Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Podcasting's transcription dilemma. I owe a huge thank-you to Eleanor Kruszewski, who has transcribed my audio interview with Intervoice's Ron Owens. And we should all thank her for raising the uncomfortable issue of podcast transcriptions which, for the most part, are missing in action. ... [Jon's Radio] 1:49:53 PM      Google It!.

Brain Processes Whistled Language Just as Spoken. LONDON (Reuters) - Like Snow White's seven dwarfs, shepherds on one of Spain's Canary Islands whistle while they work and use the sound to communicate over long distances. [Reuters: Science] 1:47:17 PM      Google It!.

Six Apart to buy Live Journal. A seismic event in the blogsphere, Six Apart - the company that produces Moveable Type, a popular blogging software, is about to acquire Live Journal (at least according to this report), one of the largest blog hosting companies in the world with about 6.5 million users. Pundits will talk about the user base - but what I look at are the features unique to Live Journal, and specifically, the social networking aspect to the site that is quite unlike Blogger or any other such service. By Om Malik, Om Malik on Broadband, January 4, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 1:46:10 PM      Google It!.

Putting Context Into Context. According to the author, design requires an understanding of context, and context has to do with more than just information about the current user and the current interface: the user may use the same tool in different situations, creating different contexts. For example, the user will have different goals at different times, be playing a different role, have different background resources and information, be in a different physical environment, and more. The article suggests that designers should anticipate these different contexts and design for them. By Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering, January 4, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 1:45:14 PM      Google It!.

Can Many Agents Answer Questions Better Than One?. James Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds, proposes that a group of people answering a question emsemble can produce a better answer than an expert answering a question on his or her own. This could be a quirk of people, but the theory says it shouldn't be. Enter this paper, in which the author (without reference to Surowiecki) asks whether a group of computer agents can answer a natural language question better than a single agent. The answer is yes, because different agents operate in different domains and may therefore offer appropriate answers in cases where the domain is ambiguous. By Boris Galitsky, First Monday, January 3, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 1:43:39 PM      Google It!.

capture the map [Edubloggers Links Feed] 8:50:35 AM      Google It!.

Academic Blogging (Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing) [Edubloggers Links Feed] 8:47:26 AM      Google It!.

Free IDE Gambas Reaches 1.0 [Slashdot:] 8:41:10 AM      Google It!.