From Tom Simonite in Technology Review:
From Amazon’s product recommendations to Pandora’s ability to find us new songs we like, the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning–algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events.
Now Google has launched a service that could bring such smarts to many more apps. Google Prediction API provides a simple way for developers to create software that learns how to handle incoming data. For example, the Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for “complaints” and “praise” using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds. Future e-mails could then be screened by software using that API, and handled accordingly.
For more…
From Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff in Wired:
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.
For more…
From Stephen Shankland in cnet news’ Deep Tech:
The face-off between Apple and Adobe Systems concerning Flash on the iPhone and iPad is a perfect fit for today’s world of fanboys and flame wars. But beneath the surface, it’s not all as simple as it seems.
There are plenty convenient rhetorical points for those who want to find a place in the debate: Apple exerts draconian control over its walled garden. Flash is a buggy, insecure, resource hog. Apple is taking a stand for the betterment of the Web. Apple is inflicting a crippled Web on its customers for its selfish ends.
For more…
From Jean Yung in the Global Post:
After watching a 13-year-old boy operate a desktop PC at the Shanghai Exhibition Hall in 1984, China’s senior leader Deng Xiaoping famously said, “To universalize computers, one must begin with the little ones.”
These words have pushed the development of China’s technology infrastructure forward over the last 25 years. Even today, computer teachers in Shanghai proudly echo Deng’s remark, even as they readily acknowledge the shortcomings of tech education in Shanghai classrooms.
For more…
from an article at http://pewresearch.org/:
At a conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, Pew Research Center analysts and outside experts discussed research findings about the Millennial generation, the American teens and twenty-somethings now making the passage into adulthood. In this second of three sessions experts on media and technology examine how Millennials are seeking, sharing and creating information.
Moderator:
Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent, PBS Newshour
Opening Presentation:
Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism
Panelists:
danah boyd, Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research New England, and
Fellow, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Dylan Casey, Product Manager, Google
Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project
For the article…
From a Marvell press release:
Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL) a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, this week announced a bold new education initiative to deliver a high performance mobile tablet based on its leading silicon platform. For about $99, Marvell’s Moby tablet prototype promises to change the way students learn by delivering an always-on, high performance multimedia tablet featuring live, real-time content, 1080p full-HD and 3D media, and full Flash Internet. Marvell’s Moby tablet could eliminate the need for students to buy and carry bound textbooks and an array of other tools.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070411/SFW034LOGO)
Announcing the initiative this week during her keynote speech to the country’s leading publishers at the Future of Publishing conference in New York City, Marvell Co-founder Weili Dai said that the Moby tablet is a technology whose time had come.
“Education is the most pressing social and economic issue facing our country and our times. I believe the Marvell Moby tablet can ignite a life-long passion for learning in all students everywhere. Marvell’s goal is to fundamentally improve the way students learn by giving them more efficient, relevant — even fun tools to use. Marvell’s Moby tablet recognizes that every student learns differently and so it delivers an array of media choices for different learning styles,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit. ”Marvell can help propel education into the 21st century with an all-in-one device that gives students access to the best live content, information and resources the world has to offer — from books and online sources, in text, video, news, music, data expression or any medium. With Moby tablet, students can conduct primary research, reach out directly to the world’s leading subject experts and even collaborate with one another around the globe. Best of all, the device is highly affordable. I envision Marvell’s Moby tablets to benefit all students around the world.”
For more…
From Steve Lohr in the New York Times:
If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?
Probably not.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitterand Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.
For the article…
From Danah Boyd, the preliminary draft of her welcoming keynote address at the 2010 SXSW conference.
What keeps me up at night is trying to make sense of how social media transforms society and, more importantly, what it helps make visible about humanity. Technophobes love to talk about how technology is ruining everything and technophiles obsess over how everything is radically different. I like to wade through the extremes to see the subtle inflection points. Reality is always in the details.
My goal today is to invite you to step back and ask: what hath we wrought? We’ve all been involved in social media from at least one perspective. Some of you are creators, developers, designers; others of you are business folks, marketers, analysts. Some of you use social media in your jobs and some of you live it as part of your daily practice. We are all collectively creating culture through our engagement with social media. So what I’d like to do is offer some insights that allow you to think critically about our collective project so that we can all find ways to do better.
To give you something to munch on, I’ve decided to focus my talk on two interwoven concepts that keep coming up whenever we think about social media: privacy and publicity. I’m highlighting these issues because I think that they’re going to play a crucial role in the evolution of social media. I think that we’re going to have to work them out and I need your help in doing so.
For the full talk…
From Eszter Hargittai in the journal Sociological Inquiry:
People who have grown up with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and communication technologies. Such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence, however. This article draws on unique data with information about a diverse group of young adults’ Internet uses and skills to suggest that even when controlling for Internet access and experiences, people differ in their online abilities and activities. Additionally, findings suggest that Internet know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, rather, higher levels of parental education, being a male, and being white or Asian American are associated with higher levels of Web-use skill. These user characteristics are also related to the extent to which young adults engage in diverse types of online activities. Moreover, skill itself is positively associated with types of uses. Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.
For more…
From the dScribe web site:
dScribe, short for “digital and distributed scribes,” is a participatory and collaborative model for creating open content. It brings together enrolled students, staff, faculty, and self-motivated learners to work together toward the common goal of creating content that is openly licensed and available to people throughout the world. It was first developed by students and faculty at the University of Michigan to leverage the interest and talent of students in working with faculty and staff to transform educational material into open educational resources (OER). The dScribe model encourages students, faculty, staff, and other interested individuals such as alumni and community members to get involved in not only creating open content, but also generating awareness about the benefits of creating and sharing educational content with a global learning community.
To view the site…
Author, teacher and commentator Howard Rheingold has made available a four-year collection of bookmarks in educational technology via the social bookmarking service delicious.
From Tricia Wang’s blog cultural bytes:
Google announced on its company blog that Chinese hackers had attacked its users and as a result Google.CN may leave China due to the security breaches.
While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current story:
- Many Chinese internet users don’t find Google to be very useful. Therefore, a Google withdrawal would not have any immediate impact on the daily Chinese internet user because most people search with Baidu, the reigning search engine in China.
- Many Chinese internet users prefer Baidu over Google because using Baidu makes them feel more “Chinese.” Baidu does an excellent job at tapping into nationalistic fervor to promote itself as being the most superior search engine for Chinese users.
- Chinese internet users don’t know how to get to the Google site. While they may “know” of Google, it’s a whole other matter when it comes to typing or saying Google’s name.
- Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.
- Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.
For the complete post…
From Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal:
What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?
Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.
The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.
For more…
From Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning.
New software developed at MIT takes advantage of the GPS technology in mobile phones to inject new adventures into the traditional science lab. The technology creates learning games that can track players’ real world locations and send a stream of virtual information to them as they track environmental spills or solve science mysteries. Teachers and students can also build their own games to share with others.
For more on MIT’s learning games that teach science and math read Spotlight’s Think Like a Mathematician, Save the World from Monsters.
For the item with YouTube video…
Jenna Wortham and Nick Bilton write in the New York Times,
An online attack Friday morning on Twitter was the result of the simplest of security breaches: someone got the password to enter the master directory of Twitter’s Internet addresses and then redirected users to an alternate site instead.
No user information appears to have been stolen in the attack. But the security breach — the third major one at Twitter this year — underscores the continuing weakness of the company’s systems as its micro-blogging service is becoming more important to business and even global politics.
The incident also highlights a basic vulnerability in the way life is lived as it becomes increasingly digital: With so much vital information stored on the Web, people are only as safe as their passwords.
To see the article…
Jon Udell’s recent blog post begins,
One of the themes I’ve been exploring for the past few years is computational thinking. It’s an evocative phrase that has led me in a few different directions. One is my intentional use of tagging and syndication as key strategies for social information management. Another is my growing interest in the kinds of uses of WolframAlpha outlined in Kill-A-Watt, WolframAlpha, and the itemized electric bill.
A lot of what I’ve read and heard about WolframAlpha seems to focus on its encyclopedic nature. But it aims to be a compendium of computable knowledge, and as such I think its highest and best use will be to enable computational thinking.
To read the full post…
In this seven and a half-minute video Howard Rheingold discusses technology and education. Those who attended the recent Ubiquitous Learning Conference may find what he says resonating with much of what was presented and discussed at the meeting.
Howard Rheingold has something to say about new literacy:
Popular discourses about the technologies that have been built on the microchip have focused primarily on the hardware, the software, the industries, the economics of computer games, PCs, dotcoms. My experiences have convinced me that the most important focus for public attention right now should shift to the literacies that bring power to those who possess them and leave behind those who don’t know how to use their telephone as a medical instrument, educational medium, social radar, political organizing tool. Chip fabrication plants, teenage personal computer wizards and moguls, networks of fiber optics and satellites, have played and will continue to play their parts in the distribution of computing and communication power to every human on Earth. But now that devices with such enormous untapped power are in the hands of so many, the factor that will most powerfully shape the resulting social institutions is literacy. My definition of “literacy” builds on the thinking of Neal Postman: I mean the inward-looking skill that enables an individual to read and write, to decode and encode messages with a medium, and I also refer to the external community to which this skill provides entrance.
For video..
For words…
A public forum presented by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Writing Project, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
6:00-7:00 PM • Reception and displays of digital work
7:00-8:00 PM • Panel Discussion and Forum
The Academy of Natural Sciences • Auditorium
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway • Philadelphia
This forum is free and open to the public. You may attend this forum in person
or follow the event online. Registration is required.
Jiangping Chen and Yu Bao have an article, Cross-language search: The case of Google Language Tools, in the latest issue of the journal First Monday. This is the abstract:
This paper presents a case study of Google Language Tools, especially its cross–language search service. Cross–language search integrates machine translation (MT) and cross–language information retrieval (CLIR) technologies and allows Web users to search and read pages written in languages different from their search terms. In addition to cross–language search, Google Language Tools provides various language support services to multilingual information access. Our study examines the functions of Google Language Tools and the performance of its cross–language search. The results and analysis show that Google Language Tools are useful for Web users. Its cross–language search service provides quality query translation while the automatic translation of result pages needs further improvement. The paper suggests that cross–language search could be used by different types of Web users. The authors also discuss the strategies and important issues with regard to implementing multilingual information access services for information systems.
