There's been plenty of debate over the past couple of years about the merits of Wikipedia, generally focusing on how "trustworthy" the site is because of its anonymous contributors and lack of professional editorial review.
Danny Hillis' latest venture, Metaweb, is about to unveil its first product, the aptly named freebase, tomorrow. While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.
modeling the 3D wikipedia puzzle ball
Hello blenderers! I am attempting to learn blender, and picked a project of modeling the puzzle ball logo for Wikipedia:
The Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Wikipedia) by the Jewish-Czech scholar Julius Pokorny was published in 1959. The work is now slightly outdated, especially as it was conservative even at the time Pokorny wrote it, ignoring the laryngeal theory, and hardly including any Tocharian or Anatolian material. But there exists no more modern and updated etymological dictionary of the Indo-European languages, so it is still of interest to scholars.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a complaint this month with the FTC 'alleging that professional sports leagues, Hollywood studios, and book publishers were all using copyright notices that misrepresented the law'. That is, they were aggressively pursuing 'right' that they were not entitled to. Now a group, backed by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, and Red Hat, has launched a web site called Defend Fair Use that shows they are serious about making the complaint stick. From the article: 'In contrast to copyright notices that take no account of fair use and claim control over "all accounts and descriptions" of a game, the CCIA offers a different
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity
A shortlist of six films is made by the UK's leading critics, film-school heads and festival directors from the foreign language films released in that year in the UK. The winner is selected by a panel of judges whose decision making process is screened as part of the award ceremony, screened live on BBC Four.
The George Junior Republic formed a miniature state whose economic, civic and social conditions, as nearly as possible, reproduce those of the United States, and whose citizenship is vested in young people, especially those who were neglected or wayward.
I have started to use moodle and I am very pleased by its forum module. Because - there is a nice threading - your receive a notification, if somebody answers a post of you.
Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference when he premiered the documentary above, The Truth About Wikipedia. It has now been posted to YouTube and is worth watching when you have a spare 45 minutes.
Ari Balogh, CTO at Yahoo! just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful.
In what is proving to be another busy day for Google, Wikipedia articles have been added to Google Maps. The new Wikipedia tags can be turned on via a 'More' button that has been added to the top right hand corner of the map.
Several readers noted that the limited pilot test of Google Health has ended, and Google is now offering the service to the public at large. Google Health allows patients to enter health information, such as conditions and prescriptions, find related medical information, and share information with their health care providers (at the patient's request). Information may be entered manually or imported from partnered health care providers. The service is offered free of charge, and Google won't be including advertising. The WSJ and the NYTimes provide details about Google's numerous health partners.
Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during World War II, is barely scraping by financially, as shown in these images compiled by ZDNet this week. The site has undergone major redevelopment as an act of remembrance for the Allied efforts to break the German Enigma code, but now its future is clouded — among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned them down for financial assistance (since it doesn't have to do with the Internet).
Today I attended an amazing presentation by Bernardo Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs, titled “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web”. Below the roughly editing notes I took during the amazing presentation. They are not intended to represent what Bernardo said but just to give you (me!) some pointers.
Although Wikipedia is a great place to find information, it's subject to incomplete citations, biased views, and inaccuracies. And when you absolutely have to have undisputable facts, that's just not good enough. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives out there that can deliver with high quality accuracy, and we've listed 25 of the best here.
WikiBrowser is a browser of the graph of Wikipedia's interlanguage links. It analyses the inconsistent components of the graph and visualizes the results in an informative way.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a short story by the 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961.
This WikiProject exists to improve the quality of existing articles related to Physics, to create articles to cover a broader range of physics topics, and to categorize and link them in appropriate ways.
Squidoo, Mahalo, eHow, EzineArticles, etc etc etc just got validation for their business models and competition for the ad network that helps them monetize their sites. Google today launched their Knol project
Welcome! This is the main page for Biglumber, a site designed to help people sign each other's OpenPGP keys, by looking up cities around the world. Signing keys allows you to expand your web of trust, a very important part of using public key cryptography. Keys are not listed here until it has been verified that the email address for the key is valid and belongs to the owner of the key.
I'm going to start a dynamic list of topics that I do routine searches on, for the purpose of tracking Google rankings, with special attention to the relative rankings of Knol versus Wikipedia over time.
This is the Home Page of The Commentary Project: a private scholarly endeavor of The Franciscan Archive, which aims to publish a complete critical English translation of St. Bonaventure’s great Commentaria in Quattuor Libros Sententiarum in the next 5 years, along with the text of Master Peter Lombard’s work, Quattuor Libri Sententiarum.
A bright is a person whose worldview is naturalistic, that is, free of supernatural or mystical elements.* The term was coined by Mynga Futrell and Paul Geisert, a pair of brights from Sacramento, California, who thought it would be sensible to adopt a common name for atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, materialists, rationalists, secular humanists, and skeptics.* All these disparate groups share in common a naturalistic worldview.
Seems that almost every story submitted to Slashdot last night in some way involved Google's Chrome that we started talking about yesterday. Dotan Cohen noted that according to Clicky Chrome has hit 3% browser share. Since Google has decided to release Chrome only for Windows, I now share for you 3 reviews written by others: the first comes from alexy2k, the second from mildsiete, and the third from oli4uk. They all seem to feature various opinions, charts, and screenshots demonstrating various exciting points.
No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not.
'There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed'
The temporary logo (shown at left) that we've used for the past two months was created when the Support Alert Newsletter merged with the Windows Secrets Newsletter in July 2008. As was announced on July 9 by the editor of Support Alert, Ian "Gizmo" Richards, our long, transitional name is being shortened to simply Windows Secrets as of today.
Google began running a live test last year that lets people rank and remove search engine results and comment on them. Testers were presented with different variations of the experiment, which the company first publicly detailed about two weeks ago in an official blog posting.
Welcome back to the EOL newsletter. For the last
few months, we have been using the feedback on
the first version of EOL to prepare for a new major
release later this year. In December, we will make
EOL into a richer environment with new opportunities
for participation. We are ready to accommodate our
higher-than-anticipated user traffic and we look
forward to sharing our progress with you here.
Technologist Clay Shirky argues that information overload isn't the problem tech journalism makes it out to be: it's really a failure of information filters. At the Web 2.0 Expo last week, Shirky said that the internet has made it easier and cheaper for publishers to broadcast information—so now the onus is on the consumer to filter out the noise (much like client-side spam filters). Hit the play button below to hear Shirky's well-argued points.
Shall I compare thee to a Knol? Hmm, perhaps not. Wikipedia sounds just right. Memorable and serious but not too serious. Of course Wikipedia is now an established “brand” and it has a big headstart on any competitor. Just like Google’s own search engine. If it is going to position itself ever to rival Wikipedia perhaps they should be thinking about a more pithy name. Knol? Unfortunately, every time I see or hear it I am transported back to Deely Plaza or the Texas Book Repository. However good the product, many have been done for because of poor marketing. This is perhaps a quibble. If a product is good enough it might survive uninspired marketing.
Wikiversity is a project of the Wikimedia foundation. It is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. We host free education resources and scholarly projects. We also aim at interacting with other wikimedia projects and support their content developments. So far, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Portuguese and Czech have developed into separate projects.
In early discussions within the Open Sustainability Network, it was agreed that we didn’t want Yet Another Website. So we use existing resources: We didn’t set up a separate wiki, instead using Appropedia.* We didn’t set up a new social network, instead using an existing, like-minded community of people doing serious sustainability and knowledge-sharing work: Global Swadeshi. When someone suggested that OSN should be building a knowledge base, Lonny Grafman expressed that this is a job some of us are passionate about (indeed, that’s what Appropedia is doing) - but it’s not the role of OSN. OSN is for supporting and connecting these initiatives.
adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It's especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously.
Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson's third novel, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's other novels it references history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, and philosophy.
Since its inception (Nov. 2006) and official launch (March 28, 2007), the Citizendium has grown. This page provides statistics on the Citizendium's output of articles and its contributor base
Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he belongs to the scientific directorate of the Foundational Questions Institute. Currently, he also teaches a relativity class (8.033) to undergraduates at MIT.
All articles related to OmegaWiki. Ultimate Wiktionary is the project name for the development. Many people objected to the name and OmegaWiki was accepted by all people interested at the time as a big improvement.
With a letter to San Francisco Catholics explaining his role in Proposition 8 that included a call for civil discourse from both sides, San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer has raised the ire of LGBT leaders who are challenging the sincerity, tone, and purpose of the archbishop's message.
After studying Classics, French, and Islamic Studies in Paris (Sorbonne), Hamburg, and Tübingen, I took an MA in Islamic Studies at the University of Leiden, and an M.Phil. and D.Phil in Classics at the University of Oxford (Corpus Christi College).
The following is a list of the largest optical reflecting telescopes sorted by mirror diameter. Note that two of the first three are not yet operational. This list does not currently include telescopes that are still in the conceptual/proposed stage, such as the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope or the European Extremely Large Telescope; the design stage, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope; or ones still in the early stages of manufacturing such as the Giant Magellan Telescope.
A refracting or refractor telescope is a dioptric telescope that uses a lens as its objective to form an image. The refracting telescope design was originally used in spy glasses and astronomical telescopes but is also used in other devices such as binoculars and long or telephoto camera lenses.
From the article: Since the early 20th century physicists have known that light carries momentum, but the way this momentum changes as light passes through different media is much less clear. Two rival theories of the time predicted precisely the opposite effect for light incident on a dielectric: one suggesting it pushes the surface in the direction light is traveling; the other suggesting it drags the surface backwards towards the source of light. After 100 years of conflicting experimental results, a team of experimentalists from China believe they have finally found a resolution
Professor Dame Janet Laughland Nelson, DBE, FBA (born 1942), is a British academic, scholar and writer at King's College London. Her research to date has been focused on early medieval Europe, including Anglo-Saxon England. She has published widely on kingship, government, political ideas, religion and ritual, and increasingly on women and gender during this period.
Have you heard of Wikianswers? No, not Wiki Answers, Wikianswers. Yes it's a little confusing, but I'm not just babbling incoherently. Wikianswers is a recently (re)launched site from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was a book published anonymously in England in 1844. It proposed a natural theory of cosmic and biological evolution, tying together numerous speculative scientific theories of the age, and created considerable political controversy in Victorian society for its radicalism and unorthodoxy.
Anselmo Lorenzo, sometimes called "the grandfather of Spanish anarchism," was one of the original Spanish anarchists. He was highly active within the movement from his meeting with Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868 until his death in 1914.
Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further.
It's official. No longer the domain of the digerati, the Twitter short messaging platform has woven itself into regular peoples' lives to help with practical matters -- getting in shape, picking stocks, raising funds for a Senate run or selling cruise ship tickets. For proof, one need look no further than Wednesday night's Shorty Awards, which honored the best Twitterers as determined by a popular vote.
LabSpace provides access to experimental educational tools for learners and educators, research into open educational resources field and ability to download, remix and upload OER materials and is part of the free Open University OpenLearn initiative. Members can access video conferencing, knowledge map, messaging tools and collaborate with other users
Someone over at Redmond flipped the wrong switch, it would seem. Ars Technica spotted that the Windows 7 download page on TechNet had switched to say Release Candidate instead of Beta. It's now back to Beta, but not before Ars got all the details off the page: 'The public RC will apparently be coming in May 2009, and not in April as previously rumored. The RC testing program will be available at least through June 2009, and the actual build will expire June 1, 2010. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions will be available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.' A screenshot and all the text on the RC download page, which was set to be published 'May 2009' is saved over at Ars
theatrecade was one of a few folks to note that Google Labs has added the five-second rule to email. Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious foodstuffs dropped on the floor, but at long last you can change your mind on that email to your boss or ex. We shall see peace in our lifetimes.
Poets.org has partnered with TextTelevision to offer TextFlows, an alternative approach to reading and experiencing poetry. By converting text dynamically into Flash animation, poems are revealed phrase by phrase through motion and light, and at a pace controlled by the reader. The simplified words and crisp motion fixes one's attention on the subtleties of language, increasing involvement, engagement, and understanding.
I have had a chance to quickly read the Iowa gay marriage decision. Here are some initial thoughts (subject to correction or revision upon further reflection!). First, people here that I've talked to are generally surprised that the court was unanimous and that it fully endorsed same sex marriage, not something like civil unions. The court's unanimity, in my view, is a definite sign that the court wanted to maximize its institutional legitimacy by joining together, despite the fact that its members have disagreements in numerous other cases. The court also reasoned pretty bluntly that civil unions amounted to treating gay people as second class citizens. Second, regardless of one's view on the gay marriage issue, I think this is a well crafted legal opinion for several reasons.
Iceland is under attack – not militarily but financially. It owes more than it can pay. This threatens debtors with forfeiture of what remains of their homes and other assets. The government is being told to sell off the nation’s public domain, its natural resources and public enterprises to pay the financial gambling debts run up irresponsibly by a new banking class. This class is seeking to increase its wealth and power despite the fact that its debt-leveraging strategy already has plunged the economy into bankruptcy. On top of this, creditors are seeking to enact permanent taxes and sell off public assets to pay for bailouts to themselves.
Fed chief Ben Bernanke has embarked on the most radical and ruinous financial rescue plan in history. According to Bloomberg News, the Fed has already lent or committed $12.8 trillion trying to stabilize the financial system after the the bursting of Wall Street's speculative mega-bubble. Now Bernanke wants to dig an even bigger hole, by creating programs that will provide up to $2 trillion of credit to financial institutions that purchase toxic assets from banks or securities backed by consumer loans. The Fed's generous terms are expected to generate a flurry of speculation which will help strengthen the banking system while leaving the taxpayer to bear the losses. It is impossible to know what the long-term effects of Bernanke's excessive spending will be, but his plan has the potential to trigger hyperinflation or spark a run on the dollar.
Following the 2009 G20 summit, plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the US dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. Point 19 of the communiqué released by the G20 at the end of the Summit stated, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity.” SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are “a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.” As the Telegraph reported, “the G20 leaders have activated the IMF's power to create money and begin global "quantitative easing". In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”
Progressives now find themselves in an awkward position of simultaneously wishing Barack Obama well, but feeling dismayed by his policies on some key issues, most notably the banking bailout. If this were a normal economic situation, the posture of semi-opposition would not be that big a deal. We would simply gratefully accept the decent policies and keep pressing for bolder ones. But a failure to revive the banking system would be Obama's Vietnam. It would wreck everything else.
I should have realized the danger of stepping into the Wikipedia morass, and the comments on today’s earlier post further indicate my folly in doing so. You know, The New York Times gets things wrong, too. As an argument on a sophisticated level, it’s that all texts are constructs reflecting the attitude of the constructor rather than a verifiable external reality; on a less sophisticated level, it’s that all the other kids are smoking pot, too.
I’ve had enough. I’m bringing it down to this challenge.
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1328.html
http://wc3.worldcrossing.com/webx?14@@.1de35bad/13
Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. 'Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were "many browser sessions,"' Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. 'Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless.' Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)
“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.
Groklaw is examining the possibility of an anti-ODF whisper campaign and the effects it has had on the ODF and OOXML Wikipedia articles. In the ODF article, Alex Brown bends the truth to make it seem like no one is supporting ODF, and that it is a flawed and incomplete standard. From the conclusion, 'So what is one to do? You obviously can't trust Wikipedia whatsoever in this area. This is unfortunate, since I am a big fan of Wikipedia. But since the day when Microsoft decided they needed to pay people to "improve" the ODF and OOXML articles, they have been a cesspool of FUD, spin and outright lies, seemingly manufactured for Microsoft's re-use in their whisper campaign. My advice would be to seek out official information on the standards, from the relevant organizations, like OASIS, the chairs of the relevant committees, etc. Ask the questions in public places and seek a public response. That is the ultimate weakness of FUD and lies. They cannot stand the light of public exposure. Sunlight is the best antiseptic
In some ways, broadband has become the tech industry's equivalent to healthcare and education: everybody agrees that it's a good thing and everybody thinks all Americans should have access to it.
Rather than view it as a game-changer, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Opera Unite as a Hail Mary bid for Opera to stay in the game. After all, in an era when even vending machines have Web servers on them, a Web server on the Web browser isn't really that groundbreaking. What Opera is attempting is to 'reintermediate' the Internet — 'directly linking people's personal computers together' by making them sign up for an account on Opera's servers and ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls, but more important, it makes Opera the intermediary in your social interactions — not Facebook, not MySpace, but Opera,' McAllister writes. In other words, Opera hopes to use social networking as a Trojan horse to put traditional apps back in charge.
Like you, we've been hotly anticipating the launch of Firefox 3.5 for Windows and Mac. Yet every time a browser receives a major update, it ghosts out a good chunk of those favorite, ingenious, and time-saving extensions we've come to rely on. That is, until the lagging publishers update their add-ons to make them compatible once again.
Peace Corps Library writes "BBC reports that about 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible, the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, have been recovered and put on the Internet. 'The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures,' says Dr. Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library. 'This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation.' The New Testament of the Codex Sinaiticus appears in Koine Greek, the original vernacular language, and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery until it was found in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany, and Britain. It is thought to have survived because the desert air was ideal for preservation and because the monastery, on a Christian island in a Muslim sea, remained untouched, its walls unconquered. The British Library is marking the online launch of the manuscript with an exhibition which includes a range of historic items and artifacts linked to the document. 'The availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago.'"
The other night, I had a difficult time sleeping. Eventually, I realized why. I was furious at George Bush. To be clear, this wasn't a case of living in the past and not getting over it. This was seeing the damage still being caused. Pretty much everything George W. Bush touched shredded the United States of America. That's not my opinion. When George Bush left office, 81% of all Americans thought the country was "pretty seriously" going in the wrong direction. "Pretty seriously" doesn't mean taking a bad turn, it's "Er, dad, we're driving off a cliff." That's why Mr. Bush ended with a 32% approval rating.