Disturbing story over at MSN.
When told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories…
When asked whether people should be […]
Slashdot links to an article on the push in Brazil to switch to open source and linux. Interesting quote form EFF co-founder John Barlow:
Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger.
Now this is pretty cool. Created by Ross Singer at Georgia Tech, it’s a bit more advanced than other methods both in that it’s not limited to a particular browser (uses a bookmarklet, which I am not really a fan of, however) and that it does a number of functions, as outlined on the […]
Earlier this month TheFeature published an interview with Hartmut Neven discussing his work on machine vision and search. The goal of his technology is to develop a “visual Google” that will allow users to take a picture with a camera phone and search for information about the objects in the image. As he […]
I just finished reading Dick Bulterman’s Is it Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?. He argues that metadata has become needlessly complex and not very useful for locating data, which he feels is metadata’s primary job:
Locating information is a useful activity. It’so useful that it is a problem that has been studied for centuries. […]
Claire Stewart links to an article in the San Antonion Express-News about libraries and museums moving collections online. From the article:
“History belongs to everybody; it shouldn’t be locked away in dark rooms,” said Michael Edmonds, deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s library archives division. “It should be on everybody’s laptops at Starbucks.”
Dutch company Parastone makes some amazing figures based on characters from famous paintings by artists including Bosch, Pieter Breughel the Elder, Aubrey Beardsley, Degas and Dali, among others. See the index for the whole list.
The video has been making the rounds since Slashdot posted it yesterday. What’s really amazing is that it looks almost exactly like a demo of OS X. Many features and some of the apps are virtually the same, even though this is from over a decade ago.
Here’s a good torrent of the video
Some […]
Even with files going digital and, thus, easily searchable, the FBI is arguing that it doesn’t have to look very hard for info in FOIA requests.
Searchday has an article listing some of the more useful non-commercial web directories.
Lessig tells the story of his trip to Porto Alegre and experiences with Brazilian Minister of Culture, music star and free culture advocate Gilberto Gil.
Ah. This is a story that will undoubtedly get its own solid place in the legend of Wikipedia. Recently there has been increasing debate over the accuracy of Wikipedia, with heavy criticism coming from project co-founder Larry Sanger.
Now we have a story about a Simpsons-watching 12 year old finding errors in the Encyclopaedia […]
According to a post on SFX/MetaLib Discuss-L, Google is aware of the interest and thinking about it.
SUMMARY: The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by “orphan works,” i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such […]
Here in Evanston, IL we have this cool online application that allows you to look up an image of the front of any building in the city. I use this all the time to get oriented if I can’t remember what building a particular address refers to (growing up here I can […]
Check out this fantastic technical overview of OS X by Amit Singh.
Tech Review reports on a coming service called Rojo that aims to combine RSS with social networks by having users flag stories and share their feeds with linked accounts. It seems like this might bridge the gap between privately reading feeds and sharing info through a blog. Right now the service is in […]
As reported everywhere, Google launches Video search beta.
The lead firefox developer now works at Google.
Rumors of a Google VoIP service.
The Council on Library and Information Resources will be publishing a series of essays exploring the value of library space in a time when so many resources are moving online. Written by four librarians, an architect and a humanities professor, the essays apparently underline a growing need for the physical library, albeit with an […]
MIT’s Technology Review has a short piece with 13 suggestions for how to use the Apple Mac mini. Some ideas include using it as a satellite interface with a HAM radio or to drive a home security system, as well as the more popular ideas like using it as a home server or to […]