Friday, July 30, 2004

1 Kilometer Bluetooth Link to Cell Phone [Slashdot:] 11:34:34 PM      Google It!.

Remote-controlled Bolts and Screws [Slashdot:] IP control of parts business via encrypted robot parts that can control access to "authorized personal" is mostly a ploy to enforce the monopoly over parts and servicing of cars with the effect of making them dead in the water when not in an authorized service area.  On the other hand the same technology could make it much easier to service the car anywhere when combined with a helpfull selfservice software control program.   Properly designed this development would give law enforcement officers a remote control way to stop the car of fleeing suspects essentially making all cars bait cars. 4:00:51 PM      Google It!.

Profile of the Southampton institutional repository. Jessie Hey, Targeting Academic Research with Southampton's Institutional Repository, Ariadne, July 2004. Excerpt: "The University of Southampton has been one of the pioneers of open access to academic research, particularly, in the tireless advocacy of Professor Stevan Harnad and in the creation of the EPrints software, as a vehicle for creating open access archives (or repositories) for research....Now that change is happening in earnest with new and varied initiatives appearing so fast in the international arena that it is vital to scan Open Access News regularly to keep up with them....The [UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee] Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way....It is useful to compare experiences and the baselines from which other institutions are working." (PS: A profile with very useful numbers and graphics. In my excerpt I couldn't resist quoting the reference to OAN, which I believe is OAN's debut in a peer-reviewed journal.) [Open Access News] 3:23:18 PM      Google It!.

Sony Endorsing Open Graphics Format For PS3 [Slashdot:] 3:21:07 PM      Google It!.

What Are You Looking At? [Slashdot:] tracking vision 10:08:39 AM      Google It!.

UK launches Research Libraries Network. The UK is launching the Research Libraries Network and funding it with £3 million. From yesterday's press release: "A new national initiative - the Research Libraries Network (RLN) - announced today, is set to transform the way research information is collected, organised, preserved and accessed across the UK. The RLN will bring together the UK's four higher education funding bodies, the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales and the eight members of Research Councils UK to develop the UK's first national framework aimed at addressing the information needs of researchers....Initially the RLNA's work is likely to include feasibility studies and market research to shape the longer-term programme. Early emphasis is likely to be on improved knowledge of and access to existing resources (for example, by developing search tools and 'union catalogues' which give a single point of access to a number of different collections). Future potential workstreams include collaborative work on developing and preserving digital archives, maximising access for professional researchers to key collections, and working towards collaborative development of collections to ensure access to the widest possible range of research materials." (Thanks to Gary Price.) [Open Access News] 10:06:17 AM      Google It!.

Open knowledge management. Yukika Awazu and Kevin Desouza, Open knowledge management: Lessons from the open source revolution, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55, 11 (2004) pp. 1016-1019. Only this abstract is free online: "One might argue that the future of knowledge work is manifested in how open-source communities work. Knowledge work, as argued by Drucker ([1968]); Davenport, Thomas, and Cantrell ([2002]); and others, is comprised of specialists who collaborate via exchange of know-how and skills to develop products and services. This is exactly what an open-source community does. To this end, in this brief communication we conduct an examination of open-source communities and generate insights on how to augment current knowledge management practices in organizations. The goal is to entice scholars to transform closed knowledge management agendas that exist in organizations to ones that are representative of the open-source revolution." [Open Access News] 9:19:38 AM      Google It!.

Raising the White Flag on our Course Management System Data Collection. As far as course management systems, the Maricopa system has quite the diversity for course management systems- 2 colleges using WebCT (moving Fall 2004 to a shared Enterprise server), 6 using Blackboard, 1 using MIDAS, a derivative of the Anlon product, and 1 developing a brand new LMS/CMS to pilot this fall. We saw this starting back in 1998, when 2 colleges were separately licensing stand-alone versions of WebCT, and the other colleges were looking at a variety of systems-- our office scheduled a series of demos with some nudging that they ought to consider going in together on these systems. The result? The colleges who started with WebCT stayed with it (individual servers), and seven who had none went in at the same time on individual site installs of Blackboard. Hence Levine's First Law of CMS-es: Most institutions are using the first CMS they tried. Now not to suggest our colleges are short sighted, but you must understand that as a system we are about as decentralized as you can get, so there is no way one could from a central office, "tell" the colleges to standardize. This was the mode that worked well during the 1960s-1980s, a competitive collaborative environment. It is the culture. And changing that is tilting at big frozen windmills. Anyhow, getting around to the title of this post- I thought it would be useful given the increase in usage of the CMSes into the early 200x years, we asked each site to report the most basic, almost not meaningful numbers: number of active course areas in their CMS number of active faculty accounts in their CMS number of active student accounts in their CMS This was gathered by me sending lots of emails to the folks running the servers at each site, and we were mostly successful at gathering that from 2000-2003, and the data shows steady, sharp rises in usage. Over time it seemed to get harder and harder to get this information, perplexing since the data is readily available for these systems in the admin control panels. And in Spring 2004, by the time I got some responses, the semester was over, and the data wiped. The flag is raised. I give up. It matters little to me since I am not even involved with supporting CMSes [cogdogblog] 8:18:43 AM      Google It!.

Microsoft Demonstrates New Hard Drive Search Tool. SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. , which is challenging market leader Google Inc. in the online search market, demonstrated for the first time on Thursday a search engine that looks for information on computer hard drives as well as information on the Web. [Reuters: Technology] 8:12:04 AM      Google It!.

Cell Phones Becoming Profitless [Slashdot:] there are some interesting lessons in this example on the role of innovation, bundling and subscription services.  There is an interesting growth dynamic in the short term similar to the lost leader marketing strategy in the context of telcos.  The endgame may have already begun with the newer devices that are quite capable of switching services on the fly leaving the telcos with the lost leader costs plus the lost service revenue to VoIP.  It is quite a transformation to see stodgy telcos become simply marketing organizations in a wireless world.  -- BL 8:11:04 AM      Google It!.

Pursuing Growth, Microsoft Steps Up Patent Chase. Microsoft plans to increase its storehouse of intellectual property by filing 50 percent more patent applications over the next year than in the previous 12 months. By By STEVE LOHR. [The New York Times > Technology] 7:57:33 AM      Google It!.

Cellphone Antennas to Sprout Atop Light Poles and Signs. New York City plans to allow telecommunications companies to put cellphone antennas and Internet transmitters on top of lampposts and traffic signals. By By IAN URBINA. [The New York Times > Technology] 7:56:44 AM      Google It!.

Controlling agent societies with Ruby: Rich Kilmer and Dana Moore.  In his talk Controlling and Testing Distributed Systems with Ruby, Rich Kilmer shared details of a DARPA-funded project he's been working on for about a year and a half. His team has built up a rich set of "control surfaces" -- in Ruby -- for a cluster of 150-odd Linux machines that run large-scale simulations of military exercises. The simulation platform is Cougaar (Cognitive Agent Architecture), an open-source project written in Java. The Ruby-based system that controls and tests the Cougaar-based "agent societies" is called ACME. ... [Jon's Radio] 7:55:31 AM      Google It!.

Science recreates mad cow disease. Scientists have made a protein that can trigger a neurological disorder similar to mad cow disease in mice. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 7:53:46 AM      Google It!.

Liberals Want Their Own Network. Emboldened by Michael Moore's success with Fahrenheit 9/11, a group of progressive reporters and media execs plans a TV network to take on Fox News and CNN. They may have the chops to pull it off, but they'll be at the mercy of the cable companies. By Mark Baard. [Wired News] 7:44:41 AM      Google It!.

Something I noticed too. There's a lack of discipline among the pros which has deformed discourse in all areas including science, technology, economics, medicine (areas where accuracy really counts). The practice of quoting out of context, if you don't want to be made to look like a fool, turns opinions into mush. I got quoted out of context quite a few times this week, I knew it would happen when I posted the item about how boring the convention was on Monday. I published the bit anyway, because communicating with my readers is more important to me than potentially being made to look like an idiot by professional reporters. This is something I'd like them to look at. If you're really an idealist (and many pros are) you have no choice but to try to convey the meaning of the people you quote. To do otherwise would violate rule #2, saying something you know is not true. [Scripting News] 7:39:51 AM      Google It!.