Tuesday 24 November 2009

Statistics in the News for Teaching I

Analysing the Social Web

My God Andrew Keen will have a heart attack. Now we can trace who is influencing the social web through twitter analytics
Klout

Designing an Information Infra-structure

BBC does Open Source for Video Compression

The BBC has created the Dirac codecs for video compression.
Dirac site

The Beginning of the End for Murdoch and Microsoft

It seems that Google and Open Source Media have caused Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft to hit the panic button that will actually lead to their own destruction.

Murdoch made a mess with MySpace which has been overtaken by Facebook since he took it over and so now he is loosing money across almost all of his operations he wants to try and charge for his content. This looks like sound business (If you read Andrew Keen you would think Murdoch was being ripped off PS DON'T). He has been attacking the BBC hard as one of the main suppliers of free-content while forgetting that it was only because he had the BBC on board that he managed to leverage any success with Sky Digital and destroy the hapless ON Digital. Now the BBC are not handy allies but a threat to his new pay model of the internet. Now he wants to get the news out of Google and to do this he has allied with Microsoft and Bing.

Microsoft will pay him to not let Google index his media output. It is a deal made in open source heaven as the two can bleed each other dry while everyone moves to alternative media sources. The UK gets to ditch the Sun which is losing its touch anyway and there will be no more Fox. It gives me the same happy feeling as AOL/Time-Warner, as I know Rupert has finally lost his touch. The people will decide with their clicks, do they want a Google dominated world or a Murdoch/Microsoft world? I know which one my money is on.
FT article
Slashdot article
BBC article
Boing-Boing article

Wednesday 18 November 2009

Nearly Open Game Building

This is how to get children to build their own games by making a site to create their own platform games.
http://ben10-gamecreator.cartoonnetwork.co.uk/

How to make computing funny

If you ever had to try and teach something like SQL there just comes a time when you know you have lost the will to live and your students have lost you sometime before this. But there is a site with some geek humour that can make your students think and you smile.

Think Dilbert only even more geeky!

http://xkcd.com/

Interactive Agent Based Models

Agent based models make simple and effective models for ecological and population based models as well as models in the social sciences. Modelling4all is a site dedicated to making these models accessible.

Saving and Playing YouTube and other Flash Media

You need to get the DownloadHelper plugin for Firefox to allow you to save the *.flv files from YouTube so that you can play them in your own media player.

Most media players do not support playing .flv files and you need specific codecs. There is ffdshow which is a set of Flash codecs but much easier to set-up and better to use is GOM player.