dan flies

Here is a great link to a Nature article noticed by Samit Joshi, comparing the quality of Wikipedia to Encylopedia Britianica. Check it out, to view the article you will need a Nature subscription.

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head: “One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

Considering how Wikipedia articles are written, that result might seem surprising. A solar physicist could, for example, work on the entry on the Sun, but would have the same status as a contributor without an academic background. Disputes about content are usually resolved by discussion among users.”

Here are two photos from Ravioli 2005!

Here is Paul posing with the final batch of ravs that we made. All totaled there were 132 cheese and 160 meat. Enjoy!

The entire Ravioli family:
Brian, Katie, Paul, Sharon (Mom), Bob (Dad), Amanda (Aaron’s), Aaron, Matt, Amanda (Matt’s), and me:

Check out this cool photo Matt took at Ichiban’s for his 27th birthday party Friday

IMG_1108
Originally uploaded by danieldflies

Not a bad set up for taking digital photos (Story from Apple.com):

Turning on the Spotlight

Today, the 100-percent pure digital photographer uses a 16-megapixel camera and depends on Macs — now equipped with Mac OS X Tiger’s new features such as Spotlight — for assignments that take him all over the world.

“Sometimes, for editorials, my clients make the choices from the original file numbers — usually it’s something like ZX045D6934,” Foley explains. “The good news is that all I have to do is copy and paste that file number into Spotlight, and it will search all six Macs and external drives in our office and tell me exactly where the file is. I just copy the file to my desktop and I’m on my way retouching. Even better, Spotlight comes up with a preview of the RAW file and I know for sure that’s the image I want — which is so much better than trying to fumble through DVDs.”

Archive Management

On assignment, Foley shoots about 23 gigs of information a day — 100 to 120 frames per subject — which he copies from his PowerBook onto a 400-gig external drive. Then he burns a DVD of the day’s shoot.

The most famous professor on staff at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Biologist PZ Meyers is features on the cover of the City Pages for his fights on intellignet design and the war on science.

Check it out:

City Pages – The Mad Scientist

Of the mantra “Hire for attitude, train for skills”, taken to the MAX.

Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales – New York Times: “As an ambitious college student, Cassie Napier had all the right moves – flips, tumbles, an ever-flashing America’s sweetheart smile – to prepare for her job after graduation. She became a drug saleswoman.

Ms. Napier, 26, was a star cheerleader on the national-champion University of Kentucky squad, which has been a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales. She now plies doctors’ offices selling the antacid Prevacid for TAP Pharmaceutical Products.”

The only reason to blog this stoy is because the guy’s name is Goto as in “‘Go to’ concidered harmful”. I think it is quite funny.

<a href="SEATTLE – There was a time long ago when the word "computer" was a job description referring to the humans who performed the tedious mathematical calculations for huge military and engineering projects.

Skip to next paragraph

Peter Yates for The New York Times

Kazushige Goto’s software runs many of the fastest supercomputers.

It is in the same sense that Kazushige Goto’s business card says simply “high performance computing.”

Mr. Goto, who is 37, might even be called the John Henry of the information age.”>Writing the Fastest Code, by Hand, for Fun: A Human Computer Keeps Speeding Up Chips – New York Times: “SEATTLE – There was a time long ago when the word ‘computer’ was a job description referring to the humans who performed the tedious mathematical calculations for huge military and engineering projects.

Skip to next paragraph

Peter Yates for The New York Times

Kazushige Goto’s software runs many of the fastest supercomputers.

It is in the same sense that Kazushige Goto’s business card says simply ‘high performance computing.’

Mr. Goto, who is 37, might even be called the John Henry of the information age.”

Halibut Dressed as T-Bone – New York Times: “NO matter how fresh or healthy, a fish fillet inspires little more than a yawn in some people. The chef David Burke is one of them.

‘I don’t want to go out and order red snapper with fava beans,’ he said from a white leather barstool at David Burke & Donatella, his plush playground of gastronomy on the Upper East Side. ‘It just doesn’t do it for me.'”

Type Managers. Who knew iLife Suite (minus gB) had a category besides “cool”. Type Manager are like file managers for a particular type or types of files plus the grouping of tasks usually associated with that type.

The beauty of Type Managers is the bundle. The authors describes heavilly manual process that he would use to get MP3 files on to his MP3 player. You need rip the cd, maybe convert formats, populate ID3 tags from CDDB, organize you files in to your home made files stucture, then move the files to you MP3 player.

Of course this process has improved through the years, but not until iTunes came along did all of those functions come under one roof. iTunes will take care of your digital music experience from beginning to end, automatically ripping, coverting, tagging, organizing and copying your music to your player.

And the most amazing part, no one missed the control they once had over the files. Who really cares how many folders you’d have to go thought to get to the music, iTunes has it all for you in a sortable and searchable set. Folks who have moved from “all in a folder” to “genre/artist/album” folks are happy to let iTunes deal with the mess.

So where does this take us? The conqured realm is music and photos. How about movies and vidoes? Word/Excel/PDF managers? There is a fine line between managers and creators (Photoshop, Word, etc), but the key is to find the post-creation management needed to make everyones life easier. Render the file system invisible, you can find files by manager or by new and improved searches.

Well what do you think? Check out the original story and leave a comment.

Type Manager: “iTunes lets you do everything related to music files in a interface perfect for managing music files. If you tried to use iTunes interface for managing your photos you would be laughed at because it just wouldn’t work. If you have Linux you can of use digiKam, another Type Manager, made for photos of course.”

Similar to Tom Barnett’s Esquire article from July, this article seeks to add another dimension to what is going on at the Department of Defense. This is a great Sunday read.

Wrestling With History: “If only he could show us the memo.

‘It’s still classified, I suppose?’ says Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, looking toward his assistant.

‘It’s still classified,’ Lawrence DiRita replies, ‘along with a lot of the underlying planning.'”