Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Project Gutenberg Adds an RSS Feed. I've been following the development of Project Gutenberg for decades. In the often faddish world of "here today gone tomorrow" Internet sites, Michael Hart's Project Gutenberg is an admirable model of persistence and a model for the sharing of online instructional resources. Visiting the site will show a web presence that is anything but slick, however the value of the project overcomes its presentation deficiencies. "Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts). Our present collection of more than 10,000 eBooks was produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use." The RSS feed provides notification of the latest ebook additions to the repository--http://www.gutenberg.net/browse/recent/today.rdf. JH [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 11:45:56 PM      Google It!.

The Flickering Mind [Slashdot] "The Flickering Mind deals a crippling blow to the blind faith that educators and politicians place in computers as solutions to education's woes. The level of research and breadth of evidence is tremendous. The book sums up America's past 20 years of false promises, senseless faddism, and wasted millions in attempts to computerize the nation's education system. And no, open source won't help a bit." 11:44:03 PM      Google It!.

Moiell teaser. Almost a year ago I wrote about adding sequences to Loell. I did a few attempts but failed. Then a month ago I implemented continuations in Javascript. (It's not pretty.) After that it went pretty smooth. All languages may by Turing complete, but some language features can make the difference between being able to solve a problem or not. … [Sjoerd Visscher's weblog] 11:40:11 PM      Google It!.

College books go digital - Maureen Feighan, The Detroit News. As soaring textbook prices continue to be a sore spot for college students and their parents, a cost-effective alternative that could change the way students learn is gaining steam. At least one major educational company plans to release 300 online ti [Online Learning Update] 8:51:12 AM      Google It!.

DISCUSSION-BASED ONLINE TEACHING - Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#561. The experts in this article focus on the concept of transactional distance between students and teachers and how to reduce this distance through interesting ways of stimulating student discussion in the online class. They are from Discussion-Based Online [Online Learning Update] 8:49:59 AM      Google It!.

XML-RPC interface for Mail To The Future. [Scripting News] 8:36:07 AM      Google It!.

The new Mail To The Future is ready to try out. It's remarkably like the app that was first deployed in early 1999, before easy blogging tools, when XML-RPC was still very new. It was a milestone, and today it's a vault for memory and visions of the future, with messages scheduled for delivery through 2030. It's important that the app be handled with care, over the years. UserLand is focused (correctly) on Manila and Radio, so I offered to host MTTF on the Scripting News server. If you have questions or comments, please post them here. If you can add to the history of MTTF, post comments here. [Scripting News] 8:35:36 AM      Google It!.

Google's supercomputer. Network theorists believe that all networks inevitably form hubs. The "services fabric" that enterprise architects are now weaving may sound egalitarian, but it's not immune to this law. Google's supercomputer -- or supernode -- gives it a leg up on the competition. Yours, however you define it, will too. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] Echoes of the Google-as-supercomputer meme are everywhere lately. Sun's new chief, Jonathan Schwartz, invoked it when we met with him recently. His take: Sure, Google runs its search and mail applications on Google, but it runs its business applications on Solaris. Coherent symmetric multiprocessing scales in a different direction, Schwartz said, and that's where Solaris 10 is headed with its revamped and highly granular partitioning. ... [Jon's Radio] 8:33:49 AM      Google It!.

'Junk' throws up precious secret. Huge chunks of apparently useless DNA may be so crucial for life that they have hardly changed through 400 million years of evolution. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 8:30:56 AM      Google It!.

World's Fastest Supercomputer To Be Built At ORNL [Slashdot] 8:28:32 AM      Google It!.

Colleges Offering Video Game Studies. TROY, N.Y. (Reuters) - Playing video games is no longer just a pastime of young boys. Now it's also homework for American college students. [Reuters: Technology] 8:27:04 AM      Google It!.