Sunday, May 02, 2004

Making The Justice Dept. A Copyright Busybody [Slashdot] new bill passed 5:18:26 PM      Google It!.

Institutional repositories are changing scholarly communication. Catherine Candee, Fat Cat Publishers Breaking the System, Syllabus Magazine, May 1, 2004. On OA institutional repositories, especially the California Digital Library and eScholarship Repository. Excerpt: "Out-of-control costs for scholarly publications have fueled new digital repository initiatives. The scholarly publishing system is broken. At research universities everywhere, scholarly work --in the form of articles, books, editing, reviewing of manuscripts-- is handed over to commercial publishers, only to be bought back by the libraries at huge cost. Libraries scramble to judiciously stretch shrinking budgets for growing runs of books and journals --books and journals that are critical to the research and teaching activities of the university's faculty who, as authors and editors, contribute so generously to the publishers who sell them. The arrangement is bankrupting research library budgets and swelling the profit margins of commercial publishers....Although CDL has never strayed from its original mission, we now have infrastructure in place that allows us to focus on creating systemic change in the way authors and readers work. We have technologies that allow broader, freer, more creative uses of text and data and we can begin to fashion badly needed services for the classroom, office, and lab." [Open Access News] 5:15:38 PM      Google It!.

Super MP3 Will Feature User Tracking [Slashdot] 5:12:21 PM      Google It!.

How Many Google Machines, Really? [Slashdot] estimated at 79,000 - 100,000 machines -- now you are talking about some serious off-hour computer utility resources looking for jobs to fill their idle time.  after G-mail there may be other ways to keep them humming. 1:47:51 PM      Google It!.

An environment for studying collaborative learning activities - Nikolaos Avouris, Vassilis Komis, Meletis Margaritis, Georgios Fiotakis; ETS. Abstract: Studies of collaborative learning activities often involve analyses of dialogue and interaction as well as analyses of tasks and actors’ roles through ethnographic and other field experiments. Adequate analysis tools can facilitate these stud [Online Learning Update] perhaps usefult for analysis of group problem solving --BL 8:44:11 AM      Google It!.