Project Gutenberg News

Literacy Project Portal Launched

[Of course, Project Gutenberg, perhaps the largest literacy project, was not contacted about this.]

 

 

The Literacy Project, a portal to connect literacy organizations around the world, was announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. It was created in a collaboration among Google, the Frankfurt Book Fair literacy campaign, and UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning.

 

Google's new online service lets teachers, organizations, and people interested in literacy use the Internet to search for and share relevant information through blogs, videos, and groups. Searchers can also locate literacy organizations using a zoomable world map.

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Draft Report from NIST Details Rfid Risks

[Of course this is only about risk to management, not to those who might have a medical risk, or who could be located by terrorists via their RFIDs]

 

A draft report from the National Institute for Standards and technology (NIST) covers some of the security and privacy risks of using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Agencies must decide how much information to include on the RFID tags and how to protect it. If the tag is tied to a back-end database, for example, an intruder could use an RFID reader as a back door to the database unless it has been properly secured with access controls, password protection, and cryptography. According to the report, "When practitioners adhere to sound security engineering principles, RFID technology can help a wide range of organizations and individuals realize substantial productivity gains and efficiencies." The report's guidance is intended to help current and future RFID users understand the risks and the best-known safeguards.

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Machine Translation

We are seeking as much information as possible on the various approaches to Machine Translation. Any brand names or contact information would be greatly appreciated.

Text To Speech

Dolphin Producer is a new software package which will convert a text document into a fully synchronized text and audio DTB at the push of a single button. The DTB can then be played back using Dolphin's EaseReader software player – which is included in Dolphin Producer.

 

The DTB can also be played back on any other DAISY DTB software or hardware player, as well as any MP3 player – The choice is yours.

 

http://www.dolphinuk.co.uk

 

or

 

http://www.dolphinusa.com

Free Internet Reference Site

LivingInternet.com provides a 700-odd page reference about the Internet "to provide living context and perspective to this most technological of human inventions", and has received input from many people that helped build the Internet. It currently receives about 3 thousand visitors a day, many from educational institutions. Now in its 7th year of operation.

 

http://www.livinginternet.com

General Catalog of Old Books and Authors

http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/ngcoba/ngcoba.htm

which now indexes 24,000 books available free online, including all PG(US) & PG(Aus)’s books, along with some basic date information about them and their authors where you can find more.

Plus many books not available on line, a good place to search for books by specific authors who you are interested in.

For information please contact Philip Harper;

webmaster AT kingkong.demon.co.uk

Experimental Online Reader

There is an experimental online reader available. Start from any bibliographic record page, e.g.

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4300

 

Basically this paginates the .txt file and remembers your last position in a cookie so you can later resume reading where you left off.

Please test it. It should work with any book that has a text file where the encoding is known.

Internet Archive Invitation

We have been invited to peruse the various eBook collections of the Internet Archive for potential Project Gutenberg eBooks.

http://www.archive.org

 

Don't worry, many of the numbers listed are out of date, but you should get all the files when you pass through to the original sites.

Click on "texts" to get started, feel free to pick up any of the eBooks you would like to work on.

Many Thanks To Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive!

Read more…

Google and YouTube...the Truth

While nearly every media outlet is once again filled with press releases from Google and YouTube, you probably have not heard much about the fact that Google tried competing with YouTube and never really got their program running — hence the $1.65 billion takeover of YouTube.

 

It would appear that Google has been sucked into the Brave New World of "Infotainment."

 

"If you can't beat them, buy them!"

 

Wasn't that once the motto of MicroSoft???

 

Or was it the motto of CBS when they bought Katie Couric?

 

Do you think the new merger will be called:

 

Yougle ???

 

or

 

GooTube ???

 

Google's eBook projects seem to be working about as well, even with a large handful of billion dollar libraries to help them with something they don't know anything about.

 

Do you think I should sell Project Gutenberg to Google?

 

For more or less thatn $1.65 billion?

 

Electronic Trading Surpasses Mercantile Exchange Pit Trading

Last Thurs might have been the first day on the CME where there were more commodities traded via electronic trading than on the actual floor of the exchange. CME = Chicago Mercantile Exchange [Various single commodities had done this before, not sure if a grand total of all trade had been a majority electronic before]