Category — General

Radio TrackBack monitor. If you're blogging with Radio and have TrackBack enabled, you'll love this service which provides an RSS feed of TrackBacks to your weblog -  I'm kicking myself for missing it when Phil came up with it a few months back. So I now have a TrackBack feed in addition to my comments feed, which means I'll be more aware of feedback on my writing. Thanks Phil!

(…lost in the jargon? Try a glossary)

(found via Al via Google)
[Seb's Open Research]

history, credit and identity. Like many students of computing, i was inspired by Vannevar Bush from my earliest days. “As We May Think” and follow-up writings on the Memex helped define a century of thought and computational effort. Yet, as Michael Buckland is uncovering,… [misbehaving.net]

my response over there follows:
Vannevar Bush's fame is not singularly tied to 'as we may think'. he was very much a polymath of sorts, and was a significant figure in several fields, this allowed him more popular press access of course, but if you check out his accomplishments on the wikipedia page here, I think you'll see that his fame is a bit broader based and that some of his other works are foundational in other fields. he was even on the cover of Time magazine for his work in physics

a short biblio includes such works as:
modern arms and free men: a discussion of the role of science in preserving democracy
principles of electrical engineering
science is not enough
pieces of action
endless horizons <--- which was on my ph.d. exam reading list

two codicils:

1. bush cetainly falls into the 'great man' problem of history, he is usually individuated and put forth out of his myriad of contexts, so we have to be careful about what his role really was in regards to certain concepts that he put forth, which could in fact be hinting at another problem in science studies, which is that we traditonally put undo emphasis on the people that do something first, usually singling them out in opposition to others, when they very well may have been aware of the others work and thought they were working in a larger framework. so saying 'goldberg or bush' is problematic, when it could have been that bush was seeking to popularize goldberg or something else.

2. memex has nothing to do with hypertext and everyone knows hypertext is dead (said snarkily)

New issue of Jekyll. The September issue of Jekyll (”International Journal on Science Communication”) is now online. Here are the OA-related articles.

• Pietro Greco, Political censorship of science

• Gerry McKiernan, Invisible Hand(s): Quality Assurance in the Age of Author Self-Archiving
• Stevan Harnad, Self-archive unto others as ye would have them self-archive unto you

[Open Access News]

Down my throat no more. Jim McGee: John Seely Brown on Stolen Knowledge.

[....]

Why is it such a
hard step to give up on the notion of control? Or, put another way, why
do organizations and schools insist on forcing certain content down
people's throats? You might want to take a look at Roger Schank's
thoughts about learning in this context. Take a look at Coloring Outside the Lines : Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules or at Designing World-Class E-Learning.

Or if you want things in a real nutshell consider the following bit of wisdom from Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin and Hobbes for 27 Nov 1992

[Seb's Open Research]

The Critical Questions. I did this week's reading for my IR&R 2 course. And according to my prof's last 2 sets of comments, I am not allowed/supposed to write reflection papers which are based on my usual critical questions/misgivings with the readings. So… [Flailing in the Surf]

U.S. funds study of tech monocultures [InfoWar Monitor]

The National Science Foundation has granted $750,000 to two universities to study how diversifying information systems and software could help fend off future cyberattacks, the agency said Tuesday.

The study, proposed by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of New Mexico almost a year ago, will seek to identify commonalities in software that could be used as the basis for attacks. Such common vulnerabilities would point to a computer “monoculture”–a population so homogeneous that a single threat could destroy it.

GOP Steal Compter Files – No Film at 11. John Moltz brings to our attention a story from Calpundit. A Republican Senate staffer accesed files on a Democratic staffers computer and then leaked them to the press. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said yesterday that a… [Eat Your Vegetables]

Patent Poet. Ray Kurzweil has been awarded a patent for his AI-based ” target=”_blank”>cybernetic poetry software. (via NYTimes) Kurzweil, a successful developer of AI-based technologies and author of several books including The Age of Spiritual Machines, has an elaborate website promoting AI… [grandtextauto.org]

From users to programmers. A few months ago Steven Garrity's blog was host to an interesting conversation on the gap between user and programmer.
I hope the computer environments of the future will enable ordinary
people to just “get things done” without encountering steep learning
curves, even when that involves choregraphing
the work of several applications. The growing adoption of scripting languages and availability of open interfaces
to services suggests things might indeed be evolving in that direction.

Reading through the discussion reminded me of Python inventor Guido van Rossum's currently-limboed

Computer Programming for Everybody initiative, and of Tomasso Toffoli's vision of the knowledge home. Alan Kay comes to mind, too.

The information objects we are manipulating, while they are meaningful in and of themselves, ought to become things that
have a more powerful and easily learnable interface than “view/save”. We're
stuck with trinkets that are nice to look at, but hard to combine in
new ways. We need tinkertoys and Mindstorms. In the information routing arena, this is the kind of direction I was getting at with that feed algebra idea.
[Seb's Open Research]

Pooping on O'Reilley. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog appears on Fresh
Air with Terry Gross and does a superb take-off on Bill O'Reilley's recent
meltdown on the same show. [Interesting Times]