Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:32:04 GMT

Google's Knol against Wikipedia?

Google loves the content of Wikipedia. Just do some Google searches and you’ll see the Wikipedia articles among the top results. While Google tries to battle Wikipedia and to create their own encyclopaedia ( under the name Knol), I thought I should share my thoughts with you as a Wikipedia administrator. But Larry Sanger, the head and founder of Citizendium, the expert-encyclopaedia, has beat me to it:

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what many others have done… Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract many genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a "knol" and be compared and ranked by "the crowd" - not by expert peers - is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish.

Second, lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. Many of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project, particularly with Google Ads appearing on the articles. It does not appear to be in the spirit of the free culture movement. Still, it is good that Google has decided to make ads optional.

As an encyclopaedia, Knol has no chance against Wikipedia or Citizendium. As an other place for advertisements where people can promote their products, it seems to be a perfect solution. We’ll see…

I highlighted the features: article rating, Google ads and peer reviews. Posted by: Bertalan      Read more     Source

December 20, 2007, 9:59 PM CT

Active computer games no substitute

New generation active computer games stimulate greater energy expenditure than sedentary games, but are no substitute for playing real sports, as per a research studyin this weeks Christmas issue of the BMJ.

Young people are currently recommended to take an hour of moderate to vigorous physical exercise each day, which should use at least three times as much energy as is used at rest. But a number of adolescents have mostly sedentary lifestyles.

Time spent in front of television and computer screens has been associated with physical inactivity and obesity.

The new generation of wireless based computer games is meant to stimulate greater interaction and movement during play, so scientists at Liverpool John Moores University compared the energy expenditure of adolescents when playing sedentary and new generation active computer games.

Six boys and five girls aged 13-15 years were included in the study. All were a healthy weight, competent at sport and regularly played sedentary computer games.

Before the study, each participant practiced playing both the active and inactive games.

On the day of the study, participants played four computer games for 15 minutes each while wearing a monitoring device to record energy expenditure......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

December 20, 2007, 9:31 PM CT

Roadrunner: A New Age of Super- computing

Laboratory officials celebrated Los Alamos's decision to pursue, pending approval by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the final phase of Roadrunner, a high-performance computer (HPC) slated to become the computational cornerstone of Laboratory mission-related work.

"Roadrunner ushers in a new era in high performance computing," said Terry Wallace, principal associate director for science, technology, and engineering (PADSTE). Wallace praised the hard work and dedication of the entire Roadrunner Project Team at the celebration last Thursday.

Roadrunner is designed to achieve a sustained operating speed of 1,000 trillion calculations each second, or a "petaflop/s" in computer jargon-peta signifying the number 10 followed by 15 zeros, and flop/s meaning "floating point operation per second." The fastest current supercomputer is rated at 478 teraflop/s (teraflop/s meaning one trillion floating point operations per second); Roadrunner would be roughly 3 times faster.

The computer will be developed in partnership with IBM and will utilize commercially available hardware, including aspects of commercial gaming and graphics technologies. Because of its off-the-shelf design, the computer costs significantly less than a one-of-a-kind machine. It uses a Linux operating system......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 13:59:05 GMT

Tablet Computers

Would a tablet computer help you in your business?

Tim Berry has a blog entry at Small Business Trends were he talks about what he likes about a tablet computer over a standard laptop.

The biggest advantage tablets have according to Berry is that they are easier to use on airplanes. It allows you to adjust the screen if the person in front of you lowers his seat back. Another versatility offered by the tablet is the ability to do handwriting or use the keyboard.

He also points out several other ideas that benefit from using a tablet.

Is it right for you? Well that depends on your computing needs.

If you are traveling frequently, using it for power points, or have other needs that will benefit from a tablet, then consider a tablet.

Personally, I purchased my first laptop computer last May. So far I have used it on all of my trips and found it handy. Would a tablet computer be more useful for me? It is possible but the laptop is working for now. However, as my consulting increases and I have to be on the road even more the benefits of a tablet may become more apparent.

It all comes down to what is best for you and how you operate your business. Posted by: John Dornoff      Read more     Source

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:24:52 GMT

From Wal-Mart for $198

Need a new computer at home and don't want to pay the earth for it? Your next computer could very well be the Everex gPC bought from Wal-Mart for just US$198.



This is a rather modest little number, but has the added feature of a Ubuntu 7.10 (the latest version of the best Linux software) already installed. Great for a kids machine in the family or rumpus room.

The computer features a middle of the road computer as far as capability, and can very well be a good Internet ready machine. It already has installed the Open Office suite of programs, including a word processor, spreadsheet program, diagram editor etc., and has Google Aps, Skype, iPod compatible software and more . . . all free-ware software.

Now isn't the price really coming down on computers! Posted by: Elwyn Jenkins      Read more     Source

December 6, 2007, 3:00 PM CT

Free software brings affordability to mathematics

Until recently, a student solving a calculus problem, a physicist modeling a galaxy or a mathematician studying a complex equation had to use powerful computer programs that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But an open-source tool based at the University of Washington won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophees du Libre, an international competition for free software.

The tool, called Sage, faced initial skepticism from the mathematics and education communities.

"I've had a surprisingly large number of people tell me that something like Sage couldn't be done -- that it just wasn't possible," said William Stein, associate professor of mathematics and lead developer of the tool. "I'm hearing that less now."

Open-source software, which distributes programs and all their underlying code for free, is increasingly used in everyday applications. Firefox, Linux and Open Office are well-known examples.

But until recently, nobody had done the same for the everyday tools used in mathematics. Over the past three years, more than a hundred mathematicians from around the world have worked with Stein to build a user-friendly tool that combines powerful number-crunching with new features, such as collaborative online worksheets......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:43:23 GMT

Microsoft End User License Agreement

By touching any computer ever made, you agree to the terms of this agreement....

Microsoft shall have the rights to your first born child. This child shal be called Bill or Billina. Said child shall be assigned an activation code, which must be used prior to this child playing outside....

User furthermore agrees to sing praises to Microsoft every morning upon waking and each evening before retiring.... Simply raise your hands in the air and repeat aloud, ''All hail Microsoft!'' Posted by: Gerard      Read more     Source

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:33:44 GMT

EyePilot

EyePilot Color Guide Software is an easy to use, interactive software program that enables you to work more effectively with color information.

Using eyePilot, you can better understand and work with a wide range of color-dependent web sites, documents, graphics and computer applications. EyePilot helps to end confusion around the use of color graphics such as pie charts, maps, web links and data plots. Posted by: Gerard      Read more     Source

November 18, 2007, 8:59 PM CT

Bee Strategy Helps Servers Run More Sweetly

Honeybees somehow manage to efficiently collect a lot of nectar with limited resources and no central command - after all, the queen bee is too busy laying eggs to oversee something as mundane as where the best nectar can be found on any given morning. As per new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the swarm intelligence of these amazingly organized bees can also be used to improve the efficiency of Internet servers faced with similar challenges.

bee dance-inspired communications system developed by Georgia Tech helps Internet servers that would normally be devoted solely to one task move between tasks as needed, reducing the chances that a Web site could be overwhelmed with requests and lock out potential users and customers. Compared with the way server banks are usually run, the honeybee method typically improves service by 4 percent to 25 percent in tests based on real Internet traffic. The research was reported in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

After studying the efficiency of honeybees, Craig Tovey, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, realized through conversations with Sunil Nakrani, a computer science colleague visiting from the University of Oxford, that bees and servers had strikingly similar barriers to efficiency......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

November 15, 2007, 10:28 PM CT

Google favored over other search engines

Web site policy makers who use robots.txt files as gatekeepers to specify what is open and what is off limits to Web crawlers have a bias that favors Google over other search engines, say Penn State scientists whose study of more than 7,500 Web sites revealed Googles advantage.

That finding was surprising, said C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology who led the research team which developed a new search engineBotSeerfor the study.

We expected that robots.txt files would treat all search engines equally or maybe disfavor certain obnoxious bots, so we were surprised to discover a strong connection between the robots favored and the search engines market share, said Giles of Penn States College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

Robots.txt files are not an official standard, but by informal agreement, they regulate Web crawlersalso known as spiders and botswhich mine the Web 24/7 for everything from the latest news to e-mail addresses. Web policy makers use the files found in a Web sites directory to restrict crawler access to non-public information. Robots.txt files also are used to reduce server load which can result in denial of service and shut down Web sites.

But some Web policy makers and administrators are writing robots.txt files which are not uniformly blocking access......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source