Equation editing in Word 2007 is a new feature (no more Insert Object), but it needs some serious work before it’ll be OK to use. The first real problem I had with it was not being able to save my document as a .docx file when I added equations. I was editing an existing file, …
Monthly Archive: March 2008
Mar
29
US must improve K-12 education and increase research funding
In the March issue of Spectrum, Robert Lucky writes about a report by the National Academies which indicates that the long-term prospects for US global competitiveness are threatened by trends in our educational system and our economy. Now the chairman of the committee responsible for this 2005 report, Norman Augustine, has written a shorter version …
Mar
26
Susan Boyce visit to Project54 lab
Susan Boyce of Tellme visited the Project54 lab and gave a talk entitled “Designing for voice search.” The talk touched upon several Tellme projects, including 1-800-CALL-411, a service that allows callers to search for businesses, buy movie tickets, etc. Impressively, 75% of incoming calls to this number are handled completely by the Tellme speech software, …
Mar
21
Exploring High Tech Day
Project54 participated in UNH’s Exploring High Technology Day today. We had 3 groups of 23-ish high school visitors come to the lab for a demonstration of the project. We had students from Londonderry, Bow, Newmarket, Portsmouth and some home schooled students. Andrew Kun, Project Director, introduced the project. Nate Purmort, Engineering Manager, explained the nuts …
Mar
18
Robotic ball launcher entertains dog
OK our dog Bingo needs this, since we have little time to play with him these days due to the arrival of our daughter, Julianna. [via Gizmodo] Andrew Kun
Mar
17
Websites devoted to obsolete skills
In response to this post by Robert Scoble, there are at least two wikis on obsolete skills. One is obsoleteskills.com run by Brad Kellett, and the other is this wiki on wikispot.org. Talk about quick response, Scoble’s post went up on February 16, 2008, which is a little over a month ago! One obsolete skill …
Mar
13
UNH ECE faculty and graduate student social
The UNH ECE Department organized a social for faculty and grad students. Turnout was great and so was the pizza. Check out more pictures from the event here (thanks for operating the camera Oszkar!). Andrew Kun
Mar
12
Microsoft acoustic anechoic chamber displayed at TechFest
Wired Magazine’s online edition has a couple of blog posts about Microsoft Research’s TechFest, an annual internal event that allows MS researchers from around the world to meet and share ideas in Redmond, WA. One of the Wired blog posts is about the so-called Soundless Audio Lab, that is an acoustic anechoic chamber, located at …
Mar
11
KLAS: The Kingsbury Location Awareness System
Project54 is mainly comprised of graduate students completing their theses in a variety of fields from mapping applications to speech interaction. Undergraduates here at the University of New Hampshire can be exposed to research as well. One of research opportunities presented to undergraduates is the Student Research Undergraduate Fellowship grant. This grant allows students to …
Mar
09
Jason Epstein: Electronic book readers are not the future of books
While I’ve written with enthusiasm about Amazon’s Kindle (here) and about ways to digitize books to feed to your digital book reader (here), Jason Epstein, co-founder of On Demand Books, thinks this is not the future of books. In a Technology Review article he points out the Kindle’s flaws. First of all, it is very …