Honey, I shrunk the news

New-age apps are making it easier to remain up-to-date with what’s happening around the world, in quick time

These days, getting news is not the problem, reading it is. There are so many sources of information that keeping track of all of them is quite a task—you could read close to 100 articles a day and still find you've missed something. Which is why short-news apps have been gaining popularity. These crisp apps specialize in delivering news, but unlike the popular Flipboard and LinkedIn Pulse, they deliver information in tiny, digestible morsels. So if you are trying to stay up to speed with events happening around the world but do not have the time to go through reams of text or look for sources of information, we suggest you try out these apps.

Way2News | iOS and Android

This is the perfect app for those who want India-centric news summarized in Indian languages. The app supports nine languages and more will be added soon. It claims to pick the most relevant news from local newspapers and other media sources and then presents it in about 400 characters. Tapping on a headline takes you to the complete story in the original source.

A news item is typically a large picture with the text beneath, with generally everything available on one screen so you don’t need to scroll down the page. You can share news across social networks and via email. The grammar might seem a trifle iffy at times, but you cannot fault the app on design, and it remains one of the best short-news apps for Indian content.

Short | iOS

Unlike a classic “news shrinking” app, this focuses more on feature stories and articles. The app is designed mainly for those who save news articles for reading later, using services such as Pocket, Readability and Instapaper. Once the app has access to your accounts on these services, it carefully rearranges the articles you can read in 5-10 minutes, allowing you to choose from the articles that will take time to read and those that can be read quickly. The app presents the articles in a clean, reader-friendly format, and as you read, an indicator at the top of the page will keep showing you how much of the article is left, in terms of the number of minutes. This is calculated based on your reading speed—how quickly you scroll down the page.

Inshorts | iOS and Android

Previously known as News In Shorts, the Inshorts app summarizes every news item in a mere 60 words—no more, no less. The app focuses on delivering just the news, keeping the analysis aside. It covers a range of categories, but does not let you specify the categories you would prefer news on. The stories are curated manually by their in-house team, with links to the complete story and the original sources. Some promotional content might show up occasionally, such as a gadget launch exclusive to an e-commerce website. The app also highlights “trending news” for those who would like to know what people are reading on social networks. You can bookmark news items and share these short stories on social networks. The innovative Toss feature allows you to send notifications to friends who also use the app.

Clipped | iOS

Clipped describes itself as “an intelligent news reader”. Those looking for customized topics might be a bit disappointed by the fact that you are pretty much at the mercy of the app’s algorithms in terms of the news that you get on the timeline. But the app does work smoothly, and it’s easy to use. It summarizes the news into bullet points, which are well written. Important numbers mentioned in the article are highlighted clearly, and even relevant locations are marked clearly on maps, wherever applicable. The emphasis in the layout is on information than images.

Newsd | Android

This app, unlike many others, allows you to set your favourite categories. So what shows up on your timeline is much more relevant for you than what the algorithms may be able to throw up. It also lets you follow updates on particular stories. The Newsd app is populated by a team of editors, who summarize the biggest news stories regularly. We quite like the interface and the general intuitiveness this app offers.

InkaBinka | iOS and Android

Yes, the name might sound funny, but it’s one of the sleekest short-news apps. It claims to get you the latest news that you can read in as little as a couple of minutes. The information is delivered under different topics, with the articles spanning just three-four main points. You can opt to read the longer version of the story and share the news with friends on social networks and messengers. The app does have a tendency to highlight US-centric news, and the reader cannot select specific genres of interest, but the app is, nevertheless, handy for those wanting a quick snapshot of the news.

Yahoo! News Digest | iOS and Android

It has been around for a while now. The app delivers news, with each item (there are generally 7-10 news in a digest) skilfully summarized with information from various sources. You are also given reference information about people and places mentioned in the story—for instance, a story featuring the prime minister might well have a brief profile of him.

The app also tells you how many stories you have read and how many are pending, and you can ask for more stories within the app itself. The Yahoo News Digest is a bit like the newspaper, delivered to your phone with minimum fuss.

Source | Mint | 1 June 2016

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

The National Film Archive of India lands a coup in the form of 1,790 songbooks from the past

Going for a song

The National Film Archive of India lands a coup in the form of 1,790 songbooks from the past

From the song booklets of the 1934 JBH Wadia film Bag-e-Misar and Nitin Bose’s K.L. Saigal-starrer of the same year Chandidas (that had the famous duet with ‘Prem nagar main banaungi ghar mein’) to that of Ashu Trikha’s 2012, The Notebook-inspired Mithun Chakraborty-starrer Zindagi Tere Naam—in a single swoop the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) has obtained songbooks of 1,790 Hindi films in what could well be its biggest acquisition in recent times. “We have a collection of 15,000 booklets as of now and in a single day we have added almost 2,000 more to it. It’s rare that in one instance we’d get to increase it by so many,” Prakash Magdum, director, NFAI, told The Hindu.

The booklets represent every decade of Hindi cinema and are a visual and textual journey through our cinematic history and heritage. They are also an indicator of the changing printing technology and art-work down the ages.

“Song booklets are a rich source of information and are of great reference value,” says Mr. Magdum. They contain the full lyrics of songs and are treasure troves of information on the films, including the cast, credits and story-lines.

According to film buff Pavan Jha, they contain full set of songs with lyrics, even those which may have later got snipped out on the editing table.

In the 1960s and ’70s Urdu film magazines like Shama and Hindi film magazines like Sushma, Madhuri and Mayapuri started publishing such information and the interest in the booklets started declining. Though not in use any more, the songbooks of the past were a great way to build hype, spark curiosity about the film, and draw viewers to the theatre.

The NFAI keeps tracing and sourcing rare, cinema-related artefacts from private collectors across India but the name of the contributor is not made public. Neither is a value put to the acquisition. “We appeal to the public to come forward with rare, archival material that will help us in conserving India’s heritage, under the umbrella project of National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM),” Mr. Magdum said in a press statement.

The NFHM set rolling last year it’s mission to conserve 1,32,000 film reels, digitisation of 1,160 feature films and 1,660 short films, construction of state-of-the-art archival and sound restoration of 1,086 landmark feature films and 1,152 short films.

Source | The Hindu | 1 June 2016

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

Best Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23, 2016.  The title of the paper is “Removing Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”

Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.

Digital forensics: from the crime lab to the library

Archivists are borrowing and adapting techniques used in criminal investigations to access data and files created in now-obsolete systems.

When archivists at California's Stanford University received the collected papers of the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 2004, they knew right away they had a problem. Many of the 'papers' were actually on computer disks of various kinds, in the form of 52 megabytes of data spread across more than 1,100 files — all from long-outdated systems.

“It was a large collection, as you can imagine,” says Michael Olson, service manager for the Born Digital/Forensics Lab at Stanford University Libraries. “He used a lot of early word processing for his writing, lots of disks and diskettes in different formats.”

After considerable effort the Stanford archivists did get Gould's papers into order — first by finding hardware that could read the obsolete disks, and then by deciphering what they found there. “We had some challenges finding old applications to figure out what word processor he used, that sort of thing,” says Olson.

The Gould papers were an early indication of an issue that's been rapidly worsening: four decades after the personal-computer revolution brought word processing and number crunching to the desktop, the first generation of early adopters is retiring or dying. So how do archivists recover and preserve what's left behind?

“People around the world have information stored on disks that are less readable with every passing day,” says Christopher Lee, a researcher in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill. “This includes floppies, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, hard drives and a variety of other media.” Many files can be accessed only with long-obsolete hardware, and all are subject to physical deterioration that will ultimately make them unreadable by any means. By now, many libraries, archives and museums have accumulated shelves full of such material, stashed away in the hope that if it's ever needed, somebody, somewhere will be able to figure out how to access it.

Digital inspiration

Increasingly, archivists are finding inspiration in the field of digital forensics: the art of extracting evidence about illicit activity from computer drives, smartphones, tablets or even GPS devices. “It turned out that law-enforcement and computer-security people were dealing with essentially the same problems of stabilizing and recovering data from digital media,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland in College Park. And many of their solutions were directly applicable to the archivists' needs.

In law enforcement, for example, a top priority is to preserve material in its original form. This is often harder than it sounds: almost anything done on a computer, even something as innocuous as plugging in a USB drive, leaves a faint digital trace. So digital-forensics practitioners have developed techniques for creating an artefact-free 'disk image' that duplicates everything, down to the unused and hidden disk space. They can then preserve the integrity of the original for evidentiary purposes in court while doing all their forensic analysis on a perfect copy.

Institutions working to decipher collections have the same need, although in their case, the object is to maintain the provenance of the original for future researchers. Creating forensic copies of the data was a relatively fringe idea 8 or 10 years ago, Lee says. “It's now quite common in library and archive settings.”

Unfortunately for archivists, however, disk imaging is usually done through commercial software packages such as the Forensic Toolkit made by Access Data in Lindon, Utah, or by EnCase, which is developed by Guidance Software in Pasadena, California. Because these packages are designed for criminal investigators, they include tools for file carving (assembling complete files from fragmentary data); cracking passwords; accessing encrypted files; advanced searching; and generating reports for use in court — tasks that tend to be less important for archival purposes. These packages also come with licensing costs in the thousands of dollars, which would strain the budget of many collecting institutions.

“People around the world have information stored on disks that are less readable with every passing day.”

So in 2011, Lee and his colleagues launched BitCurator, a platform designed for the archival field, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and with continued support from a consortium that currently encompasses 25 member institutions, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Emory University and the British Library. BitCurator has the advantage of being open source and freely available for download (wiki.bitcurator.net). “It's a combination of third party open-source tools and our own work,” says Kam Woods, a research scientist at UNC's School of Information and Library Science and co-principal investigator with Lee on the project. On the basis of the turnout at training sessions and other BitCurator events, Lee estimates that several dozen institutions now use the package actively, and several hundred more use it at least occasionally.

BitCurator not only handles disk imaging, but a number of other issues that criminal investigators don't have to worry about. One example is redaction: editing out confidential material before publication. That's an alien concept in the criminal investigations, says Olson. “Why would you ever want to redact evidence from a case? But from an archival or library standpoint, you wouldn't want to make somebody's health records available.” So BitCurator has to have methods for access control that don't really exist in the forensics field.

Another speciality of BitCurator is its ability to read long-outdated disks — an essential tool for archivists who are faced with stacks of old floppies or even reels of magnetic tape. Although digital-forensics investigators usually deal with newer-generation systems, their techniques can still be quite useful for recovery, says Lee. “Taking a forensic approach, you can still create a safe copy of the data, even if you don't know what the file system is or you can't read it,” he says. “As long as you can attach a drive and get the bits off of it, you can create an image.” Archivists can then experiment on different ways to retrieve the files, safe in the knowledge that the original is not in danger.

Some advantages to the forensics-based approach transcend technical considerations, says Olson. With the Gould archives, for example, “you can get timestamps from different word-processing files to see how he actually wrote something, a particular order that he wrote, a way that he edited. That's really nifty if you're a researcher that wants to know how his mind worked.”

Search and rescue

The same techniques can be used for other purposes besides archiving. At Stanford, Olson's lab is increasingly helping faculty members and students who need to access work that was born on now-outdated computer systems. “I had a graduate student about a year ago that came to us with an astrophysics data set on a Zip disk,” he says. “It was something that their professor had created, that they weren't able to read and needed to get to because it was part of their research. And nobody had really shepherded that to a new modern system.” The library was able to help the student do just that.

Another recent example is Stanford's long-running ME310 engineering course, which had a server full of design studies, presentation slides and videos that students had completed over the years as part of their graduate work. “The people running the programme wanted to preserve all the data from these projects,” says Olson, “but they needed help to recover the data, organize it and also get permission from the students to actually make this available.”

Data are already being lost to science at a rapid rate. One study, for example, found that as little as 20% of data for ecology papers published in the early 1990s is still available (T. H. Vines et al. Curr. Biol. 6, 94–97; 2014). Co-author Tim Vines, who now runs a peer-review service called Axios Review in Vancouver, Canada, says that the best way for scientists to preserve their data for future generations is to upload it into library-maintained archives or open online repositories, such as Dryad or Figshare.

“Putting it into the hands of an organization committed to preserving it is far better than putting it on a shelf”, he says.

Nature 534, 139–140 (02 June 2016)  doi:10.1038/534139a

Source | http://www.nature.com

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

Best Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23, 2016.  The title of the paper is “Removing Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”

Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.

App can soon make use of hearing aids redundant

PUNE: Using hearing aids may soon become a thing of the past.

City-based technologists Anurag Sharma and Paresh Patel have developed an app called Q+ Hearing Aid to help those with hearing disabilities. They say that it can get rid of the hassles of carrying hearing aids, changing batteries and the social stigma of being seen with one.

Q+ uses mobile technology to enable the hearing impaired customize their listening experience by using results of a simple, interactive hearing test. Sharma and Patel, both IIT alumni, began developing it three years ago, soon after they launched Quadio Devices Pvt Ltd in 2009.

Sharma said that the app first judges the level of hearing loss and then, processes all sounds accordingly and sends it through a compatible earphone to the user. Headsets or earphones which have a microphone would catch the sound or conversation, and send it to the app for processing. In case of group conversations, the user can hear if a person speaks slightly close to the phone's microphone. If headsets or earphones without microphones are used, then the phone's microphone would automatically switch on and the app's noise reducing algorithm will work to render clean and legible sounds.

Anurag Sharma said that the headsets which come with the phone would be most suitable for the best sound quality as they have been calibrated accordingly. "Though any headset can be used, if a third-party earphone is used, the sound quality would be slightly reduced. In the future, we would include support for third-party headsets as well," he said.

The idea for this app was floated by Patel, who had suffered hearing loss due to an overdose of Malaria medicines when he was young. With age, Patel realized that the hearing loss only increased, leading to gaps in communication. Sharma, whose father also suffered from hearing loss, joined him and the two began the development of what they call a "disruptive technology".

"The phone can now work as a hearing aid and moreover, there are settings which can be used to alter the quality of voice as per the environment whether indoors or outdoors," Sharma said.

He added that it can be used effectively by people who suffer from moderate to severe hearing loss, for one-on-one conversations or even group meetings. The user, however, would not be able to access phone calls during that time as mobile operating systems do not allow apps access to calls.

Sharma explained that Q+ uses various algorithms which Quadio has developed. "There is an algorithm which amplifies the sound according to each individual's hearing loss at the respective required frequencies. Another algorithm then handles the amplification and ensures it is not too loud, so as to not lead to further hearing loss. The background noise is cut out through a noise reduction algorithm."

"Going forward, we would also include a music player in the app, which would access the phone's library and act just like a music player in other cases," Sharma said.

Senior citizen Gopal Deshpande (83) has been using the app for almost a year, since its beta phase. He said he has decided not to go back to his hearing aid. "In old age, we often become forgetful and we have to carry hearing aid devices apart from mandatory mobile phones. It becomes a problem if one of them is left behind. With this app, only a cellphone is needed and it allows me to adjust settings according to the environment. The settings on hearing aids are delicate and handling them is tough for a person of my age."

Deshpande said that it was initially awkward to use the app, but so was using the hearing aid. when he started using one and was teased by friends. "But later I realised that most youngsters these days have earphones plugged in their ears all day, and people did not notice much if I did the same," Deshpande said.

The app is currently available for use on iPhone 4s and above and Android phones with Android Lollypop or higher on iTunes and GooglePlay. Around 100 users, with some from outside India, have already downloaded the app.

Sharma said that in low-end Android phones, the sound lag is quite a bit with as much as 300 milliseconds in some cases. "Humans can identify lags beyond 50 milliseconds, hence as of now the app works smoothly with good hardware and software where the lag is less and we need Android 5 and above version for this," he explained.

Sharma added that Q+ is the only app which does proper calibration and works according to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) norms of audiometry.

Q+ comes in two versions Pro and Lite. The Lite version is available for free, while Pro is available for a one-time payment of Rs 500.

Source | Times of India (Pune) | 31 May 2016

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

Best Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23, 2016.  The title of the paper is “Removing Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”

Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.