Will Google proof goofs?

Over at InfoWorld Tech Watch, Ephraim Schwartz raises an obvious question about Google's plan to digitize and make searchable thousands of books from major libraries:

Who's going to do the proofreading?

I realize there are high speed scanners available but I wonder how accurate they are?

If the average printed page has 550 words on it and a scanner is 99 percent accurate that means there would be 5.5 errors or misreads of letters and or words per page. That's a lot of errors to find. ...

I know from first hand experience scanning can be somewhat problematic. lower case h's and n's can look awfully similar to a non-human scanner.

Imagine a first time online reader of Hamlet puzzling over the line, "to be or hot to be"?

Elsewhere, the Detroit Free Press points out some potential real-world limitations in the service's utility.

iPod visions

If you can measure demand for a new product by how many fantastic mock-ups passionate fans design, then there's huge interest in a really tiny, flash memory-based iPod. iPodLounge presents a gallery of 64 snazzy, speculative designs showing what people wish an "iPod micro" would be. They include "flip-phone" iPods, retracting iPods, pendant iPods, wristwatch iPods and iPods that are little more than a clickwheel with an LCD. Some even dispense with the trademark clickwheel entirely.

They're fun to look at -- although, as pragmatists like John Gruber are quick to point out, many would be impossible to build and/or impractical to use.

And it's not too hard to imagine that consumers would snap up a flash iPod if it existed. As the Wall Street Journal notes today, the venerable, hard-drive models are selling out all over the country this holiday season.

(Via TidBITS, Cult of Mac, Gizmodo and probably someone else I've forgotten.)

The future of sports

You can make a good argument that sports fans are the ultimate information junkies. Now, technologies ranging from satellite radio to video-ready cell phones to pay-per-view game highlights are giving more information about teams and players than ever before -- sliced and diced just about any way fans want.

The Christian Science Monitor asks whether this will be good or bad in the long run. For example, will the instant gratification provided by edited highlights erode loyalty to real teams and lower ratings for live gamecasts? The experts have few answers yet, but the long list of questions raised by the Monitor is pretty thought-provoking.

The A-list bloggers

Newsweek's Steven Levy looks at the alpha bloggers, those who by "dint of reputation, novelty and charm, ... have built large and influential audiences." It's a pretty concise look at the de facto hierarchy of the blogosphere that offers some tips on how to work your way into the elite circles, at least for a little while ...

The lesson is that there's a new force—spearheaded by people who work for no bosses and whose prose never sees an editor's pencil—that provides the water-cooler fodder for the larger high-tech community. Its power extends not only to high-tech cool-hunting but also to what's politically correct, geek style. (Open source... gooood. Onerous copy protection... eeeevil.) And the significance of this phenomenon has some important implications for the way opinions will be formed in the decentralized world of Internet media.

Sesame Street as U.N.

Don't underestimate the power of "Sesame Street." According to research by Andrea Emberly, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, the popular PBS show's many international versions have helped create a universal children's culture.

Emberly tells writer Travis Hay that "this program can somehow go across borders and go into different communities and cultures and be applicable based on the premise that children need to be entertained and educated."

Games on the brain

P-I science reporter Tom Paulson's story today on thought-controlled computers takes a fantastic concept and reduces it to the amusingly mundane:

Tristan Lundemo, a 19-year-old man from Seabeck with severe epilepsy, is one of the world's leading players in the highly specialized sport of brainwave Pong.

Scientists working in this field tend to use technical terms like "brain-computer interface" or "closed-loop electrocorticography," but for Lundemo it's mostly just an enjoyable way to pass the time -- using his mind alone to move a cursor that chases targets on a computer screen.

Lundemo controls the cursor through a web of electrodes attached to the surface of his brain originally intended to record epileptic seizures in progress. He learned to play Pong with his brain within minutes and mastered the game in two days.