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Author: Paul (Page 15 of 146)

Word Detective – Cackalacky

For some time now, I’ve been part of a loose group of seekers trying to find the origin of the word Cackalack or Cackalacky or Kackalack or some variation thereof.

Calalacky Hot Sause sticker

@radiomayonnaise alerts me that Word Detective is now on the case. Here. Dr. Connie Eble, Dr. Glenn Hinson, and in particular Bonnie Taylor-Blake offer good information but no final answer.

Bonnie pushes the documentation date back to Kathleen Kimball’s play “The Meat Rack” in 1972. It should be noted that although the line in the play refers to South Cackalacky and Charleston in particular, that Kimball was living in Asheville, NC when she wrote it.

One thing that Dr Eble and Bland Simpson and I were able to recall but not document is that during the mid-1960s both Bland, who was living in Coastal NC, and me, living in Charlotte, heard the term Cackalack used. Those who used the term in both cases were enlisted men — Marines from Jacksonville or Soldiers from Fayetteville — who were unhappy about being stuck down here in Cackalack.

I’ve seen no written evidence of this usage, but would love to hear/see anything anyone finds.

Upcoming panels and talks

I’ll be speaking, panelling and/or moderating at these events in the near future.

Thursday September 23- Preservation North Carolina 2010 Conference

The Future of Online Preservation
Learn how the web and social media are influencing the way we do the work of preservation — and what changes may be ahead — at this round-table panel. Glenn Perkins, PreservationNC.org; Paul Jones, iBiblio.org/UNC-Chapel Hill; Gary Kueber, Endangered Durham; John Morris, Goodnight Raleigh; and George Smart, TriangleModernistHouses.com.

Monday October 4 – How Computers Changed My Life series at Carol Woods Retirement Community

Monday October 18 – Open Access Week at UNC

Panel on Images, Access and Copyright

Thursday October 28 – Carolinas Chapter: American Society for Information Science & Technology

Panel on social networks uses and misuses

Friday October 29 – Elon Law Review Symposium on Transparency, Secrecy and the Internet

Several of the nation’s top scholars in Intellectual Property law, technology and the Internet will gather on October 29 at Elon University School of Law to explore how the Internet impacts public access to information and how society balances the desire for increased access to information with the need for secrecy, privacy, and control.

ibiblio receives $50,000 donation

ibiblio, the public’s library and digital archive, has received $50,000 from the Beal Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation on behalf of Lulu.com. Lulu.com is an open publishing resource that helps authors distribute their work for profit and helps buyers find the content they need. The gift was made to support ibiblio’s continued growth as one of the Internet’s largest public libraries.

“Public libraries serve the needs of our society that can’t be served through the markets,” said Robert Young, founder and CEO of Lulu.com. “The value of ibiblio is that it stores content and cultural icons that people don’t know how to monetize. Without storing such content, they may disappear from human experience.”

ibiblio.org, which will celebrate its 18th birthday in October, was one of the first Web sites on the Internet. It historically has been a pioneer in a number of areas, including Internet radio. Today, ibiblio is home to one of the largest “collection of collections” on the Internet and hosts nearly 2,500 non-software related projects.

“All the giving to ibiblio helps us reach out further and touch more people,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We process anywhere from 12 to 16 million transactions per day on ibiblio.”

Jones said the $50,000 gift will be used to help ibiblio staff with upcoming projects, including a recent move in data centers and a shift to cloud computing.

“This gift comes at a very pivotal time for us since it will assist in our transition to a new, more affordable data center, which will ultimately save us thousands of dollars every year,” Jones said. “We are grateful to Lulu.com and to the Foundation for the generous support they’ve provided.”

 

About ibiblio:

ibiblio.org is one of the world’s first Web sites and largest “collections of collections” on the Internet. It is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio.org was formed as a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, and the Center for the Public Domain in September of 2000. At UNC at Chapel Hill, ibiblio is supported by the School of Information and Library Science, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Information Technology Services, the UNC at Chapel Hill Libraries, and the Office of the Executive Chancellor and Provost. ibiblio is housed in the School of Information and Library Science located in Manning Hall on the UNC at Chapel Hill campus.

 

Follow-up stories:

Lulu’s Young donates $50,000 to ibiblio by Alan Wolf in .biz blog at News & Observer

Young Helps ibiblio aim for the Clouds. by Alan Wolf in News & Observer (Technology Section print edition text).

Online Library Receives Major Grant by Aaron Keck of 1360 WCHL

NC’s Triangle Community Foundation awards $50K to ibiblio by Alan Maurer of TechJournal South.

The Social Network (preview)

Last night — Thanks to Columbia Pictures and the Carolina Union Activities Board — about 400 UNC folks, mostly undergraduates, got a preview screening of The Social Network. Afterwards, I moderated a Question and Answer session with the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, the lead actor Jesse Eisenberg and two part player Armie Hammer. The audience was enthusiastic and responsive to the movie and the panel.

Our second question was: “Is it okay if I come onto the stage and hug all of you?” Then she did. Okay not all of us on stage — all but me. Sorkin smiled as the hugger returned to her seat and said “Nothing like that happened at any other schools.” “We’re very friendly here and we love you,” I told him (off mike).

The movie tells the story of the founding of Facebook through the eyes (mostly) of ousted co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Mark Zuckerberg, the coder the idea man the one still holding a 51% stake in Facebook, is seen as a highly flawed and tragic character. Most tragic toward the very end.

I can’t say much more without spoilers, but the dialog, the pacing, the well-drawn characters are what you would expect from a writer like Sorkin and a cast like the one assembled and directed by David Fincher. I will say that Justin Timberlake does an outstanding acting job as Sean Parker.

Later I imagined a different and truer movie. Not one that was informed by Saverin who constantly made wrong business choices (I can say no more), but one that looked at the most interesting character in life and in the movie — Sean Parker. Many things could have sunk Facebook — in fact Parker mentions a few in this interview with Ashton Kutcher:

But Parker managed several things almost unheard of in tech startups: he secured $1/2 million angel investment while keeping Zuck at 51% ownership, he managed to keep adverts off then added only in relatively unobtrusive ways (putting privacy issues aside. timing here is everything), he took the site international, he gave Zuck confidence to drop out of Harvard and more.

This interview from Vanity Fair (October 2010) with Parker gives you a taste of the complex successful and iconoclastic character that could have been in the movie.

The movie was a great, smart and often funny drama and well worth seeing — beginning October 1 in most theatres.

See also: The New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg (September 20, 2010). No tragedy here.

Hearsay Culture radio interview now posted

KZSU-FM logo

David Levine of Elon Law and Stanford Law Center for Internet and Society writes to say that our interview (David talking with me) is now posted on the Hearsay Culture site along with good conversations featuring Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal (Property Outlaws) and Rob Frieden (Winning the Silicon Sweepstakes). That’s three shows in all. Find em here: http://www.hearsayculture.com/?p=630 All three shows aired earlier this quarter on KZSU-FM.

About the shows, David says:

The first [show], Show 118, July 28 is my interview with Paul Jones of ibiblio.org. Paul is one of the true pioneers of the Internet, having founded SunSITE, one of the first webpages, as well as the digital library ibiblio.org. Paul is also a cutting-edge teacher, having taught a course using videos as the reading. In our interview, we had a wide-ranging discussion from Paul’s pedagogical style to the future of the Internet. I am sure that you’ll enjoy the discussion.

The second show is Show 119, August 4, my interview with Profs. Eduardo Penalver of Cornell Law and Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law discussing Property Outlaws. Eduardo and Sonia have written an excellent book examining copyright disobedience and its effects on the growth and development of copyright law. Analogizing to other examples of civil disobedience, Eduardo and Sonia paint a compelling picture of the need for such actions. I very much enjoyed the interview!

Show 120, August 11 is my interview with Prof. Rob Frieden of Penn State’s College of Communications discussing Winning the Silicon Sweepstakes. Rob has written a pull-no-punches account of the failure of the FCC to properly regulate the United States’ telecommunications interest. A sweeping indictment of the FCC, Rob’s book is also a trenchant analysis of where we should go in the future to reverse our course. Rob was a great guest and I’m sure that you’ll find the interview of interest.

Poets Cooking reviewed, Fred interviewed, PubCampNC

The poetry anthology/cookbook edited by RIchard Krawiec, Sound of Poets Cooking, gets a very nice review in the Independent. Here.

Fred Stutzman is interviewed about his research and about Freedom and Anti-Social, but David Menconi. This story has legs or at least syndication after it took to the wire. Kansas City did a nice job of reuse as did a number of others. “It’s complicated.”

Just back from #PubCampNC, a public media barcamp-like unconference. Good notes here and at the Twitter #tag for the conference.

Some Summer Reading (at UNC Alumni Review)

The good folks that the UNC Alumni Review asked a bunch of faculty and administrators what we were planning to read this summer. What a challenge! We’re all a bunch of speed reading overachievers who obviously set up unrealistic goals for ourselves — there are a big bunch of books from every very busy contributor. And many of us listed our pleasure reading, our speculative reading, our airport and bad weather in the hotel or beach/mountain house reading rather than our reading for research or teaching or even books-by-our-friends reading, me included.

Here’s the full list.

My own list:

  • Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson
  • Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson and Michael B. Horn
  • Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Alex Pentland
  • How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar
  • I Don’t Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei Translated by JP Seaton
  • Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby
  • Makers by Cory Doctorow
  • No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment by David Lange and H. Jefferson Powell
  • Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene
  • The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin
  • Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Skirt, Cooking, Hearsay

Jones in Skirt


Sound of Poets Cooking

As promised, Skirt (Raleigh) is in the newsboxes (free) and online. There I am in a very nice picture taken by Beth Riley for the magazine. The crumbling column is holding up The One True Manning Hall.

*

Editor, publisher and poet Richard Krawiec writes to say that “The Sound of Poets Cooking” is on the way to him from the printers. Further, he has copies at a special Facebook discount:

I’m represented in Sound of Cooking by a poem called “Artichokes.”

*

Friday, I’ll be Skypeing over to Elon University Law School to record a session of Hearsay Culture with David Levine. Our show will be airing and online listening on July 28, but what David has online already is very impressive so go listen to some of the shows now. You won’t be disappointed.

Fred-mania: Slate vid, Economist, NYPost

Fred Stutzman‘s Freedom has gotten great and well-deserved press as folks realize that even Windows users can now exercise Freedom. Add to that Fred’s new release, Anti-social, which lets you work but not socialize and you have some very nice offerings for controlling your internet tendencies.

In the Economist, NPR’s Peter Sagal sings the Freedom song while the article’s author astutely observes:

“But in its severity and simplicity, Freedom (for Macintosh and Windows) may be the ultimate tool to ward off distractions: the virtual equivalent of retiring to a remote getaway, or going on a writers’ retreat, to get things done.”

The New York Post, famous for their understated headlines, screams “Fatal Distraction” as they warn us of the “attention-sucking vortex” that is the internet, that diabolic system of tubes and cite Fred’s insights that lead to both Anti-social and Freedom.

At Slate Video, Farhad Manjoo (True Enough) shows his love for Freedom:

Miss Norma C. Forde 1920 – 2010

Miss Norma C Forde dies — end of a Laurinburg NC era.

In the early 70s, I often ate at Miss Forde’s Coffee Shop, but even better on special occasions I would be treated to one of her unique train cakes. The cake — actually several smaller cakes representing an engine, some utility cars and a caboose — was handed to me on a 4 foot long board covered with tin foil. She insisted each time that I bring back the board in good repair within a week. I always did.

On one occasion, Miss Forde upset by my waist length hair snuck up behind me with large pastry shears. Clicking them loudly and clicking her tongue to add to the sound and drama, she grabbed my hair into a pony tail. I leapt up and beat it to the other side of the table quickly. We made peace and she would often give me an extra cookie with my lunch.

She and her shop were landmarks of Laurinburg for decades.

Her obit here: http://www.laurinburgexchange.com/view/full_story/7483520/article-Norma-Cannady-Forde?instance=lead_story_left_column and here http://fayobserver.com/articles/2010/06/06/1001783?sac=Col

MSFT: The Em-Ballmer and the Wiz of Ozzie

A couple of years back, I was invited to and did attend the Microsoft Technology Summit 08. (Reports and notes here). My impression, that I discussed with several people but didn’t blog, was that there were two strong forces within MSFT that were at odds with each other. MTS08 put them both in front of us — us being folks who “were opinion formers who might not be fully aware of Microsoft technological offerings” or those of us so into Open Source or Adobe or Apple that we weren’t paying MSFT technology all that much attention — at this meeting.

Sam Ramji who at the time was leading MSFT’s Open Source efforts was the convener of the meeting, but due to some odd scheduling he was pulled off to budget meetings for much of the conference. Sam represented a part of MSFT that I liked, felt comfortable with, understood and respected. He has (and had then) start up cred, broad experience, was open to the ideas of others, listened as well as spoke, spent less time messaging than trying to understand what was going on in a wide sense. Props to you, Sam. In short, Sam represented what Jane Jacobs calls the Commercial Moral Syndrome. I came to realize that Sam was also representative of the Ray Ozzie forces within MSFT.

Then there were the Steve Ballmer forces. They were a perfect example of what Jacobs calls the Guardian Moral Syndrome. They came to overwhelm us with their presentations, their tech and their talk. “Of course, if you were at the MIX conference (a MSFT fanboy conf)” I wrote about this at the time. Then I was comparing Dewey and Lippman, but now I think Jacobs has it divided best. The Ballmer people were MSFT lifers, for the most part, straight to MSFT from school with no turns or byways or so straight that they had forgotten any other jobs or ways of thinking.

Now Sam has left MSFT (in summer of 09 if I recall it), but the division within MSFT remains. Most recently that division between Ballmer and Ozzie came to our attention through a report in Business Insider called “Everything Wrong With The Steve Ballmer Era On Display At D8.”

I feel validated. Thanks, Sam for having me out. Thanks, Steve for acting out.

Upcoming Jones-ness

Poetry:
“Artichokes” in the Richard Krawiec edited “Sound of Poets Cooking” (as Van Morrison says to the crowd on one of his live LPs — “We’re cookin’ already”) (Due out later this summer)
“Dividing Waters” in “Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont” by Georgann Eubanks from UNC Press (scheduled for October, 2010)

About:
He’s So Original” article in Skirt (Raleigh) (in process)

Speaking:
Is Internet Addiction Real? Morehead Planetarium and Science Center Current Science Forum. Thursday, June 10, 7 p.m. Hint: Nope

Maps of Misreadings: For the Win

For the Win
Our friend Cory Doctorow has out his second Young Adult book, For the Win. His first, Little Brother, is on its second week on the the National Independent Bestseller list.

We’re looking forward to having him here to read at our local indy store, Fly Leaf Books, on Sunday at 1 pm. Fly Leaf has done a great job of getting the word out and of explaining who Cory is and what the book is about.

Over in Cary at Barnes & Noble, it’s a different story. Their synopsis of the book is completely backwards from that the book is actually about. They say:

His new teen novel, For the Win, incorporates online role-playing games into a real-life, global war. Teens are recruited and unionized by ruthless bosses to sabotage the global economy.

Err #FAIL

After a little conversation with Cory and his publisher Tor, B&N now reads:

His new teen novel, For the Win, features international teens organizing and fighting, both digitally and physically, for their rights, in a world where online games are a major driver of the global economy.

Much better

The book is about macroeconomics, video games and the labor movement. Yes, that’s right. But the HEROES are the Union organizers, the IWWWW, the Webblies (a name borrowed by Cory with acknowledgment from Scotland’s Ken MacLeod). The global and therefore macroeconomics discussed are about the importance of collaboration, of love of work and play, of pressures against workers many of whom are children and of the costs of resistance and why those costs however precious are necessary to pay.

Whilst I’m on misreadings, let me point out that there are positive misreadings to be had from For the Win too. Cory dedicates the book this way:

For Poesy: Live as though it were the early days of a better nation.

This is a borrowing from another Scots author — one of my favorites — Alasdair Gray:

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Gray says that he borrowed this phrase from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee who wrote this couple in his 9th Civil Elegy:

And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization.

I love how each author took the sentence and changed it slightly each a personal misreading and owning of the line. Dennis Lee was Toronto’s first Poet Laureate. Alastair Gray’s quote is carved in stone on the new Scottish Parliament Building’s Cannongate Wall. Cory’s is a dedication of a book to his daughter. Canada -> Scotland -> Daughter of a Canadian living in England.

Those are the better misreadings.

Come hear Cory Doctorow‘s reading, not misreading, on Sunday May 23 at 1 pm here at Fly Leaf Books.

eXtensible Catalog Organization meeting in Charlotte

The recently appointed University Librarian at UNC-Charlotte, Stan Wilder, played host to folks from Rochester, Rice, Notre Dame, OCLC and Library of Congress who are working on the open sourced eXtensible Catalog. I was lucky enough to be asked to entertain err educate during drinks and dinner before the meeting really got down to business. Since I can’t juggle, I gave a talk on the End of Search, the slides (which may be familiar but not in this configuration) are here:

Don’t worry this was a brief talk. The bartender was there ready to pour when I stopped but he looked interested in the talk so I brought him into the conversation and we were all better for having shared his experiences as a part of our talk. Sorry no video.

Time Out! WWW2010

I pretty much took the month of April off this blog. The main reasons were so that I could focus on the end of semester and the great end of semester projects/reports from my students and so that I could fret about the WWW2010 Conference.

There was no fretting necessary about WWW2010. Kathy Greene, our conference Diva, and the wonderful professional conference organizers from YCC did such a fantastic job that no sane person could fret. A conference co-chair could be nervous nonetheless. Between Kathy, Doc Searls and I, we did a good bit of press contact and interviews. And thanks to Janna Anderson of Elon who organized the co-located FutureWeb2010 and her students, there is a lot of the conference — especially that which is of more general interest — on the web now. Janna also recruited Pew Internet’s Lee Rainie to lead interview/chat sessions with all of our plenary speakers and several others.

And I can’t say enough about my co-chair, Michael Rappa, who put a ton of time thinking from the very beginnings of our endeavor together about how to form the experience and to control expenses and who provided not only his wisdom and insight but some serious resources through his Institute for Advanced Analytics at NCSU.

Local to UNC, the great students in the School of Information and Library Science provided some very significant volunteer hours and good humor. Dave Potenziani organized the Future of Public Health panel. Fred Stutzman organized the Future of Social Networks panel. Penny Abernathy, Woody Hartzog (JoMC), Alice Ammerman, Kurt Ribisl, Deborah Tate (Public Health), and Anne Klinefelter (Law) all served as panelists at FutureWeb2010.

Papers and posters from UNC authors included:

What are the most eye-catching and ear-catching features in the video?: implications for video summarization
Yaxiao Song, Gary Marchionini, Chi Young Oh

INEX+DBPEDIA: a corpus for semantic search evaluation
Jose R. Perez-Aguera, Javier Arroyo, Jane Greenberg, Joaquin Perez-Iglesias, Victor Fresno

Using BM25F for Semantic Search.
José R. Pérez-Agüera, Javier Arroyo, Jane Greenberg, Joaquin Perez-Iglesias and Victor Fresno.
Semantic Search Workshop Best Paper Award

I did a little overtime work by chairing the Future of Media panel which included Penny Abernathy, Michael Clemente, Dan Conover, Sam Matheny and Doc Searls, sitting in for Michael Tiemann (who was held over at what turned out to be a very important software patent trial in east Texas) on the Open Source panel, being part of the plenary panel on Government Data with Tim Berners-Lee, David Ferriero, Andrew McLaughlin, and Nigel Shadbolt with Jim Hendler as our moderator.

As co-chair, I got to introduce some great and generous old friends – plenary speaker Carl Malamud and Bebo White as well as help handle the questions for Vint Cerf and danah boyd.

Greg DeKoenigsberg really pitched in and helped me create a Developers Track on far too short a notice. Thanks to Greg’s strong outreach, we had strong presentations and the right people in the rooms to here them.

[still writing this]

Open Government and the World Wide Web

Open Government and the World Wide Web

The opening ceremony of WWW2010 will include a plenary panel offering perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the move to make data more open and accessible on the Web (data.gov and data.gov.uk). The panel features inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee; Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero; Professor James Hendler of RPI, who will moderate the discussion; UNC professor and Director of iBiblio.org, Paul Jones; Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Executive Office of the President; and University of Southampton Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Director of the Web Science Trust and of the Web Foundation.


Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk is a brief preview of that we’ll be talking about at WWW2010

Serious Journalism, FLOSS Licensing,

Our family joke: “He knows so little, yet he says so much” is meant to be a kind of zen koan, an insult at one reading and praise at the next. I get that kind of reaction when I come home and describe the talks and classes I’ve done. This past week was one example of many parts of my life colliding — not so much like legos that might eventually click into place, but like a grab bag of tinkertoys, legos and mechanos.

Not documenting everything by far (skipping Public Health presentations that I was only attending, class which you are welcome to check out, the WCHL community lunch, a dinner with the good INTRAHealth OPEN folks, and a murder mystery solved), but looking at two that have some documentation to present, I spoke at the UNC Law Cyberlaw class about FLOSS licensing — slides below — and at the Society for Collegiate Journalism National Conference at NCSU — great writeup by Tyler Dukes linked from the lovely dog picture below.
Serious Journalism

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