spotted on make, the 9th largest supercomputer in the world and the largest in Europe, residing in a former chapel at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
spotted on the always amazing make blog, i funded my undergrad education working as a janitor and i always thought something like this would be cool to do, though i could never bring myself to make a swan in this particular context :-)
what are the possibilities when the leading edge of the web meets the world's biggest digital collection of academic content? - an interesting discussion explored and presented in commentpress
photosynth "takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space", the demos are compelling, but the process sounds a lot like Latent Semantic Indexing. what does it mean for our notions of IR if massive collections of unstructured content can also function as a form of structured metadata by virtue of sheer quantity?
From Peter Suber's Open Access News blog, more than 1,000 journals are now using Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Suber also reports on the success of the PKP conference.
Appearing at The Stan Rogers Folk Festival, June 30-July3, when I will be sooo close to Canso, Nova Scotia. Throat singing is one of the most amazing musical experiences imaginable, and Chirgilchin would be fantastic live.
a scary incident from a top-notch access speaker and a top-tier blogger, peter's encounter shows that one of the most peaceful places on earth seems to not be immune from having at least one very thin-skinned citizen
"The results show that searchers are happy to delegate responsibility to RF [Relevance Feedback] systems for relevance assessment (through implicit feedback), but not more severe search decisions such as formulating queries or selecting retrieval strategies. Systems that help searchers make these decisions are preferred to those that act directly on their behalf or await searcher action."
Part of the Global Dialogues series from the World Bank, a panel discussion will be held on May 2 with experts from the Open Source Institute, the ODF Alliance, and others.
From Cardiff University, a "periodic table" of expertise according to the type and level of tacit knowledge involved. Thanks for the pointer, Francesca!
i did a high school english project on this novel, after seeing Vonnegut interviewed on CBC, maybe Peter Gzowski or Midday? anyway, we'll miss you Kurt
the disaster management system project started immediately in response to the Asian tsunami of December 2004 by Sanjiva Weerawarana and others, takes home the honour previously given to wikipedia
It's a pain to get into this site, but there is some really interesting info when you get to the actual article. According to IDC, a company with 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5M in annual wasted salary costs because of poor searching, and according to the Butler Group, as much as 10% of a company's salary costs are wasted through ineffective search. Information literacy advocates and desktop metadata forces could really make some inroads with CEOs using this data.
hibernate is one of the deepest persistence layers out there, and this effort started as one of the "20 percent" projects of a small team of Google engineers, a way to talk to multiple relational databases at the same time at the object level
one of my kids has started writing programs in Turing, and tells me that "it's really cool, a heck of a lot better than some language called java that takes 10 times more code to do anything"
"That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source software and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market."
"Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term costs of ownership of the software products."
as spotted on science library pad: "Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful. For instance, Flickr + Google Maps, Upcoming.org + Google Calendar, Yahoo! Local + your address book, and many more possibilities and permutations. All of these scenarios are possible due to Microformats, an emerging standard for injecting semantics into HTML."
i once tried to write an essay called "if Einstein was a blogger" but it didn't come together, this seems to be a good "what would happen if Marie Curie had a blog?"
Spotted on Make, and just in time for xmas,radar's "toy box from hell", including lawn darts (6,700 injuries and four deaths - for those "who will never know the primal excitement of a summer's evening spent impaling friends before suppertime"),the U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (including 4 samples of Uranium-bearing ores, comforting considering that "U-238has been linked to Gulf War syndrome, cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma"), and 1996's Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid with a motorized mouth that sensed neither pleasure nor pain (and with the capability of chewing off "35 fingers and ponytails" before being pulled off the market).
Peter Suber points to the SPARC press release: "SPARC has selected Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager of the Open Access Initiative at the Open Society Institute (OSI), as the newest SPARC Innovator. Hagemann was chosen in recognition of the new possibilities that now exist for scholars, institutions, and the public since the introduction of the Open Access movement and in honor of Hagemann's seminal role in launching the movement with her OSI colleagues." I have had the pleasure of working with Melissa in the past and like Peter, I think this honour is richly deserved.