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

Anti-Spam Legislation: Report on non-OECD Countries. This report was originally prepared for the OECD Workshop on Spam held in Brussels (February 2 -3, 2004). Countries covered by the report are: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Authors present provide a concise… [InternetPolicy.net]

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why don't more people actually research spam?

Disruptive technologies in scholarly communication. Susan Lafferty and Jenny Edwards, Disruptive technologies: what future universities and their libraries? Library Management, 26, 6 (2004) pp. 252-58. Only this abstract is free online: “Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Technologies predicts that mainstream organisations and industries can be made obsolete by new technologies that change the whole paradigm of the industries in which they operate. This paper demonstrates the relevance of the theory of disruptive technologies to academic libraries, higher education and the academic publishing industry. The way universities are organised and how they operate could change radically; scholarly communication could be transformed, placing academic publishers at risk; academic libraries may become irrelevant as new business models emerge. There are strategies that these organisations might adopt to limit the effect of such technologies and/or preferably transform them into sustaining technologies.” [Open Access News]

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what is the future, it is something to think about, but really it is something to build.

Starbucker.

I found this story of globalisation and soft power at charlotte street, via bertramonline. As bertram says, you can’t make this kind of thing up.

I had a look at related issues in this piece

[Crooked Timber]

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nice bit of glomm and link here, well worth thinking about the multitudes and manifolds of soft power in the world.

Call for OA at a major humanities organization. The Vice President of the American Philological Association (APA), Barbara McManus, has called on the organization to consider open access: “I was somewhat troubled by one element in several of the candidates' statements, reflecting the opinion that electronic editions of research tools have made access 'democratic' or 'available to all.' People at large research universities tend to forget that subscription-only services like the online edition of L'AnnŽe philologique or Project Muse are not available to scholars at the hundreds of smaller institutions that cannot afford such specialized services. When e-publication does get on the APA agenda, it is crucial that Open Access has a prominent place in the discussion, and I hope that continued grass-roots pressure from classicists will ensure that this does happen.” (Thanks to The Stoa Consortium.) [Open Access News]

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this is a good thing, but i can't say removing people's profit model is really a good thing. there is alot more to open access than just giving people open access … there is the concern for maintaining production value, employing graduate assistants, etc. there are costs that one model tends to provide for, and the other i personally don't know how they will account for them.

a funny comic.

OA images and videos for classicists. The Stoa Consortium, an OA portal for the field of classics, has launched the Stoa Image Gallery, a collection of OA images and videos related to classics, classical archaeology, and the classical tradition. The organizers urge submitters to distributed their images and videos under Creative Commons licenses. [Open Access News]

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very good, handy, and worth doing….

e-Government in Europe: Good Practice Cases. This database of eGovernment cases has become a component of the Good Practice Framework launched by the European Commission on April 20, 2004. The Framework uses a set of assessment criteria for evaluating practice examples, which include quality, benefits and… [InternetPolicy.net]

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this is a good bit of info to digest if you are interested in this topic.

Highwire to host Oxford journals. Starting in January 2005, Highwire Press will host the entire line of Oxford journals. This will not affect the access policies of the journals. For details see today's press release. [Open Access News]

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well this is good new….

A Word on Word. We advocates of free software don't have many friends, particularly among those fine people that would likely be our nearest and dearest save for that one fatal point of contention; we “get” open-source, free software, the importance of not only supporting this vital and progressive movement but actually learning to use the damn stuff. Our good neighbors “get” only what they pay for, and not many of our fine and noble administrators who dole out hundreds of thousands of the tax papers' hard-earned dollars want to think heretical thoughts against Microsoft, aka digital catholocism (I'll never endanger my soul by speaking ill of Pope Gates, the infallible). Microsoft must be doing something right, even if it's ensuring that the rest of us do something wrong. [Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

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word wasn't microsofts invention, it was bought, so it wasn't with gates from the beginning…..

The correct way to argue with Milton Friedman.

I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept.

A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.

[Crooked Timber]

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actually, i've found that denying any economists first principles and/or assumptions pretty much ends the conversation. if you can't agree with their assumptions about human nature or society, then everything they've modeled based on those, or argued based on those, fail miserably, as they generally do in the face of the broad body of empirical evidence in the world except in the most general cases.