Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 36 of 146)

Release the MainActor Code

Joey, who writes well and wisely about Video on Linux, alerts us to an effort to get MainActor’s code released as official development has been discontinued.

MainActor, a commercial product for video editing on a Linux platform, has been discontinued. This means that the source code could potentially be made open-source. A petition is circulating to encourage MainConcept to consider releasing at least some of their code.

A similar initiative was started by the Blender Foundation many years ago, and they successfully bought the source code for something like a hundred thousand euros, and then released it as open source.

MainActor has always been a well reviewed product, although the price tag was generally too much for many people. A source code release from MainConcept would come in the form of a partial code base, with their proprietary encoding technology removed. An effort would need to be made to replace those parts with something like libavcodec. If Blender is a good model, the process will be slow, but the potential for an active community is vast. Today Blender has one of the largest, most enthusiastic, and fastest growing user communities out there.

Moscow summer = no hot water

Fellow traveller Larry Lamb alerts us to this NYTimes article “For Russians, Summer in the City Means a Freeze on Hot Water”. Yes there is a personal story behind that.

A few years back, Larry and I were traveling in Moscow on our way to Siberia. The MGIMO folks put us up in a spacious appartment on Leninski Prospect near the Sputnik Hotel.

There were a few things I noticed that were unusual about the place.

It was quite warm, the radiators were really puffing away. And there were no controls on them and no thermostats in the apartment. I looked out the window and noticed that even though it was 50F outside, all my neighbors had their windows open. That’s how you regulated the temperature in your rooms.

The kitchen came with a giant electric tea kettle, bigger than the British ones I’d seen. There was also a great collection of wooden spoons and the like.

The shower worked well and the warm water was refreshing. The towels were thick and fluffy and somehow made without benefit of cotton or any water absorbing material for that matter. They rearranged the moisture on your body until you could step into one of the rooms that were dry from the radiator heat.

Little did I know that all of this could be combined into something wonderful under the right conditions. But not yet.

Larry and I and others made it to Siberia and returned to Moscow. Once there Larry left me for a luxury hotel and his wife. I had a very large apartment to myself.

As I came into the apartment building, I saw a new sign on the door. It had dates that included my stay but that was all I could make out.

Once in the apartment, I learned what had happened. There was no hot water! And when water is cold in Moscow, it is damned cold–even in summer.

Luckily I had been in a banya in Siberia.

I noticed I had many of the makings of a banya here.

First I put the tea kettle on. I put towels in the sink. I closed off one small bed room and closed the windows — soon it was very hot and very dry. I took the wooden tools into the bathroom with the boiling tea kettle.

I soaked the towels as best I could with the hot water until the bathroom was steamy and the towels were scalding.

I jumped in the cold shower (no hot water to be had). I leapt out and whacked myself in the Russian style with the wooden spoons. I then grabbed the towels and wrapped myself up in them briefly. Til I was hot. Then back in the cold shower.

Now out to the dry sauna of the small bedroom for the finish.

At the end I was one of the few folks in my section of Moscow who didn’t smell from the lack of hot water.

Skube and researched writing – Strike Two

In December 2005, Michael Skube wrote a poorly researched (or more properly not researched at all) oped about blogging for the News and Record (Greensboro, NC). [Oddly this article cannot be found in NewsBank or online]

Ed Cone was so shocked that he called Skube to ask him about his experiences reading blogs and found in a very interesting conversation that Skube admitted to having no experience reading blogs at all short of a couple of Andrew Sullivan pieces.

In the process, Ed mentioned Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo. Skube owned up to knowing Marshall from print but had never heard of TPM.

Fast forward to yesterday and a new diatribe against blogs published in the LA Times. Here Skube reheats his arguments, but this time points to TPM as a place where facts aren’t checked. Only one problem, Skube still admits to not having read TPM — this time to Marshall himself.

Instead, Skube claims that his editors altered his article to insert TPM and others. Skube signed off on the article having yet to have done any of the research required to have written it.

Marshall writes about this at TPM. Ed Cone and G’boro bloggers rev up on WordUp. Jay Rosen hits hard on PressThink. Dan Gillmor has his say at Center for Citizen Journalism.

UPDATE: Jay’s piece is republished in Daily Kos with over 300 comments so far.

UPDATE: Our wonderful news librarian reports “the News & Record librarian confirmed that Skube does not permit his columns to be available in the online public archives of the News & Record.” This makes it difficult to place the articles side-by-side.

A Snip from the History of Research Fraud

David H. sends this as an IM:

David: 1974, William Summerlin, reported that he could transplant tissue from genetically unrelated animals without rejection.

Summerlin demonstrated his claims by showing white mice that had black patches on their backs because their skin had been transplanted from unrelated black donor mice.

Summerlin used a black felt-tip marker.

he’s my all-time favorite research misconduct example

Me: he kept a straight face?

David: yes, at the sloan-kettering institute for cancer research and he made his demonstration to robert good

a technician took a look and ratted him out

Isaac Newton may have adjusted calculations to fit observations.

Gregor Mendel’s results with pea plants were cleaner than what is observed, experimentally, indicating that he might have changed the data.

Robert Millikan, in a research paper describing the charge of an electron, failed to mention that he eliminated some data points.

Brewster in Library Journal Interview

Kristina sends out the alert to all of us that Brewster Kahle is interviewed by the Library Journal’s Andrew Richard Albanese in “Scan This Book: In the race to digitize the public domain, is the future of the library at stake?”

Brewster speaks here in his Open Content Alliance capacity, but of course we know him from Archive.org and the emerging Open Library

Note:
at ibiblio.org, we’re involved in several projects with Brewster and his various organizations.

My Blogging Colleagues

The J-School is full of smart writers and experienced reporters. Many of them are now blogging. The latest to announce a blog are Leroy Townes and Anne Johnston with their Talk Politics blog.

Others already blogging are:

Thinking About College Teaching
A forum for the improvement of college teaching by Professor Emeritus Tom Bowers.

Talking Biz News
Information about business journalism from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and Chris Roush, associate professor and director of the Carolina Business News Initiative.

Weblog for Midcareer Copy Editors
Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and hosted by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
(UPDATE Andy Bechtel writes: The Midcareer Copy Editors blog, like the institute itself, has been on hiatus.)

Blue Highways Journal
Carolina Community Media Project director Jock Lauterer blogs about his travels across North Carolina doing his “Community Journalism Roadshow.”

The Editor’s Desk
Andy Bechtel is an assistant professor at the School. His blog is a discussion of writing and editing of all sorts, with an emphasis on the concerns of the newspaper copy desk

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