Ever heard the story of the giant ship engine that failed?
The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them couldfigure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who hadbeen fixing ships since he was a youngster. He carried a large bag oftools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work.He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. Two of the ship'sowners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do.After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled outa small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurchedinto life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousanddollars."What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!"So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."
The man sent a bill that read:Tapping with a hammer ...... $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap ........... $ 9998.00
Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort in your lifemakes all the difference
CiteULike
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software. A similar site is Connotea, from Nature Publishing Group: www.connotea.org.
Features includes such as:-
1. The list of tags/keywords on the home page shows large and small tags; the larger ones are used more often
2. You can see other accounts who have saved the same articles as you; you can also see what other tags have been used for that article
3. If there is an article in another account that interests you, you can add it to your account as well.
For more detail visit: http://www.citeulike.org/
Features includes such as:-
1. The list of tags/keywords on the home page shows large and small tags; the larger ones are used more often
2. You can see other accounts who have saved the same articles as you; you can also see what other tags have been used for that article
3. If there is an article in another account that interests you, you can add it to your account as well.
For more detail visit: http://www.citeulike.org/
KidQuery
Parents have the right to keep their kids safe.Is your children sharing his/her pictures or revealing telephone number and home address to predators online KidQuery helps by allowing parents to easily search and monitor their child's profiles over the net.Do you need this?Its free for limited period...
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CPB of New York state sends warning on google video service
The New York State Consumer Protection Board (CPB) today warned parents that children can easily access and view videos with sexual themes and off-color material through a free service that can be accessed through Google, the Internet search engine. On the Internet, Google has added "video pages" to its array of free services. The Google video service lets viewers choose from more than 100 of the most-popular videos on the Internet....
Read more>>
Read more>>
Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing
THE DALLES, Ore., June 8 — On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.The complex, sprawling like an information-age factory, heralds a substantial expansion of a worldwide computing network handling billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.
And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are building big data centers upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., 130 miles to the north. But it is a race in which they are playing catch-up. Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.
Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.
The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. "Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is," acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.
Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.
The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.
The fact that Google is behind the data center, referred to locally as Project 02, has been reported in the local press. But many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year.
"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."
Local residents are at once enthusiastic and puzzled about their affluent but secretive new neighbor, a successor to the aluminum manufacturers that once came seeking the cheap power that flows from the dams holding back the powerful Columbia. The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this year.
"We're trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and they're trying to keep us all away," said Susan Huntington, executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. "Our two cultures aren't matching very well."
Culture clashes may be an inevitable byproduct of the urgency with which the search engine war is being waged.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce.
Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion. Its center here, whose cost is undisclosed, shows what that money is meant to buy.
And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are building big data centers upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., 130 miles to the north. But it is a race in which they are playing catch-up. Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.
Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.
The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. "Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is," acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.
Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.
The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.
The fact that Google is behind the data center, referred to locally as Project 02, has been reported in the local press. But many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year.
"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."
Local residents are at once enthusiastic and puzzled about their affluent but secretive new neighbor, a successor to the aluminum manufacturers that once came seeking the cheap power that flows from the dams holding back the powerful Columbia. The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this year.
"We're trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and they're trying to keep us all away," said Susan Huntington, executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. "Our two cultures aren't matching very well."
Culture clashes may be an inevitable byproduct of the urgency with which the search engine war is being waged.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce.
Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion. Its center here, whose cost is undisclosed, shows what that money is meant to buy.
BlogBridge
BlogBridge is a blog, feed and RSS aggregator for "info-junkies." While there are other aggregators out there, BlogBridge is designed for people who are required to follow lots of feeds, not 10 or 20, but 200 or 400. You can't read that much, so BlogBridge gives you lots of ways to organize, sort through, skim and discover what's important to you in this avalanche of information.
BlogBridge: Library is a soon-to-be-released product that looks interesting. It is a tool for organizing and presenting RSS feeds. This might be a good way to provide access to news for specialized groups we serve. One for the genealogy folks, another for the bird watchers, another for the anime crowd. For each resource it provides a thumbnail of the page, link, RSS, and an OPML file for the group.
Here is a crucial point that many people will miss but is critical to understand BBL: BlogBridge:Library is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It's not the content of the library (the books,) it's the software to organize the library (the building.)
BlogBridge:Library (BBL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the 'store' where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here's the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.
BlogBridge: Library is a soon-to-be-released product that looks interesting. It is a tool for organizing and presenting RSS feeds. This might be a good way to provide access to news for specialized groups we serve. One for the genealogy folks, another for the bird watchers, another for the anime crowd. For each resource it provides a thumbnail of the page, link, RSS, and an OPML file for the group.
Here is a crucial point that many people will miss but is critical to understand BBL: BlogBridge:Library is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It's not the content of the library (the books,) it's the software to organize the library (the building.)
BlogBridge:Library (BBL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the 'store' where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here's the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.
ScienceDirect to Launch New Release in August 2006
Starting in August 2006, ScienceDirect will release new redesigns and features that will include enhancements to the overall user interface, streamlined browsing and searching and additional personalization features. Additional enhancements will be launched over the next two years. Read more >>
BioMed Central launches four new journals
BioMed Central launches four new journals
BioMed Central launches four new open access, peer-reviewed, online journals:
Cell Division
Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine
World Journal of Emergency Surgery
BioMed Central launches four new open access, peer-reviewed, online journals:
Cell Division
Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine
World Journal of Emergency Surgery
I just love this thought
By K.G. Schneider
The User Is Not Broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto
Launched after a discussion with a passionate young librarian who cares. Please challenge, change, add to, subtract from, edit, tussle with, and share these thoughts.------------------
All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday. You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.You are not a format. You are a service. The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.The user is the sun.The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.The user is not broken. Your system is broken until proven otherwise.That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because "librarians need to help people" doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and his system is broken, too.Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face. Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way. Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow's taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon. Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it.You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user. Meet people where they are--not where you want them to be.The user is not "remote." You, the librarian, are remote, and it is your job to close that gap. The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies. If you are reading about it in Time and Newsweek and your library isn't adapted for it or offering it, you're behind.Stop moaning about the good old days. The card catalog sucked, and you thought so at the time, too. If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow's cobblers. We have wonderful third spaces that offer our users a place where they can think and dream and experience information. Is your library a place where people can dream?Your ignorance will not protect you.
The User Is Not Broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto
Launched after a discussion with a passionate young librarian who cares. Please challenge, change, add to, subtract from, edit, tussle with, and share these thoughts.------------------
All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday. You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.You are not a format. You are a service. The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.The user is the sun.The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.The user is not broken. Your system is broken until proven otherwise.That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because "librarians need to help people" doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and his system is broken, too.Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face. Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way. Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow's taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon. Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it.You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user. Meet people where they are--not where you want them to be.The user is not "remote." You, the librarian, are remote, and it is your job to close that gap. The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies. If you are reading about it in Time and Newsweek and your library isn't adapted for it or offering it, you're behind.Stop moaning about the good old days. The card catalog sucked, and you thought so at the time, too. If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow's cobblers. We have wonderful third spaces that offer our users a place where they can think and dream and experience information. Is your library a place where people can dream?Your ignorance will not protect you.
Google "Spreadsheet"
You can sign up for an invitation to join "Google Spreadsheets", an on-line servbice that will allow you to:
Create basic spreadsheets from scratch.
You can start from scratch and do all the basics, including changing the number format, sorting by columns, and adding formulas.Upload your spreadsheet files.
Upload spreadsheets or worksheets from CSV or XLS format – all your formulas and formatting will come across intact.
Familiar desktop feel makes editing a breeze. Just click the toolbar buttons to bold, underline, change the font, change the cell background color and more. (...)Choose who can access your spreadsheets.
Just enter the email addresses of the people you want to share a given document, and then send them a message.Share documents instantly.
People with whom you share a given spreadsheet can access it as soon as they sign in.Edit with others in real time.
Multiple people can edit or view your spreadsheet at the same time as you – their names will appear in an on-screen chat window.
Create basic spreadsheets from scratch.
You can start from scratch and do all the basics, including changing the number format, sorting by columns, and adding formulas.Upload your spreadsheet files.
Upload spreadsheets or worksheets from CSV or XLS format – all your formulas and formatting will come across intact.
Familiar desktop feel makes editing a breeze. Just click the toolbar buttons to bold, underline, change the font, change the cell background color and more. (...)Choose who can access your spreadsheets.
Just enter the email addresses of the people you want to share a given document, and then send them a message.Share documents instantly.
People with whom you share a given spreadsheet can access it as soon as they sign in.Edit with others in real time.
Multiple people can edit or view your spreadsheet at the same time as you – their names will appear in an on-screen chat window.
Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be
An article in Ariadne, in which Phil Bradley takes a look at the development of search engines over the lifetime of Ariadne and points to what we might anticipate in the years to come.
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