Month: June 2011

Archived film footage available

Millions of Archived Films and TV Footage Now Accessible to All
Royal Holloway, University of London (06/21/2011)

A new search engine developed by Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) will make it easier for users to find film, TV, and radio content online.

Such content is usually made available as standalone collections, which requires users to know where to look before they begin their search. However, the BUFVC federated search engine is designed to serve as an all-in-one tool for accessing nine online databases with more than 13 million film, TV, and radio records.

The icon-based search engine generates related records and searches and provides a detailed user history and export function. Film, TV, and radio content is an underused resource in teaching and research, says Royal Holloway professor John Ellis.

“Educators are keen to use them, but experience many problems in locating useful resources,” Ellis says. “This unified search of all BUFVC’s existing databases solves this by providing a thoroughly tested user friendly interface with many novel features.”

The search engine will be released under an open source license this summer.

Looky lou

If you are a ‘Game of Thrones’ fan, here’s one of Hitler learning about the season enders.  Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the last episodes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kLSYTHQbm4

And then, there is this compelling Animals Being Dicks site.   You can go through all of them randomly on the site or just check out a few from here.

http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/6466159828/show-off-horse

http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/6455359139/cat-slap

http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/6752745788/double-whammy

http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/6624376691/and-stay-down

http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/6824333116/he-mustve-tripped

http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/6441634070/condescending-llama
This one’s for you, KSH

 

Last week’s news

Gender-Spotting Tool Could Have Rumbled Fake Blogger
New Scientist (06/17/11) Paul Marks

A gender analysis program developed by Stevens Institute of Technology researcher Na Cheng and colleagues could have successfully determined the sex of a 40-year-old U.S. man writing online as a gay Syrian girl, according to tests.

The software permits users to either upload a text file or paste in a paragraph of 50 words or more for analysis. The program was based on a vast corpus of documents that the researchers screened for psycholinguistic factors, and they winnowed the more than 500 factors they uncovered down to 157 gender-significant ones.

These cues were then combined by the program through a Bayesian algorithm that guesses gender according to the balance of likelihoods suggested by the factors. The program has three gender judgments to choose from–male, female, and neutral.

A judgment of neutral might signal that someone is attempting to write in a gender voice that is unnatural to them. When fed text, the software’s assessment of a male or female author is only precise 85 percent of the time, but the researchers say its accuracy will improve as more people use it and alert it to wrong guesses.

——————–

This was a huge deal to some of my online buds last week, particularly the gay activist ones.  It was interesting hearing their reactions to this, but since it was last week, I can’t remember why.

 

 

Somtimes ya just gotta ….

This raggedyass little gif says a lot about the state of little boys’ brains.  I love it.

I snagged it via twitter from Zadi Diaz.  I used to think she was a twit but now I think she’s brilliant.  Goes to show you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.  Me, I mean.  Zadi was probably always brilliant and I wasn’t paying enough attention.

One avenue of pursuit

UT Researchers Launch SpamRankings to Flag Hospitals Hijacked by Spammers
eWeek (06/08/11) Fahmida Y. Rashid

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Research in Economic Commerce recently launched SpamRankings, a Web site that identifies the names and addresses of organizations that are helping send out spam.

The site will publicize spam havens–organizations that have been taken over by spammers.

The site’s creators are hoping the publicity will pressure organizations to improve their security and spam-prevention efforts. The researchers’ initial focus will be on health-care providers that have been infected by spam bots, with future versions of the project including banking and Web hosting providers.

Last month SpamRankings identified Belgium’s WIN Authonomous Systems as the biggest spam sender in the world.

“Nobody wants to do business with a bank or hospital or Internet hosting company that has been hijacked by spammers,” says center director Andrew Whinston. The researchers worked with Team Cyrmu, which tracks cybercrime activity to analyze and correlate Internet protocol addresses with organizations.

Quotes

I like the way this woman thinks.  I had never heard of her until today, when Van sent out his quotes of the day about Mignon McLaughlin.  I keep wanting to call her Filet.

~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**~**

Courage can’t see around corners, but goes around them anyway.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

The hardest learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.

What you can’t get out of, get into wholeheartedly.

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.

Nobody really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.
All from Mignon McLaughlin, 1913 – 1983