Posts from — May 2003

Directory of Open Access Journals under Creative Commons. Lund University in Sweden has recently launched the Directory of Open Access Journals featuring hundreds of peer-reviewed, scholarly journals from scientific and cultural communities. Their principal aim is to secure the right of “users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles.” Along with the searchable directory, they also provide a metadata model based on RDF and license all their data under an Attribution-Sharealike license. [Creative Commons: weblog]

this is great! wish I'd gotten it together first of course, but congrats on it.

Help wanted
Since I'm lucky enough that this blog is read by a decent number of talented software developers and technology managers, it seems like a good place to point to this job posting. Salon is in the market for a VP/technology. If you're interested or you know someone who might be, read the posting and see if it sounds like a good fit. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

I hope they hire someone that can secure their premium content a bit better, cause 2600 has a nice article on bypassing their cookie based security system this month. i use all server side sessions myself keyed to a uid cookie that has no content other than identifying the server side session. I dunno if that's common, but it's common sense.

Army and M.I.T. Unveil Futuristic Soldier Center. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a $50 million Army contract to form a center that develops combat gear using materials the size of atoms. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]

yes remember this is the group that swiped someones comic and used it for their proposal, never giving credit, until a fuss was thrown…..

choose your own ethics, but i don't think they should be rewarded given such things.

Toys of the 80s. Toys of the 80s
They don't make them like they used to. [MetaFilter]
hmmm, they did have some great toys back then

Computer games degree 'not Mickey Mouse'. A course sponsored by PlayStation games console maker Sony is worthwhile, an academic claims. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

a degree in computer games actually couldn't be 'mickey mouse' really, there is just so much to a game beyond anything people think is simple. to really get it going degreewise, you need to be very creative and interested in the topic and have the ability to get students to imagine something that is very hard to imagine, differences.

Swarm Journalism Unmasks Another Fake. Reason: The Mystery of Mary Rosh: How a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle. Stories that might… [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

this is a great phenomenon, i wish someone would do it for the bushies

LOTR: PHD ALLEGORY?. A friend from my grad school days sent me this link: An Allegory of the PhD?. The story starts with Frodo: a young hobbit, quite… [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

yep, I like this, it's funny and somewhat true for so many involved

“Higher Ed in a Down Economy”. “Frank” at Frank Admisssions is linking to an NPR series entitled “The Ivory Tower in the Real World,” which carries the suggestive subtitle “Higher Ed. in a Down Economy.” Today's installment (which presumably will soon be available as an audiofile):… [Invisible Adjunct]

tenure is supposed to be protection, true, but as i look around this nation it seems to mean little to nothing, if you can end a persons tenure for economic reasons, then you can end any it for any reason, because all reasons are economic reasons from one often used perspective.

Tim Bray: The Death of Scholarship?. Quote: “I'm not against Web search; I use Google several times per day myself. But I think somebody really needs to get out there and exercise some leadership and dress up the world's scholarly information sources, including by the way most of our intellectual history, so that ordinary people will use them. Among other things, they might make a lot of money in the process.”

Comment: The numbers he quotes sound very accurate to me.  The solution will be hard and it won't be until it's as easy to search these databases as it is to search Google that students will come back.  Most library and journal catalogs have no focus on usability and seem too interested in revealing how many metadata fields they have, instead of making it easy to find what you need. [Serious Instructional Technology]

I think this is a very good point, I know that many times I hear someone saying something that has been oft-repeated through history, but upon questioning they don't really have a feel for that particular ideas intellectual background. Likewise, the usefulness of having a well grounded opinion seems missing in our culture, and certainly in a generation of leaders, managers, etc.

Bloki is “a Web site on which you can create Web pages, right in your browser, with no additional software required. Think of it as a word processor for the Web.” [Scripting News] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

this looks like an interesting bit of software….