Looks like soemthing that would help you sort your abcd-1234 photos that you upload to Picasa. Wonder if it can be made to work in reverse and back download the data that it applies to the photos/albums to your desktop. Aferall, the only proper way to deal with digital photos is to burn them (after properly named and sorted) to gold CDs or DVDs.

Name tags in Picasa Web Albums

Put a name to a face

Name tags help you automatically organize and share your photos based on who’s in them.

How it works
Instead of tagging your photos individually, you can quickly identify and label many photos with one click.

IBM provides plenty of tech training — in the form of text presentations, animated teaching guides, and “serious” video games — to the companies with which it works. Now the computing giant is offering its courses not just to business partners, but to business schools as well.

In an announcement this week, IBM officials said they have opened their training materials up to colleges that have signed up with the company’s Academic Initiative, a program that offers hardware and software discounts along with instructional tools. According to IBM, more than 3,000 institutions — mostly business schools and information-science programs — are now eligible to use the newly released training programs.

The company has also unveiled a tool, available on the Academic Initiative Web site, that helps professors match IBM’s technology and resources to courses recommended by the Association for Computing Machinery. —Brock Read

The Beginning of the Road

High-tech computer wizardry and good old-fashioned historical sleuthing are re-creating the lost world of Washington’s origins

“We have on one side a river two miles wide, on the other one mile wide, containing a fine harbor for the largest ships. The country round rises in all the diversity of hill and dale that imagination can paint.”
- WILLIAM THORNTON, ARCHITECT, OCT. 5, 1797

“The hills are barren of everything but impenetrable woods, and the valleys are mere swamps, producing nothing except myriads of toads and frogs of enormous size.”
- AN ANONYMOUS STONEMASON, JAN. 28, 1796

The Know-Nothing Party

One of the common claims for Millennials (Generation Y, Generation Dot.Net, Digital Natives … ) is that they are well-informed, civic-minded junior citizens who put the slacker-ness of Gen X to shame. Steven Johnson’s claim here that “The twentysomethings in the US – the ones who spent their childhood years engaged with computers and not zoning out in front of the TV – are the least violent, the most politically engaged and the most entrepreneurial since the dawn of the television era” is typical, although if we measure political engagement in terms of voting rates, the claim is false. And if we measure civic-mindedness by scores on civics tests, such as this one, we get dismaying results again and again.

And here is another study, reported in Television Quarterly (Winter 2008), that paints an even darker picture of youth awareness. It covers news consumption by different age groups, and it explodes the notion that the Internet serves many of them as a lively news source. Here are some findings:

——-While one in five older adults read a newspaper regularly, only one in 12 young adults do, and only one in 20 teens. By comparison, 20 or 30 years ago, more than half of young adults read a daily newspaper.

——-Only a small portion of older and younger folks use the Internet for news: one in seven older adults, one in eight younger adults, and one in 12 teens.

——-About one-quarter of younger Americans pay no attention to news from any source.

——-Television remains the primary source of current events for older and younger Americans. About 50 percent of them chose television as their first exposure, and no other news source reached more than half that rate.

——-Interestingly, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show barely registered in the study, leading to the conclusion, “Such programs have a hard-core following, but it is a relatively small audience in the context of the full public.”

The author of the report, Thomas Patterson, doesn’t blame the Internet for the decline in news consumption by young Americans. Instead, he cites the breakdown of group activities in the home, such as the sharing of newspapers and group viewing of the network news. But his final sentence does, in fact, imply a large role for technology in the decline: “Today, media use is a largely a solitary affair,” he says, “contributing to the tendency of media use to reinforce interests rather than to create new ones.” The screen of a cell phone isn’t easily shared by mom and dad and the kids.

 Large classrooms with frequent absences: Those are the environments where students seem most likely to benefit from computer-assisted instruction, according to a working paper released last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The paper reports on an experiment in three urban school districts in the United States. In the study, 152 pre-algebra and algebra classes were randomly assigned to use either traditional “chalk-and-talk” instruction or a commonly used computer package known as I Can Learn.

August 20, 2008

PubMed Now Indexes Videos of Experiments and Protocols in Life Sciences

PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online database, is now indexing videos from The Journal of Visualized Experiments. According to the publication’s official blog, JoVE is “the first video-journal to ever be accepted for publication in PubMed.”

The online, open-access journal publishes videos of experiments and protocols in the biological and life sciences and offers its video-articles to science bloggers to illustrate their posts.

The journal managers say that PubMed’s decision is an “official acceptance” of the scientific community of new forms of communication.

“Overall, it will increase the interest of the scientists to communicate their findings in video, making biological sciences more transparent and efficient,” Moshe Pritsker, the co-founder of JoVE, told Wired.
—Maria José Viñas

Aurora Concept Video

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

 Even if you do not read the extensive Design Concept Theory, be sure to take the few minutes to watch the video. Very inventive and reminiscent of the Apple video of the ’90s.

A professor at Michigan State University has created a free online video game to help students learn Chinese.

The multi-player role-playing game, Zon/New Chengo, allows users to choose Mandarin phrases to converse with other characters in the game about exchanging money, buying breakfast, and other activities visitors to China would experience.

The game was created by Yong Zhao, University distinguished professor of educational psychology and educational technology, who runs the university’s Confucius Institute.

Check out the game free here, or view a video demo of it here.—Catherine Rampell.

 How long ago did we use “games” called “Edutainment” to help our kids learn basic skills such as math, spelling etc?

By JEREMY BAILENSON

My virtual representation of me, commonly known as an avatar, can outperform me as a teacher any day. It can pay unwavering attention to every student in a class of 100 or more; show my most spectacular actions while concealing any lapse, like losing my cool; and detect the slightest movement, hint of confusion, and improvement in performance of each student simultaneously.

Most people may think of avatars as too primitive to show such details. But at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (http://vhil.stanford.edu), my colleagues and I use cutting-edge technology. We could build an avatar that looked just like you (the heads we produce look real enough that they are used in police lineups), gestured like you, even touched like you, thanks to haptic devices that relay the speed and force of hand movements. And the technology can be transmitted over a network.

An experiment in using an academic blog to peer-review a scholarly book showed promise, but the approach is time-consuming, and it will not replace traditional blind peer review anytime soon.

That was the assessment of those involved in an effort to post an academic book online, piece by piece over a number of weeks, and let anyone critique it (The Chronicle, February 1).