Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 138 of 147)

Fruits of Global Warming

January daffodil

Daffodils, quince, and 80 degrees F high predicted for next Thursday. This weekend will be cool in the mid-60s.

The downside is possibly melanoma.

Daffodils are early but they often wait til Saint David’s Day (March 1).

It’s hard to complain about this much beauty in what should be the dark of winter. Especially when the weather elsewhere is roughed and trying.

To add to the pleasure, I’ve sold a poem that will be the Valentine’s feature in the News and Observer.

All kinds of things are popping up.

CrossFIRED!

Bye to bow-tied twits and to Crossfire as we knew and hated it. Thanks to Jon Stewart.

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

The official CNN story on the CNN story here.

Transcript of the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire here.

Not that I ever express opinions here ;->

Many Smart People on What Cannot Be Proved (as yet)

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the “esprit de divination”). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

“The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a “who’s who” of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words.”

From John Brockman‘s Edge come some unexpected responses from some very smart people.

Smart People say Dumb things (and Smart Things)

Bill Gates gets caught with a confused message about copyright in an interview with CNet and ends up calling people who want to share “Communists.” This is certain to throw the mostly Libertarian minded Free Software and Creative Commons folks into chaos — not. See boingboing for the best on this. And the /. responses.
He also has a lot to say about:

  • blogging (“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks–something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.” and later “E-mail is inefficient today with seeing stuff that’s less relevant and how you organize it–bringing in the blog-type capabilities is very important there.”)
  • his beloved Xbox (“And Xbox Live is really talking to your friends, doing things with your friends”)
  • security (“Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE”)
  • FireFox vs IE (“In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.”)
  • Google (” We’ve been in the search business even before Google was around. The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board”)
  • and the future (“the tools around Windows and Office are not even half of what they will be.”)

More local media on local media

Fiona Morgan covers the Durham Herald axings more deeply than anyone so far in this week’s Independent. [This will move to their archives next week].

Geoffrey Graybeal reports, in the Chapel Hill Herald, that WCHL will have a new president and general manager when Walter Sturdivant comes in this week (?) to lead the station. Sturdivant is a UNC School of Journalism grad (1980) and was on the UNC football team where he lead the ACC in kickoff returns.

Herron Poetry on Radio

Patrick Herron wrote to tell me and others that he just taped a poem for WCHL AM to be played on air tomorrow (Thursday January 5) between 7 and 9AM to “WCHL Morning News with Ron Stutts.” I can say without giving anything away that the poem is about Patrick’s friend, Marine Jonathan Kuniholm.
Listen in! Unfortunately WCHL doesn’t webcast but they do archive so the poem may be available later.

EVoting petition from EFF

eVoting EFF logo
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has started an eVoting petition that asks that good safe reliable and open procedures for eVoting be followed.

Dear Election Official:

I believe that election integrity is the foundation of democracy, and that the transparent investigation of election problems is imperative.

I believe that the public has the right to an honest discourse on the performance of its voting technologies, and that knowledge of their performance is a prerequisite for that conversation.

I believe that truly independent security professionals and academic researchers should be not only allowed to examine election technologies, but required to publish their findings.

For these reasons, I urge you to allow independent, non-ITA testing of the voting machines used in your county during the 2004 presidential election.

  1. Visit the EFF eVote site.
  2. Read the good stuff there.
  3. Sign the petition.

RIP: Illustrators Kelly Freas and Will Eisner

What me worry?

Alfred E. Newman
Frank Kelly Freas who was famous for his many sci-fi illustrations, LP covers, and for his work at Mad magazine, died in his sleep at age 82 on January 2nd 2005. Freas won 11 Hugo Awards for his illustrations, but will remain most famous to me for his Alfred E. Newman images in Mad from the early 60s. Note that there is no resemblance between Newman and Larry Lessig pictured below.

Smiling Spirit
Will Eisner, whose Spirit inspired and even nurtured many comic/graphic artists, died at his home in Florida last night. Eisner invented the terms graphic novel (having done the first serious one) and sequential art as well as exemplifying the kind of serious storytelling that could be done in the comic/comix genre. Just to cite one example of Eisner’s influence, Michael Chabon says that:

I think Eisner was unique in feeling from the start that comic books were not necessarily this despised, bastard, crappy, low-brow kind of art form, and that there was a potential for real art. And he saw that from the very beginning, which was very unusual, and I took that quality and gave it to Joe Kavalier.

Lessig on the Connection – WUNC

Lessig in Thought
Larry (err Lawrence) Lessig is coming in clear as usual as he explains the Creative Commons and the upcoming Science Commons on NPR’s The Connection right now (11 am EST) and is taking phone calls. You can listen on WUNC or on the Connection site. The show will be in the Connection Archives NOW. Larry gave nice props to Duke’s Jamie (err James) Boyle and his environmental model for the Commons. Thanks to Brewster for sending an SMS message from Frisco to remind me of the airing.

Feb 12 – TriBlogCon – Wiki, Location, better URL

The Triangle Bloggers Conference for 2005 has a home for its meeting on the morning of Saturday February 12. We’ll meet in the Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall on the UNC Campus. Thanks to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication for making this possible. ibiblio is also a sponsor of the Conference.
And we have a better URL to get to the Conference Wiki http://mistersugar.com/triblogs.html .
All of this really made possible by the hard work of Anton Zuiker.

Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Freedom Forum Conference Room, Carroll Hall (j-school)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Local media consolidations

One issue I want to address at the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 is the place of blogs as local media and in local media. We can start here if you like. Are we up for being We, the Media?
What’s making me think about this more often and, I hope, more deeply in the last few months are a few local media changes: WCHL as was noticed on Orange Politics went from very very local to mostly syndicated national shows after a visit from a consultant. The Herald-Sun‘s purchase by Paxton and today’s firing of what WRAL says is 20% of the Herald-Sun staff including four of the paper’s senior officers (Thanks to Phil Meyer for the alert on that one). Potential changes at the Chapel Hill News.
And nationally Pulitzer may be up for sale. With rumors that McClatchy, owner of the News and Observer and others, may be one of the next on the line.
Phil Meyer’s new book is the Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. It’s a good read for bloggers and for journalists.

Pew on Blogs

The Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project just released one of their more or less well-formed studies (one problem: they often use telephone surveys and those surveys have inherent difficulties in that they don’t often reach cell phone only people or people who are not at home much etc) — this one on the state of blogs. The paper is only in PDF format, but is worth a read.

The abstract says:

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Who are bloggers (according to Pew):

  • Men: 57% are male
  • Young: 48% are under age 30
  • Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home
  • Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more
  • Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000
  • Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees

Growth in blog-readers far outpaced the growth in blogs themselves. “Still, since [Pew’s] survey in February, there has been greater-than-average growth in blog readership among women, minorities, those between the ages of 30 and 49, and those with home dialup connection.” There is a nice chart that is difficult to extract from the PDF that shows the reader and blogger trends from July 02 to November 04.

MacroInvertebrates and Beavers

On New Year’s Eve day, we went out on the Eno River to my friend, Sylvia Garrard,’s land to take part in the River Watch Program. The idea is to scoop up whatever macroinvertebrates you can find in dip nets and count them. The presence of difference kinds of invertebrates indicates the water quality. Needless to say this is a more fun project in July than in December, but New Year’s Eve this year was unseasonably warm and wonderful — still the water was cold. We found a wide selection of cadis fly larvae, stone fly larvae, dragon fly larvae, crawfish, gill snails, river pennies, a leech, mussels, and more. All this shows that the river along Sylvia’s land is in fine shape.
While we were there we also found lots of beaver work had been going on recently some of it very ambitious. Sally took the pictures.

Breaking 100

In the past week, I’ve been to two UNC basketball games. The first was against Cleveland State (107 – 64). And the second against William and Mary (105 – 66). I can’t complain about winning and I was glad to see both oppponents to continue to scrap and play hard right to the last second.
I did wonder as many there did through our victorious euphoria “What would Dean have done?” These margins of victory are something that we rarely saw when Dean Smith was the coach. Dean believed in taking lopsided matches as an opportunity to play the whole bench. While the bench did see action, especially in the Cleveland State game, it was not to contain the score but as a warning to the starters. This is the sixth game this season in which UNC out scored their opponents by more than 30 points.

Are we seeing the great difference between Roy Williams and Dean Smith? Are we seeing Roy rebuilding the Carolina legend and reputation after some off years?

The good news is that the team played as a team with 6 players scoring in double figures vs Cleveland State and looked good in their passing against William and Mary.

The Rise of Collapse

Collapse: the book
Jerad Diamond speaks (or rather writes) for himself as he condenses his Collapse arguments into a long article on the editorial page of today’s NYTimes called “The Ends of the World as We Know Them”.
Overall, Diamond does a better job describing his Collapse book and the stories therein than either Brand or Gladwell. He is clear that the Norse did not chose exactly for example, but he does point out, as Sally does in her comment, that we have no excuses this time out. Further — and unlike the other reviewers of his book — he points to societies that did no collapse but that saw the signs adapted and endured.
My only complaint at the article is that in my edition of the paper and on the online version of the article, the NYTimes copyeditor was asleep on the job and got the book’s name wrong. It’s not “Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed” but “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”
Alert Diamond observers will have already read his take on Easter Island in the form of a review of other books in an early 2004 article in the NY Review of Books.
Sally and Kottke point to an even earlier article in the June 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine called “The last Americans: environmental collapse and the end of civilization – Report”

2004 of ibiblio

A few selected highlights from the past year of ibiblio.org

Grants and contracts: We received contracts for streaming video in support of the NASA education site. We also received an IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services) grant in support of digitizing films for the Folkstreams project. We’re up for a much needed server refresh via an IBM SUR Grant which will be reported in January.

Radio on the net: We celebrated the 10th anniversary of Internet radio with WXYC with music, panels and interviews as well as a free CD for download (from ibiblio of course). We now stream 6 stations and will likely add two more early in 2005. We also participated in the first IPv6 continuous streaming of radio on Internet2 with WXYC and WCPE.

Speakers and visitors: ibiblio visitors and speakers for 2004 included Cory Doctorow, Doc Searls, John Hood (of John Locke Foundation), NC Senator Eric Reeves, bloggers Eric Muller and Corey Dauber, and others. Many ibiblio speakings are available for watching online including the WXYC panel.

Press. We’ve collected our press information including recent articles on ibiblio as well as technical information in an online press kit. One important new item there is Jessamyn West’s article from OCLC Systems and Services: International Digital Library Perspectives. Vol. 20. Number 2 (2004) “Free as in Tibet: ibiblio’s cultural cultivation and community creation”

We have two maturing free software projects. Lyceum is an open source blogsphere and Osprey is a peer-to-peer enabled content distribution system using Bittorrent. An very early version of Osprey is already in use for the WXYC CD downloads and a few other selected offerings.

Bandwidth: We still have to shape our bandwidth use and have with very good results. Even so we regularly use 300 – 400 Mbs. That’s a 100% increase from last year. We’re looking forward to an increase in 2005.

Storage: We’ve just added a NetApp filer which will provide highspeed file access that we desperately need, This is an additional 5+ terabyes of storage.

Management: We have a new CIO for UNC, Dan Reed, who comes to us from UIUC and NCSA. He’s very supportive of ibiblio and I expect we’ll have some opportunities arising from his RENCI projects soon.
We also have a new Dean of Information and Library Science, Jose-Maria Grifiths.
The search for a new Dean of Journalism and Mass Communication is underway as I type with campus visits by the finalists scheduled for very early 2005.

Staff: John Reuning and Fred Stutzman are our two full time employees, sysdamins and project leaders. Nancy Wilson, Josh Myer, Sean Slovney, Max Gustashaw, Patrick Herron, TJ Ward, Bret Dougherty and Adi Unnithan are with us as student employees. Sean and Max have just graduated. Nancy is expecting her first child in January.

Conferences: John and Nancy presented at the Libre Software conference in Bordeaux in the spring. Paul and Fred were among the select invitees to Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp. Fred was a presenter at the American Library Association’s Information Commons Summit. Paul was among the invitees to the Wired/Creative Commons’ benefit concert by Gilberto Gil and David Byrne. Paul and Dr. Helen Tibbo presented at the Imaging Science and Technology conference. Paul was a speaker at IBM University Day and among the 3 UNC faculty invited to meet with selected members of the IBM Academy. Fred was a panelist on the Future of Music in the Triangle. Paul spoke to visiting Jordanian journalists.

Other honors and milestones: Contributor Jessamyn West of Librarian.net was an offical blogger for the Democratic National Convention and was featured in many news stories.
Contributor Pamela Jones (and company) at Groklaw won the Linux Journal’s Editors’ Choice Award for Best Non-Technical or Community site.

Collections: we continue to add important collections of all kinds from video tutorials to health care to poetry festivals to software to Tibetan culture. No slowing down there.

CHampion Library

That is Chapel Hill Public Library is a champion having received (again) the very top rating of any public library or library system in North Carolina. In the recent HAPLR ratings for NC libraries — HAPLR stands for Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings — the Chapel Hill Public Library scored 783 or 93% in the adjusted percentiles. Congratulations to Librarian Katherine Thompson and her staff and to the Town for funding the Library well and especially to the voters who on November 4, 2003 approved the issuance of $16.23 million of library bonds.

The Library was the only library to score over 90% in North Carolina, but the goal should be to crack the National Top Ten for our population which would require a score above 860. The building expansion and other improvements funded by the Bonds should take us in that direction.


Here’s how the ratings were reported to the Chapel Hill Town Council in November.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the Chapel Hill Public Library Board of Trustees.

Gladwell’s Diamond

Malcolm Gladwell is concerned about how things change. So is Jared Diamond. Diamond is best know for his Pulitzer prize winning “Guns, Germs and Steel” in which he describes the factors that he believes have made certain civilizations triumph over others. Gladwell is perhaps most well known for his “Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Difference” best seller in which he, without complete attribution, brings together a variety of theories and stories about the mysterious tendency of humans to begin to act more like lemmings for better (as in less crime if there are less broken windows) or worse (as in tatooing going mainstream).
The week in the New Yorker, long Gladwell’s homebase, Gladwell reviews Diamond’s latest book, “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed.
I don’t have the Diamond book as yet so I’m relying on Gladwell to tell you that the civilizations that “choose” to fail usually fail by failing in their relationship to the earth. Easter Islanders completely deforest their island and it’s bye bye civilization from then on. The Norse settlers of Greenland deforest, over graze, remove sod so as to build their homes, refuse to eat fish (as near as anyone can tell), won’t learn from the locals and so all starve to death in one very bad winter. These civilizations and others (Mayas, Rwandans, etc) through their unattentative relationship with the earth create first an environmental crisis that they don’t understand that then precipitates a social crisis and collapse.
The collapse is obviously a tipping point or perhaps even a blink — to borrow from Gladwell’s newest book, “Blink: the power of thinking without thinking.” To be fair to Gladwell, “Blink” is about intuition which it seems that the civilizations in “Collapse” seem to have chosen to ignore or just do without.
I know that we’re all responsible etc, but really do societies that have no idea of crop rotation or of how to prevent erosion really “choose to fail” or are they selected out of the gene pool like the winners of the Darwin Awards. Does death of a civilization constitute a collapse, a tipping point, or a paradigm shift? Or are all of these approaches far too simplistic to be instructive, to prevent our own collapse?
I do plan to read both “Collapse” and “Blink” in the next few months and will report back. Feel free of course to comment here in the meantime.

Libraries on the Tracks and on the Ropes

Pre-opening pic of the Children's Librarian's desks
Just back from visiting my folks who are now just west of Charlotte in Matthews. As a sort of busman’s holiday, we also stopped by the new Matthews Branch Library which is the bottom floor of the Matthews Town Hall. The impressive, but almost cornily designed, building has a cupola and large letters that read “Town Hall – Library.” Now that’s a good balance.
Matthews has built a little off road Main Street of shops, the old Train Station, a caboose and a grand circle with Town Hall – Library at the end of it. One side is bordered by a still very much in use railroad track. In the library, the Children’s Section is on the track side with windows always unshaded so that the patrons in that section might wave at the trainsmen — and also because those patrons actually delight in the noise of a passing train. The more relaxed adult sections have stuffed chairs and a fireplace (not working while we were there despite the cold) set as far as possible from the tracks. The layout of the stacks and sections is such that you can have a readaloud in the Children’s and still not be disturbed in the Adult areas.
While there is Internet access throughout the building, the special Internet room with support and monitoring is set apart from the books and other activity areas. I did not see any signs about wireless access. (Wireless access is available less than a block away at the Dilworth Coffee Company — which is not in Dilworth). There are not that many computers there that I saw but I think more than are listed at the Library’s website which was put together before the place opened. Many 30 or so all told.
The train motif is carried off throughout the Children’s Section with the Children’s librarian desks set up like a large steam-powered locomotive (owner’s of the Thomas trademark should not look too closely at this) and a very very large set of crossing lights hanging from the ceiling.
The stacks are wide and welcoming with several faceout displays at the end of various section rows. Most noted ‘favorites’ or ‘staff favorites.’ Note of interest: not many of the staff favorites were recent publications although the selections were quite eclectic.
Over all the library was warm and light, well-stocked (although I did not do any kind of content review), and an excellent example of a branch library.

In less happy, but related, news, Salinas California is closing its three public libraries. The Friends of the Salinas Public Library have kept up with the latest events and news stories for us.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 The Real Paul Jones

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑