Accept no substitutes

Month: December 2006 (Page 3 of 4)

60s Student Protests in Chapel Hill

ae alerts us to an exhibit and a series of events called “I Raised my Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill” beginning on January 23 with all but the ultimate event in Wilson Library — that last event will be at the Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, Seminar Room.

Scheduled events include:

  • Jan. 23, 2007– Prof. Peter Filene, Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor in the History Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, will give a talk entitled “Personally Authentic: Carolina Student Protestors in the Sixties.” Filene, who began teaching at UNC in 1967 and has won six teaching awards in his career, will draw on his own experiences, as well as his research and teaching about the political movements of the era and student activism in general. Wilson Library, reception and exhibit viewing at 5:15 p.m., program at 6 p.m.
  • Jan. 30, 2007 – “Pressing the Hold-outs: The Desegregation Sit-ins of 1963-1964,” moderated by Sally Greene, Chapel Hill Town Councilwoman and adjunct professor of law at UNC. Wilson Library, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
  • Feb. 6, 2007 – “Speaking Out-of-Bounds: Communism, Race, Intellectual Freedom, and the Speaker Ban Controversy of the Mid-Sixties,” moderated by Ferrel Guillory, Director, Program on Public Life. The panel will include William Friday, who was president of the UNC system at the time of the controversy, and Lewis Lipsitz, an outspoken opponent of the ban. Wilson Library, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
  • Feb. 13, 2007 – “Stomping Down: The Foodworkers Strike of 1969 and the Black Student Movement,” moderated by Dr. Archie Ervin, Associate Provost for Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at UNC. Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, Seminar Room, 5:30 – 7 p.m.

Ideas of Karsarda and Galinsky (and others)

A is for Aerotropolis — or at least that newish word is the first entry in this year’s Ideas edition of the New York Times Magazine. UNC’s John Karsarda big idea (as well described here in a recent Fast Company article) that airports are the future of cities. Desirable and economic engines of the future that should be the center of our development; not noisy dangerous annoyances best placed on the distance edges and treated like a warehouse district.

As described here earlier, Adam Galinsky gets well deserved credit for discovering a secret of auction success – starting low price leads to selling at a high price in the same issue of the Magazine under the title (the titles are in alphabetical order) “Low Starting Prices Lead to High Auction Sales”.

Overall a great collection of ideas and a good read.

Jaron Lanier crabs about mobocracy in wikipedia calling it an example of Digital Maoism and warning about collectivism in the market place of ideas — no Hayakian, he.

Monkeysphere surpassable?

Monkeysphere
Robin Dunbar proposed and some say proved that there is a physical limit to the number of individuals with whom any single person can have a stable relationship.

That number is 150 (actually 147.8). But wait there’s more.

Looking at behavior of chimps, Dumbar noticed that the “chimps belong to social groups comprising about 50 individuals, but they have only two or three grooming partners.”

Then using the same neocortex measurements and ratios on humans, Dunbar calculated the magic numbers for humans.

“The results were… ~150 for social group size, and ~12 for the more intimate clique size” [or grooming size].

So much for Top 8.

Can online social networks extend the monkeysphere in the same way writing as expanded memory?

That is, do online networks allow an individual to manage and groom relationships of a greater order?

How is this accomplished?

Word of the Day – TransFatWa

Discovered or possibly imagined by David Harrison, a unrediscoverable headline reading “New York TransFatWa.” As in “New York City health authorities voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban the use of artificial cooking oils, known as trans fats, in the city’s eateries [actual wording in NewScientist]; in doing so they have declared a TransFatWa [imagined portion with great new word].

Carrboro Commons goes live

J-school colleague Jock Lauterer alerts us to the new Carrboro online/offline news — the Carrboro Commons. The Commons is a lab production, completely with cracking electronics and bubbling liquids I suppose, of Jock’s Community Journalism classes.

He writes: “A 12-page tab print version will be out later this week. Then next month, the Web-based Carrboro Commons will be released every other week throughout the semester. Once we have the user registration system set up, folks will be able to sign in and comment about individual stories.”

Kathy Sierra on “How to Build a User Community – Part 1”

Kathy Sierra gives good insights on building User Communities over on “Creating Passionate Users.” Definitely New-you-can-use.

One, of the many, take-aways: Encourage users with intermediate skills to be answerers of inquiries; not just expertly skilled users. How to do this? Kathy outlines strategies in her article and her commenters expand on those from Kathy. Much on motorcycle support vs tech support ;->

Cool News from McConville, Tyson and Newton

David McConville is back from Sao Paolo where he attended the Planetary Collegium. He sends a link that describes what’s doing on at the Collegium — it’s in Flash so I can’t link within the pages well… David and his dome will be at the AGU Meetings next week.

As Sally and a lot of other places have noticed, Tim Tyson was just awarded the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book, Blood Done Sign My Name. Speaking of names, the Grawemeyer folks manage to credit Tim “Dyson” a couple of times at their website, but the prize of $200,000 will make up for that I’m sure.

Michael Newton was just awarded The NLS Saltire Research Book of the Year for the best book covering aspects of Scottish life: arts, education, history, science, etc. for his Dùthchas Nan Gàidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes.

John Price Wilkin on InfoWorld podcast

John Price Wilkin of the University of Michigan Libraries talks about digitizing libraries from the Michigan view point including the beginnings of JSTOR (1994 and beyond), the Making of American grant (with Cornell) as the start of the Digital Library Federation, the Michigan Digitization Project with Google, and the Distributed Proofreaders Project with Project Gutenberg with Jon Udell of InfoWorld in Jon’s podcast.

[Disclosers: ibiblio hosts Project Gutenberg. John P. Wilkin is a member of the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust.]

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