Posts from — November 2003

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.

Interview with the Moor.

Via MaxSpeak comes a link to an excellent interview with Karl Marx conducted sometime in the last month, apparently. Karl has lost none of his vitality, despite having been dead for some time. His analysis is as trenchant as his invective is unrelenting. Who is an “insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence” and who is “so easy to comprehend, so stupendously unoriginal, so devastatingly tautological”? Read it and see.

[Crooked Timber]

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interesting…