London South Bank University is now offering a 3 year program (BA) in Social Technology. Here's the description: "This is an innovative course in a new and rapidly developing area of modern society that will give you the opportunity for in-depth study of the implications and applications of modern technologies. The focus is on people’s use of technology rather than technology for its own sake."

Anyone know of a commensurate undergraduate degree in the U.S.?

Rich Beckman, the new Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami, started a series of multimedia workshops at his former institution, University of North Carolina. He's relaunching them at UM. While the main focus is on journalism, these intensive courses also look interesting for computers & writing folk, so here's the link for the website describing them and giving registration information. Also, what could be better than Miami in January?

Adam Thierer in Technology Liberation Front has a nice overview of the recent raft of books on the internet. Thierer presents a schema grouping optimists and pessimists, and books by their beliefs/themes.

Abhay Parekh recently launched a new application, Flowgram, that those in the computers and writing crowd may want to check out. Think of it as Powerpoint-plus. An online screencasting program, Flowgram enables you to load URLs, images, and Powerpoints onto the web, to add layered audio, notes, and highlighting, and then to play the pages or to share them.

Lee Drutman has a good review in the July 5 LA Times of a book with a really long title. In fact, since I am on the internets so often doing the google and other stuff, this title is actually longer than my attention span enables me to read.

Full disclosure: one of the founders of this site, due to launch May 19, is a former student of mine. But here's an interesting re-mediation: Web back to print.

WordHustler is conceived as a social network that, according to the press release, "provides writers with a bevy of innovative tools designed to help authors of all genres to get their manuscripts into the hands of editors and find publishing success."

George Miller (D-CA), normally among the most progressive and sane of legislators, has sponsored an educational reauthorization bill, the ‘‘College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007," that in its 747 pages (yep, I read 'em all) puts forward plenty of good stuff.

Here's an interesting intellectual property case: Sony's Playstation 3 first-person action shooter game, Resistance: Fall of Man, has tread where angels usually go--and the Dean and Canons of Manchester Cathedral aren't happy about it. The interior of the British cathedral has been digitally represented in the game, and players can engage in violent virtual acts within.

Back in October, I posted about the Blue Eye "smart table" that allowed users to copy 2D and 3D objects almost instantaneously, as well as remix and store them. Now Microsoft has come out with a similar project, dubbed Surface, which incorporates other features, like the ability to upload and download images simply by setting your camera or cellphone on the table's surface.

... with localized slowly evanescent field patterns, for wireless non-radiative energy transfer.

That, my friends, in case you were wondering, is what Aristeidis Karalis, J.D.Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić have been up to of late.

What does that mean? Well, possibly less hassle for those of us burdened with too many PDAs, cell phones, mp3 players, and domestic robots that uncomplainingly do all our housecleaning and yardwork when we have stacks of 80 papers to grade. In a presentation this week at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, the MIT scientists, taking a leaf from much ballyhooed and maligned Nikola Tesla, outlined a scheme that could make plug-in rechargers a thing of the past.