Category — General

A major conference on “Cibercities and the Network Society” is taking
place in Brazil next October.
More information can be obtained from their website (where the
introduction below was taken from):

http://www.cybercity.com.br/ingles/finalentry.html

“CYBERCITY is an international seminar that will gather investigators in
the area of information and communications technology, urbanists, urban
and regional planners, architects, engineers, social scientists and
other professionals in the private, public and third sectors interested
in the discussion of a society of information and knowledge with focus
on the creation of cyber cities and local development. The new
information and communications technologies demand that the companies,
governments and society establish new relationships for living together
as citizens and for knowledge management, with the aim of creating
effective strategies in areas such as: network infra-structure,
education, professional qualification , work, health, environment, fast
services, optimization of resources and consumption, with regard to the
emergence of cyber cities and the demand of cyber inclusion in the
society of information.

The objetive of CYBERCITY is to gather experts in an international forum
of information about research, studies and implementation of new
information and communication technologies with the aim of local
development and mainly to improve the living conditions of the people in
urban and rural environments, mobilizing and integrating the academic
community, experts, entrepreneurs and politicians and engage them in a
debate about the emergence of a Cyber City.”

The JORUM+ Project is creating an open-access arch …. The JORUM+ Project is creating an open-access archive for reusable learning objects. As part of the job, it has written a questionnaire “to identify members of the UK FE and HE community willing to take part in focus groups and interviews”. All who fill out the questionnaire before September 29 will be entered in a drawing for a £20 Amazon voucher. [Open Access News]

This looks like another interesting project…. I hope it extends to international intent.

Australian statistics on Internet activity.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has an interesting publication on statistics on Internet activity conducted through the Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry in Australia.It contains results from all identified ISPs operating in Australia in respect of the three months ended September 2002.

Highlights of some of the findings are:

• DSL connections increased by 112% reflecting the accelerating uptake of broadband (access speeds equal to or greater than 256kbs) services.
• The increasing uptake of broadband services is evident in the large increase shown in the volume of data downloaded, up 28% between March quarter 2002 and September quarter 2002. This builds on the 42% increase in data downloaded between September quarter 2001 and March quarter 2002.

[ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

This has some interesting stats, but i wonder how much of that data is real use and how much is bloat use, like virus, html email, etc. remember the goal of industry is to get you to buy new stuff, so the way to do that is to make it seem slower than it really is.

Familiar Faces?. The Qualifying Exam Meets the Cult of Personality. I did abysmally on Marcel's People test. How 'bout you? [MetaFilter]

everyone looks the same after a while. no?

Project Gramophone.

Project Gramophone is a new project that aims to become a definitive source for early recordings that slipped into the public domain. The goals are similar to Project Gutenberg, but with audio instead of text. For now, the project features a mailing list open to anyone interested in contributing to the project.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

another great project!

sign the petition.

Single Mac keeps company running while Windows machines fail due to Blaster worm. A great story and it belies the point that Macs do not get attacked because of their small market share. It has more to do with their better default security. And, in my opinion, it is much easier to update that applying patches to a windows box. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

best quote:

n fact, several have scheduled meetings with IT to figure out how to prevent such a mess in the future and one thing they seem to want is to “mix in some Macs around here for safety,” as one manager put it.

you know i've argued that informational monoculture is a very bad thing for so very long, that seeing other people actually come to the same conclusion.

Interesting article in the NYT on some books about the history of the family and the role of children in them:

A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs. Second, many academics, especially the young, seize on the theory and run with it, in the process loading it with far more emotional and political freight than the French thinker÷who, after all, was just ãdoing theoryä÷had in mind. Meanwhile, other scholars indignantly reaffirm the pre-revisionist view, and everyone calls for more research, to decide the question. In the third stage, the research is produced, and it confuses everybody, because it is too particular, too respectful of variation and complexity, to support either the nice old theory or the naughty new one

I was talking to some colleagues the other day and we were discussing when we sort of made the decision to take the path that we were going to take. I remember that I thought i was going to go into academia or engineering sometime when i was young around 8 or so, and that was pretty much that…. I knew i was going to college, and i knew pretty much that i would get a ph.d. …. However, you an talk to people who even have a ph.d. these days and they still don't know what they want to do, they hang in some sort of existential angst of choosing, not realizing that the choice is not really an issue, but they have to start pursuing, i.e. doing something. It doesn't particularly matter what you do in the end as long as it makes you happy, but to me it seems as if people are floating around much like they always did i guess wondering if someone will do something for them or whether the system will change and they will ultimately benefit…. its been my experience that this doesn't happen often. All in all my minor rant is to say for many people once childhood has been constructed into their identity, they never really escape it again…. they never find a way to take control of their life and move forward.

Activistology. American colleges and universities have for years been in the business of training students to be political activists. Participating in… [Critical Mass]

if we aren't helping students to be well rounded citizens who pursue their interests then we are probably not helping them at all….

Take Web Data Analysis to the Next Level with PHP. 12 Aug 2003: A simple one-way Chi Square analysis procedure discussed in this article can be fruitfully applied to different types of data streams such as access logs, survey results, customer profiles, or customer orders. It will provide you with the hidden awareness and understanding of website statistics beyond simple tabulated raw counts and turn raw data into actionable knowledge. [RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix]

this is an interesting article, well worth the look if you are thinking about using web based data analyis