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

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

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
• …

Genomics & Proteomics, a web publicatgion of Reed Business Information, has a cover story on the Open Source Bioinformatics community. The lead paragraphs set the tone …

Source: Protein_molecule, Wikipedia, May 10, 2006

Jeff Bizzaro, MSc, launched the Bioinformatics Organization Inc. (BOI: bioinformatics.org), one of the largest organizations in the field of bioinformatics, to support the goals of BOI embraced the ideals of the open-source movement to combat restrictive, if not elitist, working conditions imposed by the cost of scientific progress rendered proprietary. (For this article “open source” is defined as freely available software, data sets, or computing capacity.)

“When I got into this field in 1995,” says Bizzaro, “software as well as biological data were being patented at an alarming rate. Computational tools could run hundreds of thousands of dollars, requiring institutional licenses that only the better-endowed academic institutions could afford.” Out of this frustration and almost a sense of isolation, the idea of shared bioinformatics resources evolved. “I created an environment—an online community where myself and others, those of us who didn’t have a local group—could meet and share information.”

Sited as examples of the open source movement are a variety of projects:

• ALFRED, the Allele Frequency Database, is a resource for gene frequency data on human populations around the world. http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred/
• Coffee Genome Project, CoffeeDNA.net
• EGAD, a protein design program, egad.berkeley.edu/software.php
• IntAct, the European Bioinformatics Institute molecular interaction database, www.ebi.ac.uk/intact
• Rosetta@home, a distributed processing model for protein folding, design, and docking calculations (akin to Seti at Home), boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/