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Category: General (Page 20 of 135)

Science 2.0 gets Scientific American attention; Science Blogging Conf Full Up

Science Blogging Conference
I haven’t blogged about the 2nd NC Science Blogging Conference lately because it’s filled up! And this time we mean it! Bora and Anton and Brian have done a great job getting great folks as speakers, collecting swag, lining up sponsors and getting the word out. The result is that we’re well funded and well supplied and have a distinguished crowd coming. (see also the Facebook group).

If you didn’t register, you still might want to read this great, and somewhat lengthy, article in Scientific American “Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? : Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.” You can bet that this will be a topic of conversation at the Blogging Conference.

Bora gets the penultimate paragraph in the article:

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. “It’s a Darwinian process,” he says. “About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread.”

Spooky Spooky: Feb 8th at UNC, Feb 9th at Duke

DJ Spooky

Yes we’re all set for DJ Spooky‘s visit to UNC and to Duke. ibiblio is handling the UNC part which will be a free discussion/performance/demo on Friday February 8th at 3 pm at the Carolina Union’s Great Hall. Facebook event page here.

At Duke, Spooky will perform a World Premiere of his “Video Soul: WattStax to the Avant Garde” at 8 pm on Saturday evening February 9th in Reynolds Theater. Order tickets and get more info here.

This is a Performing Arts Special Activities fund program co-sponsored by the Department of Art, the University Program in Cultural Studies, the School of Information and Library Science’s Open Video Project, Carolina Free Culture, Carolina Union Activities Board and ibiblio.org with additional support from the Department of English and Comparative Literature

Bonus: Spooky’s Buddhist Hip Hop track “Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus Mix”

Earlier in the Weekah Speakahz(February 4th) Cliff Missen of Widernet and (February 6th) Siva Vaidhyanathan of Sivacracy will be our guests.

Growing up online – Frontline 1/22 9 pm

“You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties thanks to the Internet,” says danah boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “We can turn our backs and say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘We don’t want a world like this.’ It’s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, ‘Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,’ it’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.”

Yahoo! Music Man puts it on the line

Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music posts his talk to the music industry at the Aspen Live conference. He’s got slides, he’s got video, he’s got attitude. He puts it out there saying that he will no longer “spend his energy attempting to create scarcity.” That means for starters no DRM but there’s more said smarter in his talk and posting.

ibiblio connection: We hosted the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) and worked with ianc@iuma.com in the early through mid-1990s.

The Papermaking Jones (John Dancy-Jones)

John Dancy-Jones (from NandO)
We used to say we were brothers or cousins when we could get away with it. Now John Dancy-Jones, teacher, papermaker, bookmaker (of the honest sort), artist and arts supporter, is featured in a long profile in the News and Observer. The article is good and long overdue. There are few like John D-J and we need many more.

UPDATE: John is working on a blog-to-book project called: The Natural History of Raleigh. You can learn a good deal of the secret natural areas of Raleigh there as well as the plants and animals found around town. John especially loves and can usually find turtles.

Remix Culture Defense from American U.

All the considerate people that I know alert us of this new study from American University’s Center for Social Media, “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video” headed by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the American Law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. “The study is part of a larger Participatory Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation as part of the Center for Social Media’s Future of Public Media Project.”

Great for the reading and for the great video examples that are used. Not the least of which is one of Pat Aufderheide cracking up over some of her favorites (at right from Chronicle.com). Joe Bob says check it out.

Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies Idolatorized at Number 1

VVLL
Without even a real release, the band that provides real release Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies got the Number 1 spot on Idolator for “Can You Dig It?”

I prefer “Candyland” (any song that goes “Supply meets demand, when you wave the wand that’s in your hand. When we go to Candyland, we go to Candyland.” is fine by me).

Congrats to Amanda, Alex, Doug and the band.

(Thanks for the alert, Dave)

Caldo Verde Claro y Masa Harina Cornbread

I cooked a big mess of caldo verde over the weekend using last year’s recipe more or less — with collards not kale. So for today, I thought I’d make the non-puree-based version and serve it up with some masa harina based cornbread.

I found a great recipe for the cornbread on Chow. It turned out great. Distinctive flavors of corn and a very nice consistency.

Next I varied the caldo verde recipe a bit. The major change is to not puree the potato, onion, garlic, sausage, and stock. Instead I just kept it there clear (or as clear as that combination can become). I found some linguica (Portuguese sausage) and used that but it was a little mild so I also added a good bit of hard Spanish chorizo picante. I used two cans of locally produced Luck’s blackeyed peas rinsing them before adding them to the stew.

The result, a good spicy broth (thanks chorizo picante) with wonderful flavors in each bite. The two sausages were complimentary and the potatoes were great as bites instead of puree. The beans and collards gave us a promise of wealth and luck for the coming year and the carrots provided additional color and a slight crunch to the texture. I used a food processor to really shred the collards well — something my house prefers to dealing with the julienned bits — one upside was that the good collard flavor really penetrated the broth.

And it looks beautiful, the colors of the collards, sausage, potatoes, and carrots showing well and tasting great.

Happy New Year in the New South.

Weeka Speakahz: Feb 4 – 9, 2008

Some of this unconfirmed and sites still to be secured, but the week of February 4 – 9, 2008 will be a big one for speakers here at UNC-Chapel Hill and ibiblio.org.

Gen Y loves libraries, J.Fox disses DRM, TeachFor takes off

Generation Y loves public libraries, says Pew Survey (survey here). They are the highest percent visitors. But it’s not the books they are after, says the Reuters article on the report.

“Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries,” [Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results] said.

Internet users were more than twice as likely to patronize libraries as non-Internet users, according to the survey.
More than two-thirds of library visitors in all age groups said they used computers while at the library.

Sixty-five percent of them looked up information on the Internet while 62 percent used computers to check into the library’s resources.

[…]

The survey showed 62 percent of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57 percent of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46 percent of adults aged 53 to 61; 42 percent of adults aged 62 to 71; and just 32 percent of adults over 72.

Note: this is a telephone based survey and so would likely undercount cell using Gen Ys.

Jason Fox of the Foxtrot comic and I are on the same track on many questions of the day — not just about Ent-mas Trees.

Adam Geller reports that the TeachFor.US blogosphere of unofficial Teach for American teachers has taken off this past semester. See his numbers here.

Trust ibiblio says Sunday Times (UK)

Sunday Times Page image
ibiblio is as trustworthy as Microsoft and the CIA! says Sunday Times (UK).

From The Sunday Times
December 30, 2007

The truth’s out there – honestly
We all know the pitfalls of Wikipedia, so where can you find some real facts online?

by James Knight

It has become a reflex reaction in the digital age. If you have a question that needs an answer or a fact to check, simply head online and tap it into Google. More often than not you will be directed to Wikipedia, where the answer is laid out for you.

The only problem is, it may not be the right answer.

Though many of us have come to rely on the online encyclopedia, every entry in it is available for anyone to edit, so you can’t always trust what you find there.

Fortunately, there are numerous more accurate resources on the web.

The trick is knowing where to look for them.

[…]

REFERENCE SOURCES

As an alternative to Wikipedia, try www.refdesk.com. This portal offers links to all manner of free dictionaries and encyclopedias, such as Microsoft’s Encarta, which has 42,000 articles. Conscientious researchers also have the option to head to sites with a better academic pedigree. Drawing together a range of global public-domain academic resources (of varying quality), www.ibiblio.org is worth dredging if you have a wide field of inquiry – cultural development in China, say.

For definitive statistics on any country in the world, the CIA World Factbook (www.tinyurl.com/2b2kg9) takes some beating. It contains up-to-date figures on everything from population to climate, life expectancy to natural resources and territorial disputes.

[…]

Public.Resource.org == Lots of your government docs

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org announces a plan to digitize a *lot* (60 Million pages) of your government documents held at the Boston Public Library. The project, with support of Archive.org and the Library, is funded in part by a challenge grant from the Omidyar Network and the Kahle-Austin Foundation fund.

See also John Markoff‘s NYTimes story (here).

(Note: ibiblio.org supports Public.Resource.org’s distributions with our Osprey Bittorrent service)

Craig: list is not killing newspapers; Lish, a better Carver?

In an interview in ComputerWorld, Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List, tells about his business, its successes and why it’s not what is killing newspapers.

At the New Yorker, correspondence between editor Gordon Lish and short story writer Raymond Carver shows something of their complex artistic relationship over time. And a version of “Beginners” (Carver) or “What we talk about when we talk about love” (Lish’s edit) shows what Lish did with or to Carver. My take isn’t one that late Carver lovers will like: Lish made the better story by far. (Note: I did the selection, headnote and teacher’s guide for the Health Anthology of American Literature section on Raymond Carver. There I chose “A Small Good Thing” the un-Lished version of “The Bath” I like both versions, but I prefer the longer one in this case.).

Vanishing Newspaper, local edition

Ted Vaden, the News and Observer’s Public Editor, tries to explain the upcoming shrinkages to that paper. In the process, he goes to the expert on vanishing newspapers, Phil Meyer. But Vaden misses the most telling quote from Phil’s Vanishing Newspaper in which Gary Pruitt current CEO of McClatchy (now NandO’s owners) says:

“We always say to our papers, you challenge is no matter what, the paper must improve. It always drove me crazy … where in a downturn, news hold cuts were made and the paper got worse. … And I always thought restaurants don’t make food worse in a downturn. Car companies don’t make cars less safe in a downturn. … Why is it OK to make a newspaper worse in a recession? That’s your excuse for making your product worse? It makes no sense.”

The question to Ted and to NandO and, indeed, to Pruitt is: are you making your product worse?

Also not discussed is that McClatchey revenue took a dive of 9.2% in November. A 6% decline in circulation and a more than 30% drop in real estate classifieds were some of driving forces for the revenue drop.

A more local McClatchy property, the Chapel Hill News, took a page cut today as well. The Sunday paper will now barely cover the bottom of a birdcage and is much too thin for wrapping a fish. (sans inserts).

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