Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 33 of 146)

Dancing with Art – Jane Filer Show

Saturday night amongst our social stops was a wonderful art opening at Tyndall Galleries in UMall of new work by Jane Filer, one of our favorite artists and one of our favorite people. The show itself was a delight. The gallery was crowded with great people. There was a drummer/percussionist playing and that seemed very appropriate — especially later when the paintings came to live and danced through and with the crowd.

Jane Filer has up a video of the dancing figures here. It’s a must see.

Sally has some great still shots of a different mask with its owner and with its creator.

Two years ago, some pioneer maskers invaded the Mall itself. They’re seen here, and here, and here and here with gallery owner Jane Tyndall and artist Jane Filer.

Greene-mania at Festifall

I usually don’t write about Sally and politics. This Sunday, we spent the day at Festifall giving out balloons and talking to people. And despite the heat, unusual for October, we had a great time. Festifall wasn’t overcrowded and the mood was relaxed. Lots of kids with their grandparents and at least once with their great grandparents. We did an interview with the Daily Tar Heel which hit the paper today. We also learned that Sally had gotten the important Sierra Club endorsement.

Friends of ibiblio

Last night I got a Facebook note asking me if there was a “Friends of ibiblio” group there. Hee! Not then but in about 2 minutes there was one. Within an hour there were 50 members. By noon on Friday only with the group only about 12 hours old, there were about 125. Just now there about over 160 members. Wow! That was a surprise to me and a nice surprise too.

If you like ibiblio and would like to share the love of the love of sharing, jump on over and join up. There is discussion and announcements and I’ll use the group to message you about upcoming ibiblio events such as the Bob Young talk, the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference and a visit from DJ Spooky.

Free Yourself and Your Stuff from Blackboard with bFree 2

Uncle Dave alerts us to content-freeing software, Version 2 of bFree, the Blackboard Course Extractor.

The popular bFree application has been revised to extract far more material from a Blackboard course archive, and to make your exploration and use of that material easier.

The program now extracts Announcements; Discussion Board entries, archives, and attachments; and Digital Drop Box and group File Exchange uploads. It continues to extract wiki entries and attachments, Staff Information and attachments, and Content Area pages, including folders, descriptions, links, and attached files of all kinds. Tests, Gradebook, Surveys, Assignments, and Pools are among the content items not yet supported.

bFree will quickly create an independent web site for a course. The site can be placed on a web server or CD, or even loaded into Sakai. The web site mimics the structure of the original Blackboard course.

The interface now displays previews along with the course outline, and provides a larger area for previews. All texts, titles, names, and descriptions can be searched to locate materials of interest.

All the features of bFree are documented within bFree itself.

bFree is available, free of charge HERE.

A document detailing version changes is here.

(The bFree application is Copyright 2006-2007 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. Your suggestions and comments are welcome; send them to David_Moffat@unc.edu.)

Fred-mania in print and in person

Steve Outing of Editor and Publisher’s Stop the Presses asks newspapers “What’s Your Facebook Strategy?” But before he gets an answer from the papers, he asks friend and Facebook expert Fred Stutzman what a newspaper’s Facebook strategy should be.

Fred’s talk, “Do you REALLY know Facebook?” will be opening the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center’s free Current Science Forums at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007 in MPSC’s Banquet Hall. Enter through the east entrance doors (near the Coker Arboretum) and come to the second floor.

What Bob says Bob Young will say

The connection between Ibiblio, Open Source, Lulu, and the number 42. will be the title of Bob Young’s talk on October 30 (details below).

And here’s a summary of how he’ll be making those connections:

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
WHO: Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com, Lulu.tv and Red Hat
WHAT: As seen on Facebook!
WHEN: Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 3:30pm – 5:00pm
WHERE: The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC (moved to a larger room)

Bora! Bora! Bora!

Bora
Center for the Digital Libraries (CRADLE) presents

Speaker: Bora Zivkovic, the Online Community Manager at PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science)
Date: Friday, Oct 5
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Location: Manning Hall, Room 208

Title: Science 2.0

Abstract:
The development of the Web has provided new ways for doing science, publishing and communicating science, networking within a scientific community, and teaching science. Blogs and wikis, existing social networking sites (e.g, Facebook), new science networking sites, Open Access Publishing and Open Notebook Science are just some of the many ways that scientists, students and interested laypeople are starting to change the way science (communication) is done, connected, used and archived and the future is difficult to predict – which does not stop us from speculating, which is the fun part, so let’s speculate!

Why Net Neutrality is essential – Verizon edition

The attempt by Verizon to chill speech in the form of text-message alerts by NARAL gets serious considered reactions across the net — and others. This kind of action by what should be a common carrier with no authority over content is exactly what net neutralists have feared and predicted. Thanks for making it real, Verizon. Now let’s get some legislation and enforcement in place.

Fellow J-school blogger Leroy Townes says more at his TalkPolitics blog.

MojoMom
Amy Tiemann posts her reaction, as a concerned mom, at her CNet (parent . thesis) blog.

Here’s what Verizon found offensive:

End Bush’s global gag rule against birth control for world’s poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice

UPDATE: Verizon just reversed thier position and will allow the NARAL messages says CNet.

The democratization of innovation makes everybody happy

I get the money quote in a Daily Tar Heel article out today about the success of Red Hat and of Open Source, Local open-source provider thrives.

The writer, Alex Henderson, does a good job of finding students who can say why open source and Red Hat are important. Carolina Open Source Initiative‘s Doug Whitfield also gives props to ibiblio.org (thanks Doug):

The other is the nonprofit, UNC-run ibiblio.org, an extensive online library and digital archive. “They’re the kind of poster child of open source,” Whitfield said.

[…]

Whitfield said ibiblio is an equally important member of the open-source community.

“What ibiblio has meant to the open-source community through the years, I don’t think that can be overstated,” he said. “I think that gets lost in the shuffle because they don’t make money.”

Feel free to send us money!

Trading on the currency of Roush

Fellow J-school blogger Chris Roush‘s Talking Biz News gets cited as on of the Top 100 Academic Blogs Every Professional Investor Should Read by Jessica Hupp of currencytrading.net. Hupp writes: “This blog from SABEW and the Carolina Business News Initiative discusses why economic pundits are so negative, who the media blames for economic issues, and other fun economic topics.”

Unfortunately, Hupp gets the link wrong and send you to the Library of Georgia State University instead of sending you to Chris’ great blog. UPDATE: The link is fixed now.

Woh! How to Who.

genetic dr who story:

  1. set up a feeling of a certain time
  2. but something is askew
  3. involves aliens who are not friendly
  4. people are disappearing and/or being eaten
  5. enter who and co making witty comments
  6. who crew == around 2.5-3.5 members
  7. team up with a native of that time/place
  8. each who partner discovers a bit of what’s up
  9. who crew confront aliens after near death battle
  10. alien and/or who explain it all in a monologue
  11. battle to the death (again but this time we really mean it)
  12. second monologue to explain the parts left out from last monologue
  13. back to the tardis

The Old Ceremony set list

Out amongst the scene-sters tonight at the Cat’s Cradle where the wonderful Modern Skirts opened for the Old Ceremony.

Not Ready To Go
Talk Straight
Believer
Until My Voice is Gone
Morning Glories
Shame (new one)
Our One Mistake
Reservations
Bao Chin
Blood and Oil
Pennsylvania
Papers in Order
Get to Love

Encore:
Murmur in Her Heart
Someone I Used to Know
Dumbed Down

Google unleashes the Brazillians

TechCrunch reports that Google will “out open” FaceBook in November as they release APIs to iGoogle and Orkut as a first step. Orkut is famously, or infamously, because Brazillian quickly much to the apparent surprise of Google and the “cool kids” who first rushed to the social networking site as it was growing.

Michael Arrlington further writes:

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information – the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more – such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform – meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

Dare Obasanjo adds some more detailed insight and speculation on his blog.

Stuffism to be discussed

You see the title “Why select?” but people actually do select and like selecting. The real question will be who selects and when.

My answer: Not archivists, but a variety of communities of data-miners and recommenders both human and programs will be selecting. When? Not at the time of adding to the archives so much as later at a just-in-time basis.

“Storage is Cheap: Why Select?”
Thursday, September 27, 12:30-1:45pm

Storage media for digital information are extremely cheap and getting exponentially cheaper over time. The price of a terabyte of hard drive space is a few hundred dollars, and in a decade it will be less than a dollar. The cost of the expertise of well-trained information professionals, on the other hand, is quite high and likely to increase over time. So shouldn’t we stop worrying about selection and just capture and keep as much material as possible?

Moderated by Dr. Cal Lee Panelists will include UNC Libraries’ Rich Szary, SILS faculty member Paul Jones, SILS students Lori Eakin and Abbey Thompson, Kelly Eubank – Electronic Records Archivist for State of North Carolina and Duke University’s Electronic Records Archvist Seth Shaw.

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