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Category: General (Page 35 of 135)

ClaimId, Kahle, Gutenberg in the News

Brewster Kahle of Archive.org and Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg were just on NPR Talk of the Nation talking “about how they intend to go about putting every book published online.”

Fred Stutzman, Terrell Russell and ClaimID are featured in a Reuter’s story “PluggedIn: Does your online image need a makeover?” by Paul Thomasch that is all over the net.news:

In case a home page or blog is too daunting, Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell, two Ph.D. students at the University of North Carolina, have started a company named ClaimID that will consolidate and package search results for you.

“We haven’t invented any technology,” said Russell. “This stuff is already available. You can do this already if you care to read about it and learn and spend lots of hours.”

He adds, “You can fix you own car if you want to, too.”

ClaimID began with a small circle of friends in January 2006 before opening up to the public six months later. The free site now has about 17,000 members.

Russell said they started the site — which essentially allows you to consolidate your online identity in one place — when they realized that as Ph.D. candidates and teachers, their own students would be Googling them.

LolSimon’s new Xeni-given title “Internet knowitall and Blowhard”

From Xeni‘s post “Pedantic overanalysis of LOLcats not pedantic enough, says blowhard”

Following up on yesterday’s BB post about David McRaney’s sociological analysis of LOLcats, image macros, and invisible cheezborgahs, Internet knowitall Simon Spero says:

McRaney’s recent article [McRaney 2007],whilst interesting from the syntactics perspective, fails to cite the relevant literature, and as a result does not satisfactorily align his work to the central research questions within the field.

The methodology applied in [Spero 2007] uses a Description Logic approach to the begin the process of unifying the emergent ontology of lolcats with the rules of cuteness heuristically determined in Frost’s definitive and ongoing survey [Frost 2005].

Our study revealed several strengths and weaknesses inherent in a pure Description Logic approach. Although it was trivial to dervive a solution to the lolcat/cheezeburger hypothesis (lolcat can has multiple cheezeburger), other classifications are not expressible without the use of more powerful formalisms.

For example, due to monotonicity constraints, it is not possible to encode the knowledge that, whilst by by default things that look like Hitler are not cute, a kitten that looked like hitler, wrapped in a burrito, with its paw up, might be a CuteThing. Also, without the use of higher order reasoning capabilities, it is non-trivial to describe the set of things accompanied by smaller versions of themselves.

[McRaney 2007] David McRaney, L337 Katz0rz, 1 J. Am Soc. Macrologists available at [Link] (2007)

[Spero 2007] Simon Spero, Loltology – I saw ur mom on teh sermantic webz, 1 LJ. Am. Lolbrarian. Assoc (2007) available at [Link].

[Frost 2007] Meg Frost, The Rules of Cuteness, J Cuteology (2005-2007, ongoing) available at [Link]

UNC Symposium on Academic Productivity – June 7

What: UNC Symposium on Academic Productivity
When: June 7, 2007, 1-4PM,
Where: Manning Hall 208

Add yourself to the Wiki to attend

Hosts: Fred Stutzman and the School of Information and Library Science, the SILS Doctoral Students Association, and the SILS Research and Doctoral Committee.

About: The purpose of this symposium is to bring together students and faculty to share tips and strategies for academic productivity. What is academic productivity? It refers to the strategies, hacks or tools you use to get your academic work done. Perhaps you’ve got a good strategy for keeping abreast of new literature, or maybe you’ve got a strategy for backing up your files that you’d like to share. Simple or complex, come out and share what works for you.

Format: This is a three hour event, drop-ins are welcome. Each hour there will be four 10-minute presentations, followed by 20 minutes of discussion/hands on. If you’d like to present, you must be willing to document your hack and share it electronically so others can use it. The talks will generally be “walk throughs” of your strategies. A wide range of subjects are encouraged, and presentations should be casual.

Jennifer Jenkins talk at Scholarly Communications

Jennifer Jenkins
Live blogging Duke Law’s Jennifer Jenkins’ talk about the Center for the Study of the Public Domain‘s Arts Project. Artists of all kinds need both controls and freedoms to thrive. Term expiration, Fair Use, Licenses like Creative Commons, and extralegal social practices are part of all of this tension.

Look at “Bound by Law.”

Now a scene from “Mad Hot Ballroom” in which the mother’s cell phone ring is the Rocky theme. The Rocky theme owners wanted $10K initially but were barginned down to $2500. Yikes!

Now some from “Sing Faster” about the Ring Cycle from the stage hands point of view. Originally the Simpsons were on the TV in the background. Cost for 4.5 seconds? $10K! Sound familiar. So the documentary maker subbed his own material onto the TV. Is it still a documentary?

Now on Bridgeport’s claim of owning a sample of George Clinton (note the sample was not owned by Clinton ) which was very transfered. The judge says that digital sampling of greater than one note must be licensed.

Now “The Wind Done Gone” a parody and critique of “Gone With the Wind” a case on which Jennifer worked. Is GTW the second largest selling English book (?) above a critical evaluation in a creative treatment? Mitchell estate say this book as a sequel. Pat Conroy was initially asked to write a sequel but turned them down because the estate required no mention of homosexuality or miscenegenation etc. He turned them down. Eventually “Wind Done Gone” won as did documentaries. Including documents about space alien movies (in several court cases).

Several other cases from “Bound by Law” including Ali and Elvis.

Now some on Lessig’s “Permission Culture” and the normalizing of extralegal charges and absolute copyrights.

And of copyright insurance — National Union as one company that writes. Now WIPO’s IP Comic Book [PDF] where in four panels are dedicated to your rights as a citizen.

Now some on Creative Commons (a private solutions). Note: this blog is CC licensed. Cory’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” cited as a CC success as well as “Bound by Law” itself.

About the creators creations of domain — “An Army, One By One” and “Stealing Home” in which documentary filmmakers explain copyright as it impacts the art of filmmaking. Note: I was a judge for this contest.

Next book from CSPD will be on Music! And perhaps on ReMix Culture.

Questions: Will there be a book on books? Jonathan Lethlem‘s idea of allowing remix of his stories as the Promiscuous materials Project.

Tibetan relocations in slides

Xeni alerts us to a McClatchy Washington Bureau story and narrated slide show by Tim Johnson “China orders resettlement of thousands of Tibetans” which details the forced relocation of Tibetan villages (over 250K people or 1/10 of the entire Tibetan population) while encouraging the in-migration of Han Chinese into the Tibetan cities.

The New Yorker carried a story that covered the same ground, sans the forced relocation, but more deeply in the “Our Far-Flung Correspondents” section of theie April 16, 2007 issue as “The Train to Tibet: What will the greatest rail journey on earth do to its destination?” by Pankaj Mishra. This is only available as an abstract online tho.

Passionately resisting Twitter

Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users distrusts Twitter. Why?

The big three reasons, she explains, are:

1) it’s a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines.
2) The strong “feeling of connectedness” Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing.
3) Twitter is yet another–potentially more dramatic–contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking… you can’t be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

Being Kathy there is much more said and said with wit, insight and probably from within the flow state and with graphics — and followed by some spirited discussion.

But Kathy, I’m from a large family and I need the noise to be able to concentrate! Twitter is just about the right volume — and I do keep it on the virtual desktop with email so’s I don’t have to see it if I don’t want to. Can I still be in the flow state, please?

Second Life, Croquet, Alice, AVR

I’m back from the first day of IBM University Days where a lot of attention, in fact the conference theme, is on NCSU’s Virtual Computing Initiative.

But there were two different presentations on Second Life alternatives and neither of them Croquet.

One on ALICE, which is a 3D Authoring system, from the Stage3 Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. The presentation by Susan Rodger of Duke was about using ALICE for teaching programming (via a little stealth) to K-12 and to non-CS majors at Duke. Overall it’s a smart environment that you can download and run locally. ALICE is in a partnership with Electronic Arts (you know them as the SIMS people). This partnership greatly improves the images of people in the Alice worlds — they can now look as good as SIMS people.

The second by Moha Tabrizi of East Carolina, His virtualization, his Agent Virtual Reality is achieved by placing sensors all over his body thusly and interacting in real time in a virtual environment for distance education. No keyboarding necessary! He is his own avatar! Oddly Dr. Tabrizi was unfamiliar with Second Life and Croquet.

There was an interested discussion/rant by Ethan Zuckerman with/at Charlie Nesson at Berkman Center on SL and Croquet among other things back in December. Here’s the video of Zukerman expressing distrust of SL (“a privately held company that has build their empire on real estate and porn”) and his interest in Brewster and Open Content Initiative and his slander of the French — in short a great 10 minutes. (thanks to Nassib for pointing this one out).

Bill Clinton’s Puzzle

I love the NYTimes Crosswords. I’m far from the only one. Puzzle-solver-In-Chief Bill Clinton is perhaps the most famous NYTimes Solver. Now Clinton has provided the clues for a Boomer themed puzzle only available on-line (here).

“Editor’s Note: The clues in this puzzle are a little more playful and involve more wordplay than in a typical crossword. You have been warned. — Will Shortz.”

Note: I finished the puzzle in a couple of interrupted hours having dozed off for a bit as I worked on it ;->

Hillsborough == Carrboro TNG?

Cup A Hillsborough
Sitting at the Cup A Joe this morning in Hillsborough where I picked up the latest Carrboro Citizen, the hyperlocal paper of Carrboro, while the folks across the way speculated on the exact opening date for Weaver Street Hillsborough Edition when I ran into a local politico and asked, somewhat teasingly, did he think that former Carrboro Mayor Mike Nelson would be running for Mayor of Hillsborough now that he has moved up that way. Of course not County Commish Mike has other plans, but a lot of the great funkiness of Carrboro is up in Hillsborough too. The Last Friday Arts events. The new Poet Laureate (Mike Troy who was there at Cup A Joe. The writerly hang out (Lee Smith and Hal Crowther dropped in whilst I was there at Cuppa). But also something more — the two lattes in front of me in line were discussing historic preservation with the kind of engagement that is reserved for discussions of growth in Carrboro. These were/are pros at preservation.

Blogisms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous – take the survey

The Lulus who are also sponsoring the Lulu Blooker Prize (for which I am Chair of Judges) alert us to their Survey and Prizes:

“BLOG”, “BLOOK”, “BLEADER” AND “BLAUTHOR”
– WHICH IS THE UGLIEST, OR COOLEST, BLOGGING TERM OF THEM ALL?

WIN A FREE ISBN OR PRIZE-WINNING BOOK BY TELLING US WHAT YOU THINK!

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the invention of the word “blog”, the fifth of the word “blook” (books based on blogs or websites), and the second of the Lulu Blooker Prize–the first literary prize for blooks. To mark this historic occasion, we’re asking what YOU think of all the wonderful–or gruesome?–new words spawned by the “blogosphere” (there’s another one) and by the web as a whole.

Do you love ’em or hate ’em? And which ones do you love or hate most?

Let us know by answering six pairs of mulitple-choice questions–and qualify to be one of FIVE LUCKY WINNERS picked at random who’ll be able to choose to receive either:

a. A copy of each of the three winning blooks in the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize–named 14 May, 2007 (total value to be determined).
Or…
b. A free ISBN for their own Lulu-produced book ($99.95 value).

Here’s the Survey Link.

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