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New Tool Tracks Culture Through the Centuries via Google Books. Can culture be decoded like a genome? A team from Harvard University has teamed up with Google to crack the spines of 5,195,769 digitized books that span five centuries of the printed word with the hopes of giving the humanities a more quantitative research tool. The Google Books Ngram Viewer, launched online December 16 and described in a paper in Science, allows Web users to query their respective areas of interest based on n-grams (a method of modeling sequences in natural language). • How engrained has Einstein really been in the cultural consciousness?

• Has interest in evolution been on a steady increase over the past 150 years? • Have superheroes always been out to "save the world"? Questions such as these have launched reams of undergraduate and graduate papers, which have traditionally required long hours searching the stacks—or JSTOR—for mentions to tally by hand and loads of close reading. What's in a word? What Is RDF and Why Should I Care? In a previous article we discussed how the Semantic Web is about making content easier for machines to interpret. This is accomplished in a number of ways including tagging content as structured data and defining content as linked data within the Linked Open Data cloud (LOD). RDF provides us with a framework to do both. RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. This framework is used to represent data in the LOD cloud as an XML file, and is the basis for RDFa, a format used to mark up content as structured data for the Semantic Web.

This article provides a basic explanation of RDF and RDFa. Subsequent articles will demonstrate how to use RDFa to mark up your content as structured data and how to create static RDF files as a means for adding your content to the LOD cloud. The following is a very basic explanation of how data is represented using RDF. As its name implies, RDF is a way to define resources using a specific framework. RDF triples take on the following forms: Hate PowerPoint? Here Are 5 Web-based Alternatives. Whether they're for clients, customers or colleagues, visual presentations are an unavoidable part of doing business.

For years, Microsoft PowerPoint has been the standard bearer of slide presentation applications, but several Web-based alternatives have emerged. For the most part, the alternatives offer similar functionality to PowerPoint, sometimes more, sometimes less. One obvious advantage to Web-based presentations is that they're stored in the cloud, eliminating the potential for nightmare scenarios involving lost or corrupted thumb drives. Prezi If the traditional slide-by-slide-style presentation doesn't quite cut it for you, there's Prezi, which works a bit more like one giant virtual whiteboard containing your entire presentation. Instead of flipping through slides, the viewer is zoomed in and out of the appropriate portions of your Prezi presentation, creating a much more animated and visually-appealing experience.

Check out this example: SlideRocket 280 Slides Zoho Show. Automate Just About Anything on Your Windows PC, No Coding Required. OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software. Google Wants to Kill JPEGs With New WebP Format. Quantum computers move a step closer. DIY, Battery-Powered Coil-Gun Destroys All Toys | Gadget Lab. You're a kid, and therefore you like to shoot things.

But what if the catapult and the air-rifle just aren't cutting it anymore? Then you, like Jason (aka Larsplatoon) make your own coil-gun. The styling is straight out of a video-game, but inside the engineering is very real, and very lethal. A coil-gun uses a magnetic field to accelerate a bullet up to projectile speed. Jason's uses a bank of recycled rechargeable laptop batteries to provide the juice, and various bits of circuitry to step up the voltage, prevent overloading and charge the array of capacitors. These capacitors are what you see in the cylinders at the back.

To use, flip the switch, hit the charge button and wait 30 seconds for the capacitors to fill up. The gun uses 1.25kJ of energy to fire the bullet into the model-airplane (shooting commences at around the 2:50 mark), TV-remote or Mom's best glassware, but doesn't have enough force to kill anyone. See Also: Baloney Detection Kit. Baloney Detection How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience By MICHAEL SHERMER When lecturing on science and pseudoscience at colleges and universities, I am inevitably asked, after challenging common beliefs held by many students,``Why should we believe you'' My answer:``You shouldn't'' I then explain that we need to check things out for ourselves and, short of that, at least to ask basic questions that get to the heart of the validity of any claim. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

When exploring the borderlands of science, we often face a ``boundary problem'' of where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Clearly, there are no foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the boundary between science and pseudoscience. The Author: Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Borderlands of Science. from the November & December 2001 issues of Scientific American. The Red Ocean of Cloud Infrastructure Stacks | CloudBzz. Update: am revising this still… Reposting now – but send me your comments via @CloudBzz on Twitter if you have them. It seems like every day there’s a new company touting their infrastructure stack. I’m sure I’m missing some, but I show more than 30 solutions for building clouds below, and I am sure that more are on their way. The market certainly can’t support so many participants! Not for very long anyway.

This is the definition of a “red ocean” situation — lots of noise, and lots of blood in the water. This is the list of the stacks that I am aware of: I. II. III. IV. I hope you’ll pardon my dubious take, but I can’t possibly understand how most of these will survive. If you’re one of the new stack providers – think long and hard about this situation before you make your splash. Like this: Like Loading... Cloud Computing a Catalyst for Virtualization « Data Center Knowledge. Ellen Rubin is the founder and Vice President of Products for CloudSwitch, which allows enterprises to run applications in the cloud without re-architecting the application or changing existing management tools.

ELLEN RUBIN CloudSwitch At first glance, cloud computing can appear to be “virtualization taken to its logical conclusion.” After all, if the main benefit of virtualization is to consolidate data center resources and increase the speed of provisioning, then cloud is the ultimate pay-off: don’t own the resources at all and cut provisioning down to a few minutes with instant self-service gratification. But upon further thought, cloud seems to be giving virtualization a return to the spotlight. A recent Gartner study noted that cloud computing is the number two priority for CIOs – trumped only by virtualization. Still More Virtualization To Be Done So is virtualization what’s old but new again?

This may require significant investment in additional hardware and software. Perl 6. Python Programming Language – Official Website.

Communication tech solutions

Contact Manager, Web Based CRM, Address Book for Small Business: Google Calendar: How to make your Google Calendar your PC's. Hard to Find 800 Numbers. Ten free tools to manage your personal brand online. Now, after you have finished the major overhaul of your Web presence with my tips from yesterday, the next important step is to listen to what others are saying about you, your site, and your company. Managing your personal brand is incredibly important these days, especially with the introduction of social media. Thankfully, there are many free tools that will do this for you and deliver the results right to your RSS reader and/or email account. I first stumbled across this idea while conducting research for a masters paper on social philanthropy. Social media blogger Beth Kanter discussed the importance of non-profits listening to their community, and I realized that the same rules apply to anyone.

Thanks to her advice, I now track every comment, ping, tweet, re-post and any other online conversation related to II. Below is a partial copy of “5 Free Tools for Personal Reputation Management.” “Google – Google.com/alerts Blog posts – Technorati.com Blog comments – backtype.com. IP Location Tool - Locate a Network Address on a Google Map. Getting Things Done. D*I*Y Planner | the best thing in printing since Gutenberg. WIDGETBOX. Find a friend to exchange languages ! Doc Scrubber™ Share Only What You Want Microsoft Word (.DOC) files can contain more than just text you see while editing them. Depending on the settings or features you use, they may contain all kinds of additional information that you may not want shared outside your home or company.

Doc Scrubber lets you see that information, and scrub it from files before sending them to others. Powerful Features Analyze Word Documents And discover hidden or potentially embarrassing data they may contain. Scrub Word Documents Remove hidden or potentially embarrassing data from your documents. Scrub Multiple Documents at a Time Scrub selected Word documents in a folder, or all documents in a folder, all at once - saving you time and effort. Tested Compatibility with Word 97, 2000, and XP documents Doc Scrubber can clean documents from multiple versions of Word. The Hidden Data Word Documents can contain all sorts of extra data, commonly referred to as "metadata".

This data can include: Line Monitoring - dslreports.com. Free Help Setting up Your Router or Firewall. To Test If Your Port Is Open Download our PFPortCheck ProgramInstall PFPortCheckRun PFPortCheck. Type in the port that you want to check, choose UDP or TCP, and click the Check Me button Why Our Open Port Check Tool Is Better Most online port checks assume that you already have an application (such as your game or torrent) listening for the port test on your computer, and then assume that the test was OK simply because they were able to connect to your computer. Also, web only port checkers are not able to test UDP since UDP is a connectionless protocol and there is no way to know if the packet actually made it to your computer without some sort of program on your computer waiting for that packet.

Our port test uses a local application to listen for the server trying to connect and then positively verifies that your port is forwarded. Screenshots and Instructions After downloading PFPortChecker, you run the installation file to install it on your computer. ProjectPier.org. EgoSurf - ego surfing without the guilt.