Thad Starner explains why he thinks people will soon crave the ultrafast communication and “killer existence” that Google Glass makes possible.

Few gadgets have generated as much excitement and hostility as Google Glass, a voice-activated computer-monitor combo worn on eyeglass frames. Now being tested by early adopters, Glass is an ambitious attempt to advance “wearable computing.” It’s also a milestone for Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who has been building and wearing head-mounted computers since 1993. A decade ago, he showed Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin a clunky version of such a device; in 2010 they hired Starner to be a technical lead for Project Glass. He met recently with MIT Technology Review IT editor Rachel Metz.

Thad Starner thinks people will soon crave the ultrafast communication that Google Glass makes possible.

Few gadgets have generated as much excitement and hostility as Google Glass, a voice-activated computer-monitor combo worn on eyeglass frames. Now being tested by early adopters, Glass is an ambitious attempt to advance “wearable computing.” It’s also a milestone for Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who has been building and wearing head-mounted computers since 1993. A decade ago, he showed Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin a clunky version of such a device; in 2010 they hired Starner to be a technical lead for Project Glass. He met recently with MIT Technology Review IT editor Rachel Metz.

CSS exchange has just undergone its own extensive redesign to make the user experience more intuitive while still displaying the best use of the cascading style sheet.

Christine Mallinson, associate professor in the Language, Literacy & Culture Program, is co-editor, with Becky Childs and Gerard Van Herk, of the new book, Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications (Routledge, 2013).

The book website notes, “This edited volume provides up-to-date, succinct, relevant, and informative discussion about methods of data collection in sociolinguistic research. It covers the main areas of research design, conducting research, and sharing data findings with longer chapters and shorter vignettes written by a range of top sociolinguists, both veteran and emerging scholars. Here is the one-stop, go-to guide for the numerous quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods that are used in sociolinguistic research, ensuring that Data Collection in Sociolinguistics will be not only useful in the classroom but also as a reference tool for active researchers.”

Professor J.K. Chambers of the University of Toronto writes in the foreword to the volume, “This collection provides a balanced, judicious, forward-looking summation of the ways in which we collect, access and process the data that is the foundation of our enterprise. In its format and its tone, it has the feeling of a symposium involving a select group of sociolinguists sharing their personal experiences as well as their collective wisdom. It is an invaluable sourcebook for researchers and students and also for veteran fieldworkers in the diverse situations we face on entering the community.”

Maryland – and Baltimore in particular – remains a place with a troubled relationship to the Civil War, Kate Drabinski, lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies, points out in a recent piece for the “Indypendent Reader.”

“Maryland never seceded from the Union, but its citizens leaned strongly toward the Confederacy,” she writes. “All the contradictions of this past that is still very much present are engraved in the infrastructure of the place, from street and park names to its more obvious public memorials and monuments that remind us of this war.”

Drabinski focuses her piece on Baltimore’s monuments to the Civil War (three in honor of the Confederacy and one in honor of the Union), and especially on the memorial to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee that sits at the corner of Wyman Park near the Baltimore Art Museum.

“The struggle over the meaning of these memorials continues, and the sense of a glorious Confederate past continues to radiate from this memorial, the memory of slavery and bondage past and present, about which this war was fought, surely ghosting the place,” she writes.

The full piece, “They Were Great Generals and Christian Soldiers: Remembering Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” appeared online on June 3.