Back in December Nature conducted a study comparing Britannica & Wikipedia, and reported that they are about equal in accuracy & error rates. Now — better late than never — Britannica has issued a retort to that study. (I’d love to read the full text of this, but unfortunately the PDF file won’t open. Is this an inadvertent comment on Britannica’s technological competence? I leave that as an exercise for.. Read More
2020 Visions
The current issue of Nature is a special issue containing articles on the future of computing; speculations on what computing will look like in 2020. Vernor Vinge suggests that “The Internet will have leaked out, to become coincident with Earth.” Sounds like Dan Simmons’ noosphere. This is why I love SF, folks. Two articles discuss how we will cope with an explosion of scientific data. Redefining Big Science: big as.. Read More
Minority Report, brought to you by NYU
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time: A multi-input touch screen that looks like a cross between something from Minority Report and a 2-D theremin. The technology has the rather bizarre name, Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. Brought to you by some very clever people at the NYU Media Research Lab.
The future of libraries sound bite
Needs for new library stack up, from the Rock Hill SC Herald Wanda, SILS’ resident PR Genius, forwarded me an email about a week ago, that she got forwarded from someone, et cetera, through some circuitous means, ultimately from a reporter from the Herald. The question from the reporter was very very general, & amounted to: how is technology changing public libraries? And my favorite part of his question: what.. Read More
I would prefer not to
Who’s Reading Your Cell’s Text Messages?, from eWeek [via Slashdot] Bubrouski, a computer science major at Northeastern University in Boston, is the proud owner of ‘Null@vtext.com,’ an account on the popular Verizon text messaging service… “I started getting phantom text messages with no callback number and an empty ‘From:’ field,” Bubrouski wrote. For example, text messages… told Bubrouski that “A student at 4105704297 has just completed Princeton Review Word Set.. Read More
No One Cards
I was at the Daily Grind just a few minutes ago for my afternoon fix, and there was a small sign on the side of the quick-cup-of-coffee register: NO ONE CARDS AT THIS REGISTER Of course they were referring to the One Card, but in my uncaffeinated state I seriously thought for a moment that they were saying that they don’t check IDs. As if they were sticking it to.. Read More
Google gets a War Room
Google Wages Fresh Campaign Against Critics of Project to Digitize Library Books, from the Chronicle …an announcement this month by Google that it was starting a campaign to dispel misperceptions about the project. …Google officials said they were creating a “fact-checking brigade” about the company’s digitization effort. I know it’s verging on politically incorrect to say this these days, but I’m entirely on Google’s side on this issue. Why? Because.. Read More
A reference source for your inner obsessive-compulsive
A Book for People Who Love Numbers, from the NY Times The new edition of Historical Statistics of the United States. …it weighs 29 pounds. It has five volumes. And it’s densely packed with more than a million numbers that measure America in mind-boggling detail, from the average annual precipitation in Sweet Springs, Mo., to the wholesale price of rice in Charleston S.C., in 1707. “You’d have to be a.. Read More
New journals on the scene
I saw 2 announcements today for interesting new online journals. Two in one day! A veritable bonanza of online publishing. These look to be worth following. Plagiary Devoted specifically to the scholarly, cross-disciplinary study of plagiary and related behaviors across the disciplines, articles in Plagiary address the issue of fraudulent contributions to disciplinary discourse communities and the potential (and actual) corruption of the professional literature and other genres of discourse.. Read More
Moss is the new Negroponte
Press release from the Media Lab: Moss appointed Media Lab director A seasoned entrepreneur and technology executive, [Frank] Moss has spent the last 25 years building a diverse set of companies that are on the leading edge of technology — from startups to large public companies, from high tech to biotech. With Moss’s appointment, Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte will step down as chairman to concentrate on One Laptop per.. Read More