Towards the Visible Web

Gerry McKiernan, the blogging, theoretical, visual librarian sent this to the digital library list:

John Markoff, Your Internet Search Results, in the Round, The New York Times, May 9, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 - For decades, computer researchers have experimented with the idea of displaying textual information in visual maps, but the concept has been slow to find practical applications. Now, one of the pioneering companies in the field is hoping that by making its software available as part of a standard Web browser it will be able to wean surfers away from the simple ranked lists of search results offered by Google and Yahoo. Groxis, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001, has converted its desktop Grokker software program, which displays a Web search as a series of categories set in a circular map, to run as a Java plug-in for browsers. On Monday, the company will begin allowing computer users to view Yahoo search results with its visualization technology at http://www.groxis.com . [MORE at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/technology/09yahoo.html

Gerry McKiernan's post includes links to good historical papers: [1] Gerry McKiernan, New Age Navigation, Innovative Information for Electronic Journals, The Serials Librarian, Vol. 45(2) 2003. p. 87. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf [2] Gerry McKiernan, The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases, Cyberstacks, March 21, 1999. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm

Humble Pi : Are the digits in Pi Random ?

The Christian Science Monitor published a editorial today touching on a fundamental tasks of academic computing - understanding numbers.

Pi's presumed infinite nature has absorbed mathematicians - and others - for centuries. According to "That Book...of Perfectly Useless Information," newly published, actress Melissa Joan Hart can actually recite pi from memory to 400 decimal places - not quite as good as a modern computer, which can take pi to more than 200 billion digits, but it's still pretty impressive.

But students young and old might not be aware of news generated by physicists at Purdue University that suggests pi, or 3.14159...., might not be as truly random as once believed.

The scientists just completed a study (published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics) comparing pi's "randomness" to that produced by some 30 different machines that generate random numbers. Though they found that the sequences derived from pi are an acceptable source of randomness (a big factor in producing hard-to-decrypt code, or solving particular physics problems), pi's string doesn't produce that randomness quite as effectively as the machines. Call it a case of deus ex machina.

For now, pi's integrity appears safe. "We do not believe these results imply anything about a pattern existing in pi's number set," says Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue physics professor.

The Monitor's View, Humble Pie, The Christian Science Monitor, April 29, 2005. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0429/p08s03-comv.html

Purdue University News, Pi seems a good random number generator – but not always the best, April 26, 2005. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2005/050426.Fischbach.pi.html

Spotted by GCD's Brain, Math Tidbits.

Open Source Content Mangement

opensourceCMS.com was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

Why some systems are here and others are not? Below are the main system requirements.

1. Root access to the server is not required for installation.

2. The system must be php/mysql based.

3. opensourceCMS is not just for "open source" systems.

4. We may not know of the system.

5. Some systems we couldn't get installed.

OrangeGuava

OrangeGuava is focused on allowing people to get their work done without needing to think like a computer.

OrangeGuava Desktop updates the desktop metaphor which has remained mostly unchanged for the past decade. A real world desktop has stacks of paper arranged informally in such a way that you always know where to find a piece of information, simply by knowing which side of the desk you always put that kind of information. This is combined with the functionality of a large pad of paper, to take notes in a similarly informal structure. http://www.orangeguava.com/

Edward Felten, The Freedom to Tinker

Viola Huang. Fighting for the 'freedom to tinker,' Daily Princetonian, March 1, 2005 writes:

"The world is an imperfect place, and Edward Felten likes to tinker with it.

"In December, Felten released the world's smallest peer-to-peer file-sharing program — 15 lines of code he named tinyP2P — to prove that such programs could not easily be banned. Felten wrote tinyP2P with his graduate student Alex Halderman '03.

"It isn't the first time the duo has caught the eye of the media. In 2003, Halderman discovered a way to bypass the copy-protection technique in CDs by pressing the Shift key. He was soon threatened with a lawsuit.

"For Felten, the opportunity to work with students like Halderman is what keeps him in the classroom. Felten finds that teaching enhances his ability to do his security research.

"Students are part of the key," he said. "If you're in the technology field and want to stay current, you need to have people around who know about the latest things . . . This is one of the big benefits of being at a university — there's always a constant stream of smart students coming through."

"Felten speaks out through a daily blog, http://freedom-to-tinker.com, which he started to advocate "freedom of ordinary users to adapt technologies to their cause."

[1] Viola Huang. Fighting for the 'freedom to tinker,' Daily Princetonian, March 1, 2005. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/03/01/news/12196.shtml

connotea : online collaboration

Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group.

Connotea stores your reference list online, and that provides many advantages: it's readily accessible, it's linked directly into the literature and it's easily shared with colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you.

Liquid Information

How did we go from using computers with punched cards, where you'd have to wait a day for the results of your calculations - to sitting around in coffee shops with a laptop ?

Liquid Information is a research project at UCLiC in London in cooperation with Doug Engelbart in California. We are aiming to make text more interactive - turning words into hyperwords.

Why? Most electronic communication has focused on the production of information, not the digestion of information. In order to make informed decisions in our work, it's not enough to rely on automated systems - we need to get the right information into our heads.

URLs:

[1] http://www.liquidinformation.org

[2] Douglas Engelbart, Invisible Revolution, the Doug Engelbart & the history of interactive computing. http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/

Disruptive Scholarship

Gerry McKiernan has announced the launching of the "disruptive scholarship blog". at http://disruptivescholarship.blogspot.com/.

I have begun to speculate further about the Wiki as *the* platform for The Next Generation e-Journal [1] and the transformation of the review process. I hereby invite Any and All of my Web Colleagues to Critically Review the scenarios outlined below in which I sketch the probable future [:-)] of scholarly communication, review, and publishing ['Disruptive Scholarship'] in the WikiWorld.

[1] [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/0408/0173.htm]

UK Computer Scientists Indentify Grand Challenges

Computer scientists identify future IT challenges
Goals for IT include harnessing the power of quantum physics, building systems that can't go wrong
By Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
January 25, 2005
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/01/25/HNfuturechallenges_1.html

A group of British computer scientists have proposed a number of "grand challenges" for IT that they hope will drive forward research, similar to the way the human genome project drove life sciences research through the 1990s. Ambitious goals include harnessing the power of quantum physics, building systems that can't go wrong, and simulating living creatures in every detail.

A grand challenge is a goal recognized one or two decades in advance, achievement of which represents a major milestone in the advance of knowledge or technology, according to a report describing seven grand challenges to inspire and direct IT research, released Tuesday by the British Computer Society (BCS).

Some of the challenges identified by the academics are of commercial interest to the computer industry, most notably the development of dependable systems, and of systems that model or behave like living organisms.

• To achieve the goal of building dependable computer systems, the scientists suggest building a verifying compiler, a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run -- something first written about in the 1950s.
• Architecture of brain and mind: Once seen as a matter for philosophical debate, explaining the connection between the brain (as computing machinery) and the mind (as a virtual software machine) is increasingly becoming a scientific problem of interest in the development of information processing systems;
• Memories for life: As we all accumulate personal digital memories such as e-mail and photos, it will become necessary to manage the information gathered over a human lifetime. The challenge is to allow people to gain maximum benefit from these auxiliary memories, while maintaining their privacy;
• In vivo - in silico: Through the human genome project, IT has already brought life sciences forward by leaps and bounds, but the next step is to make possible the computer simulation of entire living organisms, allowing scientists to examine a plant, animal or colony of cells in virtual reality, from the cellular scale on upwards, and at different speeds from freeze-frame
• Science for global ubiquitous computing: Many of us already carry several computing devices (cell phone, laptop, organizer) that communicate with one another and with others further afield, but such communications sometimes fail, as software interacts in unexpected ways. The goal of this challenge is to develop a scientific basis for the design and engineering of a global, ubiquitous computing infrastructure so that the results of interactions between devices are entirely predictable -- or, simply put, that they work as we want them to;
• Scalable ubiquitous computing systems: Not only do we want our devices to interact predictably and reliably, we also want them to interact with every other conceivable device -- but the complexity of many systems grows much faster than the number of nodes in the system. Computing engineers need scalable design principles: developing and applying them is the goal of this challenge;
• Journeys in nonclassical computation: Classically, computation is viewed mathematically in terms of algorithms, but there are other ways to look at it. These include rethinking the rigid classification schemes computers use and turning to others based on family resemblance or on metaphor; taking advantage of the behavior of materials at the molecular or subatomic scale to perform calculations in different ways (nanotechnology, quantum computing); using statistical models to compute how sure we can be that the answer lies in a particular range, rather than trying to calculate its exact value; and finally, seeking inspiration from biological systems to develop properties such as auto-immune or evolving hardware.

The search for inspiration began in 2002, as an initiative of the U.K. Computing Research Committee, prompted in part by an early project of the U.S. Computing Research Association. An academic conference followed, in March 2004, culminating in the publication of the report, "Grand Challenges in Computing Research."

The seven challenges are presented in seven chapters of the report, each one describing the ultimate goal, the kinds of research needed to reach that goal over a 15-year period, and the disciplines that would need to be involved. The suggestions -- quite detailed for the early years but vaguer and more conjectural as they look further ahead -- are intended to provoke discussion of the long-term aspirations for computing research.

The Grand Challenges report can be found on the BCS Web site at 
http://www.bcs.org/BCS/Awards/Events/GrandChallenges/conferencereports

Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Technology

The December 2004 issue of Linux Journal has an interesting article on connection between technology and pedagogy, and/or vice versa.

"Most LMSes are instructor-oriented and largely concerned with how course content is delivered. Moodle [2] is based on a learner-oriented philosophy called social constructionist pedagogy [3], in which students are involved in constructing their own knowledge. The concepts behind this philosophy of learning are that learners actively construct new knowledge by tinkering, and they learn more by explaining what they have learned to others and by adopting a more subjective stance to the knowledge being created. These ideas run parallel to the way open-source development works, in which the developers also are often the users, everyone is free to tinker with the software and code is constructed, peer-reviewed and refined by the means of an open discussion. This philosophy is the basis for the unusual name of this project. The Moodle Web site explains the origin of the name:

The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment ... It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leaves to insight and creativity.

"The social construction pedagogy is reflected in the design and choice of Moodle features. For example, one of Moodle's features is every course can have a glossary of terms. The glossary can be set up to allow course participants to add their own terms and definitions. Taking it a step further, Moodle allows comments to be attached to each term, enabling participants to refine and clarify these definitions."

[1] Abjijett Chavan and Shireen Pavri, "Open-Source Learning Management with Moodle," Linux Journal, December 2004. p. 66 - 69.

[2] http://moodle.org/

[3] http://moodle.org/doc/?frame=philosophy.html