Recent Bookmarks 21-Jul-2009

The Web Curriculum
Tim Bray, http://www.tbray.org, 14-July-2009
“The World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum.”
gml: Interesting to me that an individual not associated with an academic institution considers how to construct a computer science curriculum. As one person commented: “Looking forward to one day sending the kids off to the Tim Bray School of Internet Science …”

Semantic Web Tools
ESW Wiki
“This page contains the information on RDF and OWL tools that used to be listed on the home pages of the RDF and OWL Working Groups at W3C.”
gml: Nice reference source of programming and development tools related to RDF and OWL.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data (pdf)
Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira. IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2009.
“The first lesson of Web-scale learning is to use available large-scale data rather than hoping for annotated data that isn’t available.”
gml: The three authors, all Google researchers, argue that semantic interpretation derived from analysis of massive data sets will fare better than semantic web ontologies and services when “determining that an object with attributes ‘passengers’ and ‘cruising altitude’ is probably an aircraft.”

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental ‘heresies’ (video)
Stewart Brand. TED Talks. Filmed June 2009, posted July 2009.
“Villages of the world are emptying out … In town they see action, they see opportunity, they see a cash economy … They’re poor but they’re intensely urban and they’re intensely creative. … One of  the main events are these ad hoc schools. Parents pool their money, hire some local teachers, do a tiny unofficial local school. Education is more possible in the cities and that changes the world.”
gml: The first 8 minutes of this video concerns the rapid urbanization occurring most dramatically in the so-called developing world. The portion that refers to education begins about 05:20. To me it seems far more likely that the incubation needed to transform learning will occur in urban slums in cities like Mumbai than in the West.