Technology Blog

source: Oui! Les Blogs

My father just sent me a link to a NYTimes piece called “What’s the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don’t Want to Hear It” that totally cracked me up. Here’s the key concept:

Mr. Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day - that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can - to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble.

The device, called the Mosquito (“It’s small and annoying,” Mr. Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

Oh, I so want a room-sized version of this. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a room that kids couldn’t stand to go into, but grownups could sit in and relax? Or to turn this on in my office at RIT when I’m willing to talk to colleagues but not students? The possibilities are endless…

source: revenge of the grownups

Tomorrow morning the kids and I will head east to Rochester, where we’ll be spending a week in our old stomping grounds. It will be odd to be home but not home—someone else is living in our house, so we’ll be staying with my mom while we’re there.

The boys are pretty excited about seeing their friends. Me too.

I’ll still be accessible via the usual email, IM, and phone contacts. Wifi in my mom’s house, wifi on campus, wifi in most of the coffeeshops I frequent there…

While there I’m hoping to reinvigorate my lab at RIT—in my absence, its been dormant, and I have some ideas for things the folks I left behind could be working on. I’m also hoping to foster more interaction between the RIT social computing club and the lab, as well as perhaps getting our public workshop plans back on track.

I’ve also printed out a substantial stack of research papers that I’m hoping to get through on the airplane—in hopes that the kids will be able to amuse themselves reasonably well with books and gameboys while I read (I hope, I hope, I hope….).

I’m planning to be around the RIT campus on Thursday and Friday, exact times to be determined (I have to work around the array of doctor’s appointments that the boys and I have while home…nothing serious, but we’ve waited to deal with myriad small problems until we were back with our regular health care providers). If you want to get together, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can work out.

source: eastward ho!

source: Another blog comment on the Royal Society statement

Nycil George writes in yesterday’s issue of TechTree that Hewlett-Packard has helped Jadavpur University launch a DSpace repository. According to Ajay Gupta, Director of HP Labs India, HP “is keen to take the [DSpace] digital library solution to other premier educational institutions across India.” (Of course, HP is MIT’s partner in developing DSpace.)

(PS: This is very good news. Indian friends of OA should make sure their institutions are on HP’s list and then work with their institutions to develop effective policies to fill the repositories.)

source: HP helping to launch repositories in India

Richard Poynder, Struggling with Agnosia, Open and Shut, November 29, 2005. This long article is the best I’ve seen on the origin of the draft RCUK OA policy in the 2004 report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, and the opposition both have faced from publisher lobbying and covert interference by UK government officials. Here I can only excerpt small parts.

Last week the London-based Royal Society became the latest scholarly publisher to express grave concern over plans by Research Councils UK (RCUK) to mandate publicly-funded researchers in Britain to put their research papers on the Web. With irate publishers on one side, and a sceptical government on the other, will the RCUK be able to push through its radical proposals?…How seriously should we treat [the RS’s] apocalyptic claims? Not very, it seems. As Harnad pointed out, the RCUK proposal is not intended to stop researchers from using traditional subscription-based journals; nor does it propose they abandon the peer review process: the aim is simply to improve the research process — by ensuring that scholarly papers are freely available on the Web, rather than locked behind the financial firewalls imposed by journal subscriptions….Moreover, he added, claims that self-archiving poses any kind of financial threat to traditional journals simply cannot be substantiated: despite 15 years of self-archiving by physicists, for instance, there is to date no evidence whatsoever that subscriptions to physics journals have been negatively impacted. All in all, concluded Harnad, it was “Not a proud day in the annals of the Royal Society.”…But will this stream of dire predictions and gloomy prognostications [from the RS, ALPSP, and STM] derail the RCUK plan? Or will the rebuttals of OA advocates successfully neutralise them? Undoubtedly OA stalwarts can out-argue their critics….The OA movement has also become increasingly adept at managing the press (and many journalists now monitor the AmSci mailing list)….But while OA advocates are clearly more than effective at publicly countering the self-serving arguments of publishers, can they prevent the RCUK proposal from being throttled in the womb? For the bigger challenge confronting the OA movement is the continuing scepticism of the British Government — specifically, the mandarins that inhabit the Department of Trade & Industry, and their boss Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who are responsible for science and innovation in the UK….To the disgust of scholarly publishers and, no doubt, the surprise of the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry], [the RCUK proposal] called for mandatory self-archiving, and proposed introducing the mandate in October. Faced with increasingly hysterical criticism from publishers, and no doubt growing pressure from the DTI, however, the final announcement of the policy was later delayed until November. And as the temperature has continued to rise, so the timetable has continued to slip. A final announcement is not now expected before next year….Rather than waiting for its “experts on the research community” to arrive at a policy framework, Lord Sainsbury’s comments would appear to imply that the DTI has taken a very hands-on approach to the matter. Certainly this remains the view of the Science & Technology Committee. “When the inquiry was running, the Committee very much shared your suspicion that DTI was pulling the strings on open access publishing — not RCUK,” comments a former clerk in the Science &Technology office. “I’m not aware that the situation has changed since then. [In fact] anecdotally the same problems are still occurring.”…But jousting with publisher apologists in an online forum is one thing; affecting what happens in the offline world is another. The problem facing the OA movement is that Lord Sainsbury and the DTI appear still to be highly sceptical about the merits of Open Access. Will they eventually give way to the inevitable? While RCUK is currently reluctant to discuss progress, privately insiders say that they remain hopeful that they can implement a mandate, in some shape or form. They concede, however, that their work is being hampered by the lobbying efforts of publisher organisations, particularly the ALPSP….So what do we learn from this protracted and painful process? What seems clear is that the DTI has only been listening to one side of the debate. Whether this is because it simply doesn’t want to hear the other side, or whether the OA movement has failed to communicate its message effectively we don’t know. It may be that the OA movement has spent too much time rebutting publisher criticism, rather than directly lobbying the DTI — which is, after all, the ultimate power broker here.

source: The Royal Society statement in larger context

Stuart Yeates, Royal Society has come out against Open Access Journals? November 28, 2005. Excerpt:

I’m personally not convinced that this story represents the considered opinion of the Royal Society as a whole. The issue is challenging for the Royal Society, because like many scholarly societies they currently derive a large portion of their income from selling journals to institutional libraries. On the other hand, open access can provide faster, cheaper and more transparent submission, peer review, publication and dissemination than printed journals or closed electronic journals….[After quoting the Royal Society:] All their significant qualms appear to be about funding.

Stephen Downes quotes Yeates’ comment in his own blog and adds this comment: “I’m sympathetic, though I caution, the purpose of academic publishing is not to keep organizations like the Royal Society afloat, much as they may feel otherwise.”

source: Another blog posting on the Royal Society statement

source: Putting learned societies first, research second

Two Christian fundamentalists are upset about a scientific web site, Understanding Evolution, and are suing two Berkeley professors for writing it and the National Science Foundation for funding it.

Comment. The plaintiffs complain the site might “modify the beliefs of public school science students so they will be more willing to accept evolutionary theory as true.” I can’t tell whether they object that the site is persuasive (and might influence those who read it) or that it is open access (and might be read by students and teachers). OA seems to be at least part of the problem, since they are not (yet) suing the authors of priced journal articles, monographs, and textbooks on evolution. The plaintiffs clearly object that the web site is federally-funded, as if they believed in the separation of church and state. But this is profoundly confused and for at least three reasons: (1) the web site is not religious and does not violate the separation of church and state; (2) the plaintiffs are the ones who would like to breach the wall of separation between church and state, in public schools, and (3) the plaintiffs would like to erect a new wall of separation between science and state. This lawsuit is a threat to science of any kind, OA and non-OA. While I believe the court will throw it out, throwing it out is not enough. If the Berkeley scientists and NSF don’t counter-sue for frivolous litigation and collect damages, then other fundamentalists will be inclined to sue other scientists, if only to chill scientific publication by putting its authors and publishers to the trouble, time, expense, and risk of defending themselves in court.

source: Lawsuit to shut down OA science site

source: The best single site on OA textbooks

source: New search engine for OAI -compliant repositories

flickr_IMG_7139.jpg

Originally uploaded by Andy Cadaver.

I was just emailing with Sarah Carey, and she
correctly noted that my weblog has been tending towards the
techie-incomprehensible recently. A brief look at the front page confirms
this.

So here’s a remedy: a photo of the delicious ham which the lovely C cooked up for Thanksgiving, last Thursday. Just look at that, mmmmm!

When I get back to Ireland, I will be bringing Thanksgiving with me; a holiday based around eating cooked fowl, with no religious baggage whatsoever? I’m so there.

delicious flickr food ham photos thanksgiving

This post was written by jm, source: [thx] HAM

source: Google NYC vs. Yahoo! London

source: Tangible fun

source: Milestone for E-LIS repository

Barbara Kirsop, Royal Society must embrace open access, SciDev.Net, November 25, 2005. A letter to the editor. Excerpt:

I am appalled at the recent statement made by the Royal Society regarding access to research publications. Apart from misunderstanding the proposals made by the Research Councils UK (RCUK), the following statement indicates the total lack of understanding of the world’s research needs:

“A young post-doctoral researcher in mathematics at an Ethiopian university has different needs and different means compared with an established senior research fellow in pharmacology [at] a UK company’s laboratory.”

What are the different needs of an Ethiopian scientist, pray? Researchers everywhere need access to the world’s research information. Those that are less privileged need it most. The advent of the open access archiving policies, now widely accepted by visionary academics, solves the problem and greatly strengthens the international scientific communities and our ability to solve global problems (think only of bird flu, AIDS, environmental disasters, climate change). Institutional Repositories (IRs) require the continuance of journals, as 92% of 9000 publishers asked have accepted, including enlightened S&T publishers such as Elsevier. The aim of IRs is not the demise of journals, but quite the contrary.

It is shameful that one of our most senior scientific bodies misstates the present OA situation and dismisses the needs of poorer nations. Thankfully, this is not the case of such organisations as UNESCO, ICSU, CODATA, IFLA, CERN, CNRS, INSERM, INRA, INRIA, and all universities in the Netherlands and Scotland, many universities in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada…and recently of WSIS. All these support the concept of institutional repositories for publicly funded and published research results. The Royal Society should join with the international scientific community in embracing the new technology that has such huge potential for science and the economies of the poorer countries.

source: Barbara Kirsop on the Royal Society statement

Gisèle Dodji Dovi, ‘More Internet access needed’ for science to go global, SciDev.Net, November 25, 2005. Excerpt:

The Internet is not meeting its potential to globalise science because researchers in developing countries are not getting the access they need, according to an international study.

The research conducted by the World Science Project in six developing countries and the United States was presented last week in Tunisia prior to the World Summit on the Information Society.

Participants at the Summit heard repeatedly that higher education institutes in developing nations, and in Africa in particular, need more Internet connections and greater bandwidth….But according to World Science Project director Wesley Shrum, this would not be enough to boost research and teaching at such institutions. He says more must be done to ensure that scientists get the Internet access they need to participate in the global research community.

Comment. Doesn’t the digital divide interfere with plans to promote open access? Here’s how Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) and I answered this question last month in a paper for WSIS delegates: “Yes and no. First, internet access is improving rapidly in many developing countries and equipment costs and connectivity charges are coming down. Second, we should work now on the content side of the divide in order to take full advantage of every increment of progress on the hardware side. Primarily, this means educating scientists about the benefits of OA and persuading universities, libraries, funding agencies, and governments to adopt OA-friendly policies.”

source: The digital divide is hindering science

source: Advancing OA in Germany

source: More on the Open Educational Resources courseware portal

source: Browser developers team up to thwart hackers