Environmental Scan Blog

Slashdot | Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers

Gillian Kerr — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:27:28 -0500

Reported on Slashdot today: Exciting news for open access research!

"Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings.

Slashdot | Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers.

How to create a good enough website

Gillian Kerr — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0400

You can dramatically decrease the complexity of a web site project by separating the programming from the design. Seth Godin’s blog has some good tips:

Start with design. Don't involve the programming team until you're 90% done with the look and feel of your pages. It's cheap to change design if it can't by supported by programming, and cheaper and faster to have design done in Photoshop before you commit to cutting it up and coding it. [PowerPoint can also be used to create prototypes.]

From Seth's Blog: How to create a good enough website. Cited in the Globe and Mail, October 25 2007

James Robertson of StepTwo Designs agrees – in one of his terrific articles on Content Management Systems, he says that “organisations are almost always better served by separating out the design and the CMS, and sourcing these from different providers.”

Most published research findings are wrong

Gillian Kerr — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:32:48 -0400

According to medical scholar John Ioannidis, most published research findings are wrong.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true." From Science Journal - WSJ.com.

Dr. Ioannidis’s 2005 essay ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ “remains the most downloaded technical paper that the journal PLoS Medicine has ever published”.

The lesson from his research is that findings must be replicated in several different studies before the results are believed.

Scheduling meetings more quickly

Gillian Kerr — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:08:13 -0400

Scheduling meetings take huge amounts of time for most organizations, especially when external people are involved (like Board members, volunteers and colleagues). it can take days of back-and-forth emails narrowing down on possible times and dates. There are a few services available now that attempt to simplify and automate scheduling processes by offering attendees choices of different times, automatically selecting the best times for everyone, and synchronizing with Outlook and/or Google calendars.

I haven’t tested any of these yet, but I’ve read favourable mentions in a couple of discussion groups. Most of them are free, or offer free versions. They may charge more for features like synchronization and corporate branding. I’ve excerpted from their web sites below.

Timebridge (www.timebridge.com)

With TimeBridge's one-step scheduling you select attendees, propose meeting times and send a meeting invitation. TimeBridge does the rest— collects everyone's availability and selects the best time. Everyone gets a confirmation once the meeting is set. To make it easy, attendees need only a web browser to respond and no registration is required.

Biz-e (www.biz-e.com)

Full Outlook Calendar Integration
Easy Meeting Choices
Meeting Attendance View
Suggest Meeting Dates
Confirm Finalized Meeting Choices
Respond to Meeting Requests via the Web

TimeToMeet (www.timetomeet.info)

Whether you're meeting with one person or one dozen, this will help find you a time that works for everyone. How it works:
Everyone receives a private link to enter their availabilites on a common schedule. No sign-ups or logins necessary.
We'll find the best candidates and you can easily confirm a final time. RSVPs are built-in.
And you're done already.

Tungle (www.tungle.com)

Tungle, the first peer-to-peer (P2P) meeting coordinator, solves these [scheduling] problems. Tungle allows professionals to easily coordinate a meeting - no matter if their invitee is in the next cubicle, a business associate in a different city or a good friend on the other side of the world.
Tungle is a P2P meeting coordinator that is downloaded and installed by the end user. Its one-click setup automatically installs the software and integrates with the user's calendaring system.
Tungle provides professionals with a view of the times their friends, co-workers or business associates are free or busy - in advance of sending a meeting invitation - and independent of what time management system they are using.

Online counselling to youth

Gillian Kerr — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:57:30 -0400

Good news – online counselling is getting some serious attention.

A new training program at the University of Toronto will teach counsellors how to reach out over the Internet to support children and youth in crisis. From University of Toronto -- News@UofT -- U of T to train cyber counsellors (Jul 4/07).

The program will be carried out in a collaboration between the Faculty of Social Work and the Kids Help Phone service, focusing on children and youth, and addressing issues that youth may prefer to raise anonymously. The program takes a cautious approach to the counselling relationship, though:

Student counsellors, with supervisory support, review the questions that children and teens post to a public web forum, then create and post their responses. Youth browsing the site are able to read the questions that other kids are asking and they can see the counsellors’ answers.

Good start - hopefully they will experiment with one-to-one counselling if the FAQ approach works out.

Finding Credit Card Numbers on the Web

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 28 May 2007 23:01:52 -0400

Slashdot reports how to find large numbers of credit cards with user information using a simple Google search. A long and interesting discussion after the posting provides suggestions on why credit card companies don’t put a stop to this.

Take the first 8 digits of a standard 16-digit credit card number. Search for them on Google in "nnnn nnnn" form. Since the 8-digit prefix of a given card number is often shared with many other cards, about 1/4 of credit card numbers in my random test, turned up pages that included other credit card numbers, and about 1 in 10 turned up a "treasure trove" of card numbers that were exposed through someone's sloppily written Web app. If the numbers were displayed along with people's names and phone numbers, sometimes I would call the users to tell them that I'd found their cards on the Internet, and many of them said that the cards were still active and that this was the first they'd heard that the numbers had been compromised.

Slashdot | Why Are CC Numbers Still So Easy To Find?

Identifying anonymous cowards on the web

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 28 May 2007 01:56:05 -0400

‘Anonymous cowards’, according to Slashdot, are people who post comments on public web sites without using their names. The web has a long history of enabling people to post anonymously, but the habit is under attack these days. The Wikipedia scandal is putting pressure on the internet community to reveal the identities of authors who make inaccurate or inflammatory postings, and as a result we’re getting stories about ‘outings’.

Anonymity is not easy to preserve on the web if someone really wants to find you. Here’s a good article about someone who tracked down an annoying anonymous poster, which took, according to the article, about 5 minutes. Here’s an excerpt from the Slashdot article:

It is important to know that while on the web, while emailing and while writing a blog you are leaving a trail. The trail consists of IP addresses, unique ID’s, machine names, etc. For instance, look at the headers of an email you send, you will see:
– The IP address of the machine you sent it from
– The name of the machine you sent it from (mine is ‘Nik’ – obvious)
– A unique ID which can identify the mail client you use, as well as your operating system (as well as the security level of your machine, some people need to use Windows Update)
– The mail server you used (which leads you to a provider – might be the same provider you use for your blog or website)
– A lot more!
Changing the ‘From’ address doesn’t change all this other information, so if you have an email from both the real person and the alter-ego, it’s dead easy.

Dead 2.0 Outed - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet | New Web Order - Nik Cubrilovic.

Broadcasting your own internet radio station

Gillian Kerr — Sat, 26 May 2007 15:20:39 -0400

Individuals or organizations can easily set up and broadcast their own internet radio stations. Live365 offers broadcasting services starting at $10/month US ($75/month for organizations) that can be used to disseminate presentations, deliver podcast-type radio shows, and so on. The packages offer royalty fees for those who want to create their own music radio stations, but only for US-based subscribers. This would be a nice tool for a community advocacy campaign.

And here is a really cheap way to set up a private radio station in your hotel room or your organization’s waiting area – the Belkin TuneCast II (about $25) is recommended by Hexus to play an MP3 player through an FM radio, in a car or anywhere else. Hexus says that the sound quality is as good as other FM stations; several Amazon reviews say the sound quality is worse. If you can’t connect an MP3 player to a stereo, possibly because you’re on holiday and don’t have your speakers with you, an FM transmitter might be a decent choice.

Pressure is growing for open access to research

Gillian Kerr — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:02:22 -0400

Michael Geist, a Canadian legal expert on internet law, writes about international pressure to make publicly funded research openly accessible in this Toronto Star article from Feb 27 2007:

Last month, five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy to require that all government-funded research be made available to the public shortly after publication.
That requirement – called an open access principle – would leverage widespread Internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe.
Despite scant media attention, word of the petition spread quickly throughout the scientific and research communities. Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and more than 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world.
In response, the European Commission committed over $100 million toward facilitating greater open access through support for open access journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic articles written each year.

Giest goes on to say that, "Canadian funding agencies are increasingly at risk of falling behind their counterparts around the world by dragging their heels on the open access front. ...The failure to lead on this issue could have long-term negative consequences for Canadian research."

Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef

Gillian Kerr — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:30:13 -0500

Several of the major academic search engines and standards bodies are working together to improve literature searches and academic repositories. The following quote is not terribly readable unless you already know most of the acronyms:

CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), the reference-linking network of the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), has officially launched a free DOI look-up feature called Simple-Text Query (http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery). Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies.
…CrossRef actively encourages DSpace repositories to assign DOIs to original, nonduplicative works and register their DOIs with CrossRef, rather than just relying on registration with CNRI….
CrossRef also supports OpenURL links, using the OpenURL syntax in its own system and making all its publishers “OpenURL compliant” for its library participants. It also works with services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search, and Elsevier’s Scirus to connect content to the leading Web search engines.
Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef.

Deadman's Handle deletes confidential files automatically if laptop is taken

Gillian Kerr — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 13:44:21 -0500

‘Deadman’s Handle’ is laptop utility software that deletes any directories that you have defined as confidential if someone uses your computer without permission.

When your laptop is started up, DeadMan's Handle presents an innocuous-looking challenge: fail it, and all designated information on the system is securely deleted. DeadMan's Handle also deletes itself, leaving no trace that there was anything of importance on the machine. Laptop Utility Software: DeadMan's Handle for laptop security.

This is great if you have highly confidential information like medical files or sensitive financial data. It could be pretty inconvenient if a coworker innocently tried to use your computer when you were away from your desk. ‘Deadman’s Handle’ requires a good data backup.

In locked-down Baghdad, city life moves online

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 13:23:45 -0400

Videoconferencing and online chat are becoming social necessities in Baghdad. Internet access is increasing rapidly, even with restrictions on electricity and broadband. It will be interesting to see what happens with online interactions once the country becomes safer (eventually). If incorporated into business and social life, virtual relationships will support economic diversification and increase the use of Arabic on the internet.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - In the endless daily battle against the fear and isolation of life under lock-down, the people of Baghdad have found a way to keep their city alive: moving it online.
Instead of enjoying an outdoor meal at one of the fish restaurants along the Tigris embankment, 28-year-old housewife Dunya Saad spends her evenings at the computer in her living room, chatting with her friends on Yahoo! Messenger.
Most of her relatives and friends live on the far side of the Tigris, and seeing them in person is nearly impossible.
"It's sad not to see your friends like in the good old days," she sighed. "But online chatting has made things better."
Since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra sparked a wave of sectarian bloodshed, the Internet has gone from being a hobby for tech-savvy enthusiasts to a mass replacement for the daily interactions of city life.

In locked-down Baghdad, city life moves online | In Depth | Reuters.com.

Intranet Portals Usability: Report With Case Studies From Real Projects

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:43:51 -0400

Jakob Neilsen has published the second edition of the “Usability of Intranet Portals” report. Anyone who is developing an intranet portal should buy the report – it’s expensive at $250 but a lot cheaper than creating one without the research on what works.

Intranet portals are being pushed heavily by technology vendors, but the experience from the many portal managers contacted for this report is that technology only accounts for about one-third of the issues they had in implementing their portals. Organizational issues and company politics account for two thirds.

Intranet Portals Usability: Report With Case Studies From Real Projects.

In Neilsen’s newsletter this month, he also recommended a terrific article on how to choose software platforms for portals by Joel Spolsky. In a nutshell, Spolsky says:

What I do know for sure, though, is two things:

People all over the world are constantly building web applications using .NET, using Java, and using PHP all the time. None of them are failing because of the choice of technology. [In the article, he also suggests Python as a fourth reasonable choice.]
All of these environments are large and complex and you really need at least one architect with serious experience developing for the one you choose, because otherwise you'll do things wrong and wind up with messy code that needs to be restructured.

In a related article, Spolsky says:

[The software] worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. … So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. If you have a choice of platforms, use the one your team has the most skills with, even if it's not the trendiest or nominally the most productive.

This is good practical advice, and an elegant answer to an impossible question.

Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles

Gillian Kerr — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:04:26 -0400

The results are coming in about the impact of open access (OA) on research citations.

OA articles are freely available on the web, so that a search on Google Scholar will bring up the full text instead of a publisher’s page that demands payment before you can read it.

A ten-year research study now under way suggests that an OA article may be cited far more often than an article in the same journal that has not been posted on the web by its author.

Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.

This is such a fundamental issue for policy analysis. I’ve been frustrated yet again this week by trying to track down an article that is not available on the web, nor even in the York University online library. Apparently it’s available in University of Toronto’s online library but I have no access to it. As a result, this article will have no influence on policy. And researchers wonder why no-one listens to them!

Most scholarly journals now permit authors to self-archive their articles on the web either before or after publication. Many funders of research are beginning to demand that their researchers self-archive, or publish in open access journals, as a way to increase the impact of the findings. Given that publication is a small proportion of the cost of doing research, and most of the research is funded by public money, it seems obvious to get the information out to the public.

Fixing peer review

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:57:13 -0400

From Wired Magazine:

The [peer review] process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that's merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism. It seems silly to say this about a system that's been in development since the mid-1700s, but the whole thing seems kind of antiquated. "Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish," says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing – and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.
In June, Nature began experimenting with a new method online. Authors submitting papers can choose a two-track process. While the work goes through the usual peer review drill, a preprint version gets posted on the Web. Anyone – even you – can comment, as long as you attach your name, affiliation, and email address. As of July, 25 articles had undergone this process, and the journal plans to issue a report late this year on how the test went.
… In other quarters, traditional peer review has already been abandoned. Physicists and mathematicians today mainly communicate via a Web site called arXiv. (The X is supposed to be the Greek letter chi; it's pronounced "archive." If you were a physicist, you'd find that hilarious.) Since 1991, arXiv has been allowing researchers to post prepublication papers for their colleagues to read. The online journal Biology Direct publishes any article for which the author can find three members of its editorial board to write reviews. (The journal also posts the reviews – author names attached.) And when PLoS ONE launches later this year, the papers on its site will have been evaluated only for technical merit – do the work right and acceptance is guaranteed. "Data becomes useful only if it's shared," Surridge says. "At the moment, our mechanisms for sharing information are the traditional journals, and if they're hard to get into, data is completely lost."

Measuring Implicit Bias

Gillian Kerr — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:31:04 -0400

I don’t know whether the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is accurate or not, but it’s a great conversation opener. In diversity and anti-racism workshops, participants often deny having any prejudice at all. Inviting them to take a couple of these mini-tests, without sharing the scores with anyone else, might be an effective way to encourage them to address ways that prejudice affects workplaces, and what people can do to minimize it.

Welcome to the disturbing world of implicit bias, where people's preferences for racial, ethnic, and other groups lie outside their awareness and often clash with their professed beliefs about those groups. In the past 15 years, most social psychologists have come to agree that implicit biases, also known as unconscious attitudes, play an often-unnoticed role in our lives. Researchers study implicit biases using any of several techniques, such as tracking participants' feelings and behaviors after subliminally showing them pictures of black or old people.
However, one measure—the Implicit Association Test, or IAT—has proved especially popular.

From The Bias Finders: Science News Online, April 22, 2006.

You can take the IAT here.

UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog

Gillian Kerr — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:56:01 -0400

I like this librarian’s web log focusing on academic search. For example, here’s a comment from July 13:

Gunther Eysenbach's cogent editorial "The Open Access Advantage" over at the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research hits several points square on the head. The one I find most appealing is that incremental benefits accrue to researchers who publish in open-access journals; the data is clear and unequivocal. Another is the simple truth that open source tools like those developed by UBC's Public Knowledge Project are better alternatives to the commercial OA publishers.

UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog.

US Government Program Offers Easy, Free Method To Verify Immigration Status Of Potential Employees

Gillian Kerr — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 03:00:11 -0400

From HRSolutionsToday.com:

Companies looking for a way of checking on the immigration status of employees have a little known but effective program available at no cost that is being provided as part of the federal government’s homeland security agency.

Called the SAVE Program and administered by the Federal Citizen and Immigration Service, this offering is currently being used by more than 6,000 companies throughout the United States.

By signing up for the program, called Basic Point, companies can quickly check on the immigration status of new employees by typing in key information provided by applicants and receive an answer back quickly on the legal status of that individual.
Government Program Offers Easy, Free Method To Verify Immigration Status Of Potential Employees.

In a related offering, the US government and many states enable anyone to look for inmates of its prisons, past and current, using advanced searches. Friends Beyond the Wall (a prisoners network) offers a list of web resources; see for example, the State of Georgia’s Inmate Query.

A few recent launches

Gillian Kerr — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 15:29:02 -0400

PC World reviews 17 free and low-cost online storage services this month.

The new version of Windows Live Messenger allows users to share files with their contacts and is competing directly with Skype by partnering with Verizon to make calls to regular phones. And chats will soon be compatible with Yahoo! Messenger.

LanguageLine, a major international interpreting service, is now using Skype for interpreting assignments. For $2.99/minute US they will interpret in 150 languages.

Google Translator has added Arabic to English and English to Arabic as a beta service. They offer nine languages, most of which translate to and from English only. (German and French are the only non-English pairs.)

In a non-online launch, the National Federation of the Blind is coming out with Ray Kurzweil’s newest invention – a handheld scanner that reads text aloud. This will be another Kurzweil evolution for people with visual impairments.

And finally, neuroscience research is proposing that learning something new, particularly grasping a new concept, is associated with an opium-like ‘fix’. The buzz that we get from the new new thing really is an addiction. Imagine that!

Linking research to action

Gillian Kerr — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:09:54 -0400

John Lavis’s Program in Policy Decision-Making has updated its web site to include new research on knowledge transfer.

A presentation on ‘Assessing provincial or national efforts to link research to action’, dated January 2006, contains many interesting points on promoting evidence-based policy.

Among them is a reference to the reader-friendly writing style of ‘graded entry’, in which there is a 1:3:25 ratio of content. A description is posted on the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation site:

Every report prepared for the foundation has the same guidelines: start with one page of main messages; follow that with a three-page executive summary; present your findings in no more than 25 pages of writing, in language a bright, educated, but not research-trained person would understand.

These are great guidelines, and are aimed at increasing the likelihood that research reports will lead to action.

Web hosting reviews

Gillian Kerr — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 11:24:51 -0500

I found what looks like a good review site for web hosting companies. It measures several criteria, including uptime – “Good web hosts should have at least 99.5% monthly uptime”.

One of their top-rated web hosts, Midphase, has a very simple web site creation service using SiteStudio. See the demo here; it’s impressive. And their sites are only $8/month US including email, unlimited bandwidth, 12 gigabytes of storage, and guaranteed 99.9% uptime. I haven’t tested them though.

Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage

Gillian Kerr — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:22:34 -0500

Here’s an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink): In homelessness and with many other social problems, a small number of people account for a huge proportion of cases, representing a massive cost to the whole system. ‘Solving homelessness’ may involve giving those few people free apartments and keeping them out of expensive last resort services.

“Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

“… It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.”

The New Yorker: Fact.

Free teleconference calls and cheap phone systems

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:57:57 -0500

Freeconference.com offers free teleconferences of up to 100 people, but callers must pay for the long distance charges to a US number.

RealWorld Systems currently uses two tollfree phone services: Kall8 for our fax number – $2/month plus 7c/minute for faxes delivered as pdf files to any email address – and tollfreelive for our ‘virtual office’ phone system. The Virtual Office service has an auto attendant with multiple ‘follow-me’ numbers that will call any phone number in the US and Canada, and that can be changed instantly on the web. For $30/month we get 500 tollfree minutes, and each additional minute is 7.8c (all dollars are U.S.). The per-minute cost includes both legs of the tollfree call; for example, a Toronto caller phones the number and is connected to a switch in California; then the call goes back to Toronto. Clearly this service makes more financial sense for organizations that make a lot of long distance calls.

Kall8 offers cheap teleconferencing for all of its phone numbers; and both Kall8 and tollfreelive have all kinds of other useful features. For example, in tollfreelive I set up temporary extensions to clients and team members for current projects. Long distance charges to other countries are cheaper than most calling cards, so I create extensions for colleagues in Europe and Qatar. I can even set passwords on the extensions to prevent others from making unauthorized long distance calls.

Anonymous Surfing: Why would you want to be invisible on the 'net?

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:39:40 -0500

A fascinating interview by Robin Good with Lance Cottrell, President and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer:

There are a lot of reasons why people would want to be concerned about their privacy online. I mean, people are unaware of just how much information is being gathered about them on a continuing basis.

So that when you’re going out to websites, almost every website you’re going to is gathering personal information about you, logging your activities, which pages you look at. Advertising networks can track you across thousands of different websites at a time. But even things like resume websites will actually take your personal information and resell it.

Anonymous Surfing: What The Benefits And Issues Of Making Yourself Invisible Online? - Robin Good's Latest News.

The business version of the Anonymizer service allows internet users to pretend to be from other countries or locations, either to disguise their identities or to see what users in those locations see. (For example, Al Jazeera streams different content to readers in the Middle East.) This would be useful for agencies working in international development or human rights. The consumer version just protects your privacy and prevents data theft from wireless networks.

There is another type of internet privacy that the Anonymizer does not protect – privacy from people who have access to the same computer. This is a serious issue for those who are threatened with domestic violence.

A New England woman planned to escape her violent husband. She secretly found a new home for herself and her 2 daughters and she sent an email to a friend asking for help moving. She thought she had deleted the email, though it sat in her email program's "deleted mail folder". Her husband found the email, learned that she was planning to flee for safety, and he killed her. From Safety on the Internet: An educational module of the Harvard Law School

Here are some more tips for protecting privacy from threatening family members, or even co-workers who use the same computer:

American Bar Asociation Commission on Domestic Violence

Tiny computer combines Windows XP and a mobile PDA

Gillian Kerr — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 10:28:19 -0500

Many people with disabilities would benefit from small, powerful mobile computers with long battery life. Blind users could be guided with GPS mapping software that gave spoken directions. Deaf users could communicate through voice recognition programs; speakers would talk into a microphone and their speech would be translated into written text. PDAs are not powerful enough to drive the necessary software (so far), but full computers use up batteries too quickly for mobile use.

Until now, only Xybernaut has consistently delivered wearable Windows computers. Their computers are optimized for rough outdoor use by tradespeople and children, so they are rugged but with limited processor speed.

The DualCor cPC has just been announced, and looks promising. From the press release: “The DualCore cPC is the only all-in-one, wireless “handtop” (handheld-desktop) computer that combines the power of a desktop PC, the instant-on convenience of a PDA and the always-connected functionality of a cell phone. Measuring just 6.5” x 3.3” x 1.2”, the DualCor cPC offers unprecedented battery life for enterprise computing, Internet access, e-mail and talk time.” DualCor Technologies, Inc. :: Press Releases.

The Dualcor is coming out in spring 2006 for approximately $1500 US, and should be powerful enough to drive the latest voice recognition programs.

Example of Google censorship in China

Gillian Kerr — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:55:38 -0500

From Bruce Schneier’s blog on security:

Here are the side-by-side search results for "tiananmen" on google.com and google.cn.

Schneier on Security: Google.cn Censorship.

UPDATE on Feb 6: The above link on Schneier's site leads to two identical pages now. I suspect that Google is reading my location from my IP address and not streaming the google.cn results anymore. See this posting on anonymous internet surfing for more on how that works.

Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders

Gillian Kerr — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 14:24:19 -0500

Steve Krause compares two music recommendation services – Pandora and Last.fm:

Both services allow you to specify a favorite artist, based on which you immediately receive an Internet audio stream of similar music. When I tell people that this is possible—that you can have a personalized streaming radio station—most are astonished. So let's start by saying that what these and similar services do is cool. How Pandora and Last.fm do it is an interesting compare-and-contrast.

Steve Krause : Blog: Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders.

How long do burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs last?

Gillian Kerr — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:53:25 -0500

This is a nice summary of issues related to the storage time for archived CDs, from a C-Net community forum. Here’s the question, and see the link for the answer:

I recently read an article by a data storage expert who claimed that burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs can be expected to last only two to five years and not a whole lot more. I personally have commercially pressed CDs from the 1980s that still play fine, but I have begun to notice that some of my burned CD-Rs are beginning to skip, or not start (player shows "no disc").… What are the best storage methods for the discs that will make them last longest?

1/27/06 How long do burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs last? - CNET Community Newsletter: Q&A Forums.

How to give an effective presentation - audio slideshow

Gillian Kerr — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:13:14 -0500

‘Giving effective presentations’, a 23 minute audio PowerPoint presentation, is now posted on Ourmedia, a free and (supposedly) permanent archive of online content. It covers the following topics:

Finding out what your audience wants to hear
The changing role of live presentations
Defining the objectives of your presentation
Defining the audience
Developing your own style
Customizing your presentation to various audiences – academic, policy and general public
Using graphics wisely
Getting comfortable with mistakes

The presentation was originally recorded in 2004 for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, based on a seminar I gave to CIAR’s New Investigators Network.

I posted it on Ourmedia for two reasons – to see whether audio slide presentations can be easily transferred to a video format (answer: not easily enough), and to store it in a stable location so I don’t have to keep transferring the file each time I move to a new web host. Unfortunately, Ourmedia doesn’t seem to assign persistent URLs or Digital Object Identifiers to their content. That means that it will be very difficult to track down artifacts when the URLs change, as they certainly will.

I have also posted the presentation to Google Video and will update the information here when it is ready for public access. and it's available here. The slides look horrible - almost too blurry to read - and the interface for uploading media is pretty bad.

Near-Time: A combination blog and wiki

Gillian Kerr — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:58:51 -0500

Robin Good covered Near-Time this week, a new service that combines blog and wiki features. “Private Weblogs, team pages, group calendars and shared files are integrated in a hosted, secure collaborative environment. Near-Time content can be personal, group-based or published to the world.” Cost is free for a simple site, with more complex sites beginning at $5/month US.

Robin also reviewed VSee, a new Windows-only videoconferencing client that delivers high quality at low internet speeds, and includes application sharing. Another promising videoconferencing client is Wigiwigi, but it’s in alpha stage right now, so I’m not even going to link to it yet. I’m signing on to the site daily to check for a version that is stable and user-friendly enough to recommend. Both of these conferencing tools have framerates that are good enough to lip-synch. Most internet-based videocon clients show jerky motion and blurred facial expressions, or take too much computer processing and internet bandwidth for public use. These look great, though pricing hasn’t been set on either of them yet. In particular, they might be used for sign language communication or video interpreting.