Qwiki is a search engine which produces a movie from
a key word. It sits on top of other sites like Wikipedia or Google. Below are some examples
pulled on October 30, 2010 from the search engine. There are also some
examples with mathematical content relevant for this course.
Most current qwiki entries like the determinant entry or Fibonnacci entry
are rather poor. The definition of Fibonacci sequences is flawed for example.
Information on places or people are surprisingly good even so one sees,
where more work has been put in.
In the simplest case, the qwiki script scrapes the first few lines
from Wikipedia, reads it with a computer voice, grabs some pictures
from search engines and puts this together to a slide show.
Added on Nov 7: To the left, you see a self-made "Qwiki"
using Text from Wikipedia, and underlying text read by Oliver's computer
(November 6, 2010). Compare with the current Qwiki entry (last clip below).
Here is ipod,iphone version [15.5 Meg].
[ Music Credit: Teleman Blockflötenkonzerte Allegro (I think it is performed by
the Heidelberger Kammerorchestra), Text credit: streamlined and rearranged from
this Wikipedia entry.
The Harvard endowment numbers are newer than the Wikipedia entry and were
taken from here.
Pictures were grabbed by hand mostly from Google image sources. The first image and
the last movie clip are from here.
Unlike "Qwiki", this "KnillKi" needed manual assistance.
Only the spoken sound export was automatized with a small shell script.]