Listen up!
Cell phone radiation from EWG
http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone?allavailable=1
Cell phone radiation from EWG
http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone?allavailable=1
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
A Couple of Online Chart Applications
Posted: 15 Sep 2009 04:38 AM by the spectacular Researchbuzz. Thank you!
...I used to use SmartDraw, and more recently have been trying an open source program called Dia.
The first tool, which I’ve been watching for a while, is called Lovely Charts, and it is. Available at http://www.lovelycharts.com/, it not only lets you create regular flow charts but also site maps, network diagrams, people charts, BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and more. The site is nicely designed but the building tool is basic; symbols on the left and then a large area of the screen to play with. A couple of times I had to look at the help but for the most part it was pretty intuitive. To get a sense of what Lovely Charts can do, check out the Gallery. Lovely Charts is free but there is a pro version available.
The other tool I found out about earlier this week via PRNewswire. It’s called Creately, and it’s available at http://creately.com/. It’s similar to Lovely Charts but it appears to be more template-oriented; when you first log in Creately will offer you literally dozens of templates to get started; from flowcharts to SWOT diagrams to Venn diagrams to UML diagrams to electronics templates. Creately starts with a selection of more generic symbols but you can choose to add more symbols to your toolbox; those you can specify as narrowly as “Miscellaneous Cisco Objects.”
Creately has lots and lots of examples of what it can do, divided into categories with some commentary. Creately has a free version but it has some pretty strict limits. You can create three private diagrams but the rest of them are published publicly.
...I used to use SmartDraw, and more recently have been trying an open source program called Dia.
The first tool, which I’ve been watching for a while, is called Lovely Charts, and it is. Available at http://www.lovelycharts.com/, it not only lets you create regular flow charts but also site maps, network diagrams, people charts, BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and more. The site is nicely designed but the building tool is basic; symbols on the left and then a large area of the screen to play with. A couple of times I had to look at the help but for the most part it was pretty intuitive. To get a sense of what Lovely Charts can do, check out the Gallery. Lovely Charts is free but there is a pro version available.
The other tool I found out about earlier this week via PRNewswire. It’s called Creately, and it’s available at http://creately.com/. It’s similar to Lovely Charts but it appears to be more template-oriented; when you first log in Creately will offer you literally dozens of templates to get started; from flowcharts to SWOT diagrams to Venn diagrams to UML diagrams to electronics templates. Creately starts with a selection of more generic symbols but you can choose to add more symbols to your toolbox; those you can specify as narrowly as “Miscellaneous Cisco Objects.”
Creately has lots and lots of examples of what it can do, divided into categories with some commentary. Creately has a free version but it has some pretty strict limits. You can create three private diagrams but the rest of them are published publicly.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Two new offerings from Flickr and Google news archive
from ResearchBuzz Thank you!
Check them out at http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/
_______________________________________
Flickr Launches New Search Offerings
Flickr announced last week some new offerings to the search engine. And while you can get a lot more information out of the search results page, I found I had to be pretty careful with the mouse!
You can do a Flickr search off any page, and of course there’s an advanced search page available at http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/. This page allows you to narrow your search results by media type, date, and of course by Creative Commons-licensed content.
Now the search results show a whole page of thumbnails. The search box at the top of the results page allows you to narrow your search results from everything to those shots in the Getty Images collection or those in The Commons. (It’s great to have an easy to way to switch your search to Commons results.) Options over on the right of your search result give you the option to narrow your search to group, photographer, tag cluster, or even location.
This new search also allows you to get information about the individual images, and this is what I found to be tricky. If you’re in the small or medium view of search results (the default is small), hold your mouse over an image. You’ll see that a small i appears in the lower right corner. If you hold your mouse over that i in just the right way, and click on it, you’ll get a popup window with more information about the image including the number of views, comments, favorites, tags, and the date it was taken. You can see an example of this in this page of search results for tamales (haven’t had breakfast yet, again.)
Google News Increases Its News Archive
The standard Google News has been a little more open lately about how many news sources are getting indexed, and now Google News is getting in on the act as well. Google News announced last week that its news archive has been quadrupled, with new publications both from the US (Village Voice, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and abroad (Manila Standard, The Nation).
The direct URL for Google News’ advanced archive search is http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search. There you can narrow your search by a variety of options including date range and source. You can also narrow down your results to only those archives which are free.
Just to get a sense of how large the archives are, I did a search for a. I got about 328 million results. (By the way, you can also do a plain search for a on Google’s Web search. You’ll get over 17 billion results at this writing. Yes. 17 billion.) Running that search and looking for free articles only finds you about 179 million results, so based on this you can guess that something like half the Google News archives are free. (I’d have to do a lot more searching and calculating before I’d feel very confident about that, though.)
If you don’t want to use the date range option in the advanced search, you can use the timeline view at the top of the search results to narrow you results to a particular year span. When you do that you’ll get another timeline that lets you narrow down your results even further, as you can see in the screenshot below.
You might notice that the search results also have links for related news articles (which unfortunately do not restrict themselves to the fee options you initially requested) and related Web pages. I found the related Web pages option was a good way to find new keywords for my topic, as Google seems to be doing some kind of relevant keyword extraction on the news archives.
I had never used Google News’ archives that much, as it seemed to be mostly paid articles with a fairly limited offering. I’m very impressed with the new extent of the offerings. You know what would be absolutely perfect? The ability to set a Google Alert so that you get an e-mail when articles with the keyword of your choice are added to the archives.
Check them out at http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/
_______________________________________
Flickr Launches New Search Offerings
Flickr announced last week some new offerings to the search engine. And while you can get a lot more information out of the search results page, I found I had to be pretty careful with the mouse!
You can do a Flickr search off any page, and of course there’s an advanced search page available at http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/. This page allows you to narrow your search results by media type, date, and of course by Creative Commons-licensed content.
Now the search results show a whole page of thumbnails. The search box at the top of the results page allows you to narrow your search results from everything to those shots in the Getty Images collection or those in The Commons. (It’s great to have an easy to way to switch your search to Commons results.) Options over on the right of your search result give you the option to narrow your search to group, photographer, tag cluster, or even location.
This new search also allows you to get information about the individual images, and this is what I found to be tricky. If you’re in the small or medium view of search results (the default is small), hold your mouse over an image. You’ll see that a small i appears in the lower right corner. If you hold your mouse over that i in just the right way, and click on it, you’ll get a popup window with more information about the image including the number of views, comments, favorites, tags, and the date it was taken. You can see an example of this in this page of search results for tamales (haven’t had breakfast yet, again.)
Google News Increases Its News Archive
The standard Google News has been a little more open lately about how many news sources are getting indexed, and now Google News is getting in on the act as well. Google News announced last week that its news archive has been quadrupled, with new publications both from the US (Village Voice, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and abroad (Manila Standard, The Nation).
The direct URL for Google News’ advanced archive search is http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search. There you can narrow your search by a variety of options including date range and source. You can also narrow down your results to only those archives which are free.
Just to get a sense of how large the archives are, I did a search for a. I got about 328 million results. (By the way, you can also do a plain search for a on Google’s Web search. You’ll get over 17 billion results at this writing. Yes. 17 billion.) Running that search and looking for free articles only finds you about 179 million results, so based on this you can guess that something like half the Google News archives are free. (I’d have to do a lot more searching and calculating before I’d feel very confident about that, though.)
If you don’t want to use the date range option in the advanced search, you can use the timeline view at the top of the search results to narrow you results to a particular year span. When you do that you’ll get another timeline that lets you narrow down your results even further, as you can see in the screenshot below.
You might notice that the search results also have links for related news articles (which unfortunately do not restrict themselves to the fee options you initially requested) and related Web pages. I found the related Web pages option was a good way to find new keywords for my topic, as Google seems to be doing some kind of relevant keyword extraction on the news archives.
I had never used Google News’ archives that much, as it seemed to be mostly paid articles with a fairly limited offering. I’m very impressed with the new extent of the offerings. You know what would be absolutely perfect? The ability to set a Google Alert so that you get an e-mail when articles with the keyword of your choice are added to the archives.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Seadragon--Microsoft's Cool Picture Zoomer!!!
Microsoft recently launched a new picture tool called Seadragon. Available at http://seadragon.com/http://seadragon.com/, you can point Seadragon to any image on the Web, and get a zoomable viewer.
It works very simply: give Seadragon the URL to an image file, and it’ll be fetched. It’ll then process the file and give you a nice page containing your image along with tools to zoom in on it to get fine detail. You can also pan the image, pop out to a full-page view, look at the original image, etc.
I was a little leery of this at first because it didn’t seem to work. I had a nifty giraffe photo I took at the zoo that I thought would make a good image for this tool. Seadragon happily took the URL of the image and processed it — but the thumbnail and the zooms showed blurry sections toward the middle of the photograph. I tried again, this time with a larger version of the same image — and the same thing happened, only this time the blurry part was on the side. Even when I zoomed in on the image that part was blurry.
Putting that to one side I took the result I got and tried to embed it in Facebook, which worked fine. I then noticed that when I clicked the link to get to the Seadragon image from Facebook, the image looked fine with no blurs. I zoomed in on it and it still looked great. So all I can guess is that when I originally used Seadragon I didn’t wait long enough for the photos to render.
Anyway, despite what I initially thought this tool worked great. If you have some photos that you want to easily make zoomable — genealogy documents, or building images, or scans of newspaper pages — this is a very quick and handy way to add such functionality. I’m embedding my nifty giraffe photo at the end of this post so you can see how it turned out.
brought to you by ResearchBuzz.com;posted Aug.4th
It works very simply: give Seadragon the URL to an image file, and it’ll be fetched. It’ll then process the file and give you a nice page containing your image along with tools to zoom in on it to get fine detail. You can also pan the image, pop out to a full-page view, look at the original image, etc.
I was a little leery of this at first because it didn’t seem to work. I had a nifty giraffe photo I took at the zoo that I thought would make a good image for this tool. Seadragon happily took the URL of the image and processed it — but the thumbnail and the zooms showed blurry sections toward the middle of the photograph. I tried again, this time with a larger version of the same image — and the same thing happened, only this time the blurry part was on the side. Even when I zoomed in on the image that part was blurry.
Putting that to one side I took the result I got and tried to embed it in Facebook, which worked fine. I then noticed that when I clicked the link to get to the Seadragon image from Facebook, the image looked fine with no blurs. I zoomed in on it and it still looked great. So all I can guess is that when I originally used Seadragon I didn’t wait long enough for the photos to render.
Anyway, despite what I initially thought this tool worked great. If you have some photos that you want to easily make zoomable — genealogy documents, or building images, or scans of newspaper pages — this is a very quick and handy way to add such functionality. I’m embedding my nifty giraffe photo at the end of this post so you can see how it turned out.
brought to you by ResearchBuzz.com;posted Aug.4th
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Google Images Allows for Filtering by Reuse License
Wow, first Yahoo Images and now this! Google Images recently announced that searches will now be able to filter their searches by a variety of use licenses, including Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation. Searchers will also be able to find items that are in the public domain.
For this one you’ll want to skip the Google Images front page and go directly to the advanced search at http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en. At the bottom of the advanced image search page you’ll see an option for Usage Rights.
Note that you can search for everything from “labeled for reuse” to “labeled for commercial reuse with modification”. And note that you can run this search in conjunction with other Google Images search modifiers. You could, for example, find all medium sized black and white photos returned with a keyword search for “cow,” labeled for reuse. Which is what I did.
When Yahoo Images released its Creative Commons search modifier it was limited to Flickr (not that Flickr isn’t a huge repository of images.) I expected to see a lot of Flickr results with the Google reuse search, too, and I wasn’t disappointed. However, I also saw results from other large depositories like Wikimedia Commons and Openphoto. I also saw some images from regular domains which look like they had administered sitewide Creative Commons licenses. There were about 169 results overall.
Due to its sheer size, though, Flick does tend to overwhelm the search results when you get fairly specific. Medium sized green photos responding to the keyword “cow” and licensed for commercial reuse? Most of the results will come from Flickr. Blue clip art responding to the keyword “icon” and available for commercial reuse? That’s all Flickr — all four results of it.
Google’s image search has gotten a lot stronger in the last year or so as Google has added more search options, and I love being able to use those in conjunction with a license search. The disadvantage to doing this kind of search across the Web, though, as opposed to a single environment like Flickr is that it’s hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. Google makes it clear that it’s up to you to confirm that the images you’re finding are actually available for reuse and that the licensing information is accurate.
brought to you by ResearchBuzz
For this one you’ll want to skip the Google Images front page and go directly to the advanced search at http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en. At the bottom of the advanced image search page you’ll see an option for Usage Rights.
Note that you can search for everything from “labeled for reuse” to “labeled for commercial reuse with modification”. And note that you can run this search in conjunction with other Google Images search modifiers. You could, for example, find all medium sized black and white photos returned with a keyword search for “cow,” labeled for reuse. Which is what I did.
When Yahoo Images released its Creative Commons search modifier it was limited to Flickr (not that Flickr isn’t a huge repository of images.) I expected to see a lot of Flickr results with the Google reuse search, too, and I wasn’t disappointed. However, I also saw results from other large depositories like Wikimedia Commons and Openphoto. I also saw some images from regular domains which look like they had administered sitewide Creative Commons licenses. There were about 169 results overall.
Due to its sheer size, though, Flick does tend to overwhelm the search results when you get fairly specific. Medium sized green photos responding to the keyword “cow” and licensed for commercial reuse? Most of the results will come from Flickr. Blue clip art responding to the keyword “icon” and available for commercial reuse? That’s all Flickr — all four results of it.
Google’s image search has gotten a lot stronger in the last year or so as Google has added more search options, and I love being able to use those in conjunction with a license search. The disadvantage to doing this kind of search across the Web, though, as opposed to a single environment like Flickr is that it’s hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. Google makes it clear that it’s up to you to confirm that the images you’re finding are actually available for reuse and that the licensing information is accurate.
brought to you by ResearchBuzz
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Do you Twitter?
Learn how Twitter can work for you. Take the plunge! Check these
two resources out:
Ultimate Guide
Twitter in Plain English video
two resources out:
Ultimate Guide
Twitter in Plain English video
What fun! More on Wolfram and Google Squared
The Latest from ResearchBuzz
News about search engines, databases, and other information collections.
http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/
_________________________________________________
June 30th, 2009
It’s amazing to see all the search engine development that’s been taking place in the last couple of months. It’s like 1999 all over again, in a good way. Google Labs is humming with all kinds of neat stuff. When Google Squared came out earlier this month, I was pretty excited, but I think right now I’m at “It’s … okay.” A little disappointing.
Google Squared is available at http://www.google.com/squared. Here’s basically how it works. You search for something that will return a lot of things, like planets or cartoons. Google then returns a search result page that looks like a square (surprise!) and which contains items that hopefully fit what you were searching for. Each item has several columns of data, and you have the option to add more.
So I did a search for candy bars. I got a page of results and most of them were candy — not candy bars, but okay. Except for one of them which was for “Ion”, and while the description in the square contained information about a chocolate bar, the picture for the column was of a battery. (And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a chocolate battery.)
Annoyed, I did another search, for monty python, and realized two seconds later that was WAY too general. I did another search for Monty Python cast and this time I actually got a pretty good square, with a list of people affiliated with Monty Python. The first page of information was great, while the second one was starting to go a bit far afield. After a couple of minutes I realized that Eric Idle was missing. Eric Idle! How could you list Neil Innes and not list Eric Idle?!
Feeling topical (and wanting to throw Google Squared a softball) I searched for the Jackson Five. Google Squared actually returned me a front page with six Jacksons (Randy Jackson) and Diana Ross. The first result for this square was Michael Jackson, and it would be easy for someone to view the picture that’s been included as the representation of his person and find it offensive.
Anyway, let’s go back and do another search. If you do a search for candy you’ll get an idea of the kind of thing Google Squared can do. Here’s a screen shot:
Looking at a search result.
As you look at it you’ll see that each result is in a row, and each row has several columns of data. My candy searches seemed to default to price data. You can remove any column and add more columns if you like. As you can see in the next screenshot Google will make suggestions for the columns. As you also see some of these suggestions don’t make any sense.
Google Squared Suggestions
Google does say that if you don’t like the squares that Google is offering you can start with an empty square. I was still thinking about candy bars, so I started with an empty square and entered Baby Ruth and Almond Joy and Chick O Stick. My idea was that I could enter the kinds of things I was looking for, and then Google Squared could complete the list for me with similar items.
What was I REALLY thinking of? That’s right, Google Sets, which may be my favorite Google Labs product that never graduated. That’s what I wanted. And Google Squared doesn’t do that. It’ll make suggestions once you’ve started your square, but it won’t allow you to enter a few suggestions and then automatically build a square for you…
.. at least, not in a way that’s easy to find. Google Squared actually has the Google Sets functionality built in, but the way I found it was to mess up. If you enter a query that Google can’t easily square (I liked wombat inarticulate milkcan), Google will give you an error and prompt you to enter a few items upon which it can build a square:
That way I was able to enter a few candy bar names and get an actual square that I liked.
One thing I noticed is that I was never able to get full nutritional information for any of these candy bars. It was always ordering information.
So on a whim I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered in a bunch of candy bar names, separated by commas. WA gave me nutritional information for all the candy bars on one screen, even asking me to clarify which version of Twix I meant!
Not placed in a square, and not as slick as Google, but oh-so-handy.
Google Squared is a neat idea. But the squares it comes up with are odd. Sometimes they miss critical bits, and sometimes they just don’t make sense. It would be intensely useful to have some kind of way — a keyword search? a switch? — that allows you to specify what kind of columns you want to see, instead of wading through suggestions. A bit more functionality, and it could be super cool.
News about search engines, databases, and other information collections.
http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/
_________________________________________________
June 30th, 2009
It’s amazing to see all the search engine development that’s been taking place in the last couple of months. It’s like 1999 all over again, in a good way. Google Labs is humming with all kinds of neat stuff. When Google Squared came out earlier this month, I was pretty excited, but I think right now I’m at “It’s … okay.” A little disappointing.
Google Squared is available at http://www.google.com/squared. Here’s basically how it works. You search for something that will return a lot of things, like planets or cartoons. Google then returns a search result page that looks like a square (surprise!) and which contains items that hopefully fit what you were searching for. Each item has several columns of data, and you have the option to add more.
So I did a search for candy bars. I got a page of results and most of them were candy — not candy bars, but okay. Except for one of them which was for “Ion”, and while the description in the square contained information about a chocolate bar, the picture for the column was of a battery. (And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a chocolate battery.)
Annoyed, I did another search, for monty python, and realized two seconds later that was WAY too general. I did another search for Monty Python cast and this time I actually got a pretty good square, with a list of people affiliated with Monty Python. The first page of information was great, while the second one was starting to go a bit far afield. After a couple of minutes I realized that Eric Idle was missing. Eric Idle! How could you list Neil Innes and not list Eric Idle?!
Feeling topical (and wanting to throw Google Squared a softball) I searched for the Jackson Five. Google Squared actually returned me a front page with six Jacksons (Randy Jackson) and Diana Ross. The first result for this square was Michael Jackson, and it would be easy for someone to view the picture that’s been included as the representation of his person and find it offensive.
Anyway, let’s go back and do another search. If you do a search for candy you’ll get an idea of the kind of thing Google Squared can do. Here’s a screen shot:
Looking at a search result.
As you look at it you’ll see that each result is in a row, and each row has several columns of data. My candy searches seemed to default to price data. You can remove any column and add more columns if you like. As you can see in the next screenshot Google will make suggestions for the columns. As you also see some of these suggestions don’t make any sense.
Google Squared Suggestions
Google does say that if you don’t like the squares that Google is offering you can start with an empty square. I was still thinking about candy bars, so I started with an empty square and entered Baby Ruth and Almond Joy and Chick O Stick. My idea was that I could enter the kinds of things I was looking for, and then Google Squared could complete the list for me with similar items.
What was I REALLY thinking of? That’s right, Google Sets, which may be my favorite Google Labs product that never graduated. That’s what I wanted. And Google Squared doesn’t do that. It’ll make suggestions once you’ve started your square, but it won’t allow you to enter a few suggestions and then automatically build a square for you…
.. at least, not in a way that’s easy to find. Google Squared actually has the Google Sets functionality built in, but the way I found it was to mess up. If you enter a query that Google can’t easily square (I liked wombat inarticulate milkcan), Google will give you an error and prompt you to enter a few items upon which it can build a square:
That way I was able to enter a few candy bar names and get an actual square that I liked.
One thing I noticed is that I was never able to get full nutritional information for any of these candy bars. It was always ordering information.
So on a whim I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered in a bunch of candy bar names, separated by commas. WA gave me nutritional information for all the candy bars on one screen, even asking me to clarify which version of Twix I meant!
Not placed in a square, and not as slick as Google, but oh-so-handy.
Google Squared is a neat idea. But the squares it comes up with are odd. Sometimes they miss critical bits, and sometimes they just don’t make sense. It would be intensely useful to have some kind of way — a keyword search? a switch? — that allows you to specify what kind of columns you want to see, instead of wading through suggestions. A bit more functionality, and it could be super cool.
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