Posts from — January 2004

If at First You Don't Succeed, Stop!.

Just read Open Access News' blog of Information Today's If at First You Don't Succeed, Stop!: Proposed Legislation to Set Up New Intellectual Property Right in Facts Themselves. I'm getting ready to leave town within the hour, so I don't have time to either read or discuss this at length right now, but if you read the “NetCoalition's Top 10 Examples of the Potential Impact of H.R. 3261,” it would seem that teachers and researchers may need to fear this bill as much as the DMCA. For instance,

4. A university professor might be precluded from gathering weather information from a variety of Web sites for use in a paper that argues for or against the increase of global warming.

5. A local PTA might be prohibited from assembling information on drugs and other treatments for childhood diseases to make their research available on the organization's Web site.

[Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

Social Origin of Good Ideas. I read Ronald S. Burt's “Social Origin of Good Ideas” and it inspires me to think about trends in interdisciplinary thought. [Orange Cone]

Avoiding a Shocking Experience for the Information Consumer. Avoiding a Shocking Experience for the Information Consumer
http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/introduction/default.htm

The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan suggests that, paradoxically, a worthy goal of the library might be “invisibility” — in the sense that the service is ubiquitous and fully integrated into the infosphere. “After all, technology and services are most welcome in our lives when we do not have to devote much thought to them. We press a switch and light comes or goes. Expecting the information consumer to pay attention to the differences between William Shakespeare the author and William Shakespeare the subject as search terms is akin to expecting Joe Householder to know if the red wire or the black wire should be grounded before he plugs the lamp in — and expect Joe to go to RedWire.com to figure out what happens if he's wrong. Thankfully, clever people have hidden all this technology inside a box and millions are saved from a shocking experience.” [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker]

alex invited me to orkut, so i invited some more people, and hopefully they will invite more people, and we'll see how many people end up joining. also i created the usual communities, internet researchers, science and technology studies, etc.

This bill seems like a pretty good idea to me. it requires research and evaluation of technology to prevent extra-vehicular car-child accidents. I'd like to encourage everyone to write to their congresspserson to support this bill.

amazon now lets you donate to the presidential candidate of your choice. this is a good thing, i think.

New President Named at Penn. The University of Pennsylvania named Amy Gutmann, the provost of Princeton, to be its next president. By The New York Times. [New York Times: Education]

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this is an interesting move.

Watch out Friendster, here comes Google's Orkut. News.com says: Google tip-toed into the hot market of online social networks with the quiet launch of Orkut.com on Thursday, CNET News.com has learned. The search company, which is expected to go public this year, is flexing its power with its Internet fans by constantly offering new services, including comparison shopping and news search. Orkut could be the clearest signal that Google's aspirations don't end with search. “Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main… [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Open Source Courseware. Andrea L. Foster, in 4 Colleges Collaborate on Open-Source Courseware
, Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Report, January 22, 2004 (Access restricted to subscribers), describes the Sakai project, a partnership between Indiana University, MIT, Stanford and Michigan to produce open source course management systems and related software for academic institutions. Funding came from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and the universities themselves. Sakai offers academic users an alternative to commercial course management applications, said to be used by some 80% of these institutions. [Open Access News]

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sounds like the stonesoup initiative….. which is good.

On the Future of Academic Publishing. Dorothea Salo and Timothy Burke have both turned their sights on the state of academic journal publishing, arguing, in slightly different veins, that the move to electronic delivery of such journals is the most affordable, equitable, and just plain sensible model for publication into the future. I wholeheartedly agree. What… [Planned Obsolescence]