KEY POINTS:
TV maker Pioneer is set to launch the eighth generation of its plasma TV screens, claiming 80 per cent improved black levels compared to the previous generation, meaning the picture looks sharper and more accurately coloured than ever before.
The new TVs will range in size from 42 to 60 inches and support a very high contrast ratio of 20,000:1. Of relevance to those looking to take up the Freeview digital TV service, the Pioneer TVs boast built-in DVB-T digital tuners which allow them to pick up a digital terrestrial signal.
Freeview will begin transmitting its terrestrial digital TV signals next March, by which time the new Pioneers should be widely sold here.
www.pioneerelectronics.com
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It's a project the great species collectors of history, from Pliny the elder to Darwin to globetrotting microbiologist Craig Venter, would well appreciate.
It's one big book that documents every known living species of plant and animal in the world, some 1.8 million species - a map of life as we know it.
The Encyclopedia of Life, which is backed by deep-pocketed philanthropists and a string of research bodies including the Smithsonian Institution and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, will be a free online publication of scientific reports, photos, videos and maps.
It will collate, for the first time, the results of hundreds of years of scientific field and lab research and put it in a form useful to school children as well as scientific researchers. There are plans to scan, and make available online, 50 million original scientific documents.
Our native species, the kakapo through to the kauri, will have their own pages in the encyclopedia, as will the 12,000 or so marine species inhabiting New Zealand waters as the 10-year project takes shape.
The encyclopedia, which will constantly grow as new species are discovered, will be a great record globally, perhaps the most sophisticated of its kind every created. The project also confirms the impact a new wave of web-based technologies is having on how information is accumulated and published.
The encyclopedia's creators say they were inspired by the success of the Wikipedia.org encyclopedia which boasts millions of entries and allows users to create articles and edit others, policing each other as the articles pile up. The EOL will take the same open source approach, but entries will be more closely vetted by scientists.
The sheer weight of data involved in this multimedia project explains why it has never been, successfully, attempted before. The tools were not available to collate it all efficiently. The internet has changed that.
As the EOL's creators explain on its website: "The crucial software tools to accomplish it, namely aggregation or mash-up technology and wiki-style editing and accumulation of content, have only demonstrated their effectiveness on a large scale in the last year or two."
Those technologies have not only been harnessed by web companies to serve up internet content in better ways - think of the content aggregation services of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, but by organisations inspired by the concept of the digital commons, where information is openly shared, free to access and without many of the restrictions enforced by copyright protection.
The Encyclopedia of Life's development runs in parallel to similarly minded, often semi-commercial projects to collate everything from the world's literature (Google Books) to a database of every movie ever made (Imdb.com).
Ten years from now it's likely that New Zealand high-school students will be just a search engine entry away from any research resource they could possibly want, the primary sources on which the research is based, also available in digital form.
The implications for education are immense. Anyone with an internet connection will have access to the same knowledge whether they're in a well-funded private school in Britain or a make-shift classroom in Africa.
It's likely that children will come to regard reading and contributing to encyclopedic wikis as second nature as they increasingly use them to learn about the world and articulate their own view of it. One thing's for sure, I wish the Encyclopedia of Life had been around when the rich kids on my street jealously guarded their complete, leather-bound set of Encyclopedia Britannica while the rest of us fought over the school library's dog-eared collection.
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TradeMe's gadget
Internet auction website TradeMe has released a desktop gadget for users of the Windows Vista operating system, allowing them to track their auction listings without having to regularly visit the TradeMe website.
The gadget sits in the Vista Sidebar or wherever on your desktop you want to place it and will display the state of bids on your listings or the listings of other members.
The software can be downloaded from the TradeMe website and requires that you're running Windows Vista.
www.trademe.co.nz
