Thursday, July 29, 2004

NIST Proposes Abandoning DES [Slashdot:] 1:05:16 PM      Google It!.

Zerhouni supports NIH OA plan. Paula Park, NIH research to be open access, The Scientist, July 29, 2004. Excerpt: "National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Elias Zerhouni indicated at a gathering of 43 scientific journal publishers and editors Wednesday (July 28) that eventually all NIH-financed research will be freely available to the public. Zerhouni stopped short of setting deadlines for depositing full-text materials in the searchable PubMed database, as recommended in a House Appropriations Committee report released earlier this month. Instead, he asked the publishing executives to inform him how best to manage material so that the public can freely use it. 'The public needs to have access to what they've paid for,' Zerhouni told commercial and nonprofit publishing executives at a meeting he called on the NIH campus. Congress, he said, also demanded evidence of the agency's productivity. 'I need to manage the portfolio,' he said. 'The status quo just can't stand.' " [Open Access News] 11:02:19 AM      .

Man who helped unlock DNA dies. Francis Crick, who helped discover the double helix shape of DNA along with James Watson, has died aged 88 years. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 11:01:24 AM      .

A Palmtop as Wireless Omnivore. A new PocketPC from Hewlett-Packard is the first palmtop that can connect to the Internet and to other gadgets in four wireless ways. By By DAVID POGUE. [The New York Times > Technology] 9:12:52 AM      Google It!.

Utah Education Network implementing North Plains asset management system. http://www.northplains.com/media/pr072704.asp I wouldn't normally carry a news release like this but I have a bit of a personal connection with this story - the folks from UEN were partners in the recent project I did with WCET to research a number of learning object repository software packages, and based on their urging one of those packages ended up being NorthPlain's Telescope product. But I think the story is more generally significant because it adds a spin to the standard 'repository' players. NorthPlains is a Canadian company that has made its fortune selling 'digital asset management' software to large media companies, specifically ones like Sony Pictures. While it isn't purpose built for higher ed learning objects per se, it offers quite impressive functionality for dealing with media assets in general. And given its flexibility to deal with multiple metadata schemas or any type of workflow and its smart integration with a host of 3rd party authoring tools, it's actually not so hard to see how software like this (and there are a fair number of other packages in this space, all fairly mature when compared to some of the LOR stuff) can serve as the basis for a LOR play. In fact, in that WCET project (results of which will be published in the fall), of the 6 products we looked at, only one could be said to be a 'learning object repository' in the strictest sense - in addition to North Plains, the others were variously a 'learning content management system,' an 'institutional repository,' an 'Education Institution Content Management System' and finally a 'digital content management' originating from the library world. All of which, to varying degrees of success, could fulfil the role of learning object repository, proving yet again how slippery a beast those are. - SWL [EdTechPost] 9:11:45 AM      Google It!.

FCC Looks Into Regulating Violence on TV [Slashdot:] 9:09:50 AM      Google It!.

Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council. http://www.pesc.org/ I was actually pretty pleased about the fact that when a colleague mentioned this group to me, I had never heard of them before. It meant to me that I have created sufficient distance with any 'administrative computing' past. The PESC seems to be the domain of registrars and student service (eg. financial aid) folks, but I thought I'd post it because you never know when one of your projects might need to be aware of this alternate universe. Mostly they seem focused on issues like how to ship student transcripts around, though an upcoming conference on the "State of e-Authentication in Higher Education" seemed slightly relevant. - SWL [EdTechPost] 9:08:30 AM      Google It!.

One More Flickr-y Post. flickr foto Pass the Suflur, Please available on my flickr Most folks who have been to the Vancouver waterfront have likely marveled at this yellow mound- a ferry ride, a lot of pixels, and some cropping got me a nice closeup.-- this is certainly a low threshold slide show that could enable very easy student presentations that are nicely sharable -- BL I have dinkered away a bit more time than I would have preferred to set up this "blog from flickr to MT", but that is what happens why you start pawing around with new toys. It is a matter of clicking the "Blog This" icon from flickr: Anyhow, I had to do a bit of munging to the style flickr uses to create a post, and especially take out the CSS it inserts into the entry (instead putting it in my style sheet), modifying the styles to my liking. That gets really messy when you have MT's default to convert everything to HTML! Then I had to do some subsituting in the template on the flickr site, using their own template tags to insert my flickr-composed caption on the right of this image, and then put this text (which I am writing on the flickr site- screen shot pleeeze!). full size Composing an MT entry within flickr! The only thing I cannot seem to do is to assign MT categories or keywords (the latter I use to generate the full entry URL). Oh well, there is post-production in lots of things. [cogdogblog] 9:06:49 AM      Google It!.

IronPython released, Hugunin to join Microsoft. I arrived at the Open Source Convention just in time to catch Jim Hugunin -- the father of Jython -- demonstrate IronPython, an implementation of Python for the .NET Common Language Runtime and Mono. The CLR version runs some benchmarks as fast or faster than the native C implementation of Python. (IronPython/Mono lagged both, however.) ... [Jon's Radio] 9:02:22 AM      Google It!.

Learning Object Repositories. This is a presentation providing a brief look atsome examples of Learning Object Repositories used in higher education and community colleges. [openMLX demo: Newest Items] 8:56:47 AM      Google It!.

RFID More Hackable Than Retailers Think? [Slashdot:] 8:56:02 AM      Google It!.

A Machine With a Mind of Its Own. Ross King wanted a research assistant who would work full time without sleep or food -- so he built one. By Oliver Morton from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 8:53:44 AM      Google It!.

Asus announces PDA with VGA LCD, Wi-Fi. MyPal A730 formally launched at last [The Register] 8:49:42 AM      Google It!.

What Will It Take For eBook Adoption? [Slashdot:] 8:41:10 AM      Google It!.

A Taste Of Computer Security [Slashdot:] unix vs windows 8:39:45 AM      Google It!.