From: The Internet TourBus - A virtual tour of cyberspace
[mailto:TOURBUS@;LISTSERV.AOL.COM] On Behalf Of Bob Rankin
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 11:26 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: TOURBUS - 10 Oct 02 - Macaroni Clean Out The Icebox
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TOURBUS Volume 8, Number 19 -- 10 Oct 2002
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Visit the Tourbus Home Page at http://www.TOURBUS.com !
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP: Another Macaroni Clean Out the Icebox Post
TODAY'S TOURBUS ADDRESS: Yep. We've got some of them too.
Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange
curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, the river that provided much
of the water for ancient Mesopotamia. :P
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TOURBUS is made possible by the kind support of our sponsors. Please
take a moment to visit today's sponsors and thank them for keeping our
little bus of Internet happiness on the road week after week.
On with the show ...
-----------
Google News
-----------
Two incredibly cool and useful Web sites debuted recently, one that
garnered a whole mess of media attention and one that, sadly, no one
seemed to notice. The first site, the one that everyone was (and
still is) talking about, is Google News at
<A HREF="http://news.google.com/";>
http://news.google.com/ </A>
If you're familiar with other Google sites -- images.google.com,
groups.google.com, catalogs.google.com, and so on - you're in for a
bit of a surprise. Google's news site looks an awful lot like a
portal. [GASP! Google ... has ... a ... PORTAL?!] In fact, my first
reaction was that news.google.com looks an awful lot like Yahoo Full
Coverage at
<A href="http://news.yahoo.com/fc";>
http://news.yahoo.com/fc </A>
Like Full Coverage, Google News displays and categorizes headlines
amassed from news sources all over the world. But, while Full
Coverage is continuously updated by a team of people, Google News is
updated by a highly skilled flock of pigeons. [Sorry. Old joke.]
Actually, according to the About Google News page, Google News is
"compiled solely by computer algorithms without any human
intervention."
The site archives articles "from approximately 4,000 news sources
worldwide," updates its collection of articles every 15 minutes, and
automatically arranges those articles "to present the most relevant
news first." Quotes from:
<A href="http://news.google.com/help/about_news_search.html";>
http://news.google.com/help/about_news_search.html </A>
The Google News site is easy to both navigate and figure out, so much
so that now that you have the URL I should probably just shut up and
get out of your way. Let me add one thing, though: if you want to
know a whole lot more about how Google News actually works, there is
no better source that Chris Sherman's recent SearchDay article at
<A
HREF="http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1002-google-news.html";
>
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1002-google-news.html </A>
-------
MIT OCW
-------
The second site to debut recently, albeit quietly, was MIT's
OpenCourseWare site at
<A HREF="http://ocw.mit.edu";>
http://ocw.mit.edu </A>
Back in April of 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]
announced the ground-breaking and ambitious goal that, over the next
ten years, MIT should make available online all of its course
materials from every MIT undergraduate and graduate course. Syllabi.
Course calendars. Lecture notes. Assignments. Exams. Everything.
Available to the entire online world. No charge.
Pretty amazing, isn't it?
The first phase of MIT's OpenCourseWare project debuted last week,
giving the world access to MIT course materials from 32 courses in 17
different departments ranging from Aeronautics and Astronautics to
Urban Studies and Planning. Materials from an additional 2,000 MIT
courses will be added to the OpenCourseWare site over the next few
years.
So, does this mean you can now get a free, online degree from MIT?
Not on your life, Chester! While educators are encouraged to borrow
MIT's course materials for their own curricula, and while everyone in
the world is encouraged to use the OpenCourseWare site for self-study,
MIT has absolutely no plans to offer credit for the online versions of
their courses.
Besides, what makes MIT MIT isn't its course documents. Covalent
bonding works the same in Cambridge as it does in Irvine, and the
second derivative of 2 x squared is the same along the banks of the
Charles River as it is at the confluence of the 5 and 405 freeways.
What makes MIT MIT -- and what makes MIT worth $26K a year -- isn't
it's course documents. It's its faculty. And THAT you can't put
online.
Or, in the words of MIT spokesperson Jon Paul Potts in a recent CNET
interview,
An MIT education happens in the classroom, by interacting with
other students and with faculty, not by reading some Web pages or
downloading some materials, or even watching a video lecture.
<A href="http://news.com.com/2100-1023-961563.html";>
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-961563.html </A>
Still, MIT's OpenCourseWare site is an amazing educational resource,
one that will have an impact on educational institutions and learning
organizations around the world.
And, between you and me, I think the OpenCourseWare site is a heck of
a lot more exciting that Google News. :)
-----------
TrueSpectra
-----------
As long as we're taking about education, I figured I'd give you a peek
at what I have been working on at Cal State Fullerton for the past
couple of days.
There are a bunch of problems with putting images online, especially
if you want to use those images to teach. The biggest problem is
bandwidth. Oftentimes to place a huge, high-resolution image online
in a way that doesn't take an entire semester to download you have to
both drop that image's resolution and crop the living heck out of it.
Instead of a picture that says 1,000 words you end up with one that
says maybe 50, tops.
I guess you could always take that huge image, thumbnail it, and then
throw an image map on top of the thumbnail that takes you to zoomed-in
regions of the larger source image. But does ANYONE know a college
professor who has the time to do this? [And, besides, if the
professor is anything like me, he or she is going to misplace or
misname a thumbnail or zoomed region somewhere along the way.]
I guess my goal is to find a way to help Cal State Fullerton's
professors create interactive, image-rich course Web pages and
Blackboard/WebCT course sites that won't kill our student's dial-up
connections and that don't require the professors to learn Photoshop
or Fireworks. So I've been playing around with an enterprise server
application called "TrueSpectra" that automatically renders images at
different sizes. You place a single, disgustingly large image on the
TrueSpectra server -- an image that's several thousand pixels wide --
and TrueSpectra renders that image on the fly, resizing it, zooming in
and out, and so on.
I've just started playing around with the software, but you can see
what I've created so far at
<A HREF="http://fdc.fullerton.edu/technology/truespectra/";>
http://fdc.fullerton.edu/technology/truespectra/ </A>.
Drop me a line and tell me what you think. In fact, I have a huge
favor to ask of you: do you know where I can find some free, LARGE
size (2000 or more pixels wide) educational images, stuff like
skeletons, molecules, geographic features, and so on? I want to add
some more stuff to this test page, and the only high res stuff I can
find is at NASA. :(
-----
Five!
-----
I have some bad news: the University of Alabama has been "squirreled"
... again. You can read the tragic story at
<A
HREF="http://www.cw.ua.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2002/10/07/3da10b0a3ed5c?
in_archive=1">
http://www.cw.ua.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2002/10/07/3da10b0a3ed5c?in_arc
hive=1 </A>
TOURBUS extends its deepest sympathies to the squirrel's family.
------------------------
Mmmm ... Bus-Shaped Spam
------------------------
Finally, many of you may be wondering why the return address on
today's TOURBUS post is Bob Rankin's and not mine. Well, it turns out
that Cox Communications, my cable modem service provider, decided last
week that TOURBUS is spam and that my sending my TOURBUS posts through
Cox's network violated Cox's acceptable use policy. So Cox suspended
my cable modem account.
No, really.
Only after promising to never send another TOURBUS post over my cable
modem did Cox restore my account. <SIGH>
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+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
That's it for today. Have a safe and happy weekend, and we'll talk
again soon. -- Patrick Crispen
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.~~~. ))
(\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen
/o o \/ .~
{o_, \ { [EMAIL PROTECTED]
/ , , ) \ http://www.netsquirrel.com/
`~ -' \ } )) AOL Instant Messenger: Squirrel2K
_( ( )_.'
---..{____} Warning: squirrels.
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