Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 28 of 146)

Science Blogging brief report

Just back from a very successful 2nd NC Blogging Conference (thanks to Anton and Bora and Brian). Sigma Xi is a great facility for the conference. The rooms right sized and halls and architecture lovely and worked well — mostly we needed better wifi as K1v1n reminded me everytime I saw him ;->

I twittered most of the conference from my iPhone — instead of taking a computer and blogging, so I’ve grabbed my tweets and put ’em in here.

Be sure to check out Wayne Sutton’s videos of the conference at the bottom of the Media Coverage Page of the Conference Wiki.

* nice show of tweet buds @scienceblogging

I was in Science Journalism led in great unconference style by Adnaan Wasey.

@scienceblogging will blogging save science journalism?

@scienceblogging science blogging needs or doesn’t need editorial supervision?

@scienceblogging objectivity? In science journalism? Opinion? News? Feature? Breaking news? Analysis or what? Power in the writer vs editor?

@scienceblogging blogs break news; print analyses or critiques?

@scienceblogging realclimate.org as top knotch

@scienceblogging who reads science blogs? Rant on nonscience like creationism. Google searching is access?

@scienceblogging space bloggers get some amazing comments

@scienceblogging build relationships between journalists and scientists. Influence more than numbers?

@scienceblogging crowdsourcing for science journalism?

@scienceblogging where is original content on blogs? Where is direct experience?

@scienceblogging break then social science and humanities

Then in Blogging about the social sciences and humanities

@scienceblogging blog carnivals defined

@scienceblogging eurekalerts as a source

@scienceblogging several tweet buds in this session but wifi is weak

@scienceblogging duke library scholarly communications

@scienceblogging peer review vs blogs? Are journals being replaced ?

good lunch

Blogging Public Health and Medicine

@scienceblogging medical and public health blogs. What do you do when asked for med advice? Ethical concerns

@scienceblogging I am not a doctor! No specific personal advice but general info Avoid narrow casting epidemilogocal data

@scienceblogging importance of context and narrative in health info and blogs

@scienceblogging hippa and health blogs 41 outside and rain

Locopops break!

Framing Science panel

@scienceblogging serious snow here at sigma xi as second life talk begins possibly ironic

Then I fled the snow to get home to see UNC lose to Maryland and to get this breaking scientific news about Google: Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data. Report and comments at TechCrunch here.

My Brush with Barry Manilow

Barry Manilow is coming to the Triangle soon. David Menconi tells of people who love Barry. I’m not one but I have seen Barry under unusual circumstances.

In the early 70s, I was renting a room in a big house on Park Avenue in Raleigh. I think I was the only student in the house. The rest of us were folks testing out lives as female taxi drivers, cooks and waterbed salesmen.

One day the Delamars, a couple who were cooking at a jazz club called the Frog and Nightgown, came up to the communal kitchen and started ranting about the show that was on at the Frog. The extremely vivacious curly haired woman and her band of gay guys were doing their first set of gigs outside of NYC and outside of the Baths.

The Delamars couldn’t get enough of the show. It was booked for about a week, a kind of woodshedding for the singer and band. The band had a short music director, or maybe he only looked short behind the organ. He ran the show or so it seemed.

I went over to the Frog and came in through the kitchen and maybe helped prep salads. The band was jamming along with 40s songs getting warm.

I wasn’t ready for what was about to happen. The singer was so full of energy and she didn’t look like your standard jazz singer. She could hardly keep her dress on. She was a powerhouse. The band was all agiggle, but the director made them get serious without shaming them. He was good at that somehow.

Bette Midler had a big hit by the end of the week. I think she tried to get out of the Frog a few days early. Barry kept on as her music director for a while then left and then became Barry Manilow.

Our post-Ironic age

We just received this note from which I’ll slightly alter to protect the guilty:

Subject: Research: People & dogs

Dear P.Jones,

I am doing research for a company called, [cookbook] Press in [a kind of a big city by Iowa standards], Iowa. They publish small cookbooks and single country books highlighting culture, crafts & history of the specific nationality, with beautiful photographs included.

Currently one of their projects is a book written as an autobiography about the dog, May, a Labra-doodle owned by the [cookbook] Press owner. After the huge success with, Marley & Me, this has inspired [our press] to produce this book.

I am researching a chapter titled: People that sleep with their dogs.

I believe the study conducted by the “Stanley Lotus Institute of Farming” by Rob R Barron may be something interesting to include in the book.

I notice this work is copyrighted on Wire.com [sic] How may I go about accessing the study? I seem to be hitting a few brick walls. Naturally, full credit would be given to The Institute as well as Mr. Barron for the work cited.

Could you be so kind as to direct me to the proper access of this study.

Thank you kindly for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
[guilty party]

To which I answered:

the article that i referred to in a posting to my class in 2000 was published in Wired magazine (a Conte Nast property)

You’ll notice that Wired author, Jon Rochmis, points humorously to this SF Chronicle article

The Stanford study by Nie is summarized with graphs in this press release Nie and/or Erbring are the folks if you want to talk about the survey

All of that said, there is no “Stanley Lotus Institute of Farming” to my knowledge. In fact, I asked my students to ascertain the trustworthiness of the Wired article. The brighter ones realized that Jon Rochmis was committing satire.

Some at Stanford did as well.

You can reach Jon Rochmis at xxxx@xxxx.com or xxxxxxx@gmail.com

Ask him about the dog study, I’m sure it will make his day.

Bemusedly,
Paul Jones

Next I had a wonderful exchange with Jon Rochmis who told me this about the genesis of his now 8 year old satire:

As I recall, we were in our morning story budget meeting when the Stanford study was brought up. Jokes flew. Jaws slackened. Eyes widened.

I am a Cal guy. If you had seen a report like this from, say, Duke, perhaps you might have reacted similarily. “I gotta do something on this,” I said.

I don’t think I took more than a couple of hours on the piece; in fact, I’m sure I didn’t (yes, I know, it probably shows).

Some inside jokes: The official name of Stanford is Leland Stanford Junior University (we Cal guys like to point out that our rivals are, indeed, a Junior University). He built the school in memory of his namesake son who died young. Leland Stanford was one of the “robber barons” involved in the transcontinental railroad (he was president of Central Pacific, I believe) and the building of San Francisco, hence the reference to Rob. R. Barron in the piece. Stanford is also referred to as “The Farm” because of its bucolic setting. And if you transpose the initials “LS,” you get “SL,” which for some reason I can’t now recall, I turned in to “Stanley Lotus” and the “Institute of Farming.”

Yes, you are right: this made my day (but it’s still early yet here on the far left coast). Thanks for including me in this.

But WAIT THERE’S MORE! Jon just got this note from the researcher in Iowa:

Subject: Stanley Lotus Institute of Farming

Jon,

We do not know each other, thank god!
My hat is off to you for wasting good half an hour of my life tracking down your satirical study published on Wire.com [sic]
It was the dog part I was after, since I am researching a dog book,
the chapter: people who sleep with their dogs.

I am a Luddite and don’t even like the internet, so thanks for making it even more unfriendly!

I’m off to the library where I can touch something real.
That not being YOU!

Have a great day and I hope someone yanks your chain today for me.
When I want satire I’ll tune into one of the best, Stephen Colbert

Ciao,
[guilty party]

Hackors took my E err O – Charlotte MayEr’s managor

GovernEr
The grafic planely red “McCrory for Governer” but when newzreporters pointed out that Pat McCrory’s announzment newsletter wus semi-literate, his campaign managor quickly blamed *HACKERS* or is that 4@x0rz?

“There’s no way this was misspelled,” said Victoria Smith, McCrory’s campaign manager. She said a hacker had accessed the campaign’s computer to alter the word. Smith said someone has been hacking McCrory’s mayoral Web site for six months, though the campaign had not contacted authorities.

The campaign lader admitted that the mizpellin was there own meztake, butt:

That was not the end.

Smith, reached by phone, insisted the spokeswoman was wrong. The errant spelling — which had been fixed even as the e-mail sat in reporters’ computers — was indeed the work of a hacker. She said the hacker must have re-hacked the campaign to fix the error


Enjoy the entire story here
as reported by Ben Niolet at the News and Observer.

What happened?

The newletter used html-mail to include images like the banner seen above.

The images are not sent with the message/newletter directly but are called from a server when the mail is opened.

This allows the mailing list service provider to know how many “reads” of the message (actually only opens by mail readers that support and don’t block images in messages) have been made.

One nice side effect in this case is that the designer upon learning of her/his mistake could upload a new corrected image.

The new image (in this case one with the O) would now been seen by all who subsequently read the message as well as any who had read the message with a reader that didn’t cache images.

To the campaign manager, Victoria Smith, it looked like some kind of hacker magic. It wasn’t.

The Flight Toward Anonymity

After Michael Zimmer‘s talk today, “Google’s Faustian Bargain: How the Quest for the Perfect Search Engine Threatens our Spheres of Mobility,” there as a lively discussion. (Michael’s talk description below).

Larry Grossberg asked “what exactly is the link between privacy and anonymity and mobility?”

I like that question especially as Zimmer had enlisted road narratives as part of his argument and discussion. I think the answer to Larry’s question is that the American mythic story, one realizable at least to the closing of the frontier and repeated over in the classic road stories, is one of a flight toward anonymity and of course a rebuilding of self-identity. What was lost with the frontier was the place in which the performance of rebuilding took place. Luckily for America, urbanization created new spaces for the steps of rebuilding to take place. At first you achieved anonymity in New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Then the new self-identity was taken on.

If we could ignore for a moment, Cori Dauber and I won’t let you have but a moment, that Zimmer’s examples were all criminal — On the Road (car theft and assorted petty crimes), Easy Rider (interstate drug transport and dealing), Thelma and Louise (murder or at least manslaughter and flight to avoid prosecution) and pirate (Well, they are *Pirates* as Cori said)–, then we see that repeating story that is so American and while anarchic and individual, not completely unwholesome.

Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger

Driving to the Library Board of Trustees meeting after the talk, I heard a piece in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the ultimate America Count de Monte Cristo, a man who ran toward anonymity and grabbed hold of it, took a pseudo-anonymous moniker, hid his face to avoid recognition and took up his own code of ethics.

“You are only one left. They killed others.” says the Indian who saved him. “You are Lone Ranger.” Stating the obvious, Tonto gives him his pseudo-identity and 75 years of life in our imagination.

Zimmer’s abstract:

The freedom to move through both physical and intellectual space resonates within many of the fundamental values and aspirations of modernity, including free and open inquiry, personal autonomy, and liberty. These values are articulated in various spheres where freedom of mobility both physical and intellectual is typically enjoyed, ranging from the open highways, public libraries, and the Internet. New information and communication technologies are frequently designed to foster increased mobility within these spheres. Web search engines, for example, have emerged as a vital and increasingly ubiquitous tool for the successful navigation of the growing online informational sphere. As Google puts it, the goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful, and to create the perfect search engine that would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

While intended to enhance intellectual mobility, this dissertation will reveal that the quest for the perfect search engine is actually a Faustian bargain: While designed to foster increased navigation within our spheres of mobility, the search for the perfect search engine also empowers the widespread capture of personal information flows across the Internet. Drawing from historical examples from other spheres of mobility including vehicle tracking systems, library surveillance, and DRM this talk will argue that the drive for the perfect search engine constitutes a violation of the contextual integrity of personal information flows, restricting the ability to engage in social, cultural, and intellectual activities online free from answerability and oversight, thereby limiting users full realization of the levels of autonomy, self-determination, and self-definition traditionally afforded within our spheres of mobility.

50 years of Reynolds Price at Duke; Untold iPhone Story

Wired carries a great story about how Jobs and the Applers negotiated and developed the iPhone, “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” by Fred Vogelstein. They should change their name to UnWired.

Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price is a Duke institution and a North Carolina treasure. Now “Duke Celebrates Writer Reynolds Price With Three-Day Jubilee: Price will be honored for 50 years of teaching at Duke; the celebration will be Jan. 31-Feb. 2.” It seems appropriate that Duke ask for a $50 registration fee, which they do, that’s only one dollar for each year that Reynolds has been at Duke. And there is a star-studded and highly impressive line up including Toni Morrison, Stanley Fish, Charlie Rose, Josephine Humphreys and Richard Ford to name a few.

Science 2.0 gets Scientific American attention; Science Blogging Conf Full Up

Science Blogging Conference
I haven’t blogged about the 2nd NC Science Blogging Conference lately because it’s filled up! And this time we mean it! Bora and Anton and Brian have done a great job getting great folks as speakers, collecting swag, lining up sponsors and getting the word out. The result is that we’re well funded and well supplied and have a distinguished crowd coming. (see also the Facebook group).

If you didn’t register, you still might want to read this great, and somewhat lengthy, article in Scientific American “Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? : Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.” You can bet that this will be a topic of conversation at the Blogging Conference.

Bora gets the penultimate paragraph in the article:

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. “It’s a Darwinian process,” he says. “About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread.”

Spooky Spooky: Feb 8th at UNC, Feb 9th at Duke

DJ Spooky

Yes we’re all set for DJ Spooky‘s visit to UNC and to Duke. ibiblio is handling the UNC part which will be a free discussion/performance/demo on Friday February 8th at 3 pm at the Carolina Union’s Great Hall. Facebook event page here.

At Duke, Spooky will perform a World Premiere of his “Video Soul: WattStax to the Avant Garde” at 8 pm on Saturday evening February 9th in Reynolds Theater. Order tickets and get more info here.

This is a Performing Arts Special Activities fund program co-sponsored by the Department of Art, the University Program in Cultural Studies, the School of Information and Library Science’s Open Video Project, Carolina Free Culture, Carolina Union Activities Board and ibiblio.org with additional support from the Department of English and Comparative Literature

Bonus: Spooky’s Buddhist Hip Hop track “Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus Mix”

Earlier in the Weekah Speakahz(February 4th) Cliff Missen of Widernet and (February 6th) Siva Vaidhyanathan of Sivacracy will be our guests.

Growing up online – Frontline 1/22 9 pm

“You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties thanks to the Internet,” says danah boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “We can turn our backs and say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘We don’t want a world like this.’ It’s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, ‘Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,’ it’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.”

Yahoo! Music Man puts it on the line

Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music posts his talk to the music industry at the Aspen Live conference. He’s got slides, he’s got video, he’s got attitude. He puts it out there saying that he will no longer “spend his energy attempting to create scarcity.” That means for starters no DRM but there’s more said smarter in his talk and posting.

ibiblio connection: We hosted the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) and worked with ianc@iuma.com in the early through mid-1990s.

The Papermaking Jones (John Dancy-Jones)

John Dancy-Jones (from NandO)
We used to say we were brothers or cousins when we could get away with it. Now John Dancy-Jones, teacher, papermaker, bookmaker (of the honest sort), artist and arts supporter, is featured in a long profile in the News and Observer. The article is good and long overdue. There are few like John D-J and we need many more.

UPDATE: John is working on a blog-to-book project called: The Natural History of Raleigh. You can learn a good deal of the secret natural areas of Raleigh there as well as the plants and animals found around town. John especially loves and can usually find turtles.

Remix Culture Defense from American U.

All the considerate people that I know alert us of this new study from American University’s Center for Social Media, “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video” headed by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the American Law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. “The study is part of a larger Participatory Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation as part of the Center for Social Media’s Future of Public Media Project.”

Great for the reading and for the great video examples that are used. Not the least of which is one of Pat Aufderheide cracking up over some of her favorites (at right from Chronicle.com). Joe Bob says check it out.

Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies Idolatorized at Number 1

VVLL
Without even a real release, the band that provides real release Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies got the Number 1 spot on Idolator for “Can You Dig It?”

I prefer “Candyland” (any song that goes “Supply meets demand, when you wave the wand that’s in your hand. When we go to Candyland, we go to Candyland.” is fine by me).

Congrats to Amanda, Alex, Doug and the band.

(Thanks for the alert, Dave)

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