Category — General

because i maintain the servers that the Feminist Theory Website exists on, and defacto i support that project(and if anyone wants to help do updates let me know, it's an open project), i occasionally get interesting things sent to me, like I'm subscribed to women without borders or frauen ohne grenzen, which sent me an update leading with:

“We were born with the genetic advantage that the gaining of status and the fear of losing power does not constantly get in the way.”

Maria Schaumayr

and my problem is that being a woman is not a genetic disadvantage, it may be a social, cultural, or otherwise believed disadvantage, but not a genetic one to the best of my knowledge, unless they mean something else by genetic, which is possible i guess. In any case, if you are interesting women's policy worldwide, try women-without-borders and let me know what you think.

OSI layers. For reference purposes: links to explanations of the OSI network layer model. • howstuffworks.com (easy to read, different aspects in different chapters) • freesoft.org (bare… [Fragments]

somewhere i saw a paper on why the osi model failed to capture the hearts and minds of designers, hmmm…. where was that…

ICANN: regional mutiny brewing?. A posting on ICANN Watch by Milton Meuller draws attention to a move by regional DNS registries to develop a framework for cooperation that could become an alternative to ICANN. The registries involved are the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre,… [InternetPolicy.net]

Strong patent law does not foster innovation, according to a dissertation by Petra Moser, an assistant professor at MIT's Sloan School, as reported in the NY Times. She studied 19th century innovations and patents, and concludes that countries, particularly developing countries, may be better off without strong patent laws. [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

Yesterday MIT reached the first goal of its OpenCo …. Yesterday MIT reached the first goal of its OpenCourseWare project by offering open access to all the materials for 500 MIT courses. This milestone was reached one year after the project launched. (Thanks to
New.com.) [Open Access News]

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1st Int. Workshop on Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems (PSSS)
Collocated with 2nd Int. Conf. on the Semantic Web (ISWC)
Sanibel Island, Florida, October 20, 2003
[http://psss.semanticweb.org/]
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Below is a list of the research papers that have been accepted
for the PSSS workshop. The program committee selected 6 papers as full
papers and 3 poster papers out of 15 submissions.

We are happy to announce that Prof. Robert McGregor
of ISI (USC) will be giving an invited talk on

“Representing Contextualized Data using Semantic Web Tools”.

We take this opportunity to thank all the authors and reviewers for
their help in selecting this program.

We are looking forward to a stimulating workshop, fruitful discussions
and seeing you in Sanibel Island.

Isabel Cruz, Stefan Decker and Raphael Volz
PSSS 2003 Workshop (Co)chairs

Agenda (9:15 – 18:00)

OECD Global Forum on Information Systems and Network Security.

The OECD Global Forum on Information Systems and Network Security: Towards a Global Culture of Security will be held on 13-14 October 2003 in Oslo, Norway. “A large number of non-member economies will be invited.  To reinforce the agreement made in Honolulu to increase co-operation between the OECD and APEC, many APEC member countries will also be present.”

A draft agenda [pdf] is available on the OECD website.

See also the OECD Guidelines for the Security of Information Systems and Networks [pdf]

[ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

A Stroll Through Patent History. Petra Moser, an M.I.T. assitant professor, has examined the historical relationship between patents and innovations and come to some surprising conclusions. By Teresa Riordan. [New York Times: Business] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

——

to me this speaks to issues of the transformation of patents from spurs to innovation to methods of preventing others innovations.

obstacle 1.

this is what happens when lizzy gets bored: smiley.mov.

[a jeweled platypus]

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interesting bit of production

we want your soul. Freeland's We Want Your Soul video is a cynical look at the american dream and keeping up with the joneses. Whether you agree with the point of view, it's still a pretty cool and amusing use of camera effects. (note: large quicktime on that page) [via randomfoo] [MetaFilter]

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this is pretty interesting, a music video that sort of hits some of the many cultural nails on the head.