Accept no substitutes

Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 30 of 38)

First He Invented Easter Eggs then…

Warren Robinett invented Easter Eggs hidden in computer games when he hid a famous first one in his Atari Adventure. He writes now to tell us about his publication of some of the results of his nanotechnology research, “Defect-tolerant interconnect to nanoelectronic circuits: internally redundant demultiplexers based on error-correcting codes.”

Got that?

If not, Warren explains a bit:

If the abstract doesn’t quite make sense to you, some context is that a “crossbar” is a very small circuit structure we can fabricate where one set of parallel wires crosses another set of parallel wires. A bit can be stored at each junction, so that the crossbar can act as an extremely high-density memory. Our group at HP has made wires as narrow as 6 atoms wide (2 nanometers wide). A problem we have with stuff this small is that there are sure to be defects in what we fabricate, and the paper is about a defect-tolerance technique — a way to make the crossbars such that they will work in spite of having a lot of defects present. The “demultiplexer” the paper talks about is a kind of digital circuit needed to select individual bits in the memory being accessed.

CopyNight, Copyright Day

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. And tonight is CopyNight. The first is a promotion of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which says that the objectives of the day are:

WIPO has tailored its 2005 World Intellectual Property Day message and publicity material towards young people. The over-arching objectives are:

  • To encourage young people to recognize their own ability to create;
  • To increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps to foster creativity and innovation;
  • To raise awareness of the importance in daily life of patents, copyright, trademarks and designs

.

On the other hand,

CopyNight is a monthly social gathering of people interested in restoring balance in copyright law. We meet over drinks once a month in many cities to discuss new developments and build social ties between artists, engineers, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, and many others.

And there is a CopyNight in Raleigh which is sponsored by old friend and theremin player, Steve Burnett, but somehow I’m just finding out about it.

Beyond Heroism!

21st Century Achievement Awards image
We are now beyond Heroism and beyond Laureate-ism here at sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. I just received a note from the Computerworld folks that we are Finalists in the Education and Academia Category (only 5 finalists in each category) for the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Awards.
We’ll be at the June Awards Ceremony in Washington at the National Building Museum Building on June 6th.
I think I’m to wear a tuxedo again. Maybe I should buy one. And possibly I get to wear our medal again too! Just glad to represent all the folks who have worked on sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and all our contributors.

John Edwards on Podcast 411

Rob W of Podcast 411 features Senator and Vice Presidental candidate Johnn Edwards on his most recent show. Senator Edwards talks about his own podcasts done at his home with his family and post them on his website, One America Committee dot Org.
Note: Rob and Senator Edwards are speaking via Skype (voice over IP).
Rob also gives mention to the podcastercon.org being planned here with Brian Russell in the lead of the planning. (Check it out).

Vanished News Found – Berkeley Laptop and Dr. Rine

Miles at tinyapps.org has found and put together a few sources for the missing ABC News story on ranting laptop theft victim and Berkeley prof Jasper Rine. Miles also notices that the original video has been edited at Berkeley to remove Rine’s rant — so much of archives as history. But luckily there are copies around the Net [torrent of QT format] in case you are wondering what we’ve been talking about.


Page 1 on the story in Google cache.
Thanks to Miles.
Page 2 of the story in Google cache. Thanks to Miles and Julian Robichaux.

Earlier stories here about Rine and the laptop theft and here about the vanishing story on ABC News.

Alert commenter, Julian Robichaux also points us to Jasper Rine’s teaching statement in which he tells us all “Facts just aren’t that important.” To be fair to Rine, he’s getting our attention in order to make a point. That is teaching the emerging discoveries in biology that the process of discovery and research is more important to learn than a series of facts of the moment.

CalStuff blogger, Allen Lew let’s us know that the Berkeley student blog is on the case as well with pointers to articles on Rine and laptop there.

To our knowledge, the laptop remains unfound.

Vanishing News Story – ABC version

Not long after the story broke on the net of the angry rant by stolen laptop victim Jasper Rine, a story pointing out the very obvious problems with the claims made by Rine appeared on the ABC News site. The story by Hari Sreenivasan did a great and lively job of describing why Rine’s claims were wrong while sympathizing with him over the theft a bit.
Not long after I linked to it, the story vanished. Luckily I grabbed at least one good paragraph for my post. As it turns out no one else grabbed any of the story that I nor others can find.
Miles at tinyapps.org managed to get a screen shot of Google News to prove the story existed once.
Now not only is the ABC News story gone, but the site that broke the story originally seems to have vanished as well (at least for me for Miles of tinyapps).
Here’s the challenge: Can you find the story anywhere? In a cache? Other places on the Net?

Meyer and Gillmor in the Economist

In an ongoing in North Carolina invasion of Britain, Phil Meyer appears in today’s Economist (just as Jamie Boyle is in the Financial Times). Phil is quoted, his book cited and props given.
Recent visitor, Dan Gillmor also gets star treatment in the same article, “The Future of Journalism: Yesterday’s Papers,” which asks or rathers tells us what Rupert Murdock told US editors last week, the business of news is changing drastically.
Also mentioned blogs, podcasting, wikis — the usual technological suspects.

Laptop sagas (stolen and found)

All the ibiblio office is abuzz over the video performance of Berkeley Professor Jasper Rine as he visits a class in which the pharmacological effects of coffee and of viagra are explained to put fear in the heart of the person who stole his (Rine’s) laptop during the another class. Boingboing has good coverage and links to many versions of the tape. And there is even a cartoon version. ABC News’ Hari Sreenivasan discloses the most unbelievable part of Rine’s over the top tirade:

At the beginning of the monologue, Rine outlines how he reinstalled the laptop’s version of Windows on a second machine and how folks at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters responded within 15 minutes to the anomaly. (The idea that Microsoft would respond in 15 minutes to anything ought have been the first indication that there were some liberties with the truth.)

It turns out that it’s not such a good year for laptops with sensitive information at Berkeley.

And it’s not such a good year in Hampshire, England where one of the many laptops missing from the Ministry of Defense was found still full of data.

Brainz: Meta and Music

MusicBrainz
Robert Kaye, who has the most creative hair styles known, writes to announce the MetaBrainz Foundation, which is designed to run the evolving MusicBrainz project.

MusicBrainz is a user maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the name of an artist, the name of an album and list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public.

With the creation of the MetaBrainz Foundation, the MusicBrainz project enters its second phase of life. In the first incarnation, the project was privately maintained and focused primarily on basic music metadata described above. Today the MusicBrainz project has the legal backing and infrastructure of the MetaBrainz Foundation, which will allow it to embark on a mission to expand its scope.

MusicBrainz recently released the Advanced Relationships feature which allows volunteers to enter vastly more information about music than previously possible. This new feature allows MusicBrainz to capture essential music information as well as obscure facts about music and the musicians who created it. With these new features, MusicBrainz takes the first step towards creating a user contributed music encyclopedia.

MetaBrainz has a killer Board, including Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow and Dan Brickley and is officially tax-exempt and is ready to receive your donations and your help.

Pimp My Ride – Library edition

This just in from the North Carolina Library Association:

Senate Bill 971 – North Carolina Libraries Special Plate – The bill authorizes the Division of Motor Vehicles to issue a North Carolina Libraries special registration plate. The additional fees for the special plate will go to the North Carolina Library Association, Inc. for the Association’s public programs.

Notes: The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Finance. Each year several bills are introduced to add special plates for the benefit of various groups. This type of bill is generally held until late in the legislative session for consideration. If the bill passes, plates will not be issued until there are at least 300 requests and there is no estimate given on the amount of income the plates could generate.

Ross A. Holt
Head of Reference
Randolph County Public Library

Note: the primary sponsor is our State Senator, Eleanor Kinnaird.

Tryest Ye “Fortify_Source”?

Tryest Ye?
So it’s a beautiful day and we’re working outside at the Grind. John R suddenly starts laughing outloud. Why? He was amused by this image from the Red Hat Magazine site.
I was amused because I read “Tryest” without the “E” It’s that kind of day. So beautiful that the smallest things bring joy and diversion. The only part that dampens things down is that I’m working while I’m out here.

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