Google

Probably by coincidence, but still a nice concurrence: on the last day of this year’s International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Google celebrates Robert Moog’s 78 year birthday. The interesting thing is that Google not only has a picture of a Moog synthesizer, but they also have an interactive model up and running, where it is possible to play on the keyboard and tweak the knobs. The synth draws some CPU, so I had problems grabbing a screencast while playing on it. But it is worth trying out if you read this before it disappears. ...

I have been using Google Scholar as one of my main sources for finding academic papers and books, and find that is has improved considerably over the last few years. A while ago they also opened for creating your own academic profile. It is fairly basic, but they have done a great job in managing to find most of my papers, citations, etc. Now also Microsoft has jumped on academic search, and has launched their own service. When I first visited my personal page, they had only found a handful of my publications. Differently to Google Scholar, though, they allow people to upload their own BibTeX files with publication information. The data from the BibTeX file is not used directly, but somehow merged with everything else. The end result is not so bad, and after my upload the content on my profile has improved considerably. ...