New Collection: Jewish Sparks

Title: Jewish Sparks

URL: http://www.jewishsparks.net

Description:
Jewish Sparks is an educational site which contains lectures and talks from Jewish Scholars and leaders. Part of its collection includes material from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies (UNC-Chapel Hill).

New Collection: Carolinasoul.org

Local funk collector Jason Perlmutter recently launched Carolinasoul.org, and we couldn’t be more excited. Mr. Perlmutter has created an invaluable resource, documenting the musical legacy of Soul and Funk artists here in the Carolinas.

Check it out!

Notes from the Move

New Servers (well, sort of!), New Racks (very new), New Datacenter (again, very new). Here’s pics from the ultra fun move.


Jon Manages


Boxes are Moved


Boxes are Trucked


Another View


Don’t show this pic to OSHA


A little art


The new Racks

Ibiblio is Hiring!

It is with a profound sense of sadness and with the best wishes that we say goodbye to John as he moves on to his new job at Lulu. However, we’re a fast-moving shop, so we’d like to spread the word far and wide that we’re going to be soon accepting applications for a senior systems administrator/programmer full-time position. At the same time, we’ll be accepting applications for a entry-level student systems administrator position.

The full time job will have a full req (after all, it is a state job), but here’s a little bit of what we’re looking for. We’d like someone with at least 5 years professional experience, in a hands-on high- or senior-level administrative capacity. Solaris, HP-UX, AIX junkies welcome to apply, but we’re a Linux shop, and that ain’t gonna change any time soon. This is an excellent job for a highly motivated administrator who feels ready to take on the task of one of the largest free-information sites on the internet. Of course, free-information-loving, GNU-friendly folks are our fave; but you’ve got to be friendly, understanding, and able to work in a team environment. Salary is a good deal better than non-profit, but we’re no investment bank, either. We do provide one of the coolest working environments around, however. We’ll be developing the req over the next week, so if you’re interested, send us a message at jobs at ibiblio.org.

If you’re a UNC student, and interested in our entry-level admin job, please drop us a line as well (same address), and you’ll be hearing from us.

Political Orientation of the UNC Campus

I’m currently fascinated by The Facebook. Rather than being just another Friendster/Myspace clone, TheFacebook is a phenomenon on campus. Exactly why TheFacebook is such a hit remains debatable – but beside the point. In some recent research I completed, I found that nearly 90% of Undergraduates at UNC are on TheFacebook. Rather significant.

One of the interesting ways TheFacebook allows you to describe yourself in your service profile is by political orientation. Allowing students to classify themselves as either Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative, Libertarian and Apathetic/Other (I merged the last two into one category in a very unscientific manner), you can actually use TheFacebook to begin to develop a political profile of students on campus.

In this first graph (click to see it full-size), the “political orientation” of UNC-Chapel Hill is presented. Males and Females are aggregated together, and the totals are plotted. As you can see, we still live on a liberal campus, but the conservative faction is quite substantial (i.e., not the aggrieved hyper-minority it often presents itself as). Interesting also is the lack of the oft-reported chasm between liberals and conservatives. Given the chance to describe themselves as “very liberal” and “very conservative”, most students choose to describe themselves as liberal, moderate, or conservative. It seems that college students represent a more moderate, centrist bloc than is often reported.



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In this second graph, we see a side-by-side comparison of the politcial views of UNC students by gender. Interesting is the tendency of female students to identify as liberal, and the relative equal distribution of male political views. While liberals and moderates outnumber conservatives in each case, a significant percentage of males and females identify as conservative.



View Full Size

While none of this is particularly surprising to me (other than the large conservative faction), it is an interesting insight into the political orientation of UNC students. This may be especially interesting for prof’s who always wondered how their classes were politically oriented.

Cloudalicious

Our publicity-shy lab buddy “T-Rel” has just debuted, to great fanfare, his wonderful little invention Cloudalicious.

Look at its cute logo!

Cute Little Clouds

Using data scraped from del.icio.us over time, Cloudalicious constructs graphs of tagweights. It’s quite interesting to see how the group tends to settle on descriptive terminology over time. Simply pop in a website, and get its tag graph! Speaking of which, let’s give this thing a run through.

Ibiblio’s Tag Graph
Groklaw’s Tag Graph
Tron Guy’s Tag Graph

Very cool!

Still Dreamin’

With the mass departure of the ‘Big 4′ imminent in Chapel Hill, here’s some good news on ‘for the love of the hoops’ front, and I had to promote it…

In particular, this is for the Tar Heel fans, who are crying for their lost ones at the elite level…Believe me, don’t boo-hoo, they’ll be back at an even higher level in two years…Just please take a look at the other half, and do not forget the ones that continue to slip through the cracks chasing the dream of getting to the elite University of North Carolina level.

Check out the update on the sequel to “Hoops Dreams” from the original documentary team of director, Steve James; cinematographer-producer, Peter Gilbert; and producer, Frederick Marx.

With that said, I thought you would like to see this update on this upcoming sequel because this story is not just a basketball story, it portrays a number of problems in cities across the country.

I know a lot of you are like myself and loved the original “Hoops Dreams”, which may be one of the greatest American documentary films ever…Seriously. I hope that the sequel can play along with the first one at basketball camp lectures and career counseling sessions at inner-city high schools across the country.

Peace,
IronDog

Introducing Bloggy!

For those of you who thought that Lyceum and Osprey were ibiblio’s two big development projects, we’ve got a little surprise. Our hardware and software hackers have been hard at work on the secret Bloggy project, which we unveil today! Surf over to the main site to see Bloggy in action.

For the meanwhile, here’s a pic…

Bloggy

To Do This Weekend

Updated: Sat, 10:30AM – Well, it appears that Designbox is only open from 10-6 on the Weekdays. Good luck getting over to Raleigh during those beyond-inconvenient hours. Too bad…sorry this rec didn’t work out.

When you aren’t getting your basketball overload, head over to Raleigh to the Designbox Gallery to see the Paul Frederich curated show The Art of Hellcar. Hellcar, which you can check out here (scroll to the bottom), was introduced to me by Lab-friend Dave Mason – it’s great. The News and Observer gave it a writeup in this weekend’s Lifestyles. With art ranging from 25-100 dollars, it should be a great show.

Here’s Designbox’s writeup:

Opening up the gallery for 2005, Designbox is pleased to have our own Paul Friedrich curate a show comprised of 10 talented comic artists known for their work in HELLCAR. HELLCAR is a nationally distributed comic book magazine featuring the greatest cartoon talent in America. “The Art of HELLCAR” will feature original artwork and animation by the artists based on their comic strips.

Artists of the show represent some of the best of the cutting edge of comic art in the country: from the dark monsters of Gus Fink (who currently has an ebay sale of a million dollars for all of his work for one year) to Casey Porn’s poodles in space ships. Additionally, Eric Knisely will be premiering the short animated feature “Gateless Gate,” a collaboration with Brooklyn’s Barnstormer, Mike Houston. Other artists include Paul Friedrich, Stephanie Freese, David Rose, Bob Schotte, Angi Shearstone, Chris Yambar, and Kevin Dixon.

Designbox is located at 315 S. Bloodworth Street in Raleigh, NC.

ibiblio in 40 – 50 words

We’ve been working on describing ibiblio in 50 words or less.
Here’s what we came up with most recently:

ibiblio, which began as sunsite.unc.edu in 1992, is an information commons and contributor-run digital library. Originally a way to share and support all kinds of free software, ibiblio also hosts over 1500 non-software related sharing projects on almost every conceivable subject and handles over 12 million requests/day.

Help us out! Add your suggestions are comments here.

Triangle Bloggers Afters.

It all came off rather well despite having grown to over 5 times the size of attendance that we had originally anticipated. Good discussions. Good behavior. Good people meeting good people. Props to Anton for getting this going and making it happen. Props to Fred for being on top of the wireless access and much more. Props to Jen O’Bryan who made it possible for us to know each other’s names and sites. Props to TJ and John Joseph for taping the event. Special thanks to Ed Cone and to Dan Gillmor for leading discussions. Thanks to the folks at lulu.com for providing the drinks and donuts.
What was it like? There is a nice collection of live-blog postings on the conference wiki. If you have notes, pictures and/or live blog entries, please add yourself.
I’m learning what went on from the wiki myself. When you are in the middle of things, you don’t get to pay the attention that you’d like to –especially if you are me and the laptop that you brought ends up being the one projected for folks to see the blogs in question and then it starts dropping the wireless at random intervals –grrr. My ancient T-book needs to be traded in.
Sally Greene took some pictures.

Blog Together – Feb 12 and more

The Triangle Bloggers Conference has grown to over 120 registered
participants including representatives from local and regional presses.

Three Blogger Events are coming your way in the next week. Triangle Bloggers Conference in Murphey Hall (Saturday 2/12), Dan Gillmor talk in Carroll Hall (Monday 2/14) and in Greensboro Dave Winer at the News and Record (Wednesday 2/9). Details and links below.

Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – noon:30 (and beyond) Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Learn more

Dan Gillmor public talk
We the Media: Grassroots Journalism for the People, by the People
Monday February 14, 3:30
Freedom Forum Conference Center
Carroll Hall, UNC
Learn more

Dave Winer, community journalism discussion
Wednesday February 9, 7 p.m.
200 East Market St., Greensboro
Learn more

Like OMG! Snow!

Tonight: Cloudy with snow. Low 29F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 80%. About one inch of snow expected.

Let’s just hope things go a little bit more smoothly than Wednesday’s snow.

Triangle Bloggers Conf Growing – Feb 12

We’ve gotten a lot of folks signed up on the wiki for the Triangle Bloggers Conference. Many more than we had planned for originally. We’ve already secured a bigger room — now a small auditorium for the conference. If you have topics you want covered or a followup lunch group topic (like a Birds of a Feather session). Go to the conference wiki.

Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
NEW LOCATION: Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Dan Gillmor will also be doing a public talk on Monday February 14, 3:30 – 5:00 in the Freedom Forum Conference Center in Carroll Hall (home of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication). If you are more interested in hearing Dan than in meeting bloggers, then this is the event for you. We will have copies of We the Media for sale and for signing at both events.

TriBlogCon: New Venue! Murphey Hall

The Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 has outgrown the room we had reserved in Carroll Hall. I’ve secured the newly renovated auditorium in Murphey Hall nearby known as MU116. This is the Classics Department building so it comes complete with Ashcroft-offending statues at the entrance to the room. Tasteful, classic and partically clothed. The room has comfortable seating, plenty of technology and wireless access.
So the new info is:

Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Murphy Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE