Jon Udell: For me, the most salient fact about Ray's career is that he has chosen to tilt at not just one windmill, but two: collaboration and security. We tend to preach both but practice neither. [Jon's Radio] What do you think? [] links to this post 7:22:06 PM
Dan Gillmor's latest column is a call to join the copyright debate. "... But if the community of readers, listeners, viewers, scholars, researchers and others who don't 'own' copyrights doesn't at least challenge the terms of the debate, it will surely lose...." [FOS News] What do you think? [] links to this post 7:10:52 PM
Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has released Version 44 of his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. The bibliography cites over 1650 print and online books, articles, and other resources on scholarly electronic publishing. [FOS News]
Purchasing the Right Personality for College. A friend recently pointed me toward Ivy Success. Ivy Success are self-described "Admissions Strategists" whose job is to get you (or your darling child) into an elite university. [kuro5hin.org]
The links in the article are also pretty interesting.
On July 21, EDGEheld an event at Eastover Farm which included the physicists Seth Lloyd, Paul Steinhardt, and Alan Guth, computer scientist Marvin Minsky, and technologist Ray Kurzweil. [...] A new and unified language of science is beginning to emerge.
The text and streaming video of this year's discussion will be published on Edge at the end of August.
It's just a teaser with a few photographs and flashbacks from Rebooting I, but I'm eager to see what has come out of the gathering.
How do I, or more importantly, a hiring/promotion committee, determine its scholarly value? And how do I best explain that value to people who may not previously have considered its existence?
"Given the high value that most institutions put on scholarship that appears in refereed journals or in books produced by well-respected presses, how are innovative, intellectually valuable, well-researched, self-published Web sites to be counted in the processes of promotion, merit, tenure, review, and recognition?"
Weblogs are just coming on the radar. Ask around, you'll hear them treated as "alternate media" projects, like demo reels, home brew projects, performance art.
One factor in candidate evaluation: comparability of materials. I can compare Mary's CV with Bob's CV, compare essays, dissertations, theses, interviews, transcripts, references. How do you compare weblogs? Or include one person's weblog when the other person doesn't have one?
Navigation and abstraction are vital. Do you expect the evaluator to wade through your 3000 posts to find the 10 most relevant? If you don't already, please:
categorize your posts
use titles
create a master index of posts
start using a spell checker if you need it
write short abstracts linking to your many posts on key topics.
People enter your home page, then read your last dozen posts or so; ten minutes' worth. Good luck if you've been posting drivel, personal, or controversial stuff (like that never happens!)
Let Graham know if you have more suggestions, especially if you work in academia.
Catalyst. Alpha blogger. Someone who klogs well, leads by example, provokes and inspires others to join a klogging community. If you've used Blogtree, naming your inspirations, you know what I mean.
Coach. The person who helps newbies, builds internal FAQs, nurtures laggards, acknowledges great posts. Soft skills, communication and social skills, are not evenly distributed. The coach helps everyone join and get better. Chief metablogger.
Armorer. Works with IT to develop configs, scripts, integration with enterprise apps and messaging services. Power macros. Engaging templates. Technologist and architect.
Practice leader. Informal leaders of subcultures in larger organizations. The one in legal who drives the whole department to start klogging. The rep in the Cincinatti sales office who gets her colleagues to start customer-specific blogs. Watch for lists of like-minded colleagues. They may also connect to like-minded communities at suppliers, customers, and the wild blogosphere.
Mix and match.
Recruit for excellence in one or more.
Hire ringers if your community is large enough.
One other point: I beleive (without hard numbers) that blogging and klogging can improve your personal marketability. I'm exploring this at Bloggers for Hire. Suggestions welcome.
A few weeks back I was in a second hand book shop in Godalming and I bought a couple of books - at the counter I was told that having bought two books - I could get one free. I quickly stepped up to the philosophy section and run my fingers over the titles and spotted a thin red book by [Bertrand Russell]. It was called [Let the People Think] - knowing of Bertrand Russell but knowing little of his work I thought it was the ideal choice.
As I got back to the car and flicked through it I was delighted - it was a collection of short essays and one caught my eye - it was entitled Useless Knowledge Here is a quote from the essay:
"Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less pleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanisaka introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word "apricot" is derived from the same Latin source as the word "precocious" because the apricot ripens early; and that the A as the beginning was added by mistake , owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter."
In knowledge management we often talk about focusing on productive knowledge and that KM should not be an intellectual exercise and to a degree this is right but Bertrand Russell pulled me up - as he says elsewhere in the essay "Perhaps the most important advantage of "useless" knowledge as that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind." Now to me taking time to reflect is at the heart of KM. So paradoxically "useless" knowledge can promote KM. I like it!
And oh yes Apricots have also tasted sweeter to me since!
A tinkerer's blog. Edward Felten, the Princeton prof who stood up to the music industry when they nastygrammed him over his white-paper on the security flaws in the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), has started a blog called "Freedom To Tinker" where he keeps track of legal threats to tinkerers, the people who pry open technology to understand how it works, to improve it, or to make interoperable devices. [Vitanuova] via [Boing Boing Blog] via [McGee's Musings]
Too bad the link is dead. I hope it'll be back soon.
PlanetMath.org is a free online mathematics encyclopedia and repository edited by Nathan Egge and Aaron Krowne. It's designed to fill the gap created by the removal of MathWorld from the web because of copyright problems (summary in FOSN for 11/26/01). To avoid MathWorld's fate, Egge and Krowne protect the contents of PlanetMath with the GNU Free Documentation License. [FOS News]
It's worth noting that the encyclopedia is community-built, just like a wiki, except that each article has a primary owner (who may lose ownership if he/she is neglectful). Accepts LaTeX also, unlike Wikipedia.
Legal requirement to start writing clearlyI love it!Out of the highly regulated world of Franchise law comes a requirement that lawyers use plain English. What are the odds that "regulation" would require lawyers to write clearly? [Ernie the Attorney] via [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog]
