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Category: Information Commons (Page 17 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

Tomorrow – Jimmy Wales

ibiblio.org Speakers Series

Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When:3:30 Wednesday October 5

Where: 209 Manning Hall

What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More about Jimmy and Wikipedia

Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group

Poster in PDF form here (with new location)

See Jimbo on CSPAN’s Questions and Answers (September 25, 2005 and online archive)

100 years of Einstein

“2005 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein’s three great scientific papers on relativity, light and matter.

Have you read them? Did you understand them?

If not, you are not alone. When asked who is or was the most famous scientist of all time, many people mention Albert Einstein. However, few people know what he did that made him so famous or realize what a great impact his ideas continue to have on our 21st-century lives. ”

The Chapel Hill Public Library (disclosure I am on the Board of Trustees) is presenting a series of talks by Dr. Henry Greenside of Duke the first of which was this afternoon. Dr. Greenside explains the Einsteinian concepts found in his 1905 papers so that most anyone can understand what wonderful surprising and important discoveries and suggestions they were and how they continue to influence our thinking and understanding.

Beginning with today’s talk on “Einstein’s Relativity Theories and What is E=mc2 All About?” (he spent most of the talk on the special theory rather than the general theory today) and following with two other talks. Sunday, Oct. 9 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein and the Photon Concept and Sunday, Oct. 23 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein and Atoms.

Sally, Tucker and I were there and took in the talk to our various capacities. Sally caught the talk and a following experiment with bending an electron stream using magnets with her digital camera. [photo 1] [photo 2] [photo 3] [photo 4] [photo 5]

Tucker is looking forward to next week’s talk about the properties of light and the dual nature of the photon. So am I.

UNC pwned by FaceBook

They know all about us — because we tell them.

the ibiblio blog has covered Fred Stutzman’s Facebook study about the self-reported political orientation of the UNC campus earlier on.

Fred will be talking about that and more tomorrow Friday September 30 at noon o’clock in 208 Manning Hall.

One new observation from Fred: 85% of incoming Freshmen had a facebook account on day one of class.

Hear it all tomorrow. Slides may be available online (when they are I’ll add a link here).

Boyle on WIPO and Webcasters

Jamie Boyle’s Financial Times article just appeared online last night and I posted an article about it on SlashDot. Just for fun, here’s what I submitted:

It’s always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to WIPO (who deserves the sticking) in his latest article, “More rights are wrong for webcasters”. Boyle lays it out so that “economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money” can get what’s wrong.
But is Yahoo! the webcasters’ enemy? as Boyle says.

And here’s what showed up on SlashDot:

“It’s always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to the World Intellectual Property Organization in his latest article, “More rights are wrong for webcasters”. Boyle lays it out so that “economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money” can get what’s wrong.”

Jimmy Wales – New Venue – Oct 5

ibiblio.org Speakers Series

Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When:3:30 Wednesday October 5

Where: 209 Manning Hall

What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More about Jimmy and Wikipedia

Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group

Poster in PDF form here (with new location)

See Jimbo on CSPAN’s Questions and Answers (September 25, 2005 and online archive)

Jimmy Wales – Oct 5 -ibiblio speaker series

ibiblio.org Speakers Series

Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When: 3:30 Wednesday October 5
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Room
305 Carroll Hall UNC-CH
209 Manning Hall
What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More about Jimmy and Wikipedia

Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group

Poster in PDF form here

True and Candid Compositions (1795 – 1868)

What were they thinking? Those crazy college students who came to Chapel Hill at its founding and up til the Civil War. They were thinking about drinking and pranks for starters. But there is more.

The Documenting the American South Project, which has been hosted at ibiblio since its beginning, announced the release of their “True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina.”

[The project] presents 121 edited documents written primarily by students attending the University of North Carolina between 1795, the year in which the institution opened its doors, and 1868, when the devastation of the Civil War closed them again. The documents provide important first-person accounts of how antebellum University of North Carolina students lived and worked and are drawn from three special collections of the University Library: the Southern Historical Collection, the University Archives, and the North Carolina Collection. Each document is accompanied by a digitized image of the original source. The manuscript materials have been transcribed, edited, and annotated by Professor Erika Lindemann, who also has written several essays that provide editorial, historical, and contextual information for understanding the documents. Among the topics treated in these essays are the establishment of the University, student discipline and faculty authority, the purposes of a university education in the antebellum period, the daily lives of students, the role of slaves and servants, the students’ academic writing, their work in the debating societies, and their responses to the Civil War.

The project also got a wonderful writeup in today’s News and Observer by Jane Stancill.

AV Geek: Country Code Please

My run in with DRM killing a legal use yesterday nearly killed a presentation. The distributor of Occupation: Dreamland asked me to set up to show part of the movie from a DVD he had burned. We were in a state of the art classroom with a great new DVD player, computer hookups and several projectors. I can do this.

Simple to place the DVD in the DVD player and hit play. Or it should be. But that happened was that the DVD was never initialized in the player. Out of desperation, I pulled out my PowerBook and stuck the DVD in there. Apple gave me a nice message telling me that a “Country Code” or “Zone” I forget which was needed. They suggested using 1. I did.

Everything then worked fine after that — except that the lights and screens and curtains didn’t like me changing devices so much. They went through several amusing gyrations as I tried testing between the DVD player and laptop.

The aggravating thing here is that we had a wonderful legal DVD copy with a wonderful legal and approved use, but the code (as Lessig warns us) nearly locked us out.

The battle over zoning DVDs was mostly fought five years ago. Here we were with a completely allowed use and we were stymied — almost but not defeated thanks to Apple.

But this is an incomplete thanks, as Cory explained in January, you only get so many region changes before Apple permanently fixes the Zone so that it will never change again. They are not required by law to do this (according to Cory).

Will elections bring community Wifi to Chapel Hill

I wrote about seeing international teleconferencing at Carrboro’s Weaver Street Market last Saturday. This was made possible by Carrboro’s commuity wireless program.
Although UNC spreads wireless across parts of downtown Chapel Hill, that mesh is restricted to UNC id holders. If a business wanted to contribute as Weaver Street does in Carrboro they can’t even help out.
But Orange Politics is having a lively discussion on bringing community wifi to Chapel Hill. Jim Protzman’s initial post which sees community wifi as a way to get at the digital divide has caught up current candidates for office in the discussion. One interesting thing to note is the wide range in the political spectrum of the candidates supporting community wifi represent.
There is some opposition but the way the discussion is going gives me hope.

Three things

Sally reminds me that about Phil Levine’s wonderful Labor Day poem, What Work Is. Max Leach recorded Levine reading the poem a while back and we put it online soon after as part of the Internet Poetry Archive.

About half a dozen people have sent me notes about or links to The Interdictor, a blog that is now called the Survival of New Orleans blog includes picture feeds (astounding fire pics) and lots and lots of comments and many on the ground observations.

Cyberjournalist lists many Katrina blogs and collections.

Ruby gets roses and a new headline

The article on Ruby Sinreich was republished today in the Chapel Hill News with several improvements. First it’s headline is now Public Allies names Sinreich ‘change-maker’. The paper version has a color picture; the NandO one was in black and white, but both web pics are color. There seem to be fewer editorial changes except that this one has a more amusing close.

Ruby also received “Roses” (even if they are of the 2-D black and white ink on newsprint variety they are a good recognition).

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