Voila qui fera plaisir aux contributeurs de Wikipédia, car nombre d'entre eux l'utilisent d'une manière ou d'une autre sur l'encyclopédie, Mediawiki (le logiciel faisant tourner Wikipédia) permettant à chaque utilisateur d'ajouter son propre CSS/javascript dans une sous page utilisateur dédiée (avec, bien sûr,  une portée limitée à l'utilisateur seul)

As much as it bugs me when people quote Wikipedia as fact, it is still an incredibly useful tool. I am constantly amazed at the level of detail that some wiki authors go into. Putting Wikipedia on the iPhone seems so natural and this app definitely delivers.

Take your typical Wikipedia page that has a table of contents on the left, the article itself in the middle, and some useful quick facts on the right. For testing purposes I used Sarah Palin (apparently her article can't be edited at the moment, although I can't imagine why not) and Barack Obama. The iPhone app put the quick facts at the top, followed by the main site content. You might at first wonder where that useful table of contents is. Well, it's conveniently located in a submenu that can be accessed by clicking the open book icon at the bottom of the screen. There is also an icon in the bottom right corner that provides a list of the links embedded in the document

Although not a very fancy user interface, it is easy to use and works very well (and loads pretty quickly too). There aren't any editing options, but that's fine for me since I'm not the type to want to do much Wikipedia editing.

Some other nice features include autocompletion for searches and customizable font size.

Wikipanion Website

Peter, Bjorn & John - Young Folks

Heard this song on the Point Pleasant boardwalk the other day and haven't been able to get the infectious whistling out of my head since. First heard it last summer on WERS I think... just figured I'd share it and get it stuck in your craniums as well.

Kanye West is apparently a fan... he joined Peter, Bjorn & John on stage at the Way Out West fest in Gothenberg, Sweden (they're a swedish band... learn more through the almighty scholarly research power of wikipedia!) last summer and rapped over the song.

Here's that:

And here's a studio remix from him:

Some of the YouTube commenters hate on it, but I think it's a fun remix.

Personally, I think if there's any hate, it should be directed unilaterally and powerfully at one Mr. James Blunt, because this is effin' terrible... he sounds like he's trying to channel Cat Stevens and there's no whistling. Boo this man.

Ugh.

This cover by a British band called the Kooks is nice, but you'd really be best served downloading the original or **GASP!!** actually buying the album "Writer's Block", which I'm planning on doing.

6 days until NHL 09 ruins/enhances my life.

Frankly, dogma, coupled with an I-can-do-anything-even-if-I-don't-have-a-clue-what-I'm-signing-up-to-do attitude scares the hell out of me. Thoughts on women's rights, religion and Palin will follow -- but it's probably days away. Meanwhile, a recent interview follows below. And an NPR story about Palin's Wikipedia clean-up here.

1) ik heb mijn pc weer terug en hij doet het weer gewoon helemaal met alles erop en eraan.

2) ik kwam deze site tegen, hij lijkt op wikipedia maar in plaats van nuttige info is dit de grootste rotzooi die ik heb gezien op een wikipedia-achtige site. dat hier mensen dus echt mee bezig zijn om dit erop te zetten.

O site não está desatualizado, é só um probleminha na data :-)

"Minha pátria é a língua portuguesa" Fernando Pessoa

Digital signals are digital representations of discrete-time signals, which are often derived from analog signals.

An analog signal is a datum that changes over time—say, the temperature at a given location; the depth of a certain point in a pond; or the amplitude of the voltage at some node in a circuit—that can be represented as a mathematical function, with time as the free variable (abscissa) and the signal itself as the dependent variable (ordinate). A discrete-time signal is a sampled version of an analog signal: the value of the datum is noted at fixed intervals (for example, every microsecond) rather than continuously.

If individual time values of the discrete-time signal, instead of being measured precisely (which would require an infinite number of digits), are approximated to a certain precision—which, therefore, only requires a specific number of digits—then the resultant data stream is termed a digital signal. The process of approximating the precise value within a fixed number of digits, or bits, is called quantization.

In conceptual summary, a digital signal is a quantized discrete-time signal; a discrete-time signal is a sampled analog signal.

In the Digital Revolution, the usage of digital signals has increased significantly. Many modern media devices, especially the ones that connect with computers use digital signals to represent signals that were traditionally represented as continuous-time signals; cell phones, music and video players, personal video recorders, and digital cameras are examples.

In most applications, digital signals are represented as binary numbers, so their precision of quantization is measured in bits. Suppose, for example, that we wish to measure a signal to two significant decimal digits. Since seven bits, or binary digits, can record 128 discrete values (viz., from 0 to 127), those seven bits are more than sufficient to express a range of one hundred values.

source: wikipedia

Links:
Official site, IMDB, Wikipedia
Download (Xvid/HD)

Links:
Official site, IMDB, Wikipedia, Trailer
Buy (DVD), Download (Xvid)

Links:
Official site, IMDB, Wikipedia, Trailer
Buy (DVD), Buy (Blueray), Download (Xvid)

As a professor at Gainesville State College, I was outraged that a child in my community could be treated with such craven disregard. When I criticized Boortz at this blog and elsewhere over the next few days, he welcomed the controversy. On March 11, he again ridiculed the child and mentioned me on his show, laughing out loud at my attempts to hold him accountable. On March 13, he posted this at his website:

…looks like we’ve really twisted a few knickers out there with our panning of Lil’ Buford’s communications skills. You remember Lil’ Buford, don’t you? The 10-year-old kid who can’t speak the English language? Yeah .. that one, the future worm farmer.

Boortz sure seemed proud of his abuse of this child...so proud that he posted this poll at his website:

Is Neal being too hard on that ten-year-old boy from north Georgia with the thick accent?

a. Yes, he should lay off     b. No, he's spot on     c.mah diddy sez neils bein ignert

Boortz clearly enjoyed his on air abuse of the boy and had no compunction about exploiting it for a laugh. (A simple question: when is it ever acceptable to humiliate a child over the airwaves?)

Fast forward a few months. In July, I attempted to include the incident, appropriately enough, in a section of Boortz's Wikipedia profile titled "Criticisms and Controversies." My posts were at first regularly deleted; then, the entire "Criticisms and Controversies" section was deleted; and finally, an entry entitled "Boortz Detractors" was posted, asserting among other things that "a team of Boortz listeners" was responsible for deleting my entries.

As it turns out, the "team of Boortz listeners" was actually Neal Boortz himself! At the discussion page for his Wikipedia profile (scroll down near the bottom), Boortz had this to say:

What we really have here is a small-town college professor who has taken a dislike to me and is using this forum to constantly badger me with postings and edits I believe to be improper and exaggerated, if not untrue.

What exactly does Boortz mean by "improper and exaggerated, if not untrue"? He doesn't provide any evidence of impropriety or exaggeration. If anything was improper, it was Boortz's treatment of the child in question. And what does he mean by, "...If not untrue"? My description of the incident involving the child was accurate; give Boortz credit for acknowledging that fact, even in such a backhanded way.

Editors at Wikipedia have chosen to publish the following well-sourced description of the incident (scroll down to the last section just above the citations), which, while based on my initial entry, was written by another editor:

In March 2008, Boortz attracted controversy by playing an audiotape of a mentally disabled nine-year-old where he repeatedly ridiculed the child’s speech, leading to an unsuccessful FCC petition to deny Boortz’s employer the right to purchase five local radio stations.

Boortz responded on Wikipedia's discussion page with this:

I wish to have my page omitted from Wikipedia. There is a college professor named Preston Coleman who has faced repeated failures in his attempts to harass me over the content of my radio show.... I would like to request that my profile be eliminated alltogether.

Thanks

Neal Boortz

Consider the double standard: it's perfectly acceptable for Neal Boortz to humiliate a child on air, but posting a description of this abuse online is out of bounds!

Boortz, a libertarian, went on to call me a "liberal college professor" and to presume that my criticism of him was based on political differences. That's funny...I'm included in this Listing of Notable Libertarians under "Columnists, Journalists, and Writers" (directly beneath Boortz, oddly enough) and also in this list of Libertarian Professors under "Georgia." I was the official announcer at the Libertarian National Convention in Atlanta in 2004, where I met Boortz personally. Boortz might also consult his own web site, where he published one of my news satire stories, "Kerry to Endorse New 'Purple Heart' Band-Aids" (scroll down about halfway...) He read this story and another one of mine entitled "Dogooders Do More Harm Than Good" on his show. Sure sounds liberal, doesn't it?

Boortz also used Wikipedia's discussion page to accuse me of "try(ing) to arrange for attorneys to pursue civil actions against me on behalf of a third party..." The family of the child in question is pursuing legal action, and I wish them well, but Boortz's assertion is an outright lie. Boortz also writes that "some of (Coleman's) additions are factually incorrect. The assertion that I have never debated the FairTax in a public forum would be an example." I never made that assertion, a fact easily verifiable using Wikipedia's own records.

In fact, everything I've posted at Wikipedia has been backed with credible citations, unlike the lies and inaccuracies Boortz has posted about me. I stand behind everything I've written here at Newsprism, all of which can be verified using the tapes of Boortz's own show, which his employer refuses, understandably, to release.

Talk radio, both liberal and conservative, is entertainment and therefore not subject to editorial or evidentiary standards. The work college professors engage in is closely monitored and verified by a highly critical and collegial community of scholars.

Should Wikipedia use the editorial and evidentiary standards of talk radio, or of scholarly work? I think the answer is obvious.

Ironically, in 2002, Boortz wrote this at NewsMax.com:

Remember, children are impressionable. Treat a child nicely and you earn that child's loyalty and love.

What a lovely thought.

Who knew Boortz was so sensitive?

Newsprism

El fin del mundo se va acercando, ¿estás preparado para la venida del Señor?

Veamos esta noticia:

Por lo menos 61 personas murieron en Haití a causa de las inundaciones provocadas por la tormenta tropical "Hanna", que se desplaza hacia las Bahamas, informaron fuentes oficiales haitianas.

Según la oficina de Protección Civil, 37 personas fallecieron en Artibonite (norte), 21 de ellas en la ciudad de Gonaives, la región más afectada por "Hanna". Once más murieron en el sur, una en Nippes (sur) y doce en el departamento oeste.

La fuente precisó que aunque estos son los departamentos más golpeados, otras zonas resultaron hoy afectadas por las lluvias que continúan cayendo sobre el territorio haitiano.

Asimismo, calificó de "severo" el daño provocado por la tormenta tropical "Hanna" al sector agrícola y ganadero local, así como a las infraestructuras.

En tanto, la Oficina Nacional de Meteorología anunció que las lluvias continuarán durante toda la noche, por lo que llamó a la población a mantenerse vigilante ante la situación.

Horas antes, la oficina de Protección Civil confirmó que el nivel de las aguas ha bajado un poco en Gonaives, donde las autoridades organizan la distribución de 5.000 raciones de comida.

Sin embargo, la circulación en esta zona es difícil, lo que dificulta las labores de socorro y la región está aislada de la capital, Puerto Príncipe.

El alcalde de Gonaives, Stephen Moise, indicó que gran parte de la ayuda de emergencia está paralizada en la vecina ciudad de Saint-Marcm y que, de momento, es imposible evaluar los daños materiales ocasionados por el fenómeno meteorológico en Gonaives.

EFE, 3 de Setiembre de 2008

Now, I tend to think that it's rather silly for the Department of Homeland Security to have offered up only a Wikipedia article in support of its claim.  Honestly, reliance solely on Wikipedia is just not a smart idea.

But the Court's sniffy disdain for Wikipedia's type of information rings a little hollow when courts routinely make lawyers and their clients accept things like: "what we state as "facts' in this opinion for purposes of reviewing the rulings on the summary judgment motion[] may not be the actual facts. They are, however, the facts for present purposes, and we set them out below."  Cox v. Administrator U.S. Steel & Carnegie, 17 F.3d 1386, 1400 (11th Cir. 1994) quoting Swint v. City of Wadley, 5 F.3d 1435, 1439 (11th Cir. 1993).

Today in our "Salute to the UK" we're going to take a look at everyone's favorite dysfunctional family - The Royal Family!

The House of Windsor (so named since 1917 when George V changed the family name from the mouthful of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha,) according to Wikipedia includes "the monarch, the consort of the monarch, the widowed consorts of previous monarchs, the children of the monarch, the male-line grandchildren of the monarch, and the spouses and the widowed spouses of a monarch's son and male-line grandsons."

I have to admit, some of those names up in that family tree are so Hogwarts-esque. (Apparently its not just the faces of Brits that one sees over and over again!)

Being mostly a figurehead monarchy in today's world though, the British Royal Family has excelled at making certain that they remain in the public eye, as an integral part of British daily life - even if that means doing it from the tabloids. On any given day, rags like the UK Daily Mail will have at least one article somehow relating to the Royal Family past or present on their main page. Today's is a bit of a stretch, but they manage it - by relating the life of Duchess Georgiana of Devonshire (recently made into a major motion picture starring the Twiggy-ish Keira Knightly and opening this week,) to the late Princess Diana's life and loves and scandals. ("The first Queen of Hearts: Like her descendant Diana, the Duchess of Devonshire married a man who loved only his mistress" - Seriously, do they have no limit to the wordcount in article titles across the pond?)

Usually its something just a touch more relevant, like the way Princess Eugenie parties. (Sep. 2, '08 - "The eyes have it: Princess Eugenie all aflutter on night out with Fergie and Bea")

But for the most part, the Royal Family just seems to be about as relevant to a real-life family as the Hiltons are in this country. Pampered, rich, out-of-touch, and at times completely bonkers - they rather remind you of the side of the family that you only see at weddings, funerals, and reunions - and always seem to be giving them presents or money, even though everyone knows they have no need of either.

As another corporate-funded quasi-celebrity used to say - "That's Hot!"

Tomorrow on StrangeMilagros in our Salute to the UK, we cover - WAGs!

¿Qué otra cosa podría agregar? Ya todo estaba dicho. Más o menos por ahí, nace esta idea de la "Wikipedia del Rock" que, distinto de la creación de Jimmy Wales, no nació de la idea de un hombre común, sino de una mega-corporación como amazon.com.

Ahora bien, discutir que Soundunwound muy posiblemente llegue (aún es Beta) a ser excelente y completa, es una tontera sin sentido (como decir que la Coca-Cola de McDonalds es mas fea que la de un kiosco de barrio). Muy prbablemente lo logre. Y es que, en esto sí, funciona igual que Wikipedia: los usuarios editan el contenido, ellos ponen la estructura y la plantilla.

Aunque la diferencia que marco es notoria: Wikipedia no tiene fines de lucro y en cambio Soundunwound tiene vínculos directos a la tienda on line de discos más grande del mundo, amazon.com. Por consiguiente, el "aporte" de la comunidad (tan sobrevalorado en esta nueva Web 2.0) podría considerarse el "trabajo gratuito" de la comunidad.

Pero bueno. En particular, yendo al grano con la página, tengo que decir que la mayoría de las cosas que busqué, existen. Algunos artístas "consagrados" aún no tienen sus fichas completas (como el caso de U2 que aún no tiene foto de sus integrantes) y otros menos "mundialmente conocidos" apenas si tienen la nómina de discos (como el caso de Luis Alberto Spinetta). Destacable, si se quiere, es la posibilidad de ver el recorrido discográfico (y algunos sucesos) en una muy didáctica línea de tiempo que puede arrastrarse hacia adelante y hacia atrás.

Con el correr de los meses veremos si la gente se "apropia" de esta enciclopedia del rock. Aún está en beta, y medio en pañales. Ah, y digámoslo: con ese nombre se les va a complicar en el mundo de habla hispana (¿les importaremos? Cua!).

Link: Soundunwound

Elle y rédige des billets tournant autour de la méthodologie de la recherche scientifique. Dernièrement, elle pose une question assez osée et tente d'y apporter une réponse.

La question est simple : "Wikipédia devient-elle une source académique respectable?"

Pour répondre à cette question elle a recherché les bases de données scientifiques Project Muse et JSTOR. A partir du nombre de publications citant Wikipédia, de leur année de parution, et de la manière dont Wikipédia est citée, elle explique l'évolution qu'a suivi Wikipédia au sein des parutions scientifiques.

Je vous invite bien sûr à lire son billet en entier pour bien comprendre sa démarche, mais c'est sa conclusion qui est la plus intéressante:

OK, maybe Wikipedia can be a legitimate
source for student research papers–and furnish a way to teach research
skills.  But should it be cited in scholarly publications?  In “A Note
on Wikipedia as a Scholarly Source of Record,” part of the preface to Mechanisms,
Matt Kirschenbaum offers a compelling explanation of why he cited
Wikipedia, particularly when discussing technical documentation:

Information
technology is among the most reliable content domains on Wikipedia,
given the high interest of such topics Wikipedia’s readership and the
consequent scrutiny they tend to attract.   Moreover, the ability to
examine page histories on Wikipedia allows a user to recover the
editorial record of a particular entry… Attention to these editorial
histories can help users exercise sound judgment as to whether or not
the information before them at any given moment is controversial, and I
have availed myself of that functionality when deciding whether or not
to rely on Wikipedia.(Kirschenbaum xvii)

With Wikipedia, as with other sources, scholars should use critical
judgment in analyzing its reliability and appropriateness for
citation.  If scholars carefully evaluate a Wikipedia article’s
accuracy, I don’t think there should be any shame in citing it.

Je suis désolé je ne vais pas tout traduire, mais l'idée est qu'avec Wikipédia, comme avec toutes les autres sources, les chercheurs doivent utiliser leur sens critique en analysant la fiabilité et la pertinence de faire une citation.

Rien de nouveau au soleil, c'est ce que disent les Wikipédiens depuis des années. Ce qui est plus intéressant c'est que l'auteur de ces propos soit lui-même un chercheur qui, autant que je sache, n'est pas rédacteur sur Wikipédia.

Je vais terminer en citant une dernière fois le billet de Lisa Spiro:

However, you can begin to see academic norms shifting as more scholars
find useful information in Wikipedia and begin to cite it.  As
Christine Borgman notes, “Scholarly documents achieve trustworthiness
through a social process to assure readers that the document satisfies
the quality norms of the field” (Borgman 84)

Je vous invite, amis anglophones, à lire ce billet en entier pour vous faire une meilleure idée de ce qu'elle dit. Il n'y a rien de bien novateur, mais c'est tellement rafraichissant de le voir écrit par une personne extérieure à la sphère Wikimedia.

The appeals court reversed a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals that said it wasn't an error for DHS to cite Wikipedia in its decision to deport Lamilem Badasa, an Ethiopian woman who was seeking asylum in the US, claiming her laissez-passer travel permit didn't prove her identity.

The government used a Wikipedia entry to convince an immigration judge that the document was just a one-way travel document based on information provided solely by the applicant.

In overturning the Board's decision, the appellate court noted that, because anyone can edit Wikipedia, there was no assurance that the information the government found there was accurate. The court said that looking up information on Wikipedia might have misled and tainted the government officials' decision in the case.

The purpose of today’s short blog is to draw further attention (where necessary) to three stimulating and informative articles by a senior IT expert and former Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious magazine PC World, Harry McCracken. The 3 timely contributions raise two separate but connected issues concerning the Google colossus: its voracious appetite for IT projects in very different fields and the recent unveiling to netizens of the beta version of Google’s penultimate tentacle, Knol, as a new (and commercial) competitor in the online encyclopedia market. (And only a few days ago the IT world witnessed the baptism of their Chrome Browser...)

In just under a year, McCracken has shared his changing views about Knol on three occasions:

a basically negative reception of the announcement of the Knol project:

16 December 2007: Knol: ‘Google Ennui Sets In, at Least For Me’;

an optimistic greeting of the recent launch of the first Knol beta offerings:

23 July 2008: ‘Knol’s Well: Google’s Encyclopedia Looks Cool’;

an expression of doubts about perceived weaknesses and inconsistencies in the Knol project based on a small sample of comparisons between the larger number of Knols currently available and Wikipedia offerings:

1 September 2008: ‘Google’s Knol: So Far, Not So Good’.

If you have not read Harry’s evidence and arguments contained in the latest of these three (which provides links to the two previous articles), I strongly recommend it to you.

Google’s Knol: So Far, Not so Good.

Of particular interest is that although, as McCracken admits, his opinion has twice veered sharply, there is a consistency in his concerns that in addition to its phenomenally successful stellar enterprises, Google has shown a tendency to launch projects which do not achieve the sort of resounding success that Google Search and Google Maps, for example, have garnered. McCracken’s reservation is that, although he still feels the idea of Knol is cool, on the present preliminary evidence, there is reasonable cause to suspect that Knol may end up as one of that second category.

Just one short quotation to whet your appetite further:

“…Google is better at getting things started than finishing them. Services like Google Base and Google Page Creator remain rough drafts at best, eons after they debuted. Even a company with resources as vast as Google can’t do everything and do everything well.”

In the two days following that blog article on 1 September 2008, Harry has already posted a barrage of articles about Google’s launch of the beta of their Chrome Web Browser project.

Perhaps he never sleeps.

]]> http://libprofdev.wordpress.com/?p=332 Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:42:40 +0000 ellieheartslibraries http://libprofdev.wordpress.com/?p=332 Wikipedia, YouTube & Information Literacy!

High school and community college librarians,

you are invited to a FREE workshop!

• Wikipedia!
  • Do students at your school/campus use it for research?
  • How is it useful and what should they know about it?

• YouTube!
  • Is it just for fun?
  • How can you use videos to teach?

Attend this workshop to learn…

• tricks & tips re the limitations & uses of Wikipedia for research
• how to use YouTube videos to help students learn information literacy concepts
• how to navigate the new UCLA College Library web site
• what’s new in online researching tools
• about UCLA Library cards for you & your students

Date & Time: Friday, September 19^th, 10:30 am – 1 pm

Location: UCLA College Library

RSVP by Friday, September 12, 2008:

Esther Grassian
Information Literacy Librarian
UCLA College Library
estherg@library.ucla.edu
310-206-4410

<http://www2.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/11314.cfm>

(Note: Unfortunately, we are unable to cover the cost of parking at UCLA - $9/day.)

via cjc-l