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Category: General (Page 38 of 135)

Gene Spafford added to Security Panel!

That’s tomorrow, April 14, in Chapman Hall!

The Security and Liberty Forum

Program – Confirmed Speakers and Panel Members

1:00-1:10
Christian Stalberg
Welcome
1:10-1:25
Senator Janet Cowell
Opening remarks
1:25-1:45
P. T. Wright
US-VISIT: Safeguarding privacy
1:45-2:05
Jim Harper
Data mining, sharing, and brokering
2:05-2:25
Katherine Bryant
Consumer rights
2:25-2:45
BREAK

2:45-3:05
Barry Steinhardt
Real ID
3:05-3:25
Melissa Ngo
RFID; US-VISIT; Real ID
3:25-3:45
Gene Spafford
Government surveillance and propensity profiling
3:45-4:05
Bruce Schneier
The Future of Privacy
4:05-4:20
BREAK

4:20-5:00
Annie Anton, moderator
PANEL DISCUSSION
5:00
Jeannie Walsh
Door prizes
Thank you and adjourn

Confirmed Speakers and Panel Members

Annie Anton, Director, The Privacy Place

Katherine Bryant, Vice President for Consumer Advocacy at ChoicePoint

Sen. Janet Cowell, State Senator, State of North Carolina

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, the CATO Institute

Melissa Ngo, Staff Counsel and Director of EPIC‘s Identification and Surveillance Project

Bruce Schneier, internationally renowned security technologist and author

Gene Spafford, Executive Director, CERIAS – Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security

Barry Steinhardt, Director of the Technology & Liberty Program, American Civil Liberties Union

P. T. Wright, Acting Deputy Director, Department of Homeland Security

Durham County Library Precision Book Cart Drill Team

You have to have WindowsMediaPlayer, but if you do you can see Durham Country Librarians celebrate National Library Workers Day (April 17) a little early this year.

Here in the Durham County Commissioners’ video of their meeting minutes we see the Durham County Library Precision Book Cart Drill Team in action.

Later the Chair of Commissioners reads a proclamation in honor of the workers efforts at keeping knowledge available to all citizens.

Thanks to Samiha Khanna of the News and Observer for pointing this out.

I Caused the Decline of Literature

A literature group that I participate in online — warren wilson alums –had turned into a complaint forum about the overuse of I in writing. This is a perennial complaint of course and often raised as as answer to why writing isn’t worth reading today (during whichever today this complaint is being registered). Where is mythic writing? Asked one member. (or perhaps the discussion started on the mythic as a cue for writing). I confessed thusly:

I Caused the Decline of Literature

Sex with a swan
is decidedly mythic;
sex with a swain
is mere arithmetic.

AMD Servers to power Groklaw.net

ibiblio logoGroklaw logoAMD logo

Part of a press release we’re sending out today (full release here):

The popular Groklaw.net, an Open Source legal news and discussion site, will soon be quicker to access because of a gift from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to ibiblio.org – the public’s library and digital archive located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The two dual-core AMD Opteronâ„¢ servers were presented to ibiblio.org in support of Groklaw.net to improve the speed and reliability of the site. ibiblio.org has hosted Groklaw.net since October, 2003.

[…]

“AMD is delighted to assist in keeping projects like Groklaw available to the open source community,” said Marc Miller, Open Source Relations Manager in the AMD Developer Outreach team. “This is part of our mission to support open standards, freedom of choice in operating systems, and foster the growth of industries important to the success of AMD products.”
The servers are expected to be in production by April 20, 2007.

UPDATE: Here’s how Groklaw announced it and how the readers are commenting.

UPDATE: The ever alert Jon Mills noticed that the story is now on SlashDot.

UPDATE: The Inquirer reports – “AMD bungs Groklaw some servers “

Twits show wit while Twittering

Fred has an article on Twitter at the dev.aol.com site called “The 12 Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter.” No, it is not a 12 step program for Twitterholics but Fred does mention the Twitterholic site — and he quote the tweets of SILS alum and Twitter friend, Jason Griffy, in the article.

I was inspired to go grab Twitterrific which has great improved my twittering life. It’s a smart little application for OS X that aggregates and lets you manage your twittering friends and their tweets.

Tales of Two Theses

I was privileged to be on the committees for two interesting theses in Journalism in the past two days.

One challenged some of the assumptions of the Sundar study about recommendation source. Could customization be such a strong positive factor that recommendation source makes no difference at all? One of the findings of this forthcoming paper says it can be and is.

What causes students to decide to watch and pass on commercial messages they find on YouTube? The strongest reported responses were personalization and humor. If it ain’t funny, higher that average funny, it won’t get passed on.

ibiblio, Project Gutenberg and LibriVox in NYTimes

Nice to wake up to a story about digital libraries and have a good part of it about reuse and remix of ibiblio-hosted materials. In today’s New York Times Arts Section is:

Sampling, if Not Digesting, the Digital Library
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: April 9, 2007

[…]

Admittedly, it is not that difficult to find all this free on the Internet. As the credits in Mr. Seltzer’s books affirm, almost all come from the Web’s premier text site, Project Gutenberg (ibiblio.org/gutenberg), a project that started in 1971 and trumps Mr. Seltzer’s “complete” collection with its 20,000 free books, including selections in Chinese, Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Sanskrit and Yiddish.

Many of the Gutenberg books (including those used by Mr. Seltzer) are also prepared by Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net/c/), which does for proofreading what Wikipedia does for encyclopedias. Public domain books are proofread by volunteers who are given a page of a scanned book to compare with the electronic text. In 2004, the site says, 300 to 400 proofreaders from around the world participated each day, completing 4,000 to 7,000 pages of text a day, which are then proofread again in a second round before being submitted to Project Gutenberg. Yet another site that contributes to Gutenberg, LibriVox.org, uses volunteers to read public domain books, aloud, creating free audio books.

[…]

Security and Liberty Forum – April 14

What: Security and Liberty Forum
When: Saturday, April 14, 2007 1-5 p.m.
Where: 201 Chapman Hall on the UNC Campus
Who:

  • Annie Antón, Director, The Privacy Place
  • Katherine Bryant, Vice President for Consumer Advocacy at ChoicePoint
  • Sen. Janet Cowell, State Senator, State of North Carolina
  • Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, the CATO Institute
  • Melissa Ngo, Staff Counsel and Director of EPIC’s Identification and Surveillance Project
  • Bruce Schneier, internationally renowned security technologist and author
  • Barry Steinhardt, Director of the Technology & Liberty Program, American Civil Liberties Union
  • P. T. Wright, Acting Deputy Director, Department of Homeland Security

  • MORE INFORMATION and REGISTRATION

    bFree – Blackboardâ„¢ Course Content Extractor

    One of the many pains of Blackboard is that once materials have been placed there, it’s a royal pain to get them back out.

    Uncle David Moffat has tackled this problem and come up with bFree, a course content extractor. This Java-based software has been tested and runs on both Windows XP and Mac OS X. No word on Linux support but since it runs under the latest Java Software, there is a good chance it will.

    Read about bFree and download the software here (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License)

    Amongst the Disruptors

    I spent yesterday afternoon and evening with an eclectic group of entrepreneurs gathered for a discussion and networking and basketball tossing led by Business 2.0′s Josh Quittner and Erick Schonfeld. As one of the very very few academics there — Ted Zoller of the B-School’s Entrepreneurship program and Steve Jones, the B-School Dean being the others, I was flattered to be a part of the occasion.

    Among the attendees were (in no particular order): Bob Young of Lulu (and Red Hat founder), Matt Wilson of rPath, Fred Stutzman of ClaimID, Babatola Oguntoyinbo of Sonecast, Chuck Messer of Tackle Design, David Sink of IBM (emerging tech group), Paul Garner of Motley Fool (and Executive in Residence at the UNC B-School), Tim Tobin of Greenbridge Development, Reyad I. Sawafta of QuarTek, Pete Durand of Integrian, Ed Iacobucci of DayJet (and Citrix founder), Michael Jones of ChannelAdvisor, Bryan Allis of Broadwick, John Edmond of Cree Research, Chris Marentis of Clearspring, Mark R. Wiesner of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, (who am I leaving out?)

    Just took a call from Rick Smith who is writing up a longer article with pictures for WRAL and will link to that later. Rick tells me that the video of the discussion will be edited back at CNN and some of it aired on CNNMoney and less edited on the Business 2.0 site. Will link to those as they appear online.

    RTP 2.0 Social: Tonight, April 4 at Tyler’s in Durham

    RTP 2.0 and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development are proud to present the first RTP 2.0 Social. Sponsored by RTP 2.0, CED, and Broadwick, makers of IntelliContact, this event will be held Wednesday, April 4, from 7-9PM at Tyler’s Tavern in Durham (located in the American Tobacco Campus).

    This event is open to everyone interested in meeting other technologists, innovators and entrepreneurs in the area. The goal of RTP 2.0 is to bring individuals together for meeting, sharing ideas, and having fun. Friends are welcome, of course.

    Single string guitar on air, CNNmoney interview, violet jelly

    Teen Spirit took over WCOM today from 10 – noon and will be back on tonight at midnight – 2 am. Can you tell it’s Spring Break? Tucker and friends not only played records, but also the single string guitar made its on air debut. It may be back tonight.

    Fred and I were interviewed separately and together for CNNmoney‘s New Disruptors. I caused a small disruption by wearing a pin striped seersucker suit. I talked quite a bit for something that will probably boil down to 30 seconds to 3 minutes of air time. As you can imagine we spend a couple of hours walking and talking on a great spring day. Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 is a good conversationalist so we had plenty to say. The biggest downside for TV is that both Erick and I are expansive people. He has plenty to say too. I found myself trying to find ways to compress my ideas to an almost ridiculous extend which didn’t lead to a very fluid conversation. Finally I could explain Open Source software and non-market production this way: You understand how an Amish barnraising works. Open Source and non-market is like that in that everyone pitches in. But in this case everyone gets a barn including the people who didn’t even work on the raising.

    Fred on the other hand was very concise and to the point in a good way as he explained ClaimID and how it works. I’m sure he’ll be blogging about this soon.

    Afters we had a more relaxed conversation between the three of us outside at UNC’s Johnson Center for Undergraduate Excellence. I started to realize how much impact the past 15 years of sunsite/metalab/ibiblio have had on the local business scene as well as the not-for-profit scene. As we sat in the warm afternoon sun, I felt very lucky to have been a part of the journeys of so many lives and adventures. And more to come.

    Finally, Tucker and I whipped up some of our famous violet jelly. By now we’re getting pretty good at this.

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