Ed's Tech Tips

That's the slogan from a new free anti-spam utility from Carnegie Mellon University. This is a very innovative use of technology that serves dual purposes which I just implement on all of the comment forms for the blogs in Mount Blog. From the ReCAPTCHA web site:

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

 

 

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.

You can help by putting the ReCAPTCHA software on your site, if you have one. It is very easy to implement with support for a wide variety of programming languages. THere are plugins for popular applications, such as, WordPress , LifeType, and MediaWiki. It is one of the best programs of it's kind that I have seen. If you cannot read the text, click the recycle or refresh button to get a new image. If you are sight impaired, click the speaker icon to hear numbers read to you that you can enter into the field. 

 

Amazon has just released a new product of their own called the Kindle, an ebook reader. David Pogue has a great review at the New York Times, so I won't go into great detail about here. However, I will say that I think this ebook reader has a chance. Numerous readers have come and gone in the past. At $399 it is still too much money. It is a $100 more than the Sony reader which is similar. It uses the same e-ink technology, has long battery life and fits easily in the hand. It is about the size of a DVD case.

What sets the Kindle apart is that it features free wireless connectivity and it is not WiFi. Instead, Amazon has teamed up with Sprint and is using Sprint's 3G data service that Kindle customers do NOT have to pay for. Instead it allows you to shop for books from Amazon without ever connecting to a computer.  You can be wherever you can use your cell phone and download a new book in less than a minute - in a cab, waiting in line at the bank or sitting in the doctors office. You also have free access to Wikipedia and can subscribe to daily newspapers, magazines and blogs that are automatically delivered to you. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal arrive at 3 AM ready and waiting you in the morning.

So far Amazon has 90,000 books -  over four times more than Sony has and Amazon plans on making every book they carry available for the Kindle. The Kindle store is similar to Amazon's online store. You can read a chapter of the book and read reviews from other customers. With the built in keyboard you can take notes, bookmark pages and search for books. The average price of books is $9.99 for best sellers - more than a paperback, but less than trade cover or hard cover. Finally, someone who understands that ebooks should cost less and has the weight t convince others of that fact.

As a student, this would be a great alternative to lugging around numerous books in a back pack. If you are a avid reader of newspapers and magazines, the Kindle would help keep your recycling bins from getting full.

Amazon is trying to to make it's Kindle the iPod of books and hopefully it will catch on and they will come out with cheaper models. They sold out of their initial stock. I do not know how many they had to begin with. 

If you are in the market for a computer this holiday season but have a limited budget, you may want to consider a few new non-windows computers:

Asus Eee PC

If you want a ultra compact notebook for less than $399, take a look at the new Eee PC from Asus. Asus? It is not a household brand name for some, but if you have ever built your own computer Asus motherboards are very highly regarded. Asus also produces components for other corporations that you may have heard of before, including Sony (PlayStation 2), Apple Computer (iPod, iPod Shuffle, MacBook), Alienware, Falcon Northwest, HP and Compaq.

The Eee PC is a 7" notebook, with no hard drive or optical drive, instead it has a 4 GB flash drive. The 4G model has a full QWERTY keyboard, three USB ports, SD card slot, WiFi and ethernet network adapters, 512 MB RAM, 900 Mhz Intel mobile processor, VGA out, mic and headphone jacks. 

Instead of Windows, it runs Linux with 40 applications across 4 categories: Internet, Work, Learn and Play. 

The notebook powers up almost instantly and runs OpenOffice which is MS Office compatible. You also have Firefox and Skype. You can connect external USB drives, as well as, cameas and printers. Most customers on Amazon have given it a 5 star rating.  The biggest complain is the small keyboard and touchpad, but that is going to be an issue with any notebook this size. This looks very promising, but if $400 is too much there are still other options, but before we look at those, consider another notebook option...

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

The OLPC is a computer designed for children in third world countries. You can help contribute to the program by buying one for yourself and one for a child for $399 - you cannot get just one by itself. The configuration is similar to the Eee PC, but you do not have as much RAM or as fast a processor, but what do expect for a $200 notebook. However, it does include a webcam and game conrtroller. The OLPC does run Linux and supports WiFi, as well as, a mesh network. This means that if you have a group of these computers, such as in a class room, only one of them needs to be connected to the Internet in order for all of them to be connected to the Internet. It has an interesting social interface to help with teaching. Be sure to visit the OLPC web site to learn more. The program is not without controversy since it could be argued that children in third world countries could benefit more from other things besides notebook computers. 

Everex TC2502 Green GPC

If you only have $200 in your budget, check out this desktop computer available at Wal-Mart. A monitor is extra. It does include a 80 GB hard drive and DVD/CD-RW drive. It runs a version of Linux called gOS, which emphasizes Google's online applications. Howeve, you can run other Linux compatible applications, such as, OpenOffice if you want.

If $200 is too much and you like Do-It-Yourself projects, you can purchase the $59 dollar motherboard which you'll need to match up with a case, power supply, hard drive, CD drive keyboard and mouse.

For the price of a blank CD, you can dowload the gOS live CD ISO image and burn your own copy that you can use in a computer you already own.

 

 

 

 

 

So you have a Family Plan for your cell phone and you get your teenager a cell phone. You disable web access so they do not run up data charges with surfing the web or downloading  games.  You lay down the law about how many minutes they can use a month. You explain how unlimited nights and weekends work (nights start after 7 or 9 PM depending on what plan you have) and you show them how to check how many minutes there are remaining on the plan. You even sign up for unlimited texting, because they are happy to text instead of talk.

The Deal with Texting 

Unlimited texting on the Sprint Family Plan is $20 for all phones on the plan, but without it text messages are 15 cents each, sent and received. For example, send a message and receive a reply and that cost you 30 cents. It does not take long for your teen to burn through $100 or more simply texting. I learned the hard way. They claim ignorance and you would like to too, because you did imagine how they could text so much, but you are stuck with the bill. By the way, texting cannot be disabled on Sprint/Nextel phones. You can restrict who they can call and who can call them. You can disable web access and downloads and roaming, but I guess the "freedom to text message" has been added to the Bill of Rights as long as you can pay the bill. You can ground, bribe and plead but your teen is likely to give in to the pressure. Plus you cannot stop other teens from texting your teen. You can tell them, but then they will forget or ignore you and text any way. You are not their parent. Therefore, go with the unlimited plan or have a pay-as-you-go plan that they are responsible paying for. Unfortunately, with pay-as-you-go plans you may not know who is calling your teen or who they are calling, but that is another story. Also, the phones and the minutes will cost more.

After all that you think you have your bases covered then you get your bill and you see multiple $9.99 per month subscriptions for ring tones and $1.99 per message charges (that will be covered in another article). What the (insert explicative here)!!! You call the phone company and complain and they answer that these are legitimate charges, but will disable web access on the phone. Thanks a lot, but I already did that. Once again your teens claim ignorance and then after further interrogation they think they might of tried to order some ring tones from an ad in the back of Seventeen or Cosmogirl magazine.

Accidental Ringtone Subscriptions  

Look back in the magazine and sure enough you will find full page ads for ringtones, wallpapers, hot hunk movie animations and future husband tests. In large text at the top of the page you are instructed to send a text message containing "teen+code" to a five digit number. It is so easy! In small print at the botom of the page you learn that you can download five ringtones per month for a subscription rate of only $9.99 a month. I could get HBO for that much. I could buy 10 complete songs from iTunes instead of 30 second snippets of a song done by cover artists. Now if you have web access disabled on your phone you cannot download the fake ringtones, but your phone bill will still be charged every month. On the bill there is no explanation or instructions on how-to cancel your subscription. You have to track down the web site and discover what number to send "STOP" to, to stop the insanity and stop the drain on your bank account. 

Make Your Own Ringtone? Maybe

Instead of subscribing, you could, buy your ringtones one at a time from your cell phone carrier. I have Sprint and the cost is $2.50 per ringtone. The music snippets are from the actual artists, but it is $1.50 more than the whole song I would purchase from iTunes. Then the thought occurs to you that you can transfer data to your phone via a cable you usually have to buy separately or via Bluetooth for free if your computer has Bluetooth. Well, I have Bluetooth on my Mac and with Leopard, it is even easier to transfer files to and from your phone. Many phones will play MP3's and you can use a free program like Audacity (an open source audio editor that will work on Linux, Windows and Macs) to trim a song down to a suitable length for a ringer. However, once you convert, edit and transfer the song over you might discover that you cannot assign the song as a ringtone. You can play it, but you cannot use it as a ringer, at least not on a locked cell phone from Sprint. I have read that this is possible on a iPhone, even though Apple sells ringtone versions  of many of the songs available online for 99 cents and you can select which part of the song to use as a ringtone right from within iTunes.

There is a work-around that my daughter's boyfriend revealed to me. If your phone has a voice recorder, you could record the song via the cell phone's mic and then assign it as a ringer. This does not give you the same control or quality you would have with the above method using Audacity, but it does allow to have a variety of ringtones for free and remember we are only talking about ringtones. I remember when you had no control over your phone's ringer which by the way you did not own and had to lease from the phone company monopoly. You could not even adjust the volume, but that shows you how old I am and how far we have come. It use to be a big deal for a household to have a separate phone line for the teens. That family was rich. Now it is not uncommon for every family member to have their own phone that they can play "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader" on, customize with hot hunks wallpapers and fake ringtones.

 

I wrote a post a couple months ago titled "What's a Wiki?". I should logically write one called "Why A Wiki?", but there is already a lot on the web about the benefits of using a wiki, so I am not going to dwell on that subject too much, however here are some links to help you out if you are still wondering:

• BusinessWeek article on wikis
• Wiki Benefits 
• Wiki Solutions for Business
• Gartner Report on Team Collaboration and Social Software

In short ,wikis can easily facilitate collaboration and communication between people in networks and enhance knowledge building, sharing and searching. Almost any business or organization can benefit from using a wiki internally or externally as a web site. A wiki can pick up where email falls short when it comes to working with others and no one can argue that email is not beneficial. Email can be overwhelming, but a wiki can help with that by keeping information in a single shared space so that everyone is on the same page, literally. So, take it from me you want a wiki. That's not the hard question. The difficult question is which wiki to use? 

You can go to WikiMatrix and compare dozens of wikis, large and small, commercial and free.  There is even a Wiki Wizard  to help you narrow down your choices and you'll want to use it.  I had initially decided on MediaWiki, the same software used to run  Wikipedia, probably the most popular wiki in the world. It is also the wiki software used by many others. It is well supported, robust, yet easy to install. Thousands are using it, so I thought it would be easy to use and it is, to a point. While a few on my staff saw the potential of wiki's Mediawiki's interface and work-arounds to make it a useful collabrative tool were just too awkward. The developers make it point to indicate that their main purpose is to develop MediaWiki for Wikipedia and it shows. For example, it is easy to upload an image, but you hav eto do it in a seprate page from the page where you want to put it. You have to remember the image name or file name to include it on a page. You can also attach other documents, such as PDF's and Word files, however they are treated like image files. There is also no adequate WYSIWYG graphical editor. There are some in development, but they are either incomplete or buggy. You can say what you want about the benefits of wiki syntax, the average office worker does not want to learn it or use it on a regular basis. I personally do not mind it, but I'm a tech geek, web developer and network administrator comfortable using the command line on a remote Linux server.

To make a wiki work in the average office it has to be easy to use as email. Unfortunately, the open source wikis, while feature rich and flexible, ease of use is not a hallmark feature. For ease of use you need to look to the commercially supported wikis, such as, SocialText and Confluence. They both have a free version, but the later only for 5 users. Confluence will donate software to non-profits, but because we are related to an academic institution the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association would not qualify. SocialText offers an open source version, but it requires that Apache 1 and 2 be installed. I was able to install a VMware vitual image of it, but found the configuration not so straight forward and could not get the email function, a critical component of SocialText, to work. 

I then saw an article on a CNet blog that mentioned that DekiWiki from MindTouch was one of the fastest growing commercially supported open source wiki software programs on the market. The installation is more involved than MediWiki, but Mindtouch offers a VMware version like SocialText that is easy to install on the free Vmware server or Player application. I installed it and I was sold. DekiWiki, which was orginally based on MediaWiki, has all of the best features of MediaWiki, but without the non-user friendly awkward interface. It is as easy to use as email, but with a lot more functionality than MediaWiki. Check out the complete feature list on the Mindtouch web site. The full unrestricted version of DekiWiki is avilable for free. MindTouch makes money like Red Hat does , by selling support for the wiki. I think that business model will builds more good will, as well as, acceptance of the product and broader market share. It's worked for Linux and MySQL. The wiki is actively being developed, with new versions or updates scheduled for December and Febraury. There is an active community of DekiWiki developers and users at Opengarden.org.

You do not need to install DekiWiki to test it out. You can open a free account on Wik.is (.is is the country  domain for Iceland - the home country for one of the co-founders of MindTouch). You get 100 MB of space. If you want more you can sign up for the Pro version which will get you 10 GB of space and the ability to include your ads on your ite. The free version has no advertising. The cost is $10/ month billed annually. You can get it for $5 a month if you sign up before 2008.

So, which wiki? DekiWiki from MindTouch. 

In another post I'll describe how we are using the wiki and some other possible uses for the software.  

 

blipBack is a new web widget that allow syou to easily post or embed video or audio comments on your web site or blog. Many computers (all of the new Apple models, except the mini Mac) have built in web cams and microphones. If you do not , external USB web cams are fairly inexpensive and easy to install.

The widget automatically detects your hardware via the Adobe Flash plugin. There is no additional software to install. You allow it to connect to your camera and mic, click record and post your message or comment. Check it out below:

 

I might be able to use this on the main Alumane Association web site as a video Class Notes feature or as a tool to promote Reunions.