ResearchBuzz

I knew about the regular Wikipedia, but I didn’t know about the Simple English Wikipedia until I stumbled across it at http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page . As you might suspect, the Simple English Wikipedia is written in simpler language. There’s a whole set of standards set up around Basic English and the Simple English Wikipedia has a page devoted to writing Simple English articles. If you review that page you’ll get a better idea of who this Wikipedia is designed for.

This Wikipedia is a lot smaller than the main one — a little under 27,000 articles. Even though this is the Simple English Wikipedia, the concepts here are anything but simple; topics include physics (though there have apparently been some issues with the quantum physics page), engineering, several religions, and philosophy.

There’s a fairly busy SimpleTalk forum here, and a School Gateway Page for students wanting to access and edit this Wikipedia.

Sometimes people at work want me to do search engine-y things. A co-worker’s mother is losing her vision, unfortunately, and he wanted some help in finding equipment for her. “I want her to have one of those scanners,” he said. “You put a letter on it and it reads it.” I thought he meant a computer scanner, but after looking around some I think he means a whole class of scan-and-read standalone devices. One of them is called The ScannaR. (There’s also SARA, the Portset, and the Extreme Reader XR10, if you want to look around on your own.)

The ScannaR and similar devices are pretty expensive — I saw prices for around $3000 — so I tried to find a used one. eBay didn’t pan out, so I decided to look on Google.

scannar for sale found only about 3,060 results, but many of them were for people who couldn’t spell the word scanner. So I tried again with scannar for sale blind.

Imagine my surprise when the result count jumped up to 511,000!

Turns out Google was politely correcting my spelling when I DIDN’T WANT IT TO BE CORRECTED and searching for scanner instead of scannar. So I ended up with half-a-million results. If you want Google to quit correcting your spelling, put a + in front of the word you want left alone. In this case +scannar for sale blind brought me a mere 100 results, a much more easily-handled set.

I found a good circular listing different types of assistive products at http://www.loc.gov/nls/reference/circulars/assistive.html. I think I’ll take it to my co-worker and see if he can clarify a bit on what he wants. Maybe he and I can sit down and look at Abledata.

I am not a big fan of arbitrary capitalization. You know what I’m talking about; when a company name just sticks a capital letter in there for no particular reason. However, I like eXtension enough that I’m willing to make an exception. eXtension, at eXtension.org , is a project brought to you by over 70 universities (list here) which provides expertise in sixteen topics.

These topics are divided into five categories: Community, Disaster Issues, Family, Farm, Pest Management, and Youth. A couple of these categories only have a couple of topics, while Farm and Community each have five. The topics contain articles, advice, and questions-and-answers. (There will be more topics added over time.)

I’m really surprised at some of these topics and how extensively they’re populated. Let’s take one of the Community topics, “Imported Fire Ants”. Its page is http://www.extension.org/fire+ants. There is a ton of information here — a management plan, a whole raft of publications and case studies, a video, and a hundred questions-and-answers about imported fire ants. There’s even a calendar listing Fire Ant-related events (granted, there are only two of them, but…) The page has an RSS feed as well as a tag cloud. (Whoever planned out all the extras along with the content, like the search and the RSS feed and the tag cloud, did a great job.)

If you’re interested in lots of content from this site, you can also browse all the news, all the Q&As, the full calendar of events, and all the self-learning lessons.

The site is actively soliciting questions in all its topics and has plans to expand past the sixteen topics currently being covered. Absolutely worth a browse.