DrWeb's Domain

Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them - New York Times

Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them - New York Times.

Slipstream Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them
By JASON PONTIN, Published: February 25, 2007

THE World Wide Web is awash in digital video, but too often we can’t find the videos we want or browse for what we might like.

That’s a loss, because if we could search for Internet videos, they might become the content of a global television station, just as the Web’s hypertext, once it was organized and tamed by search, became the stuff of a universal library.

What we need, says Suranga Chandratillake, a co-founder of Blinkx, a start-up in San Francisco, is a remote control for the Web’s videos, a kind of electronic TV Guide. He’s got just the thing.

Today in Comics History: Zorro creator died « Sequential Study

Today in Comics History: Zorro creator died « Sequential Study.

Today in Comics History: Zorro creator died
November 23rd, 2006

Today in 1958, Johnston McCulley passed away at the age of 75 in Los Angeles, California. He is remembered for creating the pulp hero Zorro, first appearing in McCulley’s 5-part serial “The Curse of Capistrano” from All-Story Weekly in 1919. The character was a huge influence on masked super-heroes to come, and inspired the creation of DC Comics’ Batman. (Sources: The Vintage Library, Wikipedia)

Pictured above, McCulley stands second from the left on the set of the 1920 silent film The Mask of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks. The movie catapulted the character’s popularity and led to hundreds of pulp stories (many written by McCulley), novels, comics, and merchandise.

CORRECTION: The photograph is more likely from the set of the Disney “Zorro” TV series circa 1957. McCulley is flanked by actors Guy Williams as Zorro and Henry Calvin as Sgt. Garcia. Many thanks to Lil Niramani for catching my erroneous assumption. Any other further info is welcome. (Photo from The Vintage Library.)

One of my namesake people, Johnston McCulley.. writer and creator of the original Zorro.. I don't know if we are related, but I don't think so.. the name is spelled the same though.. I think this was his most significant screenwriting success in his career...

TheStar.com - artsentertainment - Everyone's connected, at least in TV plots

TheStar.com - artsentertainment - Everyone's connected, at least in TV plots.

Everyone's connected, at least in TV plots
Feb 24, 2007 04:30 AM, Raju Mudhar, Entertainment Reporter

Move over flashbacks and omnipresent voiceovers; there's an annoying new device that is sweeping across pop culture – let's call it the connection con.

It's the idea that seemingly random people have significant but unknown links to each other, with meaningful ramifications.

Heroes and Lost are the biggest culprits on television right now, but we could add the failed ABC serial Six Degrees. Recently on Heroes, we've learned Nathan is Claire's father, Christopher Eccleston's Invisible Man has earlier links to Horn-Rimmed Glasses, while the big unknown right now is the mysterious and yet-to-be-seen Linderman, who has ties to almost all of the characters in some way.

Of course, it's Lost that has made this con into an art form. I could go on for pages listing all the pre-island connections that have been shown in flashback, and the conceit is that one day it will be revealed there is some overarching point, a promised "a-ha" moment that will make this intricate spiderweb of character links all make sense.

Sailing With Few Frills or Inhibitions - New York Times

Sailing With Few Frills or Inhibitions - New York Times.

Activities and Interests > Cruises
Sailing With Few Frills or Inhibitions
By MATT GROSS, Published: February 25, 2007

O.K., so the guy from Southern California was telling me about Seaman's, the strip club on the island of St. Martin where he'd made the acquaintance of two prostitutes, while behind me the self-proclaimed Almost Cool Crowd — a handful of hard-partying Americans ranging from 26 to 42 years old — were drinking Carib beers and rum punches and dancing barefoot to Euro-ish rhythms spun by D.J. Dan, a diminutive music maestro with oversized black plastic eyeglasses and an unshakably ebullient demeanor.

But I couldn't concentrate on any of this, because right there, in a corner of Deck 5's outdoor bar, on the black-cushioned banquette next to the hot tub, two gorgeous French women — part of a trio who'd resolutely refused to converse with the rest of us — were engaged in an erotic wrestling match. They were slapping each other's faces with hands and flip-flops, their sundresses riding up their thighs, their mouths stretching to form wide, ecstatic smiles. The girls had, as they say, gone wild.

If easyCruise — the two-year-old low-cost, no-frills cruise line that is an offshoot of easyJet, the low-cost, no-frills European airline — was aiming for a younger crowd, it had succeeded.

A different kind of cruising, aimed at a younger and more on-your-own kind of crowd, less frills, more emphasis on the ports-of-call than the ship itself.. don't miss the cool "interactive graphic" of the ships, A Tour of easyCruiseOne...

Dangerously Irrelevant: Gone Fischin' : Did You Know?

Dangerously Irrelevant: Gone Fischin'.

Gone Fischin' : Did You Know?

[update: please see my comment below regarding permission rights to use this presentation; also, Karl says that the music is a mix of three tracks from The Last of the Mohicans]

Earlier this month I thanked Karl Fisch for his wonderful Did You Know? presentation. I've been playing around with a modified version of his original files and Karl has given me permission to make the new version available to folks. Here it is (pick your desired format)
...

Good, thought-provoking and a bit frightening, too.. I looked at the YouTube version.. maybe we should recommend this to start off the next Library Training & Development Day? ...

Chronicle Careers: 2/20/2007: The New Library Professional

Chronicle Careers: 2/20/2007: The New Library Professional.

The New Library Professional
By Stanley Wilder

If you work in an academic library and are under 35, you probably don't have a lot in common with your older counterparts. You are far more likely to work in areas beyond the confines of traditional librarianship, often in information technology. You are less likely to hold a degree in library science. You are more diverse in ethnic and racial terms. And while those of you in nonsupervisory jobs generally earn less than your comparable older colleagues, some of you in high-tech jobs earn much more.

All of those conclusions are based on 2005 demographic data, the latest available, from the Association of Research Libraries, which collects information on the professional staffs at its member libraries.

Burlington Free Press.com | Top Stories: Middlebury College rethinks Wikipedia

Burlington Free Press.com | Top Stories: Middlebury College rethinks Wikipedia.

Middlebury College rethinks Wikipedia
Published: Tuesday, February 13, 2007
By Tim Johnson Free Press Staff Writer

Suppose you want to impress someone with your command of local trivia by pointing out that the main architect of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was not really Sherman after all, but a Vermont senator named George F. Edmunds -- the man Burlington named a school after.

You're not entirely sure of this, however, so you Google "George F. Edmunds." The first thing that pops up on your computer screen is the "George F. Edmunds" entry in Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia" online that's written and edited by thousands of people around the world -- anyone who has access to an Internetconnected computer can contribute. This entry tells you that, yes, indeed, Edmunds was the author of the 1890 antitrust act.

The Wikipedia citation might be enough for you to prevail in a barroom trivia contest, but could you get away with using it as a footnote in a history term paper?

Not at Middlebury College. The history department there recently adopted a policy declaring, in part, that "Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source."

Online Collection Presents Oral Histories of U.S. Diplomats - The Library Today (Library of Congress)

Online Collection Presents Oral Histories of U.S. Diplomats - The Library Today (Library of Congress).

February 21, 2007
Online Collection Presents Oral Histories of U.S. Diplomats
Includes Interviews with Z. Brzezinski, J. Child, L. Eagleburger, J. Kirkpatrick, C.B. Luce, D. MacArthur II, A. Harriman, D. Rusk, C. Vance, M.P. Wolcott

On Feb. 21, a new online collection of interviews with some of the most prominent diplomats of the 20th century will be available from the Library of Congress at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/.

"Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training" presents a window into the lives of American diplomats. Transcripts of interviews with U.S. diplomatic personnel capture their experiences, motivations, critiques, personal analyses and private thoughts. These elements are crucial to understanding the full story of the creation of a structure of stable relationships that maintained world peace and protected U.S. interests and values.

Most of the interviews in the collection come from foreign service officers, but there also are some with political appointees and other officials. While some 1920s-, 1930s-, and World War II-era diplomacy is covered, most of the interviews involve post-World War II diplomacy, from the late 1940s to the 1990s.

Another fine collection from the American Memory project at the Library of Congress..

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar - New York Times

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar - New York Times.

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar
By JULIE BOSMAN, Published: February 18, 2007

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation.

Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

Such a strange ironic discussion, on a truly descriptive and accurate word in a book where it makes sense, and it works in the story.. hopefully, sensible minds will prevail on this fine book.. the author is a librarian in Los Angeles.. thanks to Library Link of the Day for the pointer to this one...

Update February 23, 2007: American Libraries has an article on this now, too...

Scrotum Flap Raises Ruckus over Librarians’ Sensibilities

A thread on a school-library discussion list about the 2007 Newbery Award winner The Higher Power of Lucky has catapulted the practice of school librarianship onto the front page of the February 18 New York Times. As of February 23, it had also propelled the novel into the top 40 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list—demonstrating that, for reading material at least, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Pet finders unleashed | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Pet finders unleashed | The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Pet finders unleashed
It's one cagey business for detectives who search for missing loved ones
By Alex Roth STAFF WRITER, February 19, 2007

It's 11 a.m. in Oceanside and Annalisa Berns, pet detective, is searching for a missing Jack Russell terrier.

Berns and her partner, Landa Coldiron, already have picked up several items with rubber gloves and sealed them in bags marked “evidence.” These items – small pieces of fur, lumps of coyote feces – offer potential clues to the whereabouts of Chloe, a white-and-brown purebred who vanished from her owners' backyard five days earlier.

Great story on a local entrepreneurial business to find missing pets.. the game's afoot, and yes, for the owners, finding a lost loved pet is very important...

Feeding your brain: new benefits found in chocolate | Tech&Sci | Science | Reuters.com

Feeding your brain: new benefits found in chocolate | Tech&Sci | Science | Reuters.com.

Feeding your brain: new benefits found in chocolate
Sun Feb 18, 2007 5:03pm ET, By Julie Steenhuysen

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As if people needed another excuse to like chocolate, new studies suggest a specially formulated type of cocoa may boost brain function and delay decline as people age, researchers said on Sunday.

Scientists, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, presented results from early studies testing the effects on the brain of flavanols, an ingredient found in cocoa.

Funded by candy maker Mars Inc., which provided a specially formulated liquid cocoa concoction for the research, the studies suggest that flavanols increase blood flow to the brain and may hold promise for treating some vascular impairments.

More good reasons to love, enjoy, and celebrate chocolate.. smarter people eat chocolate, don't you know? :) ...

TypePad Featured Blogs: Skimp

TypePad Featured Blogs: Skimp.

February 17, 2007
Skimp

Hide the credit cards, Skimp is a new blog guaranteed to turn practical, research-minded electronic lovers into the biggest impulse shoppers this side of the Pacific. Loaded with coupons, deals, and discounts on tech toys of all sorts -- from webcams to monitors, scanners to cell phones. The posts are simple and straight to the point, offering only the facts, prices, and links you need to know. There are often more than a dozen posts a day leaving readers swooning with desire. The products come from BestBuy, Circuit City, NewEgg, Tiger Direct, and even more old-school department stores like JC Penney. If you're shopping online, look here first.
Technorati Tags: bargains, electronics, shopping
Email this • Add to del.icio.us • Subscribe to this feed

Always after a good bargain, coupon, or discount, this blog featured by Typepad looks like a winner.. you can search the entries via Technorati...

Google Earth Blog: Yahoo Pipes - What It Means for Google Earth/Maps - See Earthify

Google Earth Blog: Yahoo Pipes - What It Means for Google Earth/Maps - See Earthify.

February 09, 2007
Yahoo Pipes - What It Means for Google Earth/Maps - See Earthify

Yesterday Yahoo released a new beta product called Yahoo Pipes.  This tool has already been called "...a milestone in the history of the Internet" by visionary Tim O'Reilly. The full concept may be a little tricky to grasp if you are not a technologist, but in a nutshell it enables you to easily take the output from one Internet site and feed it to another site as an input which then lets you do something new with the data. (Those of us who have lots of Unix experience are quick to grasp the concept). The Google Maps mashups you hear about all the time (combining unique data and applications with maps) are an example of manually developed "pipes". Yahoo Pipes makes it even easier using a graphical diagram to architect by drag and drop mashups (and more). So, for example you can take the home page of the New York Times, find all the words which are locations, and then find pictures at Flickr which represent those locations. What I am excited about is that it should be possible to include applications which can handle KML and both process and generate GE content combined with other data sources to generate really unique GE visualizations. Read on for an example of what I'm talking about in the form of a thing called Earthify.

American RadioWorks - Hearing America: A Century of Music on the Radio

American RadioWorks - Hearing America: A Century of Music on the Radio.

American Radioworks: Hearing America: A Century of Music on the Radio

A century ago, the first radio broadcasts sent music out into the air. Since then, music has dominated America’s airwaves and it’s been a cultural battleground.

Listen to the radio hour or read the transcript.
Download this program as an mp3.

A great listen and wonderful historical look at radio in America.. includes parts on "An American revolution on the radio," a map of AM and FM stations from 1922 through 2006, forefather of modern shock jock, clashes with country music, and "sex, race, and rock & roll" .. here's a link to the stories resources...

Slashdot | Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability

Slashdot | Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability.

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability
Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 17, @11:18PM from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.

oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.' "