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

thePeoplesToolbox – Programming Tools :

this site has thousands of tools of use to all kinds of programming tasks from the beginner to expert. it also has useful tools like this tool to represent how a large segment of the population might be seeing the colors that you choose differently. check it out, you might find something useful

YouTube – Children See, Children Do:
Children See, Children Do

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another must see movie, we model our world for forthcoming generations, not just the ‘good’ things, children see it all, and learn to do it all.

Tomorrow’s Professor Blog: 772. Academic Freedom:
This function of tenure has been challenged as “absolutizing” academic freedom: “[T]enure can never protect of guarantee academic freedom,” John Silber opined. “Academic freedom is protected and guaranteed by the courage of individual professors, and by individual administrators who protect individual members of the faculty, and by students. If they express their freedom responsibly, they will not expect immunity from criticism or public disapproval; they will recognize these risks as one of the essential conditions of responsibility.”

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a nice brief review of the history and purpose of academic freedom

YouTube – March of the Librarians:

Can you trust your mind? at hvattum.net:
How good are you when it comes to concentration and perception?
Here is a cool experiment where you can test you ability to focus attention on a certain object in a short video.

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no, one can’t trust one’s mind, but eh..

Radical Society – Review of Culture & Politics:
THE SKEPTIC IS GENERALLY PORTRAYED AS standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity. The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.

The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge. Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.
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ahh pyrrho.. an old favorite.

In You More Than Yourself — In These Times:
And the same goes for my partners who I communicate with in cyberspace: I can never be sure who they are. Are they “really” the way they describe themselves? Is there a “real” person at all behind a screen-persona or is the screen-persona a mask for several different people? Does the same “real” person possess and manipulate more screen-personas? Or perhaps I am simply dealing with a digitalized entity that does not stand for any “real” person? In short, interface means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never face-to-face, that it is always mediated by the interposed digital machinery whose structure is that of a labyrinth. I “browse,” I err around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the Whole of it—this immense circuitry of “murmurs”—remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension. The obverse of cyberspace’s direct democracy is this chaotic and impenetrable magnitude of messages and their circuits that even the greatest effort of my imagination cannot comprehend. Immanuel Kant would have called it a cyberspace Sublime.

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zizek on cyberspace

Cult Of 2.0:
Confession: I have my own religious mental picture of librarians and libraries and the primary symbol has always been the monk and the monastery. People driven by and dedicated to structure and fundamentals. That’s not all a library is but in truth I believe the majority of what constitutes a library is fundamentals, basic rules that guide our actions on a day to day basis. We’re a tool for visionaries, not the visionaries themselves.
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I find this to be very problematic. Perhaps I’m an optimist and just think that everyone is a visionary, if they want to be and find a way to be, they can be a visionary. Everyone can contribute and lead elements of the field forward.

There are structures and fundamentals, this is true, but libraries are not monks and monastaries or the homes of servants, they are places that serve the community and there is no better way to serve than to provide leadership and direction in the service of those communities, their informational needs, their cultural needs, and their social needs. The guide is to serve, but not to be be servile.

Paper Daisies: NYC:
These things happen all the time

I’ve always said (well, since I moved here 4 months ago) that NYC smells like a toilet. Apparently, though, these things happen all the time. I didn’t notice this today, but I guess many others did.

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This is an interesting post… for those interested in attending Pratt for a graduate degree in library science.

Peter Suber, Open Access News
:
Is China blocking OA to Chinese Marxist texts?

Noam Cohen, Who’s Attacking an Online Marxist Archive? China Is Suspected of Trying to Block Access to Texts, New York Times, February 5, 2007. Excerpt: …According to the Marxist Internet Archive, an online community that produces and organizes an ever-growing [open access] Marxist library…computer attacks primarily from China are jeopardizing its ability to provide Marxist texts, perhaps forcing the library to stop providing material in Chinese.

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The NYT covered the Marxist Archive of which the CDDC is now one of the main hosting providers. We have not had as much problems with Chinese, but that is probably because of the excellent infrastructure that Virginia Tech provides.