Scholarpedia is a new online encyclopedia and competitor to Wikipedia. I am a big user of Wikipedia and have wasted a lot of time clicking through articles. I have exactly the same habits as the user in this XKCD cartoon. Despite it’s addictiveness, Wikipedia does have a problem with the quality of its content as it is not accepted by any academic institution.

Scholarpedia’s author selection is a lot more strict than Wikipedia and it is peer reviewed. It can still be user edited, however new editions must be approved by the original curator. The main idea behind it is to have an online encyclopedia like wikipedia, but with higher quality articles.

So far, there are only encyclopedias in Computational Neuroscience, Dynamical Systems, Computational Intelligence and Astrophysics. I am not an expert in any of these fields, however the amount of content so far looks promising. I am a little bit skeptical as to whether this will expand quickly because of the greater amount of work required to produce an article. It is based on the same MediaWiki engine as Wikipedia, so the look and feel is completely natural.

Check out Scholarpedia soon!!!!!

I have recently started to become more skeptical of broadband providers’ false advertising. I have recently signed up for Virgin Media’s 20 meg broadband in the UK. The result above is the fastest bandwidth test result that I have achieved within the first week of having this service.

I am aware of Virgin’s fair use policy, and I know that I haven’t exceeded it. Their fair use policy is pretty ridiculous as well. It states that if I exceed 3gb of downloads within a day, then my connection will be capped at 5 megs between 4pm and midnight. This is ridiculous on a supposed 20 meg connection; 30 minutes of downloading at full speed will put me over the cap.

The BBC has recently published an article here about broadband speeds being under scutiny:

Some 3,000 readers took part in speed tests and 62% found they routinely got less than half of the top speed advertised by their provider.

A survey last month by consumer group Which found that consumers with services promising speeds of up to 8Mbps were actually getting an average speed of 2.7Mbps.

All we can hope for is more legislation in the future, so that we can access the net at advertised speeds.