In this month’s issue of the Montague Institute Review, I wrote about Mendeley, a collaboration and personal knowledge management service popular with academics (see A new knowledge platform: SharePoint vs. Mendeley). As someone who thinks for a living, I read with interest the most popular reference in the huge Mendeley archive — an article by … Continue reading
I just finished reading A Beautiful Mind about Nobel prize winning mathematician John Nash — a very sad book. His early, most productive, years were marred by arrogance and social dysfunction. His middle years were consumed by mental illness. Shortly thereafter, I read a profile of Silicon Valley libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel and an article … Continue reading
In spite of the fact that I make a living in the computer field, I’m usually slow to use new technology. I was one of the last to get a microwave. I still prefer my desktop computer to an iPad, and would rather use a map or follow my nose than use a GPS. The … Continue reading
A recent article in the National Geographic Traveler discussed the utility of a “third language” when traveling to a foreign country. For example, an English speaker traveling to southeast Asia might converse with the natives in French. The author puts it this way: “The not-native-to-either-party language is like a neutral territory, a halfway point where … Continue reading
Lately I’ve been working intensively on a semantic web project. As a result, I find myself moving away from the traditional research process that is rooted in the index-card method we were taught in school. My evolving new model is more web-like and has a greater emphasis on people. Maybe I’m part of a trend. … Continue reading
For years I’ve been publishing the Knowledge Base Editor’s Digest, a monthly annotated listing of articles I’ve read and liked. The production process involves: bookmarking articles as I find them; selecting the ones I like for the current month’s issue; creating a record for each article in our knowledge base; exporting article metadata as RSS … Continue reading
Originally published December 2005 Article in focus: “Interface lift” (Amy Wohl, IEEE Spectrum, November 2005). More articles on this topic: See “usability and user behavior” in the Digest index or the Montague Institute Review index. About the author. Amy Wohl is a consultant, newsletter publisher, and columnist for VARBusiness magazine. Prior to that, she was … Continue reading
Originally published June 2009 Until recently, information about the Semantic Web has been either visionary and theoretical or highly technical. Now, with the appearance of applications such as Google’s “rich snippets,” Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, and Reuters OpenCalais, the future is tantalizingly close (see De facto standards for semantic search?). It’s time to face two issues that … Continue reading
