Posts from — September 2006

Euroscience Open Forum 2006, 15 – 19 July, Munich, Germany:
Prof. Stevan Harnad

Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences,
Université du Québec à Montréal
and
Professor, Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton
harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Publish or Perish

As Science is mere structured common sense,
her means but trial-and-error made intense,
the only virtue setting her apart,
and raising her above (some think) mere Art,
Is her convergence ever on consensus:
collective, self-corrective her defenses.
A flagellant, she boldly does defy
Reality her schemes to falsify.

And yet this noble jousting were in vain,
and all this pain would yield no grain of gain
if Science were content, a shrinking violet,
her works from all the world ‘ere to keep private.
Instead, performance public and artistic,
restraining all propensities autistic,
perhaps less out of error-making dread,
than banal need to earn her daily bread.

For showbiz being what it is today,
work’s not enough, you’ve got to make it pay.
What ratings, sweeps and polls count for our actors,
no less than our elected benefactors,
for Science the commensurate equation
is not just publication but citation.
The more your work is accessed, read and used,
the higher then is reckoned its just dues.
Sounds crass, but there may be some consolation,
where there’s still some residual motivation
to make a difference, not just make a fee:
the World Wide Web at last can make Science free.

——-

This one the euroscience poetry prize

Another real-world person experimenting with an entirely different SL persona is Boston-based blogger Andy Carvin. Last fall he joined SL as Andy Chowderhead, but he got “bored with it” and decided to create Abdi Kembla, an African refugee he modeled after photos he found online of former Somalian child soldiers.

“Previously, when I used my old Andy Chowderhead avatar, I found people were more likely to come over, say hello, and start a conversation. But with Abdi, people tended to just act as if I just weren’t even there,” says Carvin, who estimates that he spent between 20 and 30 hours in February and March exploring as Abdi. “The more I traveled through SL, the more I realized I seemed to be the only African-looking character around anywhere.” He adds, “I encountered gnomes, floating beams of light, characters that were shaped like boxes, elves, everything you can imagine — but no African-looking characters.”

National Security Experiment – BREAK.com
:
7/3/2006 – An Australian TV performs a simple and hilarious experiment on bridge security. How long can an average looking white tourist take pictures of security cameras before being bothered?

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nothing new here….

Media @ LSE Group Weblog » Blog Archive » A university lecturer’s life in ’40s Britain?:
He has a leisurely breakfast at half-past-eight, followed by pipe and paper; reaches the University between ten and half-past; reads his letters and perhaps writes one; saunters into the Common Room for a cup of coffee; calls on a colleague, or the Bursar, or the Clerk to the Senate; returns to his room, glances through the latest issue of a learned review, has a few words with a pupil – and lo, it’s lunch-time. After lunch in the refectory, followed by a chat about the day’s news in the Common Room, he gives a lecture at half-past-two, and immediately afterwards hurries home lest he should be late for tea. After tea comes the day’s exercise (unless it happens to be a day when he has no lecture, in which case he plays golf in the afternoon) and after dinner he spends a couple of hours with a new book on his special subject (or a book from the circulating library on something else), after which, the paper again, a nightcap, and bed at eleven after a somewhat tiring but thoroughly well-spent day.

——

very similar sometimes…. only about 1/10th as leisurely

Wiki Textbook Proposal:
To bing down the cost of expensive text books, and make them more universally accessible, a new project is proposing creating “wikitexts“, collaborative text books.
——–
isn’t this just wikibooks and wikiversity….

Top Ten Reasons you should not Blog « Messaging….. Technology…… Life…..:
Top Ten Reasons you should not Blog

——

yep, 10 reasons….. it is always interesting when people make lists like this… it makes you wonder why anyone does anything… because most interesting human endeavors should not be done according to lists like this.

Pictures that lie:
news.com.com has a good photo-spread on “pictures that lie” and another one on the ways in which digital cameras are making it easier to subtly lie with without having to edit the image. A must see for anyone who believes their own eyes.

I’ll stand up right now and say that many of my sunset photos were taken in a “sunset” mode that completely changes the colour balance to make sunsets come out much “nicer.”

A third photo-spread explains High Dynamic Range (HDR), a technique used to overcome the fact that the eye has a wider dynamic range than any of the available image recording and presentational tools (cameras, films, printers, monitors, etc). These images are less like the original, but seem more like it.

——–

this post on educause blogs is very enlightening. it shows significant work in the construction of photography as news.

here is the current version of the syllabus that I’ll talk about today…

http://www.learninglibrarians.net/cl/digitalarchives/index.php?title=Syllabus2006

This is the first time that I’m teaching this course, so feedback on this or or my other course on Library 2.0 and Social Software is appreciated.