Judge Orders Cheney Document Release. A federal judge has ordered several government agencies to release documents related to Cheney's energy task force. In an opinion… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

Truly Beautiful Photography [digitalwarfighter.com]

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interesting enought, some are rather striking…

Digital Library Construction Tools. Digital Library Construction Tools
http://www.bcdlib.tc.ca/

A guide to digital library collections, primarily text-based ones, and digital library construction technology in BC and around the world:

Digital Library Construction Tools: Standards
Digital Library Construction Tools: How-To Courses
Digital Library Construction Tools: How-To Manuals
Digital Library Construction Tools: Preservation
Digital Library Construction Tools: Software [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant]

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this could be handy stuff

Canada's RIAA can't prove infringement by P2P uploaders, says court.

Canada's Federal Court has ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association was not able to prove copyright infringement by the uploaders it sued. The judge also said that under that country's copyright law, downloading is not illegal. Link

Chris Hoofnagle, Assoc. Director of EPIC, The Electronic Privacy Information Center, tells BoingBoing: “We have the decision online here (~670kb PDF). It's remarkable. The judge says that keeping a file in a p2p system is no different than installing a photocopy machine in a library.” And BoingBoing reader Chris suggests this alternate link to a leaner PDF from the Federal Court of Canada: Link [Boing Boing]

[Ted Ritzer: Free Music] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

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great news…. if it is not an april fools day joke.

Sad chapter for university presses, by Marilyn Gardner, The Christian
Science Monitor.

When Northeastern University Press prints the final books on
its 2004 list later this year, the titles will have a dubious distinction:
They will be the last ones bearing the university imprint. After 27 years,
the respected press is shutting down, a casualty of rising costs and
shifting priorities. School officials say they cannot afford subsidies that
now stand at $450,000 and could reach $600,000 this year.

. . .

Northeastern is not alone. The University of Idaho has announced that it is
closing its press July 1, when the deficit will total $385,600. And the
University of Georgia Press faces a possible loss of $289,329 in state
support, half of its annual state subsidy.

. . .

Across the country, 95 university presses publish 11,000 books a year. In
2002, these scholarly works generated $444 million in sales. Although they
account for a fraction of the 150,000 titles published in the US annually,
they create what Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota
Press, calls an impressive cultural entity.

Even so, he says, university presses suffer from stereotypes that they are
simply fossilized recyclers of dissertations.

As one measure of the importance of university press books to broader
audiences, Givler notes that in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, three
previously published volumes quickly became bestsellers:
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555535097/socratiforthe
21s">
The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden, and the Future of
Terrorism (Northeastern);
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0300089023/socratiforthe
21s">
Taliban (Yale); and
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0813527422/socratiforthe
21s">
Twin Towers (Rutgers).

It was so unusual that three university press books would be topping the
national bestseller list, Givler says. There is no visible, large,
national market for a lot of these very specialized books. But when
something comes along – 9/11 being the most dramatic and horrible example -
university presses have already published the books about it that people
need to read. They're serving the public need for information, not just
scholars' need for information.

[A blog doesn't need a clever name]

Bush Admin releases Evildoers List

The long-awaited list of “Evildoer Nations Doing Evil Evilly” was announced today by the Bush Administration, prompting consternation from critics who noted that only one nation, England, was not listed as a Evildoer.

A White House spokesperson acknowledged this, saying that all of continental Europe has fallen under the growing influence of Evildoers, adding if Tony Blair's government ever fell, the U.S. would have no allies left, but “who cares, we have the biggest guns so we will crush them all like the impudent bugs they are,” then cackling fiendishly, before being hurriedly led off the stage by concerned aides.

France was singled out for special opprobrium as a nation “that should be doing what we tell them without any yap-yap but instead would be real Evildoers if they weren't such wussies.” When told that, without the help of the French in the U.S. Revolutionary War, we would have almost certainly lost to the British, a high-ranking White House staffer said, “tax cuts for the wealthy will stop terrorism, and slap those Frenchies upside their heads too.”

[Politics in the Zeros]

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heheheheh, careful or george will sick The Tick after other nations. SPOOOOON! actually for those not familial with comic book, i'll say this, there are deep and profound parallels between the way The Tick treats villains and the way the Bush family has treated evildoers

The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. Via Slashdot, the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. (Also via Slashdot, how carrier Pigeons transfer data faster than networks)… [Discourse.net]

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this is funny.

Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts.

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/
webfeatures_snapshots_archive_03172004

This isn't an 'edtech' related item, but it was so striking I couldn't pass up on posting it. The first graph is sheer number of unemployed, and shows that in the U.S. there are now more of them with college degrees than are high school drop outs. This in itself is not that shocking – as the report says, “There are, however, far more college graduates than high-school dropouts in our current labour force.” The graph shown in figure two should be more alarming, though it's trends be not so steep – it depicts unemployed as a percentage of those two populations, and actually shows a decrease in unemployment for high school drop outs, but a steady increase for college graduates. I saw this referred to in an interesting article in Salon magazine about globalization and off-shoring software jobs to India, and as someone who works in both 'high tech' and 'high ed' it's hard not to be afraid of the implications. – SWL

[EdTechPost]

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this is striking. but i don't think offshoring has anything to do with it. it is a much broader change arising in the last 20 years involved with the relative worth of labor, information processing and the management structure of enterprise. it is tied closely with an increasingly powerful class of super-wealthy who no longer need the tens of hundreds of tiers of managers underneath them to keep their empires going.

well i totally pulled out of an orkut discussion on defining politics yesterday, deleting all my posts and letting the other party talk to himself. why? it is the only thing that i really dislike in the world when approaching theoretical positions, the unwillingness to think about what is being said at any deep level, the co-discussant seemed to merely want to play on the surface, with methodological games that could have gone on forever, in short he didn't want any depth or real consideration of his position. this is one of the failures of education, when someone, no matter how brilliant, graduates thinking that applying methods is thinking. methods, logic, stats,etc. is an assistant to thought, but thought needs more, else you end up with mechanico-fascism.