Erehwon Notebook
The Occasional Notebooks of Doug Miller
Wednesday, February 23, 2000
3:37:46 PM I'll freely admit to being an information-junkie, but I'm also strapped for time. That's why I'm on a continual quest to find new and better ways to sort, search, and summarize the information I want access to on a regular basis. My current tool set ranges from accounts on major news and tech news web sites to personal portals to a variety of search tools to a Palm VII. Today, I've run across a site that may prove to be an invaluable too indeed, something called The Daily Learner.
TDL is "an intelligent online newspaper that uses artificial intelligence techniques to learn about your interests." Basically, this is a research project where an intelligent system has been designed to do content relevance ranking based on what stories you read and how you rate them. After an initial set up, the system begins learning your preferences, and on subsequent visits presents a customized menu of news items (mostly from the major wire services). Unlike traditional news portal sites, however, the system keeps learning the more you use it. This is a truely adaptive news agent. Even more useful are the mobile tools that have been develop, not only for the Palm VII, but also for Windows CE and PDQ Smartphones. This reminds me a lot of the news agent software in David Brin's book Earth, and might just represent the future of news retrieval. Coupled with a Palm VII, I've got a wireless, read anywhere, adaptive, intelligent news agent, which is just way too cool!
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Monday, February 21, 2000
9:18:39 PM Slashdot | Your Rights Online | Lightning Crashes, An Old Freedom Dies
An excellent piece on online censorship, and some informative details about the problems with blocking software. In some ways, this is a new debate, but at the core, it's really the same old debate instigated by social conservatives hell-bent on legislating morality.
To me, this is an interesting debate not only from the larger social concerns of free speech and censorship, but because I encounter virtually the same sort of issue nearly every day in corporations. A key point in this larger debate is the issue of parental responsibility, and whether it's more appropriate to deal with inappropriate content through a technological solution, i.e. filters, or if parents should take an active role in policing what their children look at online.
Interestingly enough, as a corporate IT type, I run into the same argument at work. Very, very often, managers want to employ technological controls to limit what their employes can do, or access as a group, rather than actually manage and lead their people. Essentially, managers often want to avoid personal contact with the very people they're responsible for providing guidance to, and would prefer to rely on a technological crutch.
The final irony, of course, is that in both the larger societal debate and the arena of corporate politics, it's generally the technology advocates who are arguing against technological solutions and in favor of interpersonal solutions. So often, we are accussed of being anti-social and out-of-touch, only concerned with technology and not people. Why is it then, that time and time again, it's the technologists who really understand the limits and abilities of this stuff that are the primary voices in favor of human solutions rather than technological ones?
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5:24:05 PM Since this is now common knowledge to my employer, I guess that I can announce that I'll be leaving my current position to start a new position at Cyberdesic. I'm extremely excited by the prospects of this new opportunity, and man, does it seem like a great fit. Wish me luck!
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Sunday, February 20, 2000
2:21:30 PM ThinkFree Office - The first of the MS Office compatible web-based office suites has emerged, and it isn't made by either Microsoft or Sun. Thinkfree provides a no-cost, Office-compatible Java-based suite including word processing, presentation graphics, a spreadsheet, and a PIM/e-mail client. All the basics appear to be here, and it can be used offline. The current version will run on all the Microsoft OS's, as well as Linux. Versions for other*nixes and the PPC are in the works. All-in-all it sounds pretty good - unfortunately, it keeps dying on me halfway through the download of the initial Java classes. I'll try and report more later, once I've managed to get it working!
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