Silicon Valley Blog for early adopters, technology geeks, RSS addicts and Mac freaks.
(May also occasionally contain some TiVo, media, sports and politics...)
The Biodiversity Sciences Technology group (BSCIT), part of the Berkeley Natural History Museums at UC Berkeley, develops web-based, database-driven software systems for biological and natural history museum collections, biodiversity science projects, and other research projects. Our projects include genetics, Geographical Information Systems, digital images and digital documents, and collection management software and databases. BSCIT was formed in 2005 after years of successful collaborations among the Berkeley Natural History Museums, Berkeley Digital Library Project, Department of Integrative Biology, and Information Systems and Technology on the UC Berkeley Campus. BSCIT is currently supported by the Berkeley Natural History Museums, the Department of Integrative Biology, and Information Systems and Technology.
Mit youtubetime kann man YouTube-Videos mit voreingestellter Startzeit weitergeben. Dazu muss man nur den Link zum Video und die gewünschte Zeit angeben.
Rivva versucht einen gewichteten Schlagzeilenüberblick über die deutschsprachige Blog- und Online-Medienlandschaft zu liefern. Nach US-Vorbild Techmeme steckt dahinter eine vollautomatische Suchmaschine, die interessante Themen verfolgt, verwandte Dis
RFDump is a backend GPL tool to directly interoperate with any RFID ISO-Reader to make the contents stored on RFID tags accessible. This makes the following types of audits possible:
* Test robustness of data-structures on the reader and the backend-application
* Proof-of-concept manipulations of RFID tag contents
* Clone / copy & paste User-Data stored on RFID tags
* Audit tag-security features
OpenBeacon is a free design for an active RFID device which operates in the 2.4GHz ISM band. The device contains a unique serial number, but may have other information. OpenBeacon is designed as a transceiver device and therefore both transmits and receives radio waves. The intention of this project is to offer a wide range of use cases such as visitor or item tracking and wireless remote control with a free self-contained and low-cost RFID design.
New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks -- looks at innovation in the use of technology along the timeline of crisis response, from emergency preparedness and alerts to recovery and rebuilding.
It profiles organizations whose work is advancing the frontlines of innovation, offers an overview of international efforts to increase sophistication in the use of IT and social networks during emergencies, and provides recommendations for how governments, aid groups, and international organizations can leverage this innovation to improve community resilience.
We invite you to join a global online discussion about the key themes addressed in this publication. Submit questions for our panel of experts via Twitter (using the tag #Tech4Dev) or the UN Foundation’s Facebook page.
Graeme Paton in Telegraph: A £50 million scheme to replace school blackboards with "interactive whiteboards" has failed to improve children's results, a Government-backed study has found.
the root causes of disastrous failures can often be traced back to deficiencies of the social organizations in which they are designed, used, or controlled (Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies).
This article presents a qualitative case study of a Web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a taboo topic: students' persistent frustrations in Web-based distance education.
WHEN GOOD ENUF IS GREAT
Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience.
— Erin Biba
J. Abbate. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1999)Provides a good overview over the history of the Internet.
Use of the Internet has grown tremendously in a very short time and we take much of it for granted. We shop online, bank online, purchase airline tickets and make hotel reservations online, all at the click of a mouse through the World Wide Web, a graphical application for using the Internet. But how did the Internet get its start?
In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate tells the tale of the creation and evolution of the Internet beginning in the late 1960s with the development of a revolutionary concept for transferring data called packet switching developed simultaneously by Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation in the U.S. and Donald Davies of the National Physics Laboratory in Great Britain.
Abbate discusses the challenges faced by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in creating ARPANET, the first wide-scale computer network. ARPA's challenges ranged from utilizing the new and unproven technique of packet switching to connecting a wide variety of incompatible computers to the fledgling network. Packet switching proved to be a success but as Abbate points out, it is hard to say if packet switching made ARPANET a success or if ARPANET made packet switching a success. Abbate explains the efforts of several organizations that went into developing international standards that were necessary for the Internet to become as successful as it has become.
Abbate also explores the social issues surrounding the creation and development of the Internet; issues such as the cooperation necessary between the builders and the users of ARPANET in the 1970s and 80s that made ARPANET more user friendly to how the users themselves saved the ARPANET and ultimately the Internet through the popularization of an unlikely application. Abbate states 'had the ARPANET's only value been as a tool for resource sharing, the network might be remembered today as a minor failure rather than a spectacular success. But the network users unexpectedly came up with a new focus for network activity: electronic mail.'
Abbate delves into the popularization of the Internet through such applications such as the World Wide Web and how private enterprises including Internet service providers such as America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy quickly transformed the Internet from a dull, text-only entity to a glitzy, graphically oriented medium. The World Wide Web exponentially added to this popularization by providing an application that was not only easy to use but also wildly entertaining to both expert and novice users alike.
Abbate presents this history of the Internet in an easy-to-read style that is both entertaining and informative. Inventing the Internet is well documented with extensive chapter notes and an excellent bibliography..