ResearchBuzz

All the kids are doing it! Barnes & Noble recently announced Quamut.com, a how-to Web site. The twist here is that some of the how-tos are available as HTML and PDF and on laminated booklets in the stores… (Quamut is apparently derived from Latin and is pronounced kwómut. I guess they’re never going to do radio advertising.)

Start at http://quamut.com/. You’ll see the that the thousand or so topics that are currently available (plans are to add “hundreds of new titles a month”) are divided across five categories: House & Home, Hobbies & Leisure, Money & Business, Computers & Technology, and Mind & Body. There’s also a free Quamut. Today’s is writing an essay. You can read it online or you can download the PDF. At the bottom of the screen you’ll see pointers to a Quamut Wiki (Ooo! How to deep-clean your keyboard!), recently-added Quamuts, and a tag cloud.

I decided I wanted to look at the Quamut on making sushi. The Quamut is divided into several sections, from Sushi and Sashimi Basics to How to Make Scattered Sushi (Chirashi). Each section has copious illustrations but are a bit on the short side. (Which is okay when there are over a dozen sections in one Quamut.)

Looking at the HTML version of the Quamut is free. (It’s ad-supported.) If you want to download a PDF of the material, it’s $2.95 — at least all the ones I looked at are $2.95.

I think some of these topics work better as Quamuts than others. The most popular Quamut at the moment, for example, is a set of shortcuts for Excel 2007. I can see that. On the other hand, the Quamut on investing in mutual funds was only an overview and, while it was good enough to teach me what questions I need to ask, was really only a jumping-off point to more in-depth materials.

It’s kind of hidden, but there is an RSS feed of the newest Quamuts available. I’m not sure I’d buy any of the PDFs, but there were plenty of interesting topics here.

Technology Review has an interesting article on a new offering from MIT — a tool that allows users to search over 200 academic lectures by keyword. The Lecture Browser is available at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/ .

I think this site is supposed to work in Firefox but I had no luck. I would get the “searching” window and no actual results. It worked fine in IE. Choose some keywords and a category for your search. What you’ll get is a lecture name, date, and a list of the times the searched-for keyword appears in the transcript. There’s also a timeline with play controls; click on a play icon and the lecture will show up in the RealPlayer on the right side of the screen.

As the video plays, a transcript follows along underneath. It doesn’t appear that the transcripts are perfect — I was watching a 2002 lecture from Jeff Bezos that had some really weird transcript. But I can’t find the example. Something about Bulgarians paying for their order in cats. I found it:

“i even know they had internet access in eighteen ninety five in bulgaria but they’d and this person did not pay with a credit card they paid with cats”

… so don’t trust the transcription completely. It’s accurate enough that it’s useful to follow along while watching the video, but that’s it. Watch the video.

It’s a little disorienting, jumping all over a video instead of watching it beginning to end. On the other hand it is MUCH faster — and I was able to do a depth of content exploration I wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. Now if it would just work in Firefox…!

So I’m sitting here watching the Colts getting the stuffing beat out of them (maybe the 2nd half will be better) so I need something nice to talk about. This’ll do. Edumax, at http://www.edumax.com/ offers online tutorials of several different topics AND forums for those topics.

There are about two dozen tutorials at this site, covering several aspects of Microsoft Office as well as eBay, several programming languages, and non-programming topics like Success and Debt Management.

Let’s take Microsoft Access as an example. The tutorial is divided into eleven different parts. The parts themselves are divided into bite-sized sections, introducing you to concepts on step at a time. The forums I looked at were completely empty (actually it looks like they’re all empty), so while having forum discussions could add an interesting dimension to online tutorial, at the moment it’s adding nothing.

Not surprising, as this is a very new resource. This is not the place to get advanced training, but I like the very detailed and very delineated basic lessons that are offered.