Reported by Star-Bulletin staff & wire
Meeting planners meet in Waikiki
The National Coalition of Black Meeting Planners is meeting at the Hawaii Convention Center through Saturday, an event expected to draw 550 attendees and $1.7 million in visitor spending.The group, founded in 1983, is focused on the training needs of black association executives, meeting planners and hospitality professionals.
The event's opening session today features Wayne E. Anderson, pastor of the City of Refuge Christian Church-Hawaii.
Pacific Rim ministers start talks on trade
SANTIAGO, Chile » Top government ministers from 21 Pacific Rim nations convened high-level talks on free trade and global security yesterday as police battled university students protesting the summit and a weekend visit by President Bush.Several hundred demonstrators who tried to gather in downtown Santiago were confronted by riot police, who doused them with tear gas from fast-moving jeeps and knocked them to the ground with blasts from water cannons mounted on trucks. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Google introduces tool for scholarly research
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. » Online search engine leader Google Inc. is setting out make better sense of all the scholarly work stored on the Web.The company's new service, unveiled late yesterday at scholar.google.com, draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request. Mountain View-based Google doesn't plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver text-based ads -- the primary source of its profits.
"Google has benefited a lot from scholarly research, so this is one way we are giving back to the scholarly community," said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the new search tools.
Although Google already had been indexing the reams of academic research online, the company hadn't been able to separate the scholarly content from commercial Web sites.
