Accept no substitutes

Month: April 2005 (Page 1 of 4)

Cole Fest: 26 years of Deaning Journalism

Richard Cole is stepping down after 26 years of being the Dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina.
Last night, Sally and I went over to celebrate his time, his kindness, his optimism, his innovativeness and his leadership with about 300 of his closest friends. Richard has had some influence on the life of anyone who has said the word “journalism” in North Carolina and beyond so to narrow down the list to only 300 is saying something.
It would take a long long page to list all of Dean Cole’s accomplishments, but the University Gazette takes a pretty good stab at it.
There is no dispute that Dean Cole knows his journalism and he certainly knows his barbecue — he accepts only pulled pork from Bullock’s of Durham. (I prefer Keith Allen’s of Allen and Son, but don’t tell Richard).

Carrboro Poetry Fest: May 21 and 22

Last year’s Carrboro Poetry Festival was a real blast. Paris of the Piedmont Poet Laureate Patrick Herron lined up 40 very very different poets for two days of readings. He’s doing it again May 21 and 22 in Carrboro’s Century Center. I’m making a return appearance with a few new and different poems.

The low down:

Friends of Huffington

Nassib Nassar sends this links to a parody piece from the Guardian teasing us about Arianna Huffington’s upcoming Huffington Post project (which begins May 9). The advance press says that the project will be a group blog by 300 celebrity bloggers [are there 300 celebrities that want to blog?] including:

Warren Beatty, Jon Corzine, Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Nora Ephron, James Fallows, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Hart, Vernon Jordan, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Mort Zuckerman.

This list from Editor and Publisher article.

Andy Ihnatko’s 24 Hour Audio Book

MacExpert Andy Ihnatko sends a link for downloading the audiobook that he created according to the rules for 24 Hour Comics Day. “Jeeves and the Object Class” is slightly less than 1 hour and 30 minute story conceived, written, and performed in bad British accent by Andy in just over 24 hours. The noise in the background is P. G. Wodehouse spinning in his grave. That said the story is pretty good and has as a major character a librarian from North Carolina. Not like too many that I immediately recognize, but very believable — except for the accent.

First He Invented Easter Eggs then…

Warren Robinett invented Easter Eggs hidden in computer games when he hid a famous first one in his Atari Adventure. He writes now to tell us about his publication of some of the results of his nanotechnology research, “Defect-tolerant interconnect to nanoelectronic circuits: internally redundant demultiplexers based on error-correcting codes.”

Got that?

If not, Warren explains a bit:

If the abstract doesn’t quite make sense to you, some context is that a “crossbar” is a very small circuit structure we can fabricate where one set of parallel wires crosses another set of parallel wires. A bit can be stored at each junction, so that the crossbar can act as an extremely high-density memory. Our group at HP has made wires as narrow as 6 atoms wide (2 nanometers wide). A problem we have with stuff this small is that there are sure to be defects in what we fabricate, and the paper is about a defect-tolerance technique — a way to make the crossbars such that they will work in spite of having a lot of defects present. The “demultiplexer” the paper talks about is a kind of digital circuit needed to select individual bits in the memory being accessed.

CopyNight, Copyright Day

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. And tonight is CopyNight. The first is a promotion of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which says that the objectives of the day are:

WIPO has tailored its 2005 World Intellectual Property Day message and publicity material towards young people. The over-arching objectives are:

  • To encourage young people to recognize their own ability to create;
  • To increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps to foster creativity and innovation;
  • To raise awareness of the importance in daily life of patents, copyright, trademarks and designs

.

On the other hand,

CopyNight is a monthly social gathering of people interested in restoring balance in copyright law. We meet over drinks once a month in many cities to discuss new developments and build social ties between artists, engineers, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, and many others.

And there is a CopyNight in Raleigh which is sponsored by old friend and theremin player, Steve Burnett, but somehow I’m just finding out about it.

Beyond Heroism!

21st Century Achievement Awards image
We are now beyond Heroism and beyond Laureate-ism here at sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. I just received a note from the Computerworld folks that we are Finalists in the Education and Academia Category (only 5 finalists in each category) for the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Awards.
We’ll be at the June Awards Ceremony in Washington at the National Building Museum Building on June 6th.
I think I’m to wear a tuxedo again. Maybe I should buy one. And possibly I get to wear our medal again too! Just glad to represent all the folks who have worked on sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and all our contributors.

John Edwards on Podcast 411

Rob W of Podcast 411 features Senator and Vice Presidental candidate Johnn Edwards on his most recent show. Senator Edwards talks about his own podcasts done at his home with his family and post them on his website, One America Committee dot Org.
Note: Rob and Senator Edwards are speaking via Skype (voice over IP).
Rob also gives mention to the podcastercon.org being planned here with Brian Russell in the lead of the planning. (Check it out).

American Life in Poetry

Andie Miller writes from South Africa to tell us about American Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry site.

The site is meant to be fodder for newspapers seeking free content and to thus get poetry out into the hands of more folks — more folks who read newspapers.

Locally, the News and Observer has been doing a good and fairly regular job — they sometimes print prose — in their Sunday Journal section, were my own poems have appeared over the past couple of years. I appreciate the readers and the publication and especially the copyediting there by Marcy Rice.

Vanished News Found – Berkeley Laptop and Dr. Rine

Miles at tinyapps.org has found and put together a few sources for the missing ABC News story on ranting laptop theft victim and Berkeley prof Jasper Rine. Miles also notices that the original video has been edited at Berkeley to remove Rine’s rant — so much of archives as history. But luckily there are copies around the Net [torrent of QT format] in case you are wondering what we’ve been talking about.


Page 1 on the story in Google cache.
Thanks to Miles.
Page 2 of the story in Google cache. Thanks to Miles and Julian Robichaux.

Earlier stories here about Rine and the laptop theft and here about the vanishing story on ABC News.

Alert commenter, Julian Robichaux also points us to Jasper Rine’s teaching statement in which he tells us all “Facts just aren’t that important.” To be fair to Rine, he’s getting our attention in order to make a point. That is teaching the emerging discoveries in biology that the process of discovery and research is more important to learn than a series of facts of the moment.

CalStuff blogger, Allen Lew let’s us know that the Berkeley student blog is on the case as well with pointers to articles on Rine and laptop there.

To our knowledge, the laptop remains unfound.

Vanishing News Story – ABC version

Not long after the story broke on the net of the angry rant by stolen laptop victim Jasper Rine, a story pointing out the very obvious problems with the claims made by Rine appeared on the ABC News site. The story by Hari Sreenivasan did a great and lively job of describing why Rine’s claims were wrong while sympathizing with him over the theft a bit.
Not long after I linked to it, the story vanished. Luckily I grabbed at least one good paragraph for my post. As it turns out no one else grabbed any of the story that I nor others can find.
Miles at tinyapps.org managed to get a screen shot of Google News to prove the story existed once.
Now not only is the ABC News story gone, but the site that broke the story originally seems to have vanished as well (at least for me for Miles of tinyapps).
Here’s the challenge: Can you find the story anywhere? In a cache? Other places on the Net?

Meyer and Gillmor in the Economist

In an ongoing in North Carolina invasion of Britain, Phil Meyer appears in today’s Economist (just as Jamie Boyle is in the Financial Times). Phil is quoted, his book cited and props given.
Recent visitor, Dan Gillmor also gets star treatment in the same article, “The Future of Journalism: Yesterday’s Papers,” which asks or rathers tells us what Rupert Murdock told US editors last week, the business of news is changing drastically.
Also mentioned blogs, podcasting, wikis — the usual technological suspects.

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