IBM Presents:
A Workshop on Humanities Applications for
World Community Grid

On October 6, 2008, IBM will be sponsoring a free one-day workshop in Washington, DC on high performance computing for humanities and social science research.

This workshop is aimed at digital humanities scholars, computer scientists working on humanities applications, library information professionals, and others who are involved in humanities and social science research using large digital datasets. The session will be hosted by IBM computer scientists who will conduct a hands-on session describing how high performance computing systems like IBM’s World Community Grid can be used for humanities research.

The workshop is intended to be much more than just a high-level introduction. There will be numerous technical demonstrations and opportunities for participants to discuss potential HPC projects. Topics will include: how to parallelize your code; useful tools and utilities; data storage and access; and a technical overview of World Community Grid architecture.

Brett Bobley and Peter Losin from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities have been invited to discuss some of the NEH’s grant opportunities for humanities projects involving high performance computing.

If attendees are already involved in projects that involve heavy computation, they are encouraged to bring sample code, data, and outputs so that they can speak with IBM scientists about potential next steps for taking advantage of high performance computing. While the demonstrations will be using World Community Grid, our hope is that attendees will learn valuable information that could also be applied to other HPC platforms.

The workshop will be held from 10 AM – 3 PM on October 6, 2008 at the IBM Institute for Electronic Government at 1301 K Street, NW, Washington, DC. To register, please contact Sherry Swick, sherry@us.ibm.com. Available spaces will be filled on a first-come, first served basis.

More about the World Community Grid

World Community Grid, a philanthropic initiative developed by the IBM Corporation, offers researchers a unique opportunity to accelerate the pace of their work while also mobilizing people worldwide around critical social issues.

Launched by IBM in November 2004, World Community Grid uses grid technology to harness the plentiful, underutilized resource of PCs and laptops to support humanitarian research. Today, volunteers around the globe have donated the computational power of close to 1 million PCs; World Community Grid is harnessing their power when the computers are on but not in use to help advance promising research. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world.

World Community Grid is available free-of-charge only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of IBM’s commitment to advancing human welfare, all results must be published in the public domain and made public to the global research community. Current research partners include The Scripps Research Institute, The University of Texas Medical Branch, New York University, University of Washingon, French Muscular Dystrophy Association, the University of Cape Town and The Ontario Cancer Institute.

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Looks like Ill be at this:)

Amazing but True Cat Stories is a collection of stories about feline antics, illustrated in vivid 8-bit color by true mspaint artists. Stolen pants, pooped-on veterinarians, fur on fire, foretold seizures, and much more! This book was entirely written by the anonymous crowd. All stories and illustrations were submitted by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

[From bjoern.org]

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darn wish i would have thought of that….

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries

[From Curious Expeditions » Blog Archive » Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries]

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i’d love to take a trip where i went to great libraries and instead of looked at them, actually used them.

Toolbox can do MANY things. It allows me to construct cool graphics with building blocks and just like playing with Legos everything can be built this way. I personally use Toolbox for creating textures, icons and some photo tasks. You may find it useful for experimentation and eventually figure out a task that its good at solving for you.

It’s not Photoshop. The interface is different and requires another mindset to use. If you are a master of Photoshop layers then you should have no trouble understanding the superior concept of building blocks. Toolbox is not intended to be a Photoshop replacement. You can use it as a supplement or for leisure.

[From Toolbox - Graphics program for Mac]

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going to have to play with toolbox.