Fortnightly Mailing

The future of computing - a forward look from Nature

In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work. From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?

3 News Features and 5 Commentaries from the 23/2/2006 issue of Nature (all freely available as a result of sponsorship from Microsoft Research) concerning the future of computing. Take your pick:

1. Philip Ball - Champing at the bits
2. Jacqueline Ruttimann - Milestones in scientific computing
3. Declan Butler - Everything, everywhere
4. Stephen H. Muggleton - Exceeding human limits
5. Vernor Vinge - The creativity machine
6. Alexander Szalay and Jim Gray - Science in an exponential world
7. Roger Brent and Jehoshua Bruck - Can computers help explain biology?
8. Ian Foster - A two-way street to science's future

Google Calendar - plenty of appealing features, but no substitute for Meet-o-matic

Google recently launched a new calendar service. Having tried it out in a low key way, it seems to have the features needed to enable organisations to publish calendars of events, or for individuals or workgroups to maintain online schedules. It has good RSS support, integration with desktop calendar applications, an export/import capability, and scope to give different users different levels of "write rights". What it seems to be missing is the equivalent of Meet-o-matic, the wonderful free scheduling tool created by Marc Eisenstadt and Stuart Watt.  Overview.  Calendar Help Centre.

Web stats - StatCounter seems to offer all you might need

I came across the Irish StatCounter, a free "Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats" service. I am now using it to keep an eye on traffic to this site. I am very impressed with the basic (i.e. free) service. It is flexible, very easy to set up, and much more powerful than others I have investigated. The StatCounter web site has excellent user-documentation and help. The help is written with great care, and the user-documentation has useful insights on interpretation. You can review the range of reports provided from the StatCounter demo.

13/5/2007 update. StatCounter currently has over 1.3 million members and tracks 9 billion page-loads per month across its network of 2 million websites. StatCounter was founded by Aodhan Cullen when he was 16. In May 2007 Aodhan won the Irish "Young ICT Person of the Year Award".

Events in the pipeline

A clutch of forthcoming events.

1. 17 May, Brussels. Citizen Connect. The concluding event of the URBACT Information Society Network, which concerns how technology can connect citizens, combat social exclusion, stimulate economic local development, and put the citizen at the heart of the democratic process. (Thanks to reader Martine Tommis for this.)
2. 24 May - 9 June, online.  Identifying Successful Business Strategies for Online Programs.  An online workshop with Steve Schiffman, Chris Geith, and Karen Vignare, organised by the Sloan Consortium. "This workshop marks our most ambitious effort to date to map the business models of the online industry and present them in a context that will actually help to improve the success of your online programs. This workshop includes ongoing research that has been collected over the course of the past two years from top institutions and has included the input and work of several top researchers in this area. And as with all of our workshops, it is provided in a way that adapts to your busy schedule. If you are a top level administrator in an online program, you don’t want to miss this workshop." (Workshops like this one have in the past produced very useful outputs, for example Effective Workload Management Strategies for the Online Environment [84 kB PDF].)
3. 2 June, London. ‘blog.ac.uk’, the UK's "first educational blogging conference bringing together practitioner and research based expertise to explore cutting edge issues surrounding the educational use of weblogs and weblogging software". With keynote contributions from Stephen Downes and Barbara Ganley.
4. 6-7 July, York. 6th International Meeting of JISC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). With keynote speeches from: Reg Carr, Director of University Library Services at Oxford University; Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC; Derek Law, Librarian and Head of Information Resources, University of Strathclyde; Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, CNI; Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, CNI; David Nicholas, University College London. (If I was not going to be on holiday at that time I would stump up the £350 residential fee for this event.)
5. 5-7 September, Edinburgh. ALT-C 2006 - the next generation. Keynote speeches from: Stephen Heppell; Diana Oblinger, Vice-president of EDUCAUSE; Tim O'Shea, Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Theme speakers: Terry Anderson, Athabasca University; Phil Candy, UK National Health Service; Gilly Salmon, University of Leicester; Chris Yapp, Microsoft. (I work half time for ALT as its Executive Secretary.)
   

The future of the Web - a 2 hour web-cast from/with Tim Berners Lee

Tim Berners Lee gave an 80 minute lecture, followed by about 30 minutes of discussion, in Oxford on 14/3/2006. Definitely worth listening to it, and possibly watching, particularly if you want to get a better understanding of the Semantic Web and the direction  that Berners Lee sees it as taking.

Abstract. The development of Web technology has been an exciting ride, a series of socially motivated technical innovations some languishing, others catching on in a viral way. As each development has suggested many new ones, and much of the original vision is still unfulfilled, there is a lot to do. This talk will discuss new challenges and hopes for weblike systems on the net.

Slides for the talk. 

Links to media files from the talk, hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute:

• Streaming RealPlayer video of the talk which will launch in your external player
• MP4 File [685 MB]
• MP4-LOW File [204 MB]
• MP3 File [70 MB]

Rollyo - DIY cross-domain searching

Some readers will know that if you put "site:XYZwebsite" into Google or Yahoo prior to your search terms, your will get results that are restricted to XYZwebsite. This is useful when the site you want to search has a poor search tool of its own.

With Rollyo you can quickly construct and share a search window for one or more web sites, which when used will provide a Yahoo-based search of those web sites. You can make your search windows public on the Rollyo web site, and you can also generate the code to include a "hand rolled" search window on your own web site.  Here, for example, is a search window which you can use to search:

• all the UK Research Councils' web sites, or
• the web sites of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Joseph Rountree Foundation, and the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

Select Search Engine...ODPM/DCA/JRFUK Research Councils

Powered by Rollyo

Good stuff from Clive Shepherd in "Clive on Learning"

Clive Shepherd is a consultant specialising in the application of technology to education, who co-founded Epic plc with Donald Clark. I reviewed Clive's book - the Learning Object Design Assistant in Fortnightly Mailing Number 30. Shepherd's blog - Clive on Learning - contains regular insights into e-learning, and is worth keeping an eye on.

TechNews from Becta - deserves wider circulation

Thanks to Andy Black for sending me details of the British Educational Communication Technology Agency's seriously underpromoted roughly bi-monthly TechNews, a technology news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. It cries out for an RSS feed.  March 2006 issue [250 kB PDF].   Sign up page.  Archive.

Open Source mind mapping software - SourceForge's project of the month

On the few occasions I've tried it, I've not got on with mind mapping software like MindManager; but several people I know and trust swear by it.  I would be interested to hear from readers who have used FreeMind, which is said to be an equivalent product to MindManager, and which was the Sourceforge Project of the Month in February 2006.

Elegant browser-based calculator via Marco Barulli

Calcoolate is browser-based calculator, with some clever features, including a particularly useful "history", which keeps a running record of the steps you have taken. Thanks to Marco Barulli for this.