Thursday, November 18, 2004

Stan Krute says (via email) that Keyhole is an accomplishment on par with Basic, the Apple II, Mac, Mosaic and Google. He's created a set of bookmarks that "let one fly among the major league baseball park to baseball park." A bbs where users share their discoveries. [Scripting News] 8:01:02 PM      Google It!.

Electronic Eye Devised to Help Blind Cross Roads. LONDON (Reuters) - An "electronic eye" that can be fitted to a pair of glasses could help the blind cross roads more safely, scientists said on Friday. [Reuters: Science] 8:00:15 PM      Google It!.

DavPack 1.0.1. DavPack is a series of fixes for using WebDAV with Plone. If you use WebDAV with Plone, then this product is for you. [Plone RSS] 7:58:57 PM      Google It!.

DoCoMo to Use Linux on Phones [Slashdot:] 7:57:57 PM      Google It!.

PSP Site Launches, Launch Titles Confirmed [Slashdot:] 1:01:44 PM      Google It!.

D-Lin Article - A Web Service Interface for Creating Concept Browsing Interfaces. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november04/sumner/11sumner.html Some of you may have run across the VUE concept mapping application before. One of its promises is that it will allow you to create concept map interfaces to Fedora-based repositories. This recent D-Lib article describes a similar innovation, but in this case it is the introduction of a web service-based interface called "Concept Space Interchange Protocol" to support the deployment of concept browsing interfaces to digital libraries. As the paper concludes "The merit of [the] approach lies in its innovative use of web services technology to provide an educationally relevant visualization service across distributed library sites, as opposed to creating a visualization interface for a single library." What's that sound you hear? Listen carefully, it's the sound of the train leaving the station, and while the library community all quietly climbed aboard, the ed tech community was still debating the need for a train. - SWL [EdTechPost] 10:04:12 AM      Google It!.

Stem Cells Feed Brain Tumors. Researchers discover stem cells that initiate and maintain the growth of brain cancer tumors. The study could lead to new treatments for many types of cancer. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News] 9:26:04 AM      Google It!.

Speech recognition circa 2004. If you've never tried dictation, you can get a sense of how it works by watching a video screencast I made shortly after I installed Version 8 of NaturallySpeaking. The out-of-the-box experience was dramatically better than before. It got even better when I fed the program all the articles and blog entries I've written during the past few years. ... What I find most interesting about this process is the way in which I train the computer to be an intelligent assistant. Because recognition accuracy is such a difficult problem, dictation software has to pay very close attention to me. It has to learn everything it can about my speech patterns, vocabulary, and writing style. And it must leverage all this information to the maximum degree possible. Perhaps because we imagine that other application domains are not as challenging, other programs pay strikingly little attention to what we do. Sure, the browser will remember the last thing that you typed into a field on a form, and your e-mail program will help you keep track of whom you've replied to. But by and large, our so-called productivity software does not monitor what we do, is not meaningfully trainable, and does not grow more valuable over time as our relationship with it deepens. We are creatures of habit, but we are ill-served by software that does not notice or respond to those habits. When I organize my e-mail or conduct research on the Web, I exhibit predictable patterns of behavior. We have long expected but rarely experienced personal productivity software that absorbs those patterns, automates repetitive chores, and can be taught to improve its performance. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 9:24:07 AM      Google It!.

Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars - JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times. Google, Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers. Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's colla [Online Learning Update] 9:02:08 AM      Google It!.

Google Keyhole, Google Scholar [Slashdot:] keyhole is quite amazing and the Scholar service is a big step tward federated style searching research literature. -- BL 8:37:49 AM      Google It!.