It's my life, you're just along for the ride!

E-readers may not be good enough for Princetons hallowed halls, but students and professors at Oklahoma State University seem to have fallen head over heels for their iPads. Last fall, the school introduced the tablets in a handful of lecture halls and classrooms, as part of its iPad Pilot Program. Teachers involved in the study said they benefited from all the educational software available on Apples App Store, while students appreciated not having to spend their life savings on traditional textbooks. At the end of the pilot program, a full 75-percent of collegians said the iPad “greatly enhanced” their classroom experience, though were guessing that much of that enhancement came from their newfound ability to check TweetDeck between lecture notes. Opinion was noticeably more divided, however, on the devices value as an e-reader. Some enjoyed having all their books in one place, whereas others were a bit disappointed with the experience, saying they didnt use it to read as often as they expected to. Our former undergrad-slacker selves can totally relate. Video and PR await you, after the break.

via Shocker! College kids like having iPads in the classroom — Engadget.

Budweiser, which has been increasingly brazen in its viral marketing activities, appears to have invented a new sport: Poolball.The game, introduced in this video aimed at the UK market, combines a 7-meter, Astroturfed pool table with soccer balls made up to resemble billiard balls. The rules are also the same as pool: You have to get the balls into the pockets, though you can’t use your hands. Your head is OK. The idea is to combine a daytime sport with nighttime clubbing.This is the second viral video for Budweiser within the last few weeks. The other, a military-themed spot, got attention from bloggers for its possible-but-unlikely gay subtext.Like other marketers of alcoholic beverages, Budweiser owner Anheuser-Busch has been somewhat tentative about social media. Facebook officially bars such companies from marketing to consumers whose birth dates are below the legal drinking age, though watchdog groups like the Marin Institute believe that underage consumers engage with the brands via social media by lying about their age. Budweiser tried to circumvent the issue with Bud.tv, an ambitious $30 million effort to create its own content behind an age-verification wall, but wound up scrapping the effort in 2009.

via Budweiser Invents New Sport [VIDEO].

When its not crunching data brought back by spy plane missions, the US Air Force’s PlayStation 3 super-computer (nicknamed “Condor”) is now being loaned out to universities so they can crunch slightly less dangerous data.

One of those institutions is the University of Dayton in Ohio, where it’s being put to work creating “artificial neural networks”.

The University of Massachusetts is another, assistant professor of physics Gaurav Khanna given access to Condor to help him model the effects of things like black holes colliding and ripples in space-time.

Khanna is full of praise for the toughness of the PS3, saying of his own PS3 super-computer (which uses 16 consoles in a machine called the “Gravity Grid”) “They’ve been running almost continuously for four years now and it’s a non-ideal environment. It’s a lab, there are students.” Not a single one of the consoles has needed replacement in that time.

Lucky they never need to connect to the PlayStation Network, then.

PlayStation 3 Clusters Providing Low-Cost Supercomputing to Universities [Govtech]

Republished from http://kotaku.com

via The Air Force is Loaning out its PS3 Super-Computer.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Blu-ray function is disabled, so no, you wont find Defense Department engineers on the job watching “Avatar” in high def while running classified satellite images through their new supercomputer that harnesses banks of Sony PlayStation video gaming consoles. Also, the Defense engineers didnt go to Toys R Us or Sears to buy those 1,760 PlayStations. They worked directly with Sony and one of its distributors. “It wasnt something as simple as going to Best Buy or Wal-Mart,” said Mark Barnell, the high-performance computing director at the Air Force Research Labs operation in Rome, N.Y. Barnell answered these as well as more technical questions this morning in a phone interview with The Plain Dealer, which in todays editions described how Defense Department engineers and scientists developed the biggest, fastest interactive computer the Pentagon has. The supercomputer, nicknamed the Condor Cluster, will allow very fast analysis of large high-resolution imagery — billions of pixels a minute, taking what used to take several hours down to mere seconds, Barnell said. Its sophisticated algorithms also will allow scientists to better identify objects flying in space, where movement and distance create blurring, with higher-quality images than possible before.  (click below for more info)

via Defense Department discusses new Sony PlayStation supercomputer | cleveland.com.

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