Researchers from Japan's prestigious Waseda University and the Shanghai Jiaotong University in China have jointly developed a robot capable of reading out stories from printed books.
Called 二宮くん or Ninomiyakun, the aluminum-made robot is 1-meter tall and weighs 25kg. It comes with a built-in camera and a computer that can recognize 2,300 Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji) commonly known to a Japanese elementary school student. A character recognition software is used to translated text into spoken words, which are produced by a voice synthesizer.
Kamada Seiitirou, the professor who co-developed the robot, told the Yomiuri Shimbun that in future, Ninomiyakun will be enhanced to tell stories with emotions. Listen to the robot here:
If robotic researchers get their way, how will the face of storytelling be changed? There are larger questions to think about here as we inch closer toward technological singularity. What does it mean to be human?
It's official. The International Internet Preservation Consortium has announced the publication of the WARC file format as an ISO standard.
For those who are unfamiliar with web archiving, the WARC format provides a standard way to structure, manage and store resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It is an extension of the ARC format, which has been used since 1996 to store files harvested on the web.
WARC allows recording of HTTP request headers and arbitrary metadata, the allocation of an identifier for every contained file, the management of duplicates and of migrated
records, and the segmentation of the records. WARC files are intended to store every type of digital content, either retrieved by HTTP or another protocol.
The demand for a container format such as WARC came about many years ago when heritage organizations started searching for appropriate ways to collect and keep track Web content using web-scale tools such as web crawlers.
At the same time, cultural organizations were concerned with the requirement to archive very large numbers of born-digital and digitized files. A need was for a container format that permits one file simply and safely to carry a very large number of constituent data objects (of unrestricted type, including many binary types) for the purpose of storage, management, and exchange. Another requirement was that the container need only minimal knowledge of the nature of the objects.
The standardization of WARC is the first step toward facilitating interoperability across institutions charged with preserving our cultural heritage on the Internet. Hopefully, this move will promote the use of WARC beyond the web archiving community.
The National Library of Australia is giving users a glimpse into SBDS, an in-house developed discovery service focused on Australian content held by institution in the country. Essentially, it provides a "single point of access to resources currently discoverable via the Library's multiple discovery services, and to digitised material freely available online anywhere in the world."
The primary purpose of this first prototype version is to develop the technical framework to support this new discovery service, and as far as possible ensure that the technologies we are using will provide acceptable performance, especially for record updates. The design so far is based primarily on decisions made within the project team to allow rapid development of the prototype. What is there now will form the basis for feedback, ideas for improvement, and input into the design of new features from a wide range of people.The system is a work in progress, and we have made it available for you to follow our development as we build and improve it. The prototype will be constantly updated as it evolves into a system planned for release into production in the third quarter of this year.
This is one of the most laudable efforts in the development of information discovery platforms I've seen in recent years. The user interface is simple, yet displays search results that do not overwhelm users. You can choose to look for content that's only available online, in addition to external sources that are not held by the NLA.
The metadata comes from several sources including the Australian National Bibliographic Database, Picture Australia, Australian Research Online, OAIster, the Open Library, Hathi Trust and Wikipedia.
For now, the only thing that's lacking is the ability for users to tag and comment on content.
After 76 years, Nancy finally goes to the library!
Oracle today said that it is paying US$7.4 billion for Sun Microsystems, an amount that represents a 42 percent premium over Sun's Friday closing price of $6.69.
The surprise announcement comes on the heels of an earlier attempt by IBM to acquire Sun earlier this month. Talks between both companies broke down after a Big Blue refused to agree to Sun's request for a higher bid.
This deal, if approved, will mark Oracle's first acquisition of a vendor with a significant hardware business. Even before this, Oracle and Sun have an existing partnership where the former's datawarehousing solutions and database products are optimized for Sun servers, StorageTek arrays and the Solaris operating system.
While this acquisition presents opportunities for further synergies between Oracle and Sun, there are also issues that could derail the effort. Oracle needs to balance the interests of its lucrative database business with Sun's MySQL open source database product. That's on top on the competing middleware products from both companies.
Oracle will also have to heed the concerns of its existing hardware partners. Dell in particular needs to be assured that Uncle Larry's complete stack – from applications to disk – will not encroach on its Oracle partnership.
In participatory librarianship, one of the things we're trying to do is to facilitate conversations between people. That means helping people to connect with one another to engage in knowledge sharing. I recently learned about Aardvark, a company which has developed a social search product that should keep librarians awake at night.
So what is social search? According to the company's whitepaper published in March 2009:
Just like Web Search provided a revolutionary way to find web pages that have the information you're looking for, Social Search is a revolutionary way to find people who have the information you're looking for. In both cases, using sophisticated search indexing algorithms is a vast improvement over the manual process of following links or browsing directories to find what you want.If you've studied about information seeking behavior, you will know that we often turn to the immediate folks around us or those we have identified as experts in our social networks whenever we have an information need.
The goal of Social Search is to make the everyday activity of getting information from people you are connected to easier and more powerful. Most people rely on the human knowledge of those around them on a regular basis: when wandering over to a coworker, emailing a friend, or calling a family member, people are getting information that is personalized, timely, and trusted.
Like it or not, librarians are not the first people we think about whenever we need to know something. And while librarians know where to look for answers, they aren't experts in everything. More importantly, they can only work with information (not knowledge) that resides somewhere in online some database, website, book or journal.
Aardvark addresses that shortcoming by allowing you to tap into knowledge residing in people's heads. After all, information represents just a small fraction of the total universe of knowledge. There are far more things we know as a civilization that haven't been written or published somewhere.
To connect you with people who can help you address your information need, Aardvark will aggregate your connections in various social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, as well as your IM contacts. You send in any question and the system will use a variety of algorithmic techniques to identify the expert in your social network to answer that question.
So how should librarians respond to something like this? I'd say we should identify ourselves as experts in areas we're naturally comfortable (whether it's music, technology or fashion) with and plug into these communities. Librarians, especially those working in public libraries, can no longer be a Jack of all trades if we want to provide a valuable reference service that meets the diverse needs of our users.
If you are intending to participate in the Conversants virtual conference on participatory librarianship, check out this presentation by Dave Lankes for some ideas on conference topics. We're looking forward to hearing from you!
A group of Amazon customers have decided to boycott Kindle titles that cost more than $9.99. So far, nearly 800 books have been tagged "9 99boycott".
It's the case of greedy publishers who do not incur distribution and other costs that are typically associated with selling physical books. Their counterparts in the music industry had once pressured Apple to raise the price of iTunes' 99-cent music downloads, but Steve Jobs was adamant about keeping the price. Any effort to raise prices would backfire on the record labels themselves as well as Apple, since consumers may be driven to free downloads from illegal P2P sites and services. An Amazon customer summed it up best:
Kindle prices have been going up.
Just today I spotted a "trashy novel" for over $10 on the Kindle store -- when the HARDCOVER version costs $9 from Amazon!
Let's send a message to publishers:
Charging $11 for a paperback novel -- without the paperback! -- is ridiculous.
Charging $18 for a digital version of a book that relies heavily on photographs -- which look bad on the Kindle -- is ridiculous.
Charging $12 for a business book you can get at Costco in 2 weeks for $9.99 is ridiculous.
** LET'S TAKE ACTION **
Let's tag all over-$9.99 books with the tag "9.99boycott"!
Just go to the form field under the "Tags Customers Associate with This Product" headline and type "9.99boycott" (without the quotes) and click the button.
It's that easy.
I've already started.
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WHY?
Kindle books are kinda like movie tickets. While you can re-read the book, you cannot:
* donate it to a library
* sell it to a used book store
* sell it on Amazon's Used Marketplace
* trade it to a friend
And, of course, the book *has no paper* so it *has no production costs*.
The publisher does not need to pay for paper, glue, press time, press employees, insurance, ink, boxes, or shipping.
Amazon does not need to stock its warehouse, pay staff to fulfill orders, or pay shipping.
The price needs to reflect these VERY important facts.
We did not buy our Kindles with the promise of convenience and low prices, in order to be swindled with this kind of bait-and-switch tactics.
Those of you in Singapore might have seen this ad that aired on TV over the past week. It's extremely heartwarming, and forces you to take a step back and examine your relationship with your family members, though it was created with a purpose of getting singles to think about their expectations of their life partners by the Singapore government. Oftentimes, we get so caught up with those expecations that we fail to realize that it is the imperfections of the other person that complete our lives.
As the woman who delivered the eulogy of her late husband in the ad put it: "In the end it's these small things that you remember, the little imperfections that made them perfect for you. So to my beautiful children, I hope one day you too find yourselves life partners who are as beautifully imperfect as your father was, to me."
Microsoft has started airing its version of Apple's Mac vs PC ads to state a point: that PC users know what they want and demand a machine that does what they want to do, rather than turn to a Mac that's "more about aesthetics than about computing power". The model in the ad, Giampaolo, goes on to state further that he wants to pay for the computer and not the brand.
To be fair, as a user of both Macs and PCs, there's really no difference in the hardware and performance of Macs and PCs today. This ad is potentially misleading to the average consumer who needs to consult a Best Buy salesperson before a computer purchase. By the way, isn't HP a brand? By dismissing the brand equity of PC makers, Microsoft is undermining efforts undertaken by its hardware partners in differentiating themselves from other PC vendors and Apple. See it for yourself:
