Posts from — February 2005

Rhetoric and the Politicization of Science:
2005 American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (AARST) Workshop: Rhetoric and the Politicization of Science Wednesday, November 16, 2005 – Boston, MA The controversy over the “politicization” of science advice and policy under the Bush administration provides…
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this looks like it will be an excellent program.

Pop.: 1 Plus 5,000 Volumes :
Across the Great Plains, towns that have long since lost their schools, their banks and all hope of a future still keep their little libraries going. Volunteers open them for a few hours a week, waiting for readers to come down deserted Main Streets.

Nearly 30% of the nation’s libraries serve communities of fewer than 2,500 people, including almost 3,000 libraries in towns where the population is measured in the hundreds.

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cool little story

retroCRUSH: The World’s Finest Pop Culture Site:
BLOGS It’s a sad day when a gothic kid with an online diary written in his parent’s basement is given the same journalistic integrity as Fox News. Seeing Political Blog commentary during the debates like, “KERRY IZ A FAG LOL” just doesn’t quite do the job.

revising tenure
Giving young professors up to 10 years — instead of 6 — to earn tenure

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this isn’t what is needed. what is needed is a restructuring of the escalation of tenure requirements. one thing that a 10 year rule will do is make people take 10 years 1/4 of their career to find out if they are good enough to keep it. that… creates a new underclass from the untenured. untenured people also don’t have tenure, so they can be fired more easily.

Blog Bib:
A comprehensive resource about the blogging phenomenon has been put together by Susan Herzog a librarian at Eastern Connecticut State University. Blog Bib includes links to studies, research, articles and interviews. Information about blogging tools and the technology and how the technology is being used by librarians….

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could be useful

Animal Planet :: Puppy Bowl :: puppies, dogs, pet adoption

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i think that i may have missed a great cultural event.

The End User: What came before blogs

Usenet newsgroups, recognizable by their unique naming system, like rec.crafts.jewelry or comp.sys.hp.misc, came to life on the Internet around 1979 as semipermanent bulletin boards. You could post a question to alt.animals.dogs.collies, and answers from fellow collie devotees from around the world would be available for anyone to read.

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If that sounds familiar, you’re right: It is essentially how today’s Internet blogs work. But advances in software make blogs easier to create, design, customize, navigate and control. Since newsgroups predated even the World Wide Web, they are design-free – simple text entries, one after the other, sometimes “threaded” into back-and-forth postings.

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well… i personally wouldn’t say usenet is a predecessor to blogs, but it is an argument that could be made….

Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Michael Jordan:
It’s a great thing to recommend an author that a friend gets excited about. Two years ago, I’d never heard of Iain Banks, who’s now one of my two favorite (living) science-fiction authors. If you like SF and you haven’t…

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i’ve recently started to read banks too, mainly because some people say i’m like ‘the culture’ which is a strange analogy……

The Frown : BECOME REPUBLICAN!

more reasons than any ‘intelligent’ person needs….

t r u t h o u t – Bill Moyers | The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma – the science of the heart … the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

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yep, scary….