Bebo White, America's first webmaster, to return to Rose-Hulman on Thursday

Bebo White, one of the pioneers of the Wide World Web, will be making a special presentation on Thursday. Sept. 17, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology that examines Web science as a new, multi-disciplinary research effort. The event, from 4:20-5:10 p.m. in the GM Room of Moench Hall, is free and open to the public.

Bebo is a key player in the Web Science Research Initiative, which aims to create a new interdisciplinary field called Web Science. Rose-Hulman has been a thought leader in this field, previously hosting the WWW@10 conference in 2004 (unfortunately a full year before I attended there) and founding the Web History Center.

But for its own part, Rose is not yet a pioneer in the practical side of this field. Academia as a whole has had difficulty keeping up with the fast-paced digital world and its rapidly changing technology base, and Rose is no different from the vast majority of other institutions each still focusing strictly on basic computer science and engineering concepts at the undergraduate level. Without acres of trees worth of Ph.D dissertations on web science, universities find it difficult to create the new courses and majors required to support America in the 21st century. A small group at Rose is trying to change that, and other schools in the tri-state are wasting no time building out curriculum under the banner of "informatics" (NKU, IU), but nothing fruitful will happen at any of these schools until well into the next decade. Even MIT only has labs (CSAIL, Media Lab) tangentially related to the field, not majors.

What are your takes on how academia can catch up to the current knowledge-based economy?

NYT thinks Facebook is imitating Twitter

The NYT ran an article yesterday claiming that Facebook is adding "Twitter-like" features. I would argue the opposite: Facebook had micro-blogging first, the NYT just missed out on it since Facebook was restricted to the college crowd at the time. Facebook has always been about keeping your friends up to date.

Tagging has been around for quite sometime on the blogs, it was a natural extension to add it to status updates. And once again, Facebook is doing it better than Twitter, using AJAX drop-down suggestions for these new @ tags.

The new Facebook Lite site is reminiscent of the original Facebook, and appeals to people who don't like Facebook's new found robustness - like Zuckerberg himself. These updates have little to do with Twitter and more-so to do with customer demands for increased usability.

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Digging Deep: Where are our GPS navigation units with built in radar detectors?

Driving down I-75 in Cincinnati, you see billboards for the latest line of radar detectors featuring speed trap alerts powered by GPS. But whatever happened to GPS units with built in radar detection?

Uniden's MapTrax™ series, still sorely lacking radar detection capabilities two years later.

Months prior to CES 2008, Uniden announced their new lineup of GPS units using NAVTEQ™ maps and featuring radar detection and Bluetooth compatibility. According to the press release, four lines were set for release in 2007 with more models due out in 2008. We're now wrapping up 2009 and only two of the original lines are available, with no new models even sketched out as far as us consumers know. Unfortunately, neither available unit features radar detection or Bluetooth according to the Uniden website.


Taiwan start-up Rayee Technology Ltd. has also apparently created a GPS with radar detection capabilities, as caught at Computex 2009 (Taiwan's version of CES).

The Blinder GPS+Radar+Navigation, not yet for consumer sale. Expected to cost around $367 USD.

The Blinder is built on WinCE (really? why?) and can have up to two navigation databases installed at once. The radar detector is detachable and communicates to the GPS via RF, with the GPS saving the radar locations for future alerts. It's likely to only come with Asian maps at launch, so you'll have to download and install your own US maps.

PaPaGo, formerly known as KingMap, is likely to ship with the device. And this graphic was from the US version!

There are numerous reasons for merging the two devices most commonly found on car dashes or mounted to car windshields - safety, convenience, utility, you name it. But for now, it looks like we'll all still be buying our GPS and radar detectors separately. If you find a GPS with built in radar detector actually for sale, please post a comment!