Academic Computing Blog

Joi Ito explains Creative Commons to Loic Le Meur in light of “transaction costs” ….

[

Originally found on Oliver Thymann’s “Oliver’s Stuff” blog .

Wolfram Workbench is the state-of-the-art integrated development environment that makes it easier to build and maintain software solutions written with Mathematica technologies.

Wolfram Workbench is currently available as a prerelease exclusively at UVM as part of our subscription to Wolfram’s Premier Service. All Mathematica users at UVM can download a free copy now for any work machine on which they’ve installed Mathematica through the site license.

Key features in Workbench enable users to:

* Group files, code, and other Mathematica resources into a single project

* Perform source-code editing with syntax highlighting, error reporting, local variable coloring, and many more options

* Study code as it runs to easily detect and fix any problems * Profile code’s execution and develop and run tests, with an array of insightful reporting methods

* Manage multiple versions of files and access their version histories

* Build and deploy Mathematica packages

For more information about Workbench, visit our website at:
http://www.wolfram.com/workbench

To download Wolfram Workbench, go to:
http://www.wolfram.com/services/premiersupport/

Murcia, Spain, 5 to 8 October 2006 (http://www.iadis.org/icwi2006)

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline for submissions (second call): 28 July 2006 – The IADIS WWW/Internet 2006 conference aims to address the main issues of concern within WWW/Internet. WWW and Internet had a huge development in recent years. Aspects of concern are no longer just technical anymore but other aspects have aroused. This conference aims to cover both technological as well as non-technological issues related to these
developments. Main tracks have been identified (see below). However innovative contributes that don’t fit into these areas will also be considered since they might be of benefit to conference attendees.

(more…)

The Google Notebook appliance has arrived with not much fanfare – the news competes with Apple’s announcement of the new MacBook, Sony’s announcement of a new pocket Vaio UX, Yahoo’s announcement of a new home page and probably others still to come. The Google announcement is byfar the most interesing one.

Google Notebook is a Firefox (and IE) extention that creates a notepad at the bottom right of the browser. You can “cut and paste” information from the current webpage (text, images, links), insert tags, and store the information on your Google “page.” The notebook can be private or public. Installing the Firefox extentions and then restarting the browser takes you to a startup tutorial page. After that, we’re on.

Although it’s branded “Google Labs”, not “Google Beta”, it feels more like betaware – some of the features are less than idea when compared to popular social network sites – or maybe I should just read the manual :).

[1] Google Notebook, for IE and FireFox, http://www.google.com/notebook

[2] Press release, “Sony delivers world’s first full-function, pocket-sized PC”, San Diego, May 16, 2006. http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/notebooks/release/22130.html

[3] Apple Website, Introducing the all-new MacBook, http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html

Envision this: A computer tells students that their latest literary concoction doesn’t connect ideas logically. At Warren Central High School, in Indianapolis, English teacher Kathy Paris doesn’t have to imagine. She uses Criterion, a Web service that scores essays and shoots feedback out to students within seconds.

Article source:

Cheri Lucas, “Grade-o-Matic : The red pen goes high tech”, Edutopia’s Technology Intrgration, May 11, 2006. Edutopia, The George Lucas Educational Foundation. http://www.edutopia.org/magazine/ed1article.php?id=Art_1411&issue=dec_05

Article resources:

Criterion: http://www.ets.org/criterion
Grades That Mean Something: http://www.edutopia.org/1040
SAGrader: http://sagrader.com

Using RSS to increase user awareness of e-resources in academic libraries
Jay Bhatt
Drexel University
http://www.higheredblogcon.com/index.php/using-rss-to-increase-user-awareness-of-e-resources-in-academic-libraries/

Engineering Resources Blog:
http://englibrary.blogspot.com

Jay’s blog on the Digital Divide Network
http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/jaybhatt

Jay’s Journal on LISNews
http://www.lisnews.org/~Jay/journal

Jay’s submissions on LISNews
http://www.lisnews.org/~Jay

Abstract:

There are numerous blogs and RSS feeds available from a variety of scientific databases, electronic journals and electronic books still not well-utilized by many academic libraries supporting scientific disciplines. Since one of the important roles of academic libraries is to promote and provide instruction in the use of electronic resources, it is evident that the libraries need to play a pivotal role in developing awareness about the evolving applications of scientific blogs and RSS feeds. Various course offerings such as those in biomedical engineering, chemistry and engineering management can effectively make use of such blogs and RSS feeds to support both face-to-face and distance learning. Their applications may include: current awareness services to keep up with new information, RSS feeds of new journal article citations, RSS feeds of research queries in electronic databases, and news alerts from different subject areas. Other library related uses may include RSS feeds of new book titles based on selected keywords, blog entries for course related information, and announcing library related events. A particular emphasis on the Engineering Resources blog created for the Engineering Departments at Drexel is highlighted to show how it is used by engineering students at Drexel. Faculty collaboration in the creation and use of course related blogs can further enhance their educational partnership with the libraries. RSS feeds can now be integrated into Refworks, a bibliography management tool, to facilitate citation of those feeds in student research papers. It is strongly envisioned that this presentation will further motivate academic libraries supporting scientific disciplines to seriously consider using them if they have not yet done so. Overall, almost all disciplines in academic libraries can benefit, provide additional avenues to reach their faculty and students and in the process help students learn valuable life-long learning skills.

This presentation attempts to answer questions such as:

1. What is a blog? What is RSS? How does it work? What is a feedreader?

2. Why is it important for faculty and students in academic libraries to learn more about it?

3. What are major electronic resources that provide RSS feeds?

4. What are some ways by which RSS feeds can be used in academic libraries?

5. Can academic blogs improve information seeking skills of faculty and students? If so, how?

6. What are different ways that information consultants/librarians can use to develop user awareness of RSS feeds?

7. Where are we heading?

Re: Eprints, Dspace, or Espace?

Question:

I need to compare and choose a suitable software for a repository. I have decided to discuss ARNO, CDSware, DSpace, Eprints, and Fedora. Could you briefly discuss each one in terms of suitability for a university?

Answer:

The answer is very simple: It doesn’t matter! The only thing that matters is that it should not be “ESpace” (Empty-Space); in other words, there has to be a policy that ensures that the university archives are filled with the intended content.

All the main OAI-compliant archive-creating softwares are functionally equivalent, because after all, what they do is quite simple: They make sure that all deposited papers have the same metadata tags, the obvious ones: author-name, article-title, date, journal-name, etc., so that they are interoperable as well as harvestable by OAI service providers.

The article then goes on to provide anice background on ARNO, CDSware, DSpace, Eprints, and Fedora.

Article URL: http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l&S=&P=87449

For more information about the Open Access Initiative, see http://www.openarchives.org/

Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Some Google Scholar search results include links to full-text; some offer only citations.

Google Scholar Local Links allows a user to specify a “local library preference,” and then, if Google Scholar finds a local link, it flags that citation as available locally.

Quinn Norton, Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure, Wired News, 02:00 AM Mar, 15, 2006 EST.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70413-0.html

You’re in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike.

Now, thanks to a new software-collaboration tool, you and your intrepid party of fellow hackers can navigate your labyrinth of code and slay its dastardly bugs, all in a dungeonlike world similar to an old-school text adventure.

Called playsh, the new tool is a collaborative programming environment based on the multi-user domains, or MUDs, so popular online in the early 1990s.

Trying to do things in playsh is most similar to games like Zork from the 1970s. To go north, you type north. To examine an object, you type look. There are no graphics, just descriptions.

But instead of ducking grues and collecting zorkmids, you’re interacting with whatever program code you’re working on, as well as the data and hardware devices that it uses. “It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places,” says developer Matt Webb, who unveiled the tool at last week’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Why Not Python?, Part 1:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8794 — After 20 years of working with C, Collin Park decided it might be time to see what the “new” programming languages had to offer. So he took Python out for a spin, and now he’s sharing his experiences and his thoughts on modern languages in a three-part series for LJ.com.

Why Not Python?, Part 2:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8729 — In Part 2 of his series, Collin Park gets deeper into Python by trying to write a program to solve Sudoku puzzles.

Why Not Python?, Part 3:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8858 — The old C hacker is back to share what he learned about writing a short-and-sweet Python program that solves Sudoko puzzles. This time out, he’s working on the algorithm that fills in the puzzle blanks.

Why Not Python?, Part 4:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8859 — In his final installment, Collin Park demonstrates how he got his Python program to make “guesses”. More importantly, he learned that when you’re coding in Python, “simply assigning a list doesn’t copy it”.

F
–