Group items tagged

Welcome to the home page of Stephen Downes. I work for the National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. I specialize in online learning, content syndication, and new media.

To begin using SemantiFind, you must go to www.google.com - the service won't work from iGoogle or your Google search box in your browser. After you enter your search term in the box as usual, you then are prompted to indicate the precise meaning of your term before starting your query. This is done through the use of a drop-down box where specific terms and their definitions display. For example, if you were searching for "Georgia," you would be presented with the option to select either the U.S. state or the former soviet republic.

One of the most surprising discoveries of modern physics is that objects aren't as separate as they may seem. When you drill down into the core of even the most solid-looking material, separateness dissolves. All that remains, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, are relationships extending curiously throughout space and time.

With the economy in a slump and budgets being cut in traditional print and TV advertising campaigns many will be looking to the Web 2.0 world to reach their constituents. So what should be on your Web 2.0 radar for 2009? Web 2.0 gurus give you the low down.

VIVACE stands for Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy. It doesn't depend on waves, tides, turbines or dams. It's a unique hydrokinetic energy system that relies on "vortex induced vibrations." Vortex induced vibrations are undulations that a rounded or cylinder-shaped object makes in a flow of fluid, which can be air or water. The presence of the object puts kinks in the current's speed as it skims by. This causes eddies, or vortices, to form in a pattern on opposite sides of the object. The vortices push and pull the object up and down or left and right, perpendicular to the current.

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

Lively, for all its promise appears to be the shortest-lived entry thus far in launched commercial virtual environments. If you dumb something down far enough, very few people will actually want to use it. We're not ragging on Lively here. Instead, we're aiming to learn from its principles and performance. Let's introduce a new principle called necessary complexity.

I'm fascinated with the way that a bunch of old ideas floating around from the dot com era are back, and now succeeding. Many of these apps are explicitly social, and are benefitting from the larger user population and increased comfort - it took quite a while for Match.com to catch on, and sixdegrees had much of the Friendster model down by 1996 and flamed out anyway. One really interesting category of these v 2.0 apps is shared bookmarking, a la the service Backflip from Back in the Day. So, with a minimum of editorializing, here is a list of places doing some form of shared link management, which are providing some of Tom Coates' "user-friendly throw-aroundable clumps of groupness."

Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Rails 2 In 15 minutes, we go from scratch to complete weblog engine with comments, ajax, an ATOM feed, an XML and JSON API, tests, an administrative interface, and much more! We strongly advise that you sit down before starting this whirlwind tour. Your head may well be spinning at the end.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

I hope that "Smarter" is going to be a key tag for the Web 3.0, and yet I think "More Open, More Ubiquitous, with even More Information (Overload) and a little Smarter" is what it's really going to be. We'll have to wait till "Web 4.0" for a web that really is stepwise more intelligent, one that could really be called semantic and hold the hidden promises of a "Semantic Web". And the reason I believe this is that the community is focused on linking more stuff together in new ways and breaking down data siloes, much more than it is focused on creating new, smarter filters for all the data that's going to be made accessible that way.