Thursday, December 7, 2006

Even The Blind Get Deja Vu. zentropa writes "Cosmos magazine is reporting that even the blind experience deja vu [~] backing the idea that it is caused by misfires in the brain's temporal lobe. They quote a British study where a blind man feels like he has 'already seen' some unfamiliar situations. 'Hearing and touch and smell often seem to intermingle in the déjà vu experiences,' said the study subject, whose name has not been made public. 'It is almost like photographic memory, without sight obviously... as if I was encountering a mini-recording in my head, but trying to think "Where have I come across that before?"'" [Slashdot] 8:32:41 PM      Google It!.

General-purpose intermediation. The solution I cobbled together speaks volumes about the fundamental openness of Web applications. To find out how Gmail creates a distribution list, I logged in, created a list interactively using Gmail's form, and captured the resulting HTTP transaction using one of the handiest tools in my Web developer's kit, Firefox's LiveHTTPHeaders extension. The next step was to replay that transaction outside of the browser. I rearranged its elements -- an URL, a chunk of HTTP POST data, and a set of HTTP headers including a cookie packed with crucial name/value pairs -- as a command-line invocation of another of the handiest tools in my kit: curl. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 8:31:14 PM      Google It!.

EDUCAUSE Releases Report on Campus IT Environments. EDUCAUSE has just released the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2005 Summary Report, which summarizes data collected early in 2006 for the past fiscal year from colleges and universities about their campus IT environments and practices. This year[base ']s survey for the first time integrated elements of the COSTS (Cost of Supporting Technology Services) Project, started in 1997 in association with the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges as an effort to measure the unit costs of providing IT services based on institutional characteristics. This integration resulted in new Core Data Service questions on total campus budget and personnel, yielding new ratios and benchmarks. While there are significant trends in higher education IT benchmarks from one year to another, many of the most interesting changes are specific to community colleges, research institutions, or other Carnegie groups. Read about this year's key findings. [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs] 8:30:08 PM      Google It!.

No Wires, No Plugs: Just Access By WiFi . Alexandria is going wireless. The city is close to a signing a 21st-century agreement to build a citywide wireless network. Anyone with a laptop computer equipped for wireless access will be able to connect to the Internet from virtually anywhere in the city with the purchase of a $21-per-month... By Jerry Markon. [washingtonpost.com - Technology - Industry News, Policy, and Reviews] 5:42:12 AM      Google It!.