Have you all checked out the new iTunes U features yet? What about SharePoint? What about Google?

Jon

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/punched-up-lectures-hands-on-with-the-new-itunes-u-app-for-ios.ars

Geared towards university students—and even just casual students on the Internet—the iTunes U app takes advantage of Apple’s already-existing iTunes U content and presents it to college and university students in a more usable way, allowing instructors to send full syllabus information, assignments, and even notes from the professor directly to students’ devices. Students can subscribe to certain classes—if that feature is available, that is—and automatically download relevant course material, not to mention links to outside apps or PDFs.

Rather than stick with traditional all-you-can-eat deals known as “enterprise licensing agreements,” the CIA wants to buy software services on a “metered,” pay-as-you-go basis, Ira “Gus” Hunt, the agency’s top technology officer, told an industry conference.

“Think Amazon,” he said, referring to the electronic commerce giant where the inventory is vast but the billing is per item. “That model really works.”

The old way of contracting for proprietary software inhibits flexibility, postponing the CIA’s chance to take advantage of emerging capabilities early on, Hunt said.

He added that this made it harder to keep up with “big data” at a time that such challenges are growing while federal agencies are tightening their belts for deficit reduction.

“Don’t kid yourself that we can’t do this thing because we can,” he said, adding that the agency was seeking to build strong partnerships with its information technology suppliers.

“We’re not out there trying to screw you,” Hunt told representatives of the many vendors present. But “you really need to think differently about how we do these things,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Reginald Brothers, deputy assistant secretary of defense for research, told the conference that existing software tools for data analysis, management and interaction lagged the vast amounts of information that drones and other high-tech U.S. military sensors were vacuuming up.

“The big data problem is the analysis of it,” he said. Existing tools “do not aid users … in the mission timelines.”

The potential of librarians working in e-science, a term for using the Internet and other digital tools to facilitate scientific data collection, management, and sharing, has been the cause of much discussion. Many professionals agree that librarians could participate in or facilitate e-science tasks. This article explores what e-science librarianship is by examining the skills and requirements from job advertisements for e-science related library positions. After reflecting on the sample of job advertisements, the analysis of the sample, and the use of the word e-science itself, the authors conclude that e-science librarianship is at present not a defined field and that the role of librarians in e-science is nebulous.

That led us toward a single-page app that would generate its UI on the client and accept data updates from a push channel. This is pretty far from any of the work weâve done before at Fog Creek, so from a technical perspective Trello has been an adventure.

Initially, we were wondering how interesting and far-out the stack could be before management got nervous, but our concerns were addressed in an early meeting with Joel, when he said âUse things that are going to work great in two years.â

So we did. We have consistently opted for promising (and often troublesome) new technologies that would deliver an awesome experience over more mature alternatives. Weâre about a year in, and itâs been a lot of fun.

Last month, Republic Wireless made waves when it announced an Android phone with âunlimitedâ service for just $19 per month, no contract required.

Iâve spent the past couple weeks test-driving that phone and service, and Iâm happy to report that except for a few wrinkles, both performed beautifully. (Read my original post for the full details on how it all works.)

Academia.edu, a social network for researchers, is having a good year. In 2011 itâs tripled its total registered userbase to 800,000, and today itâs announcing some major news that ensures the site will be expanding well into the future: itâs just raised $4.5 million in a funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from True Ventures. This is the companyâs second round of funding, after a $2.2 million round in late 2009 (the investors from that round participated in this one as well).

Academia.edu can be thought of as a social network for academics, in that it allows them to forge connections and follow updates around their field, but it has another benefit: it gives them a powerful, efficient way to distribute their research. Unlike, say, a personal website, which probably wonât have much in the way of analytics or search engine optimization, Academia.edu will let researchers keep tabs on how many people are reading their articles with specialized analytics tools, and it also does very well in Google search results. Academics are uploading 2,500 articles to the site each day, and, as a result, the site is now drawing some 3 million unique visitors, many of whom are arriving at the siteâs articles via Google.

Here’s an article that describes iOS mirroring via AppleTV in the classroom that I was telling you about the other day. Now that some of the testing requirements are being handled other ways, it would be cool if HRSA could fund an iPad CoW rather than standard CoWs.

Jon

http://applesforkids.org/archives/442

One of the most underrated and significant developments of iOS5 has been the ability to mirror the iPad2 onto any screen via AppleTV. This development signifies a break away from the shackles of cables and allows the iPad, iPod or iPhone to become an even more natural addition to the classroom.

(via Instapaper)

AT&T today unveiled AT&T Toggle, a service that allows you to create two separate and distinct identities on your smartphone or tablet. The first would be a personal account where you can freely browse the Internet, text your friends, and watch videos. A second, more secure identity would house your business apps and documents and can be managed by your companyâs IT department.

Touching the upper right corner of the screen on the Galaxy S II using one hand, with its 4.27-inch screen, while youâre walking down the street looking at Google Maps, is extremely difficult and frustrating. I pulled out my iPhone 4 to do a quick test, and it turns out that when you hold the iPhone in your left hand and articulate your thumb, you can reach almost exactly to the other side of the screen. This means itâs easy to touch any area of the screen while holding the phone in one hand, with your thumb. It is almost impossible to do this on the Galaxy S II.