Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 31 of 146)

Minjeong in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication

UNC PhD and Hawaii Pacific University professor Minjeong Kim has a part of her dissertation published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. It’s “The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses.”

Please reference as: Kim, M. (2007). The Creative Commons and copyright protection in the digital era: Uses of Creative Commons licenses. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html

Note: I was on Dr. Kim’s dissertation committee.

Friday: Don on Open Content Alliance

What: Open Content Alliance: 2007 Meeting Report
Who: Don Sizemore
When: Friday Nov 16 12:00-1:00pm
Where: Manning Hall, room 208

“What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.”[1]

In 2005 a small group met at the Internet Archive offices to establish The Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.[2]

Kirill Fesenko, Richard Szary, Simon Spero, and Donald Sizemore represented UNC at this year’s meeting. Discussion topics included updates on the OCA’s Scan on Demand, Print on Demand, and Open Library initiatives, over recurring themes of Open Standards and Open Access.

The OCA was recently in the New York Times for adhering to its open principles:

[1] The Open Library:
[2] The Open Content Alliance:
[3] The Open Library CardCataWiki:

The United Nations and the New Media/Information Age – Friday

In Austria — but also online –, ibiblio alum Mark McCarthy will be a panelist at the conference The United Nations and the New Media/Information Age: Education for the Next Generation of “the People of the United Nations”

Mark’s panel, “New-Media Mediated Peace Building & Societal Development”, will take place between 4 pm and 6 pm Austrian time or 10 am and noon US Eastern Time. I tried their video test stream and it looks like it will work just fine (it’s on the conference home page; give it a try)>

Mark will be talking about his work with ReliefWeb.int in “ReliefWeb and the Role of Information in Humanitarian Response”

Perils of Public Homage: WUNC and Conference

Sally Greene, who was recently reelected to the Chapel Hill Town Council by a very large margin, and Blogger and Law Professor Eric Muller will be featured on WUNC’s State of Things at noon on Thursday (November 15) talking about the subject of their upcoming conference “The Perils of Public Homage: Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann in History and Memory”.

The conference to be held on Friday November 16 from 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. in the Dialectic Chambers of the Di Phi Society atop of New West, Cameron Ave., UNC-CH Campus is described below and at the Center for the Study of the American South. A complete schedule with speakers biographies and other material is here.

The memory of antebellum North Carolina Supreme Court Judge Thomas Ruffin looms large both on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where a dormitory bears his name, and in the state’s capital, where a statue of the judge greets visitors to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

Across North Carolina, Ruffin, who served as chief justice from 1833 to 1852, is considered the greatest jurist in the state’s history. Remarkably, in the popular mind his reputation has not appreciably suffered for his authorship of State v. Mann (1830), the most notorious judicial opinion in the history of American slave law. In that decision, Ruffin held that North Carolina law insulated the renter of a slave from criminal prosecution for shooting her in the back. “The power of the master must be absolute,” wrote the judge, “to render the submission of the slave perfect.”

On Friday, November 16, experts in the law of slavery and the study of public memory will gather on the UNC campus to reconsider the position of Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann within our historical legacy. Convening in the restored Dialectic Chambers of the Di Phi Society in New West, these scholars will take the judge and his work as points of departure for exploring the difficulties of remembering prominent people who supported systems of oppression.

Speakers will include legal scholars Sanford Levinson, Mark Tushnet, Al Brophy, Adrienne Davis, Sally Greene, and Eric Muller, historians Laura Edwards and David Loewenthal, philosopher Bernard Boxill, and North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge James A. Wynn, Jr.

The event, which will get under way at 9 a.m. and continue until 4:30 p.m. with a break for lunch, is jointly sponsored by the University of North Carolina School of Law, the Center for the Study of the American South, and the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities. It is free and open to the public.

Sally, Eric and Sanford Levinson “Rethinking Ruffin” on State of Things here.

SunSPOTs – Demo and talk (Small Programmable Object Technology)

What: SunSPOTS talk and demo (not a sale pitch they promise)
Where: Sitterson 014
When: Thursday November 15th at 3:30
Who: Sun Labs’ David Simmons

More: David has hands-on experience in building applications for SunSPOTs and was instrumental in its design and development, will be on hand to offer his insight into this amazing product.

The SunSPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) was developed in the Sun Labs and represents the future of embedded systems. Already used throughout academia, students and professors alike are finding new and interesting uses for SunSPOTs. Each SunSPOT comes equipped with a processor, memory, eight external tri-color LEDs, light sensors, temperature sensors, an seemingly countless practical uses.

At its core, a SunSPOT is an embedded system. But, unlike other embedded systems that must be programmed using a low-level language such as assembly or C, SunSPOT applications are developed in Java. By allowing Java applications to be uploaded and run on an internal Java Virtual Machine, Sun is not only opening up SunSPOTs to more users than many other embedded systems, it is also leaving the final function of each SunSPOT up to the end user. By following a simple API with which to interface the SunSPOT, developers nationwide have created unique uses for SunSPOTs – everything from animal research to rocket testing and much more!

Tomorrow: YouTube, WeTube, TheyTube

Gary Marchionini tests our/your/their joint command of personal pronouns as he shoots the video rapids in HisTube tomorrow

Tuesday, November 13 at 11 a.m. in the Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library:

YouTube, WeTube, TheyTube: How the new video revolution changes everything
Led by Dr. Gary Marchionini
Panel members: Paul Jones, Cal Lee, Terrell Russell, Chirag Shah, plus (maybe) surprise guests

The YouTube phenomenon has changed the way people create, display, and watch video on the Web. Video is now being integrated into the Web experience on a more fundamental level than ever before, cropping up everywhere from Facebook walls to blogs to podcasts. Now that the two have been enmeshed, what challenges and opportunities do this new hybrid medium present? And with all that non-text information out there, how do we adjust our notions of metadata, indexing, and searching so that we can actually find what we need?

Wed @ Wootini – Onionhead Monster meets SteveB

Steve B writes to let us know that he’ll be “using open source software (GPL’d Audacity sound editor) as a required component of [his] music for this show”:

Onion Head Monster and Subscape Annex invade Carrboro, 14 November

Paul Friedrich of Onion Head Monster and Hellcar fame is holding a reception this Wednesday evening at Wootini. Around Paul’s presentation, I will perform an improvisational live looping set of my audible vision concept, taking Paul’s posters for the exhibit and processing the graphic images as sound files, chopping and looping the samples.

See and hear Paul Friedrich speak.
See and hear Paul’s artwork.

For an introduction to audible vision, see HERE

When: Wednesday 14 November, 7-10pm.
Where: Wootini, Carr Mill Mall, Carrboro NC.

Jones @ NCSU CS Graduation

40 years of NCSU CS
39.5 years after I went to Raleigh to take classes in something brand new called Computer Science at North Carolina State University, I’m headed back — at least for one day. I’m giving the graduation speech for the Winter grads on December 12. The Department is only one year older than my experience with it so while I’m not from the very first cohort to graduation after a full 4 years, I’m very early in the program.

I only get, thankfully the grads to be are probably saying, about 10 or 15 minutes to excite, inform, educate and amuse the grads.

What would you tell today’s Computer Science grads before they go out into the world?

Silence of the Jones

I took a little time off the blog this week, for the first time in years really, busy working on balancing work and attention to Sally’s re-election bid with my other projects. Much of my time was spent pounding signs into very hard ground and then in the past two days finding them and pulling them back up. Yikes! I’m best at that level of politics.

The good news is that Sally was reelected handily only out of first place overall by about a dozen votes. ibiblio is doing very well. Many interesting things are happening in the social networking area. Our seminar is becoming immersed in social capital theory and I think in a good way.

I’m reading poetry with Jerry Eidenier and Marielle Prince on Sunday afternoon at 4 pm at Saint Matthews Church in Hillsborough. More on that here.

The Carolina Union Activities Board just wrote to say that they would join in sponsoring DJ Spooky’s visit to UNC on February 8th. Watch the ibiblio home page for details.

Joe Herzenberg (1941 – 2007)

Last night long time Chapel Hill political activist, Joe Herzenberg died following a long illness. Sally was among the last to visit Joe and also visited with him during his last hospitalization. Many of Joe’s friends are posting their memories of Joe on the Orange Politics blog where the owner/moderator Ruby Sinreich has turned the pages black in Joe’s honor.

Among the press stories recognizing Joe is this one from the Daily Tar Heel and this one from the News and Observer. And as it was broken online by the Carrboro Citizen.

Corey sends this link to an oral history of Joe talking about the Cane Creek Reservoir and other political happenings in 1985.

Bob Young has the Gnack

Bob Young is known as the founder of Red Hat, Lulu.com and Lulu.tv, but he is also the founder of Gnack.com an open source solutions company that aims to support open source media players and servers like Gnash and Cygnal.

According to Gnashdev.org:

Gnash is a GPL’d Flash movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.


Bob will be speaking at UNC (as noted below)
as we begin to celebrate ibiblio’s 15th year.
Bob Young
Who: Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com, Lulu.tv and Red hat
Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Location: Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Room 103

Woz at NCSU (amongst other Stately things)

Steve Wozniak
Just back from my ole alma mater, North Carolina State, where the Computer Science department is celebrating the 40th anniversary of their (our) founding. When I entered NCSU in September 1968, the department had only been in place for one year. As I recall, there were no PhD’s in Computer Science on the faculty — yet. That would soon change.

It was a pleasure to see the current faculty explaining their research in 5 minute segments ;-> One that stood out was Dr. Robert Fornaro who tried to teach me sometime in about 1969 or 70. His dedication and appreciation of the undergraduate computer science experience is still as fresh as it was in those first classes.

Of the speakers, Al Aho the A in awk (amongst other things) posed the challenging unanswered questions in Computer Science including on from Bill Gates. The Gatesian question goes like this Moore’s Law is seen mostly from the benefits in computer power achieved, but the Law also shows a doubling of power usage and of heat produced. Given that multiprocessors have kept the growth of processing power and the production of heat growing, how will programming fully take advantage of the increased power and how will hardware solutions deal with the increased heat. (highly paraphrased).

Larry Hodges of UNC-Charlotte
took great pride in presenting the work of his students, undergrads, with Avatars, ChatBots, Virtual Humans, Virtual Characters, and Embodied Agents as he argued that avatars were the Human-computer Interface of the future.

Dr. Dorothy Strickland of do2learn.org too was interested in avatars and animation but to a different end. Her work is with special need education especially but by no means restricted to autistic children.

The main attraction was Steve Wozniak, already a holder of an NCSU CS Honorary Degree and ready to tell tales of pre-Apple glory (which are also available in his new iWoz book which was itself available for purchase outside the hall). Woz was wound up and wonderful and full of tales of his various pranks, of blue boxes, of dropping out of college and later returning as “Rocky Raccoon Clark” to graduation from Berkeley, of his shocking Steve Colbert and of as many of his early engineering innovations and pranks.

Bob Young at UNC – October 30

Bob Young – The connection between Ibiblio, Open Source, Lulu, and the number 42
Bob Young
Who: Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com, Lulu.tv and Red hat
Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Location: Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Room 103

Handy online printable poster here [PDF]

More info and signup at Facebook and the ibiblio speakers page.

Entrepreneurs can be found in all fields of human activity, not just business. The common characteristic of Entrepreneurs, and most humans for that matter, is they eventually get tired of just listening and throwing things at the television set, or the pompous Professor at the front of the room, or their software supplier, and instead decide one day to do something about it. This explains Paul Jones and Ibiblio, it explains Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds of the free-software-open-source-gnu-linux movement, and it explains Lulu. It also explains the number 42.

Bob Young is the founder and CEO of Lulu.com, the premiere international marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 100,000 recently published titles and more than 2,500 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries.

Lulu.com, founded in 2002, is Young’s most recent endeavour. The success of this company has earned Young notable recognition; he was named one of the “Top 50 Agenda-Setters in the Technology Industry in 2006” and was ranked as the fourth “Top Entrepreneur for 2006,” both by Silicon.com.

In 1993 Young co-founded Red Hat, the open source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Red Hat has evolved into a Fortune 500 company and chief rival to Microsoft and Sun. His success at Red Hat won him industry accolades, including nomination as one of Business Week’s “Top Entrepreneurs” in 1999.

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