Monday, April 26, 2004

Text to Librarian. Startup Offers Text Message Q&A Service "Colly Myers, founding CEO of Symbian, has launched a new startup in the UK, called issuebits.com, offering a search engine-style service to answer any question by text message, reports ElectricNews.net. UK mobile users can try it out by texting their question to short code 63336. and "within (6) minutes they will get a text answer". issuebits.com says it has patented Natural Language Processing algorithms as well as real human researchers. The service goes live on Orange and Vodafone networks in the UK on Thursday with the others to follow." [textually.org] Coming to a future near you: answering reference questions and searching the library's catalog via text messaging. [The Shifted Librarian] 11:09:23 PM      Google It!.

Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed [Slashdot] Desktop publishing for nix 11:04:23 PM      Google It!.

Learning Disabilities: A Clearer Path to Reading Fluency. A new study shows that more aggressive treatment can make dyslexic brains work the way normal brains do. By John O'neil. [New York Times: Education] 10:59:44 PM      Google It!.

Pick up a 32MB USB watch for a quid. Cash'n'Carrion Limited offer By Cash'n'Carrion . [The Register] 10:58:05 PM      .

Introduction to Latent Semantic Indexing. http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/cover_page.htm This paper, titled "Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization" is offered by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education as a "layman's introduction to latent semantic indexing." It does start to go into the specifics of how LSI works, but fortunately at an introductory enough level that most of us can grasp. This paper has it all: metadata...ontologies...visualization ... what more could you ask for! A helpful introduction to an overlooked technology. See also the NITLE's LSI project page for pointers to PERL-based LSI software. (Thanks to Bruce Landon for the tip.)- SWL [EdTechPost] 10:42:59 PM      .

Harmoni PHP Project. http://sourceforge.net/projects/harmoni Also from the NITLE site, a reference to this OKI-related open source project, which consists of three major components: 1) A PHP application framework and architecture, offering, e.g. authentication, DBC, file storage 2) PHP OKI OSID (service definitions) conversion system 3) PHP implementations of those OSIDs This is the result of a collaboration of two projects we've heard a little bit about in the past, Segue (which has been referred to at times as the 'blogging-based CMS') and a LMS from the Associated Colleges of the South Tech Centre. It's hard to overstate the importance of this project to OKI - originally all of the OKI castings were in Java which, for all of the sense it may have made, to me was also a serious impediment to many non-institutional developers (read 'individual instructors') being able to build in it/on it. Having the OKI OSIDs implemented in PHP suddenly opens the door to the potentially much vaster legion of people who are developing systems and individual learning apps in that language. - SWL [EdTechPost] 10:41:33 PM      Google It!.

OpenOffice.org, MS Office 2003 Compared, Evaluated [Slashdot] 10:07:38 PM      Google It!.

Legoland Introduces Wi-Fi Tracking for Kids [Slashdot] 5:49:21 PM      Google It!.