A fab round-up of some recent Google research projects. Including… analyzing and searching Arabic text … help children aged 5 to 13 find what they are looking for … a system to measure distances in Flickr-sized collections of images (presumably leading to “show me long sweeping views” filter, and possibly to automatic geo-location of photographs in Google Earth) … and more.

Depth-sensing is, of-course, potentially on the way in pocket s-3D digicams. Depth information would be encoded in the image metadata, as a by-product of stereo-3D imaging.

New figures on the number of links to journals from Wikipedia pages. Although I’m not sure I’d call Autocar or the New York Times academic journals, most of the titles look like major(?) medical journals and can thus be assumed to be peer-reviewed.

Nice to see that someone is thinking of posterity…

“the Bodleian Library will make at least one existing run of print titles of the e-journals it acquires”

Those who care about clarity when reading from screens, may like to read this long account from a Microsoft engineer of the improvements to ClearType in the new Windows 7, including a new ClearType Tuner. ClearType is absolutely vital if you want to use your laptop as if it were an ebook reader.

I’ve used the Tuner (my desktop is now running on Windows 7 RC) and it works well, although the personalised changes it makes are very subtle. ClearType is enabled by default in Windows 7.

Those who are not going to plough through the article may still be interested to read the key findings…

* We’ve measured an improvement in word recognition accuracy of 17% using ClearType over bi-level rendering.

* We’ve found a 5% speed improvement in reading speed and a 2% improvement in comprehension (this is remarkable) using ClearType

XP and Vista have ClearType — but I don’t think it’s enabled by default in XP, and there’s no Tuner in Vista (the Tuner is an optional download). Given the figures above, it sounds like students would benefit from having a canteen “ClearType tuning surgery” for their laptops, during the Autumn term.

Oh, and there’s another nice if rather minor benefit for Windows 7 users. W7 comes with a native standalone XPS reader, XPS being the “XML paper specification” which is a competitor to PDF. Sadly the XPS reader/viewer appears to have no sample XPS documents, although you can download the official Microsoft sample pack here. It’s primitive as a reader, but unlike Acrobat Reader, XPS Reader automatically shows pages in two-up view (aka ‘facing’) when in full-screen mode. In Acrobat you need to burrow into Edit / Preferences / Full Screen / Uncheck box to “Fill screen with one page at a time” to get a two-up page display in full-screen mode.

Uh oh, the future of open intelligence analysis will be in the hands of bots? Somehow, that doesn’t sound reassuring. DARPA (U.S. defence research) is reportedly to spend $30 million on a bot that can digest the web, and automatically churn out potted reports and data-sets for humans.

Still, it’s said there might be civilian spin-offs…

“However, BBN also expects the program to enable a plethora of new civilian applications, everything from intelligent bots to personal tutors. The system could provide unprecedented access and automated analysis of the world’s libraries, allowing for vastly expanded cultural awareness and historical research”

If you’d like to have your own mini intelligence agency on your desktop, the free Maltego 2.0 application is fun to play with, although oddly lacking in a basic means of identifying which website is hosted in which nation.

I’m partial to ‘feature-length anything’ that touches on nerds. I just found a feature-length documentary I hadn’t known about, The Hollywood Librarian, a documentary about librarians. Despite being out on DVD it’s not listed on Amazon U.K. or U.S. — but can be purchased from a small educational foundation from between $275.00 (universities) to a more reasonable $24.95 (“home use”). A full-length low-quality watermarked copy is available free online.