Recently in Technology Category
Does anybody other than me see this as incredibly ironic?
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I'm in Ann Arbor for the Spring CSG meeting. The first day is a workshop focusing on cyberinfrastructure issues.
The NSF Atkins report defines ci as high perf comp; data, information; observation, measurement; interfaces, visualization; and collaboration services. Today will concentrate on the last two.
The workshop agenda will cover interdisciplinary science; virtual organizations; visualization; mapping scientific problems to IT infrastructures; and getting CI funded.
Chad Kainz from University of Chicago is leading off, talking about the Bamboo Planning Project. The Our Cultural Commonwealth report from ACLS served the same kind of function in the humanities that the Atkins report did in the sciences.
Chad starts off with a scenario of a faculty member in a remote Wyoming institution who creates a mashup tool for correlating medieval text with maps, and publishes that tool, which gets picked up for research by someone in New Jersey, where it is used for scholarly discourse. The Wyoming faculty member then uses the fact of that discourse in her tenure review.
What if we could make it easier for faculty to take that moment of inspiration to create something and share it with others? How do we get away from the server under the desk and yet another database?
How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of share technology services?
There are a seemingly unending number of humanities disciplines each with only a handful of people - you don't build infrastructure for a handful of people. One of the challenges is how we boil this down to commonalities to enable working together. Day 2 of the Berkeley Bamboo workshop showed that unintentional normalization will lead to watering down the research innovations. The next workshop will start by trying to look at the common elements.
About eighty institutions participating in the first set of workshops.
One idea is to have demonstrators and pilot projects between workshops to test ideas, explore commonalities, desmonstrate shared services, and experiment with new application models. There is one project exposing textual analysis services from the ARTFL project that will probably be the first example.
Tony asked me yesterday what blogs and other news sources I read. I was going to point him to my list of "blogs I try to read regularly", which is a blogroll from Bloglines, when I realized that my Bloglines subscription list and my Google Reader subscription list (which was originally derived by exporting the OPML list of feeds from Bloglines) had drifted out of sync with each other.
Well, I thought, this should be simple! I'll just export the OPML lists from both readers and sort them and then compare using diff or something, and bring them back into sync, and clean them up a bit while I'm at it.
No such luck.
Bloglines' OPML file uses outline text= for specifying folder names, and outline title= for individual subscription names. Google's OPML file does the reverse.
Bloglines puts all the data for a single subscription on a single line. Google separates elements onto different lines.
Here's an example:
Bloglines:
<outline text="Blogs" > <outline title="Accidental Pedagogy" text="Accidental Pedagogy" htmlUrl="http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/atom.xml" />
Google:
<outline title="blogs" text="blogs">
<outline text="apophenia" title="apophenia" type="rss"
xmlUrl="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/index.xml" htmlUrl="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/"/>
Guess it's time to break out some Python.
I'm down in California - had a good meeting yesterday with our colleagues from UC Berkeley about their organizational efforts, the Kuali Student project, and their collaboration tools strategy effort. Great stuff, and great folks!
Now I'm in Cupertino for a meeting of the higher-ed iPhone task force. Should be an interesting day.
At dinner last night I was complaining to Jason Ediger about not being able to manually manage my music on the iPhone by dragging and dropping songs from iTunes. He told me that I was wrong, and that with the iPhone update from January you could actually manually manage music and video on the phone.
And sure enough, he's right!
If you set your iPhone settings to enable this, which you do like so:
You can then drag and drop songs onto the iPhone - as shown below in this clip:
Google has started adding offline functionality to its online word processor (not for spreadsheets or presentations yet, though that's sure to be coming). It's rolling out to groups of IDs - hasn't hit mine yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
As long as I have an Internet connection, every change I make is saved to the cloud. When I lose my connection, I sacrifice some features, but I can still access my documents (for this initial release, you can view and edit word processing documents; right now we don't support offline access to presentations or spreadsheets - see our help center for details). Everything I need is saved locally. And I do everything through my web browser, even when I'm offline (the goodness that Google Gears provides). When my connection comes back, my documents sync up again with the server.
It's all pretty seamless: I don't have to remember to save my documents locally before packing my laptop for a trip. I don't have to remember to save my changes as soon as I get back online. And I don't have to switch applications based on network connectivity. With the extra peace of mind, I can more fully rely on this tool for my important documents.
Adobe has released what is maybe the finest example yet in the inexorable march of applications onto the web - Photoshop Express.
While it doesn't have the power of regular Photoshop (or even Elements), it's an incredibly seductive site for photo editing and sharing. I'm impressed.
I've slapped some photos up at http://orensr.photoshop.com
So both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are on Twitter (I assume they have folks who do their twittering for them.
Hillary has 1,486 followers, and is following 0.
Obama has 12,953 followers and is following 12,261.
Guess it shows whose campaign knows how to relate to the current generation netheads.
I didn't find John McCain on Twitter.
Almost half of all "tweens" (kids between age 9 and 14) who consume digital music get it from the iTunes Store, according to a survey from the NPD group released this week.
I always have said that one of the things that would bring down the amount of illegal downloading would be good convenient legal sources. The other thing would be to get the prices down further.
Bill Corrigan is at the Educuase Learning Initiative (ELI) annual meeting in San Antonio and he's blogging it over at our eTech blog.
"What everyone else is calling Web 2.0 is fandom without the stigma" - Henry Jenkins (MIT) interviewed by Danah Boyd at last year's SXSW Interactive.
Hear it here.
