Blogs

Transformation is a common theme among the eight final student team projects of this year's ME310 cohort. Take, for example, Idéum, which proposes how to transform an old building in a Swedish coastal town into an innovation center for Volvo workers who insist "that they [are] not innovative people." The students ask, and then answer, "How might we build confidence and make a user feel like an innovative genius, with a tool that actually helps develop creative skills?"   

AutoDesk announced that it is releasing a ton of stuff into the Creative Commons. “The group adopted the Creative Commons licensing which means 20,000 pages of documentation, 70 videos and 140 downloadable 3D asset files are now ready to be modified, remixed and shared globally.”

AutoDesk said soon all AutoDesk online help, learning channel movies, podcasts, support articles and downloadable materials will be placed under the Creative Commons model -- even their AutoDesk University training content past and future.

Making historical data sets available to the world is one of the many ways the Stanford Digital Repository is promoting data preservation and sharing. This Deposit of the Week from Hopkins Marine Station is a perfect example of that.

Pisaster ochraceus--the ochre sea star--lives along the rocky coast of Central California and the Hopkins Marine Life Refuge. Studies of the ochre sea star population over time help scientists better understand what is happening to the population and how outside forces like the reintroduction of a possible predator or local environmental changes can affect it.