Monday, November 22, 2004

Dolphins Protect New Zealand Swimmers from Shark. WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A pod of dolphins circled protectively round a group of New Zealand swimmers to fend off an attack by a great white shark, media reported on Tuesday. [Reuters: Science] 8:15:18 PM      .

The Definitive Guide to MySQL, 2nd Ed. [Slashdot:] little fluff in 802 pages. 5:39:15 PM      Google It!.

Plone 2.0.5 Release Candidate available. After a successful bug-fixing day earlier last month, lots of small issues with the 2.0.4 release were attended to. [Plone RSS] 5:37:15 PM      Google It!.

Mobile Firms Hope Consumers Will Turn on to TV. STOCKHOLM/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A reality show or soap opera on your mobile phone? This is the vision of top telecoms firms as they hope that from 2006 consumers will sign up for new phones that can receive digital television signals. [Reuters: Technology] 2:07:23 PM      Google It!.

PloneContacts 0.1.1 released. A new beta version of PloneContacts has been released. [Plone RSS] 2:06:01 PM      Google It!.

PloneContacts 0.2 beta Released. PloneContacts is a product designed to be an address book system. It allows users to keep track of individual "contacts", in the form of Plone content objects. The contacts can be exported to vCard format, for importing into Microsoft Outlook, Novell Groupwise, or any other application that supports the vCard format. [Plone RSS] 2:03:10 PM      Google It!.

HP & Commodity Computing [Slashdot:] 2:01:45 PM      Google It!.

Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004. From the report: more than 1.9 million students were studying online in the fall of 2003. Schools expect the number of online students to grow to more than 2.6 million by the fall of 2004. "Schools that offer online courses believe that their online students are at least as satisfied as those taking their face-to-face offerings." Detailed report, numerous statistics. 695K PDF. A summary is also available. Coverage from eSchool News. By I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, The Sloan Consortium, November, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 2:00:13 PM      Google It!.

Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite!. A computer program known as Brutus.1 is generating brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out. By By DANIEL AKST. [NYT > Technology] 9:24:24 AM      Google It!.

230mph Electric Car [Slashdot:] 9:22:26 AM      Google It!.

Parts of Special-Ed Bill Would Shift More Power to States and School Districts. Congress has given state and school officials more power to shape the terms for providing services to the nation's 6.5 million disabled students. By By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO. [NYT > Education] 9:20:59 AM      Google It!.

It's Got a Z, It Must Be Edgy. Take the Sims to the big city, let them mix with punkers, ravers and slackers, and The Urbz delivers an amusing, yet frustrating experience. By Lore Sjöberg. [Wired News] 9:10:26 AM      Google It!.

Reasoning and Ontologies for Personalized E-Learning in the Semantic Web - Nicola Henzem, Peter Dolog, Wolfgang Nejdl; Journal ETS. The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information. ... Especially in e-Learning, it is important to overcome the one-size-fits-all approach and provide learners with individual learning experiences. Learners have different requirements (like their individual learning style, their actual progress in the learning process, their individual background knowledge, but also more technical requirements like the device they are currently using for accessing the E-Learning materials, etc.).[Online Learning Update] 9:09:16 AM      Google It!.

Survey: Half of U.S. Parents Plan to Buy Videogame. LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Nearly half of all U.S. adults with children plan to give video games as gifts this holiday season, according to a survey conducted by the trade group representing the video game industry and released on Monday. [Reuters: Technology] 8:49:37 AM      Google It!.

RTX Provides Cordless Phones for Net-Based Calls. COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish electronics equipment maker RTX Telecom RTX.CO said on Monday it had signed an agreement with Skype, a provider of Internet-based voice telephony, to develop and market cordless handsets. [Reuters: Technology] 8:48:55 AM      Google It!.

Open Source Biology Initiative [Slashdot:] 8:47:57 AM      Google It!.