Posts from — July 2003

The AAU has made public its reservations about the …. The AAU has made public its reservations about the Sabo bill. Excerpt: “AAU strongly supports what we understand to be the objective of this legislation: to enhance public access to the results of federally funded scientific research. However, we believe that the denial of copyright protection for publications resulting from federally funded research, the primary tool contained in the bill, not only is unnecessary for the achievement of this objective but also may prove quite harmful to the nation's research enterprise….” [Open Access News]

it is quite harmful for profits based on federally funded research which is more and more what underwrites the cost of major state universities, since the states would rather spend the money elsewhere, and not raise taxes to cover the expenses. However, just because bill will slow the corporatization and profit structure of higher education in relation to federally funded research, does not mean that it isn't a good thing for the U.S. in general. It would certainly require new strategies, but maybe one of those is to start arguing that education and higher education with research is important to the national and state economy and generates significantly more economic output than is usually recognized.

A Man With A Memory.

John Cole has 5 good reasons why we went to war, and not a damn one of them involves whether Saddam tried purchasing uranium.

[Electric Venom]

While the Humanitarian aide is certainly and important aspect, lets not forget who is making money providing that aid, and no, it is not the red cross or any other independent international agency….

lets also consider oil, why? because breaking opec's price control is what has yet to occur, but it likely will. This war is foreign policy based on profiterring in energy policy, or at least it is partially. Someone's friends are making money and will continue to make money for some time.

Perl Culture. There's a section devoted to 'language', and another for 'science', in Games, Diversions & Perl Culture, the best of the Perl Journal. [via fieldmethods.net]… [HubLog]

casting perl before swine is not a bad thing, though not a good thing either. I've received a few perl journals before and they always are insightful in some way or another.

Enemies of learning.

Charles Feltman's Enemies of Learning (2-page .pdf) is a quick survey of personal factors that make it harder for us to approach the unknown. A few of the “enemies” that George picked out:

• Our inability to admit that we don't know
• The desire for clarity all the time
• Inability to unlearn
• Lack of trust

(via elearnspace blog via thought?horizon)

[Seb's Open Research]

This is a nifty, short analysis worth considering for anyone that attempts to inspire learning, it might be less appropriate for those that try to teach.

It's the User-Interface Guidelines stupid!. If you want to design a user-interface that is intuitive you need guidelines.  And then you have to encourage developers to follow them.  Oh, and if you Google “Windows User Interface Guidelines” here is where you wind up.  That seems about right. [Ernie the Attorney]

LOL, nothign new hear, there are no guidelines, just look at the mess of interfaces in windows, every new app has a new interface, horrid.

[NYT] Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books. “Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.

Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.”

It's all about the search engine. [Web Voice]

It is all about the search engine, deep content searching for conceptual relationships though is one of the things that I work on when i get the chance, and I think they can do this and i should probably work on my system some more.

i love the smell of moonbats in the morning. Someone thinks I am an admirer of fascism just because I think John Gilmore was an idiot for wearing his “Suspected Terrorist” button on an airplane. fasácism n. often Fascism 1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority… [A Small Victory]

Fascism is a bit more complex than this. I suggest reading Felix Guattari's essay “everybody wants to be a fascist”. or perhaps Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of enlightenment or Hannah Arendt's On Totalitarianism.

in short, the definition provided above is not made, like so many definitions, to help you understand the topic, but to provide a start toward understanding the topic.

white house communication enhancements. Could there be a better, more public, more embarrassing example of poor interface design? The real question is whether it was born of ignorance or malice… Doc Searls’ step-by-step attempt to email President Bush John Markoff’s New York Times article on the new system… [mamamusings]

I emailed them to complain, I got the email back basically stating that more or less that the whitehouse only wants to hear what they want to hear and unless i wear my brown shirt and march to their drum, my comments will be unheard:( i find it utterly appalling.

flash toys. adrian's cool flash toys featuring adrian's battlebots. [MetaFilter]

toys, yummm

media technologies for open communication. While I agree in principle with Fiske in rejecting the technological determinism point of view, I also believe that due to the social construction of communication technologies there ought to be some characteristics of particular technologies that are better fit to serve the designer. My argument is that if a particular technology was designed to serve the corporate interest, most of its features will be driven to maximize the profits. [see the entry on adaptive structuration for this argument] In contrast, if a group of people is about to design technology for open communication and democratic access to information, the… [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information

SCOT, the social construction of technology, Edinburgh school, admits that there are more than 1 significant group in the construction of a technology, ideally, there are many. one though is the designers, one is the market, and depending on the institution one might be the business oriented marketeers, etc. I'm personally not fond of SCOT as a great model of analysis, because it usually focuses on the development of a paradigmatic technology, instead of showing the plurality of technologies surrounding the paradigm, but that's a whole different discussion I suppose.

I think that technology is never designed to fulfill one interest, but that the contexts, and social milieu might allow that many groups have certain interests in common, but they pursue them in a myriad of ways, and that what comes out of at the end, if interpreted in certain ways, can appear to be singularly oriented toward one interest or collection of interests that is associated with a certain group. The question then becomes how you get at what really occured? and why that might be important.