Maximum Entropy: On Resolving one of the Greater Mysteries in Our Information Universe

July 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

So where is the CD-ROM for this Springer ebook title - Entropy and energy?

If you follow the link to SpringerLink  (or my MyiLibrary version) to the actual ebook you won’t find it there (or really any clear indication from the contents view that anything is missing (you’d need to get some indication or reference to that in the text and then you’d still need to ask the right people to connect with the material).

If you go to  http://extras.springer.com/2005/978-3-540-24281-9  – voila! Now our Springer rep had to point me to that site when I inquired about the missing CD-ROM material and how that could be accessed. She suggested that we could just create a link in the note field of our bibliographic record for now until they can do better in the future…a good deal of needless energy to expend on our end, I’d say (and still somewhat confusing for the user if they don’t see the note in the record).

So for those with Springer ebooks, you should look to http://extras.springer.com/ with the ISBN for the book if you need to find a CD-ROM or other ‘extra’ material to go with your Springer book in ebook format. This is at least until Springer integrates/articulates the extra material with the ebook (sometime in the future).

You’d think in a more digital universe it’d be easier to bring all electronic material together (after all, it seems like it is far more complicated to arrange the electronic data on a physical medium and then bring one physical medium (the CD) together with another physical medium (the book).

Hopefully the coincidence of humour in using this title (Entropy and Energy) is not lost here as it seems rather arbitrary (or perhaps not) for our electronic information universe to be arranged (or disarranged) so. It was one thing for there to be incongruity with physical and electronic mediums, but I’m sure we can all do better in a digital information universe than this and have everyone spend a good deal less energy in trying to bring it all together.

Don’t get me wrong with this post that this is just an issue with Springer. Springer has shown it is a progressive publisher, especially in terms of publishing one of the largest STM DRM-free ebook collections (see Springer Launches DRM-free E-book Repository) and I certainly enjoyed having someone from Springer speak on the ebook panel I moderated at the 2008 SLA/MLA PrariePartnerships Conference to raise awareness and set expectations very high in what we could expect for ebooks. However, I don’t think we are doing ourselves any favours by not integrating our systems and simplifying our interfaces. We need to start pulling this all together and start by doing it in the right places.

Filed under eBooks, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Publishing, User Experience

Evergreen Open ILS in Canada

June 4, 2009 Leave a Comment

University of Windsor, Algoma University, and Laurentian University have come up on their Open Source ILS based on Evergreen.

UPEI has been using Evergreen for about a year now. There’s also the BC Pines project that started as a pilot in 2007 and is now live as Sitka with the BC Libraries Cooperative.

Univ of Windsor, Algoma University, and Laurentian University, however, weren’t going to go live with Evergreen until they had developed an Acquisitions module for Evergreen….so, some follow-ups will be needed on that front.

So far, the University of Winnipeg Evergreen pilot project (aka Spruce) (involving Manitoba Public Library Services and South Central Regional Library) is being actively used by South Central Regional Library (Morden, Winkler, and Altona branch libraries) since the end of April 27, 2009. We are, however, hoping to grow our pilot soon to include others.

Filed under ILS, Open Source Tagged with , , , , ,

Gestural Interfaces: Are Wii having Fun in Physical Therapy?

January 8, 2009 Leave a Comment

Gestural interfaces were in their infancy not even a decade ago and they have really come a long way very recently.  About ten years ago when I was at NASA-GSFC, I attended a presentation by Joe Paradiso from MIT on his Gesture Wall.  I think Jeff Han’s presentation at TED in 2006 really grabbed some attention in terms of interacting with systems with a gestural interface.

The iPhone may have an abysmal battery life, but it is the first widespread consumer device to really have a gestural interface with its touchscreen.  Now the BlackBerry Storm and other phones are implementing the same kind of touchscreen technology. Like the iPhone and the iPod Touch, the Wii is a good example game system that uses a gestural interface.  I recently came across an innovative use for the Wii game system:

Nintendo Wii as Therapeutic Tool
Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators
20 minutes, 9.4mb, recorded 2008-12-15
Topics: Health and Medicine Science and Technology (general)

Although host Jon Udell isn’t an avid gamer, and neither is his wife Luann, he was intrigued when she came home from a physical therapy session raving about the Nintendo Wii. In this episode Luann talks about how the Wii, the Balance Board, and the Wii Fit application are helping her retrain the proprioceptors in her legs. Then we’ll hear from Anna Domyancic who, with Darren Gerber, runs Keene Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine. Like other physical therapists, they’re finding that the Wii can be a valuable therapeutic tool.

A number of research articles published in the past year show that the Wii game system has been used by many in physical therapy. Some are calling the use of this system in physical therapy ‘wiihabilitation’.

From having my own Wii and just using it out of the box, it’s amazing how sensitive the controllers are and the haptic feedback that some of the games provide to the game controllers.  It’s also amazing how immersive the games can be with having the Wii hooked up to an LCD projector when playing Metroid.

O’Reilly just published a new book on Designing Gestural Interfaces:

Designing Gestural Interfaces, 1st Edition
by Dan Saffer
Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Pub Date: December 3, 2008
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-596-51839-4
Pages: 272

Designing Gestural Interfaces provides you with essential information about kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns — all you need to know to augment your existing skills in “traditional” web design, software, or product development. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, this book helps you: Get an overview of technologies surrounding touchscreens and interactive environments. Learn the process of designing gestural interfaces, from documentation to prototyping to communicating to the audience what the product does Examine current patterns and trends in touchscreen and gestural design Learn about the techniques used by practicing designers and developers today See how other designers have solved interface challenges in the past Look at future trends in this rapidly evolving field.

In the movie Minority Report, it seems that gestural interfaces are science fiction.  However, science fiction has quickly become science fact with technological innovations and a number of social and market forces at play.  Going from conventional keyboard and mouse to gestural and interactive environments., there are so many future possibilities in terms of how we design and develop these new interfaces.

Filed under Gaming, HCI, SciFi, Serious Games, Trends, User Experience, Visualization Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Top 10 Most Over-hyped Tech Products

January 6, 2009 Leave a Comment

Yet another top 10 list, so I’m already thinking top 10 lists themselves are overhyped.  I already posted a couple top 10 lists on IT trend predictions for 2009 in a previous post. This one is from Yahoo! on the top 10 most over-hyped tech products.

Segway Personal Transporter – there was a deal in Winnipeg that went bust, because it simply failed to recognize that it was Winnipeg.

I have a Wii – got it from Costco online about a month ago.  Two controllers and two nunchuk controllers, three games. Reasonable price and best of all they actually had stock (unlike many other places).  I’m liking the boxing with the Wii sports right now.  It’s very therapeutic (tho if you play a luddite and they win, will you be able to bear the shame?).

My son enjoys playing with his OLPC on a daily basis (we got one with a G1G1 program last year).  It’s too bad many of the deals fell through as there is some impressive technology and educational theory behind it.  At least its introduction has produced a line of inexpensive laptops and netbooks. Perhaps the hi-res and energy efficient screen will one day produce a number of tablet computers and other e-readers (hopefully less retro looking than the Kindle).

I think the iPhone is abysmal in terms of battery life (I don’t have one, just an iPod Touch), but I think the big thing about the Wii and the Touch/iPhone is the gestural interface component (I think Jeff Han’s presentation at TED in 2006 really grabbed peoples attention - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLhMVNdplJc – though I saw a presentation by Joe Paradiso from MIT when I was at NASA-GSFC about 10 years ago (see http://web.media.mit.edu/~joep/TTT.BO/wall.html for early work in this area).

If the Kindle didn’t look like 80′s ColecoVision, I think it might appeal to me.  I borrowed a few BlackBerries (as I don’t currently have one) and loaded some SciFi ebooks and found that they were pretty good for reading (http://knowledgenavigator.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/adding-freely-available-ebooks-to-your-blackberry/ )

Ahh, Vista – all the advertising and marketing in the world won’t help.  Micro$oft should actually invest money in making the next OS innovative (and abandon the silly widgets – I already have a big clock and calendar on my wall! …find something more interesting to amuse me.)

Filed under News, Trends Tagged with , , ,

Intel’s Experiment on Free Cooling to 90 degrees

December 23, 2008 Leave a Comment

Intel has announced the results of experiment that challenged myths about server room cooling:

  • The chipmaker’s air-economizer experiment reveals that servers can weather relatively harsh conditions while delivering huge savings on cooling
  • For 10 months, the chipmaker had 500 production servers, working at 90 percent utilization, cooled almost exclusively by outside air at a facility in New Mexic
  • Only when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit did they crank on some artificial air conditioning. Intel did very little to address air-born contaminants and dust, and nothing at all to deal with fluctuating humidity
  • The result: a slightly higher failure rate – around 0.6 percent more – among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company’s main datacenter – and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year in a 10MW datacenter using free cooling over traditional cooling.

The computer industry has a practice of keeping data centres under 70F/21C. The University of Winnipeg Library server room runs around 90F/30C on an average day. Our mean time to failure (MTTF) on drives and blistering capacitors on motherboards has been no where near industry standard reports.  Perhaps it is a myth and the hotter, the better…or perhaps we’re just too lucky. We’ve been running about 10 servers in the server room for about four years now, so we’ll have to see if they start to get a bit more cranky as they get a bit older.

Filed under Green, Library Systems, News

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