The International Development Fair: The Human Factor at Work in the World
Imagine if thousands of Amy Smiths were unleashed on the world, providing simple, ingenious inventions to make life easier for those subsisting on less than $2 a day -- half of humanity. This MacArthur Award-winning inventor has been seeding such programs at MIT, and describes tangible results of efforts to inspire
Education Across Borders: The India Perspective
Rickshaw drivers in India are frequent victims of tuberculosis after just a few years inhaling traffic fumes. This near-epidemic went unacknowledged until
Kapil Sibal demanded a solution. The fix, now gaining traction across the country, is a solar-powered vehicle that eliminates pedaling. But what began as a project to ass
Looking Ahead to 2020
Real-world practitioners of systems engineering/engineering systems describe how the young discipline has shaped their very large enterprises.
For the past 10 years, David Lehman has been incorporating key systems engineering ideas within MITRE Corporation. Successes include getting project leaders to think
How Can We Improve Disaster Response?
Even if the U.S. draws the right lessons from Hurricane Katrina, panelists suggest, the nation may still be caught short in the next disaster.
In some areas of government, Kenneth Oye points out, “weaknesses can go on for a long time because you don’t confront a reality test. Katrina was a reality test wi
Living with Catastrophic Terrorism: Can Science and Technology Make the U.S. Safer?
After the terrorists attack of September 11, three Academies-the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine-sponsored a major study of the role that science and technology might play in countering the threat of catastrophic terrorism in the United States. This study involved a committee of 24 expe
The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies: Taking Nanotechnology from the Laboratory to the Soldier
A U.S. Army soldier carries more than 100 pounds of gear into battle. What can be done to lighten the load, while still providing maximum protection? Edwin Thomas, Director of MIT’s new Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, describes an alternative to the past practice of “dressing up a soldier like a Christmas tree”. He descri
The Future of Digital Public Media
Public broadcasting executives and producers discuss their changing roles as digital technology transforms the news and entertainment industries, and provides individuals with powerful tools for shaping their communities. Moderator Jake Shapiro asks panelists to discuss ventures that illustrate new dimensions of public medi
Khrushchev and Khrushchev : from the Kremlin to Brown University
The website "Khrushchev and Khrushchev: from the Kremlin to Brown University" is the online version of an exhibition organised and hosted by Brown University Library in 2002. It focuses on the visit by the Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev (1894-1971, premier 1954-1964) to the United States of America in October 1960. The second Krushchev of the exhibition title is his son Sergei Krushchev, who famously took American citizenship in 1999 and donated his father's papers to Brown University Library.
South Asian diaspora
The South Asia Diaspora website hosted by the South / Southeast Asia Library at the University of California, Berkeley, contains several useful resources for scholars researching the Indian diaspora. The site briefly describes the relevant archives held at Berkeley, and includes images from the archive illustrating aspects of the diaspora in California. An essays section summarises the history of Indian immigration to California during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and links to further
Radiography of the past (RADIO-PAST)
The website of the EU funded project RADIO-PAST (radiography of the past) publishes information about the project and its teaching and research activities. The project has its base at Ammaia (a Roman site), Portugal, where most field activities are being carried out. A gallery of images shows many artefacts and architectural structures from Ammaia; there are also short videos and panoramic images. The website also briefly presents many remote sensing technologies, including aerial photography; L
Paul Revere Williams : American architect : a man and his work
The Paul Revere Williams website is designed to provide introductory material about African-American architect Paul R. Williams (1894-1980), who was the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the first to become a Fellow (FAIA). The project is a collaboration between AIA and the University of Memphis. The website provides information about the architect and a large image gallery, which can be browsed by decade or category. The 'resources' section of the w
Complete list of lost English country houses
This website contains a near-complete list of lost English country houses. There are over 1,770 records freely available, at April 2010. The well-designed and presented website is a personal project by Matthew Beckett. It appears to be regularly maintained. Records are detailed, rigorous, and can be sorted by county. There is also a list of extant houses that are deemed to be at risk. There is a useful listing of sources used. There is also a useful weblog, The Country Seat. This will be a us
Village Works
From 1992 to 1993, women in villages of rural north west China were given cameras to record a year of their daily life, as pat of a women's reproductive health programme supported by the Ford Foundation. The resulting pictures not only formed an exhibition, but were used as prompts to discussions with officials on improving conditions in the areas involved. From the main page of the website, users can view a textual introduction to the project, and link to selected photographs, covering: work; f
Wyndham Lewis's art criticism in 'The Listener', 1946-1951 : postwar British art in its context of i
This website, entitled Wyndham Lewis's Art Criticism in 'The Listener', 1946-1951, is the outcome of an AHRC research project, 2008-2009, at the University of Plymouth, England and the Universidad de La Rioja in Spain. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was not only a major English artist of the twentieth century, who co-founded the Vorticist movement, he was also an important art critic, a novelist and short-story writer, a cultural commentator, a political theorist, and a philosopher. This research pro
Ghostsigns
Ghostsigns is the website and gallery of a collaborative national effort to photograph the remaining painted wall-signs of the British Isles. The website has full details of the project, an interactive map plotting the 600 signs so far identified, and some historical background. There are also details of how people can participate in this summer 2010 project. Ghostsigns is hosted and supported by the History of Advertising Trust. The project will be of interest to those researching advertisin
Daily drop cap : an illustrative initial every day
This is the website for Daily Drop Cap, an ongoing project by New York-based typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische. The project provides a new decorated drop capital letter, designed by Hische, every day for users to download for non-commercial use in blog postings etc. Instructions are provided for download, along with restrictions on usage. The project was begun in September 2009, and archives of previous postings are available dating back to this date. The website links to Jessica Hi
Muslim devotional posters
This is the website of the 'Muslim devotional posters' project at Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion (AHKR), University of Bergen in Norway. It documents... "mass produced religious popular pictures in a Muslim context. The material consists of posters and smaller prints with religious motifs such as prophets, Shia Imams, saints, sacred places, historico-mythical narratives, pious people in devout worship, pictures and Quran or Hadith texts in combination, calligr
Chamber of demonstrations : reconstructing the Jacobean indoor playhouse
The Chamber of Demonstrations website documents a DVD that represents a theatrical experiment in theatre research and teaching. The DVD is the culmination of the research of Martin White, Professor of Theatre at the University of Bristol, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and produced with the support of PARIP, an AHRC-funded project on documenting performance as research. In a full-scale candlelit reconstruction of the interior of a Jacobean indoor playhouse, experie
Journal TOCs
Journal TOCs is a JISC-funded project, allowing users to easily search the recent tables of contents (TOCs) from most commercially-published academic journals. The service offers a simple search-box, enabling keyword searches of RSS feeds from... "12,725 journals collected from 422 publishers". The service also has lists which can be browsed by either publisher or journal subject. The export of OPML files is permitted - enabling users to set up feeds for their favourite RSS feedreader. This rev
Europeana: European culture
Europeana is a European Commission funded web portal which is building a virtual European library offering free access to Europe's cultural resources. Multiple languages are available. It is organised as a giant database of cultural artefacts, typically presenting a (low quality) picture and some metadata for each record and redirecting to other websites to access digital resources. It searches millions of texts (manuscripts, papers, ebooks), images (photographs, maps), films (moving images, vid
