the author of perdido street station and scar comes out swinging….

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious – you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity.

Pandora Bots. Pandora Bots
http://www.pandorabots.com/

Welcome to pandorabots.com, the place where you can create and unleash virtual personalities. Pandorabots.com is an experimental software robot (bot) hosting service based on the work of Dr. Richard Wallace and the A.L.I.C.E./AIML free software community (www.alicebot.org).

From any browser, you may create, design and publish your own software robots 䴋 and make them available to anyone via the Internet. Click here to sign-up for an account to begin creating your own virtual robots. If you already have an account, please sign-in below with your email address and password. [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker]

Hotels of Doom. Hotelchatter. The ever-prolific Rusty of Kuro5hin fame has a new website out. This one is a collaborative weblog for reviewing hotels around the world. Having had some bad hotel experiences, I fully endorse the idea, but will people be motivated enough to write? [MetaFilter]

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this is interesting, some nice little stories here.

This week i have to finish my proposal stuff, get out a few job applications, and finish writing a book review for david. all in all, i'm busy. nothing new there.

IMing at Work. From the CACM Newstrack: A recent study of 300 firms in the U.S. and Britain÷ the world's two largest instant… [zephoria]

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both of my co-panelists, Anabel Quan-Haase and Gina Neff, at the aoir internet environment as work environment panel spoke of interesting studies related to IM'S, i don't really think that much about im's though i think they fit my general thesis on those environments.

US develops lethal new viruses. A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering. [Gyre.org]

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hmmm, it makes me wonder, doesn't it make you wonder? i wonder things like 'when will it jump species?' or 'which human will be the first to die from it?' or 'why are we doing things like this when we could be doing more profitable thing?'

New Online Information Review. The new issue of Online Information Review is now online. Only the table of contents and abstracts are free online. Here are the OA-related articles.

• Hussein Suleman and four co-authors, Building digital libraries from simple building blocks (on OAI interoperability)

• Margareta Benner, The digital archive of the Swedish East India Company, 1731-1813: a joint project of a university library and a history department
• Mike Thelwall and four co-authors, Which academic subjects have most online impact? A pilot study and a new classification process

[Open Access News]

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interesting papers

Open Source Software economics: “Linux has been around for quite some time, yet Apple came in and created a Unix operating system with a much easier to use and comprehensive UI, becoming the number one vendor of desktop Unix in a few short years. This demonstrates another pitfall of OSS: distributed part-time development on a wide range of projects (many of them competing) does allow for more choice, but it also results in slower progress, and multiple projects with half-implemented features and functionality.” [Universal Rule]

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there is quite a bit to say in regards to open source economics, but this is less economics than social issues….

well virginia tech beat miami, i could still here the low roar of the fans about 2]30 minutes after it was over, though i live about a mile away and my windows face away from the stadium. it's amazing, all that energy could probably change the world, and there it is trapped in a stadium. it makes me think of how real the power must have felt when the roman colloseum was at full tilt.