Posts from — May 2003

Research Assistant

the Launch and Reception of the Lord of the Rings: Part 3

Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies

RESEARCH GRADE 1A: £21,125 PER ANNUM, PRO RATA

Working for ESRC-funded project for a period of ten months, full-time, beginning 1 October 2003, you will play a crucial role in organising the research within the UK, but also in helping to co-ordinate the research internationally in at least 14 other countries. You should have a good first degree, and ideally some postgraduate research experience, in a subject relevant to audience and reception studies, along with experience in dealing with people and excellent communication skills. The job will be based in Aberystwyth but you must be available for frequent travel to UK destinations. Ref: TV/03/04. Closing date 13 June 2003.

For informal conversation about this position, please contact Professor Martin Barker (email: mib@aber.ac.uk, telephone 01970-622369).

Further details and application forms available from the Personnel Office, The University of Wales, Old College, King Street, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 2AX. E-mail: personnel@aber.ac.uk. Tel: 01970 621586. Fax: 01970 622975

Working towards equal opportunities

i just had to repost this

Applied social network analysis. Somehow Eric Promislow's Amazing Baconizer escaped my attention until Eric mentioned it to me recently. Eric was co-creator of OmniMark, an ahead-of-its-time XML-oriented programming language, and is a senior developer at ActiveState. “The Baconizer,” he says, “is where I go to play in your basic LABP world (I'm too lazy to replace Berkeley DB with My SQL).” I've seen a few other applications that automate the traversal of Amazon's “Customers who bought this book also bought…” links, but Eric's does so in a goal-directed way. Here, for example, is the 12-hop path from my book to my wife's book:
… [Jon's Radio]

interesitn bit of equipment that….

MS $180M 'Crush-Linux' fund: Good NYT piece by Thomas Fuller this A.M. about the kinder, gentler Microsoft that has emerged since its deal with the Bush Administration.

MS set up a $180 million fund to enable salesmen to offer MS server products and services to governments at steep discounts or free (”Under NO circumstances lose against Linux”) according to an email obtained by Fuller.

The story goes on to describe MS employees attending Linuxworld, posing as independent consultants and OEMs. One described Linuxworld as “an even mix of local Union Hall teamster gathering, Christian Scientist revival and Amway sales conference.” Steve Ballmer is quoted, calling Linux “a cancer”. Good to see they really got the message up in Redmond, especially about predatory pricing… meanwhile Linux has 26% of the server market, according to IDG, against MS' 44%, and is growing… [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

i would think that this would be an anti-competitive strategy.

The missing Web.

Allen has mounted a passionate argument on behalf of the inspired idea behind GlobeAlive: That we have fine search engines for documents, but not for people.

When he first told me about it, and tossed off the line World Live Web, my mind was blown. In a World of Ends, we should all be able to find each other and talk, or corresond, live. (And not just on computers.)

He explains:

What I'm talking about is something entirely different. What I'm talking about is using the Qeb to find actual people in the world at large that you can talk to right now, about whatever youÕre specifically searching for. There's nothing like that yet. Nothing. People aren't searchable. TheyÕre the most important resource in the world, and theyÕre not searchable, theyÕre scattered to the wind. ThereÕs no “people” tab at Google (and “groups” isnÕt the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but youÕll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesnÕt exist. I want to build it.

To a significant degree, he has. With GlobeAlive, Allen is prototyping the idea very nicely. The hundreds who have joined in, and are also passionate about it, bear witness to something.

Allen has bootstrapped this thing on a shoestring. Somebody needs to come in with some money and take it to the next level. If I had it, I would (even if he wasn't my son). But maybe one of ya'll do. If so, jump ahead to Allen's closing paragraph:

The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it's like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it's a mathematical certainty that weÕre selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. ThereÕs an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live; it would change the economy by making it personal; it would change the world by making it smaller; and it would change you and I… by helping us meet.

[ href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">The Doc Searls Weblog]

hmm, this is a good idea, as more and more people are hooked in minute by minute into their information technology, things could be enlivened…. the secret will be decentralization.

Don't read my blog!. I suggest that you consider reading this blog, or perhaps this one.  You know there are lots of great blogs out there.  Scout around. [Ernie the Attorney]

but I like yours, in part because of the mnemonics of the name, but also because it provides such interesting pointers to others, plus you were one of the first to link to my blog.

Put the “public” back in the public domain
Lawrence Lessig is looking for a few good congressmen:

It seems that there was one member of congress willing to introduce this bill, but the lobbyists got to him/her. So Prof. Lessig is calling on people to write their representatives and ask them to do something relatively small and achievable to redress the copyright imbalance that prevails today.

This, it seems to me, is a good fight, worth giving some long-haul energy. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

I think this is a great idea, and I want to know about that stanford library 1000 page an hour thing, cause i know that i have books that are out of copyright that could be scanned, and then i could use material from those books much more easily in my courses.

2nd IEEE Intl Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE 2003)
JungLi, Taiwan December 8-10, 2003
http://lttf.ieee.org/wmte2003/

Theme: “Mobile Support for Learning Communities”

** Important dates:

Submissions due: June 16, 2003
Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2003
Final articles due: September 1, 2003
Author registration deadline: September 1, 2003
Workshop: December 8-10, 2003

** Proceedings

The WMTE 2003 proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press.

** Topics of Interest

We invite full papers, works-in-progress, and posters. The program committee will seek to
achieve a balance of empirical investigations and design studies, including relevant
methodologies from computer science and engineering research as well as cognitive science
and educational research. All submitted papers should address mobile and/or wireless
technologies and provide new insights relating to their use in teaching and learning.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

- Innovative designs and uses of tools to overcome barriers of learning
- Principles and patterns for learner-centered design
- Design of learning activities supported by mobile devices
- Advances in teaching conceptually difficult topics in school
- Interface designs optimized for small screens or other modes of interaction that
fit on mobile devices
- Architectures that support rapid prototyping, reuse, or large-scale test beds
- Techniques of instrumentation devices and networks for research data gathering
- Case studies of teaching and learning
- Surveys of learners that reveal important trends and opportunities
- Analysis of the topology of learning communities
- Evaluation of effectiveness
- Comparisons of alternative designs
- Issues of scaling up to reach large numbers of learners
- Mobile agents for learning

** Paper submission:

- Full papers (maximum 8 pages)
- Works-in-progress (maximum 5 pages)
- Posters (maximum 2 pages)

Details of submission procedure are available at the conference website:
http://lttf.ieee.org/wmte2003/

Alarmist? You bet! Ding ding ding ding!. “First they came for the Greens…” Texas' proposed “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” which its backers are hoping to extend nationally, is the next step after Patriot Acts I and II. The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights says the legislation criminalizes “basically every environmental and animal-rights organization in the country,” which means that if you don't even march with, but send money to any of them, you may be tacitly waiving your 4th-amendment rights. [More inside] [MetaFilter]

i am consistently amazed at what people think they should let their representatives do….

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM

MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated
support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web
browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link MnM to ontology
servers and for integrating MnM with information extraction tools. MnM works with a number of representation languages, including RDF, DAML+OIL and OCML. The annotated documents can be used to populate ontologies or as a training corpus for information extraction (IE) engines. The MnM IE plug-in is generic and documented and therefore developers can add new IE mechanisms to the system.

The version of MnM available for download has been integrated with Amilcare Version 2.1, a tool for Adaptive Information Extraction from Texts. Amilcare has been developed by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, F.Ciravegna@dcs.shef.ac.uk, http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~fabio. This version of Amilcare has been released as demo as part of the MnM tool and CAN BE USED ONLY AS PLUG-IN FOR THE MnM tool. It cannot be used in stand alone or as plugin for any other annotation tool.
Please contact Fabio Ciravegna if you want to use Amilcare in commercial applications, distribute it to other colleagues or integrate it in other tools.

MnM is provided “as is” and it is free of charge for non commercial
use (see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/license.html for more details).

For more information about MnM you can have a look at the published papers
(http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/publications.html), and at the user
manual and developer guide (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/documents.html).

SID2003 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Social Intelligence Design International Conference
Royal Holloway, University of London 6-8 July 2003

Conference website:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Management/News-and-Events/conferences/SID2003/

This is the second workshop on the subject of social intelligence design
focused on the significance of information technology in our lives, work,
home, and on the move. In this workshop we consider Social Intelligence
(SI) as the ability for people to relate to, understand and interact
effectively with others. Our particular concern is how SI is mediated
through the use of new technologies.

The workshop is organised around four main themes:

1. INTERACTIONS – with presentations covering theory, modelling and
analytical frameworks that have been developed with Social Intelligence
Design in mind.

2. COMMUNITIES covering topics community media, communication patterns in
online communities, knowledge-creating, network and anonymous communities.

3. COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES and tools – presenting innovations to support
interactions within communities, covering a range from knowledge sharing
systems, multi-agent systems, interactive systems, Embodied Conversational
Agents.

4. APPLICATION DOMAINS – including architecture, education, policy and
business.

Intended Participants:
This workshop is intended for all who are concerned with the impact of
advanced information and communication technologies on social intelligence,
in particular, researchers, developers and designers of new ways of
communicating enabled and supported by such technologies. The contributions
will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Please visit the conference website for further information and
registration details

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS:
Prof. Duska Rosenberg, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of
London, Egham, Surrey, UK.
Prof. Toyoaki Nishida, Department of Information and Communication
Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Dr. Renate Fruchter, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Director of Project Based Learning Laboratory, Stanford University,
Stanford, USA.