Thought Mesh

Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich are striving to create a more intelligent search engine, one that gets more intelligent and gives you more powerful searchers relating to academia. Their creation is called Though Mesh, the trick will Thought Mesh is that it will only grow and become more useful and powerful as it's users  begin to see it's value and feed their own content into it's system then and only then will Though Mesh begin to grow. 

The creators are trying to break the stereotypes with online publication, they want to make information more useful and easy to gather within the world of scholarly essays.

What users would do is submit an article / essay they have written to Thought Mesh with up to two levels of headings. What Thought Mesh would then do is search essays and headings for the topic(s) of your choice. It would also give you a list of scholarly essays with that same information in them. 

Thought Mesh is only on it's Beta version but if a user is unsure about how to publish or navigate a published article they offer step by step Quicktime videos to help you along the way.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure about the purpose of this website is, but it sounds like and interesting idea to check out and further pursue. 

I have enjoyed reading Vectors so far, it has opened my eyes about upcoming scholarly search engines like Think Mesh.

Check out Thought Mesh for yourself at the link below.

http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/

Act/React

I really enjoyed going to the Act/React show at the Milwaukee Art Museum, to me it wasn't even like a homework assignment, just more so going and seeing/interacting with something that I enjoy. 

My favorite artist at the exhibit was Daniel Rozin's Peg Mirror and Snow Mirror. These were my favorite because not only could you interact with the piece and it personally showed you in the space, but it actually transformed you into the piece. It took you from a traditional museum setting and put you into a snowy wonderland and back. 

With Peg Mirror, I was really amazed at how intricate and sophisticated the inner-workings of the mirror were. It's far more that a camera and an image on a screen. Each little piece of wood was attached to a motor and moved to make your face or cater to your specific movements. 

Over all I thought that the Act/React show was awesome, much better that walking around looking at paintings, (which I really don't mind doing, I'm minoring in Art History) but being able to have the opportunity to interact with the works as much as you were able to do, especially in a museum setting was a very fun experience!