Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 56 of 147)

20th Century Fox: Blame Canada

Can it be true?

Are 50% of the world’s pirated movies coming (not movies featuring pirates) from Canada?

A nation of only 33 million people obviously very busy, camcorder obcesssed people (nearly 18% of whom are under 14 years old)?

Canada.com reports that being bilingual is one thing that makes Canada a pirate hot spot (even though “pirate” and “hot spot” are not terms I’d associate with Canada).

As much as 50 per cent of the world’s pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.

According to an investigation by Twentieth Century Fox, most of the illegal recording, or “camcording,” is taking place in Montreal movie houses, taking advantage of bilingual releases and lax copyright laws.

[…]

Science Blogging Conference Wrap-UP

science bloggers conference logo

From Anton (for Bora, Brian and me):

Hello again. We wanted to contact you one more time to extend our heartfelt thanks to you for attending the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. Bora, Brian, Paul and I were delighted to meet you and greet you last weekend, and we truly appreciate your participation in the event.

Here are a some wrap-up announcements:

1. Please take a few minutes to share your comments about this conference and suggestions for how we might improve the next science blogging event. Use this easy to fill-in form.

2. The wiki has a comprehensive listing of links about the conference. You can find audio files for Dr. Willard’s talk and slides for Dr. Stemwedel’s talk, as well as links to all of your postings before, during and after the event. If we’re missing your posts, send Bora a message.

3. Help us thank our sponsors, donors, contributors and discussion leaders by visiting their blogs and websites. Click on the logos at the bottom of the wiki home page, or find a comprehensive listing of people to thank here. If you or your organization would like to get on the list of sponsors for the next science blogging conference, or help organize the event, send Anton a message or add a comment at the end of the feedback form.

4. Public Library of Science graciously donated t-shirts. In return, they ask that anyone who took a shirt sign up for the free PLoS One service and try it out for a while.

5. The science blogging anthology is out. Get it.

6. Lastly, if you live in or visit the Triangle region (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill), please join us at another of our BlogTogether events, including the Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup and the Raleigh Bloggers Meetup. Monitor our blog at and sign up for our mailing list to learn about our events and social gatherings.

That’s all. Again, thank you. Keep in touch, and keep on blogging.

Anton, Bora, Brian and Paul

Student Protests at UNC

Students protesting the war - 1970.

This is not a current event but an exhibit and series of panels and talks at Wilson Library called “I Raised my Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill” which opens today.

Sally will be leading a panel on Jan. 30, 2007 called “Pressing the Hold-outs: The Desegregation Sit-ins of 1963-1964,” at Wilson Library, 5:30 – 7 p.m.

Since I was there the first time round for some of this, I’ll be doing a bit of family work most of those evenings.

Lyceum-based TeachFor.US in LA Times

Last night, Sally and I watched Davis Guggenheim‘s The First Year, a moving and informative documentary that follows five teachers in their first year in the classroom.

We could have been reading Adam Geller’s blog of his first year teaching in St Louis with Teach For America, In the Lou. It’s much more dramatic than the documentary.

Adam’s adventures in teaching were just covered and linked to by the Los Angeles Times today.

The TeachFor.US blogsphere uses Lyceum and is hosted on ibiblio.org

UnBound commentaries

I couldn’t get up to NYC for Google’s Unbound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World at the New York Public Library on Thursday. Nice of them to ask me tho:

Please join us for a day examining how the book business has changed and how it will continue to evolve. Hear from thought leaders and industry veterans who are taking advantage of our increasingly digital world – from blogs and social networks to print-on-demand and online access.

Some great folks were there though including Chris Anderson, Cory Doctorow, Tim O’Reilly and Seth Godin.

The confab created enough of a stir to merit commentaries around the world including a longish doubtful commentary,
Count this be the final chapter in the life of the book? (Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times – London), and many more (Google News search for “Google Unbound”)

Technorati shows only light blogging by tags 

At the Science Bloggers Conference

Murphey Hall is full. Folks are struggling to get on the net. The biggest problem is the UNC set up. Once on, the room is fairly well provisioned.

We’re even on schedule.

Food and set up are all fine — except that the Open Eye dropped the ball on delivering coffee. We (Brian) had to run get some from another nearby coffee shop.

Badger has a picture up already.

Did I mention that the swag bags are full of great science publications?
Bora gets things going. It was his idea to have a science blogging conference.

Then Anton announce Dr. Hunt Willard who created to first artificial human chromosome who is talking about science communications. He has amusing stories about his adventures trying to get his stories covered sanely by the press (MSM that is) and about writing OpEd pieces. (see AskBig).
Badger is IMing me with stories of digital accordions in the middle of all of this.

Props given to the Public Library of Science and various F/LOSS journals in discussion with Dr. Willard. Great discussion of scientists speaking to the public. Now a guy from Lancet asking about blogging and peer-review publishing — specifically about timing. Worries about the credibility of blogging and of scientists in the face of peer-review and citation. Will that change? Willard says no change. But he thinks that our current students who are used to real time will be the ones who bridge the two worlds. Can Lancet provide that bridge? Time frame? Willard says within three years. That soon.

[break]

Janet Stemwedel leads a discussion about how to be a blogging scientist.
[still helping folks set up their wireless. I will have learned a lot about WinDoz once this conference is over.]

Badger is amongst the many liveblogging the event. Other liveblogs and pictures at Technorati

[lunch and break outs — I exercise my garbage removal skills which are awesome if I do say so myself]

Adnaan Wasey of Online NewsHour is talking about Teaching and Science. Lea Winerman shows a section on Pig Farm Politics which has a NC angle.

How can a science blogger convert their stuff for use in teaching — what is a lesson plan? is asked by a science blogger.

Adnaan is pretending to be a wiki sorta. he is refering to a page on the wiki (linked above as teaching and science)

Is science about accuracy (as one guy here says; i think he means classical empiricism) or about the process of science through falsification or Popper’s critical rationalism or from Kuhn‘s more complex vision of “paradigm shifts.” Basically a discussion of the role of accuracy. Is accuracy the end or one of the tools that help science progress by falsification. We’re not even touching on critical science theory.

Science resources being tossed out like Science House at NCSU and Moodle and BlackBoard (which I don’t personally like) and Google Earth.

Dave Warnick recommends reading teachers’ blogs; Ouida Meyers recommends LearnNC and Dave’s tool ClassBlogmeister.

At drinks and later at dinner, we were joined by elected officials, US Representative Brad Miller (NC-13) and Chapel Hill Town Council Member Sally Greene. Miller has an interesting announcement which I have been ask not to blog just yet.

Great conference! Thanks to Anton, Bora and Brian for all their hard and good work.

Google to NC mountains

They’re already in Chapel Hill, but now it looks like Google will also be in the NC mountains near Lenoir (where they can really use the jobs). NC is paying tho with some serious incentives. AP reports here. (thanks Fred).

Rick Smith of WRAL has the most details I’ve seen here.

I may be part of a News and Observer story on the Google-NC site if Jonathan Cox takes anything from our conversation. I hope he uses the part where I say something like: “What Walmart, FedEx, Food Town and the like do with atoms, Google will be doing with electrons. That’s using spokes and hubs to localize service, avoid highway jams, anticipate needs and supply redundancy for their systems.”

Update: Here’s what Jonathan said I said in his article (News and Observer Business section) — and he was taking notes so he’s probably got it right

“The reason that Food Lion, Wal-Mart, Federal Express, all those places, work is they have an incredible delivery system based on hubs delivering atoms,” said Paul Jones, an associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of Ibiblio.org, a digital library. “This is the same kind of thing, just delivering electrons.”
Robert X. Cringely has his ideas about what Google is up to here (and in SC where Cringely lives).

Bora and Science Bloggers Conference on NPR

science bloggers conference logo

Serena alerts us to Bora‘s appearance on NPR’s Market Place this morning talking about tomorrow’s Science Bloggers Conference.

LISA NAPOLI: Forget those pricey science journals. Debut your cure for cancer in a blog. From the Marketplace Innovations Desk at North Carolina Public Radio, Janet Babin reports.

JANET BABIN: More than a hundred journalists, scientists and teachers are coming to the blog conference at the University of North Carolina.

The goal is to get more people to think of blogs as a tool to communicate about science.

Bora Zivkovic helped organize the event. He says science blogs accomplish a lot.

BORA ZIVKOVIC: Debunking pseudo-science, fighting against anti-science, and science popularization. Hoping that especially kids who are online all the time will bump into science blogs and see cool stuff and get excited about science.

Zivkovic was one of the first researchers to publish data using a blog — a trend he predicts will become more popular.

Conference attendees will learn how to start a blog and how to use one to collaborate on scientific exploration.

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