could be done at public libraries. Anyone want to take on the challenge?

(via 3D Printer)

Touché is a new sensing technology that proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction. This allows to significantly enhances touch interaction in a broad range of applications, from enhancing conventional touchscreens to designing interaction scenarios for unique use contexts and materials. For example, in our explorations we added complex touch and gesture sensitivity not only to computing devices and everyday objects, but also to the human body and liquids. Importantly, instrumenting objects and material with touch sensitivity is easy and straightforward: a single wire is sufficient to make objects and environments touch and gesture sensitive.

(via @genebecker)

• Manufacturing: The third industrial revolution : “The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital.”
• How To Be A De-Motivational Leader : “With all this talk of trying to motivate the people around you, I’m concerned that all we’ll do is create a bunch of overachievers. Overachieving is over-rated. In order to be fair and balanced, I think we need a good lesson in how to demotivate people. It’ll do their over-sized egos some good. Toughen up the masses. Besides, recent studies show that we’re spending WAY too much time trying to boost everyone’s self-esteem. So let’s step back a bit from the compliment and think more in line with containment.”
• A Girl In Publishing: “Costs Nothing To Produce.” Harumph : “So, of course, because I’m me, I take everything so very personally, I went around tweeting that Chabon essentially thinks my role, that of ebook person, is essentially worthless, that the value he sees in a publisher’s role is all dictated by the physical side of things, the “real” work — the editorial, the print production, the very paper machine that drums up his words for the masses, the boxes that get opened by long-suffering bookstore owners.”
• University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets : “The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.4 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.”
• Harvard Releases Big Data for Books : “Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries.”

There was one thing that all the speakers agreed upon at the debate – even if libraries are obsolete, librarians aren’t. Rather than dividing our time and effort on compensating for an inadequate educational system, or inequalities in the market place, we should free up our brilliant librarians to work within these organizations to make the institutions better. Why take amazing information professionals and saddle them with leaky roofs, security at the door, and maintaining physical artifacts in often duplicative collections just waiting to be digitized? We see this at the Cushing Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts that made the press when they significantly downsized the physical collection of the library. They did so at the same time they hired more librarians. Close the library and hire more librarians.

(Thanks to @freemoth for the link)

On Wednesday, April 18, Harvard Library Strategic Conversations will sponsor an Oxford-style debate on the role of libraries. The program will be held from 3 to 4:30pm in Piper Auditorium, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with a reception to follow.

Libraries Are Obsolete: An Oxford-Style Debate

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Updated April 26 with a link to the video of the full debate