From the category archives:

Commercial Services

The More Data You Have, the Clearer You See

6 October 2010
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The IBM marketing machine has been turning out various commercials that discuss data. What it is, how much of it there is, how it can be used, how channeling it can help your business, and how it can help the planet. The argument goes, if we can mine and analyze the data, then we can [...]

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The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time

4 October 2010
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Have you ever wished you could go back in time to see a town or city as it “used to be”? Cities like Ancient Rome, Athens, and Tenochtitlan? What about China’s Forbidden City?
Thanks to a collaboration between IBM and the Palace Museum, you may explore this aspect of Chinese culture and history online via [...]

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Google Releases World Map of Government Censorship Requests

28 September 2010
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How would you display a somewhat abstract term like “censorship” to your users and the rest of the world?
Earlier this week, Google released the latest version of their censorship map. Via the BBC: “the new map and tools follows on from that and allows users to click an individual country to see how many [...]

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Zotero Everywhere — Coming Soon to a Browser Near You

24 September 2010
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How do you organize your references when you are doing research? I’ve tried several different methods, both digital and manual. For a while, my favorite was Zotero, but I did not want to be tied to the Firefox browser; I prefer to use Safari. If there is any one immediate area where I would be [...]

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Satire No. 1: Eric Schmidt, Google and Your Digital Exhaust

7 September 2010
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Is Google Evil? What secrets do your family members hold? What does Google actually know about you based on your digital exhaust? Is there a difference between having something to hide and some things not being anyone’s business?
Consumer Watchdog has created an animation that shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving an ice cream truck around, [...]

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Facebook: By the Numbers

5 July 2010
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The numbers behind the Facebook phenomenon are staggering. Users spend 500 million minutes per month on the site. Seventy different languages are used on Facebook. As of December 2000, there were an estimated 361 million users on the Internet; as of 2010, Facebook alone has 400 million users. As of this writing, the Facebook user [...]

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The Humanities Take on Data Mining via Google Books

22 June 2010
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The Humanities are “Going Google”, according to Marc Parry of The Chronicle, in a piece he wrote a few weeks ago.
The gist of the article is that some Humanities scholars are very interested in data mining the texts scanned in for the Google Books Project.
Why do they want to use Big Data mining techniques [...]

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A Short History of Scientific Information Services

15 April 2010
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In the following videos, the producer traces the history of scientific communication from verbal/in-person, to letters, and then to printed journals. The producer describes the work of ISI and the company’s founder, Eugene Garfield. Journals grew from a handful to thousands. This led to classification and indexing in order to find relevant journal articles via [...]

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Bruce Schneier on “Security, Privacy, and the Generation Gap”

10 April 2010
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Bruce Schneier gave a great talk on privacy at the recent CACR Higher Education Security Summit. Basically, he argues that privacy isn’t dead and we should aim for more privacy laws. It is a thought-provoking talk that is worth watching. I also enjoyed hearing the questions from attendees, and his thoughtful responses to them.

His talk [...]

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Google Books Settlement Paths Forward Diagram Released

4 March 2010
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Jonathan Band has developed a diagram charting the possible outcomes of the Google Books settlement. Designed by Tricia Donovan, the diagram is called, “GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement”, and has been released by the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Association of [...]

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