Updated: 10/2/2004; 9:00:25 AM.
Bruce Landon's Weblog for Students
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Friday, September 24, 2004

Spam Over Internet Telephony (SPIT) to Come? [Slashdot:]
4:43:09 PM      Google It!.

NASA Releases World Viewer [Slashdot:] this is impressive

11:01:09 AM      Google It!.

Campus Life Comes to Second Life. Teaching online isn't unusual, but professors are taking advantage of Linden Lab's 3-D metaverse to shape meeting spaces to their needs and provide an added dimension to learning. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News]
8:11:56 AM      Google It!.

Moiell teaser. Almost a year ago I wrote about adding sequences to Loell. I did a few attempts but failed. Then a month ago I implemented continuations in Javascript. (It's not pretty.) After that it went pretty smooth. All languages may by Turing complete, but some language features can make the difference between being able to solve a problem or not. … [Sjoerd Visscher's weblog]
8:10:20 AM      Google It!.

Lancet supports OA to genome data. Keep genome data freely accessible, The Lancet, September 25, 2004. An unsigned and OA editorial. Excerpt: "[W]hile free and open access to [scientific] data is a boon to science, it carries some risk: among the genome sequences freely available on the internet are those for more than 100 pathogens, including the organisms that cause anthrax, botulism, smallpox, Ebola haemorrhagic fever, and plague. It is possible that a government, a terrorist organisation, or even an individual could use data from these repositories to create novel pathogens that could be used as weapons. Concerned about this possibility, several US agencies...commissioned the National Academies of Science...to convene a scientific panel to evaluate the risk and recommend policies to govern access to such data. On Sept 9, the panel released its report Seeking security: pathogens, open access, and genome databases. The panel concluded, rightly, that current policies should remain unchanged....The panel noted that the threat of misuse is not as great as some might fear....But even if sequences were identified as being particularly dangerous, the panel noted that it would be 'difficult, expensive, and probably counterproductive' to try to restrict access to these data....The current system also offers tremendous benefits. The panel pointed to the recent experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) as an example of the power of an open system....But beyond the practical, open-access policies of the genome database repositories serve another purpose. One that might, in the long run, be more important. They present the world with a model of international cooperation, trust, and altruism that offers a compelling alternative to the worldview of those who would use bioweapons to impose their political and ideological views." [Open Access News]
8:06:39 AM      Google It!.

WorldCat Goes Bookmarklet!.

worldcat bookmarklet - get it

"Thanks to Steven Cohen and Michael Fagan and Andrea Mercado [and me, and Michael and Andrew whose emails with similar code I didn't get til this morning], the WorldCat Lucky Bookmark lives! While I agree with Sarah that we can't expect our patrons to grok the bookmarklet thing, as much as we might like them to, this one is [nominally] for staff. Go nuts team!

Lucky 'Cat [in same window]
Lucky 'Cat [in new window] " [librarian.net]

And as always, Jon Udell provides more help:

"I could have switched LibraryLookup over to this technique, but never did because it only works with Amazon. I've always liked the idea that LibraryLookup can also work with isbn.nu and All Consuming and other book sites. (It'd be cool if they all emulated Amazon's metadata pattern, but they don't.) Still, in the context of this excellent new WorldCat hack, I thought the non-ISBN-dependent solution might be useful. So here it is:

Amazon/Google/WorldCat bookmarklet: A/G/W (drag to linkbar) "

Most excellent - nice work, everyone! Another ringing endorsement for open, web services-based back-ends for library catalogs.

[The Shifted Librarian]
8:03:21 AM      Google It!.

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