Pauls musings and tidbits

White House Launches Data.gov and Seeks Advice on Transparency: Via Threat Level.

The Obama administration launched its anticipated Data.gov web site today where federal agencies will publish raw data. The data is being made available to programmers to allow them to develop applications to make the data more accessible to the public.

The site’s catalog currently contains fewer than 100 datasets, but will grow as agencies translate more data into raw digital formats. The data is available in XML, Text/CSV, Keyhole Markup Language and Compressed Keyhole Markup Language, Feeds, XLS, or ESRI Shapefile formats. The site also provides links to widgets and data mining and extraction tools to help cull through data from specific agencies.

To encourage the development of applications for the data, the Sunlight Foundation, in conjunction with others, has launched a competition, Apps for America 2: the Data.gov Challenge.

The winner of the best application will receive $10,000. The runner-up and third place winners will receive $5,000 and $2,500 respectively. All three will receive a trip to Washington, D.C. to the awards ceremony in September. A special $2,500 prize will go to the person who creates the best visualization of data.gov data. Deadline for submissions is August 7.

In addition to its Data.gov site, the Obama administration is also asking the public for advice on how it can become more transparent. Comments, ideas and proposals can be submitted between now and June 3 to opengov@ostp.gov or through the White House Open Government Initiative web site.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

Read Original Article:(Via Threat Level.)

reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books: A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.

(Read Original Article - Via .)

Identify Galaxies Using Spare Wetware Cycles: “hazem invites us to have fun, learn about galaxies, and actually help astronomers by looking at pictures of galaxies and identifying the type. Warning: it’s more addictive than Tetris. From the site: ‘GalaxyZoo… harnesses the power of the internet — and your brain — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you’ll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. Why do we need you? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you.’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

VideoJug and Expert Village | “How To” Video Sites with Differing Models For Content Producers.: “

I have previously outlined 3 video sites that specialize in ‘How-To’ type educational videos. Of these 3 there are two which stand out as the 2 main competitors in this niche. These are VideoJug and ExpertVillage.

The two companies are very similar providing education how-to videos on everything you can think of from Gardening Videos to Earthquake Survival.

Continue Reading…

(Read Original Article - Via Web TV Wire.)

CDT Urges Congress to Make CRS Reports Available: “CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris today urged lawmakers to make the unclassified, taxpayer-funded reports produced by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) available to the public over the Internet. Harris joined other open-government advocates at an event on Capitol Hill to unveil the recommendations of the Open House Project, a collaborative effort launched earlier this year by the Sunlight Foundation to make the House of Representatives more readily accessible to ordinary citizens on the Web. CDT created OpenCRS.com in 2005 to increase the public availability of CRS reports and has long advocated for Congress to make the reports fully available to the public online.”

(Read Original Article - Via Center for Democracy and Technology.)

Web Video: A PoliticsTV Retrospective: “

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(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

I just started up an automatted blog to gather news and gossip about socialite Paris Hilton. The girl who is famous for being famous. It is at http://News-Paris-Hilton.com/

Welcome to my new personal Blog. This is in addition to http://www.PrivacyDigest.com/ where I follow the news relating to your privacy.
I have also added a new personal photo gallery at http://www.Paulhardwick.com/photos/

And the Sunflower Children’s silent auction was a success.