e-Technology: Emerging Technologies
Bob Jensen at Trinity University
Microsoft Gets Serious
About Interactive Authoring for the Web
Cottage Industry Web Authoring --- The
Clash of the Titans
An OO World
Wireless Network Devices
Internet 2 Bandwidth
Listening and Speaking Computers
Rocket e-Book and SoftBook Electronic Tablet Devices
Ubiquitous (Invisible) Computing
From Broadcasting Servers to Interactive Servers, Chat
Rooms, Simulations
Station WHYY in the Delaware Valley
Ask Jeeves --- Artificial Intelligence
NetCloak-Type Devices
Microsoft
Microsoft Gets Serious About Interactive Authoring for the Web
Go to Interactive Spreadsheet Illustrations
Titans
Cottage Industry Web Authoring --- The Clash of the Titans
Allen's Click2Learn Challenges Milken' Educator Virtual Workspace |
Trivia Question: What do Paul Allen and Mike Milken have in common?
Serious Question: What are their latest big-time investment ventures?
Go to Click2Learn Go to Milken Educator Virtual Workspace
Free server space alternatives for courses: http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245soft1.htm
An OO World
An OO World
Wireless
Wireless Network Devices
Go to Wireless Updates
Internet2
Internet 2 Bandwidth
"New York State's First Internet2 Point of Presence
Established," Syllabus, February
1999, Page 10. http://nysernet.org
Listening
Listening and Speaking Computers
Wireless Audio and Video Knowledge Bases --- BeVocal
Speech technology is coming of age
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,1015493,00.html
Trends in voice/data hardware and software http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,405330,00.html
Even when the Dragon Mobile is properly trained, the Dynamic Duo found an average
of one error in 20 words --- and that is an average number.
When there is ambient noise the error rate explodes. Recording from a distance such as 15
feet greatly increases error rates. I think I will wait for a while before going Dragon
Mobile. You can find links to other speech recognition vendors at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#Speech1.
An optimistic article about the longer-term future of speech recognition is given as
"The Urge to Converge: Multimedia Networks Combining Data, Voice, and Video are
Changing the Face of Business Communications . . Again," by Jeff Burger, NewMedia,
July 1999, N.2-N.6.
Rocket
Rocket e-Book and SoftBook Electronic Tablet Devices
Ubiquitous
Ubiquitous (Invisible) Computing
e-Bras and Other Undercover Devices
Go to Invisible Computing Conference
Shells
From Broadcasting Servers to Interactive Servers, Chat Rooms, Simulations
CEP Workshop 37 on August 15
WHYY
Station WHYY in the Delaware Valley
Go to WHYY
Jeeves
Ask Jeeves --- Artificial Intelligence
Please share your answer to the following question: Are there any applications of "Ask Jeeves" or related artificial intelligence natural language searching software in academe (universities, libraries, or academic associations)?
When I visited the Ask Jeeves web site, I did not find any serious applications in academe. What a pity! See http://www.ask.com. For example, I can ask Jeeves about the weather at the University of California, but I cannot ask about any technical expertise of accounting professors at UC. Of course the $400,000 to $1,000,000 price for Ask Jeeves software is a high hurdle to cross in the world of academe. Unlike most other web sites, the Ask Jeeves web site uses artificial intelligence for natural language questions? It also gives listings of hits in other search engine databases besides its own huge database.
When reading the following article, it struck me like a thunderbolt that this is what is needed for higher education is an Ask Jeeves type of knowledge database in virtually every discipline. What a marvelous thing it would be to put academic expert transcriptions on a server along with other reference materials and then use the natural language capabilities of "Ask Jeeves" software or similar types of software. For a review of "Ask Jeeves" software see http://newmedia.com/newmedia/99/06/realworld/Ask_Jeeves.html.
This is another sad example of where academe badly lags private industry in utilizing emerging technologies. We have billions of dollars of resources, but our infrastructures and traditions just do not allow us to shift priorities in budgeting. This is one area where the R1 universities have a tremendous opportunity and comparative advantage to become leaders in knowledge base innovations. Dell Corporation, Toshiba, and many other hardware and software vendors have adopted Ask Jeeves software for answering technical support questions.
NetCloak
NetCloak-Type Devices
Many educators would like to put more materials on the web, but they are concerned about
protecting access to all or parts of documents. For example, a professor may want to share
a case with the world but limit the accompanying case solution to selected users. Or a
professor may want to make certain lecture notes available but limit the access of certain
copyrighted portions to students in a particular course. If protecting parts of your
documents is of great interest, you may want to consider NetCloak from Maxum at http://www.maxum.com/ .
Alternatives to using NetCloak:
1. Symantec http://www.symantec.com has a free
utility called Secret which will password-protect any type of file.
2. Winzip http://www.winzip.com has a another shareware utility called Winzip - Self-Extractor, which has a password protect capability. The advantage to this approach is that you can bundle different file types (.doc, xls) , zip them and you can have them automatically install to a folder that you have named. If you have a shareware install utility that creates a setup.exe routine, you also can have it install automatically on the student's machine. The price of this product is about $30.