the great work at duke re: Orphan Works
Saturday, April 30th, 2005
The good folks at Duke have put together this cool chart on documentary films.
Archive for April, 2005
Free online biomed literature
Saturday, April 30th, 2005The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched a brief directory of Free Biomedical Literature Resources. It focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on NLM resources like PubMed, PubMed Central, and the NCBI Bookshelf. (Thanks to Gary Price.)
source: Free online biomed literature
Implementing the NIH policy
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Yesterday, the NIH released a new statement on implementing its public-access policy. Excerpt: ‘At the time of submission, authors are given the option to release their manuscripts at a later time, up to 12 months after the official date of final publication. NIH expects that only in limited cases will authors deem it necessary to select the longest delay period….In all cases, approval of the submitted materials and the determination of the public release date require the PI’s review and authorization. Currently, the system is designed for individual submissions, but procedures for batch processing of multiple submissions are being explored and may be developed in the future. No further formatting of the manuscript is necessary beyond that required by the accepting journals. Special arrangements will be available for unusual cases….[One step in the submission process:] Review and approve the terms and conditions of a submission agreement and specify the timing of posting of the final manuscript for public accessibility through PMC (this must be completed by the PI). Authors and/or their institutions should ensure that their final manuscript submissions to PMC are consistent with any other agreements, including copyright assignments that they may have, or enter into, with publishers or other third parties. Upon approval of the submission by the PI, the manuscript will be converted into XML - the standardized digital format used by PMC.’
source: Implementing the NIH policy
Tiger break
Saturday, April 30th, 2005I just installed Tiger on my computer and it’s now importing all of my email to Apple Mail from Entourage. It’s been importing for about 24 hours, but it’s still only about half way through. I don’t feel like reading and writing on a slow machine so I’m going to take a blog break until my new Tiger machine is running properly… See you on the other side.
source: Tiger break
Dreaming
Saturday, April 30th, 2005From Motivational Quotes of the Day:
“To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.” - Anatole France
This post was written by George, source: Dreaming
Who are they representing?
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Ummm, is this for real? You mean to tell me not only are our state legislators trying to regulate municipal WiFi, but they’re also creating legislation that will only go into effect if a federal law is overturned?
Don’t they have anything better to do? I might have to email my representatives again…
This post was written by George, source: Who are they representing?
Another Civic Strategies, another Cleveland mention
Saturday, April 30th, 2005I haven’t brought it up in a while, but for BFD readers who don’t know Civic Strategies “is a strategic planning firm that structures public policy solutions for cities and regions.” Every month Otis White sends out a newsletter. When he mentions Cleveland, more often then not the stories paint a dim picture of our city. Like this one regarding Plain Dealer reporters visiting Cleveland schools.
Hello? People around the country receive this newsletter. Doesn’t anyone monitor this stuff besides me? Isn’t there a PR person for the school district? Or is that why MaryBeth Matthews blogs? I think we need some better “media relations” then press releases about basketball scholarships. Not that those aren’t important, but I think we’ve got some serious perception issues here…
This post was written by George, source: Another Civic Strategies, another Cleveland mention
Review of three archiving tools
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Marion Prudlo, E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools, Ariadne, April 2005. Abstract: ‘In recent years initiatives to create software packages for electronic repository management have mushroomed all over the world. Some institutions engage in these activities in order to preserve content that might otherwise be lost, others in order to provide greater access to material that might otherwise be too obscure to be widely used such as grey literature. The open access movement has also been an important factor in this development. Digital initiatives such as pre-print, post-print, and document servers are being created to come up with new ways of publishing. With journal prices, especially in the science, technical and medical (STM) sector, still out of control, more and more authors and universities want to take an active part in the publishing and preservation process themselves. In picking a tool, a library has to consider a number of questions: [1] What material should be stored in the repository? [2] Is long-term preservation an issue? [3] Which software should be chosen? [4] What is the cost of setting the system up? and [5] How much know-how is required? This article will discuss LOCKSS, EPrints and DSpace which are some of the most widely known repository management tools, in terms of who uses them, their cost, underlying technology, the required know-how, and functionalities.’
source: Review of three archiving tools
2004 Nebula Awards Winners
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Congratulations to Ellen and Eileen on their Nebula Awards!
source: 2004 Nebula Awards Winners
H2G2 Review
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Bill Humphries,
April 30th, 2005
Rating: out of 3
It works, mostly.
Parts of the film seem rushed and confused, as if the director became self-concious of the expository lumps.
Trillian’s character has been reworked as a romantic interest for Arthur Dent, a move necessitating the transformation of Beeblebrox from lovable goof to goofy thug.
Sam Rockwell’s Zaphod Beeblebrox, the President of the Galaxy, comes off as a mixture of George W. Bush sneer, and self-absorbed rock star swagger.
There are some nice nods to Hitchhiker’s Guide creator the late Douglas Adams: Trillian’s costume at a fancy dress party, and a certain computer company’s logo on a giant computer.
The visuals are great, especially the interior of the planet manufacturing planet of Magrathea, and the Vogons, who have been reworked into bureaucrats. The bits of business involving paperwork turned out great.
If you like the original radio play, the books, or the BBC TV adaptation, you’ll enjoy it.
source: H2G2 Review
New OA title added to PubMed Central
Friday, April 29th, 2005Preventing Chronic Disease is an online only, peer reviewed journal produced by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Preventing Chronic Disease - Fulltext v1+ (2004+) CDC | PubMed Central; ISSN: 1545-1151.
A fun place to visit
Friday, April 29th, 2005John Ettorre let me know that BFD is listed with his blog by Northern Ohio Live Magazine.
So “Pour yourself a satisfying cup of Blog”. Thanks, NOL.
This post was written by George, source: A fun place to visit
Survey of OA in Europe
Friday, April 29th, 2005Gretchen Vogel and Martin Enserink, Europe Steps Into the Open With Plans for Electronic Archives, Science Magazine, April 29, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: ‘While moves in the United States to make scientific research results available –for free– at the click of a mouse have generated intense debate, European research organizations have quietly been forging ahead. Slowly but surely, they are starting to build and connect institutional and even nationwide public archives that will, according to proponents, be the megalibraries of the future, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to access papers that result from publicly funded research. “The cutting edge of the Open Access movement is now in Europe,” says Peter Suber of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C….London’s Wellcome Trust, for example, has taken one of the strongest public-access positions worldwide. The U.K.’s largest funder of biomedical research is planning to launch a system that will archive all papers produced by its grantees. Wellcome will require researchers to deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript within 6 months of publication. That goes much further than the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, which decided to “strongly encourage,” but not require, grant recipients to post their papers in the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central within 12 months of publication….”We are certainly very interested in what Wellcome is doing,” says Anthony Peatf ield of the [UK Medical Research Council]. The seven U.K. Research Councils plan to announce their own publicaccess policy next month, which is expected to ask grant recipients to deposit their papers in an archive maintained either by their own institution or, if available, a centralized one like U.K. PubMed Central. Similar projects are under way in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The continent’s open-access advocates got a boost in October 2003, when members of several of Europe’s leading scientific organizations signed the so-called Berlin Declaration. It says that authors should retain rights to their papers –including the right to distribute electronic copies freely– and that all papers should be deposited in a public archive.’
source: Survey of OA in Europe
Tip: expand a bash commandline as you type it
Friday, April 29th, 2005UNIX: another useful tip. Bash supports a wide variety of command
line editing tricks; you have the usual
(backspace, insert new characters, delete, blah blah) through the GNU
Readline library, and in addition to that you have the traditional
csh-style
history expansion (like ‘!!’ to refer to the previous command typed).
The latter are great, but they won’t actually be expanded until you hit
Enter and run the command line. That can be inconvenient, resulting in
the user being forced to reach for the rodent for some cut’n'paste
instead.
Here’s a handy trick — add this line to ~/.inputrc (creating the
file if necessary):
Control-x: shell-expand-line
Start a new bash shell. Now, if you type CTRL-X during command line
entry, any shell metacharacters will be expanded on the current
command line. For example:
% echo Hello world Hello world % echo Hi !$ (press CTRL-X) (current command line expands to:) % echo Hi world
There’s a
few more commands supported, but none of them are really quite
as useful as shell-expand-line.
Update: ‘Smylers’ wrote to point me at this UKUUG talk from 2003 which discusses .inputrc expansions, and provides some insanely useful tips.
In particular, Magic Space clearly knocks this tip into a cocked hat, by performing the expansion on the fly as you type the command, with no additional keypresses — amazing! Bonus: it works if you use Emacs-mode line editing as well as Vi-mode.
I strongly recommend reading that paper — lots of other good tips there.
Tip: secure SSH tunneling for cron jobs
Friday, April 29th, 2005UNIX: a quick recap of a good tip combo picked up from ILUG recently.
To paraphrase Conor Wynne’s original question:
What’s the best way to set up a secure connection between two hosts,
possibly over the internet, using SSH, suitable for use from cron
so that it can run via crontab without entering authentication
manually?
Barry O’Donovan replied:
I suggested ssh keys without passphrases … in
http://www.barryodonovan.com/publications/lg/104/ and it includes
instructions. … You can invoke rsync over ssh and specify a specific
key with:rsync -a -e ’ssh -i /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa-serverbackup’
Colm MacCárthaigh followed up with:
You can restrict what commands an ssh account can run in the ssh public
key. This is how some of our more important projects (like Debian,
FreshRPMS, and a few more) push us updates. The key looks like
(jm: all on one line, no space between ‘no-pty,’ and ‘command’):no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty,
command=”/home/ximian/rsync-ximian-nolog &”
ssh-dss keydata username@blahSo, create a passwordless public key like so, and just change the
command to whatver rsync runs.
Combined, that’s a useful tip — I knew about the ssh command restriction
technique, but being able to use a specific single-purpose key from the
ssh client is very useful.
(updated: mbp mailed to
note some missing quotes in Barry’s command above; they’d been eaten
by WebMake. drat.)
Nagoya Mathematical Journal — OA on Project Euclid
Friday, April 29th, 2005
Nagoya Mathematical Journal is the latest small press mathematics journal to benefit from an association with Project Euclid. The most recent five years of the journal have been digitized and mounted. Current issues appear to be created in digital format. Retrospective conversion of the entire backfile, v1-152 (1950-1998), is expected to be finished by late May. All of the material is being released as Open Access.
Nagoya Mathematical Journal
- Fulltext v153+ (1999+); ISSN: 0027-7630.
[Thanks to Terry Ehling, Cornell University Library’s Director of Electronic Publishing for the notification.]
Adding metadata
Friday, April 29th, 2005A message posted by Eberhard Hilf to the American Scientist Open Access Forum on 29 April, Harvesting from the many OA servers that are not yet OAI-compliant, summarizes some experience with My Meta Maker, which can be used to mark up resources in Physics using the Dublin Core metadata standard. Excerpt: “Just by adding metadata to quantities of OA documents harvested from local research groups using http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/services/mmm/ rather than waiting for each institution to make up its mind to adopt an official OA self-archiving policy, we have generated an enormous positive response from authors, gratified at being more cited, being found in google, being phoned and emailed by colleagues, etc.“.
source: Adding metadata
a question for jay
Friday, April 29th, 2005So here’s a genuine question about journalistic ethics that I’ve gotten different feedback about:
Imagine:
(2) that the report is factually and fundamentally wrong,
(3) that X complains to the reporter, and publication about the mistakes, but
(4) no correction follows,
(5) then the reporter asks to write an “in depth report” about X,
(6) and the publication authorizes it.
Given 1-4, is 5 or 6:
(a) common
(b) unremarkable
(c) odd
(d) bad business
(e) unethical
My sense is at least (d): if the report is generous, it seems a way to make up; if the report is critical, it seems grudge journalism.
Journalists?
source: a question for jay
Tips for Protecting Yahoo and other Passwords
Friday, April 29th, 2005Posted By Riff Raff: A Highly Respected Infowar.com Administrator.
Always use both Numbers, Letters and Characters in your password. A password comprised of only letters or only Numbers can be cracked/guessed fairly easily, there are applications that will try every possible word or numerical combination to guess your password.
Applications like John The Ripper (JTR) and Brutus are just two of the more popular password cracking software that is available to anyone who wishes to download them. But don’t be fooled into thinking theses are the only way of getting your password, there are plenty of other ways. For example, a yahoo password isn’t susceptible to Brutus or jtr. For someone to guess your password or even just change your password. All they need is some basic information that you would probably divulge in a normal chat with someone - like your user name , your Date of Birth, Postal code or even the country you live in.
Ok, now you are thinking it’s not that easy to get all that info. IS IT? Yes it really is easy. Consider your last Instant Message with a new person. First thing you find out is their age, location and if they are male or female. Right? In just a few sentences you’ve told them a lot. Social interaction is normal. It’s what draws us to the net. Communication is why we use Instant Messaging.
Social Engineering is a way of getting enough information from you to crack or change your password. Social Engineering is getting you to tell on yourself. Now they know your user name, date of birth, location and probably some other minor things, such as pet names or your nick names. The bad guys are half way there. Soon your new contact has stolen your yahoo identity and they have access to all of your contact lists and email addresses - all from a short chat that you didnt think you’ve told them anything they can use.
If you make it harder to guess, it’s harder to crack. Always use an informal and apolitically combination. Never use a pets name in your secret question and answer. When you do fill out your secret answer to your secret question make them nonsense like pets name could be your mothers maiden name or combination of letters and numbers.
Safe practices will keep it your account. Rule of thumb - a 13 letter, number and character password is almost impossible to break ( it can be broken but it takes much more time and effort than most people want to spend).
Always use both Numbers, Letters and Characters in your password. A password comprised of only letters or only Numbers can be cracked/guessed fairly easily, there are applications that will try every possible word or numerical combination to guess your password.
Applications like John The Ripper (JTR) and Brutus are just two of the more popular password cracking software that is available to anyone who wishes to download them. But don’t be fooled into thinking theses are the only way of getting your password, there are plenty of other ways. For example, a yahoo password isn’t susceptible to Brutus or jtr. For someone to guess your password or even just change your password. All they need is some basic information that you would probably divulge in a normal chat with someone - like your user name , your Date of Birth, Postal code or even the country you live in.
Ok, now you are thinking it’s not that easy to get all that info. IS IT? Yes it really is easy. Consider your last Instant Message with a new person. First thing you find out is their age, location and if they are male or female. Right? In just a few sentences you’ve told them a lot. Social interaction is normal. It’s what draws us to the net. Communication is why we use Instant Messaging.
Social Engineering is a way of getting enough information from you to crack or change your password. Social Engineering is getting you to tell on yourself. Now they know your user name, date of birth, location and probably some other minor things, such as pet names or your nick names. The bad guys are half way there. Soon your new contact has stolen your yahoo identity and they have access to all of your contact lists and email addresses - all from a short chat that you didnt think you’ve told them anything they can use.
If you make it harder to guess, it’s harder to crack. Always use an informal and apolitically combination. Never use a pets name in your secret question and answer. When you do fill out your secret answer to your secret question make them nonsense like pets name could be your mothers maiden name or combination of letters and numbers.
Safe practices will keep it your account. Rule of thumb - a 13 letter, number and character password is almost impossible to break ( it can be broken but it takes much more time and effort than most people want to spend).
Industry group offers cybersecurity recommendations to Congress
Friday, April 29th, 2005by Marcia Savage
Congress should take a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity instead of its current way of dealing with spyware, phishing, and data warehouse security on a piecemeal basis, according to the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA).
Read this at SC Magazine.
source: Industry group offers cybersecurity recommendations to Congress