• Consola PS3 (320 GB) + Battlefield 3 → 299’95€
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 PS3 → 62’96€
• Warhammer 40K: Space Marine PS3 → 24’95€
• Killzone 2 Platinum PS3 → 29’95€
• Killzone 3 Edición Coleccionista PS3 → 29’95€
• Gran Turismo 5 Platinum PS3 → 29’95€
• Need for Speed: The Run Limitada PS3 → 62’96€
• Vancouver Olimpiadas Invierno PS3 → 29’95€
• PRO Evolution Soccer 12 PS3 → 49’95€
• Sennheiser OMX 180 Negro Auriculares Sport → 29€
• Sony HDR-PJ10E Videocámara Alta Definición Proyector → 474’05€
• Canon EOS 600D + 18-55 MM IS Cámara Réflex Digital + PNY 16GB Tarketa Micro SD → 717’90€
• Caselogic DCB-309 Mochila Réflex Digital → 99€
• Bolsa: Pan-Am Globe Landscape → 37’99€
• El último libro de Calvin y Hobbes → 16’10€
• El gran Calvin y Hobbes. Ilustrado → 17’05€

El total asciende a 2011’66€

• PS3 320GB + Gran Turismo 5 → 349,95 €
• F1 2010 PS3 → 49,95 €
• Need for Speed Hot Pursuit PS3 → 69,95 €
• Moto GP 09/10 PS3 → 19,95 €
• Logitech Volante Driving Force GT PS3 → 129,95 €
• Nintendo Wii edición limitada Mario Kart 25 Aniversario (Negra) → 199,95 €
• New Super Mario Bros Wii → 44,95 €
• Wii Fit Plus + Balance Board Wii → 101,95 €
• Call of Duty Black Ops Wii → 60,95 €
• EA Sports Active Personal Trainer Wii → 29,95 €
• PES 2011 Pro Evolution Soccer Wii → 29,95 €
• Panasonic RP-HS33 Black Auriculares deportivos → 19’95 €
• Sennheiser HD448 Auriculares Hi-Fi → 94,95 €
• Sony HDR-CX155E Videocámara Full HD → 439 €
• Panasonic DMC-TZ8 Negra Cámara Digital → 249 €
• Panasonic Funda DMW-CLXA1E de Cuero Negro Compacta → 30,90 €
• Sandisk SDHC 8GB → 24,50 €
• Bolsa PANAM Sport Fake Leather → 39,95 €
• From Hell (Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell) → 23,95 €

El total asciende a 2009,65 €.

Different style sheets for a blog

Firstly, the use of style sheets let us choose the appearance of our websites or documents. This includes the colour, the underlining, the size… of fonts; the distribution an amount of  information displayed; etc. Secondly, style sheets are a truly fast way of modifying a whole document whithout changing the information that we want to provide. By only clicking one button we can give our document or website the layout that fits better with our needs.

In the third place, we have to remark that all the detailed instructions that we introduce in our style sheets remain there, which is really beneficial when we want to customize another document in the same way. Moreover, we can obtain all the orders of our style sheet, for example, in a Word document so as to apply identical rules in every document - for instance, the size of headings or citing some bibliography.

As we can see, the use of style sheets can bring us a large number of benefits; the sooner we start to work with them, the better. So why don’t you begin by changing the appearance of your Worpress blog with a different style sheet? Or maybe you prefer to structure some guidelines to present your papers for class. Nevertheless, don’t forget to investigate a bit deeper the style sheets!

References:

• Style sheet (desktop publishing). (2009, December 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 22:02, December 20, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Style_sheet_(desktop_publishing)&oldid=332300316
• Style sheet (web development). (2010, December 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 22:09, December 20, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Style_sheet_(web_development)&oldid=339724625

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

LaTeX

The first markup language that we are going to study today is LaTeX, which was created in 1984 by Leslie Lamport in order to make easier the use of Donald Knuth’s TeX. This markup language is widely accepted among mathematicians, scientists, engineers, philosophers, economists and other scholars due to its ability to write academic and technical books containing mathematic signs and formulae.

In addition, I would like to introduce you TEI. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an association of American and European academic institutions that has developed a standard for representation of texts in digital form. The TEI has set some guidelines specifying encoding methods for machine-readable texts in the areas of humanities and social sciences.

The TEI has collaborated with important institutions such as, for example, the Brown University or Oxford; and, as a result, the TEI has taken extremelly interesting projects including the Canterbury Tales Project, the Oxford Text Archive, the Perseus Project or the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, just to mention some of them.

Summing up, although some markup languages are not as popular as others, we have discovered that all of them can be truly successful when we are dealing with a very particular field of knowledge and its special needs for encoding texts. I hope that you have found this entry about LaTeX and TEI helpful and interesting. To conclude, as always, I encourage you to keep on investigating this matter of markup languages (BibTeX… ) because you will not regret.

References:

• LaTeX. (2009, November 28). In LaTeX Project site. Retrieved: 19:38, November 28, 2009, from
  http://www.latex-project.org/
• Drakos,N. (1995, November 17). Manual de LaTeX by the Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. Retrieved: 19:10, November 28, 2009, from
  http://www.fceia.unr.edu.ar/lcc/cdrom/Instalaciones/LaTex/latex.html
• Text Proccessing using LaTeX. (2009, November). In Department of Engineering of Cambridge University. Retreieved: 19:14, November 28, 2009, from
  http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/
• LaTeX. (2009, November 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 18:21, November 28, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LaTeX&oldid=340092178
• TEI: Text Encoding Initiative. (2009). In Text Encoding Initiative site. Retrieved: 18:57, November 28, 2009, from
  http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
• Text Encoding Initiative. (2009, November 26). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 18:42, November 28, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_Encoding_Initiative&oldid=336490551
• TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding. (2005, June 27). In Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Retrieved: 18:53, November 28, 2009, from
  http://etext.virginia.edu/standards/tei/teip4/

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

Digital library concept

Moreover, one of the main ideas of this post is to present some of the most important digital libraries that nowadays exist such as Project Perseus, Project Gutenberg, Google Book Search, etc. However, as I am studying a degree in English I thought that it would be appropriate to focus on one important digital library with contents in English. That is the reason why we are going to talk today about the Darlington Digital Library (University of Pittsburgh).

The Darlington Digital Library was created from the collection of books, atlases and maps that were assembled, in the first place, by the attorney William M. Darlington, who was born in Pittsburg in 1815. After his death in 1889, it was his family that continued his passion for recollecting documents and materials about colonial American history. In 1938 the University of Pittsburgh Press published a magnificent overview of the whole collection.

In adittion, the Digital Research Library (DLR) department started digitalizing and scanning books from the Darlington collection in the year 2006. In this project there are involved scanning technicians and graduate students who spend 90 hours per week digitalizing the already mentioned materials. But would you like to know how does this process take place? Then pay attention to the following video:

As a result, what we obtain is a whole series of atlases, books, broadsides, images, manuscripts and maps that can be consulted online, at any time and all around the world. Besides, with this system of digital libraries the materials that we have access to do not suffer any harm and they are preserved in optimum conditions. So, if remained skeptical about the benefits of digital libraries give them a try. You will not regret.

References:

• Digital library. (2009, October 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:10, October 25, 2009, from
  http//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_library&oldid=321357328
• List of digital library projects. (2009, October 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:13, October 25, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_digital_library_projects&oldid=321196444
• The Darlington Digital Library. (2007). In The Darlington Digital Library, University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved: 19:17, October 25, 2009, from
  http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/index.html

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

An example of eBook: the new Sony Reader (model PRS-505)

So now you may be wondering why you should start using this new type of devices, right? The answer is quite simple: because they have a never ending list of advantages over traditional books. Let me illustrate this afirmation with a few examples:

In the first place, we have to highlight the enormous capacity of an eBook reader. Just one of these appliances is able to store hundreds of books. Can you believe it? 100 books in a 250 grams gadget! Secondly, you can legally download the content of a book directly from the Internet to your eBook reader, which means that you have access to constantly updated information within seconds. Moreover, all data contained in these products can be easily improven by means of adding hyperlinks, etc.

And all that we have mentioned above is just the large number of benefits that eBook readers have from the point of view of the device itself. We have to remark here too that they allow us to save a huge amount of paper, which means that reading in a screen is truly ecological and it will help to save the planet or, at least, to give it a break.

Still not convinced? Oh, well, I think you are a romantic then. However, the sooner you get used to these new appliances, the better. Traditional books are evolving after all I assume; and the future success of eBooks, audioBooks, eComics seems pretty clear. It’s just a matter of time.

References:

• E-book. (2009, October 16). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:51, October 18, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=E-book&oldid=320169638
• ¿Qué es un eBook?  (2009). In Todoebook.com. Retrieved: 21:36, October 18, 2009, from
  http://www.todoebook.com/que-es-un-ebook.html
• Libro electrónico. Qué es. (2003, January). In Ciberhábitat. Retrieved: 19:48, October 17, 2009, from
  http://ciberhabitat.gob.mx/biblioteca/le/
• Joseba Abaitua (2003, November 17). Panorama de la Edición digital. Jornada sobre La profesión del filólogo en la sociedad de la información (Universidad de Deusto). Retrieved:  September 28, 2009, from
  http://www.slideshare.net/JosebaAbaitua/panorama-de-la-edicin-digital

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

CEDRO Logo

As Delia Lipszyc perfectly describes in her book Nuevos temas de derecho de autor y derechos conexos, works can now be digitalized (transformed into binary code) and be uploaded to an Internet server. As soon as these works are available online, the general public can immediatly make an unlimited number of copies without the legal permission of the copyrights holder. Moreover, once downloaded, these copies can be manipulated, processed, amplified, reproduced and transferred via electronic mail and/or public website.

From that moment, Internet users and traditional editors have started an important legal battle trying to demonstrate if the difussion of those contents is legal or not. Important associations as, for example, CEDRO (Centro español de derechos reprográficos) are fighting in order to restrict the access to these contents and to be able to charge the users some money for these intellectual rights. As a consequence, important firms such as, for instance, Google Inc. have been sentenced in court to pay multimillionaire fines to these associations and have been also forced to remove from their websites protected content.

On the other side, users claim that the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are not illegal. Besides, in their opinion, the access to culture is a universal right that cannot be avoided. This controversy was analyzed and the Bern Convention established that copyrights belong to the author during their whole life and 50 years more. After that moment copyrights become public and we no longer have to pay for them.

References:

• María Jesús Lamarca. (2009, February 15). “El autor y la autoría en el mundo digital”. Retrieved: September 19, 2009, from
  http://artesadigital.blogspot.com/2009/02/el-autor-y-la-autoria-en-el-mundo.html
• El plan de Google para dominar el mundo (de los libros). (2009, May 20). In Escritores.org. Retrieved: 22:04, October 2, 2009, from
  http://www.escritores.org/proba3/index.php/recursos-para-escritores/noticias-literarias/1667-el-plan-de-google-para-dominar-el-mundo-de-los-libros-
• Los retos de los autores y editores con los cambios producidos con las nuevas tecnologías, a debate. (2008, February 8). In Asociación colegial de escritores de Catalunya. Retrieved: 21:44, October 2, 2009, from
  http://www.acec-web.org/quincenal/09/el15nalESP.htm#6
• Carlos A. Fernández Ballesteros. (2007, May). “Desafíos para el derecho de autor y los derechos conexos en la era digital”. In Seminario internacional de la OMPI sobre el uso estratégico de la propiedad intelectual para el desarrollo económico y social. Retrieved: 21:20, October 2, 2009, from
  http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:_j7tyDvyxLgJ:www.wipo.int/ip-development/en/economic_dev/docs/rio07_ballesteros.doc+cedro+conflicto+intereses+usuarios+y+editores&cd=10&hl=es&ct=clnk&client=safari

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

ASIMO, created by Honda, is a humanoid robot that is able to walk and interact with humans.

And when we talk about a simulation, we really mean that because chatterbots are not capable of “understanding” the conversation. The way they “converse” is just simply by recognizing words or phrases from the human user, which allows them to use pre-calculated responses which can move the conversation on in an apparently meaningful way without requiring them to know what they are talking about.

To solve this problem researchers have been working hard in order to provide the chaterbots with some kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI); moreover, they have made an special effort to improve their flair for Natural Language Processing (NLP). As a result, we have obtained chatterbots as Jabberwacky, which is able to learn new responses based on user interactions.

Nowadays, large commercial entities are already utilizing Virtual Assistants to reduce expenditures on Call Centres and provide a first point of contact that can inform the user exactly of points of interest, provide support, capture data from the user and promote products for sale. This has to be considered an important step forward in the use of chatterbots in order to help people, but we cannot forget to mention that malicious chatterbots are also frequently used to ask people for personal information, such as bank account numbers. So we have to be on alert.

If scientists continue providing chatterbots with Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be one day we will all be able to interact and have a “real” conversation with chatterbots in a natural language. And who knows, may be that day is not so far away.

References:

• Chatterbot. (2009, March 30). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:09, April 2, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chatterbot&oldid=280590430
• What is a chatbot? (2009). In chatbots.org. Retrieved: 23:06, May 2, 2009, from
  http://www.chatbots.org/static/English/what_is_a_chatbot

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

Question Answering (QA)

Question Answering (QA) is, in information retrieval, the task of answering automatically a question asked in natural language. In order to provide you with a proper answer a QA computer program can use either a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents (such as the World Wide Web, for instance).

QA computer programs are designed in order to be able to deal with a wide range of question types including: What, When, Why, Where, Who, How, definitions… Moreover, two types of question can be distinguished. In the first place, we have the closed-domain questions, which deal under one specific topic. In the second place, we have the open-domain questions, which deal with almost everything. This second type of question is much more difficult to give an answer due to the higher requirement of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

However, QA methods still suffer from some little problems. Let’s mention a few of them: QA programs have to be able to “understand” the question; they have to know how to extract the most relevant information; they have to be able to formulate an answer in natural language; they have to provide you with the requested information quickly; they have to deal with cross-lingual questions, etc.

In spite of all of this, QA computer programs are evolving extremely quickly and they are absolutely fulfilling our expectations. We are day after day provided by these QA computer programs with the requested information and the results cannot be more satisfactory. Is not that right?

References:

• Sistemas de Question-answering. (2009). In Recuperación y Organización de la Información, por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Retrieved: 22:54, April 14, 2009, from
  http://question-answering.orgfree.com/
• Cano Esteban, C. (2006). “Sistemas de búsqueda Question-Answering”. In Recuperación y Organización de la Información. Retrieved: 22:58, April 14, 2009, from
  http://usuarios.lycos.es/questionanswering/
• Question answering. (2009, March 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:27, April 13, 2009, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=278611780

(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)

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