Posts tagged Document
European Commission Readies 400+ Page Document on Google’s Abuse of Dominance
Dec 5th
The European Commission (EC) will issue a 400-page document outlining its concerns with Google’s alleged anti-competitive practices, according to sources at the EC.
Sources in the organization revealed that the EC will issue its statement of obj…
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ARKive to Document Every Species on Earth
Aug 11th
I am a fan of archives and have covered their digital avatars here often enough. I am especially keen on any archive, whether physical or digital, that takes access as an important elements of its mission. And I don’t just like archives of books and manuscript, I also dig archives that have nothing to do with the written word. For instance, if you haven’t marveled, drop-jawed, at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, do. I’ll wait here.
Cool, right? Well, coming a close second to that in my personal pantheon of parchment-free archives is a digital project called ARKive. Their goal: no less than the capture and preservation of a photographic record of every species under the sun.
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According to ARKive, its mission is “Promoting the Conservation of the World’s Threatened Species, Through the Power of Wildlife Imagery.”
“Powerful wildlife imagery is an emotive and effective means of building environmental awareness and engagement, and quick and easy access to this imagery is essential in the digital mass communications society we live in today.
“However, until now, this valuable imagery has been scattered throughout the world, in a wide variety of private, commercial and specialist collections, with no centralised collection, restricted public access, limited educational use, and no co-ordinated strategy for its long term preservation.
“ARKive is now putting that right, gathering together the very best films and photographs of the world’s species into one centralised digital library, to create a unique audio-visual record of life on Earth, prioritising those species at most risk of extinction. Preserved and maintained for future generations, ARKive is making this key resource accessible to all, from scientists and conservationists to the general public and school children”
The group’s immediate goal is the completion of audio-visual profiles for all of the threatened species on the IUCN Red List.I spoke with Merove Heifetz, ARKive’s chief operations officer, about progress toward this goal.
“There are an estimated 1.9 million known species globally, with likely many more yet to be discovered (mostly very small organisms). To date, we have profiled nearly 14,000 species on ARKive. We have researched all 19,000+ species on the Red List (plus some other species that are not on that list, but are still threatened or regarded as species of conservation need to some degree), and have found that generally, the remaining species that we have yet to cover are those incredibly rare and cryptic species that may have never been captured on camera. We are working with the scientific community and IUCN scientists who may likely be the only individuals to have ever seen some of these species to see if they can help us gain further imagery for those. Having said that, on average, we add about 200 additional species to the site each month.”
Access to the ARKive is free and it features photographic records that are extensive and at a very high resolution. In addition to being an educational undertaking, the group also acts as a repository.
“We bank all of the imagery on ARKive.org in its highest resolution in a secure digital vault for posterity,” Heifetz told us.
The materials can be browsed by species group or eco-region or can be searched. Additional information includes topics like climate change and geography. Also on offer is an educational menu tailored to specific age groups. The photos themselves can be viewed individually or as slideshows and each species’ photo gallery is accompanied by a detailed description of the animal or plant.
ARKive is run as a non-profit initiative by Wildscreen, a non-profit organization that promotes global biodiversity. Begun 25 years ago, the group’s patrons include England’s Royal Highness Prince Philip and the wildlife filmmaker Sir David Attenborough, among others
Other sources: Discovery News
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Wolfram Launches a New Computable Document Format: Real-Time Computation & Interactivity
Jul 22nd
Wolfram, the company behind the Mathematica computational software and the Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge” search engine, has released a new document format today – the Computable Document Format (CDF). As the name suggests, the CDF aims to bring real-time interactivity and computational power to documents, by enabling them to include a variety of graphs and formulas.
This makes a “computable” document quite different than a “print” document. The information isn’t fixed but can be manipulated by the reader. Unlike static formats, CDFs are “as interactive as apps, yet as everyday as documents,” say Wolfram. “Central to the concept are knowledge apps, interactive diagrams, or info apps – the live successors of traditional diagrams and infographics.”
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Interactive “Knowledge Apps” versus Static Graphics
In a blog post describing the new format, Conrad Wolfram compares a “traditional” graphic explaining the Doppler Effect with what he calls a “knowledge app,” a CDF-based graphic demonstrating the same thing. Using the latter, readers can adjust the variables – observer location, source frequency, initial velocity and time – in order to gain a better understanding of how the Doppler Effect works.
That idea of giving readers tools for better understanding dovetails with Wolfram’s larger mission of supporting educational and scientific efforts. And Wolfram sees the CDF as being particularly useful in educational and scientific publications.
It isn’t simply readers who are meant to benefit from having more interactive publications. Wolfram says that the CDF is also designed to make it easier for authors and publishers to create and incorporate these knowledge apps into documents, arguing that up until now, these sorts of things have often required a knowledge of programming. CDFs can be created using the Mathematica software, and Wolfram insists that building a knowledge app is as easy as writing a macro in Excel. (And Conrad Wolfram quips that he’d like to make authoring even easier so that “anyone who can make an Excel chart be able to make a CDF.”)
Will the Format Be Widely Adopted?
While the CDF does open a lot of possibilities here, this new format is based on proprietary technology. It’s not an open standard, and as O’Reilly Radar’s Andy Oram notes, “I assume Wolfram will keep strict control over the format, which draws a lot from the Mathematica language, and I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer.”
To experiment with the new Computable Document Format, you can visit the Wolfram website and see some examples and other use cases. These require the download of a Wolfram CDF Player.
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ServioTranslate Document Translation Service Reaches 500 Translators. – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
May 31st
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ServioTranslate Document Translation Service Reaches 500 Translators.
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Servio (formerly CloudCrowd) provides industrial-strength content, SEO and data solutions for customers including Target, eBay, and Healthline. Servio is powered by the CloudCrowd workspace platform, its proprietary global workforce of more than 90000 … |
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Mobile Phones Document Rape as Weapon in Libya
May 25th
Using rape as a weapon in war and other violent conflicts is unfortunately nothing new. Ivory Coast recently experienced an epidemic of it during a conflict for the contested presidency there. But in Libya, the proliferation of mobile tech has resulted in a surprising amount of direct video evidence of this revolting practice, evidence which may result in the punishment of those responsible.
According to Libyan rebels, the troops of the country’s nominal leader, Moammar Qaddafi, have been using rape on civilians. This isn’t an accident, they say, but a policy, at times directly enforced by officers of the Libyan army. According to the Sunday Times’ Marie Colvin, there is evidence for this assertion: mobile phone video, taken by the criminal soldiers and officers themselves.
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As Libyan governmental forces have been forced back in that country’s civil war, rebels in the formerly besieged town of Misrata have seized the mobile phones from killed and injured soldiers. On some of those phones were video documentation of wide-spread rape by soldiers of women in the path of the fighting. The rape is systematic and committed by the military as a weapon.
Talking to The World’s host Lisa Mullins on the radio, Colvin said, “From the evidence I’ve heard and seen I believe the rapes were extensive and that they were condoned at the highest level.”
She describes viewing video from one of the phones of a rape of a number of women in a private home. All of this video, it is worth restating, is by the victimizers, an indicator of both our era’s pervasive habit of self-documentation and the resilient notion that electronic media is unalterably private and governable.
The BBC’s Andrew Harding describes an interview he conducted with two captured government soldiers, aged 17 and 21, in Misrata. They told him they were ordered by their commanding officers to rape several women, after the officers themselves had done so.
Should this conflict turn out in the favor of the rebels, those responsible may be punished as a direct result of the evidence captured by the mobile phones.
This is far from certain. As much as a stigma attaches to rape anywhere, it is arguably even worse in conservative Islamic countries like Libya. But should the people show the collective will to confront the situation and punish not just those directly involved but those giving the orders, they will have a type and amount of information and evidence rarely seen in a post-conflict situation before.
Photo of Libyan women from Maghrebia
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5 Document Collaboration Tools for the iPad
May 5th
Continuing our series on iPad apps for work, today we’ll look at document collaboration tools for the iPad.
First of all, the iPad isn’t great for this. As Instapaper creator Marco Arment, wrote recently: “The iPad isn’t really a great ‘office productivity’ device, in the traditional PC sense. It can be used that way in some cases, but it’s rarely the best tool for the job.” That said, there are a few apps that enable you to view, edit and share documents using the iPad.
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With one exception, we decided to keep this list limited to apps that have editing and sharing capabilities, so certain popular apps like Dropbox, GoodReader and WatchDox weren’t included.
Box
Box recent released a new version of its file sharing and document collaboration app for iPad. Box gives you 5GB of storage space for free, as well as tools for editing documents and commenting on them.
Google Docs
Google added editing features for its mobile version last year and it works well on the iPad. You can check out our hands-on test of it here.
The downside is that you won’t have offline access to your documents, but it does use HTML5′s offline storage feature to avoid losing work in case you lose a signal.
iWork
iWork is Apple’s own iPad-optimized document suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
iWork is obviously very Apple-centric, but it can save in Microsoft Office formats, and you can share files to the public Web via iWork.com for maximum compatibility.
MangoSuite
We’ve covered MangoSpring‘s MangoSuite a few times in the past. This is the one that doesn’t support document editing. You can download, upload and view documents. But you’ll need to use another editor, like Pages or QuickOffice, to edit your documents. So why did we include it?
Because you can leave comments, have real time chats and get notifications about document changes from within the application. These are excellent features for collaboration, so we think it’s worth noting.
QuickOffice
QuickOffice is a popular mobile office suite. It works with Google Docs, Dropbox, Huddle and other file sharing platforms and can share files on Slideshare, Scribd and Docstoc.
Which One is Best?
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New Guide To Document Sharing For SEO Released – PR Web (press release)
Feb 8th
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New Guide To Document Sharing For SEO Released
PR Web (press release) Document sharing for SEO is one that has been a sleeping giant, which has now been woken through this new report, Document Sharing Strategies. … |
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Internal Google Document Reveals Struggles Over Data, Privacy: WSJ
Aug 10th
Google’s internal debates over privacy and how to monetize the mountains of data it has about its users — including whether to monetize it at all — are detailed today by the Wall Street Journal. The lengthy article examines a confidential, seven-page “vision statement” that made the rounds at Google as far back as 2008. [...]
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