Developing your alter-ego online

I spotted this in a strange place, but Computer Shopper report that "psychologists have carried out studies that suggest that people are using social networking websites to develop an alternate identity, and are gradually growing into the personas they create. They explained that social networking sites are beginning to serve as a self-development tool for young people discovering their own identities."

From this I found a link to the papers from the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA, for the academic reports behind the news.

BBC News: Pupils can beat safe net filters

According to Ben Geoghegan: Pupils are using special websites to hack out of their school computer network while in the classroom. They then access social networking sites and even hardcore pornography.

BBC News: School computer firewall fears

There is concern some schools are not doing enough to stop students accessing unsuitable websites.

Settlement of the lawsuit against Google for its Book Search program

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities blog reports his first impressions of the Google Books Settlement. The agreement focusses on in-copyright but out-of-print books and on access to the Google Books collection via libraries ...

The Text Technologies blog focusses more on the authors' side of things ...

Gender analyser

This site lets you test whether a blog has been written by a man or woman.

Windows to Mac tips part 2: internet shortcuts

I've been used to dragging the icon to the left of the URL in a web browser to a folder and it gets stored as an internet shortcut on Windows. You can do the same in Safari on the Mac and it is saved as a webloc file. However, the URL part is stored in the resource fork. In order to get a more portable webloc file in which you can view the stored URL as plain text, you should drag the full text of the URL to Finder. This still results in a webloc file, but the URL is readable as plain text so that you can open the webloc file in a text editor. 

There are some other solutions: storing the URL as text clippings rather than weblocs and converting weblocs to urls with Applescript and again.

How not to make PowerPoint slides

There are a large number of these on You Tube, but this one is funny.

Thanks to Adrian for spotting this ... 

BBC Magazine: Midweek quiz: Old computers

You can test your knowledge of old computers at the BBC Magazine site. 

Windows to Mac tips part 1: screen grab

Since there is no handy "Print Screen" or "Prt Sc" button on a Mac, you need to know the following:

Command + shift + 3 = whole screen

Command + shift + 4 = select a section

The results are dropped onto your desktop in PNG format.

Friends have also recommended utilities such as "Grab" and "Onyx", but I haven't tried those yet.

Bash foreach equivalent

I can never remember the bash equivalent of tcsh's "foreach", and now I need to remember it having moved over to my nice new shiny MacBook (did I mention that?). 

There's a quick reference here at Mike's Blawg.

Instructions about moving Windows Outlook PST files to Mac OSX Mail

After becoming the proud owner of a shiny new black MacBook recently, I've been reading up about switching email from Windows Outlook (2003) to Mac OSX Mail. Demdike has some done some research on switching from Outlook to Mail via Thunderbird. My plan A for now involves using VMware Fusion to get Office 2007 running on the Windows virtual machine that I've installed. This seems to be the most pain-free way of switching email over for now. Plan B (medium term) is to actually move over to using the Mac proper for email.

Tim Showers' visualisation strategies

Tim looks at a collection of different visualisation techniques.

Thanks to Adam.

Instructions on how to build a Lego Wall-E

http://picasaweb.google.com/perayson/HowToBuildALegoWallE

designed by Jamie.

Authorship identification in the news

Spotted on Language Log:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=573

BBC News: The case for forensic linguistics

THES: research council success rates

By university:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403263&c=1

and by research council:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403255&c=1

THES: Do lecturers have a summer holiday?

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403405&c=1

About the end of the world in 5 days

... when we all disappear into a man made black hole!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7548994.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468966.stm

The schedule is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/programmes.shtml

The switch on is due at 8:30 BST. Andrew Marre will be the first to go if a black hole is created.

Have a look at the Q&A on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/asktheexpert.shtml

The answer to the question “Black Holes and matter” doesn’t fill me with confidence!

BBC News: 10 items or fewer

Grammatical correctness gone mad?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7591905.stm

BBC News: OCR spelling and bad spelling

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7567692.stm (OCR solution) spotted by Alistair and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7546975.stm (Bad spelling should be 'accepted')

BBC News: Paedophile 'librarian' is jailed

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7561915.stm

New and interesting uses for webmail...

http://chuqui.typepad.com/chuqui_30/2008/07/new-and-interes.html thanks to Adam

Photos with translationese

Courtesy of Flickr bad translations and Chinglish groups:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/badtranslations/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6052800.stm
http://www.flickr.com/groups/chinglish/

Review of an academic Doctor Who book

Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who
Edited by David Butler

The glowing review is at the Behind the Sofa blog.

BBC reporter's blog: 10 reasons to cheer our teenagers

A positive news story at last?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/07/10_reasons_to_cheer_our_teenag.html

Sentiment analysis of twitter

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/summize_likely_acquired_by_twi.php

thanks to Adam.

Word clouds of Doctor Who New Series

http://sandwich.ukcod.org.uk/~matthew/subtitles/

Spotted on Paul Cornell's blog

BBC News: Baby's bottom censored by store

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7474968.stm

BBC News: Adults 'scared to go near kids'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7474692.stm

Guardian: Regenerate! Fans revive 60s Doctor Who

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/26/bbc.doctorwho

Computational Approaches to Measuring the Similarity of Short Contexts : A Review of Applications and Methods

A paper by Ted Pederson (arXiv:0806.3787v1 [cs.CL]):

http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3787

The Subtle Knife

This morning at 6am I was mostly reading ... chapter 12 of The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman.

Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies

A history of treemaps: (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/) by Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/)

BBC News: 'Oldest' computer music unveiled

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7458479.stm

plus how the BBC reported the birth of "Baby" in 1948

Leadership and Diffusion in Online Communities

David Huffaker's using text analysis methods such as LIWC and Wmatrix to analyse "leadership and diffusion in online communities by exploring the relationship between communication processes, social structure and language use".

http://www.davehuffaker.com/blog/?page_id=3

How text search has evolved over the past 15 years

http://www.texttechnologies.com/2008/06/15/how-text-search-has-evolved-over-the-past-15-years/

on the text technologies blog ...

TwitArcs and Wordle

http://www.neoformix.com/2008/TwitArcs.html
http://wordle.net/

with thanks to Adam.

BBC News: Man jailed over indecent images

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7453034.stm

Chinese translations

Today, I've been mostly reading and correcting glosses and translations of examples for the forthcoming Chinese Frequency Dictionary.

Dispelling the green myths

http://kate-craigwood.livejournal.com/4615.html
As seen on the BCS website.

THE article: Google generation

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=402225
Thanks to John H for pointing this out to me.

Guardian article: Breakin' open the asylum

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jun/04/mentalhealth

Hello World!

This week I've been mostly reading ... exam scripts!