An open-source encyclopedia offers the history behind the daily news. A Berkeley Web site serves up stunning images of our planet and a new Google service helps you discover the academic within. The problem with daily news is that it all too often lacks the background and context you need to make any sense of it. Enter the folks over at Wikipedia, the ever-growing not-for-profit, open-source global Internet encyclopedia project that pits armchair academics against Britannica with pretty impressive results. Wikipedia now offers daily news headlines with nifty links to online encyclopedia entries that fill-in more blanks than one would expect from a freebie.
Halfway across the planet from Berlin, at the University of California at Berkeley, researchers have assembled high-resolution images from NASA's Blue Marble project that provide crystal-clear images of our planet from just 1 kilometer above. We found them sehr schoen. Don't like your research data parsed for you in the form of newspapers, magazines or other mainstream media? Google, the world wide web's biggest search engine now offers Google Scholar, a service that indexes journal articles and academic research papers for your midnight scholarly perusings. Caveat emptor: These search results don't come with user instructions. |