Technology Blog

I just found an error in an Apache config file for taint.org, resulting in some of the legacy RSS feed URLs producing invalid data — this meant that anyone subscribed to the Feedburner feed, for example, had been missing out on my witterings. Fixed now — apologies!

Tags:feedburner feeds meta rss

This post was written by Justin, source: Unblocked

Google to allow free downloads of books, Associated Press, August 29, 2006. 

Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to begin letting consumers download and print free of charge classic novels and many other, more obscure books that are in the public domain.

Using Google’s Book Search service, Web surfers hunting titles like Dante’s “Inferno” and Aesop’s “Fables” will be able to download PDF files of the books for later reading, to run keyword searches or to print them on paper. Up to now, the service only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online….

The download initiative does not include any books under copyright….

More news coverage.

Comment. This is big. Of the major book-scanning projects, Google’s library project never rivaled the Open Content Alliance for barrier-free access to the resulting texts, even when the texts were in the public domain. Google is now lifting the two largest and most irritating barriers –those that blocked downloads and printing.

What barriers remain? Both OCA and Google restrict downloads to analog image files, even though they have digital text behind the scenes for searching.  (Project Gutenberg is the best source for digitized public-domain books if you want the text in searchable, cut/pasteable form.)  And last I heard, Google is still blocking access, without pattern or explanation, to users in certain countries.

So far, I’ve seen no announcement on the Google Book Search blog. (Why would Google let itself be scooped by the mainstream press?)  Nor does the barrier-free access seem to have begun yet. Here’s a public-domain 1897 edition of MacBeth scanned from Harvard’s library.  I can print it one page at a time, but I can’t find a way to print or download the full text.

Update. Here’s Google’s own press release and the Google Book Search blog post (both dated August 30).

source: Google lifts access restrictions on public-domain books

Heiko has a great myspace page devoted to Net Neutrality issues — including a Net Neutrality song as well.

source: mySpace as pamphlet

The University of New Hampshire library has publicly posted its May 24 proposal that the university should buy institutional memberships in BMC and PLoS. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt: The high inflation rate for library journal subscriptions continues with projections for next year at 7-9%. One of the options for reducing the impact of journal inflation on Library and University budgets is

source: University of New Hampshire supports OA journals

Abe Harraf, Provost of Southern Utah University, has added his signature to the SPARC list of U.S. university presidents and provosts endorsing open access to publicly-funded research and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA).

source: Another provost for FRPAA and OA

Stockholm University has decided to sign the Berlin Declaration and do something with deposits in its institutional repository.  But I can’t tell from the Swedish announcement whether it will require deposits or merely encourage them. 

I’m already trying to get human help with the translation.  But in the meantime, here’s Systran’s machine translation, which leaves the key question obscure: 

On Stockholm’s universities, a workgroup with representatives has from the four faculties and University Library a left letter to the headmaster with proposals to new policy concerning handling of Open Access publication. Headmaster Kåre Bremer has the 29/6 taken decisions on the basis of the workgroup’s recommendations to sign the Berlin Declaration and to advocate that the researchers in possibly anxious deposits a copy of each published scientific article in the university’s digital archives. More information: Letter from the workgroup for Open Access wide Stockholm’s universities

Update. Here’s an unofficial statement of the new policy from Ingegerd Rabow. (Thanks, Ingegerd!)

The Vice Chancellor’s decision for Stockholm University says that

1. Through their prefects/equivalents institutions from 2007 are responsible for making bibliographic data available in the university publication database
2. This registration shall cover all publications related to the teacher’s/researcher´s employment at the university. This includes scientific/scholarly publishing and publishing within the framework of the cooperation with the surrounding society (i..e popular science, articles in the daily press)
3. Researchers as far as possible deposit a copy of each published article in the university digital archive.

source: New OA policy at Stockholm University

Andrés Guadamuz González, Open Science: Open Source Licenses in Scientific Research, North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology, Spring 2006. Abstract: In recent years, there has been growing interest in the area of open source software (“OSS”) as an alternative economic model. However, the success of the OSS mindshare and collaborative online experience has wider implications to many other

source: Developing open-science licenses

Kate Worlock, ARL: A Glimpse Into The Future For Institutional Repositories, EPS Insights, August 29, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
The ARL survey received responses from 71% of its members, and offers some interesting insights into how IRs are set up and managed by research organisations. 43% of respondents had an operational IR, with 35% planning an implementation in 2007;

source: ARL, Elsevier, and Thomson on OA repositories

source: India and Japan cooperating on OA?

I’ll be speaking in London next week and hope that you will join us:

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth:
How Professional Investors Elicit Maximum Information in Minimum Time from Industry Sources

Sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of London
Thursday, September 7, 6:30pm
Offices of McKinsey & Co., 1 Jermyn Street near Piccadilly Circus, London
RSVP and prepayment: http://www.hbsa.org.uk/cgi/hbs?do=index&page=event&event=222

Cost: £10.00

“Interviewing industry sources requires a broad range of skills which I didn’t learn in business school: rapport-building; how to open a conversation to start off on the right foot; how to close a conversation and keep the door still open. Nitron Advisors has helped me to interact with experts more effectively, learn more from them, and make better trading decisions. Nitron showed me how to ask the right questions… And how to help an expert teach me how to ask the right questions! Any investor without this skill set is at a significant disadvantage in the war for alpha.”
- Partner, Multistrategy/Convertible/Credit Arb $500M fund, New York, NY

As a professional investor, you speak every day with corporate management, with industry sources, and with other knowledgeable experts. However, are you getting as much information as possible? Do your sources pro-actively contact you with new investment ideas? Do you have access to the right sources for your business?

David Teten, CEO of research firm Nitron Advisors, will fill the gap. Come learn:

+ How can I learn the most information possible from industry sources?
+ What questions should I ask?
+ What are the killer phrases NOT to say?
+ How do I build a pool of knowledgeable sources in the industries in which I invest?
+ What questions prompt sources to share their most valuable information?
+ What are the legal and ethical guidelines that I should think about when speaking with sources?

There are countless books on how to read a balance sheet or an income statement. However, when you actually measure how professional investors spend their time, they spend perhaps half of it talking with management, attending conferences, and in other ways learning from industry sources. Yet, there’s not a single book on Amazon or course in business schools on how to do that effectively. We fill this gap.

Who is Nitron Advisors?

Nitron Advisors provides professional investors with precise answers to their questions about specific companies and industries, by tapping our exclusive Circle of Experts of thousands of knowledgeable industry insiders. You can learn directly from the Experts through private telephone consultations, in-person customized surveys, and interactive events. We provide access to senior executives, local managers, technologists, suppliers, customers, and regulatory observers. We specialize in connecting you with executives in transition.
By the nature of our business, we have developed an in-house expertise in elicitation, and developed this training program for our clients as a “User’s Guide” to our services.

“By talking with a Nitron Advisors expert, our…conversation led to north of a million dollar profit for us and our clients. Within 48 to 72 hours, I was trading facts with the actual person we wanted to be connected to, and that allowed us to form an extremely fast, investable idea.”
- Lyron Bentovim, Managing Director, SKIRITAI Capital,
New York Post, August 7, 2005

Biography of Speaker

David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors. David is also the lead author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first business book about how to use online networks to accelerate sales and raise capital. He runs TheVirtualHandshake.com resource site and blog and co-writes a monthly column for FastCompany.com. David recently was named a “2005 Future HR Leader” by Human Capital magazine for Nitron Advisors’ unique use of social software for recruiting. David serves on the Advisory Board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and of Accolo, a recruitment process outsourcer.
David is a frequent keynote speaker at finance and technology industry conferences and at such universities as Wharton, Columbia Business School, Yale, and Princeton. He formerly was CEO of GoldNames, an investment bank focusing on serving the internet domain name asset class. He has worked with Bear Stearns’ Investment Banking division as a member of their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team, and was a strategy consultant with Mars & Co. David holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Sep. 7, London: How Professional Investors Elicit Maximum Information in Minimum Time from Industry Sources

I’m curious to see if anyone has data on the biggest providers of online network services. According to my sources, they include:

Yahoo Groups-90m users
MySpace-100m users (and many thousands more in the last day or so, no doubt)
Classmates.com-40m users
Neopets-30m users
Facebook-7.7m users

Jeff Weiner, SVP of Yahoo Search and Marketplace, reported at Yahoo Analyst Day on May 17 that Yahoo Groups has 90 million members. Does anyone have any more detailed information on this number? Are these 90 million members receiving and reading their Yahoo Groups emails, regularly visiting the Yahoo Groups website, or doing anything else to prove that they are “active” members in some way? Or does 90 million simply refer to the number of users who at some point in the past registered with a Yahoo Group, but who are not necessarily participating or involved in the group in any way anymore?

Thanks!

This post was written by David Teten, source: Seeking data on Yahoo! Groups and competitors

The presentations from the Australian conference, The Successful Repository (Brisbane, June 29, 2006), are now online.

source: Presentations on successful OA repositories

Elaine Peterson, Librarian Publishing Preferences and Open-Access Electronic Journals, Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, Summer 2006. Abstract: Librarians have often led the way in championing Open-Access (OA) journals on the Internet as an alternative to established journal titles that are subscription based. In the discipline of Library and Information Science [LIS],

source: Author attitudes toward OA journals in the field of LIS

In his talk on Saturday at Chinese Wikimania 2006, Jimmy Wales reiterated his view that he will not accept Chinese government censorship as a condition for restoring access to the full Chinese version of Wikipedia.

source: Wikipedia will not cooperate with Chinese censors

Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder, The Economics of Open-Access Journals, May 2006. A preprint self-archived July 14, 2006. (Thanks to DocuTicker.) Abstract: A new business model for scholarly journals, open access, has gained wide attention recently. An open-access journal’s articles are available over the Internet free of charge to all readers; revenue to cover publication costs

source: Fee-based OA journals in a two-sided market

Katarina Tomasevski, The State of the Right to Education Worldwide: Free or Fee: 2006 Global Report, Copenhagen, August 2006. This is a major, 281-page report surveying the laws and practices of 170 countries. There is no executive summary, but here’s a short overview from the splash page: [The] bitter reality of economic exclusion from education is evidenced in 22 different types of fees in

source: The gap between rhetoric and reality on free public education

Yesterday Jared Benedict’s Libre Map Project came to a successful conclusion. (Thanks to Boing Boing.)

Jared bought electronic copies of 56,000 topological maps from the U.S. Geological Survey. These maps are in the public domain but were not yet OA. Or more precisely, not all were OA and not all the OA maps were OA from the same site. Jared’s project was to raise $1,600 to cover his expenses and then give the maps to the Internet Archive for permanent OA hosting. Yesterday he met his fund-raising goal and the 300 GB of data are on their way to the IA.

Comments.

1. The UK Free Our Data project likes to point to the US as a country that provides open access to publicly-funded data. While the US does have a commendable track record on this score (as opposed to OA for literature based on publicly-funded research), there are still many pockets of data funded by US taxpayers available only to those willing to pay a second fee. Kudos to Jared Benedict for identifying one such pocket and liberating it, and kudos to the Internet Archive for its assistance. 
2. I doubt that the USGS will object to this project. The maps are not copyrightable; the (slight) diversion of traffic from the USGS store to the IA should trigger a (slight) reduction in agency expenses; and I’ve found that most US government agencies sincerely support the principle of public access for publicly-funded information even if various regulatory or political obstacles prevent them from fully implementing it. However, the USGS’ business partners, through which it sells most of its priced products, might object. I’ll follow this and blog what I hear.
3. Jared raised the money by selling DVDs of the data he was trying to liberate. This is a beautiful model for any data unencumbered by copyright. Instead of needy taxpayers paying a public agency again and again for the same public information, benefiting only themselves, a small cohort pays the same price for the same information in order to liberate it once and for all for everyone.

Update. I’m glad to see the LibreMap Project getting some good press. See the articles in Federal Computer Week and SiliconValley.com.

source: Success for the Libre Map Project

Sandra Braman, Transformations of the Research Enterprise, Educause Review, July/August 2006. Excerpt:

Large research projects are more likely to involve working with the results of data from multiple studies at multiple sites across multiple time periods than working with single studies alone. High-performance computing has made it possible to analyze much larger aggregates of data, expanding vision across space and time in ways previously not possible. Researchers working with such datasets need…institutional arrangements that ensure access to that data irrespective of where it resides or in what form….

The desire to maximize knowledge reuse has become a much more important factor in the design of libraries, databases, storage collections, and archives. Knowledge reuse occurs in several different ways: conducting a secondary analysis of a researcher’s raw data, analyzed either by another in the same field or by people in other fields; revisiting data through new analytical lenses; analyzing data of multiple types through a single analytical lens; synthesizing the results of many different types of studies for simultaneous analysis of multiple types of data about the same problem; adapting analyses of data for application in new contexts; and visualizing results of data analyses….

There is…a tension between the need to centralize data that is being used by multiple parties for multiple purposes and the interest in dispersing data in order to respond to vulnerabilities and to maximize access…

source: Data sharing is critical for new kinds of science

Here’s the 2lmc boys getting rightly
annoyed about Flickr’s new mapping feature, which displays geotagged photos
overlaid on a mapping UI — as they note, it’s basically a steaming pile of
crap outside the US:

However, because Flickr are owned by Yahoo, they’re using their maps. And,
like all Yahoo! products, if you’re not American, it sucks.

Compare this lovely data-rich map of
SF:

With this featureless grey blob:

That’s just pathetic — there isn’t a single place name visible, and even the
Phoenix Park, the biggest urban park in Europe, is simply displayed just as a
light-coloured splat with a road going through it.

It appears the Yahoo! mapping data for the UK and Ireland just isn’t really
there. What someone needs to do, is take the geotagging data from Flickr, and
overlay it on the far more informative Google map
data
instead ;):

It’s a real shame — I used to rely on Y! Maps to get directions everywhere while in the US. They’re missing out on so many customers here…

Tags:flickr geodata geotagging insularity ireland mapping yahoo

This post was written by Justin, source: Flickr’s Lousy US-Only Maps

http://www.links.org/?p=130

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source: Freenigma Firefox Extension Considered Harmful?