Chronicling America API

For my individual iteration 2 I am am using the Chronicling America API. This API gives information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. It is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC).

The site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. To encourage a wide range of potential uses, they designed several different views of the data which are publicly visible and do not require an API key to use them.

This API allows you to:

• Search - the newspaper directory and digitized page contents using OpenSearch.
  
• Link - using stable URL pattern for titles, issues, editions, and pages.
• Linked Data - views of information about titles, batches, issues, and pages in RDF/XML.
• Aggregations - of items, like all the pages that make one issue, are related using OAI-ORE

Compared to the old methods of looking up newspaper pages, this is a convinient way to view historic data. Here is an example of a newspaper page:

1Gbps Streaming?

The average internet user in the United States pays for broadband ranging from 1 - 12Mbps, allowing us to stream videos and download songs at a fairly decent rate. Even with these modern "fast" speeds, there are still situations in which faster speeds may be necessary. Siemens recently went to 500Mbps streaming with the use of white LED's, but there is a solution that works even better than that.

A Penn State graduate student and a professor have but a mechanism that sends data at a blazing 1Gbps. "Their setup sent data across a room by modulating a beam of infrared light that was focused on the ceiling and picking up the reflections using a specially modified photodetector. The pair says that their measurements show the system could support data rates "well beyond" the one gigabit per second they are currently claiming."

A wireless N connection is currently only capable of about 300Mbps and anyone who has done large data backups over this speed knows that it can still take quite some time, especially considering multiple users on the same router who may be using its resources. I personally look forward to this being available to the public. Take that, FIOS.