Last night I watched Nova's Smartest Machine on Earth program.Really fascinating stuff as it explored how machine learning happens (it is essentially a weighted relevance ranking dependent upon data and rules, but then it makes decision based upon specific bits of information including pattern seeking). It also touched on what makes us human, our peopleness and how our experiences shape our knowledge (and how do you teach those to a computer?) The main focus was exploring the work on the machine Watson which plays on Jeopardy Feb. 14-16.

In the last week, I've received 3 requests to teach or train people in various things. Basically, they want me to teach them what they should know 1) to do a particular job for which they don't want to hire someone or 2)to do the job for which they were hired, but clearly do not have the skills (or to teach someone they hired who is clearly undertrained). Oh, and did I mention for FREE?I've been thinking about this long and hard -- for a variety of reasons, as one of my goals for this year is to evaluate my career path.

Personal Knowledge Management: A Framework for Librarians( http://georgialibraries.org/events/wed-web-series/personal-knowledge-management-framework-librarians )Presented by Elisabeth ShieldsWednesday, January 19, 2011, 11:15am - 12:15pm Eastern TimeSeparate registration is required for each hour-long session (free & open to all)Searching is the easy part. But what do you do with all the material youve collected?

interesting... [canada] ---------------“It is not reasonable for e-mails belonging to a private individual to be subject to access by members of the public merely because they are sent or received on a government owned e-mail server,” Madam Justice Anne Molloy wrote for the panel.Complete article athttp://is.gd/j9Utf

In case you've not seen the news, gawker (parent co. of lifehacker, jezebel, lots of pop sites) was hacked. Email addresses and passwords FOR GAWKER sites were published at pirate bay and are now out in the wild.Gawker has contacted those who logins/passwords were released, but you can also check to see if your email is on the listhttp://www.slate.com/id/2277768/If your login and password was published on the web, it should only affect Gawker sites UNLESS you've used the same login and password across the web (which is really not a good idea).

Social Media Consultant (Guru, Dude, etc.) Chris Brogan is offering a free webinar on how to not/give a webinar. For many of us, webinars are becoming an increasingly important form of training and teaching (I teach Drupal classes as a webinar through Lyrasis - next intro to Drupal Class is coming up in November).Unfortunately, as many of us have witnessed, being a good face to face teacher does not equal being a good webinar teacher. I've done quite a few webinars (attended even more) and I definitely realize there is an art form to a good webinar.

Q: How do I delete a note in facebook?A: Although not intuitive, this is easy to do.Type Notes into the Search field at the top OR start with your home page (In the news feed list on the left side, click on More, if you do not immediately see 'Notes').

Some interesting thoughts on e-books from a textbook industry blog:Nine Important Trends in the Evolution of Digital Textbooks and E-learning ContentThe increased disaggregation of content and the breaking up of the traditional textbook model — The movement toward disaggregated content has been seriously afoot ever since iTunes appeared and we started talking about songs instead of albums. We see this happening increasingly in education as digital capabilities allow us to take content apart easily and remix it into new, personal/custom collections.