Bob Furst's List: technology

• $225 per year regardless of organizational budget size

•    As any Windows user knows all too well, Windows can (and does) take a while to boot up and get online.

• The State Board shall select the participating schools for
  14              the pilot project based on need. In selecting participants, the
  15              State Board shall consider each school's:
  16                      (1) free and reduced lunch eligible student
  17                  population;
  18                      (2) access to educational technology resources; and
  19                      (3) performance on standardized tests required by the
  20                  State Board.

• Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet
• Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."
• Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale.
• The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.
• Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies."

• This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."

  Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.c

• Worldwide network: A brief history of the internet

  1969 The internet is created by the US Department of Defense with the networking of computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute.

  1979 The British Post Office uses the technology to create the first international computer networks.

  1980 Bill Gates's deal to put a Microsoft Operating System on IBM's computers paves the way for almost universal computer ownership.

  1984 Apple launches the first successful 'modern' computer interface using graphics to represent files and folders, drop-down menus and, crucially, mouse control.

  1989 Tim Berners-Lee creates the world wide web – using browsers, pages and links to make communication on the internet simple.

  1996 Google begins as a research project at Stanford University. The company is formally founded two years later by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

  2009 Dr Stephen Wolfram launches Wolfram Alpha.

5 more annotations...

• Wolfram Alpha, set to launch Monday, is more of an enormous calculator than a search: It crunches data to come up with query answers that may not exist online until you search for them. And sites like Twitter are trying to capitalize on the warp-speed pace of online news today by offering real-time searches of online chatter -- something Google's computers have yet to replicate.
• "The general trend has been relatively clear and consistent for the past five years: Google is growing its market share at the expense of every other engine," said Graham Mudd, vice president for search and social media at comScore, a company that tracks industry trends.
• If you search Google news, the results will be recent, but not live. That's where Twitter's search comes in. It searches the site's micro-blog posts by the second, allowing users to see what's buzzing on the Web at any instant.
• Scoopler is another real-time site that's trying to aggregate info from all of these sites.
• Twine, a social site created by Spivack, soon will start incorporating information about its users into a search function, he said. Some of the information comes through a user's search history. The site also will ask users to rank search results by their relevance to your interests.
• Helping computers understand the information that's online is the next step in making searches more personal, Spivack said.
• At an event on Tuesday, Google announced a new "show options" feature as part of its search. Users can use the function to see new ways search results are linked, such as through timelines or a "Wonder Wheel," which displays visual relationships between search terms.

5 more annotations...

• The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.
• In short, the Semantic Web is about more "meaningful" content.
• Moving toward the Semantic Web will allow our searching technologies to become more intelligent and will set the stage for the next revolution in which computing systems can become more aware of the "meaningfulness of data".
• Amazon's A9
• Wolfram Alpha
• We have yet to a see a compelling reason for web masters to place RDFa or microformats into a site to enable this semantic data to be mined until today, until Google provided a social incentive for site designers.

4 more annotations...

• Its like saying you have to write your pages using Google’s own version of html where all the tags have slightly different spellings to be listed in their search engine!

• 3 or More User Version  $2,095.00 (unlimited users)

• Small Windows Network (Peer to Peer/File Server)
    Each machine on the network using Total Info should at least meet the following:
   

   
   
  • Newer Pentium 4 processor or better
     
  • Windows Vista XP, ME, 2000, or 98
       
  • 1 GB RAM or more depending on the number of concurrent users
     
  • 500 MB Free Space on Hard Drive
     
  • 100/1000 Mbps Network
     
  • CAT 5 or 6 cable connections
• You only need to pay us $20 per Primary User* per month - paid annually.

1 more annotation...

• Google led off its Google I/O 2009 developer conference in San Francisco by declaring "the Web has won" -- that is, the Internet and Web browsers, not a computer's operating system, are the future of application development.
• "You can imagine how excited we were to hear Microsoft's public statement about their commitment to the HTML 5 standard. And we eagerly await actually seeing evidence of that," Gundotra said.
• Google is positioning Chrome as an alternative to Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and other browsers. But Gundotra's underlying message is clear: four out of the five major Web browsers -- Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera -- are all open-standards browsers with HTML 5 adoption in the works.

1 more annotation...

• Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.
• They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research and running advertisements for “cyberninjas” at a time when other industries are shedding workers
• At a Raytheon facility here south of the Kennedy Space Center, a hub of innovation in an earlier era, rock music blares and empty cans of Mountain Dew pile up as engineers create tools to protect the Pentagon’s computers and crack into the networks of countries that could become adversaries. Prizes like cappuccino machines and stacks of cash spur them on, and a gong heralds each major breakthrough.
• “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” The president said he would appoint a senior White House official to oversee the nation’s cybersecurity strategies.
• thousands of intrusions each day from organized criminals and legions of hackers for nations including Russia and China.
• Though even the existence of research on cyberweapons was once highly classified, the Air Force plans this year to award the first publicly announced contract for developing tools to break into enemy computers. The companies are also teaming up to build a National Cyber Range, a model of the Internet for testing advanced techniques.

4 more annotations...

• Arts & Business Council of Chicago

• Tomorrow, on the 22nd of July 2009. the longest solar eclipse of this century will occur; it will last over six and a half minutes, and it will be visible, among other places, in parts of India, Butan, Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Japan, and the Marshall Islands.

• LoTi Level 0 - Non-use
• LoTi Level 1 - Awareness
• information dissemination to students (e.g., lectures, teacher-created multimedia presentations
• students (usually unrelated to classroom instructional priorities) as a reward for prior work completed in class.
  
• LoTi Level 2 - Exploration
• resources are used by students for extension activities, enrichment exercises, or information gathering assignments that generally reinforce lower cognitive skill development relating to the content under investigation
• Level 3 - Infusion
• the instructional focus emphasizes student higher order thinking (i.e., application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and engaged learning
• problem-solving, decision-making, reflective thinking, experimentation, scientific inquiry
• resources are used by students to carry out teacher-directed tasks
• Level 4a – Integration: Mechanical
• teacher may experience classroom management (e.g., disciplinary problems, internet delays) or school climate issues (lack of support from colleagues) that restrict full-scale integration.
• Students use of digital tools and resources is inherent and motivated by the drive to answer student-generated questions that dictate the content, process, and products embedded in the learning experience.
• Level 4b – Integration: Routine
• students are fully engaged in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources
• teacher is within his/her comfort level
• Level 5 - Expansion
• collaborations extending beyond the classroom
• Level 6 - Refinement
• instructional curriculum is entirely learner-based

18 more annotations...