Posts from — February 2003

GREATEST THREAT TO PEACE. Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? Isn't Time Magazine typically read by real conservative types? I took the informal survey, with about 348,000 other respondents and was surprised by the percentages. [MetaFilter]

this should be obvious

Recall that the Budapest Open Access Initiative re …. Recall that the Budapest Open Access Initiative released two guides to open-access publishing last week, one on launching new open-access journals and one on converting traditional journals to open access. It has now amended the copyright pages in each guide to make clear that users have permission to copy and redistribute them for non-commercial purposes. See p. 2 of each guide for more details. [FOS News]

this is important work.

The National Science, Technology, Engineering, and …. The National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) is now soliciting grant applications. Letters of intent are due by March 12, and full proposals are due by April 21. [FOS News]

where are the social sciences?

superman's dead. I've been nothing but saddened every time I hear another rumor about some shitty actor “in talks” to play Superman…. [A Small Victory]

ok, well, this just won't do. it just won't

The Infography is an open-access bibliography on a …. The Infography is an open-access bibliography on a growing number of scientific and scholarly topics. To insure quality, the publisher, Fields of Knowledge, invites subject-matter experts to submit citations. If they submit more than six, then they must specify which six are the most important. The result is a manageable and human-filtered alternative to the avalanche of citations produced by search engines. Of course it's also searchable.

(PS: Full disclosure: I'm not a neutral observer. I just completed the Infography section on Free Online Scholarship.) [FOS News]

this looks interesting…

MMOG in Print. Former employees of Origin, makers of Ultima Online, launched a magazine devoted on MOGs. Their range seems pretty broad, and… [game girl advance]

this looks nifty

We'll leave the light on for you!. The principality of Liechtenstein has thought of an innovative way of rasing tourism revenue: Rent the whole country! Liechtenstein, established by the Holy Roman Empire in 1719 and sovereign since 1806, is among the smallest nations on the planet. It boasts a population around 33,000 living in a nation around 0.9 times the size of Washington DC. Check out the Liechtensteinian homepage. (in German) [MetaFilter]

well this explains what might be in bush's mind for the future of the U.S. to pay of his enormous future debt, we can just rent the country to corporations, wait, isn't that what we basically do now though?

A couple of articles looking at the way….

A couple of articles looking at the way we program.

• Coding from Scratch [via email from Matt Jones], in which Jaron Lanier makes the good point that programming languages can't handle variance, and if nature worked like this there'd be trouble. A scale problem: a single byte difference can have enormous consequences. The reason for this, he says, is that language design follows the metaphor of the telegraph. Passing variables to a subroutine is imitating the wire. And so he talks about phenotropic, pattern-recognition, computing as an alternative paradigm. Emit and collect?
• They Write the Right Stuff [via ext|circ] is about how to write bug-free software in the current paradigm, in this case for the space shuttle. 420,000 lines of code with one error. The commercial equivalent bug rate would lead to 5,000 errors. How do they do it? Detailed design, many levels of testing and proofreading, and a culture unlike the commercial world: no pulling all-nighters, no sending out for pizza.

Two approaches to the same problem.

[Interconnected]

Making computer programming more like life is interesting. I'm sure there are lots of scientists working on something like this, over and above the sorts of genetic programming sorts of things. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

there are thousands of people working on this i suppose, but the reql question is what becomes of the skills that were once required to do this job, if there were any…

The Lysistrata Project. The play's the thing… From a flyer at a demonstration, earlier today: On March 3, 2003. Groups all over the world will perform readings of Aristophanes' anti-war play Lysistrata to show Bush and the world that war is not the only option. The list of performances is quite impressive. Pro-peace? Get involved! [MetaFilter]

This stands on its own!

Join eBn: Educators Blogging Network. Become a member .
I think others are right.Ê The recent press attention to educational blogging is creating a tipping point. [Serious Instructional Technology]
seems like a good idea, glob together into an amorphous knowledge group and see what shakes out….