Tuesday, March 6, 2007

SXSW - Second Life meetup?. Hey Now. If anyone will be attending SXSW in Austin this weekend please let me know. I will be putting together an informal gathering of Second LIfe educators on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Email me at joesanchez@mail.utexas.edu or joe@sanchezsocialmedia.com for more information. Technorati Profile [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs] 10:54:07 PM      Google It!.

Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform Available. UnreasonableMan writes "Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he's been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans. For an overview see Hawkins' 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. White papers are available at Numenta's website. Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than trying to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it."[Slashdot] 8:53:29 PM      Google It!.

Novell Releases OO[^]OOXML Translator. Tookis writes in with news that Novell has released an Office Open XML (OOXML) translator for OpenOffice.org. The article argues that, though this move may represent a nail in the coffin of the franchise known as Microsoft Office, and therefore a Good Thing, what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.[Slashdot] 1:47:30 PM      Google It!.

How Open Source Is Changing Education. ftblguy writes "MIT's Open CourseWare program provides a great example of how the open source movement is impacting education. The Online Education Database also lists Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, and Google (?) as some of the other open source in education success stories. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems, and online documents for educational purposes. Each success story has served as a springboard to create more open source successes."[Slashdot] 1:45:54 PM      Google It!.

IBM Many Eyes After One Month. ReadWriteWeb writes "IBM's Many Eyes app, a 'shared visualization and discovery' service, has been running for a month now. In this article two of the IBM researchers behind Many Eyes, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, showcase some of the best visualizations so far. They also talk about the future of 'social data analysis' on the Web. Wattenberg and Viégas believe that Many Eyes is not just social software, but 'societal-scale software.' They say that Many Eyes represents a break from conventional visualization research. Traditionally, computer scientists concentrate on scaling in terms of data, making visualizations work for bigger and bigger databases. IBM's agenda with Many Eyes is to scale the audience, not the data."[Slashdot] 1:43:59 PM      Google It!.

Scientists claim first in using brain scans to predict intentions. Researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity -- in this case, adding versus subtracting. The researchers inferred t... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 1:39:24 PM      Google It!.