Category: Information Operations (IO)

Yay for the Smithsonian! They are making available files to reproduce historical items on 3D printers for teaching purposes. Excellent use of 3D printing!

Smithsonian X 3D Provides Great Resources for Teaching Using 3D Models and Artifacts

Smithsonian x 3D is a platform that provides teachers and educators access to a wide variety of 3D materials and artifacts stored in the popular Smithsonian museum. These materials can be used as the scaffolding to tell stories or send students on a quest of discovery.

Teachers can also print different 3D models from this site provided that they have access to a 3D printer and for many of the 3D materials, raw data can be downloaded to support further inquiry.

“The SIx3D viewer offers students the ability to explore some of the Smithsonian’s most treasured objects with a level of control that has never been possible until now. We hope this revolutionary level of access to the Smithsonian collections will spark your students’ curiosity and that the exploration of these objects will enable them to build lifelong observation and critical thinking skills.”

Watch this video to learn more about Smithsonian X 3D in education

Elasticsearch: 70:30 Odds as the Next Big Thing in Search

We learned on March 26, 2014  suggesting that the German search vendor Intrafind has been looking for the next big thing. The company may have found it, and we expect that this low profile vendor will be plugging into the Elasticsearch power cable. Wikipedia already has, joining hundreds of other firms looking for a solution to doggy indexing in some other open source centric solutions.

Elasticsearch repackager SearchBlox has rolled out Version 8 of its hosted Elasticsearch system, according to Timo Selvaraj, Co-Founder/VP Product Management of SearchBlox.

As if these two recent developments were not enough, GoveWizely, a Washington, DC engineering services firm, has added Elasticsearch to its arsenal. GovWizely, operated by Erik S. Arnold (yep, that’s my boy) has moved adroitly to capitalize on the surging interest in Elasticsearch’s high performance system.

Contrast Elasticsearch’s rise as the go to open source enterprise search system with the struggles of other open source search vendor and some commercial outfits. LucidWorks has ingested $2 million in venture funding, according to Crunchbase. Elasticsearch has received $34 million in funding. Parity, right?

Not so “fast”. (A gentle nod to the fascinating proprietary system shoe horned by Microsoft into SharePoint.) Elasticsearch seems to be catching up to LucidWorks or winning the critical struggle for developers. Here’s the Elasticsearch pitch:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Elasticsearch: 70:30 Odds as the Next Big Thing in Search — and Open Source Tool to Boot”