Google has release a neat new tool that uses their Google Books database. The Google Ngram Viewer lets you plot the relative frequencies of words and phrases over time.
Information about the tool can be found at, http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info.
The graph above shows truth (blue) graphed against false (red).
On Thursday we held the first University of Alberta Digitization Day. The idea was to bring projects on campus that are digitizing research evidence from texts to 3D objects. We also invited a number of units on campus that provide research computing services like Library that runs an Education and Research Archive (ERA).
See my Digitization Day Conference Report. At the end is a list of issues that came from the final Lightning Round. Also, I have put up a list of useful links in the Histories and Archives area of the CIRCA wiki.
From Judith I discovered Springer Realtime visualizations. The image above is a visualization that shows you each download of a journal content as it happens. I wonder if one cold play a Tetris-like game with this. Go in and see it here. The others are fairly common.
The CIRCA Histories and Archives group I am part of is organizing the University of Alberta’s first Digitization Day.
This one-day event is a chance for research projects that are digitizing evidence to meet up with each other and with units on campus that provide relevant research services. Projects that are creating digital archives of different sorts will give short presentations as will units on campus that support research.
The idea is to bring a lot of digitization projects together to learn about each other and what is happening on campus. My sense is that we have hit a critical mass on campus and now that we have a trusted digital repository ERA (Education and Research Archive) it is time to start talking and sharing knowledge. Each project should not have to reinvent itself.
From Slashdot I came across a story in GamePron about how Australian R18+ games rating gets govt support. In Australia any game that isn’t classified MA 15+ or below is refused classification and thus can’t be sold. (The Australian system is law unlike the voluntary industry ESRB system.) The Australian government is now considering adding a new R 18+ designation based on government supported studies and consultations.
Of particular interest is a literature review on Literature review on the impact of playing violent video games on aggression (PDF). This excellent review concludes that “research into the effects of VVGs (Violent Video Games) on aggression is contested and inconclusive.” (p. 5) This 50 page review by the Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department is a model of clarity and balance – it is worth quoting in greater detail,
There is some consensus in the research that some members of the community, such as people with psychotic personality traits, may be more affected by VVGs than others. However, there is mixed evidence as to whether VVGs have a greater impact on children.
A number of other findings of this review arguably reduce the policy relevance of VVG research.
- There is stronger evidence of short-term VVG effects than of long-term effects.
- The possibility that third variables (like aggressive personality, family and peer influence, socio-economic status) are behind the effect has not been well explored.
- Researchers who argue that VVGs cause aggression have not engaged with or disproved alternative theories propagated by their critics.
- There is little evidence that violent video games have a greater impact than other violent media. (p. 5)
Science-Metrix from Montreal has released a web tool for exploring their ontology of scientific Journals, the Ontology Explorer. There is actually more than one visualization as they also have a Map of Science too.
One neat thing their ontology browser lets you see is what fields are citing which other ones to see the flows of knowledge, so to speak.
From Slashdot I was led to a great critique of Kurzweil’s futurism, see the IEEE Spectrum: Ray Kurzweil’s Slippery Futurism. I’ve tried to tackle Kurzweil in previous posts here (on Singularity University), but never quite nailed his form of prediction the way John Rennie does.
Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil’s brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.
We recently had Derek Pennycuff give a talk at our Humanities Computing Research Colloquium on
“Prioritizing performance optimization for higher education websites.” He pointed me to his blog where he deals with this issue and where he also has a nice summative point on
Higher Ed Institutional Blogging Server Usage Guidelines.
From Humanist I found out that the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) recently celebrated its 20th anniversary on November 28th, 2010. BMCR is a hybrid e-journal with print backup for classicists that has been edited for all these years by James O’Donnell and others. On the 28th he posted a message about the 20th anniversary that includes the original post. The original post includes how to FTP back issues – a technology we no longer have to teach.
Erik pointed me to the WikiMindMap, a tool for visualizing topics in the Wikipedia and navigating them. It uses the mind mapping visual paradigm you see in thinking tools, see previous blog entry.