Category — General

Boing Boing: Fly with rubber band ball, go to jail, forced blood test:
Fly with rubber band ball, go to jail, forced blood test

A traveller who had a rubber-band ball in his bag was pulled over by the TSA. They insisted that the ball had something metal at the center (it didn’t), then concluded he was on drugs. They put him in jail, forced a blood-sample from him, and continued to hold him after they cut open the ball and finished testing his blood.

———

This is getting out of hand…. they should have seized the ball at most… this guy should sue … big time. There are clear procedures that TSA is supposed to follow in these and it reads like they broke someprocedural rules.

Office Space, Recut as a Thriller.:

This one’s going ’round the Net, done by What the Maynard: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube

——

hah! classic

Kiwi!:

jakemandell.com » Test your musical skills in 6 minutes!:

it says i have excellent musical abilities…..

Ethics of Science in Africa:
A Youth Forum on the ethical and social responsibilities of scientists in Africa is also planned, in order to involve young researchers or representatives of youth organizations in the work of COMEST.

Finally, a Regional Ministerial Meeting on the incorporation of ethics of science and technology in African public policies will also take place in order to assure visibility and political support to the debate of this matter in the West Africa region.
——-

This is a great idea and a good program. The issues of ethical research always pops up on my agenda… I think we need to be very careful about the way we imagine the relationships between ethics and the power dynamics of the developing/developed world.

Elderly harmonica player arrested for performing copyrighted songs at bar – MSN-Mainichi Daily News:
A 73-year-old bar manager who illegally performed copyrighted tunes by the Beatles and other artists on the harmonica was arrested Thursday on suspicion of violating the Copyright Law, police said.Arrested was Masami Toyoda, of Tokyo’s Nerima-ku. He has reportedly admitted to the allegations against him.

——

when copyright law goes wrong….

LIS Zen Heaven:

LISZEN: Library Blog Search Engine

“Wanting to find out what other librarians are saying about Library 2.0? Or perhaps you can’t remember who talked about ‘Fighting the Stereotypes!’ a few weeks ago. Welcome to the search engine for librarians!

I’ve been slaving away, taking links from LISWIKI and importing them to Google Co-op. The result is a custom search engine that sifts through 530 individual blogs.” [Library Zen]

——

This looks cool

Miles away, ‘I’ll have a burger’ – The Boston Globe:

NASHUA — When Jairo Moncada pulled up to the drive-through at Wendy’s in Burbank, Calif., for his usual cheeseburger, fries, and soda, he knew things looked different. There was an extra lane.

But the 25-year-old could not see the biggest change: The woman taking his lunch order was sitting 3,000 miles away at a computer terminal in Nashua, and fielding calls from Wendy’s customers at drive-throughs as far away as Florida and Washington, D.C.

“I had absolutely no idea I was talking to someone in New Hampshire,” Moncada said in a phone interview later that day. “Our order was ready at the window. It was really quick.”

It took a total of 66 seconds.

—–

wow…. this changes…. something…. not sure what, but something.

Change Magazine Article(s): A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education:

For two decades, worldwide enrollment growth in higher education has exceeded the most optimistic forecasts. A milestone of 100 million enrollments was passed some years ago, and an earlier forecast of 120 million students by 2020 may be reached by 2010. If anything, enrollment growth is accelerating as more governments see the rapid expansion of higher education as a key element in their transition from developing to developed countries.

That is the situation in China, where enrollments doubled between 2000 and 2003. With 16 million students enrolled by 2005, China had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest higher education system. Malaysia also illustrates the trend. It plans to increase enrollments in higher education by 166 percent in the next four years, from 600,000 to 1.6 million, to achieve college participation rates similar to those of developed nations. Mauritius has recently passed legislation to create a third university for its 1.2 million people, having added its second only five years ago.

—–

Some would say that this will ruin…. the american university… I say… contrarily that the key is to encourage learning and that doesn’t have to be ‘american’

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists – A closed mind about an open world:
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

——-

I agree there is an aversion to openness, and i think this is very problematic. when professors and scientists won’t share data because they are afraid of competition, you have a real problem with innovation, that you might have to make a law to make people share is utterly surprising. openness and sharing are being overwritten by other values and those values are not market values, but anti-market, monopoly capital values. However, this was predicted by Simmel, so….