Category — General

U.S. Universities Competing to Build Biohazard Level 4 Labs [Disinformation]

mmmm, coming to a university near you, a new place for radical students to injure themselves and others. up go the armed guards, i suppose.

On-line scientific publications and blogs.

Recent editorial of Information Research journal (bold is mine):

A couple of issues ago I asked readers whether or not they knew of any work on the 'half-life' of electronic journal papers versus that of print journal papers. I received a helpful e-mail message pointing me to Steve Lawrence's paper in Nature in 2001. Lawrence looked at papers in computer science and related fields and found:

…a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online, in computer science. The mean number of citations to offline articles is 2.74, and the mean number of citations to online articles is 7.03, an increase of 157%.

Then there is a small piece about Weblogging Multiplier Effect and a conclusion for scientific writer:

The crafty author, then, can pretty well ensure some take up by cultivating a friendly blogger and letting him/her know when a paper has been published – off round the network the news goes and, before you know it, you are on the best-seller list.

And finally:

Perhaps we'll see the day when a Blog Impact Factor (BIF) is required of all candidates for tenure or promotion.

For an interesting history of blogs, read Rebecca Blood, and if anyone has a paper on the subject in preparation, let me know.

See also for a list of most popular articles.

[Mathemagenic]

some people were citeing this a while ago in a discussion about some online publications. I think it is interesting to keep track of, but it is unclear to me, in the end, what this actually shows about anything… given the nature of scientific literature these days.

Booktalk

“In constructing allconsuming.net, Erik has deliberately left software hooks and information bait dangling from the site, ready for us to connect and consume. Moreover, he encourages us to do so, telling us to “Use [his] XML” and try out his SOAP interface.

So I did.

While allconsuming.net can send you book reading recommendations (by email) based on what your friends are reading and commenting about, I thought it might be useful to be able to read any comments that were made on books that you had in your collection. “I've got book X. Let me know when someone says something about book X”.

So I whipped up a little script, booktalk, which indeed uses allconsuming.net's hooks to build a new service. What booktalk does, crontabbed on an hourly basis, is to grab a user's currently reading and favourite books lists and then look at the hourly list of latest books mentioned. Any intersections are pushed onto the top of a list of items in an RSS file, which represents a sort of 'commentary alert' feed for that user and his books. It goes without saying that the point of this is so that the user can easily monitor new comments on books in his collection by subscribing to that feed, which, aggregated by Blagg and rendered by Blosxom, would look something like this.” [DJ's Weblog, via snowdeal.org > ex machina]

[The Shifted Librarian]

hmmm, this is interesting, spread the joy..

NEEEERD! – The Streak Of Anti-Intellectualism In Colleges. Plastic::Work::School: “Some college students and faculty are fretting over an 'anti-intellectual thread' running through college.” [Plastic: Most Recent]

i think this is occuring more and more. I think it is in part symptomatic of a growing professionalization and profitization of the goals of higher education students.

Distributed KM.

Italian research project: enabling distributed and autonomous management of knowledge

The aim of this project is to develop research in information technology and software tools that support the Distributed and Autonomous Management of Knowledge. The goal will be achieved by:

• structuring knowledge in different “contexts”, that allow each different organization component to create, use and update autonomously its view on data encoding knowledge;
• providing a set of techniques allowing for the interoperability and the interaction among different contexts;
• implementing the techniques on an experimental platform supporting distributed and autonomous knowledge management;
• experimentally evaluating with significant business cases the techniques for creating, codifying and exchanging knowledge.

While it may sound too traditional or technical, the ideas behind are really in-line blogging as an emerging network of independent knowledge nodes. Check this site for project publications, related works and PhD positions (e.g. social models for distributed networks  :)

I'm reading a couple of papers from there, so more will follow.

[Mathemagenic]

now if my tinderbox was just distributed….. mmm that would be nifty

uiweb.com: How to run a design critique. In the early and middle phases of a project, teams need a way to understand and explore the current direction of the design. The challenge is to create the openness needed for good ideas to surface, while simultaneously cultivating the feedback and criticism necessary to resolve open issues. [Tomalak's Realm]

i didn't get to post this the other day, so here it is. i think it is important to read.

Hate your TA? Now you have a home.. When Kyle's teachers got too liberal, Kyle's mom launched this Web site
I laughed, I cried upon reading the Union-Trib article on student discontent with TAs at UCSD and around the country. Man, if I had a nickel for every time I heard, “Yes, I know that you think capitalism is evil, but will this be on the test?” Next time I'll jump in the box! (more) [MetaFilter]

ha ha ha, i have problems with people having conservative bias only being able to identify liberal bias. has anyone noted the conservatism arising on campuses these days?

Textfiles.com. Textfiles.com: Before the Web, before Google, we scoured Fidonet, absorbing the forbidden fruits of anarchy, occult and a lot of bad fiction. For better or worse, TEXTFILES are relics of that age. [MetaFilter]
they aren't really artifacts of that age, they are artifacts of our age.

Technology anthropologists.

Jim McGee in Doing anthropology cites Ernie the Attorney's post  about technology anthropologists Bold was math's

i'm going to say that the more i think about this, i'm not sure that titles matter as practice, and the practice is ethnography.

Things to catch.

Some of recent posts to catch:

Content Management: Our Organized Future [elearnspace blog]

Contagious Blogging [Ton's Interdependent thoughts]

Conflicts of interest between publishers and information creators [Synesthesia]

DeadJournal about LJ and blogging communities [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Introducing: Seb's matchmaking service! [Seb's Open Research]

Proxemics and knowledge management [McGee's Musings]

[Mathemagenic]

handy list…