Year: 2016

Teenagers have built a summary app makes studying easier

Teenagers have built a summary app makes studying easier

Available for iOS, Summize is an intelligent summary generator that will automatically recap the contents of any textbook page (or news article) you take a photo of with your smartphone.

The app also supports concept, keyword and bias analysis, which breaks down the summaries to make them more accessible. With this feature users can easily isolate concepts and keywords from the rest of the text to focus precisely on the material that matters the most to them.

Picturize – Android Apps on Google Play

Picturize – Android Apps on Google Play

Picturize is an app that can summarize the text in an image.

Create short paragraphs, paragraphs, or bullet points from a picture/screenshot of a text (textbook, newspaper, newsletter, magazine, article, screenshots etc.) all in seconds!

With the power of Optical Character Recognition and the Google Cloud Platform, Picturize can handle almost any kind of text and create accurate summaries very quickly!

How can we be sure old books were ever read? – University of Glasgow Library

How can we be sure old books were ever read? – University of Glasgow Library

Owning a book isn’t the same as reading it; we need only look at our own bloated bookshelves for confirmation.

…
With the help of Tom Gauld, one final thought: just how easy will it be for academics of the future to look back at our present reading behaviour? Bits, bytes, page-clicks and logged keystrokes will surely be able to tell them what web pages we visited but what of physical material evidence confirming reading? That may be more elusive.

How can we be sure old books were ever read? – University of Glasgow Library

How can we be sure old books were ever read? – University of Glasgow Library

Owning a book isn’t the same as reading it; we need only look at our own bloated bookshelves for confirmation.

…

Although this is surely a more common anxiety in a time of relatively cheap books and one-click online shopping we should be reassured that it’s nothing new: Seneca was vocal in criticising those using “books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining-room”, and in his early 16th century sermons Johannes Geiler (reflecting on Sebastian Brant’s‘book fool’) identified a range of different types of folly connected with book ownership that included collecting books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly items of furniture1. When we look at our own bookshelves we can fairly easily divide the contents into those we’ve read and those we haven’t. But when it comes to very old books which have survived for hundreds of years how easy is it to know whether a book was actually read by its past owners?2

Continue reading “How can we be sure old books were ever read? – University of Glasgow Library”

Restoring the world’s oldest library |

Restoring the world’s oldest library |

The ancient al-Qarawiyyin Library in Fez isn’t just the oldest library in Africa. Founded in 859, it’s the oldest working library in the world, holding ancient manuscripts that date as far back as 12 centuries.

..

First, some history. The al-Qarawiyyin Library was created by a woman, challenging commonly held assumptions about the contribution of women in Muslim civilization. The al-Qarawiyyin, which includes a mosque, library, and university, was founded by Fatima El-Fihriya, the daughter of a rich immigrant from al-Qayrawan (Tunisia today). Well educated and devout, she vowed to spend her entire inheritance on building a mosque and knowledge center for her community. According to UNESCO, the result is the oldest operational educational institution in the world, with a high-profile role call of alumni. Mystic poet and philosopher Ibn Al-‘Arabi studied there in the 12th century, historian and economist Ibn Khaldun attended in the 14th century, while in medieval times, Al-Qarawiyyin played a leading role in the transfer of knowledge between Muslims and Europeans.

How Gmail lets spammers grab your attention with emoji ← Terence Eden’s Blog

How Gmail lets spammers grab your attention with emoji ← Terence Eden’s Blog

So, what’s going on here? How have they got an animated image into the subject line?

Here’s the raw text of the message’s subject line:

1
Subject:=?UTF–8?B?876tqQ==?==?utf–8?q?__=79=6f=75=27=76=65=20=62=65=65=6e=20=63=68=6f=73=65=6e=20=66=6f=72=20=33=30=20=66=72=65=65=20=73=70=69=6e=73_?==?UTF–8?B?876tqQ==?=

Let’s take a look at the code sequence at the start and end of the subject: =?UTF-8?B?876tqQ=

As all good geeks know, characters outside the ASCII range are encoded as Base64 in emails.

The resultant character is U+FEB69 – a “Private Use” character which has no defined representation in Unicode.

For most of us, the character “󾭩” doesn’t display as any meaningful symbol – but on the web version of Gmail, it shows up as: B69, a flashing star.

WTF?

Ok, here’s what’s going on…

Way back in the midsts of time (well, about 2009) there was no standard for Emoji. Each company made use of Unicode’s private use characters in a different way. If you had a phone from Google and sent a message using the “Glowing Star Emoji” to a phone made by another manufacturer – the symbol would either not display properly, or show up as a completely different character!

Obviously, in an interconnected world, such a situation is untenable – so Google and several other companies set up the Emoji4Unicode project.

Google uses Private Use mappings to represent Emoji (“picture character”) symbols in Unicode text. These characters are commonly used by Japanese cell phone carriers. This project makes these mappings available.

Google and other members of the Unicode consortium are also developing a proposal for the addition of standardized Emoji symbol characters to Unicode.

The Unicode consortium banged some heads together (in a friendly way) and everyone agreed on a new standardised set of characters.

The new Unicode standard has “Glowing Star” set as U+1F31F and looks like this: 🌟.
(If your computer doesn’t support Unicode 6.0 you can take a look at the official reference chart.)

But the old version lives on! The animated GIF lives at https://mail.google.com/mail/e/B69where it is used for the web version of Gmail. (You can alter that end number to get all manner of odd characters.)

Modern Android phones still recognise this relic – although, in Google’s typically slapdash fashion, Android’s Gmail app won’t display the animation in the subject line, only in the body:

Gmail Flashing

The same happens with the iOS version of Gmail. Animated in the body, not in the subject line,

Try it yourself by sending an email with the subject and body “Star 🌟 vs Animated 󾭩”.

It doesn’t seem to work in Google Hangouts – or any other Google apps, just mail.

Interestingly, when sending this characters from the web or Android version of Gmail, it adds an “X-Goomoji-Subject” header and automatically converts the characters to GIFs. The Unicode is completely stripped away from the message.

So there we have it. An ancient form of Emoji, probably all but forgotten, has been resurrected by spammers in the hope that you’ll notice their wares.

What a load of 󾓴!

Unicode Emoji

Unicode Emoji

Unicode Emoji Resources

Unicode Emoji Subcommittee

The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is responsible for the following:

  • Updating, revising, and extending emoji documents such as UTR #51, Unicode Emoji and Unicode Emoji Charts.
  • Taking input from various sources and reviewing requests for new emoji characters.
  • Creating proposals for the Unicode Technical Committee regarding additional emoji characters and new emoji-related mechanisms.
  • Investigating longer-term mechanisms for supporting emoji as images (stickers).

The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee operating under theTechnical Committee Procedures. Current co-chairs are Mark Davis (Google) and Peter Edberg (Apple).

Participation in the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee weekly video/phone meetings and mailing list is open to members of the Unicode Consortium as listed in §13.1 of the Technical Committee Procedures, plus invited guests. Contact usfor more information.