Knowledge Handler

Fifty New Tech Tools

2012-01-26T18:25:00.003-05:00

Victor Hernandez reports in CNN Tech on "Fifty New Tech Tools You Should Know About".
The applications for both traditional computers and mobile platforms promise to provide shortcuts for individuals in their daily life.

-DD

More Of It

2012-01-15T21:43:00.003-05:00

MoreOfIt.com allows one to find sites similar to a specific Web site.

-DD

Searching Delicious.com

2012-01-12T00:33:00.003-05:00

Carol Walker also has a video on searching DELICIOUS.COM

-DD

QR Codes

2012-01-11T18:59:00.003-05:00

Carol Walker, a Scottish educator, shares examples of how QR codes are used in higher education in a video developed in late 2010:

-DD

Travel Websites / Apps

2012-01-05T21:18:00.006-05:00

Michelle Mastin penned "Sixteen Free Smartphone Apps for Hassle-Free Travel" for PC World. Most of these apps point to websites providing invaluable resources for the airline traveler.

-DD

Time Magazine's Fifty Best Websites

2011-12-20T11:01:00.004-05:00

Time Magazine presents The Top Fifty Websites of 2011.

-DD

Top Ten Tech Trends

2011-12-19T13:43:00.002-05:00

Peter Cashmore listed these Top Ten Tech Trends for 2012 on CNN:

Touch computing (seen in Windows 8 and Mac Lion operating systems)

Social gestures (automatic posting of your activity without your intervention)

Near Field Communications and electronic payments

Kindle Fire will outsell the iPad because it has content

TV everywhere on the new tablets

Voice control

Spatial gestures to control your computer

Apps that will automatically display content playing on your TV

Flexible screens

HTML5

-DD

Android App Allows Remote Search of Macs and PCs

2011-12-17T01:23:00.003-05:00

James Niccolai reported in the December 15 issue of NetworkWorld that Wyse Technology has developed Pocket Cloud Remote Desktop for iPhone and now Android phones (video).

-DD

Tech and Learning Top Ten Lists

2011-12-17T00:13:00.008-05:00

Tech and Learning magazine contributer David Kapuler has provided a number of top-ten lists that would be of interest to a librarian or educator in a K-12 environment:

Alternatives to YouTube

Creating Word Clouds

Educational Games

Educational Resources

Images and Clip Art

iPad Tips and Tricks

Self Help Sites for Technology

Social Networks for Education

Video Editing

Web 2.0 Sites for Education

If you enjoyed these, you might also enjoy Digital Storytelling Tools and Web Tools that Every Educator Should Have In The Bag by Özge Karaoglu, The Ultimate Web2.0 Smackdown at Tech Forum, Boston (April, 2011) by Lisa Thumann, A Catalog of iPad Apps for Teachers and Students and Back to School [iPad] Apps for Teachers by Vicki Windman or 25 Free Resources from Discovery Education by David Andrade.
-DD

David Kapuler's Top 100 Sites of 2011

2011-12-16T23:56:00.004-05:00

Educational Consultant David Kapuler has posted a list of the Top 100 Sites of 2011 in Tech and Learning.

-DD

The History of Google Search

2011-11-29T10:03:00.003-05:00

The following video provides a history of Google search, with a look toward future technologies.

-D.D.

Communication Appropriate to the User

2011-11-04T10:32:00.002-04:00

Hype over social media and new tablet technologies is rebuffed in "Tools, Not Trends," a blog post by academic librarian Wayne Bivens-Tatum. He cites the "National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011," which indicates that 99% of students are using email for communication.

-DD

Web 20.11 From DiscoveryEducation.com

2011-10-31T00:03:00.002-04:00

DiscoveryEducation.com has listed some nifty educational for school educators.
-DD

Digital Hoarding

2011-10-30T16:31:00.005-04:00

Bob Sprankle has raised the issue "Are We Digital Hoarders?" With over a thousand emails in a couple of my accounts, I need to evaluate myself.

-DD

Browsys

2011-10-27T12:14:00.002-04:00

Browsys.com is a metasearch tool with a chaotic group of tools. It promises to "folders" of searches to be shared without requiring a login, which should help librarians and scholars in passing information to one another. It also offers links to a number of sites I have not previously explored.

-DD

Microsoft on YouTube

2011-10-26T00:19:00.002-04:00

Microsoft's YouTube Channelwas hacked on October 22, according to an article by Computerworld reporter Lucian Constantin. It appears that someone had or obtained a password to the site and replaced Microsoft's content with their own. Constantin encourages readers to use strong passwords and to check their user profiles periodically.

-DD

SWEETSEARCH

2011-10-24T00:40:00.003-04:00

Sweetsearch.com is advertised as a search engine for students. I believe it uses Google as its search engine, but limits results to those judged to be quality sites.

-D.D.

Retreiving Erased Data

2011-10-04T10:26:00.003-04:00

Network World has been offering videos on technical issues, such as this one on restoring lost files.

-D.D.

Microsoft Academic Research

2011-09-22T08:25:00.005-04:00

Microsoft's Academic Research appears to be the software giant's answer to Google Scholar. To see its full capabilities, observe its treatment of the scholarly article co-authored by Bill Gates. Presently Academic Research is still in the "beta" stage of development, and at this point it seems to focus on scholarship in technical or information processing fields, as my searches for humanities scholars at my institution only showed a couple entries compared with Google Scholar.

-D.D.

Mapping Scholarship

2011-09-20T11:25:00.003-04:00

Jennifer Howard, in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that mapping the relationship of cited works in JSTOR databases revealed interesting patterns in academic scholarship.

-D.D.

Not All Statistics Are Valuable

2011-09-02T01:19:00.002-04:00

Sharon Machlis noted in her ComputerWorld blog that minor usage changes are often statistically insignificant.

-DD

Time's Websites of the Year

2011-08-19T23:59:00.004-04:00

Time has announced its choices for the 50 best website of the year. A new search site that supposedly has a tiny staff is Duckduckgo. The site offers view privacy and other configurable settings, but is saddled with such a funny name....

-DD

Arguements For Document Scanning

2011-08-06T18:50:00.003-04:00

Lincoln Mullen recently posted "Using DocScanner to Scan on the Go" in the "ProfHacker" column of The Chronicle of Higher Education. User comments gave mixed reviews about DocScanner iPhone software (user comments recommended other products) but the discussion and links did provide some rationales for digitizing academic work.

-DD

Open Information Extraction

2011-08-04T15:51:00.006-04:00

Bob Brown noted in NetworkWorld that Oren Etzioni, the CEO of Decide.com believes that keyword search techniques will be obsolete in a few years. Etzioni believes that computers will be smart enough to answer our verbal questions on general topics, a technology he dubs Open Information Extraction (IE). Etzioni on his corporate blog cites an opinion piece he wrote in Nature where he said that "we will soon view keyword search 'with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric type-writers and vinyl records.'”

We will have to wait and see how quickly this technology impacts our handling of knowledge. I suspect that Etzioni's "soon" may be at least a decade in the future, except for some very crude searches or targeted applications.

-DD

Mendeley & Bandcamp for Organizing Information

2011-08-02T10:15:00.005-04:00

In a Chronicle article titled "Basecamp for Organizing Student Research," Heather Whitney mentioned a tool for organizing bibliographic information called Mendeley. By organizing information in an Internet cloud, researchers can share their bibliographic information with others, form groups of people with the same passion, and otherwise network with researchers worldwide. I have not downloaded Mendeley, but from its description it possibly will be an inexpensive scholarly resource.

From Instructional

-D.D.

Journal Table of Contents Service

2011-07-27T19:24:00.004-04:00

The Journal Table of Contents Service indexes over 14,000 journals from over 700 publishers. Some of the journals offer free full-text, and other journal texts may be available through database subscriptions. Originating in the UK, the Journal Table of Contents Service seems to have a European content emphasis.

-DD

Ubiquitous Information and Retrieval

2011-07-15T09:51:00.004-04:00

Joab Jackson writes about "search engines supplanting our memory" in ComputerWorld. Researchers have found that students memorize less material if the information can be located later. Researchers also found that students were more likely to recall the source where they found information than the information itself.

Jackson summarized John Bohannon's article Searching for the Google Effect on People's Memory which appeared in the July 15, 2011 issue of Science and another article on the Science website entitle "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" by Betty Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner. Jackson provides this quote from Betty Sparrow:

I don't think that the parts of our brain that can remember information are atrophied," she said. While the Internet is fairly new, the act of relying on external resources for memory is not new for humans. People have long relied on friends, co-workers and family to keep track of information that they themselves have forgotten. The researchers call this phenomena "transactive memory."

[I suspect that disruption of transactive memory may be a cause for homesickness, and partially explain why when one spouse dies, the other is so devastated.]

-DD

2011-07-15T07:50:00.002-04:00

David Kapuler wrote about "Ten Educational Apps for Facebook" in Tech and Learning. These links include tools for tagging recently read books, a typing test, and even Zoho Office.

-DD

Apple Users and Mozilla FireFox

2011-07-11T10:50:00.002-04:00

Macintosh users may have some support issues with Mozilla Firefox according to a recent article by Gregg Keizer in Network World. The issue involves the display of downloaded fonts, and seems to affect FireFox version 5.0.0 and before. Those users with FireFox 3.6 will have their ability to download web fonts disabled if they use the new Lion operating system, while later versions of FireFox will update to the 5.0.1 version.

-DD

Business Intelligence

2011-07-07T00:51:00.002-04:00

Sandra Gitlen wrote a ComputerWorld article on business intelligence for mid-sized companies.

Search In Doonesbury

2011-06-30T09:10:00.004-04:00

The June 26, 2011 comic strip "Doonesbury" dealt with the impact of ubiquitious search on learning and education. The students portrayed in the comic may have the skills to quickly find facts, but do they know how to wisely interpret information?

-DD

Blekko

2011-06-29T21:42:00.004-04:00

Blekko is a new search engine that claims to:

crawl 3 billion pages of websites selected for quality, and,

allows users to create "slashtags" that organizes websites around specific topics or from specified lists of credible sources (credible domains).

Those who want to add their own slashtags must open a Blekko account. The primary developer of Blekko was also behind the Open Directory Project, which uses humans to select individual web pages rather than marking entire domains as reliable.

-DD

Television Viewing In The Digital Age

2011-06-17T11:19:00.002-04:00

Jonny Evans of Computerworld provides information on television/video usage trends occuring as viewers become accostomed to the everpresent Internet.

-DD

Wikipedia

2011-06-07T10:17:00.004-04:00

Sharon Gaudin noted that "Sarah Palin fans try to rewrite history on Wikipedia" in her June 6 Computerworld article. The fact that partisans can change the content of Wikipedia articles is a major reason to avoid using this tool as the sole source for research. Information found on Wikipedia should be confirmed by consulting other reliable sources.

-DD

Google Indexes Social Networking

2011-05-20T10:23:00.002-04:00

Google has indexed major social networking sites in nineteen languages, according to a Computerworld article by Juan Carlos Perez. I suspect this will eventually be subjected to a patent lawsuit, such as the one that Google and Microsoft are facing over instant search.

-DD

Mobile Web Technologies or Mobile Apps?

2011-05-11T21:29:00.000-04:00

Tomi Ahonen wrote an insightful article on the "Full Analysis of iPhone Economics - It's Bad News. And Then It Gets Worse." The thrust of the article is that hiring someone to develop an iPhone app typically costs $30,000, but the vast majority of mobile users do not have iPhones. He recommends the companies spend a tenth the money and develop mobile websites or SMS campaigns for distributing mobile advertising or information -- strategies that will reach all smartphones and the majority of feature phones with one effort.
-DD

Plagiarism Goes Social

2011-05-01T11:40:00.003-04:00

Marc Parry's "Plagiarism Goes Social" is a good account of plagiarism sources today.

-DD

Information Visualization

2011-04-14T10:05:00.002-04:00

I ran across Dr. Mohamed Taher's blog on Information Visualization. I found his post on "Deconstructing the Learning Pyramid" thought provoking - view the slideshow and note that the research supporting the percentages of student retention cannot be found by the referenced source.

-DD

Scanning Information

2011-04-14T09:47:00.004-04:00

Digitization by Google and the Library of Congress is bringing collections of books and photos online. Keith Shaw has published an article on portable scanners that might be useful for researchers to take into an archive "Honey, They Shrank the Scanners." Be sure to obtain permission before using such equipment in an archive -- many archives are concerned that scanning might fade or mutilate their irreplaceable documents.

-DD

Google Books Issues

2011-03-28T00:07:00.002-04:00

Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses copyright issues in the opinion article "Thank You, Judge Chin". Vaidhyanathan calls for agencies other than Google to provide free access to orphan materials -- something that will require changes in the copyright laws.

-DD

Concept Maps

2011-03-25T10:17:00.005-04:00

The Chronicle of Education just ran an article by Xarissa Holdaway on concept maps for science and literary genres and library collections.

-DD

Semantic Web

2011-03-23T20:39:00.004-04:00

Elisabeth Horwitt authored an article on the semantic web appearing in ComputerWorld today. The article describes tools for accessing the semantic web that are being developed for cross-searching the vast amount of text and data found on the Internet.

-DD

All Kinds of Minds

2011-03-21T19:08:00.003-04:00

"All Kinds of Minds" has consolidated research on the different mental gifts needed for student success. At this time they are posting material for teachers and parents on memory.

-DD

YouTube Alternatives

2011-03-19T00:29:00.002-04:00

David Kapuler provided a nice list of YouTube alternatives in Tech & Learning.

-DD

Internet Usage Tracking

2011-02-25T11:50:00.003-05:00

Ann Bednarz reports on tracking software users can install to automatically document hours spent on tasks. The designers developed this so that knowledge workers can bill clients for hours of work without logs being manually maintained, but some workers found that it had the positive benefit of showing them where they were unproductive.

-D.D.

National Broadband Map

2011-02-18T14:43:00.004-05:00

The National Broadband Map displays the Internet providers for a specified ZIP code. Brad Reed did some analysis of the map for Network World.

-DD

2011-02-18T00:19:00.002-05:00

IEAR.ORG is a site where volunteers rate educational iPhone APPS.

-DD

The Bible on the Web

2011-02-04T12:51:00.003-05:00

Dr. Mark Goodacre has developed forms to searching various Bible sites. It is a nice compendium of sites with Bible information, but the forms I tried took me to the resource web site rather than having the forms generate results. I suspect that the commercial sites preferred that their sites get the "page views," and Dr. Goodacre obliged.

-DD

Hints That Might Make Your PC Run Faster

2011-02-02T14:24:00.005-05:00

My WindowsXP laptop seems to take longer and longer to do basic tasks, I assume due to the years of updates to counter virus threats. Lincoln Spector just released an article on things an end user can do to regain some system speed, title: "Speed Up Windows by Stripping It Down." I enjoyed Spector's graphic prose - "Who wouldn't want a feature that distracts you when you need to concentrate, steals precious screen space, and slows system performance like an anvil chained to a swimmer's leg?"

-DD

Offline Reader Apps for iPhone

2011-01-29T22:11:00.003-05:00

App Advice has a review of offline reader apps - useful if one is going
to be reading research material in an area without Internet.

-DD

MegaReader

2011-01-28T00:33:00.003-05:00

The new MegaReader APP offers access to almost two million public domain books, and puts the iPhone4's camera to good use for walkers.
-DD

Quora

2011-01-27T18:39:00.006-05:00

Quora.com is an online community where people discuss various intellectual questions (registration required).
One thing I liked about Quora were the interactive helps that guide newcomers in making appropriate posts (see black inset, below). This type of interactive help might be useful in a course management system such as Blackboard.

-DD

Predictions for 2011

2011-01-23T14:20:00.004-05:00

Ellen Ullman at Tech and Learning has offered some predictions for 2011. Most of these predictions sound over-reaching to me.

-DD

Fragility of Cloud Applications

2010-12-29T13:08:00.004-05:00

Many are now relying on Skype or other Internet technologies for communication or operational processes. However, a glitch in these loosely managed systems can render millions of individuals unproductive, as reported in the recent Skype outage.

-D.D.

Top Ten Safe Search Engines

2010-12-01T07:43:00.002-05:00

David Kapuler has developed a list of the "Top Ten Safe Search Engines" for use by children, teachers and parents.

_-DD

Editing Wikipedia

2010-11-18T15:44:00.002-05:00

Some people are not aware that many articles on Wikipedia are unlocked so that they can be edited by anyone. Wikipedia is a great starting point if one knows nothing about a topic, but as Stephan Pastis indicated in the November 18 "Pearls Before Swine" cartoon, verify what you learn by consulting other sources.
-D.D.

TrueKnowledge.com

2010-11-02T00:34:00.002-04:00

TrueKnowledge.com attemps to respond to user-posed questions. This was a niche explored by Ask.com a decade ago. An oddity of the database is that if the database cannot provide an answer, the person posing the question is invited to provide an answer.

Links from this page went to dbpedia.org, which harvests and sorts data from Wikipedia, and to thearda.com.

-DD

Internet Movie Database

2010-10-22T11:41:00.004-04:00

The Internet Movie Database lists top movies for the last twenty years, as well as a plethra of information on the actors, locales, summaries, etc. for most films available in video format. Paul McNamara has posted a review of the first twenty years of www.imdb.com.
_-DD

Surfing the Web--While Driving

2010-10-12T09:31:00.002-04:00

Ford has announced upgraded technology that allows a vehicle interior to be a wifi hotspot, according to Nick Mediati's report in PC World's October 7 "Car Tech" article. And Sharon Gaudin announced in ComputerWorld that Google Is "Developing Self-Driving Cars" to make this surfing safer.
_-DD

Creating A Personal Database

2010-09-30T00:07:00.002-04:00

Dr. Alexander Halavais reocunts his experience with "digitizing the personal library" in an article by that name authored by Jennifer Howard for the Chronicle of Higher Education. She notes that Dr. Halavais posted additional thoughts digitization on his blog, A Thaumaturgical Compendium, and it is interesting to read what others think of his work.

-D.D.

Coping With Google Instant Search

2010-09-13T09:26:00.002-04:00

I find that the new Google Instant Search speeds up simple queries and provides an idea of the most popular searches starting with a particular letter combination. However, instant search eliminates my phrase searches by eliminating the quotes if I try to edit my search, so I have turned-off instant search.

-D.D.

Microsoft Preparing Beta Release of Internet Explorer 9

2010-08-11T22:17:00.002-04:00

According to reporter Gregg Keizer, Microsoft is preparing a beta release of Internet Explorer 9.

-DD

An Educator's Search Technique's

2010-07-08T14:41:00.002-04:00

Marsha Ratzel shares the following techniques with Teacher Magazine readers:

I have learned from my school library media specialists always to use the advanced search. I dutifully type the keywords “student engagement” in one box and "2010" in the "Publication Date" box. I also take a moment to check the box that reads "only" under "Full Text Articles." That way I don’t waste my time chasing an article that I can’t access because the library hasn't subscribed to it. I've also learned that if you hover the mouse over the magnifying glass in the list of articles, you can read the article's abstract without opening the whole thing. This makes it super time efficient and I can easily determine which articles I want to read all the way through. So out of the possible 6,000,000 articles in the database, as in this case, I found seven worth scanning.

-D.D.

Location Data and Personal Privacy

2010-07-07T19:21:00.003-04:00

Mike Elgan has recently penned several articles about the ramifications of updating search tools with your person location. His article on Foursquare indicates that discounts and social pressure will compel most people to share where they are at any given time. His earlier article on Google Buzz provides examples of the potential for misuse of this information.

In a similar vein, columnist Preston Gralla reviewed the location information Apple collects from users of iPhones and iPads.

-D.D.

Real-Time Search

2010-07-07T14:29:00.005-04:00

Kristin Burnham explains that real-time search engines "index updates from social communities such as Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube, providing you with a peek into the hot discussion topics on the Web."

-D.D.

Google News

2010-07-01T17:36:00.004-04:00

Barbara Krasnoff reports that Google News has been updated, but the comments both she and her readers make indicate unhappiness with the "upgrade."
-D.D.

Encrypted Google Search

2010-06-28T22:23:00.003-04:00

Encrypted Google search is now available. Juan Perez notes that encrypted search has been given a search address that can easily be blocked by corporate and school technologists: "Google moves encrypted search to a new site."
-D.D.

Office2010

2010-05-08T23:17:00.002-04:00

Office 2010 has been reviewed by Preston Gralla. He praises the updates to Outlook, and notes that Office now has a screen capture tool and PowerPoint sharing site.

_-DD

Voice

2010-04-23T16:54:00.002-04:00

Voice interactivity is a major focus at Google Labs.
_-DD

Defining Transliteracy

2010-04-23T10:22:00.002-04:00

Defining Transliteracy" is Bobbi Newman's description of an initiative to study communication techniques in an age of print and electronic resources. She shares a working definition developed by Sue Thomas and others:

Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.

Just from reading this definition, it appears that this new discipline is a broadening of existing communication studies to include new media. I hope that this new discipline does not suck academic resources from efforts to ensure beginning college students know how to write basic academic and commerical correspondence.
_-DD

Future Smellphone

2010-04-14T14:46:00.002-04:00

Bob Brown penned "Feds Seek to Sniff Out Toxic Chemicals with Cellphones", which indicates that cell phones in the near future will have the ability to detect smells such as toxic chemicals. I suspect that this technology may have potential for monitoring illnesses and assisting with receipes.

^-DD

3D

2010-04-03T21:43:00.004-04:00

Sharp has developed a 3D screen technology for cellphones that does not require special glasses, according to an April 2nd ComputerWorld article by Martyn Williams titled Sharp develops 3D LCD screen for mobile gadgets. This might have potential for more densely packing data into visual displays, and definitely has potential for new entertainment software.

-DD

Smart Phone Market Share

2010-03-30T12:56:00.003-04:00

I observe smart phones increasingly appearing in the hands of office personnel, a demographic that appreciates having information always available (and with the financial resources to pay the monthly contract charges). According to Rodger Entner's March 26 NielsenWire post, "Smartphones To Overtake Feature Phones in US by 2011", smartphones now comprise twenty percent of US cell phones, and will be fifty percent of the phones in service by 2012.

-DD

Smartphones

2010-03-25T16:48:00.003-04:00

A technologist at my university was showing his new smartphone, which he said allowed him to accomplish many of the tasks that formerly required a desktop computer. The sticking point for many is that data and application fees for a smartphone typically tally near $100/month. These fees are especially daunting because they are a new, continuing household expense that typically does not eliminate Internet service to a home desktop computer or laptop.

Because smartphones do provide mobile workers with tools they can use outside of the office, some employers are considering subsidizing smartphones, or providing such phones to their professional staff. An excellent article on the issues involved for a corporation was Who Should Own Your Smartphones? by Galen Gruman, which appeared in NetworkWorld online March 24.

-D.D.

LibraryKnowledge.com

2010-03-11T13:33:00.003-05:00

Library Knowledge is the Web site for Tony Bandy's training firm. The site offers sample training materials which might be useful to anyone wanting to learn about Web sites or information technology.

Note: I attended an event where the presentation equipment suffered a total technical failure, and witnessed Tony cooly continue his presentation with an alternate technology.

-D.D.

Tools For Mobile Technologists

2010-03-05T16:14:00.007-05:00

Explore http://sosius.com/, a British tool for online data storage and collaboration; http://box.net is a cloud storage company in the US.¹

Consider http://www.k7.net/--K7 Unified Messaging provides a personal phone number that serves as your voicemail box and fax number.¹

Try http://docs.google.com, a cloud tool that has proven invaluable when trying to convert Open Office to Word, and has sometimes been successful in opening corrupt Word documents that Word2007 could not open. I have also used Google sites http://sites.google.com for simple web pages. Erik Arnold notes that elements of Google Apps such as calendars and documents are easily merged into the created sites pages, something I have not explored.²

Look at http://basecamphq.com/--BaseCamp offers single-project management software for free--multiple project management requires a fee. Freshbooks www.freshbooks.com, a cloud-based billing and hours program, has a similar pricing structure.²

_{Today I discarded a heap of literature from the 2009 annual conference of the American Library Association. In the June 2009 issue of Searcher magazine, "Free Tools For Job Seekers" by Irene McDermott¹ and "Tools of the Trade" by Erik Arnold² provided these nifty web sites I just had to pass along.}
-D.D.

Tutorial for First-Time Computer Users

2010-03-05T16:06:00.003-05:00

The New User Tutorial http://tech.tln.lib.mi.us/tutor/ was developed by The Library Network (TLN) to give first-time computer users some skills with the personal computer interface without requiring constant oversight by a member of the library team.

-D.D.

VIZ--A Tool For Data Analysis

2010-02-12T14:45:00.010-05:00

Tableau Software is the focus of a February 11, 2010 ComputerWorld article by Eric Lai. Mr. Lai explains that Tableau is providing a free workspace called Tableau Public which enables users to create charts like these. Examples of the output of the commercial desktop product (like these with data drawn from the Chicago Fed or data.gov) are shown on the company blog.

_-D.D.

Pew Internet Research Reports

2010-02-04T13:28:00.003-05:00

The Pew Research Center provides current reports on the Internet and technology usage by the American people. For example, the Center recently found that blogging has fallen into disfavor with young adults because Facebook, Twitter and other social media consume the time that would have gone into maintaining an online journal.

Bill Gates Has a Blog

2010-01-21T13:19:00.003-05:00

Bill Gates now has a blog [gatesnotes.com] where he shares what he is learning. As he has the money to fund a great research team, this might be a useful resource, especially if one is interested in ministering to the poor and sick.

_-D.D.

Automated Translation

2010-01-19T16:21:00.004-05:00

Translation services have been available on the Web through sources like Google translate [ http://translate.google.com ]. Yesterday, Martyn Williams reported that Toshiba is developing a Windows Mobile phone software that can translate conversations in English, Japanese, and Chinese. If this actually works with an academic vocabulary and cross-cultural idioms, it might allow extending reference service to students internationally.

Quantcast.com

2009-12-16T19:20:00.004-05:00

http://www.quantcast.com is a page that estimates information about a Web site, including traffic frequency. I am not expert enough to know if these estimates are close to reality, but they seem plausible.

There are similar Web sites (for example, WebSiteShadow.com) that try to do even more, but from looking at their results on academic institutions I am familiar with, I can tell that they are inaccurate.

_-D.D.

Google Dictionary

2009-12-05T12:06:00.002-05:00

Google has deployed online dictionary functions, according to a ComputerWorld blog entry by Seth Weintraub.

-D.D.

Google Swirl

2009-11-18T21:58:00.002-05:00

Juan Carlos Perez reports in Computerworld that Google has a new tool for matching similar pictures, called Swirl.

_-D.D.

Bing and Wolfram Alpha

2009-11-12T00:10:00.002-05:00

According to a Computerworld by Nancy Gohring, Microsoft has reached an agreement to add the science data and mathematical abilities of Wolfram Alpha to Bing.

_-D.D.

Q R Codes

2009-10-28T12:23:00.002-04:00

QR Codes allow the url for a Website to be stored as a barcode. The following barcode, generated at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ should direct mobile phone users to my library's website.

Malware Flea Market

2009-10-07T14:00:00.004-04:00

Ellen Messmer reports in the October 6, 2009 issue of Network World on a Malware flea market [that] pays hackers to hijack PCs. Operating out of Russia, the flea market entrepreneurs pay to get control of US computers (and for the opportunity to steal from US citizens). In order to avoid local prosecution, hijacking PCs in Eastern bloc nations is not permitted.

_-D.D.

Libraries Provide Security

2009-09-24T12:10:00.004-04:00

ComputerWorld ran an article today by Robert McMillan which detailed how crooks are placing ads on popular web sites. These advertisements contain hidden code that takes control of the researcher’s computer. As library resources have few (if any) advertisements, researchers who use library databases should be less susceptible to attack. Just another reason students should not confine their research just to using Google.

-D.D.

Access My Library

2009-09-23T12:51:00.008-04:00

Access My Library makes Gale database articles freely available on a website funded by advertising (and perhaps by local libraries).

The first-time user is prompted to selects a nearby library using their zip code and then provides an email address. There is no prompt for a library card number, but one is asked to check approval of specified terms of service. When I submitted this information, a long form requesting contact information appeared -- however, this form was actually an advertisement, and I had to go "below the fold" to decline the advertisement offer to retreive my article.

The database claims to have thirty million articles. Based on the results of my search, the content includes magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and academic journals. There does not seem to be any way to do a phrase search -- enclosing search terms in quotation marks (the normal way to do a phrase search) had no impact on the results, which included a significant amount of chaff. There is no advanced search option, and the catagory search that is offered retrieves ads, articles, and journal titles that might be of interest to the demographic researching the limited number of topics presented. It did provide tools for linking an article to a blog, emailing the article, printing, and citation. The reference creation algorythm seem poor, as APA references had quote marks around the article title.

In my opinion, researchers would do far better accessing the Gale databases through their library:

Library database searches are not confused by advertising, especially by advertising that tries to get the researcher's contact information
The advanced search options and formal subject headings library databases provide allow more targeted results.
The citation tools provided by the library databases are much more accurate than those provided by AccessMyLibrary.
If the library databases are used, then trained librarians can be called upon to provide assistance in the search for information.

^-D.D.

Government Considers Email Private 180 Days

2009-08-07T09:53:00.003-04:00

Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick was cited in Nancy Gohring's August 6, 2009 ComputerWorld column regarding the government's view of the privacy of personal email:

The EFF argues that as with a letter or a phone call, the content of an e-mail should be protected. "The government argues different," she said. The government believes that if you've opened an e-mail and left it on the server, they can access it without a warrant. In addition, if a user leaves an e-mail on a server for more than 180 days, officials don't need a warrant to retrieve it.

But the reasoning behind that policy, set in the 1986 act, is antiquated, she said. "The theory is, in 1986 if you left something lying around that long it was like garbage, it wasn't important to you. Now we know that with Gmail and cheap storage it's quite the opposite. You keep stuff that's important to you and throw away what's not," she said.

-D.D.

Electronic Books

2009-08-04T15:48:00.004-04:00

Electronic books are possibly more environmentally friendly than paper books. I think for unwired convenience and for archival storage, books still have a strong future.
_{- D.D.}

Gale Databases Now Generating Downloadable MP3s

2009-07-28T17:53:00.003-04:00

Gale has given users the ability to generate and download MP3 files with its new PowerSearch 2.0 interface.

LEARNER.ORG

2009-07-10T10:25:00.003-04:00

Some great educational video series are hosted at www.learner.org through funding by the Annenberg Foundation. Art of the Western World, for example, is a video series that will help students prepare for the DANTES test with the same name. Other videos cover topics like statistics, English and foreign languages, science, and social issues.

Promoting Technology and Ideas

2009-06-26T09:55:00.004-04:00

Tech&Learning has a good article on how to promote a specific tech tool (Wordle), and the same motivational methods apply to encouraging database use or other technologies.
The same virtual magazine has a discussion on what the ideal school library would be like -- some visions seem to threaten the stereotype of the traditional librarian. And I liked the suggestions on what role or responsiblity educators have AFTER attending a conference -- if we discover something that will work in our environment, we should promote it.

^-DD

Microsoft Bing

2009-06-01T11:01:00.004-04:00

Microsoft Bing has been released. A nifty feature for its video search is that if you mouse over a video clip, a snippet of video begins to play. The majority of the video content seems to be from Youtube (a Google property), though it also found other sources that might have otherwise been hard to find.

-D.D.

Twitter Search

2009-06-01T10:17:00.007-04:00

It is possible to search recent Twitter posts for use of a term by going to http://search.twitter.com without having a Twitter account. If the URL for the search is saved as a favorite, you can repeat that search later, as seen in this example search for "Indiana Wesleyan University".

A beta search tool for Twitter and other social media is www.scoopler.com, but from looking at the results on June 1, 2009, it may just be an interface powered by search.twitter.com - it retrieved the same tweets.

^-D.D.

Web Search Blog

2009-05-18T12:10:00.004-04:00

Wendy Boswell, the About Guide for web searching, has a blog available at http://websearch.about.com/b/ which provides news about the latest search engine updates and searching techniques.

-D.D.

Start

2009-05-01T12:28:00.003-04:00

Start, which has been on the Web since 1999, is perhaps the oldest web-based natural language search engine. As with Ask.com, users can post natural language queries and generally get information that is on-topic. Start was developed at MIT by Dr. Boris Katz.

At the other end of the temporal spectrum, WolframAlpha.com is a new natural language search engine that is slated to launch this month.

-D.D.

Search Engine Colossus

2009-04-24T13:52:00.004-04:00

Search Engine Colossus is a website with links to search engines originating from (or focused on) nations around the world. Leslie Starasta, Information Services Librarian at Lincoln Christian College and Seminary, recommends this tool for cross-cultural research.

Murl Winters, Associate Library Director at Evangel University, recommends Phil Bradley's list of Country Based Search Engines.

^-D.D.

Peek You

2009-04-18T21:27:00.003-04:00

PeekYou is a new website for locating people. It harvests photos from blogs, phone numbers from the white pages, and text from other sources. Currently free, this product provided lots of results when I tried seeking old friends. The product is strongest at locating those with an online presence.

_-D.D.