Academic Computing Blog

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/

RFID & the Internet of Things
Mediamatic, Amsterdam
May 9, 10, 100
http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11183-en.html

RFID will play a pivotal role in fusing the physical world with the digital. RFID allows for the unique identification of objects, and any kind of online data can be linked to these unique ID’s. Here is where the real world and the internet become two faces of the same reality. Things go online.

Questions that come up: What are useful things to have online? How can the sharing of information between things yield us new valuable meanings and experiences? What new kinds of play can we think of, when our ordinary stuff begins to talk among itself? Will objects gain personalities?

And the key question seems to be: What are valid and imporant kinds of human agency that should be designed into an Internet of Things?

The participants of this workshop will develop scenarios for an internet of things. Ideas can range from scripts for small new rituals to outlines of societal changes of epic scale. The critical, utopian or nightmarish scenarios will be informed by lectures with concrete knowledge about currently available technology; by handy workshop tools that give hands-on experience in developing RFID applications, and by insightful presentations by cutting-edge makers and thinkers.

The AIMSA conference series has provided a biennial forum for the presentation of Artificial intelligence research and development since 1984. The conference, which is held in Bulgaria, covers the full range of topics in Artificial Intelligence and related disciplines and provides an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world.

As its name indicates the conference is dedicated to Artificial intelligence in its entirety. However, for AIMSA 2006, we would like to put the emphasis on a specific phenomenon that affects all areas of AI: the application and leverage of artificial intelligence technology in the context of human collaboration which today is mediated by the web. Artificial intelligence is used for supporting human communication in a wide variety of ways. For example, reasoning over the semantic web, analysing relationships between people, enhancing the user experience by learning from their behavior, applying natural language to large multilingual corpora, planning a combination of web services, adapting and personalising educational material, etc. All Artificial intelligence techniques are amenable to facilitating communication on the web. Moreover, these techniques are not deployed in isolation but are typically combined with results from other disciplines such as the social sciences, discrete mathematics, network computing, or cryptography. AIMSA 2006 aims to reflect this plethora of avenues whereby Artificial intelligence supports human collaboration based activities.

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2006 Workshop “Developing a Digital Libraries Education Program”

June 15, 8:30A-5P
Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Indiana University (IU) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will be offering a full-day workshop, aimed at digital library professionals, researchers, and educators to cover prominent issues surrounding digital libraries education. It is based on an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded collaborative DL education project. It is the second year of a three-year project. We have spent the past year recruiting our first classes of Digital Library Fellows, learning about the requirements of the digital library profession, and developing new courses. The workshop will bring together a number of speakers on topics of interest to digital library educators and working professionals. The workshop will provide the opportunity for IU and UIUC, other IMLS grant recipients, and several representatives from DL programs in other countries to report on project details, including requirements analysis, curriculum development, and program evaluation.

Specific topics to be covered are:
- Defining the domain of “digital librarianship”
- Core competencies in technical areas
- Core competencies in user, social, and legal areas
- Management of projects, systems, and people
- Balancing theory and practice
- Advanced Registration Rates: May 15th, 2006

http://jcdl2006.org/program/

Dan Albertson
Indiana University

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?

From the Higher Ed Blog, http://www.higheredblogcon.com/

This week, HigherEd BlogCon takes a closer look at the technology for bringing institutions into the Web 2.0 era. It’s a diverse set of topics, ranging from the nuts and bolts of podcasts to a session covering one of the hottest development tools, Ruby on Rails.

Mon, April 24 – Legal Education Podcasting Project
Tue, April 25 – Student To-Do List RSS Feed: Combining Audience and Task Navigation
Wed, April 26 – Using Web Traffic with a Kaizen Methodology
Thu, April 27 – Know Enough to be Dangerous: Tools for Taking Control of HTML and CSS
Fri, April 28 – The Fast Track to Agile Web Apps: Best Practices for Higher Ed Web Development on Rails

Feed 1 : feed://feeds.feedburner.com/higheredblogcon

Feed 2 : feed://www.higheredblogcon.com/index.php/feed/

Bonnie C. Carroll, President of Information International Associates Inc., will present the Keynote Address at the Opening Session of the Eighth International Conference on Grey Literature. This year’s conference is titled “Harnessing the Power of Grey”; and if there is one informational professional who can bring this to task, it is Bonnie Carroll. As President of IIa, she supports government and industry in managing information as a strategic resource.

Recent Keynote Addresses in the GL-Series were presented by:

GL7 – Dr. Laurent Romary, National Centre for Scientific Research, France
GL6 – James G. Neal, Columbia University, United States
GL5 – Dr. Helmut Artus, Information Centre for the Social Sciences, Germany

More information may be found at

http://www.textrelease.com
http://www.greynet.org

TextRelease
GL8 Program and Conference Bureau
Beysterveld 251
1083 KE Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Tel/Fax +31(0)20-672.1217
info@textrelease.com
http://www.textrelease.com
http://www.greynet.org