if you think you know whats going on online, but aren't on nettime or at least watching it, you might want to reconsider your self-evaluation. likewise, if you haven't seen the association of internet researchers, you are might want to rethink things. aoir check out this years conference, its great fun and great people.

Database Dilemmas
The third and final theme for this year's Impakt Online commissions
will be 'Database Dilemmas'. The deadline for submitting proposals is
September 15, 2003. From these proposals, two projects will be chosen
for the commission, which will be publically launched on December 1,
2003. Thematic and practical details follow:

The process of collecting, structuring and storing information and
data is a phenomenon typical of digital times. Obviously, data are
the fundaments of almost any digital platform. As an archiving tool,
the database seems to be the most dominant form by which to organise
and structure information. So far.

The obsession with organising and archiving information has also left
its traces in contemporary digital art practices. Many artists have
discovered the database as a new domain for artistic, social and
aesthetic experiments. In the last decade, these artists have been
developing several different approaches toward its specific
characteristics. Their dilemmas concern, among others, the narrative
[how to create narrative from a static collection of data?], the
formal/structural [how to change the specific indexical form of the
database?] and the socio-political [how to change its character from
a closed, controlled system into an open, public one?].

Impakt intends to seek and show projects from artists that explore
the phenomenon of data-collections and the particular structure of
the database from a critical point of view. What are their poetics,
aesthetics and ethics? How do they visualise collections of
information in their projects? How do they approach the traditional
model of the
database? With which aims do they attack, transform and extend its
static form and encyclopaedic structure?

'Database Dilemmas' was conceived by Deanna Herst for Impakt Online.

Call for Proposals

Deadline for Proposals: September 5, 2003
Project Completion Date: November 15, 2003
Launch: December 1, 2003

*Proposals must be written in English, and the project accessible to an
English-speaking audience
*Proposals should include a project description:
—description of content
—details of the technical implementation, including ALL server-side
software required
—rough estimate of total project size in Mb
—time line
—relation to the theme
*Proposals should also include an artist[s] biography:
—short CV
—documentation + URLs of previous projects
*Projects should be accessible to users of all three major Operating
Systems: Linux, MacOS and Win32.
*Previously exhibited projects will be immediately disqualified
*Please do not send any unsolicited large attachments [i.e. >400K],
as they will not be opened. If you must provide us with large files,
please send us a URL or FTP location for them.

Impakt will provide webhosting for the project for 1 year, and pay a
fee to the accepted artist[s] of EURO 1000.

Address for submissions:
online@impakt.nl

Impakt Festival
P.O. Box 735
3500 AS Utrecht
The Netherlands

http://www.impakt.nl/online/

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released its new report,
“Let the Games Begin: Gaming technology and entertainment among college
students.” For the full text of the report, please see:
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=93. The press release is
pasted in below.

College Students and computer, video and Internet games

CHICAGO–Computer, video and online games are woven into the fabric of
everyday life for college students. And, they are more a part of college
students' social lives than many would suspect.

All of the 1,162 students surveyed on 27 campuses by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project reported they had played a video, computer or online
game at one time or another. Fully 65% of college students reported being
regular or occasional game players.

Among the more surprising and notable findings:

Students cited gaming as a way to spend more time with friends. One out of
every five (20%) gaming students felt that gaming helped them make new
friends as well as improve existing friendships.

Gaming also appears to play a surrogate role for some gamers when friends
are unavailable. Nearly two-thirds (60%) of students surveyed agreed that
gaming helped them spend time when friends were not available.

Close to half (48%) of college student gamers agreed that gaming keeps them
from studying “some”or “a lot.” In addition, about one in ten (9%) admitted
that their main motivation for playing games was to avoid studying.

One third (32%) of students surveyed admitted playing games that were not
part of the instructional activities during classes.

—
this was sent to the digra list by my friend charlie who is supposed to be drinking bourbon and writing his dissertation in a small cabin int denmark this week, but is yet still online, and helping control the evil spammers so i don't have to, yay charlie

— Semantic Web Services —

2004 AAAI Spring Symposium Series

Stanford University, CA

http://www.daml.ecs.soton.ac.uk/SSS-SWS04.html

Services, i.e. network pervasive programs or devices, facilitate
interoperation by exposing their interfaces to each other. Such
service-oriented research includes:

* Web Services – standardized enterprise components
offered across the Web;
* Grid Services – scientific/computing resources that
facilitate large-scale e-science research;
* Multi-Agent Systems – heterogeneous agents that
cooperate or compete to solve distributed AI problems.

Whilst services deliver dynamic, personalised, and relevant applications
though discovery, invocation and composition, a key remaining challenge
is to support automated interoperability without necessitating human
intervention. The inclusion and use of Semantic Web annotations promise
to make Web-based information and services both accessible and
understandable to agents and other applications. Emerging ontologies
(e.g. DAML-S) are being used to construct semantically rich service
descriptions. Techniques for planning, composing, editing, reasoning and
analysing about these descriptions are being investigated, and deployed
to resolve semantic interoperability between services within scalable,
open environments.

Key research challenges in the area of Web services, Grid services and
Multi-Agent computing include the construction of ontologies for service
description, ontologies of service types (i.e. describing classes of
services), etc, as well as techniques that support the manipulation of
service descriptions to automate service discovery, translation,
composition, etc.

This proposed symposium aims to bring together researchers addressing
many of these issues, and promote and foster a greater understanding of
how the Semantic Web can assist Grid, Web Services and Multi Agent
System research.

Topics of Interest include:
===========================

Ontologies that support service descriptions
Ontologies for service classification
Semantic interoperability and integration
Quality of service and service level agreement management
Semantic Web security policies, management and frameworks
Semantic description, discovery, and selection of services
Scaleable service composition for heterogeneous environments
Knowledge Representation for Semantic Web Services
DAML-S services
Semantics in Agent Communication Languages
Semantics for service delegation and knowledge aggregation
Architectures for supporting Semantic Web Services
Service enactment/invocation frameworks
Service Negotiation
Rules within Semantic Web Services

Submission Information
======================
Those interested in participating should send either 1-3 page extended
abstract, or an 8-page paper to Terry Payne (trp@ecs.soton.ac.uk) by the
submission deadline. Electronic submissions (Postscript or PDF) in AAAI
format preferred

Dates
=====
Abstracts Due: October 3, 2003
Acceptance Notices: November 7, 2003
Camera Ready: January 20, 2004
Registration: February 27, 2004
Symposium: March 22-24, 2004

Committee
=========
Terry Payne (Chair)
Keith Decker
Ora Lassila
Sheila McIlraith
Katia Sycara

Vote Rigging.

Scoop: Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

unconfirmed. unverified. treat as suspect.

that's about the article, but if the article is correct if will be about our election results. there seems to be growing noise in the system about computerized voting machines built by for profit corporations that do not leave proper audit trails. potentially very scary. be on guard, I suspect there is more to come.

[Abstract Dynamics]

i think more people should pay attention to this issue. more and more online or computerized elections are going to occur, i've run a few, and without solid, ethical support, they can be easily manipulated.

What's The Pitch?. A novel online resource proposal by David Wiley: “Pitch” is a free, online, peer-reviewed journal focusing on facilitating discourse related to free and open access to learning opportunities for all. The goal of the journal is to provide a forum… [Object Learning]

interesting stuff.

Secrets of Dungeons and Dreamers. A new book due out in August offers a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of gamer culture through the eyes of one of its leaders: 'Lord British.' By Xeni Jardin. [Wired News]

this looks like it will be a good read.

The Emerging Sixth Estate.

In this essay, Dr. Elwyn Jenkins, the guy behind Microdoc News,[Smart Mobs]

there are some interesting bits there, but what about the fifth estate, lets not forget!

The June issue of the INASP Newsletter is now onli …. The June issue of the INASP Newsletter is now online. Here are the articles relevant to open access.

• Sir Roger Elliott, E-publishing and the Scientific Information Chain

• David Prosser, Towards open access to scientific journals
• John Willinsky, Scholarly associations and the economic viability of open access publishing
• Carthage Smith, World Summit on the Information Society
• Evelyn Kortum, WHO Collaborating Centres: International sharing of knowledge
• Maritza Hee Houng, Latin America and the Caribbean seek to meet the challenges of the information society

[Open Access News]

this is also interesting.

The new issue of Library Hi Tech is devoted to the …. The new issue of Library Hi Tech is devoted to the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting. The guest editor Timothy W. Cole. Only abstracts are free online. Here's the TOC.

• Timothy W. Cole, Using OAI: innovations in the sharing of information

• Carl Lagoze; Herbert Van de Sompel, The making of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
• Caroline R. Arms, Available and useful: OAI at the Library of Congress
• Michael L. Nelson, Terry L. Harrison, and JoAnne Rocker, OAI and NASA's scientific and technical information
• Simeon Warner, E-prints and the Open Archives Initiative
• Sarah L. Shreeves, Joanne S. Kaczmarek, and Timothy W. Cole, Harvesting cultural heritage metadata using the OAI Protocol
• Kat Hagedorn, OAIster: a “no dead ends” OAI service provider
• Martin Halbert, The Metascholar Initiative: AmericanSouth.Org and MetaArchive.Org
• Christopher J. Prom, Reengineering archival access through the OAI protocols
• Gary Simons and Steven Bird, Building an Open Language Archives Community on the OAI foundation
• Hussein Suleman and Edward A. Fox, Leveraging OAI harvesting to disseminate theses
• William Y. Arms, Naomi Dushay, Dave Fulker, and Carl Lagoze, A case study in metadata harvesting: the NSDL
• Judith Wusteman, XML to the desktop
• Morell D. Boone, Library facility planning – the consultant's view: a chat with Andrea Michaels
• Michael Seadle, Copyright in a networked world: digital distance education

[Open Access News]

there are some interesting links here, i hope to see more in the future. we helped 2 years ago to add project gutenberg to Open Archives, along with the RFC and IETF proceedings. the computer scientists didn't build an autoupdate app though, so they are likely out of date now.