Wednesday, January 05, 2005

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!.

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!.