Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Presentations from DSpace meeting. The presentations from the DSpace User Group Meeting (Cambridge, March 10-11, 2004) are now online. [Open Access News] 9:52:16 PM      Google It!.

P2P for text sharing. Tracey Logan, File-sharing to bypass censorship, BBC News, April 9, 2004. Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, one of the first to advocate P2P file-sharing, now wants to extend the practice to the distribution of news. Not only would P2P networks bypass censors, they would break the monopoly of major news syndicators. Quoting Anderson: "The effect of peer-to-peer networks will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible. If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck". (PS: Of course the same networks could be used for research data and articles, preprints and postprints. This would aid in preservation and freedom from censorship, but would hinder efforts to measure traffic and usage.) [Open Access News] 9:14:51 AM      Google It!.

Scribbling in the margins. The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists. In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard's Software Design and Usability, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that "one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin." There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] This column muses on the use of DNS TXT records to implement the latest round of SMTP sender authorization schemes. Everybody feels guilty about not using some new formally-defined DNS resource record type, but everybody also knows that would be a non-starter. So instead we're scribbling in the margins of the DNS, and luckily, DNS has margins available for scribbling. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:14:17 AM      .

Federal preemption, open source, and open access. Michael Warnecke, NASA Will Become First Agency to Get OSI Certification of Open Source Agreement, BNA Electronic Commerce & Law Report , March 31, 2004. In the U.S., software and research produced by government employees is not copyrightable. That's good news for the free exchange of software and research. But open-source licenses typically require copyright-holder consent, not the public domain. So how can goverment-produced software use those licenses? After some legal analysis, NASA has decided that while its software cannot be copyrighted, it can be licensed, and it will take advantage of this fact to release its software under open-source licenses. This strategy depends on some court rulings that state contract law, which governs licenses, is not preempted by federal statutes, which govern copyright. My take: it's good news that NASA software will be released as open-source, but bad news that other agencies might use less generous licenses to control downstream use of their uncopyrightable content. And despite its effects on open-source software, I still believe that federal preemption would be better than the lack of federal preemption for open-access research. [Open Access News] 9:12:10 AM      Google It!.

Turning Robots into a Well-Oiled Machine [Science Blog] 9:11:14 AM      Google It!.

Skeptical eye on Google repository searching. Henk Ellermann, Google Searches Repositories: So What Does Google Search For?, -=(In Between)=-:, April 12, 2004. Ellermann puts the brakes on enthusiasm for Google's proposed federated repository searching, reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday, April 9 (see earlier OAN posting.) His questions relate to the actual number of documents concerned; press accounts have said the 17 repositories hold an average of 1000 documents, but Ellermann's calculations show a number considerably smaller. He maintains that the repository movement has a long way to go to attract and index content and provide reliable access, that there be something for Google users to search and find. [Open Access News] 9:08:51 AM      Google It!.

Fundamental issues with open source software development. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_4/levesque/ The latest issue of First Monday contains this paper by Michelle Levesque which offers a non-'fear uncertainty and doubt'-based accounting of some of the common problems with open source projects. Many of these are now commonplace complaints. Based on my own investigations of existing open source learning object repositories and course management systems, I have to concur that many of the problems she outlines, especially the varied quality of documentation and the limited user interfaces, are endemic and do limit the uptake of these systems when they are compared against their commerical alternatives. And as Levesque says, it's not that any of these failings couldn't be corrected, and you can point to some open source projects that get it right. - SWL [EdTechPost] 9:08:04 AM      Google It!.

Grade Deflation. Why marking Adriana Lima on a curve is a bad idea. [Slate Magazine] 9:02:48 AM      Google It!.

A Home Away From Home Keeps Old Scholars Happy. In the 10 years since the federal law eliminating mandatory retirement took effect, universities have faced a conundrum: how to encourage senior professors to retire. By Bob Tedeschi. [New York Times: Education] 9:00:18 AM      Google It!.

Vonage goes to Canada. Bell tolls for telcos By John Oates . [The Register] 8:53:09 AM      Google It!.

Blackboard Decides to See if Market Is Ready for IPOs Again - Ellen McCarthy, Bizreport. During its short, seven year existence, Blackboard Inc. has winked and nodded at speculation that it would attempt to become publicly traded company until last month, when the online learning software maker filed to raise up to $75 million in an initia [Online Learning Update] 8:45:10 AM      Google It!.