Amusing viral add from Volkswagen
Friday, 4 February 2011
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Social media users grapple with information overload - USATODAY.com
In a way, comforting to know that I'm addressing the right problems with the Knowledge Hub project (http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub). This will integrate data and conversations from many thousands of sources (website feeds, blogs twitter); aggregating the content into common memes, and filtering according to personal profiles. In other words, you get to see more of what you WANT to see and less of the stuff that is irrelevant to you. Beta release this April.
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Saturday, 29 January 2011
Mobile Learning - new apps from WolframAlpha
I've been following WolframAlpha for some time - they have an intriguing (some may say mysterious) business model based on a very powerful semantic search platform with ability to answer any and every question with speed and accuracy. I was intrigued therefore when I came across these (new?) apps, which appear to be opening up an entirley new channel for online/mobile education.
No doubt other players are looking at this market (Open University?) but I think that WoframAlpha are currently ahead of the game.
Amplify’d from products.wolframalpha.com
Gain a competitive advantage with Wolfram Course Assistant Apps. Each app is custom designed
specifically for today's popular courses. Wolfram
Course Assistant Apps use an intuitive interface that guides you through
the coursework to help you solve problems, not just give you the answers.
As the makers of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, we have been providing solutions in education for over 20 years. Now we're combining expert-level data, high-performance computation, and state-of-the-art interface design to give you the power to excel in all your classes—right in the palm of your hand.
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Saturday, 22 January 2011
Wolfram Alpha announces changes to its API for semantic search
Wolfram Alpha have announced a big change to its pricing plans which gives non-commercial users 2,000 free calls a month. Also mention of an upcoming data API, which sounds like it might offer a more programmer-friendly version of the results.
Anyone interested in the power and potential of a semantic web search engine should give Wolfram Alpha a try-out.
Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com
Wolfram Alpha has assembled an impressive collection of information on everything from chemistry to high finance, but until recently external developers could only access it by paying between two and six cents per query. Today the company announced a big change to its pricing plans which gives non-commercial users 2,000 free calls a month, as well as adding new features like the asynchronous delivery of slower results. With few external applications appearing to use the old interface, can these changes open it up to a wider audience of developers?
The API itself is very similar to the Wolfram Alpha Web interface. Developers pass in a query string, and then get back XML results that reflect exactly what you'd see in the browser for the same search. This makes it ideal for formatting and displaying to users, since you get back plain text descriptions and images visualizing the information. This is exactly how most of Wolfram's flagship customers have been using it. For example Bing displays information from Alpha alongside its own search results, and Touch Press uses it to supplement its interactive books.
This is great if you want to show the information immediately to users, but what if you want to understand and process the data as part of your application? You might want run your own analysis on a company's share price, but you'll have a tough time converting their plain text results into numbers you can feed into an algorithm, and though their Mathematica versions are structured, it's not a simple format to read in. This may not be accidental - their terms of service make it clear that you can't "access, cache, store, retain, or in any way compile any copies or portion of any Wolfram|Alpha content."Wolfram has built up a large and valuable collection of data, and the company doesn't want to make it too accessible for fear that it may be copied. There is a sign of hope though in the mention of an upcoming data API, which sounds like it might offer a more programmer-friendly version of the results.
The easiest way to try it for yourself is through their API Explorer page. If you enter a query, you'll see the XML results appear, along with the URL you'd call from your application to run the same search. The results are split up into sections that Wolfram describe as "Pods." Each one of these corresponds to a different nugget of information related to the terms you entered, and matches the way results are shown in the normal Web interface.
There's a complete reference guide available as a PDF, detailing the options you can specify to narrow down your query, as well as the meaning of some of the results sections.
Stephen Wolfram and his team have created an astonishingly powerful collection of information. As he puts it on the Wolfram blog, the dream is to make this "computable knowledge" available to immediately enhance any program that's connected to the service. Today's announcement is a big step forward to opening it up to far more developers, but it will need much more computer-readable results before it will really fulfill that promise. Do you agree, or am I misunderstanding the power of the API as it is right now? Are there existing applications beyond the handful that Wolfram highlight? Let us know in the comments.
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Friday, 21 January 2011
BBC News - A Point of View: Does more information mean we know less?
An interesting article - some of which I can agree with (taking on more and more information does not necessarily make us more knowledgeable). I think the state of your mind can influence what information you are able to absorb and make sense of. Maybe rather than talk about 'fasting' the brain the author could have used the concept of 'reflection', i.e. a calm period where you give the brain an opportunity to organise its thoughts.
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Thursday, 20 January 2011
World now in third era of cybercrime
One could ask "what's the connection between Facebook and the Iranian Nuclear Programme?" - Answer - both under attack from cybercrime. Details in this clipping. The quote from the author also worth noting:
"The scale of malicious activity on Facebook appears to be out of control," notes report co-author, Graham Cluley. "The social media site, however, is either unable or unwilling to invest the necessary resources to stamp it out," he writes, the latest in a line of stinging comments he has made in recent months on Facebook's apparent security complacency.
Time for me to check my Facbook privacy settings....again!
Amplify’d from www.pcworld.com
The year 2010 was a hugely significant one for computing criminality and could turn out to mark the beginning of a 'third era' of cybercrime, security expert Graham Cluley of Sophos has said in advance of the company's latest threat review of the year.
The first era was marked by amateur hacking and virus creation on the PC, the second by the fusing of organised crime with the new technologies of the Internet, and as expected 2010 saw plenty on both these fronts in ever more sophisticated and varied forms.
On that score, during the year criminals appeared to migrate to some degree from old-style spam and web exploits to embed themselves in the next e-crime battlefront, social networks.
"The scale of malicious activity on Facebook appears to be out of control," notes report co-author, Graham Cluley. "The social media site, however, is either unable or unwilling to invest the necessary resources to stamp it out," he writes, the latest in a line of stinging comments he has made in recent months on Facebook's apparent security complacency.
But it is the 'third era' that has finally started in earnest that marks out the last year as different, and which can be defined loosely through the sudden emergence of cybercrime as a geo-political theme.
Hillary Clinton railed at China in thinly veiled terms for its supposed involvement in the Aurora attack on US companies, Stuxnet hit the Iranian nuclear program in what now looks like a carefully-crafted targeted attack, and a new UK government suddenly defined cyberdefence as one of its highest military worries.
Topping the year off were the extraordinary leaks of US military and diplomatic data to Wikileaks, and the hacktivism of the Anonymous group which developed the idea of cybercrime as an unconventional political tool.
"2010 was an unusual year. This was the year the gloves came off and it became serious," comments Cluley.
All three tiers of cybercrime - nuisance hacking, the criminal, and now the paid or unpaid political hacker - represent a threat to consumers and companies alike and sometimes telling them apart can be difficult.
A good example of how these different layers can fuse into one crime came with September's odd 'onMouseOver' Twitter worm, which was a social media attack that caught out senior political figures, including Sophos notes, ex-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's "wife Sarah Brown, Lord Alan Sugar, and even Robert Gibbs, the press secretary to US President Barack Obama."
One encouraging and significant statistic from 2010 was a spike in the number of arrests for alleged cybercriminal activities, which hit organised gangs as well as loners out to cause nuisance.
Before 2010, Internet crime was assumed to be low risk and the pressure to find the culprits was apparently modest. Now, with cybercrime suddenly deemed important by governments, criminals in developed countries can no longer assume they won't be found out and possibly even, in 2011, extradicted from countries other than the ones in which crimes were committed.
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Tuesday, 18 January 2011
10 years of Wikipedia
In case you missed this - a great Podcast from a number of contributors (including Jimmy Wales) to mark the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. Follow the link below to get to the podcast.
Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk
It started as a hobby with noble aims and has blossomed into the fifth most popular website in the world - with over three million English articles alone, ten million contributors and 175 languages.
Today, it's hard to imagine life without Wikipedia. When you want to know more about anything, what do you do? You turn your computer on, put your query into a search engine, and in the first few hits there's a Wikipedia page. It's easy to see why the English site alone gets over nine million views per hour.
In this documentary, Science in Action presenter Jon Stewart explores this truly global phenomenon as it continues to grow at an impressive rate, despite surviving on only 50 paid staff and being run as a charity.
Why has it become such an invaluable resource? How has it changed over the decade? And is it a reliable source of info and news or a symptom of the spread of mediocrity and devaluation of research?
As it enters its tenth year, we look at the history and evolution of Wikipedia - which by allowing people from opposite sides of the world to contribute - has grown into one of the most popular websites on the internet.
What does the future hold for the site? Will it simply be replaced by another way of sharing knowledge on a mass level? Or will Wikipedia one day contain the sum of human knowledge? And are there any downsides to this democratisation of information?
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bmm0x
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