Wednesday, January 28. 2009

The Job that Paid for College Now Done by Robot...

Wired writes about smart robots at work in warehouses like those of online shoe seller Zappos. The little guys go and "fetch" products needed by their human masters. They are "pickers." I was a picker - made good money back in the day $4.15/hour at the SKYR warehouse in my home town.

But the robots are smarter than I was as a high school kid: they not only find the product and re-route themselves back to the requester, but they find time for the 5 minute/hour charge they require and help reorganize the wares for better efficiency.

The warehouse, says those behind the robots are 2 to 4 times as efficient with the robots. I'll bet.

How DC Got Coders to Write Open Source Open Access Apps for Almost No Money

The OhMyGov blog details how DC spent $433 in advertising and a bit in "prize" money to jumpstart development of 47 open source online apps that support DC government. If you've not heard the story, this is a great write up.

New GIS Education Programs: Michigan and Rwanda

North Central Michigan College's University Center in Gaylord will launch an associate of science degree in geographic information systems (GIS) starting in the fall of 2009. It's a two year program.

- Petroskey News-Review

The National University of Rwanda has partnered with the Centre for Geographic Information Science (CGIS) to launch a Post-Graduate Diploma programme in GIS. It runs nights in the country's capitol, Kigali. The first class has 33 students, young and mid-career professionals are the target population.

- The New Times

ArsTechnica Looks at Location Awareness for Linux

Desktop is the focus.

- ArsTechnica

Location Tech Tops Librarians List

Location technology was among the trends cited at the Library and Information Technology Association Top Tech Trends panel at the American Libraries Association Midwinter Meeting. Josh Hadro, writing in the Library Journal covered it this way:

While the panel frequently has addressed mobile technologies in years past, this session extended to geo-tagging and the use of location-aware data services, setting the groundwork for a call for libraries to use geospatial data more programmatically in the catalog and in wider applications. This could help users identify and locate institutions that offer access to useful resources (as can be done via WorldCat), and perhaps even find geocoded items on shelves within the buildings themselves.

[Crawford] Lynch [director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)] cited the Flickr Commons project as an example of "crossing a new threshold in the management of collective description." He added that, while the Library of Congress's and others' participation in the photo-sharing pilot was interesting in itself, it also represented a move toward using a variety of means and platforms to generate "narratives about content." By capitalizing on individual interest and expertise, collection managers might "start building bridges between knowledge that's held out in the broad public and the knowledgebases that libraries have."

Tuesday, January 27. 2009

Why sex-offender tracking doesn't always work

Government Technology examines the pitfalls of programs across the country. Bottom line: the technology is not perfect, those managing the implementations are not on duty 24/7 and legislators are not aware of the limitations. Another challenge: more and more paroles are homeless, making "confinement" unworkable.