narvi pointed out to me that The WikiMedia Foundation is doing a 3^rd Quarter 2005 fund drive in order to raise $200000 for Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.
Edit, 11:45 CST Thu 08 Sep 2005: Looks as if they made it. As of 10:50 UTC 2005-09-08, they've raised $227,860.

( Athrabeth Narvi a Banazir: a discussion on merits, flaws, risks, and benefits of Wikipedia )
( Media Wiki and the planned Graphical Models Wiki )
( On Memory Alpha and Star Wars Wiki )

In other news: The hearing in the Microsoft-KFL-Google case began in King County Superior Court today and is expected to conclude tomorrow. The court filings appear in a Seattle Times supplement and details of today's proceedings are here.

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Banazir

Cross-posted to infojunkies, futuretech, and the AI community tessier_ashpool.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23 - For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.
( Source: Gary Rivlin for New York Times )

( Google as Microsoft: a rebuttal )
( Source: Andrew Orlowski for The Register )

( About the article in The Register )
( Google and privacy )

As for retaining its position as the king of search, Google faces some fights of its own, including a fierce competition over the desktop search applications market and the legal battle over its new hire, departed Microsoft VP Kai-Fu Lee.

Other sources:
( O'ReillyNet | Slashdot | CNet )

( In other news: U.S. citizenship quiz, open source economics and profit models )

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Banazir

As those of you who have been following the story of my course, CIS 690, Data Mining in Bioinformatics, may recall, I have changed the prerequisite from CIS 300 (Data Structures and Algorithms) to CIS 200 (Introduction to Computer Science).

There are 10 people in the class but only 5 are taking it: 3 CIS undergrads, 1 Ph.D. student in Math, and 1 Ph.D. student in Statistics. That leaves 5 auditors: 1 M.S. student in CIS (and Ph.D. student in Stats), 1 Ph.D. student in CIS, 1 statistics faculty member, and 2 SUROP students (Math and CS).

"How does one cater to such a diverse audience?" I wondered. A couple of them are quite familiar with BLAST and dynamic programming, while the whole concept of string matching algorithms (or algorithms in general) is new to others.

Thus did I come up with the following example for explaining edit distance and k-approximate string matching today:

--u-r- 2-- q--l 4-- mee!1!!
++|+|+ x++ x++| x++ ||-|---    insert (10) / delete (4) / twiddle (3)
you're too cool for me-!---

( History is philosophy teaching by examples )

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Banazir