Spatial metaphor considered harmful.

Matt Jones, reflecting on the last Information Architecture Summit: “We talk about navigating when we mean understanding.”

(Go read his post if you're wondering about the font size and color.) [Seb's Open Research]

mapping, ie navigating, isn't understanding it is representing. In the map we have the ability to understand an abstraction, not the original, and ftmp, the understanding can never be understood as the whole, in the on the ground totalizing experience.

Sun Certified System Administrator. 3 Apr 2003: Unix Review tells us about the Sun Certified System Administrator.”This month, I will focus on the Sun Certified System Administrator, Part I exam for Solaris 9 (exam CX-310-014). This exam consists of 57 multiple-choice, drag-and-drop, and free response questions that must be answered within 105 minutes, with 64% or more correct to pass. A complete list of the exam objectives can be found here. In this article, the focus will be on what topics you need to know, and where you can find more [RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix]]]

well, i should get this, and then i could teach this sort of thing, cause i do it everyday anyway, solaris9 is pretty simple comparably to early solaris versions, but overall it is still somewhat more complicated than the bsd versions.

When Games Override Calls as Phone Feature. Nokia, Sony Ericsson and their competitors are deploying technology to let callers kick, punch and beat one another up over their mobile handsets. By Matt Richtel. [New York Times: Technology]

zam, bang, smash, god i despise phones, i really do, not the users, but the concept that you may have someone far away that you think deserves more attention than your immediate experience. in fact, I'm writing, mcluhanesqly on the desocialization surrounding the mediation of the radio based phone. think local act global right, or is that the opposite….;)

Steve Hitchcock has created two extremely useful w …. Steve Hitchcock has created two extremely useful web pages amounting to a comprehensive and up-to-date directory of OAI-compliant, open-access eprint archives. The Core metalist of open access eprint archives lists the major lists of archives by type. The Metalist of open access eprint archives is the same list with helpful annotations. The first will be updated more regularly than the second. Having a definitive metalist or directory will help users find archives and help activists measure the progress of the movement. Thank you, Steve! [FOS News]

handy

The April issue of Learned Publishing is now onlin …. The April issue of Learned Publishing is now online. Here are the FOS-related articles. Only the table of contents and abstracts are freely accessible.

• Colin Steele, Phoenix rising: new models for the research monograph?

• Mark S. Frankel, Seizing the moment: scientists' authorship rights in the digital age
• Heather Dalterio Joseph, BioOne: building a sustainable alternative publishing model for non-profit publishers
• Alan Turner; Pippa Steele, Archiving – the full-text solution: an innovative way to electronic archiving
• Pippa Smart, E-journals: developing country access survey
• David J. Powell, Voluntary deposit of electronic publications: a learning experience

[FOS News]

between the discussion on air-l and this, e-publishing is getting some coverage this week

Blogs Rule on Lawrence.com (Go Jayhawks!).

Blogs Are No. 1! Blogs Are No. 1!

“The most-read content at Lawrence.com? Believe it or not, it's currently the city site's weblogs, according to general manager Rob Curley. Curley & Co. have crafted Lawrence.com into an edgy site with wide appeal to a younger audience (Lawrence is home to the University of Kansas), and the site's blogs are promoted heavily and displayed prominently on the home page. See, weblogs do hold some serious potential for media companies.  (Lawrence.com is one of several sites produced by Curley's Web team. LJWorld.com is the main news site.)” [ E-Media Tidbits, via  MediaSavvy]

Lawrence.com is a great a way to keep up with the rockin' town that is home to my alma mater (and the soon to be NCAA basketball champions!), and the LJWorld's endeavors are consistently awarded high praise on the national level. Now all they need is a few RSS feeds to maintain their “head of the pack” status!

Actually, it would be pretty cool if they'd let you register and customize the local feeds you want to read online, including ones that will eventually come directly from the University, KJHK, the Bottleneck, etc. This type of aggregation service is a bountiful opportunity just waiting for some enterprising BigPub to notice it! Just think of the dedicated, daily eyeballs Lawrence.com/LJWorld would get!

P.S. Carolina – you can't have him!

[The Shifted Librarian]

i'm not much of a basketball fan, but lawrence is a great town.

More spooky .gov stuff. Derek Murphy is one of 2 other bloggers who have also seen a hit from another weird .gov:

http://sseop101.eop.gov/

“eop”? Anyone?

[www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

wierd, is it time to do a foi request. or perhaps ask your representative, the best bet is that it is executive office of the president (eop) which is where ollie north worked during contragate, it has a wide variety of functions in support of the president's office.

Next trick: doing this on the highway at 100km/h..

Gary Turner has put together something I want.

The Geek Gene explains it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

cool toy!

Reasons not to become a scientist.

On the heels of my previous post Are doctorates worthwhile? comes Don't Become a Scientist!, another rather dispiriting view of why science today might not be the best spot for bright young people to settle into.

I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won't get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas, and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job market first? [...]

Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They're not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.

What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career.

Think this sounds bleak and gloomy? Then you can cheer yourself up with Philip Greenspun's illustrated Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists.

Now I wouldn't want to appear one-sided on this issue; I think there might be good reasons to become a scientist as well. I'll try to find counterpoints out there and report on what I find.

[Seb's Open Research]

Any job I know of requires compromises. You take a chance in any of them. What this little story says is absolutely true. Yet many scientists DO pursue their own questions. They find a way to make grant requests work. They find a way to turn the system to THEIR advantage. I did not want to spent my time writing grants, trying to wring the last penny out of every grant. So I went to work for a biotech compnay where I spent 16 years doing what I wanted. I figured out ways to make what I wanted overlap with what the company wanted. I found a path that let me explore the questions in Nature that I found interesting. It is possible but it is not something you can follow a checklist for. It requires creativity, adaptability and driven curiousity. If you have those, you have a good chance to do what you find interesting. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's
Weblog]

ahh, the joy of a ph.d. i think i just posted my reasons for pursuing this type of degree. but it is really the same way everywhere, the real problem is that the professionalization of higher education.

The Language of Imperialism.

The Language of Imperialism

I am finding it fascinating to learn the Dutch language. Especially fascinating is how perfectly bi-lingual so many Dutch people are. And amazingly, there are so many Americans who seem to think than's just fine and why shouldn't they be? And these same folks would figure, why should we learn any other languages anyway? And why should we bother funding language programs in our schools? What's the point? Everyone learns English anyway. Let them do the hard work of learning another language. And I cringe when I run into this attitude. When we speak English with this attitude we are speaking a language of imperialism. We could learn a lot from the Dutch — they were once imperialistic like us and and now have a much less brutish and overbearing attitude. Their history and all the lessons learned there are in that beautiful language of theirs.

I am in awe of the mastery of languages most Europeans have. I took a helluva long, grueling time to learn French. Learning a language is just sheer uphill work unless you're three years old. And so next time you speak with someone bi-lingual, I invite you to KISS THEIR ASS, because they are handing you a gift that took as much as 10 to 20 years to make. They had the courage to fall on their faces repeatedly learning your language — that's the only way anyone ever DOES learn a language. They had the perseverance to keep enlarging their vocabulary, their accuracy, their present, past and future verb tenses, the whole ball of wax. They had the gigantic respect and humility to study YOUR WAY OF THINKING, because nothing helps you understand someone else's thinking like learning their language. I learned that in French and I happen to love the French language and in an unpopular time, also love the French.

And now, as I learn Dutch, I am enthralled to hear the echos in the language of the way the Dutch think — it's so interesting — and the way the Dutch language still holds so many French and German words in it — like a delicious haute cuisine six-course meal with delicacies from the other languages that once lived within their now modern borders, but the remnants of old visitors marching through those lowlands and leaving some of their tasty words behind. < [Halley's Comment]

about 6 months ago,i was at a confernece held in the room where the dutch west indies trading company did its business. it was a good conference, if a bit overwhelmed at times by the venue.