Posts from — September 2004

labor day exists for a reason. it exist to remind you that there is a reason you should work 8 hour days, that there is a reason that children don't work in factories, that there is a reason why people get paid a minimum wage. it is because people fought for their future and the future of their children to make sure we had the possibility to live a good and meaningful life. don't choose to abandon that tradition, celebrate labor day, celebrate labor, and don't forget your life is more important than your work.

yes, this has been going on a while…… ruining any sense of progressive culture and american ideals. conservativism of these strains is anti-american.

There I go…. The address is now… and I hope for a while http://jasonnolan.net/words for daily postings. Don't go complaining that you have to change things. Either it is worth it, or it is not. And if it isn't, why have you been hanging around this long? [Team Polysynchronous - Just Differently Intelligent - - Just Differently Intelligent -]

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jason disappeared again. for future reference, my new policy will be not to change people's link on my blogroll more than once a year.

New version of OJS. The University of British Columbia Public Knowledge Project has released Open Journal Systems version 1.1.8. OJS is open-source journal management software. The new version supports LOCKSS, delayed OA (an embargo period that can be set by the article or by the issue), and publishing in French and Spanish (in addition to English and Portuguese). [Open Access News]

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this is good software…

Science is Political.

In a classic televised debate from 1971 titled Human Nature: Justice versus Power Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky discuss their respective approaches to understanding the foundations of social structure. Since Chomsky and Foucault entertain partially contradictory views on human nature and society their exchange highlights the differences of their theoretical departure points.

[Projectories]

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well, yes. science depends on context and theoretical constructs… language even, and lets not even think about where lab money, grad studetn salaries or other funding comes from….. and then… as aristotle had it, mankind is a political animal. mankind also pursues science. the real question thought in the chomsky/foucault debate is the location of the political and really… power., whether it is discursive or materially based and how power relates to subjectivity… the problem of course is those questions are partisan and political too. though inarguably, the parties are different than most. the real answer is probably some inclusive combination of both theoretic positions because they wouldn't be as well thought of, if they did not each have some aspect of knowable fact about them…

i am starting to believe that people who write blogs about academia really need to watch Brazil a few more times and particularly pay attention to the samurai scenes

about bush's issue with the truth.

The Digital Hoards.

We Are Becoming Digital Pack Rats 

“Personal computers — our jukeboxes, photo labs, accountants and film studios — are becoming the proverbial junk drawer, scattered with scads of must-have information. Sister devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital video recorders overflow with often barely a bite of spare storage.

The ravenous nature of society coupled with the quest for convenience has spawned a nation of digital pack rats, eager to possess every gigabyte of media they can download, and too greedy — or lazy — to let it go….

One's desk might be clean and tidy, but countless computer desktops have become chaotic.

'It's like an infinite attic, and we're filling it,' said Peter Lyman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. 'People are feeling overwhelmed and trying to find coping strategies.' “ [The Indianapolis Star, via Library Link of the Day]

Heh – good timing! I just wrote about the rise of the personal server as part of my “Product Pipeline” column for the next issue of netConnect. The day after I turned it in, I bought a 1GB SD card for my Treo because I can't carry around enough ones and zeroes on my current 512MB version. Storage storage everywhere, and not a drop to drink! I paid a little under $100 for the new card, a Gigabyte of portable storage the size of a postage stamp! Next year, terabytes will be affordable.

To quote Roy Tennant, “Storage is officially cheaper than dirt.”

[The Shifted Librarian]

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i hoard, but i am waiting for tiger to make sense of it all. see i download alot of text and save it as pdfs and i want to be able to use that text very efficiently, to write. tiger's search engine should do this. no more looking over my hd to find things….

He's Not My Commander in Chief. I wish people (including Republicans pretending to be Democrats) would stop calling George W. Bush “our commander in chief.”

If they'd check Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution — a document about which they keep showing their limited knowledge and even more limited respect — they'd learn that the president commands the armed forces, not the nation. Or do they have bigger goals than we know? [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

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yep, well republican's are really well known for the truth, they are more known for appearing appropriately to gain advantage and then to prosecute their ideological position.

Elsewhere: Army urged to step up IT security focus. FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The security threat on DOD networks is growing substantially each day, so much so that on two separate occasions this summer, viruses infiltrated … [SecurityFocus News]

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they need more network separation i think.