Wonderful Thoughts A weblog about latest news and reveiws on technology,science,computing,software and autoblog. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 0 850

Articles from Wonderful Thoughts

Generative filtering 2007-10-15 06:24:33 Rebecca’s got an excellent post up today explaining a critical distinction in Internet censorship in China - the difference between internal and external censorship. In external censorship, the “great firewall” (neither a firewall nor, actually, all that great) blocks access to certain sites hosted around the world to users in China. Human Rights Watch’s website, for instance, is hosted in the US. Chinese censors can’t do anything about the content on those servers except to prevent it from being accessed from Chinese networks. This form of external censorship is pretty common - our friends at the Open Net Initiative have documented it at one point or another in roughly two dozen countries. But China practices another kind of censorship as well. When bloggers in China write on Chinese-hosted blog services, authorities can exercise much more control over that content. As Rebecca explains, Chinese content-hosting companies maintain teams that monitor all con ...

SWORD unsheathed 2007-10-14 20:46:53 A while ago I mentioned the work of the JISC-funded SWORD project on a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol. At the time of writing, the profile was still work in progress, but I noticed that in a message to the CETIS Metadata Jiscmail list last Friday, Julie Allinson has announced that version 1.0 of the SWORD profile is now available. From:eFoundations ...

Post Charlotte Quips 2007-10-14 02:21:27 Well, this is the second week in a row that I’m congratulating Jeff Gordon on his win. This win came at the expense of everyone else in The Chase - some more than others.Jeff Gordon has opened up even more of lead on his competitors. Even though Jimmie Johnson had a terrible day at Charlotte he was still able to bounce back and get a top 15 finish which keeps him in 2nd place in the standings. Clinton Bowyer finished second, but still lost a little bit of ground to Gordon, as did Tony Stewart who also had a good run in yesterday’s race at Charlotte.In all of the interviews with the Chasers after the race they all stated that Jeff and Jimmie need to have some bad luck for them to get back into the Chase themselves. Well duh! Like we didn’t know that - even Clint Bowyer needs the Hendrick cars to horribly fail. Even when Gordon runs out of gas he still wins the race.An interesting point was brought up later: after the last red flag they still ran 5 laps of caution befor ...

Detritus and happiness in Ecsari Market 2007-10-13 16:26:47 There’s a lot of junk near where I live, the product of family farms shutting down and businesses moving south and west. I’ve spent many a happy summer Saturday cruising the junk shops of Washington County, New York, finding things that were once precious to someone and bringing them home to my garage. This probably helps explain why I find visiting flea markets when I travel completely irresistable. If there’s one thing more interesting than junk, it’s unfamiliar junk. The best junk market I’ve ever been to is the Vernissage in Yerevan. As I understand it, it began as an art market near the main museum downtown where professionals and amateurs showed their works. (The term suggests an art opening, which is true, except it’s open every weekend.) At some point, the market opened to antiques, as well, and to an amazing variety of junk. The dealers at the Vernissage are some of the best organized I’ve ever seen, with one selling nothing but forcep ...

Delivering Ethiopian teff via Czech taxi? 2007-10-13 10:49:22 The reason for trying to get off the road is that I’m discovering that my brain is full. It appears to be taking me longer and longer to process the meetings I attend, the new projects I see, the talks I hear at conferences. So two weeks after returning from Rome, I find myself processing a conversation from the Web2 for Dev conference. I participated in a very strange panel on eAgriculture, where the main topic of conversation seemed to be the fact that none of the panelists quite knew what eAgriculture was or should be. Gabre-Madhin’s system is supposed to launch this December. In the meantime, friends at Feedelix, a company that’s built an SMS client that supports Amharic characters, are pioneering a system called BoonaNet, which will provide pricing information on commodities like teff, coffee and berbere in the Amharic, Tigrigna, and Afaan Oromo languages. There’s a very rich powerpoint online showing the success and challenges to the system, which range fr ...

NY Times Article + Our Letter to the Editor 2007-10-12 19:25:59 As you may already know, Students for Free Culture was in the New York Times on Wednesday (File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints), which made us very happy except for some inaccuracies that crept into the article. Here is the letter to the editor that my fellow Board member Elizabeth Stark sent to the NY Times in response, and which happily was published: We stand for a culture where everyone has the right to participate and where works are made available for all to legitimately access, share and remix. This is a culture that is “free as in speech” — not necessarily one that is free of charge. Elizabeth Stark Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 10, 2007 The writer is a founder of the Free Culture Group at Harvard. There are some other incorrect facts and misleading implications in the article (which we may address in future posts), but we’re just glad to have mainstream media recognize the importance of the free culture movement as a whole and Students for Free Culture i ...

Oh bondage, up yours! 2007-10-12 15:47:36 The announcement this week about the collaboration between Linden Lab and IBM to produce open, standards-based interoperability between virtual worlds has been widely heralded this week.  Quite right too. IBM and Linden Lab plan to work together on issues concerning the integration of virtual worlds with the current Web; driving security-rich transactions of virtual goods and services; working with the industry to enable interoperability between various virtual worlds; and building more stability and high quality of service into virtual world platforms. This is a potentially significant development and one that will help to move us away from the current situation of being bound to particular virtual worlds in terms of the investment we make in them. From:eFoundations ...

Patrick Carpentier Is a GEM of a Deal 2007-10-12 04:50:01 Canadian Patrick Carpentier has signed on to drive the #10 Dodge next year in Cup for GEM. Sponsor and possible new car number are still yet to be determined. This also leaves David Stremme out in the cold as he was in the running for this seat. This information was ‘leaked’ earlier Wednesday and when Ray Evernham was approached about it, he denied any knowledge of Patrick’s signing, although he did admit that Patrick was being considered for the ride. Later in the day an official announcement was made by co-owner of GEM, George Gillette. “We are excited to add Patrick Carpentier to our organization for 2008,” said George Gillett. “Patrick has shown tremendous talent in every series he has driven throughout his career and has a bright future in NASCAR. “We are committed to giving Patrick the best resources and opportunities available to make this transition, and we look forward to a great deal of success together both on and off the track.& ...

Active Learning - Remembering 2007-10-12 00:11:37 Active Learning is a teaching strategy that encourages students to write/type, click, discuss, act and create in order to engage in the learning process. Students who are engaged in learning are more likely to remember what they learned over time. Edgar Dale Cone of Experience Media by Jeffrey Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.edutechie.ws Active learning techniques fall into one of the following four categories: Remembering Meaning Making Creating Meaningful Artifacts Connecting This article will focus on teaching techniques that improve memory. Helping Students’ Remember Cognitive scientists have shown that active learning helps students: 1. pay attention 2. connect new knowledge with previously learned content 3. retrieve information/processes when needed. Active Pause - Pausing to allow students to refocus their attention is a favourite technique of lecturers. Pausing and asking students t ...

Andy is … 2007-10-11 18:35:11 … writing this blog entry (obviously). The Facebook status line is a wonderful thing, allowing you to supply any statement that sums up your current state of mind provided it starts with your name followed by the word ‘is‘.  So, for example, you can’t say "Andy needs to get some sleep".  Instead, you have to say something like, "Andy is tired and about to hit the sack".  It remains to be seen what effect this grammatical limitation has on the long term ability of our children to write expressively! Anyway, I digress…  I want to talk about Twitter, which also gives you a mechanism for answering the question, "What is Andy doing right now?" - allowing you a maximum of 140 characters to supply the answer but without the limitation that it must start with "Andy is".  As a result, Twitter doesn’t get used in the quite same way the Facebook status does - people use to it make any 140 charac ...

Nationwide Is On NASCAR’s Side 2007-10-10 16:28:59 It would appear, to me anyway, that Nationwide is not taking it’s sponsorship of NASCAR’s No. 2 series lightly. They are in it for the long run.Let me explain.Last week Nationwide became the official sponsor of NASCAR’s Grand National Division. Here is the Official Press Release. NASCAR fans can also listen in to last week’s announcement conference call via podcast here, which also features Brian France, Chairman and CEO of NASCAR, and Jim Lyski, Chief Marketing Officer of Nationwide discussing the NASCAR Nationwide Series.After that announcement I wrote about my feelings regarding Nationwide’s new sponsorship. Well guess who contacted me yesterday? A representative for Nationwide who has”been following (my) posts on the (sponsorship) announcement and wanted to share additional details and content for (myself) and (my) readers”.I don’t know if this was a generic email sent out to some of the NASCAR blogs, or if it was sent out in response to ...

Google analytics, bounce rates and search rankings 2007-10-10 11:01:24 This probably says more about the nature of my working day than I should admit to publicly, but we are currently thinking more about what Web site analysis tools we should make use of here for the Eduserv Web sites.  This caused me to go and have a look at the Google Analytics pages for the Newbridge Primary School Web site (which I help to maintain in my spare time), which caused me to notice the school’s bounce rate, which led me to this (slightly old)  research on the Google bounce factor, which ultimately got me thinking! What the research above says is that the more times people click on your link in Google search results, the better your ranking gets.  This is good.  But on the downside, the more times people immediately bounce back to Google, the worse your ranking gets. What Google Analytics does though is to give Google information about how long people are staying on your site.  The implication is that Google also uses this information, in addit ... Google

Why Didn’t Clinton Bowyer’s Engine Fail Like The Other DEI/RCR Engines 2007-10-09 18:27:50 Clint’s crew chief, Gil Martin, went with a more conservative engine package. Being more conservative hurt as far as power and racing for the win at the end, but it helped Bowyer’s championship hopes as he stayed within arm’s length of Jeff Gordon in the Championship. Apparently, all of the motors broke in the same place, “When you open the hood, now you know what to look for,” said Steve Hmiel, competition director for DEI, during the race. “We had two, now we have three. The hole is in the same place in the oil pan. It’s breaking something inside and it’s breaking it in all three engines.”One saving grace in all of this is that any rumours insisting on a DEI plot/conspiracy over Dale’s 6 engine failures this season can now be put to rest. Since all of the engine failures are happening in the same place in the motor of each car then it is clear that all of the DEI/RCR cars are getting the same engines.Another saving grace, if ...

The Pink Cure Car 2007-10-09 14:58:18 “We’re racing a “Pink for the Cure” No. 43 Dodge to raise awareness for breast cancer. October is breast cancer awareness month and our sponsor, General Mills, is teaming up with Susan G. Komen to raise awareness through “Pink for the Cure”. It’s a campaign that General Mills already donated $2 million to Susan G. Komen for the Cure and offers anyone touched by the disease an opportunity to join the cause.” - Bobby Labonte at Nascar.comI’m with Bobby on this one. Cancer is a serious and vile disease that needs to be wiped out.General Mills is OK in my books for doing this, I just wish more sponsors and organizations would get involved in finding a cure for cancer. Just think of the money out there. Corporations are spending well past 20 million a year on sponsorships alone, imagine if all that were funnelled into cancer research.No one is immune to cancer, this past year alone NASCAR has lost 2 notable personalities, Bobby Hamilton ...

Berkman: Drew Clark mashes up the FCC and the media 2007-10-09 10:25:10 Drew Clark from the Center for Public Integrity should give hope to anyone interested in how the availability of data on the Internet might lead to better journalism. Clark, an experienced technology reporter, leads a project at CPI called “Well Connected“, which produces a brilliant tool called Mediatracker, a fascinating mashup system that lets users dig into the ownership and political affiliation of their local media. Visiting Mediatracker and entering in my home zipcode, I discover that there 20 TV stations and 24 radio stations I might receive, 1 cable company, six broadband providers, and 42 newspapers published within 100 miles of my home. Clicking into the data, I can discover that five of those radio stations are owned by Clear Channel Communications. Clicking further, I discover that Clear Channel owns 1177 stations around the country. The site includes a recent corporate profile of Clear Channel as concerns media competition and regulation issues, and a page tha ...