A National Dialogue on Higher Education

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences is sponsoring a National Dialogue on Higher Education in November in Ottawa.
How is it a dialogue? They have an online forum and at the conference there will be “Table Talk” sessions at meals. There has also been a lot of discussion behind the scenes between the organizations sponsoring this. I can’t help feeling, however, that some of this is about promoting higher education outside the academy.
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Stanford Podcasting and iTunes

Stanford iTunes is a site that will launch your iTunes so that it sees podcasts from Stanford University organized as a podcast “store”. In effect Apple gave Stanford a section of the iTunes store with its own graphics, “What’s New” section and subsections. Very interesting way to promote academic content (and the university) by being able to manage ones own area. I wonder how it works under the hood, and if Apple will let anyone create an iTunes site? From the FAQ I note that the tunes are not kept on the Apple iTunes site, but on Stanford’s server, and that therefore searching iTunes won’t work. This is thanks Peter Sutherland.

Wikipedia quality issues

From HUMANIST an article in The Register on Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems. The article is by Andrew Orlowski (18th of October, 2005) and looks at the problem of quality (where many entries are terrible) and how (if at all) the wikipedia could rectify the situation. In particular the article discusses the way the wikipedia has become a “religious crusade” so that criticism is flamed.

I must admit that most of the stuff I have looked up was pretty good. Hmmm, I wonder if I am looking for a particular subset of things or have a low threshold for quality.
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Canadian pioneers and education

IT Business has an article by Shane Schick on Canadian computing pioneers have issues with IT education (10/19/05). The article reports on IBM’s Centers for Advanced Studies: CASCON – CASCON 2005 conference where they brought together Canadian pioneers (those who got their Ph.D. before 1973 and spent time doing computing at Canadian universities.)

A short list of the pioneers that were featured is here.
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High Performance Computing

What is high performance computing?

On Wednesday I was at a meeting to discuss the National Platforms program which is part of the new CFI programs. Here are the details or the proposed program:

National Platforms Fund (NPF)

The National Platforms Fund provides generic research infrastructure, resources, services, and facilities that serve the needs of many research subjects and disciplines, and that require periodic reinvestments because of the nature of the technologies. The Fund is established to deal first with High Performance Computing, but may be applicable in other cases.

Working with the HPC folks raises interesting questions about what HPC is and whether it has applications in the Humanities.
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ATLAS.ti

ATLAS.ti! is a “Knowledge Workbench” for the qualitative analysis of texts, images, audio and video. It looks like a PC program that lets you annotate large quantities of materials for interpretation, coding, and clustering.

I saw this years ago, but it has matured and now handles multimedia. I should add that it is for sale, not free, though they have a trial version.
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Ask-an-Expert for Linguistics Documentation

Alex Sevigny pointed me to a post on the Linguist List (16.2917) about Ask-an-Expert System: Digitizing Lang Documentation. The announcement is for a system run by E-MELD, which is a project dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation, for people to Ask an Expert. This is not a bot, the questions go to real human experts. Interesting way to support the community.