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Computers are ranking the world's important authors
Trying to rate the world's literary giants is tricky at best. Do you go by the number of books sold? The long-term cultural impact? If you're Dartmouth College researcher Allen Riddell, you make computers decide. As part of an effort to determine which books would be most valuable in the public domain, Riddell has developed an author ranking algorithm that determines the most important authors who died in a given year. The system ranks writers based on the age, length and popularity of their Wikipedia articles, along with the number of titles they have in the public domain. If an author gets a lot of attention but doesn't have many freely available works, that person climbs the charts and is more likely to have titles published on free literature sites like Project Gutenberg.
GyroBike flywheel helps bicycles self-steady
Besides learning to use the toilet properly, the ability to ride a bicycle is one of the most important early-childhood accomplishments, but unfortunately, the current use of training wheels for practice does little to prepare kids for life on two wheels. Well a start-up using technology developed at Dartmouth College is aiming to eliminate the rolling crutches that are training wheels, and replace them with a gyroscopic flywheel that attaches to the front wheel and helps a bike steady itself whenever the rider loses his/her balance. Expected to retail for around $40 when it hits the market, the GyroBike by the company of the same name works by spinning in conjunction with the wheel it's attached to, using natural physical properties to turn the handlebars towards the direction of an impending fall. GyroBike also claims to be in talks with the top six manufacturers of kids' bikes, so you may soon be able to buy a model with this technology built-in instead of retrofitting one you already own.[Via Cnet]
