Resourceress

Helping cure cancer, hacking Kinect for medical use – teen scientists at work

resourceress — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:05:55 +0000

In early December, the Siemens Foundation announced its 2011 scholarship winners. The individual and team winners exemplify the ingenuity of teen scientists at work. Individual winner Angela Zhang designed a nanoparticle that attacks cancer cells, and team winners Cassie Cain and Ziyuan Liu repurposed the XBox 360 Kinect to evaluate walking patterns, a development that might help reduce costs and improve functionality for people with prosthetic limbs. It’s easy to imagine MLWGS students achieving similar feats of intelligence and creativity. Read a news article about these winners or see the full list of 2011 scholarship recipients on the Siemens site.

MLK, Jr. in letters and other documents

resourceress — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:36:34 +0000

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the King Center in Atlanta unveiled the King Archives, an amazing digitization project that already contains over 200,000 documents and will eventually contain over 1 million. You can search the archive or browse it by theme.

Here is the King Center’s description of the Spotlight documents: “These pages will present a more dynamic view than is often seen of Dr. King’s life and times. The documents reveal the scholar, the father, and the pastor. Through these papers we see the United States of America at one of its most vulnerable, most honest and perhaps most human moments in history. There are letters bearing the official marks of royalty and the equally regal compositions of children. You will see speeches, telegrams, scribbled notes, patient admonitions and urgent pleas. This spotlight shows you a glimpse of the remarkable history within this collection.”

New library books

resourceress — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:09:32 +0000

Now available for check out from the MW Library:

Three books about origami (a new student club this year) including the eco-friendly trash origami
A variety of examples of visual (a.k.a. graphic) storytelling – novels, biography, and nonfiction
Books about designing video games, making zines, and drawing comics and other sequential art
Books about craft activism and the handmade/DIY revolution in craft art
Dreamsongs, volumes 1 and 2 by George R.R. Martin
Feynman – a new biography in visual storytelling format
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
The Manga Guide to Calculus
The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian
Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art of Persuasion
To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild (recommended by Mr. Smith)
Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor (style: magical realism, setting: post-apocalyptic Africa)
Why Read Moby Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick