Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Cognitive Rascal in the Amorous Swamp: A Robot Battles Spam. Since 1984, scientists at the Cyc project have been spinning a vast database to equip computers with good old-fashioned common sense. By George Johnson. [New York Times: Technology] 5:47:50 PM      Google It!.

Take Two Aspirins, E-Mail Me Tomorrow. In an age of palmtop computers, wireless Internet and instant messaging, more and more doctors are using e-mail to work with their patients. By Anahad O'connor. [New York Times: Technology] physician 2 patient 5:47:08 PM      Google It!.

HP touts blade PC. Computing in the cage By Ashlee Vance . [The Register] all upgrades and servicing is in the machine room plus allowing for power users to have custom boxes in the machine room. Likely handles everyting except video editing. --BL 5:44:45 PM      Google It!.

Masters of online collaboration - Eric Wilson, Sydney Morning Herald. The early debates about e-learning centred upon the merits of online versus classroom training. Then people started to realise there is still value in the old classroom, giving rise to the term "blended learning" - a mixture of online and classroom tra [Online Learning Update] 5:33:34 PM      Google It!.

Carbon kitty's $50,000 price tag. BBC News Online talks to the Californian company that is now offering a pet cloning service. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 5:31:22 PM      Google It!.

Radical software customization. The always-interesting Sean McGrath has a great column this week about software customization. He says, in part: In order to stay sane, most programmers concentrate on the part of the problem they are working on today. As a consequence, their view of what pieces of the functions under development need to be parameterized and which do not, tends to be a quite low level. Indeed, most of the items programmers will chose to parameterize will amount to double dutch to the business analysts. [Sean Mcgrath: The mysteries of flexible software] In the companion blog entry Sean gives the example of a Jython script that he used, instead of an XML configuration file, to parameterize a piece of software. It illustrates, by example, one of the points I tried to make in my recent IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye. Dynamic languages are a great way to record data when a solution is fluid and requirements are evolving. And, come to think of it, when aren't those things true? ... [Jon's Radio] 5:28:19 PM      Google It!.

Women remember appearances better than men [Science Blog] 5:25:58 PM      Google It!.

Too Much of the Wrong Thing. http://www.work-learning.com/seductive_augmentations.htm Work-Learning Research has an interesting review of research in the area of "Seductive Augmentation" of learning material. Seductive Augmentation is defined as "interesting yet unimportant words, sounds, photos, graphics, and video that are added to instructional materials." The research indicates that seductive augmentation can negatively impact learning retention in some situations. However, it is less clear what constitutes "seductive augmentation" and what is "important" augmentation that may contribute to learning. The following recommendations are made: "1. In designing instruction, we should avoid the tendency to willy-nilly add “decorative” (Levie & Lentz, 1982) bells, whistles, neon, or purple prose to our learning material. 2. Specifically, we should add only elements (1) that directly help our learners understand the content, and (2) avoid overtaxing learners’ limited capacity to process visual and auditory information. 3. In adding interesting elements to our learning materials, we ought to create job-relevant (or, more broadly, performance-relevant) content that challenges learners with realistic exercises that prompt them to make decisions similar to those they’ll have to make on the job (or in future performance situations)." [e-Learning Eclectic] 5:24:48 PM      Google It!.

Notebooks Replace Textbooks in Texas [Slashdot] 5:17:38 PM      Google It!.