Ashcroft Chief Deputy Thompson Leaving. The number two position at the Justice Department is held by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, who has just announced... [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

More and more are leaving the Justice Department. A good time to be a lawyer.  8:49:13 PM    

Pilot held over air 'joke'. An Air France pilot is arrested in New York after making an "inappropriate" remark during a security check. [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

This joke could land him in jail for 11 years. It will be interesting to hear what his side of the story is.  8:42:52 PM    

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The anarchy and oligarchy of s .... Siva Vaidhyanathan, The anarchy and oligarchy of science, Part 3 in a 5-part series for Open Democracy on The new information ecosystem: cultures of anarchy and closure. Siva depicts science from the angle of copyright and patent law. Here's how he introduces the open-access movement: "The absurd copyright economy forces scientists to assign all rights to a major commercial journal publisher for no remuneration, then buy back the work through monopolistic subscriptions. As a result, many scientists are forming free and open collaborations to distribute peer-reviewed scientific literature outside the traditional commercial journal system." [Open Access News]

This is pretty much right on and is one reason this publishing model will disappear.  8:19:10 PM    

Oxford University Press has announced that one of .... Oxford University Press has announced that one of its high-impact journals is making an experimental conversion to open access. Excerpt from today's press release: "Oxford University Press (OUP) is initiating an Open Access experiment with one of its flagship journals, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), recently listed by ISI as one of the top ten 'hottest' journals of the decade in biology and biochemistry. This initiative is in response to calls from the academic community to make research freely available online without the barrier of a subscription to access. NAR will adopt an author-funded publishing model for a key section of the journal (the annual Database Issue published in January 2004), with these papers being freely available online from the moment they are published. If successful, the rest of the journal would gradually move to an open access model over a transitional period of 4-5 years, at which point all research published in NAR would be funded in such a way." Kudos to OUP for this trying this experiment! [Open Access News]

This is a nice move although NAR has moved down MY hottest list the last few years (it was a must read in the 80s) this should increase the access to its articles which should help spread its information more rapidly.  8:16:00 PM    

"We Must Win for the Future".

Michael J. Groetken, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota wrote this beautiful personal reflection in the blog comments last night. I thought I'd share it:

I don't have anywhere else to put this so here goes...my very personal reflections on where we are and we are going in this campaign...any thoughts, email me.

We will win this election for one very simple reason. We must. We must win for the millions of unemployed. We must win for the millions of disenfranchised. We must win for the tens of thousands whose immediate families are far from home in a war they didn?t begin. We must win for the homeless and hopeless. We must win for those who care not to participate in our great democratic process due to the extreme polarization of this administration. We must win for the children who ARE being left behind. We must win for those whose economic opportunities are being extinguished before they have a chance to ignite. We must win for the future of our planet Earth. We must win.

[Blog for America]

The Dean weblog is allowing a conversation between average people to occur on a national level. The new technologies are allowing something new to become visible, much as TV did in the 60s.  8:08:30 PM    

Restoring the American Community.

Dan Gillmor at the San Jose Mercury News posts his column today on his visit to Dean HQ, and examines how the net is helping to restore the American community:

The profound insight in the campaign's Net-working -- which raises huge risks along with opportunities -- is in trusting people out at the edge to become the campaign, too. The campaign tries to give them some additional online tools, but the people out at the edges are not under anyone's orders but their own.

"What's going on in Austin?'' Trippi asks rhetorically. ``We don't have a clue. We're just assisting....'

"To enable and promote commitment, you have to start with trust,'' [volunteer Ka-Ping Yee] says. "And trust is tremendously enhanced by the power of human contact.''

In the end, that notion is at the core of Dean's rise to prominence. His campaign has used the tools of communications and collaboration to assist more human contact, bringing together people who have a cause and want to take it to others.

Will Dean take this all the way to the White House? Who knows, but maybe this kind of conversation can spread into the governing part of the process, not just the electioneering. At the very least, the Dean effort has brought back into the process some people who'd given up, and these tools will inevitably find their way into other campaigns and causes.

"If we win,'' says Trippi, "we'll have done something for democracy.''

Win or lose, they've done a lot already.

[Blog for America]

An organization that values trust, letting the people decide what is right. INteresting that it uses the web to further this.  8:06:50 PM    

your results may vary. Tom points to the 'George W. Bush - U.S. President and Naval Aviator - 12" Action Figure'. The most hilarious line is at the bottom of the advertisement: "Actual figure may vary slightly from item shown." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Ohmigod. It is only $40 from KBToys. Many of the Presidental dolls are humorous. Not this one.Talk about photo-ops run amok.  1:32:35 PM    

Pharma Industry Leaders to Headline 2003 Pharmaceutical Marketing Congress; More Than 60 Industry Thought Leaders to Address Congress [BioWire 2k: Biotech]

What the heck are Pharmaceutical Industry Thought Leaders? Is that a fancy term for Executive Vice President For Worldwide Marketing? And they don't just have a conference. They have a Congress. I guess this is what you get when you have a whole bunch of marketing drones get together. And as long as the preception of pharmaceutical companies by the general population is driven by these thought leaders and their marketing, you will continue to see measures to limit the cost of drugs. This guys do a lousy job really describing what it takes to get a successful drug, probably because they don't really know. To many of them firmly beileve that marketing makes the drug ( which it does in some cases), but the average person does not want to think that they are paying $12,000 for a new drug because of marketing.  1:24:51 PM