Posts from — October 2003

U.S. Prisons and Mental Illness. Prisons have become America's default mental health system. According to a new study by Human Rights Watch, between two and three hundred thousand men and women in U.S. prisons are seriously mentally ill, about three times more than the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals. [Via TalkLeft.] [MetaFilter]

Crisis and opportunities in scholarly publishing. The 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place in Philadelphia, May 9-10, 2003. The presentations from the one public session, Crises and Opportunities: the Futures of Scholarly Publishing, are now online. See the separate pages by Carlos Alonso, Cathy Davidson, John Unsworth, and Lynne Withey. [Open Access News]

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there are some interesting presentations here. However, Professor Unsworth is no longer at Virginia, so I wonder what's up there…

Computers don't do good security screening. It's a recurring fantasy: if we could compile a nice database of information on people and then load it into a computer we could set the computer on “autopilot” and it would tell us which people to watch out for…. [Ernie The Attorney]

Preliminary speed of the G5 cluster: 7.41 teraflop/s. I updated my story about the G5 cluster at Virginia with preliminary benchmark results. The R_max figure of 7.41 teraflop/s would put this supercluster to position 4 in the top-500 list of supercomputers. Not bad at all. [Universal Rule]

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it seems pretty slow to me, i suppose this is because of the network architecture, it would be nice to fix that, but i suppose they can't.

UNESCO statement on universal access to information. On October 14, a UNESCO Ministerial Round Table Meeting (Paris, October 9-10) issued communiqué, Towards Knowledge Societies. The communiqué ranks “universal access to information and knowledge” on a par with “freedom of expression” as a priority for the world community. Excerpt: “No society can claim to be a genuine knowledge society if access to knowledge and information is denied to a segment of the population. We therefore affirm the need for universal access to information and knowledge. By access we imply: infrastructure and connectivity; content; affordability; information literacy; know-how for use and development; education; and, the free flow of opinions and ideas.” For more detail, see the meeting press release. [Open Access News]

Which Dr. Seuss character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

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this is one i like

Australian report endorses open access archives. John Houghton, Colin Steele, and Margaret Henty, Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment, Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia, August 2003. Excerpt: “We find that there is a new mode of knowledge production emerging, changing research practices and bringing new information access and dissemination needs. Adjustments will be required to the existing research information and scholarly communication system to accommodate these changes, but new opportunities are emerging for more cost-effective and sustainable information access and dissemination….Open access digital repositories, operating in parallel with existing commercial publishing mechanisms, may provide a major opportunity to develop a sustainable information infrastructure for both traditional and emerging modes of knowledge production. Together, they provide the foundation for more effective and efficient access to, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly information.” (Thanks to Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.) [Open Access News]

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australia is getting into the fray here, that is good. the larger the academic community involved and the more state involvement in the issue, the more likely that this will take positive steps for knowledge distribution.

Free Culture!.

I helped put together the new Creative Commons CD featuring all sorts of great licensed music, and it's all available for download.

Now that the pool of CC-licensed music has grown, we had a great deal of choices and as a result there are all sorts of songs in the mix. I've been listening to these songs for months and it's hard to pick favorites, they've all got some strengths. Don't miss the bonus remixes too, the creativity there was amazing.

[A Whole Lotta Nothing]

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there is some interesting music here….

Guide to Institutional Repository Software.

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

Really helpful report from George Soros' Open Society Institute that looks at the currently available open source institutional repository systems that comply with the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocols. (Note these aren't 'learning object' repositories per se – these are typically more focused on archiving scholarly publishing and other institutional materials, though through things like z39.50 and the IMS digital repositories interoperability spec it may end up that your searches go against these repositories and more.)

You'll have seen this already over at OLDaily (you do read Stephen already, don't you?) – this post was more a personal note as this was one of those 'just in time' nuggets that float through the blogosphere and land on your desktop seconds before you knew you needed them. Hurray!. – SWL

[EdTechPost]

Warfare at the speed of light. After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution ÉÉ warfare at the speed of light. [Gyre.org]

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danger danger danger danger danger