Well, it appears that while I’ve been away Jarred managed to increase readership and start a robust discussion in the comments. Maybe I should go away more often. In any case, I should be back to posting tomorrow, and next week I’ll be guest posting on Tactical Philanthropy. Details soon - T
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
I have class tonight and so won’t be able to post very much until tomorrow night, but I did want to throw two related thoughts at you guys and hopefully generate some discussion.
First, I learned that my old high school is getting ready to implement “Smart Board” technologies in some of its classrooms. Smart Boards combine a whiteboard, a computer, a projector, and some sort of touch/motion sensor to know when your hand or marker makes contact with its surface. The result:
The Smart Boards also allow you to save notes taken on the whiteboard.
Second, Ars Technica has a write-up on Abilene Christian University’s plan to give out iPhones to incoming freshmen this fall, ostensibly for academic use. Some say it’s a gimmick, others see great potential.
With those two blurbs in mind, what do you think of technology in the classroom? We’ve recently discussed blogging as a learning method. Where do you draw the line between a cool gadget and a real tool for teaching and enrichment? Could this money be better spent in other ways? Speak your mind in the comments!
P.S. — Bonus points to whoever can figure out where that guy is browsing in Google Earth. I don’t have the answer… but if you recognize the buildings on the board then speak up because I, for one, am curious!
Unsurprisingly, the ever-innovative Google is conducting intensive research into improving image search. The web giant’s mission – ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — requires that its computers be able to interpret and index images, in addition to text. To date, as Mike Arrington explains, computers have not been so good at this:
Today when we talk about search all we really mean is text search. That’s sort of like only being able to see in one color. And when we search for image, video and audio content, the only data that search engines use to do those searches is the text that is associated with those files. That’s like trying to describe the color green when you can only see in red.
One approach to solving this dilemma is giving humans an incentive to label images themselves (see my earlier post on human computation). Luis Von Ahn, the brain behind Google Image Labeler (an addictive game that pairs users together to attribute labels to images), says that all the images on the web could be sufficiently labeled in a short amount time with a critical mass of participants; to drive home his point, he often references the millions of potentially productive hours that go wasted on Solitaire each year.
There are two major shortcomings to this approach. First, it is still completely text based — what happens when a certain image is only labeled in a certain language, or when pranksters “Google bomb“ image results (imagine every result for “miserable failure” being the face of George W. Bush)? The second, major shortcoming of this approach is that there are untold numbers of new images being uploaded to the Internet every day. Flickr alone gets as many as one million new photos from its users every 24 hours. Is a human-centric approach to putting images in context sustainable? Google doesn’t think so, and so it is beefing up its computer-based image search strategy.
Want to see what Obama, Clinton, and McCain will look like in 2012? The Huffington Post covers PopPhoto’s attempt to age the candidates by four presidential years (which is apparently about ten human years). I mean this very nonpartisan-like… but is it just me, or does it look like McCain just ain’t gonna make it? - J
Dear Internet Explorer users: It has come to my attention that Tropophilia officially hates your browser with every ounce of its being. Especially after a recent upgrade to Wordpress, it’s been particularly disagreeable to you. I apologize for Tropophilia’s disdain for your hardware and software choices… but might I suggest an upgrade or two? — J
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