Group items tagged

"In Douglas Adams's famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of science-fiction books, interstellar species use Babel fish - "small, yellow, leech-like" creatures that feed on "brain-wave energy" - to translate speech in real time. A team of developers at Google is working on the real thing, using statistical models to translate different languages, including Afrikaans, on the Web and on mobile phones, using voice input and output as well as text. TechCentral sat down with Google Translate research scientist Ashish Venugopal at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley last week and asked him about the stumbling blocks to effective real-time translation and the future of the technology. This is an edited transcript of that interview. (...).Do you have a team of linguists working all over the world? We have a team of statisticians, all working right over there [points and laughs]. It's less linguistically orientated. There are linguistic ideas that influence our decisions. To give you an example, when I was working on the last set of Indian languages that were launched, I didn't use any linguistic knowledge; I used Wikipedia and my grandmother. So, it's Wikipedia, my grandmother and statistics. That's what we use to put a language together. - Duncan McLeod, TechCentral"

Intervista a uno sviluppatore di Google traduttore, su come funziona, pubblicata nella rivista sudafricana TechCentral il 12 gennaio 2012.

"Babelfish 101 (also appliable to the Google translator) Babelfish is not a little polyglot genius lurking in your computer or in cyberspace Babelfish is A computer program made of lists of words and phrases in different languages complex, but not all-covering, rules applied to these lists in order to produce translations Babelfish will not give you a publishable or even editable version of your text in another language analyse and render correctly complex sentence structures always choose the meaning you had it mind if two or more words have the same spelling confuse two words due to approximate memory Babelfish will produce apparent gibberish give you a rough idea of what someone else's original text is about Therefore, when dealing with Babelfish, you must use commonsense Don't use Babelfish to produce a translation into another language, especially if you don't know that language If you know others will use Babelfish to read you, use simple sentence structure and avoid terms that can have several meanings If you read something absurd or outrageous in a Babelfish translation, don't immediately attribute the absurdity or outrage to the author. Try to guess from the context what the author might have meant Compare what the author might have meant with what you know of Babelfish's limitations, to see if these limitations are the likely cause of the apparent absurdity or outrage be wary of commonsense The author may indeed have expressed something that would baffle you even if you both used the same language: because your cultural references are different, because s/he is using irony because (make your own list) ask when in doubt ;-)" Avevo scritto questo post su un blog del Digital Divide Network (DDN) che non c'è più. Questa è la copia salvata sull'Internet Archive il 13 agosto 2007

"Fair Use, MOOCs, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Frequently Asked Questions In October 2015 the Librarian of Congress issued new rules permitting certain teachers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to break encryption on DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and streaming videos to create short clips for use in their teaching. It's a major step forward for MOOC teachers and their students. This document, prepared by Professors Peter Decherney and Brandon Butler, answers some of the most common questions you might have about the new rule."

(Per il contesto, vedi http://infojustice.org/archives/35654 e http://ipclinic.org/2016/01/22/fair-use-moocs-and-the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-frequently-asked-questions/) Parti problematiche: Coursera and Udacity are for profit companies. Can they take advantage of the exemption? Coursera and Udacity are the platforms. Colleges, universities, museums, and other nonprofit organizations offer courses through these platforms. The organization that creates the course must be an accredited nonprofit educational institution, but the provider of the software platform may be for-profit . So a university course offered through Coursera may take advantage of the exemption. How can the material be restricted to students enrolled in the course? We believe that use of passwords provided only to enrolled students will sufficiently limit access to the course content to students or learners. How can redistribution be prevented? Offering streaming rather than downloadable versions of the course content should reasonably limit unauthorized redistribution of the work. Unfortunately, this unfairly disadvantages learners with slower internet access" Cioè l'autorizzazione a far saltare i blocchi anticopia vale soltant per i MOOC che non sono MOOC perché non sono Open ma protetti da password. E l'argomento secondo il quale il fair use vale per i video di corsi Coursera e Udacity, a patto che gli enti che elargiscono il corso non siano a scopo di lucro, anche se le piattaforme lo sono, è dubbio. in effetti Coursera e Udacity traggono profitto dai materiali proposti da questi enti. Quanto all'offerta dei video in solo streaming per impedirne lo scaricamento: almeno nei corsi Coursera dove il link di scaricamento è stato t

"Welcome!!! Through these pages you can enter into our Project. The aims of this project are: to improve the use, discover and disseminate the Web 2.0, open source software and ITC in all kind of schools. Sharing documents by Web2.0 tools Showing the importance to work with different country and different student ages Use teaching strategies like active learning, contextualized knowledge, cognitive and cooperative learning. Using virtual world as educational tool Creating free courses for teacher that want improve their ITC competences I, Riccardo Rivarola, am the data processing responsible, Claudio Filosi is the didactic/pedagogical responsible. Prof. Riccardo Rivarola WARNING! All videos that are not manufactured by us have been chosen with great care but we can not hold accountable if you connect the same to other movies, maybe not education and / or not suitable for minors!"

"Published on March 18th, 2013 | by Guest Author [Kate Lee] Infographics are becoming an increasingly popular method of communicating information quickly and clearly. Great designs can reduce the complexity of information, making a process, product or service easily understandable and accessible to the general public. And a good infographic means that all of that information is presented in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to boot. But have infographics become too good at streamlining information? Have they become the fast food of graphic design - quickly digestible, but lacking in substance? Infographics: Guilty As Charged The web has lots of criticisms levelled at infographics and it's true that many are poorly created, failing to fulfil their purpose, using Papyrus or other crimes against design. The main complaints when it comes to infographics are: 1. Creates confusion: the data is presented in a manner that takes a long time to interpret, is difficult to follow and creates additional complexity instead of providing clarity. 2. Inaccurate information: [...] 3. Too long: [...] 4. General ugliness: [...] The problem with infographics is that so many people think it's easy to create them, when in fact it's a particular subset of skills in an already specialised profession.[...] Data Visualisation Requires Thinking That being said, there are truly great infographics out there that tick all the boxes: accurate information, presented in an effective visual manner that helps the audience interpret and understand quickly. And so we come to the point of this post: with complex information rendered so comprehensible, without the need to read long reports and with the ability to look at pictures and share it with all your friends - is there a danger that infographics cause the audience to stop thinking? In short, the answer is no. In most cases where the audience needs to think, the data isn't simple anyway. The mission of infographics is to re

Titolo volutamente provocativo. Ottima presentazione delle "infographics", di cosa dovrebbero e potrebbero essere ma purtroppo spesso non sono, e degli risvolti cognitivi del loro uso.

"Importing Feeds From the Internet Another very useful function that could potentially be used for some pretty cool uses inside of Google Spreadsheets is the IMPORTFEED function. If you consider the sheer volume of information throughout the Internet that are offered by feeds, just think of what you can do with this versatile function. How it works is pretty straightforward. Simply fill in the feed details into the function itself, surrounded by quotes."

"Wordcounter is a word count and a character count tool. Simply place your cursor into the box and begin typing. Word counter will automatically count the number of words and characters as you type. You can also copy and paste a document you have already written into the word counter box and it will display the word count and character numbers for that piece of writing. Knowing the number of words or characters in a document can be important. For example, if the author is required to write a minimum or maximum amount of words for an article or paper, word counter can help them know if their article meets these requirements. In addition, word counter automatically shows you the top 10 keywords and keyword density of the article you're writing. This allows you to know what keywords you use most often and what percentage each is used within the article. This can help you from over-using certain words in your writing and allow you to make sure you have the correct keyword distribution you're trying to obtain for any article you write. Word counts can also be important in defining typing and reading speeds. Word counter can help determine both of these. Simply set a timer and start typing and when the time is up, you'll instantly know how many words you have typed for that period of time. If you have any questions about word counter, please feel free to contact us here. Disclaimer: We strive to make our word counter as accurate as possible but we cannot guarantee it will always be so."

Contatore di parole online: si scrive o si incolla un testo, e lui ti dà automaticamente il numero, oltre a quello delle parole, dei segni (non so se con o senza spazi però), delle frasi, dei paragrafi, e la lunghezza media delle frasi (in No di parole), nonché la frequenza delle parole chiave più usate. Cioè potrebbe anche essere utile per scegliere tag quando si fa un segnalibro su Diigo ;)

"Here's the lastest video educator's are jacked about: [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UFpe3Up9T_g ] I like much about this video. I like the message. I like the way it's shot. I like the girls. What I don't like is the perception that this is the girl's invention. It's not. These girls are likely no more into inventing and making than most girls their age. While I might be able to look past that, and I can, I don't like the perception that this is authentic as it suggests. Which raises the larger question of authentic student voice. I remember first being struck by this when this video came out about 6 years ago: [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_A-ZVCjfWf8 ] It's an iteration of Michael Wesch video using college aged students. When I saw the k-12 version it just didn't sit well with me. The signs the students held seemed to be the language and ideas of adults. I had a hard time thinking any 5 year old would use the phrase "engage me". But still I thought the video had value but I never used them to share with others. (...) If you're still jacked about the little girls video, that's okay, show it to your young girls, encourage them to explore science but let's have enough awareness to know when we're being sold something. My point with this little wander through video is let's advocate for student voice but not fake ones. Our students do have a voice. Most of them are childlike, full of child like ideas and most aren't as eloquent as adults because they aren't adults. That's what we're supposed to be doing, helping them develop that voice. Yet we do have some that are ready for prime time and we should provide ways for them to share. I know some districts have had students keynote. I think that's great, as long as the core of their story is their own, not the districts or their teachers. I'd way rather listen to a student share a less polished message that was their ow

Vedi anche il commento di Stephen Downes in http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=61423

"March 19, 2013, 1:00 pm By Prof. Hacker [This is a guest post by Lisa Rhody, who works for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as the project manager for WebWise 2013....] From early posts about scholarly uses of social media to more recent entries on its usefulness for improving student engagement, there seems to be a general consensus among ProfHacker writers that the use of social media promotes the widening of scholarly networks. Keeping in mind that online social networks extend beyond the obvious Twitter and Facebook-blogs, podcasts, wikis, and photo/video sharing sites are a few other forms of social media-the vexing question to answer has been how to quantify the scope or significance of one's participation in social media to a wider scholarly conversation."

" Sign-up is now closed. But don't worry, we'll definitely be back! Follow us at @medialabcourse for updates. Free & Online! You've been dying to take the MIT Media Lab course on creative learning, but you're not in Cambridge? Despair no more. We invite you to join the course right here, on the interwebs. It's free of charge and we hope you'll like it. A Big Experiment This is a big experiment. Things will break. We don't have all the answers. Sometimes we plan to rely on you to make it work. But we'll try our very darndest to make sure you have a good time, and get something out of it. Weekly Lessons Make new friends, and start learning from weekly live videos, readings, discussions, and project-based activities. Open for signup now, course starts February 11th. Questions? Drop us a note in our Google+ community or send us an email at medialabcourse@p2pu.org. All materials licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license."

"Hi, Today we made some changes at Ning. I want to share with you the email Jason Rosenthal, our CEO, sent to all Ning employees: Team, When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us. So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy. As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies. I've never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months. We'll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus. Thanks, Jason Rosenthal I know many of you will have que

"Twitter subtitling is the process of using live or recorded tweets from the backchannel to create subtitles for video content. The use of 'twitter subtitling' has mainly been used to enhance the video archive of live events (e.g. television broadcasts, conferences etc.)."

Come creare una pista di "sottotitoli" per una conferenza o altro evento in diretta a partire dei tweet spediti di chi segue la conferenza, o dal vivo o in streaming.

By Matthew Hughes MakeUseOf.com April 5, 2013 "... Dire Consequences For An Administrative Error The one thing that stuck out for me when speaking to Amber was how catastrophic being removed from Facebook could be. Her suspension almost derailed a social media campaign for a large, multinational company. It resulted in her losing some of her oldest friends. It resulted in a loss of trust in an institution which almost all of us use to handle our social interactions. If an administrative error on a website can result in someone losing old friends and potentially losing their professional reputation, we should be questioning the role that Facebook has in our lives, and if we're too dependent on it. We reached out to Facebook and asked them to comment on this story. When asked how they identify breaches of their terms of service, they said "People report content or accounts to Facebook via the reporting links you can find on every page of Facebook. After you submit a report, Facebook will investigate the issue and determine whether or not the content should be removed based on Facebook's policies". They also said that their policies for dealing with people who breach their TOS depend on the particular rule broken. "If a content violates our policies then we will remove it. For example if a photo breaks our nudity guidelines we would remove it and let the person who posted it know. If someone is using Facebook under a false identity then we remove the profile." (...) Matthew Hughes is a writer, blogger and programmer from Liverpool, England. He's rarely found without a cup of coffee in his hand and loves making beautiful things. You can read his scribblings at matthewhughes.co.uk. " (Ottima spiegazione di come Facebook funziona - e a volte NON funziona -vedi anche i numerosi commenti)

Ho esitato a dare il link nei commenti a http://iamarf.org/2013/04/11/non-solo-luci-ltis13/ . Poi ho deciso di no, perché i commenti già vertevano molto (troppo?) su Facebook.

"Author: Andy Carvin , EDC Center for Media & Community | December 7th, 2004 You may have noticed recently that lots of websites now contain little graphical buttons with the word XML on them. For example: XML button When you click on the button, all you see is a bunch of jumbled text and computer code. What's this all about? It's an RSS feed, and they're changing the way people access the Internet. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technical format that allows online publishers to share and distribute their content to other websites or individual Internet users. It's commonly used for distributing headlines on news websites. Bloggers use it to distribute summaries of their blog entries as well. RSS is written in the Internet coding language known as XML, which is why you see RSS buttons labeled that way. If a website publishes an RSS page, commonly known as an RSS "feed," this feed will contain summaries of all the recent articles posted on that site. For example, Yahoo News publishes news related to world headlines, national news, sports, etc. These you can all read by going to the Yahoo website. But they also publish RSS feeds for each of these subjects. Each RSS feed contains a summary of the most recent news stories posted. Similarly, the Digital Divide Network publishes RSS feeds for our news headlines, events listings and other content on our website. I even have my own RSS feed for articles that I publish on my personal blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth. But why do RSS feeds look like a jumbled mess when I click on them with most Web browsers? It's because RSS feeds are meant to be read by machines rather than people. Software and websites can understand the data contained in RSS feeds and make it available to people on personalized websites, through software known as news aggregators, even through email. So when you aggregate RSS feeds, you're having a computer collect content from many different websites and organize them in a convenient pla

Linkato in http://iamarf.org/2013/04/20/racconti-ltis13/ , commento 42. RSS come empowerment.

January 22, 2014 | By Katitza Rodriguez "We aren't going to let the NSA and its allies ruin the Internet. Inspired by the memory of Aaron Swartz, fueled by our victory against SOPA and ACTA, the global digital rights community are uniting to fight back. On February 11, on the Day We Fight Back, the world will demand an end to mass surveillance in every country, by every state, regardless of boundaries or politics. The SOPA and ACTA protests were successful because we all took part, as a community. As Aaron Swartz put it, everybody "made themselves the hero of their own story." We can set a date, but we need everyone, all the users of the Global Internet, to make this a movement. Here's part of our plan (but it's just the beginning). Last year, before Ed Snowden had spoken to the world, digital rights activists united on 13 Principles. The Principles spelled out just why mass surveillance was a violation of human rights, and gave sympathetic lawmakers and judges a list of fixes they could apply to the lawless Internet spooks. On the day we fight back, we want the world to sign onto those principles. We want politicians to pledge to uphold them. We want the world to see we care. Here's how you can join the effort: Send an email to rights (AT) eff.org confirming your interest in participating in this action and receiving updates. Let us know what you would like to do in your own country so we can send you more information and amplify your voice. Visit TheDayWeFightBack.org and Take Action. Join your fellow global citizens and, sign the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles here: https://en.necessaryandproportionate.org/take-action/EFF Use social media tools to announce your participation. Develop memes, tools, websites, and do whatever else you can to encourage others to participate. Be creative -- plan your own actions and pledge. Go to the streets. Promote the Principles in your own country. Then, let us know what your plan is, s

11 febbraio: giornata di azione contro la sorveglianza globale tipo PRISM della NSA. Vedi anche i 13 "Princìpi internazionali in materia di applicazione dei diritti umani alla sorveglianza delle comunicazioni" https://it.necessaryandproportionate.org/text . Tra i firmatari, in Italia: Agorà Digitale, Electronic Frontiers Italy - ALCEI, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights,

Pacchetto di istallazione di Moodle per sistemi windows, con tutorial istruzione procedura di download e prima istallazione. Complete install packages are available from Moodle.org's Windows download page. The packages are designed for new installations on a standalone computer. The complete install package can be used on a server, but it is not recommended that it be used as a production site. Please note Moodle.org's Standard install packages only contain the Moodle code. This document provides instructions for using the Windows packages. Separate instructions are available for Mac OS X packages. The complete install packages allow Moodle to be installed, along with the prerequisites that includes a web server, Apache, database, MySQL, scripting language, PHP, an administration tool, phpMyAdmin and Moodle all wrapped in the Xampp-lite shell. Several versions of the complete install package are available. The instructions on the download page provide guidance on which version is likely to be most suitable. In short, complete install packages are designed to create a matched webserver and Moodle site on a standalone computer with minimal effort."

Filmed Feb 2008 * Posted Mar 2008 * TED2008 "Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrates a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity -- thoughts, emotions, pain -- while it is happening. In other words, you can actually see how you feel. Christopher deCharms is working on a way to use fMRI scans to show brain activity -- in real time."

From http://www.stanford.edu/~efs/693b/TED1.html : "1. length: 4:00 2. overall speed (WPM): 182 3. vocabulary profile: 3K-94.3%; 5K-96.4%; 10K-97.9%; OL-3.2% 4. accent: US standard 5. comments: there is a reference at the beginning of shrinking a ship and injecting it into the bloodstream, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060397/; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093260/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. fMRI = functional magnetic resonance imaging--a way to view the brain in action. 6. Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrates a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity -- thoughts, emotions, pain -- while it is happening. In other words, you can actually see how you feel.

"...Teachable moments As is often the case in awkward cases - where the system does not quite work as intended - a few things can be drawn from this episode. YouTube's Content ID system - http://youtube-global.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/improving-content-id.html - is, in fact, intended to act as a buffer between the sometimes conflicting interests of content holders and uploaders: rather than forcing content holders to either ignore infringing content or go straight to a DMCA takedown notice. YouTube compares content that is uploaded to huge numbers of files of copyright works supplied by content owners, as do external agencies contracted to content owners. Content owners are able to set their own parameters, and determine what action YouTube should take - whether that is allowing, monetizing or blocking the content. One problem with this setup is that mechanical systems, while necessary to sort the vast amount of content being uploaded to YouTube and other video sharing sites every moment, are short on nuance. One can make assumptions and built rules based on quantifiable properties - if there are five minutes of rightsholder-owned content scattered across a 30 minute video, for example, that content is more likely to be being used for illustrative purposes in a review than uploaded in an infringing fashion - but ideas like fair use are generally decided by humans, and can only be approximated by mechanical systems. So, the rights holder, the agency pursuing monetization on the rights holder's behalf, the uploader and YouTube have connected but not identical interests. This may go some way to explaining the lacunae which took this example from a formality to a three-month epic. And, in this particular case, there are unusual elements - for example, the double claims, for first audiovisual and then visual content. The system is not intended to enable this kind of double jeopardy

Daniel Nye Griffiths descrive un caso reale di disputa sul copyright nel caso di un remix video pubblicato su YouTube. Da lì, spiega come funziona il sistema YouTube che individua possibili violazioni di copyright ma consente anche di contestare tali individuazioni. Ci sono anche link alle fonti dirette. Cosa buffa: il caso reale riguarda il copyright di una serie TV intitolata "The Twilight Zone", l'area crepuscolare tra giorno e notte. Sono capitata su questo articolo cercando di capire se un episodio del 1960 di questa serie era ancora sotto copyright oppure era caduto nel pubblico dominio. Prima avevo provato con lo strumento Digital Copyright Slider dell'associazione delle biblioteche US - http://librarycopyright.net/resources/digitalslider/ - che aveva cautamente risposto "Forse", con una nota che spiegava che dipendeva se il copyright originale era stato rinnovato, e link a lunghi e complessi documenti su come fare per scoprirlo... quindi sono tuttora nella "Twilight Zone" in merito.

"4. Titles 4.1 Content Rejection and Removal We may, in our sole discretion, at any time, and without notice to you (a) reject Content; or (b) remove, or refuse to list or distribute any Content on or from any CreateSpace E-Store, Amazon Property or other sales channel. You will remain liable for all fees and other amounts that you may owe under this Agreement in connection with any Title or Content we remove because of a violation of this Agreement or our Content Guidelines. You may withdraw your Title from the Services at any time, but we will have 30 days from the date of a Title's withdrawal (or termination of this Agreement) to remove all applicable Content. However, we may fulfill any Customer orders pending as of the date we remove such Title from the Services. If we request that you provide additional information relating to your Content, such as information confirming that you have all rights required to permit our distribution of the Content, you represent and warrant that any information and documentation you provide to us in response to such a request will be current, complete, and accurate. You authorize us, directly or through third parties, to make any inquiries we consider appropriate to verify your rights to permit our distribution of the Content and the accuracy of the information or documentation you provide to us with respect to those rights."

"The Ultimate Section 508 Guide for Students In 1973, the United States government passed a sweeping piece of legislation known as the United States Workforce Rehabilitation Act. Intended to aid those with disabilities, this legislation provides funding for ...vocational rehabilitation, supported employment, independent living, and client assistance (and) authorizes a variety of training and service discretionary grants administered by the Rehabilitation Services Administration. As technology advanced, and both the workplace and society as a whole underwent significant changes, the need of those with disabilities also evolved. In order to foster equal access to the Internet and related technologies for all, the government added Section 508 to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act in 1998. What is Section 508? As amended by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (P.L. 105-220), Section 508 ...requires federal agencies to develop, procure, maintain and use electronic and information technology (EIT) that is accessible to people with disabilities - regardless of whether or not they work for the federal government. In short, federal law requires government agencies to create and use electronic devices, and content developed to be used with them (e.g., websites, media files, etc.), that people with disabilities can readily access. "

Questa guida è scritta in lingua molto semplice e illustrata da video, mentre la sezione 508 dell'ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act, un po' come la legge Stanca in Italia) in legalese originale è più difficile da capire.