| It’ll Be Code Orange For The Wikipedia This Fall |
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Wired Science reports that this autumn the Wikipedia will introduce a feature that color-codes text in order to show its trustworthiness. New text from untrustworthy authors — i.e., those without a track record on the site — is highlighted in bright orange. As more people view the text and leave it unedited, the color will fade to light orange, and then eventually to white. I’ve extracted the following quotes from the article. What do you think about the logic behind them:
IMHO this system is flawed in that it’s based upon the assumption that all editors are going to be fair and impartial, which we all know is definitely not the case. But it’s a nice try, though. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (1)| Trial Tactics, Second Edition |
 By Stephen A. SaltzburgTrial Tactics is a compilation of high profile criminal cases, practice tips, legal analyses, and cautions. The text provides statutory, case law and inside advice in updates of the "Trial Tactics" columns written by ABA Criminal Justice Section Chair and George Washington University Wallace and Beverly Woodbury Professor of Law Stephen Saltzburg since 1991 for the Criminal Justice Magazine. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Digital Content Coordinator
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August 27, 2009
| More “Boatloads of Money” |
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I previously blogged today about the boatloads of money Apple will make when they finally get cleared to sell the iPhone in China. Now I’m reading a post by Om Malik in which he gives an estimate of the iPhone App economy: $200 million a month. It’s getting harder and harder to remember the Bad Old Days, when Apple was seemingly headed for the dumpster. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Never Marry An Artist [UPDATED] |
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As I mentioned on Tuesday, Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be released tomorrow. It’s going to be faster, take up less space, and costs only $29. Many people are stoked. Does it get any better than that? Um, little problem here. It so happens that the artist I live with happens to use Adobe Photoshop CS2. That changes the dynamic. According to the Snow Leopard Compatibility Wiki, the Adobe CS2 Suite ne marche pas with the new Mac OS. So here are my options:
Looks like I’m gonna be stuck with Mac OS X Leopard for a while. UPDATE, August 31: I’m guilty, too. Looks like SL won’t play nice with Parallels, which I used to test Lexis Thru Jenkins. Sigh … I could have bought VMWare, which isn’t on the list. But noooo … |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Markoff’s Back With More Choice Quotes About Conficker |
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“It is still out there. Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security experts to eradicate the program and trace its origins and purpose, exposing serious weaknesses in the world’s digital infrastructure.” I love it. John Markoff’s giving us an update on the Conficker worm, and as he did on two other occasions, he makes it entertaining. Even though apparently nothing much is happening: “Some researchers think Conficker is an empty shell, or that the authors of the program were scared away in the spring. Others argue that they are simply biding their time. If the misbegotten computer were reactivated, it would not have the problem-solving ability of supercomputers used to design nuclear weapons or simulate climate change. But because it has commandeered so many machines, it could draw on an amount of computing power greater than that from any single computing facility run by governments or Google. It is a dark reflection of the ‘cloud computing’ sweeping the commercial Internet, in which data is stored on the Internet rather than on a personal computer.” It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a woman screamed. Conficker had struck again … |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Want Me To Translate This For You? |
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Here’s the link. Translation: Apple’s about to make a boatload of money. According to the Wall Street Journal (sub required), Apple has “received one of the technical licenses the government requires for mobile phones, according to a testing center under the [Chinese] Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.” There are other hurdles ahead of them, but it looks like they’ll be selling the iPhone in China before too long, probably in October. There are two-and-a-half times more mobile customers in China than in the U.S. This is gonna be a huge revenue boost for Apple: “Xiang Ligang, chief executive of Chinese telecommunications news portal Cctime.com, estimates 100 million mobile phone users in China change their phones every year and about 20 million of those buy high-end mobile phones. In some of the biggest cities especially, mobile phones are often seen as status symbols and high-end cellphones typically cost upwards of 3,000 yuan.” On a personal note, I dropped 2,042.76833 yuan last night on an iPhone 3GS combination graduation/birthday present for my daughter. I got traded up, but she’s a good kid so I don’t mind. Much. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 25, 2009
| I Got Called Out In Class Today |
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In today’s Google class I praised the virtues of Gmail over Yahoo Mail. I mentioned how it’s only inertia that keeps me from ditching the Yahoo Mail account that I’ve had for the last decade. One of the students raised his hand and challenged me to stop being such a snob. He said that most of what I praised about Gmail — https encryption, remote logout, and the forgotten attachment detector — aren’t all that important most of the time. He bet that I’d only need them about once a year or so. I gotta admit that he made me pause — was I just parroting what others have said lately? Maybe. One of the nice side-effects of Yahoo getting out of the search biz is that they’re starting to focus on their more profitable properties. Yahoo Finance, for example. And Mail, too. Yesterday they announced that they’re increasing the maximum attachment size from 10MB to 25MB, matching Google’s limit. It’s a small step, but it shows they understand that they need to focus on the details. And now I’m off to brood about being called a techno-snob. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| You’re Not As Good As You Think You Are |
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Wired points to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences comparing how well high- and low-multitaskers fared while attempting to complete some standard psychological tasks. And the results were surprising, given that we’ve been led to believe that young people are good at juggling multiple sensory inputs: the low-multitaskers did better. Is there a takeaway? One of the paper’s author’s isn’t sure: “As for what caused the differences — whether people with a predisposition to multitask happen to be mentally disorganized, or if multitasking feeds the condition — ‘that’s the million dollar question, and we don’t have a million dollar answer,’ said [Stanford University cognitive scientist Cliff] Nass.” I have a takeway for you — you’re not as good at multitasking as you think. Put yer dang cellphone down while you drive. Don’t call people. Don’t text. Pay attention to the road. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Snow Leopard Available This Friday, August 28 |
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Apple has announced that Mac OS X version 10.6, called Snow Leopard, will drop this Friday, August 28. As I posted back in June, the price will be $29 for a single upgrade and $49 for a family pack. Compare this with the ten different prices for upgrading to Windows 7. That’s what kills me about Windows. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 24, 2009
| Federal Jury Practice and Instructions Criminal Companion Handbook, 2009 ed. |
 By Kevin F. O'Malley, Jay E. Grenig, William C. LeeThis book is designed to assist the reader in the preparation of federal criminal jury instructions by providing a survey of instructions used in real cases as well as author commentary and tips related to the use of the pattern instructions, research references, and related materials. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Digital Content Coordinator
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