Posts from — December 2006

Three Cheers for High Tuition
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AMERICAN.COM: A Magazine of Ideas, Online
:
Modern academics often liken their work to drinking from a fire hose. Historians, philosophers, and physicists all find it impossible to keep up with every potentially relevant paper or study. It’s not just a matter of catching up to the state of the art—one couldn’t even read the research materials in an academic field as fast as they are being produced.

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interesting take on tuition.

Joi Ito, new chairman of Creative Commons:
Here’s how my Friday night went.

Tonight, in the virtual Kula islands, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Jimmy Wales (and many others from Creative Commons), gathered in an ancient stadium to celebrate the fourth birthday of Creative Commons. On the screen behind them was a live feed from San Francisco, where analog avatars were dancing and drinking and being relayed the announcements that were happening from within the grid.

I called Kevin Smokler to see if he was en route to ; he was at another engagement, yet I let him know that if he was at the party, to wave to the camera and say hi to the metaverse from SF.

Lessig remains the CEO of CC, but had stepped down to pass the torch (a nice green glowy torch) to Joi. Joi was in Tokyo, Larry was in Portugal, people were from all over the world.

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Congratulations to Joi and all, I was tired and went to bed of course, but i helped setthis us in the main kula land

Find yourself on the Map of the Internet!:
Not sure where you lie in the great wilderness that is the Internet? Wondering how far away your friends (or enemies) are along the TCP/IP pipes? Look no further — just use the Map of the Internet!

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handy, and interesting mapper.

MnemonicPT:
The Mnemonic Periodic Table
By Mr. Brugge’s 8th-Grade Students

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smart kids:)

Let it rain – And then I was eaten by a grue.:
>search for commas around subordinate clauses
Surely you jest.

>search for commas prefacing speech
You spy a clutch of young semi-colons here, looking slightly confused.

>get semi-colons
You have the clutch of young semi-colons.

>throw semi-colons in direction of my own writing
I don’t think you need any more of those, young lady.

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Grading season…. a brilliant analysis.

YouTube – Henry Rollins “America is under attack.”:

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Henry Rollins is against the forces of Net Neutrality and their related programs. he says ’strike back with vengeance’ and I think that is part of the program… By using debt and overwork to get American’s minds out of social programs and centered on their own interests, the war on freedom in the U.S. prevents people from acting collectively for their own interests. We should be pissed.

Librarian’s Ultimate Guide to Search Engines:
Librarian’s Ultimate Guide to Search Engines is a helpful starting point for anyone – librarian, professor, or student – wanting to get a lot more out of web search. By Scott Hawksworth for DegreeTutor
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again this is very handy… for more than librarians.

How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media » Ad Terras Per Aspera:
For comparison, DVD-R includes one profile, optimum power output based for that one profile only and uncalibrated towards what wavelength it is for, less precise laser power settings, and no other additional information. Typically, DVD-R burners have to already know how to burn a certain piece of media (and include this information in their firmwares) before they can properly burn to it. New media often is not properly supported.

In addition to the optimum power control profiles, DVD+R also gives four times more scratch space for the drive to calibrate the laser on; more space can only improve the calibration quality. So, in short, DVD+R media exists to simply produce better burns and protect your data better.

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handy information

Open University Closes a Tradition:
For more than 30 years, the university — which was quick to adopt TV as a means of reaching its hundreds of thousands of enrollees — has produced low-budget programs on subjects as varied as art history and particle physics. The institution has proven to be a remarkably prolific broadcaster, with tens of thousands of shows aired on the BBC, almost of all of them in the wee hours.

But next weekend, Open University will mark its last broadcast. Almost all of its students now have access to the Web, and so campus officials say they’ll distribute course lectures through podcasts and, for those looking for that throwback feel, on DVD’s.
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It is the end of an era.