Eprints Handbook released. Les Carr of Southampton University has written an Eprints Handbook for all users of Erints, the open-source software for building and maintaining open-access OAI-compliant eprint archives. Quoting the press release: “The handbook is desisgned for…the system administrators who set up and maintain the archives, the departments or libraries that manage them, the authors who self-archive their papers in them, and the readers who use their contents.” [Open Access News]

Darwine. Darwine – putting Windows apps on OSX, by porting Wine to Darwin. A whole world of right, yet oh so wrong. (via Brent)… [Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent]

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this could be handy….

Theodore Roszak, “Raging Against the Machine” [Interactivist Info Exchange]

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well worth thinking about, maybe in a sort of third removed way…

List of open/free 'courseware tools' from UNESCO Free Software Portal.

http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/
Software/Courseware_Tools/

Via an email from Jim Sibley came mention of this list of open or free 'courseware tools' – there were a couple of ones new to me (MANIAC and OLAT being examples). But the reference was as useful also for introducing me to the UNESCO Free Software Portal which collects together a large number of resources on the topic. – SWL

[EdTechPost]

grounding cosmopolitan democracy in rights perpetuates a paucity of democracy.

democracy, in any rich sense, any sense beyond mere proceduralism and constructing the populace as machines of the world requires a significant understanding of political enculturation, the creation of the political subject.

it is the acts that construct the culture in which democracy is found, not in any simplicism of rights and protectionism

rights are negative freedoms, they are freedom from others, they are as such antagonistic toward democratic cultures, where it is precisely the others that reconstruct the self in its image, the public and private understandings merge into one and in that one you have a possibility for democracy, a progress, a rousseauean general will of the people not unlike….

democracies are built on positive freedoms, the freedom to do, the freedom to talk, think, move, etc. rights don't preserve that, because culture can squelch them, instead, what one needs is visible actions that promote the positive freedoms of democracy and with that you have a chance for cosmopolitan democracy.

the rubric of this paper is built upon a different sense of cosmopolitan democracy, a democracy of actions, of movement, of transversal communications.

granted, both rights and a progressive democracy can operate in conjunction. however, rights without constructing their active space that territorializes that which is not populated in the negative relations of rights cannot yield a progressive democracy, just a negative space of have nots and do nots.

HR 3261. So. HR 3261. The Anti-Feist, it’s being called. And it’s an utterly horrendous, horrible, viciously wrongheaded idea. Somebody’s gonna be gearing up the ol’ printer to write a few letters to congresscritters, yup yup. Guess whose lobbyists are part of the engine behind this madness. No, go on, guess, it’s… [Caveat Lector]

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I'm against this bill as it stands, some of the principles might be good, but the implementation and the implication is entirely wrong.

What So-Called Liberal Media?. Spotted at Brian Leiter’s blog…. [Discourse.net]

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you have to admit it, cbs is one of the most conservative christian oriented networks around. they aren't radical like fox, but they are very conservative oriented.

Best. Coffee. Table. Ever.. The Drift Table lets you float gently over the British landscape from the comfort of your living room. Other projects from the Equator research group include a tablecloth that glows and a key table that responds to your mood. Hi-tech knick-knacks, or a glimpse of the subtle way we'll interact with the domestic environment of the future? [MetaFilter]

thank you virginia tech microsoft users, my primary email is reporting 'permanent fatal errors' all over the net, and vt is now blacklisted by a few providers. I don't blame the mail adminstrators for this, they've done the best they can and i know they try to do the right thing. however, this is really a bad thing for me because i do alot of research, and management through email and now i can't know that things have happened appropriately or not.