Academic Computing Blog

Larry Press recently posted a message to the DIGLIB List announcing his survey on the accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles.

On May 19th, he posted a quick summary of the results so far:

So far, 50 respondents have evaluated a Wikipedia article in an area of their expertise. Of those, 76% agreed or strongly agreed that the article was accurate and 46% agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete.

Of the 50, 18 compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thirty four percent of those people found the Britannica more or substantially more accurate and 39% found the Britannica article to be more or substantially more complete.

You can see detailed results at: http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/wikieval/

The survey is at: http://express.perseus.com/perseus/surveys/1734848031/1e78143f.htm

Please complete it (for as many articles as you wish) and forward it to others.

For more research on the accuracy and completeness ofthe Wikipedia, see http://del.icio.us/lpress/wikieval).

Larry Press

A number of tools support destop blogging. On the Macintosh, MarsEdit

This is a testing MarsEdit remote blogging with the api enabled … the main tweaks here on WordPress 1.6 were to

• specify blog ID 1
• specify the path to /wordpress/xmlrpc.php
• set the execute bits on the xmlrpc.php file

A few different tweaks were required for MT

• set the author’s api password.
• turn off the “s” in https

The next steps are to test other packages, such as

• Ecto
• VoodooPad
• …

College Students’ Latest Obsession
University Business
Published: Thursday, February 9, 2006
http://www.universitybusiness.com/page.cfm?p=607&news_date=2006-02-09&news_id=8787#top

Forget parties and hanging out at Starbucks. Today college students are clicking on to networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com to socialize.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), there are over 15 million undergraduate college students in the US, and they are a strong, active online audience.

The complete article is available at: eMarketer (may require login)
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003820

To understand this complex group more deeply, eMarketer went back to campus to interview students. The picture that emerged is of a college student population that:

+ Is adept at multitasking

+ Is collaborative and group-oriented, whether doing schoolwork or participating in online communities

+ Moves seamlessly between multiple communications platforms

+ Believes in their right to express themselves online

+ Is unfazed by the idea that the online environment may not be as safe as they think

+ Wants to participate in the media they consume

“I’m online all the time,” Nick, 22, a senior majoring in international studies and religion, told eMarketer. “I’ve got it on my cellphone; I go on in between classes. It’s always on.”

The Penguin Personal Cluster(TM) is a high performance Linux cluster to-go that delivers powerful, scalable and easy to use supercomputing resources to project teams, departmental computing and highly-productive individual contributors. This unique cluster family packs up to 200 Gflops and 48 CPU cores in a tiny package, and provides a budget friendly answer to your most computationally intensive projects. And these clusters go anywhere – no computer room or system administrator needed. With a patent pending package design and world class Scyld Beowulf R Linux clustering software, you get workstation-like simplicity with unmatched scalability, reliability and performance. Whether your project is on land, sea or in the air, the Penguin Personal Cluster delivers all the freedom and productivity you need in one small and convenient package.

http://www.penguincomputing.com/hpcpersonal

Keep science off web, says Royal Society
Richard Wray
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,16781,1650370,00.html

The Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, yesterday joined the debate about so-called open access to scientific research, warning that making research freely available on the internet as it is published in scientific journals could harm scientific debate.

The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. “Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society,” The Royal Society said.

Every fall, higher education institutions host the return of thousands of students to campus. While this return is a challenge on many fronts, in recent years it has become increasingly challenging for IT staff to mitigate the threat posed by unmanaged student machines. For the 2005 back to school timeframe, Microsoft has several options for managing the patching and vulnerability assessment process, most of which are no-cost service add-ons to Windows 2003 Server.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/student_patch_management.mspx

– Geoff

“The majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their handset,” Jonathan Schwartz, the president of Sun, argued at a Friday speech in San Jose at a meeting of the American India Foundation.

When it comes to aiding developing regions’ digital development, “Our collective generation believes the desktop PC is the most important thing to give to people. I don’t buy that. The most important thing to give is access to the Internet.”

Source : Stephen Shankland, Sun president: PCs are so yesterday, CNET News.com, ZDNet News: September 23, 2005, 3:06 PM PT. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5879292.html

Researchers at Penn State and other universities have developed a tool to help educators and researchers search for and exchange large academic or scientific files more easily–using the principles most associated with trading music and movies illegally.

But unlike the free “peer-to-peer” (P2P) file-sharing systems that have drawn complaints and lawsuits from the entertainment industry, people who allow data to be exchanged over LionShare can place limits on who can view specific files.

eSchool News staff, New tool aims to ease academic file sharing, eSchool News, September 23, 2005. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=5876

TP Msg. #661 Publish and Flourish : Become a Prolific Scholar

“Write daily for 15 to 30 minutes. Many scholars believe that writing requires big blocks of time. They’re wrong. Research shows that scholars who write daily publish far more than those who write in big blocks of time. The problem with big blocks of time is that they’re hard to find. In contrast, when you write daily, you start writing immediately because you remember what you were writing about the day before. This leads to impressive production. ”

Source : Rick Reis, Tomorrow-s Professors Listserv, Stanford University. September 6, 2005. An archive of all past postings (with a two week delay) can be found at: http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml

%A Daniel Perron
%T Learning on the WWW: A Case Study (Preliminary Version)
%D 1994
$J Second International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference ‘94: Mosaic and the Web.
%I NCSA, UIUC
%X The course was built around four main components: the hypertext book, the mailings lists, the projects and the MOO interactions.