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CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace

CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

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Saturday, July 28, 2007

 

CompuSchmooze April 2007: Encyclopaedia Judaica Online

CompuSchmooze April 2007: Encyclopaedia Judaica Online
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2007 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 636


The Encyclopaedia Judaica has been a mainstay for researchers in the to the history of the Jewish people for a number of decades.

Now, Thompson Gale Publishers, the new publishers of the Encyclopaedia, after winning prestigious awards and critical praise for the print edition of the work, is making the entire 22-volume Encyclopaedia available in an online interface.

Unfortunately, the online product misses a fabulous opportunity to take advantage of the rage media capabilities of the Internet. The online version uses a standardized text database architecture designed primarily for online text research.

It reminded me of the frustration of online research of more than 20 years ago, when only experienced professional researchers were allowed near the computer terminals to perform searches and then hand the results on paper to library patrons.

This implementation of the Encyclopaedia uses Thomson Gale’s standard format for online bibliographic databases. While it probably made sense to the editors creating the online structure, it isn’t designed for the casual browser, and is a rather sterile experience compared to some of the other multimedia-rich websites on Jewish topics that we’ve been exploring in this column.

Access to the online Encyclopaedia Judaica begins with “About This Publication,” a page that includes the physical characteristics of the publication, its standard book publishing number (known as the ISBN number), the number of pages in the publication, the number of volumes if it is a multiple volume publication, and a small thumbnail image of the cover.

There is a wealth of information in the online publication, just as in the printed version. You can review the articles in each of the volumes in a series of cascading subject headings that become visible when you click on a plus sign next to the topic or range of topics.

You can download an Acrobat PDF version of each article. However, all you see when you open an article is the text of the article with some hyperlinks to cross reference the text to other entries in the Encyclopaedia.

There are also some quirky experiences. While browsing through the Encyclopaedia, we found at least one hyperlink that were functional, but did not highlight the entire phrase to which they referred.

The online database also provides users with extensive information about proper bibliographic citation for each article, and it even lets you format the citation for download into EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, or RefWorks, popular bibliographic software used by research librarians. This is great if you are a research professional, but it’s probably not very useful for the casual reader/browser.

The ability to view illustrations and visuals from the printed Encyclopaedia also is limited. Because of the decision to use an existing bibliographic database structure, the editors effectively have prevented web designers from making the Encyclopaedia experience on the web more interactive and full of more rich content such as audio interviews, video clips, and high resolution photographs. Because of the structure illustrations are effectively disconnected from the articles to which they refer and you need to switch back and forth in order to view them in the context of the articles for which they were selected.

Clearly, the editors were focused on bringing of the Encyclopaedia into the online world in a database publishing format that would allow them to better manage and manipulate future editions of the print publication. This is a real case of disregarding the needs of the audience in an effort to make the publishing job easier.

Unfortunately, this approach misunderstands the full power of an Internet based publication, and severely limits the functionality that could have been achieved with a more integrated approach.

At $1,995 per printed 22-volume copy, this is not a reference work the average user will purchase for the home library. The online access price is not disclosed on the website.


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CompuSchmooze June 2007: Book Collector Software Makes Cataloguing EasyCompuSchmooze June 2007: Book Collector Software Makes Cataloguing Easy
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2007 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 695


Thanks to the sheer difficulty of finding books in boxes and shelves in the attic, I am fairly certain that we have bought third, fourth, and fifth copies of such literary staples as Catcher in the Rye, and Death of A Salesman.

I’ve always wanted to catalog all the books I own but I always deferred the project because of the sheer manual labor involved in writing down every book’s information and then typing it into the computer.

I tried taking a laptop into the attic, where many of the volumes are stored, but it’s just too hot and uncomfortable to sit there typing. Then I thought about using voice recognition to record ISBN numbers, the unique identification number assigned to every book, but that was cumbersome and time-consuming. And so, the project never really got off the ground.

More recently, I learned about the Collectorz.com set of software cataloguing programs, made by a firm in the Netherlands called Bitz & Pixelz .

There are databases for music, movies, comics, games, and MP3 files, in addition to the book program. What sets this vendor’s programs apart is its tight integration with a handheld barcode scanner that can read and store up to 500 of the ISBN bar codes that have been on the back cover of most books since the mid-1980s.

Instead of writing down the book’s information, you just scan its ISBN bar code as if you were using the self-checkout in a grocery store. Then, you plug the scanner into the computer through a provided USB cable, and Book Collectorz software automatically looks up the ID numbers in the Library of Congress, Amazon.com, and several other major library resources.

If the number is recognized (and most are), the program does an amazing job of filling in card catalog information, including downloading a thumbnail image of the book cover. The program tracks all the information about a book you would want. A complete description is on the Collectorz.com website .

The company initially used a scanner called the “CueCat,” an early consumer barcode scanner shaped like a feline, according to company CEO Mark-Jan Harte.

CueCat scanners were once distributed free by Radio Shack as a web surfing aid. The store printed bar codes in its circulars, and when you scanned them with the CueCat, your computer navigated the Internet to the Radio Shack web page for that item.

Today, Collectorz.com uses a more sophisticated Flic scanner , and it works smoothly. It takes a few minutes to get the knack of aiming the scanner at bar codes at a slight angle, but it’s a very efficient way to go through your library or DVD/CD collection scanning the codes.

“If you only have a hundred books or so, it’s probably not worth it,” Harte says. “But if you have 500 or a thousand books, then it probably can save you a lot of time.”

Books published before ISBN bar coding was standardized do present an obstacle, Harte admits. “You’ll have no choice but to enter at least the author and title yourself, but you can search a number of sources that are incorporated into Book Collector, so you can still retrieve the information about those books.”

The program is particularly popular with churches and not-for-profit groups, which often can’t afford to buy professional library management software, he said.

A new version of Book Collector is in the works, Harte says. Although features are still in flux, he says the new version will definitely support the new ISBN-13 bar code format and shared network use. One other limitation is that even though the Flic scanner can be used with CD or DVD bar codes for the other catalog programs, it’s not possible to scan barcodes from different types of products in a single scanning session. You have to initialize the scanner separately for each type of product.

Nevertheless, it’s a great way to get control of that library and stop buying multiple copies of books you own but just can’t find. Each database is $39.95 separately, but there are several different packages that include multiple databases and the Flic scanner for $199.95, about a $75 savings.


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CompuSchmooze May 2007: Israel21c website provides 'good news' about Israel<br />CompuSchmooze May 2007: Israel21c website provides 'good news' about Israel
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2007 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 630

One of the challenges facing Israel in the court of public opinion is generating positive news about the incredible intellectual and professional achievements of its citizens. Most Western news media are generally content to focus on stories about the conflict between Israel and its neighbors, while completely ignoring the technology, scientific and medical advances coming out of Israeli universities – advances which those of us living in Western countries frequently use on a daily basis.

Most cell phones, for example, are built around a chip design that came out of Motorola's development efforts in Israel.

A not-for-profit website based in California, Israel21c (it stands for "Israel 21st-Century"), has made a mission out of promoting positive stories about Israeli culture, technology, democracy, peaceful coexistence, and other issues. Its news stories have appeared, on occasion, in the mainstream US news media. For those of us accustomed to a steady diet of negative stories about Israeli politics, Israeli policy, and the conflict with Arab neighbors, the stories distributed by Israe21c are both refreshing and surprising.

In recent postings on the website's health page, we learn about researchers at Hebrew University studying drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease, including current research that combines an Alzheimer's drug with a Parkinson's disease medication. The combination, according to the site, "can not only slow the loss of cognitive function in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases but also help alleviate symptoms of major depression." Another story reports on an audio device invented at Technion University that helps patients with multiple sclerosis walk with less difficulty.

Under the technology heading, researchers at Ben Gurion University have designed a software program that converts handwritten Arabic script into printed Arabic characters on a computer, with a very low error rate, despite the complicated geometric calculations required to interpret Arabic script.

The global democracy section of the site reports on the Save a Child's Heart (SACH) program, which has brought more than 1,600 children from 26 different countries to Israel for life-saving heart surgery under the program since it was founded in 1992, according to the news item. The story reports that SACH provides medical training for Medical personnel from China, Ethiopia, Moldova, Eritrea, Nigeria, Vietnam and the Palestinian Authority at the Wolfson Medical Center in a Tel Aviv suburb.

The culture page describes positive interactions between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including the work of the Jerusalem Foundation, focusing on young people learning how to get along peacefully while enjoying educational and cultural activities together.

A section entitled "Profiles" features a story about Amitai Ziv, founder of the Israel Center for medical simulation, who last month received the Charles Bronfman 2007 Humanitarian Award for creating a training center where medical professionals can learn treatment techniques by actually simulating medical scenarios with both live actors portraying patients, and computerized mannequins simulating medical conditions. A former combat pilot, Ziv conceived of the idea of adapting aviation simulation technologies for use in medical training while he was a student at Hadassah Medical School.

The website also includes a series of links to blogs written by Israeli authors, about everyday life in Israel. On the home page, you can get a list of bullet-point factoids about countless technological and medical achievements by Israel, after being reminded that Israel is the 100th smallest nation in the world, "with less than 1/1000th of the world's population." These can be particularly useful in discussions with friends and family who often only know about the negative news coming from the Middle East.

Israel21c's goal is to ensure that the Western media have access to stories that show another side of Israeli life. It's a worthwhile goal, and a real eye opener when you start to browse through the stories of the incredible achievements of this tiny, continually surprising eretz of ours.

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CompuSchmooze April 2007 (2): Limits of Blogs for BusinessesCompuSchmooze? April 2007 (2): Limits of Blogs for Businesses
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2007 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 691

Blogs and social networking websites may be the way many younger people connect with each other, but for most of us, they have a long way to go.
The mainstream news media have capitalized on the "blogging" craze by giving high visibility to blog authors and their postings, often out of proportion to the number of people who read blogs.

For those of you who don't read them (and that will probably be most of you), blogs (or weblogs) are web-based diaries or journals written by (often) highly opinionated individuals. They are rarely reviewed by anyone, and seldom adhere to the standards we assume are being followed by traditional news organizations, such as fact-checking, editing, good grammar, and so on.

Blogs are supposed to be a conversation, where the blogger writes his or her opinion, and other people comment on it, or have a discussion about some issue. But there are more than 40 million blogs, so it's sometimes hard to decide whose blog to read.
To get noticed, some blog authors have decided they need to have what amount to screaming matches, like you see on Fox News or Court TV when they are discussing some controversial case, like Anna Nicole Smith, or Michael Jackson.

Outrageous blogs get attention, and blogs and other social media, like consumer generated videos, have been responsible for fueling some high profile news stories recently.

It was a blog written by a liberal media watchdog organization that helped fan the flames regarding Don Imus' racist comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team by posting a video clip on their blog.

A YouTube.com posting of a racially charged temper tantrum has all but sunk Michael ("Kramer") Richards comedy career, and former Sen. George Allen of Virginia lost his reelection bid, in part because of his strange decision to call his opponent's videographer "Macaca" while that photographer's camera was running. You have to wonder if Mel Gibson would still be raking it in if there was a video of his drunken, anti-Semitic tirade.

Because of the unfettered nature of blogs, some enthusiasts are encouraging businesses to create blogs as a way of opening a "genuine" conversation with their customers.

Some companies have done this with mixed success. General Motors has a blog called the GM Fast Lane Blog, in which at least some of the entries are being written by the company's vice chairman, Bob Lutz. Lutz is a legendary car guy, an engineer who loves to chat with car and truck enthusiasts about engine design.

I'm sure that's a fine hobby, and I am certain that GM can get a lot of useful consumer research information by having a blog. But you know, the company posted a $12 billion loss last year, and I'm pretty sure that some GM shareholders would rather see Mr. Lutz spending a little time with other senior managers to figure out how to avoid such a big red number this year, or at least reduce it a bit. Letting the market research people do the blogging might be a good idea.
Even the companies that have embraced blogging circle the wagons when there's a real problem. Last year, Microsoft had a security problem in its software (so what else is new?)

Unfortunately, their primary blogger, Robert Scoble, who has even written a book about the importance of having honest, "naked" conversations with customers (the book is called Naked Conversations), went on radio silence about the security issue. His blog only referred readers to the official Microsoft statements. That's hardly a "naked" conversation.

More recently, MySpace.com, the popular social networking website used by many teens and college students, decided to prevent its users from generating revenue by posting links to their own musical compositions or photos for sale. MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., says it is ensuring that copyrights are not being violated. But one MySpace.com diva, a singer called Tila Tequila, has been selling her own videos and songs online.

These incidents suggest that new forms of expression like these may be social media, but traditional companies are still having a very hard time not being anti-social.


 
CompuSchmooze March 2007: A Potpourri of Web ActivitiesCompuSchmooze March 2007: A Potpourri of Web Activities
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2007 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 589

A new version of a familiar product, a new survey about teenagers and social networking web usage, and an interesting but oddly named new add-on for Microsoft Outlook kept us busy this month.

Version 9 of Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) was released recently. It's a voice recognition software package that lets you speak into your computer and have the computer convert the voice into text.

"Speech is one of those technologies whose promise has been great for many years, but the delivery on that promise hasn't always been to expectations," said Chris Stromiello of Nuance , the manufacturer. "We've been able to drive accuracy levels far beyond where they've been before."

And that's actually true. One of the biggest turn-offs of voice recognition software has been the need to "train" the software to recognize a user's voice patterns. You had to read lengthy passages into the computer and then wait for up to an hour while the software created a voice profile. Training still makes recognition accuracy better, but DNS9 works very well, recognizing even odd words like my last name right out of the box.

DNS also works with portable digital recording devices, so you can dictate on the road. You transfer the audio file to the computer, Dragon transcribes it.

The most popular use for Dragon is for long documents, but people are also using it to dictate email messages very quickly, Stromiello said. Since we can speak about 160 words a minute, and most people can only type about 40-60 words a minute accurately, the time savings can be enormous, he said.

If you were wondering about your teenagers and those social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook , it's more like their school lockers than the wild West, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Pew released a new tracking study about teenagers, noting that more than half of all online youths aged 12-17 are using social networking websites, but also indicating that they more likely to use social networking sites to reinforce existing friendships, not to meet new people.

"One of the fascinating things about social networking websites is they are viewed as a very chaotic place where teenagers are changing their profiles, the photos, and so on, but they are also providing a source of stability in their lives, and this gives them a way, particularly in that crossover period between high school and college, to maintain contact with their friends," said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The teenagers in the survey overwhelmingly (88%) said they would not use social networking websites to meet new people or flirt. You can read the study at the Pew Internet website .

Finally, if you are a power networker and use Microsoft Outlook to collect your networking contact information, a new add-on program lets you analyze the value of your network.

It's called Cortege – sort of a strange name, since a cortege is a procession, usually at a funeral. But the program, from Personal Software, builds graphical trees of your network based on the individuals in your Outlook contact folders. You cam record detailed information about each individual, including how you met them, who referred you to them, and link them together to build a visual model of your circle of friends and colleagues. The program also will link people at the same company or in common categories. If you're in sales or consulting and you need to network, it's worth checking out, at www.personal-software.com.

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CompuSchmooze February 2007: Jewish Webcasting Week Site Finds Multimedia<br />CompuSchmooze February 2007: Jewish Webcasting Week Site Finds Multimedia
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2007 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 614

There’s a growing effort to pull together a lot of the Jewish multimedia resources on the web, including digital photos, digital audio, or digital video. One site doing a worthwhile job of identifying and alerting subscribers about useful Jewish content is Jewish Webcasting Week (). This site is like a TV listing for Jewish webcasts, podcasts, and other multimedia files.

There are some glitches in the design of the site that make it look amateurish, but the content is useful enough to allow some leeway on the look and feel.

The American Jewish Committee Archives, for example, contain Adobe Acrobat PDF versions of World War II era scripts for a series of radio plays written by Moss Hart that imagine putting Axis leaders on trial for their war crimes (). You can listen to audio recordings of old radio broadcasts as well, like a 1944 dramatization of “Behold the Jew,” by British poet Ada Jackson, which won the 1943 Greenwood Poetry Prize in the UK ().

Music is well-represented and very eclectic. There is a link to a British Jewish rap artist who calls himself Antithesis the Rapper (). You can download his song for Israeli MIAs, “Ima Mechaka Babayit,” which Chief Rabbi of Great Britain Jonathan Sacks has called “a very novel prayer.” Profits from sales of his CD go to charity, the website claims. You can also listen to the Chassidic Jazz Project (), a band that “combines traditional Chassidic melodies with contemporary jazz arrangements,” according to the website.

A link to the Jewish TV Network () gives you access to some popular music videos, like Jewish guitarist Mark Knopfler (once of Dire Straits) singing “This is Us” with Emmy Lou Harris, and of course, Adam Sandler singing his “Hanukkah Song.”

One of the site’s most elaborate discoveries is the Center for Online Judaic Studies (), a collaboration of faculty and graduate students from universities around the world, including Princeton University and Rutgers here in New Jersey.

There are a number of video interviews with scholars from the Center ()on topics such as the causes of anti-Semitism in Western Christendom, and why Jews chose to live in Christian Europe. There are also discussions of the use of technology for teaching Jewish history and how technology has affected Jewish communities around the world.

Among other gems, the site includes translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and an interactive animation that simulates an archeological dig in Jerusalem (). By clicking on various buttons, you can highlight different archeological work sites and get information about discoveries there.

There is a directory page just for Jewish podcasts (), and you can sign up for site’s best feature, a weekly email highlighting some of the sites listed in its directory, by sending an email to info@Jewishwebcasting.com.

In other news: A terse email this week from Serious Magic () informed software owners that the company had been acquired by Adobe Systems, maker of Adobe Acrobat and PhotoShop, among other digital multimedia programs. Serious Magic created several programs for producing digital videos, including Visual Communicator (reviewed in CompuSchmooze in August 2002), which brought “green screen” techniques used by professional broadcasters to home and business PC users. It’s the same kind of technology that’s used on local TV newscasts to put the meteorologist in front of the Doppler radar image. Serious Magic told users that the company would cease to operate independently, but said little else. Its website has links to Adobe’s online press room, but so far, Adobe hasn’t even posted an announcement of the acquisition. There’s no clue as to how they will integrate Serious Magic’s technologies with Adobe’s popular suite of digital photography and video production tools.


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