All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.

One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated form the workplace as another closed site, but both disappear and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. negotiations 174

The world is most often presented, in academic text, popular media, and fiction, as a world of places. We are animate beings in a world of objects arranged in a locale. Our geographies have mountains and rivers and landmarks; our civilizations have capitals and governing offices and schools marked on maps; our businesses have boundings with addresses on named streets.

Place is not given, but made. People make place for various reasons: of belonging; of politics; of power and control; of meaning. But people move, thoughts progress, goods flow: we live in a world of refined movement. In studying war, and espeically in studying the shadows, I direct my research not at a set space, but at fluid targets. The shadows as I define them in this book are, at core, about movement, not merely place. They comprise in Auge’s words, non-places. This is part of the way in which they are rendered invisible. It is place that is given meaning and substance, it is locale that is populated, it is site that is “seen.”

(36-37)

Nordstrom, C. (2004). Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. University of California Press.

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The shadows are lines of flight.

School web sites fail accessibility test:
Eighty-six percent of the nation’s top universities have web sites that do not comply with standards designed to make the internet more accessible to persons with disabilities, according to a recent survey.

Conducted…
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i bet it is a higher percentage for local libraries.

The Literacy Project:
A resource for teachers, literacy organisations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning.

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Google’s literacy push.

Print:
British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn’t tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can’t conduct experiments in it.

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Harry Collins, noted sociologist, learns physics as well as or better than some physicists, is able to discuss and describe physics similarly. This experiment shows, to some extent, that one does not have to be inside of a scientific field in order to study and understand a scientific field. That is to say, one can know science without being a scientist. (Which we all knew to some extent) However, more importantly what it seems to indicate is that Science and Technology in Society researchers in their understandings of science and scientific practice could be, and likely are, just as correct as scientists in their observations of science. Now, as a justificatory act, this is important, but it is also important because external observation,outsider research, ethnographic, is generally thought poorly of in the sciences as a result of the ’science wars’ . However, everyone had a sneaking suspicion that the science wars were not about science as much as policing the boundaries of a culture of expertise. What this paper then says in that light… is that the boundary, unless well policed, is a fiction, and knowledge of a science or discipline can be had without specific participation in that discipline.

Article: Google print outshines the European Digital Library:
In talking about the long road to creating the European Digital Library, this stood out to me:
In 2010, the European Digital Library should have 6 million e-books available, a much lower figure than that given by Google for the same year: 15 million.
Both numbers are hard to get your head around. As one local businessman in Upstate NY would say, these projects are H-U-G-E.
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15 million ebooks… wow. That is no footnote to universal information. I’ve been using google books for some time and I have to say sometimes it is handy, but most of the time the publishers restrictions just ruins any capacity to do research. However, the likelihood of actually having the books that I want in the local library, even the esteemed NYPL is not really happening. Of course, then again I’ve never really had a library with the books that I want in it, other than my own library.

Article: Google print outshines the European Digital Library:
In talking about the long road to creating the European Digital Library, this stood out to me:
In 2010, the European Digital Library should have 6 million e-books available, a much lower figure than that given by Google for the same year: 15 million.
Both numbers are hard to get your head around. As one local businessman in Upstate NY would say, these projects are H-U-G-E.
——

15 million ebooks… wow. That is no footnote to universal information. I’ve been using google books for some time and I have to say sometimes it is handy, but most of the time the publishers restrictions just ruins any capacity to do research. However, the likelihood of actually having the books that I want in the local library, even the esteemed NYPL is not really happening. Of course, then again I’ve never really had a library with the books that I want in it, other than my own library.

There is a current issue with Badische Landesbibliothek of Karlsruhe selling off 3000+ medieval manuscripts. Apparently, they are contentiously held by the Counts of Baden, but may actually be state-owned. In any case, they are selling them for reasons unrelated to the preservation of the collection and archive. More info at: http://www.cronaca.com/archives/004613.html English version of the letter of protest: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/2743873/

In the next few years, as maintenance costs for physical infrastructures increase, I suspect we will be seeing more tendency toward the centralization of manuscripts, and barring that, a tendency toward selling off manuscripts. The case of Karlsruhe likely isn’t unique, of course, as this sort of thing has happened in the past, but we’ve never seen the legal issues, nor the amount of capital involved in this. What happens when people sell collections for this level of profit? How will that affect archiving and archivists? should we work to prevent this, now, and in future situations?

The New Atlantis – Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford:
So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

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learn a trade…. no really, learn a trade.

Whobar identity 2.0 technology now available as open source:
Sxip is pleased to release the Whobar code to the community.

Whobar makes it easy for users to register and login to a website using their choice of emerging identity protocols such as InfoCard, i-names, and OpenID. It enables developers to easily add support of all these emerging Identity 2.0 technologies to their site. The benefits of this for users is a common website login experience. For web developers, to streamline their user registration and login process so that they don’t need to store user passwords, nor users needing to remember yet another password, thereby improving site conversion ratios. Future releases will also allow users if they so choose, release data about themselves with a single click.
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this is an identity 2.0 system… i’m not really sure it is a good thing, or the fuss over identity is even worth the effort. it seems to me that no matter what we eventually do, identity will come down, in the u.s. at least, to dealings with financial institutions or medical institutions as governance institutions.