Fortnightly Mailing

Machine translation

You may recall something I included last June on machine translation. This two minute audio clip from Web Search as a Force for Good, a speech given at Stanford University by Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Search Quality, on 7/11/2004, sheds light on how the company is developing machine translation. It is using the huge processing power available to it, alongside the increasing body of digitised works (EU documents, out-of-copyright novels, millions of titles being digitised for Google Book Search, etc.) that are available in multiple languages, already translated by professionals. Google is definitely getting somewhere. This 2005 evaluation of the output from several machine translation systems from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has Google's translations "winning" in all the categories evaluated.

Wellcome Trust breaks new ground on open access

From a 15/12/2005 press release issued by the Wellcome Trust, which funds a large amount of medical research:

Three publishers, Blackwell, OUP and Springer, have today announced changes to their license conditions that will provide for research published in their journals to be immediately available on line and without charge to the reader.

Interview with Michael Stevenson

6/1/2006 Times Educational Supplement interview with the DfES Director of Technology/Chief Information Officer, who worked previously for the BBC - necessary but not gripping reading for people in the UK with an interest in public sector e-learning. This extract gives you a little of the flavour.

Industry has a really nitty gritty understanding of what works for people. It is critical that we bring those insights into government. Secondly it is in industry that we will see the innovation. If we really care about personalised content than I think it will be industry that gets us there: industry that works with government; industry that works with research labs and universities; industry that works with teachers and learners.

The technology areas (yes, there are two) of the DfES web site have some of Stevenson's reflections, and 4 e-learning case studies. [I had a hand in the early stages of the course described in the third of these.]

Records and ramifications

The London Review of Books has published an excellent, considered, thorough article by John Lanchester. It is more comprehensive than this week's interesting BBC Money Programme documentary about Google, notwithstanding the latter's slightly chilling interview with Google's Marissa Mayer (Google's VP for Search Products). Her phrase, apropo of privacy, that "we do need users to be aware that there are records and ramifications" stuck in my mind, along with her general coyness under questioning - about 20 minutes into the programme.

Is Google Book Search "Fair Use"?

A clear and convincing "Yes" from Lawrence Lessig in this recent talk [video may launch automatically]. I found it via David Weinberger's prolific, informative, committed, and provocative blog, which is definitely worth looking at regularly.

Connotea

Social bookmarking systems are web based online reference management systems which users can make publicly available over the web. Connotea is an Open Source bookmarking system launched 12 months ago by the Nature Publishing Group, and modelled broadly on del.icio.us.

Connotea is a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user's links are visible both to visitors and to every other user, and different users' libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks.

As with deli.cio.us, if you are using Firefox as your browser you can put a convenient "add to Connotea" button in your browser tool bar.

Evaluation of the Sheffield College/Sheffield LEA 'Literacy through Technology' Project

The Sheffield College has published a comprehensive evaluation by Julia Davies from the University of Sheffield's Literacy Research Centre. This shows strong benefits in learner achievement, motivation, and aspirations for school pupils using the Sheffield College's ground-breaking 'Young People Speak Out' blended learning literacy course. The college originally developed this to address the literacy needs of young students leaving school with Entry Level and Level 1 literacy. The materials are clearly of value for school-aged learners also.

Tackling the roots of racism

Useful report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

What are the causes of racism? And how successful are policy measures in addressing these? The main focus in this unique review by Reena Bhavnani, Heidi Mirza and Veena Meetoo, from Middlesex University, has been on British research and policy evidence. The review also included examples of international interventions and the lessons from their success.

The standard for standards

Over the last few years I've worked on the drafts for public comment of 3 British Standards relating to e-learning. As you'd expect, BSI has a standard describing how British Standards are to be written; and this has just been issued in a revised form as BS0:2005, A standard for standards. Published at the same time is the BSI guide to standardisation [3 MB PDF], section 2 of which contains rules for the structure, drafting and presentation of British Standards. If ever you've got a complex document to produce, with, for example, tables, figures, numbered and bulleted lists, footnotes, bibliography, and a multi-level heading structure, the guide has some very clear advice on how such a document could be laid out.

Sun policy on public discourse

"After 23 years in the e-learning industry, a founder and CEO of Epic Group plc, which was sold on the stock market in late 2005, I am now free from the tyranny of employment." So says Donald Clark in his newly started blog, the launch of which coincides with the publication by Epic of Donald's new white paper "Blogs and e-learning". I guess I'm mildly sceptical about a white paper on blogging by someone with little direct experience in the medium as a writer, but there is no doubting the high quality of the many white papers which Donald has written over the years, all of which are free to order (not download) from the Epic web site. One thing I particularly liked in the white paper was its inclusion of Sun's policy on public discourse, through which a major IT company gives active, if constrained, encouragement to its employees to discuss things openly on the web. Fortnightly Mailing's coverage of Huveaux's 2005 purchase of Epic.