I got goose bumps the first time I saw the virtual choir performance that Eric Whitacre put together of his Lux Aurumque last year.  That video went viral in a big way and as a result of that success Whitacre has been working on another project, this time with his incredibly popular work, Sleep.  Sleep has always been my favorite of all of his works so far, and in my opinion translates just as well as a wind band piece as it does vocally so I couldn't think of a better piece to use for this Virtual Choir 2.0 project of his.

I found out about the new piece through a TED talk that just came out a day or two ago.  It is a fifteen minute video of Eric on stage at TED talking about how the first one was put together and how inspiring the project was not only to him but also to the people he performed it with thanks to YouTube.  At the end of the talk you are treated to a short sample of the new Sleep video showing the faces of thousands of performers from all over the world who gave their voices to the project.  The full version of Sleep is due to be released on YouTube on April 7th.

When you think about the technical challenges that this project presented it really is a sight to behold and a feast to listen to.

These days iPhone and iPad cases are a dime a dozen and all do exactly the same thing, provide fairly minimal protection for your device.  In the end the driving reason behind the purchase of a new case for your device is probably form over function.  In the arena of style, iFrogz cases for the iPhone and iPad stand out with some very cool designs.  The function side of things however isn’t always perfect.

iFrogz Plays Well With Others- Sort of...
iFrogz provided me with a sample Luxe Lean iPhone case to review using my own iPhone 4.  Slipping the case onto the phone is easy to do, and the inside of the back of the case has a nice felt backing to it to protect the back side of the phone from scratches.  However, I had a little more trouble getting

Back in 2002 Google began to undertake a secret book digitization project of mammoth proportions.  They partnered with some of the most prestigious universities in the world and began to digitize the tens of thousands of books that the held that were out of print and out of copyright.  It was a lofty goal, aside from the technical hurdles that had to be overcome just to get through all of the books, but also to make them easily accessible for research and study over the Internet.  They then went on to expand their digitization efforts to include even more books, and entered into agreements with publishers to make use of “orphan works,” books who are still in copyright but that are out of print and whose copyright owners are unable to be found.  Basically Google wanted to make these orphan works available as well, and most people would probably say that this was a good thing at least on principal.  For schools and educational institutions this would be huge, opening up vast amounts of hard to find knowledge and doing it in a way that would probably be very low cost or free.  Not everyone liked the idea though, and maybe there are some good reasons why.

For educators or anyone that is tasked with the need to do cited research on a topic creating the bibliography page is always a pain.  If you have an iPhone or an Android smartphone it might help to take a look at a new app called QuickCite that does the hard work for you.  Simply hold you phone up to the book’s UPC code, scan it with QuickCite, and the app will email you a properly formatted citation for that book in your choice of APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE formatting styles.

QuickCite is only 99 cents on the iTunes app store, no idea how much it is for Android but I would bet it is the same.  Save yourself some pain and suffering the next time you are working on your graduate thesis and try it out!