details of a global brain
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Learning & commerce
Nuvvo is a platform where teachers can add an online course and optionally sell enrollments. Nuvvo is free – but once the instructor charges money Nuvvo will keep an 8% commission of all enrollments sold. Besides of the fact that this is a really interesting business model, the Nuvvo web application is designed to be…
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3rd webmonday/webmontag in Cologne went well
Yesterday the 3rd Webmonday in Cologne took place. Again we arranged the Hallmackenreuther for this get together, but this time they decided to put us in the cellar (which is a nice location for maybe 50 people, but not 70 or 80; see the images). People start to get familiar with each other. I think…
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New seminar weblog
I started a new weblog about the project seminar titled »Sound«. It’s a seminar covering sound design, corporate sound, sound in film, sound art, etc.
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Webmonday ahead
There is another »Webmontag« event ahead tomorrow in Cologne. There are around 54 people planning to attend right now (and another 26 more unsure). I think I need to walk over to Hallmackenreuther and issue a warning.
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The unawareness of lack of skill
This appears to be a funny note, but actually it is really something ultimately true: Unskilled and Unaware of It. Justin Kruger and David Dunning made several studies to support following concepts: 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.2. Incompetent individuals will…
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Which country to invade next?
Like Michael Moore once said: »If you want to bomb a country you should at least be able to point it on a map!«. I would add you should at least be able to name some kind of reason. Just watch this video: It’s a little bit hard to see in the video: These people…
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The rediscovery of function in product design
The ACM IT magazine publishes an article written by Andreas Pfeiffer titled »Why features don’t matter anymore: The new laws of digital technology«. He lists ten fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology. The article begins with this: The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a…
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Visual explanations
A very nice example of visual explanations: the wave vs. matter paradox of quantum physics.
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Media war
BBC reports that US secretary of offense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges that the “war on terror” is primarily a struggle of ideas. He proposes the US propaganda machinery must be capable of fighting down the unfavourable news from offensive media with a “more effective 24-hour propaganda machine”. Hm. I was thinking free press and freedom of…
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Web 3.0?
While everyone is talking about AJAX and JavaScript there is a very old technology taking up steam that could replace the DOM+JavaScript approach: XUL. Look for example at this application called »Songbird«. The problem with XUL has always been a lack of development tools. XULrunner seems to fill a huge gap here. Anyway it seems…
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3D face recognition from a single video frame
I have a constantly updated presentation about »The future of computing«. One chapter of it is about security and surveillance technology – the face recognition approach in particular. Two computer science students in Haifa, Israel, have invented a face recognition method with a 3D scan. It can radically improve the success rate and it was…
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Anthracite Web Mining Desktop
This tool is used to enable some kind of visual programming with apple script components Metafy’s Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit gives you the tools you need to build powerful data processing systems with an easy-to-use visual interface that makes complex manipulations quickly possible. Anthracite is built for people who need to transform internet sources…
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Webmontag in Frankfurt
Only a couple of hours left fo everyone to decide wether or not he/she should go the the Webmontag event in Frankfurt today. There are around 60 people that have announced to attend this meetup. There are also a number of presentators. So it seems to become a very informative and lively evening.
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The Secrets of Ruby on Rails
Tobias (flying sparks) points to a audio recording of David Heinemeier Hansson with a keynote at OSCON ’05. He talks about the basic ideas behind Ruby on Rails. Update: There are also slides available as PDF from the Ruby on Rails website.
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iTunes U – Apple employs iTunes store for electronic education
I have written about this before. Now Apple translates the iTunes Music Store model to educational content. Students listen to lectures, download subscribed video feeds or podcasts. Apple acts as a service provider hoping it would broaden the footprint of educational technology.
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Performancing Blog Editor for Firefox
There is a new Blog Editor called Performancing available as Firefox Extension. Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browse and lets you post to your blog easiy. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as…
Got any book recommendations?