Chris Aldrich

"I'm always kind of surprised that in situations like these that people aren't using some of the newer technological advances that take simultaneous advantage of research like that mentioned in the article, but also newer as well as older technology. In particular, I always recommend some of the technology by Livescribe who make the Pulse and Echo smart pens (http://livescribe.com). These technologies use traditional pens which have embedded optical scanners and microphones so that both the written words and the spoken parts of lectures are recorded - and more importantly they're directly connected within the technology. This can allow students (disabled or not) to capture all of the spoken lecture and even allow them to go back later and supplement their notes. Bookmarking technology built in also allows one to easily come back to important points to to easily skip around within the lecture to quickly find the portions they'd like to relisten to or add additional notes to. For those..." - Chris Aldrich

"I was interested to see a recent interview of Dr. Rodin in conjunction with her recent book on resilience. I've ordered a copy as I'm surprised to hear how some of the principles she discussed were related to my own research in the areas of Complexity Theory and particularly the overlap of information theory and molecular biology. The science underpinning all of this is truly fascinating. For those unfamiliar with these areas, I'd recommend also taking a look at Melanie Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour and Nicholas Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable which do a reasonable job of giving the idea of how these areas all inter-relate with little or no mathematics. In particular Taleb discusses the concept of "too big to fail" from a probabilistic and an evolutionary standpoint, which can easily be applied to the potential fragility of institutions which underpin cities and will help to make them more resilient." - Chris Aldrich

"If you don't receive a direct reply from the communications department, which published the story, you should try contacting Earle Havens directly via http://krieger.jhu.edu/singlet.... Sacrobosco is a wonderful classic. Based on your spelling of the title, it may be a Finnish translation? There is a relatively well-known humanist and geographer by the name of Jacob Ziegler who died two years after the publication date you give. Most of his writing was in Latin, but he travelled through most of Europe including Germany and Italy and would likely have known multiple languages. I'm sure Earle can be much more helpful." - Chris Aldrich

"No mention of Summize.com which Twitter essentially bought and shut down? No mention of the original "firehose" feed from Twitter? No mention of Twitter cutting Google out of the firehose? This was originally supposed to be one of the services Twitter had that was going to help them monetize, and now it's apparently just a side note on Wired. Whatever happened to the concept of realtime?!" - Chris Aldrich

"Some interesting choices. I'd also highly recommend geographer and cultural anthropologist Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? as something to include in the top five of this list." - Chris Aldrich

"It's been a year since this post and a bevy of RSVP-related technologies have proliferated in the interim. My favorite speed reading app is Spritz, along with the Spritzlet bookmarklet for reading on both the web and mobile. Even better than this is the Balto app for the Kindle/Android platform which I use religiously on my Kindle tablet. I've written some additional details about these and others for those interested: http://boffosocko.com/2014/06/..." - Chris Aldrich