Posts from — August 2004

or buy other cool aoir stuff.

tinderbox is now $99 for a limited time.

DHS Secretary Ridge Gives the Go Ahead to Linux. 24 Aug 2004: “Like many government contractors, the provider of ERN (Emergency Response Network) Systems maintains a low profile. When you ask the CEO, Jo Balderas, for references she politely says, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Public Safety and the Department of Homeland Security”. That's quite an impressive list, and it represents only a few of the company's clients. When you ask for a technology snapshot Jo says, “currently we use an enterprise open-source software stack k [RootPrompt -- Nothing but Unix]

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well, it is better than nothing…..

fertile women are useless. Just a quick link to Torill Mortensen's sigh for today, about the lack of women even in “soft” areas like media, and the use of temporary contracts and freelancing to avoid the fearful fertility of women…. [misbehaving.net]

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well, if you read this, it goes onto show how in certain fields there is an explicity bias toward hiring women full time when there is still an expectation of motherhood…. society should account for motherhood (and fatherhood) but not like this. but then, i don't think it should account for them by implicitly requiring different things from people who aren't.

The Pink Bunny of Battle Sees Red. The Pink Bunny of Battle sees red over The War on Academic Freedom. We see an echo of this war here in Florida, where Betty Castor the leading Democratic candidate for our open Senate seat, is being castigated for not having fired a tenured professor accused of aiding terrorists when she was a university president. (In fact, if Castor can be accused of anything, it was over-reacting to flimsy charges and suspending the man for two years on the basis of what was then quite little evidence.) One thing I don’t agree with the Bunny about, though, is the claim that legislatures have an obligation to support good science. I want them to, and I demand they support academic freedom — but I can’t say that this includes any sort of duty to go beyond contractual committments. The state has no duty to provide research grants unless it’s spelled out in a contract of employment. And if the legislature thinks it has better ways to spend the money, or even if it disagrees with the research on ideological grounds (think stem cells), it has a right to withhold funds. Think of it as a right to be wrong, if you… [Discourse.net]

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legistlatures have a duty to maintain a well informed and educated public that is capable of discussing current issues intelligently… this implies that they should support science to some extent, in order to insure that people actually know what the current issues are by knowing what future issues might be, based on a progressive growth of knowledge.

New(ish) job. While this may not be news to everyone who reads the blog, today it was made official. I have a new administrative position in the School: I am the Graduate Director of Informatics. In practice, I'll still be teaching and doing research, but I will also be in charge of … [Alex Halavais]

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alex has a new position, i hope he got a course buyout…. i wonder if this is a strategy to keep him from teaching his pron class….

Open-source publishing system from Cornell. The Cornell University Library has a grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop an open-source publishing platform for online scholarship. The platform is called DPubS (for Digital Publishing System), which Cornell originally developed for Project Euclid. From today's press release: “DPubS will support peer review, have extensive administrative functionality, and will provide interoperability with other open source repository systems such as Fedora and DSpace….The DPubS beta version will be available in 2005, with final release scheduled for 2006. An initial meeting to elicit development recommendations from interested libraries and publishers is scheduled for late October at Cornell.” [Open Access News]

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this could be useful…. i've built one of these before, but never put it to much use….

Internet2: 2004 and Beyond. Internet2 has proven to be a big hit with music conservatories, which use the high-speed research network to conduct lessons by videoconference. (CNET) [Chronicle.com - The Wired Campus]

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it also is good for teaching in general….

rochelle once wrote about a pink vespa, i believe she should have written about a purple vespa with yellow polka dots.

Rochelle actually has a picture of a Pink Vespa, go there to see it.

Penzeys Spices. Global spice source [Cool Tools]

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i've always liked penzey's