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Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor | Comment
Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online | Comment [4]
Educause Issues Statement on RIAA's Methods of Catching Music Pirates | Comment
ABC News to Open 5 University News Bureaus | Comment [10]
How a Lawsuit Over Electronic Reserves Could Affect Colleges | Comment [5]
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April 4, 2008
'Abortion' Searches Are No Longer Blocked, Says Johns Hopkins U.
The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health has reversed itself and will no longer block searches for the term “abortion” in its popular public health database Popline. Searches for the word had been blocked because of concerns over federal financing.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which finances Popline and is legally prohibited from “supporting or encouraging abortion as a method of family planning,” had objected to two abortion-related items in the database, the university said. Database administrators then decided to make “abortion” a stop word in searches about seven weeks ago.
Michael J. Klag, the school’s dean, said in a prepared statement today that he “could not disagree more strongly” with the decision. He is having the block reversed and will hold an inquiry into the matter.
Gloria Won, the librarian who first noticed that something was awry with the database last Monday, said she was pleased with the reversal. She said she had been “disturbed” by the decision to block “such a useful word,” and had encouraged library associations and medical organizations to contact the university.
Some medical researchers argue that U.S. policies on reproductive-health programs may encourage censorship. The policies create “a chill on the overall willingness and enthusiasm for researchers to tackle this topic,” said Janie Benson, vice president for research and evaluation at Ipas, an international women’s reproductive health group that promotes abortion rights.
The Agency for International Development did not return calls seeking comment.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Friday April 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [6]Johns Hopkins U. Health Database Blocks Searches for 'Abortion'
The “world’s largest database” on reproductive-health issues, run by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been blocking searches for the term “abortion” because of concerns over federal financing, according to Wired.
A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco became “puzzled” on Monday after running a routine search, and she then wrote to the database’s manager at Johns Hopkins to ask if the database had been changed. It has nearly 25,000 articles using the word.
“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” the database’s manager, Debbie Dickson, replied in an e-mail message. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”
The database receives money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency whose mission is “extending a helping hand to those people overseas struggling to make a better life, recover from a disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country.” Since 1973, the agency “has been legally prohibited from supporting or encouraging abortion as a method of family planning,” according to the agency’s Web site. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Friday April 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]January 23, 2008
U. of Manchester Adds Digital Repositories to Academic Search Engine
The University of Manchester announced yesterday a reintroduction of the academic search engine Intute, slated for the end of the month.
The newest development for the relaunch is the Intute Institutional Repository Search. It will be a search engine for university digital repositories, allowing researchers to easily find academic material in one place.
Caroline Williams, Intute’s executive director, says the search engine has gathered data from 86 institutions, and that number is growing.
The university launched Intute in the summer of 2006. At the time, it was touted in Britain as a “rival to Google.”
Hefty claim, but perhaps not without merit. The search engine was created specifically for British students (though it’s openly accessible to students everywhere) and is closely monitored by a consortium of seven British universities, including Oxford. “Subject experts” — from academics to librarians — scour the Web for the most relevant sources they can find with the aid of automated processes. In addition, users can suggest relevant sites for review. The goal is to ferret out the most useful and relevant academic information in the sea of Internet drudge.
“Compared to Google, we’re very small,” Ms. Williams says. “We focus on quality, rather than quantity.”
While she says there is no current plan to go international with the contributing consortium, she notes that a significant number of hits on Intute’s site comes from the U.S.—Hurley Goodall
Posted on Wednesday January 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]November 16, 2007
Skipping the Boring Parts of Faculty Lectures
The 1-hour-and-13-minute lecture on “The Birth and Death of Stars” by the MIT physics professor Walter H.G. Lewin is probably really good. But suppose you’re cramming for an exam, and you just want to review the part where he talks about white dwarfs (a type of star)?
MIT students are in luck. Lewin’s lecture not only has been recorded, but MIT has come up with a search engine that scans lectures for key words (like white dwarf) and lets students play just that part of the lecture back. Lewin mentions white dwarfs, for example, at the 9-minute-and-20-second mark.
The search engine, a prototype, was developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The system can now search 200 recorded MIT lectures, in video and audio, and the technology could be adopted at other universities.
The search engine is based on speech-recognition software that, MIT researchers say, gets four out of five words in a lecture correct. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Friday November 16, 2007 | Permalink | Comment [2]September 28, 2007
Open Content Alliance Will Scan Boston's Books
The Open Content Alliance, Brewster Kahle’s alternative to Google’s much-discussed book-scanning project, announced this week that it would digitize public-domain material from the 19 institutions in the Boston Library Consortium.
The alliance was created in 2005 by Mr. Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who has criticized Google’s digitizing project for scanning snippets of copyrighted texts and for tying material to its own search engine. Books scanned by the Open Content Alliance are public-domain texts that can be scanned in full and indexed by every search engine.
Mr. Kahle and his corporate sponsors, including Adobe, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard, haven’t grabbed as many headlines as Google, but they appear to be making steady progress. About 40 institutions have signed on, and pages are being digitized at six scanning centers across the country.
The newest location, at the Boston Public Library, will let the alliance scan books at a cost of just 10 cents per page, project officials said in a statement. —Brock Read
September 27, 2007
Google's Own Second Life?
Today The Arizona Republic notes an interesting rumor: Google is reportedly working to create a virtual world that will rival Second Life, and the company may be testing the project at Arizona State University.
So far, details are scant. But the university is now soliciting students with video-gaming experience for an unspecified software-testing project. And since the questionnaire Arizona State is sending to student applicants asks if they have Gmail accounts, speculation is rampant.
Tech bloggers and Arizona State students might be excited about the project, but skeptics are already lining up: The Motley Fool has weighed in with a column titled “Don’t Do It, Google.” —Brock Read
September 26, 2007
A Book on Google Goes Interactive
Google’s famous motto — “Don’t be evil” — has long been cited as a sign that the company isn’t your typical corporate hegemon. But now that its search engine has “utterly infiltrated our culture,” writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, it’s time to start asking questions about Google-as-monolith.
“If Google becomes the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it will have remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions,” writes Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “Its biases are built into its algorithms. It knows more about us every day. We know almost nothing about it.”
The scholar will take on the search engine in a forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community—and Why We Should Worry. But observers won’t have to wait to read his thoughts on Google. The professor is chronicling his progress on the book on a new blog.
The blog was created by the Institute for the Future of the Book, affiliated with the University of Southern California, which has made Mr. Vaidhyanathan its first fellow. Many of the institute’s projects have attempted to turn book writing into an interactive process, and the new blog will be no exception: Mr. Vaidhyanathan says he will post snippets of text that he has composed, and let readers have at them. “They might never make it into the manuscript,” he writes. “But they will be up here for you to rip up or smooth over.” —Brock Read
September 18, 2007
Google Reader Goes Beyond English
Google Reader, the search company’s news site and blog reader, is no longer limited to English. “As of today, it supports these languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, English (UK), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, and Korean,” wrote Kevin Systrom, a product manager, on the official Google blog.
Systrom also announced that the company was removing the “Google Labs” label from the Reader, meaning that it is past the “a bit wobbly” stage (that’s Google’s description) and has become a stable, mature product. However, the Labs label was still on the Reader page as of this afternoon. Perhaps the memo about maturation got lost in translation. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Tuesday September 18, 2007 | Permalink | Comment [1]September 17, 2007
Students Fret Over Facebook's Public Listings
Earlier this month Facebook made an announcement that, at first glance, seemed fairly innocuous: The social network decided to make “limited public search listings” available to people who weren’t using the site.
What that means, essentially, is that search engines like Google and Yahoo will now be able to locate Facebook users who haven’t designated their pages as “private.” Philip Fong, a Facebook engineer, wrote on the company’s blog that search-engine links would only show only the names and thumbnail photos of Facebook users: “We’re not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.”
But even that information is too much, according to the editors of The Cornell Daily Sun. In a fierce editorial, the newspaper accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, of invading the privacy of his site’s faithful patrons:
At an age when most of us are just trying to enjoy college, it’s unfortunate that we have to be so conscientious about our every move — and that Zuck feels the need to play the role of Main Cop. It’s the latest in a string of indications that Facebook isn’t the plucky upstart of a cultural phenomenon it was three years ago.
The Daily Sun worries that Facebook’s new policy will make it easier for employers to scrutinize students’ Facebook pages, and that could be a valid concern. Certainly, some students and alumni might be less than thrilled to know that the bare bones of their Facebook entries might soon be Googleable. But previous privacy scares haven’t seemed to drive students away from Facebook. Will this one be any different? —Brock Read
September 11, 2007
Playing Craps With Copyright?
Folks following Google’s ambitious book-scanning project might want to check out First Monday’s interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, a strong critic of the “Googlization” of libraries and copyright law. (The interview is available as a podcast and as a written transcript.)
Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, argues that Google’s library-scanning project could cause a copyright catastrophe by casting doubt on fair-use doctrine. Fair use is typically threshed out on a case-by-case basis, the scholar says, but Google is asking courts to issue broad rulings on the doctrine:
But to lay this huge experiment, this many millions of books on a rather rickety and unpredictable system like fair use, is actually very unfair to fair use. And what I¹m afraid of is that Google will certainly lose in court, and what will happen is courts will generate an indelicate view of fair use, a highly restricted view of fair use and will ultimately reign in a lot of future experiments.
Of course, plenty of college libraries have already signed on with Google’s digitization project, and more institutions will certainly follow suit. Should colleges be taking a more circumspect approach to Google Book Search? —Brock Read