How do computers
Remember? By disc and RAM,
And now by "racetrack"!
Discs spin, cheap but slow;
RAM is quicker but costly;
Racetrack's fast and cheap.
The culturally rich Cherokee Nation has announced the first AmerIndian language to be featured on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. The hope is the ubiquity of mobile computing will shore up daily native language use, which has fallen to only 8,000 speakers out of a population of 290,000.
Cherokee, the only southern Iroquoian language to survive into the present, does not use the standard Latin alphabet (the one you're reading) but instead uses a syllabary developed by a polymath tribal Chief named Sequoyah, two centuries ago. The tribe worked with Apple to allow Cherokee users to utilize that unique representation while using their products.
During the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we kept you current on how all parties were employing social media. We followed that up with tools to track the aftermath of the spill. Now, we would like to present you with a new way to watch the ripples that are still spreading from the Deepwater Horizon: lawsuits.
The Environmental Law Institute's Ocean Program has launched a comprehensive and sophisticated database of every lawsuit related to the spill, replete with interactive maps. The count so far is 473 cases!
Under the auspices of the Smithsonian, the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions has been digitizing and "databasing" the contents of ancient medical treatises for decades. Having done so, they were well positioned to help scholars understand the discovery of a lifetime: 2,000-year-old pills found in a shipwreck, the only ancient medicines ever discovered intact.
The Roman ship, excavated in Tuscany's Bay of Baratti in the Eighties, contained a host of medical implements, including 136 boxwood vials and tin containers. One of the latter was recently found to contain pills and those pills were in tact, the metal having held the water off for over 20 centuries.
Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. The latest installment is the top 10 stories of the culture of technology.
These are the stories that answer that question you sometimes hear from tech skeptics or those who mistake advances in computing and communications for Beanie Babies and Segways. The question is "So what?" Here's what.
Everyone knows what a computer is. It's. Well. You. Come on. Let's see. OK. An iPad. That's a computer. And. So, there's laptops. You get the idea. Electricity! That's it. Definitely. And plastic.
But before electricity and before plastic humans still had the drive to create devices to help them think, to do some of the heavy lifting. It's a very old impulse. So we rummaged around a bit and found a few of the tools without whose development, your most sophisticated tool for thinking would be your own fingers.
Hey, remember when the IBM computer Deep Blue went up against a chess grandmaster? That was cute. Well now a "DeepQA" supercomputer will go up against someone with a brain in his head: a Jeopardy champion.
Actually, the computer, named "Watson," will go up against two of the winningest players in the show's history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
As the social web becomes more common, universities start to make use of it. As they do, their reliance on it grows until often the only place to access essential information is online. But what of those who cannot utilize that information in the same way as the majority of their fellows?
Just as lecture halls built prior to the Americans With Disabilities Act did not come with wheelchair ramps, universities' online presence and strategy were built with equally little thought to those outside of the mean. And universities and students alike are beginning to pay the price for that oversight.
George Ewart Evans, the pioneer of British oral history, collected 250 recordings of around 170 individuals born largely in the 1880's and '90s. That collection is now accessible online via the British Library, pioneers in their own right.
The George Ewart Evans Collection "document(s) rural life and agricultural work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, folk and popular songs."
No technology can keep a language from going extinct. Languages require a context of culture that no electronic tool, however sophisticated, can reproduce. But what it can do, and what Cambridge University's Endangered Language Database does, is collect and document those threatened languages. As they themselves describe their mission:
"Researchers at the World Oral Literature Project have compiled a database of language endangerment levels with references to collections and recordings of oral literature that exist in archives around the world."
