|
Tuesday, August 24, 2004 |
Turing Digital Archive. The Turing Digital Archive
is an excellent collection of digitized facsimiles of historical source
material from one of the pioneers of modern computing, Alan Turing. The
archive is OAI-MHP compliant, and thus searchable through OAIster and other Open Archives Initiative metadata repositories.
Quoting from the cover page:
This digital archive contains mainly unpublished personal
papers and photographs of Alan Turing from 1923-1972. The originals are
in the Turing archive in King's College Cambridge.
It contains letters, obituaries and memoirs written by colleagues and
used by Sara Turing for her biography of her son (Heffers: Cambridge,
1959); talks and publications on the Automatic Computing Engine, his
work at the National Physical Laboratory, the theories of computable
numbers, digital computers, morphogenesis and the chemical development
of cells. [Open Access News]
11:21:45 PM Google It!.
|
|
RSS Feeds for Maricopa ePortfolio. Today
I cleaned my desk of paper piles, revamped the "todo" list that
overflows from my whiteboard, and finished up a little experiment I had
started on our ePortfolio site.
Audree Thurman, the clever programmer of this nifty system, had developed a nifty approach for RSS feeds. There is a web page version (human readable) for changes among all the portfolios, there is the geeky, orange icon labeled RSS version,
and you can also sign up to get notifications by email when a specific
eportfolio has changed (e.g. so a teacher can monitor a number of
student eports). See the details under her posted "enhancements" summary.
Anyhow, I had plotted to put the RSS feed on the front page, and
forgot about actually doing it. So I was able to rather quickly use the
Feed2JS version that generates the content via a PHP include. I will likely end up making this a cron (timed) job that runs it every 15 minnutes, so the include is just a static file.
But I was also interested in creating part that would pick a
published eportfolio and random and insert a link on any page I needed.
I wrote Audree this morning and asked if she could write a script that
would update a text file with a tab delimited format for each
eportfolio's Owner name, their college, and its URL. With this, I can
easily have a PHP include that sucks the data into an array, counts'
em, and picks one at random. She wrote back in about 15 minutes and
said it was done.
So now, the new and improved Maricopa eP site has both of these dynamic features:
http://eport.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/
We are expecting this site to bust out of the seams as our Ocotillo ePortfolio Action Group ramps up this year. There ought to be much better ePortfolios than that one by Biff Cantrell. [cogdogblog]
11:19:57 PM Google It!.
|
|
Americans for Taxpayer Access. A large number of public-interest groups today launched the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The coalition formed to support the NIH open-access plan and these three principles:
- American taxpayers are entitled to open access to the peer-reviewed
scientific articles on research funded by the National Institutes of
Health (NIH).
- Open access to these reports will lead to usage by millions
of physicians, public health professionals, patients, students,
teachers, scientists, and others, and will deliver an accelerated
return on the taxpayers' investment in NIH.
- Widespread dissemination of these reports is an essential, inseparable component of our nation’s investment in science.
The members
of the ATA include patient advocacy organizations, libraries, library
associations, universities, and university departments. Membership is
open and all stakeholder groups that support open access to
taxpayer-funded research are strongly encouraged to join. For more details, see the ATA web site or press release. [Open Access News]
12:40:19 PM Google It!.
|
|
Boring Game? Outsource It.
It's not just work that's being outsourced from wealthy nations to
poorer ones. These days, online gamers in developing countries are
being paid to earn virtual goods that wealthier players are too lazy or
unskilled to win on their own. By Laila Weir. [Wired News]
9:44:59 AM Google It!.
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
|