Technology Blog

I thought that some of our readers might be interested and qualified to attend one of our upcoming private hedge fund dinners.

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Seeking Ecommerce Experts for New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Hedge Fund Dinners
December 2006

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Nitron Advisors is organizing a series of dinners for Ecommerce experts to talk with major hedge fund investors interested in this sector. These invitation-only events will be taking place in New York on December 4th, Boston on December 6th, Chicago on December 11th, and San Francisco on December 13th. We will compensate you for flight expenses.

We’re looking for senior industry executives and other experts with the following backgrounds:
+ online specialty retail (eBay, Amazon, Blue Nile, Overstock, Audible, etc.)
+ online auctions (power sellers on eBay, other auction sites)
+ search engine space (Google, Yahoo, MSN)
+ consumer generated media/ free video hosting services (YouTube, MSN Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video)
+ online advertising/marketing (ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media, aQuantive)
+ lead generation players (Autobytel Inc, Move Inc, Bankrate, IAC InterActiveCorp, HouseValues, etc.)
+ Online media (PRIMEDIA, New York Times/About.com, etc.)

Qualifications: As an expert, you have at least four years senior experience in the eCommerce space. You have a “big picture” perspective on different firms in the space.

If you are not already a member of our Circle of Experts, please visit http://www.circleofexperts.com/apply-form.html?i=11 and apply to be a member of the Nitron Advisors Circle of Experts. Please contact Mr. Jesse Mandell, 1-212-682-6455, JMandell(AT)nitronadvisors.com, with any questions. Please note that we must review your bio and talk with you before we can accept you for the dinner.

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I should also mention that we’re hosting a dinner on Nov. 15 for consumer technology experts in New York. We’re interested in experts in PCs, flash memory, MP3 players, GPS systems, and mobile telephony. Register at http://www.circleofexperts.com/apply-form.html?i=11. Contact Mr. Jesse Mandell, 1-212-682-6455, JMandell(AT)nitronadvisors.com , for details. We’ll reimburse flight expenses.
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This post was written by David Teten, source: Seeking Ecommerce Experts for NY, Boston, Chicago, and SF Hedge Fund Dinners

From the “brazen careerist”, 10 Job-hunt tactics you might not know:

2. Use proactive recommendations.
Instead of waiting for a hiring manager to ask for references, have your reference call immediately. This works well if you have a heavy-weight reference, like a well-known CEO or someone who knows the hiring manager. But it also works well if you have little professional experience.

more

This post was written by David Teten, source: 10 Job-hunt tactics you might not know

Link, with pictures

[ comments ]

source: Scary Halloween Costume: Dress up as THE PATRIOT ACT!

Link, with pictures

[ comments ]

source: Scary Halloween Costume: Dress up as THE PATRIOT ACT!

Chris Armbruster, Cyberscience and the Knowledge-based Economy, Open Access and Trade Publishing: From Contradiction to Compatibility with Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing, a preprint, self-archived October 17, 2006. 

Abstract:   Open source, open content and open access are set to fundamentally alter the conditions of knowledge production and distribution. Open source, open content and open access are also the most tangible result of the shift towards eScience and digital networking. Yet, this article takes issue with widespread misperceptions about the nature of this shift. The focus is on knowledge distribution and scholarly publishing. It is argued, on the one hand, that for the academy there principally is no digital dilemma surrounding copyright and there is no contradiction between open science and the knowledge-based economy if profits are made from nonexclusive rights. On the other hand, pressure for the ‘digital doubling’ of research articles in OA repositories is misguided and OA publishing has no future outside biomedicine. Yet, commercial publishers must understand that business models based on the transfer of copyright have no future either. What is required of universities and governments, scholars and publishers, is to clear the way for digital innovations in knowledge distribution and scholarly publishing by enabling the emergence of a competitive market that is based on nonexclusive rights. This requires no change in the law but merely an end to the praxis of copyright transfer. The best way forward is the adoption of standard copyright licenses that reserve some rights, namely Attribution and No Derivative Works, but otherwise will allow for the unlimited reproduction, dissemination and use of the research article, commercial uses included.

source: A scholarly publishing market based on non-exclusive rights

source: October HEPLW

Here’s an excellent quote from the OpenGeoData weblog, really worth reproducing:

‘’We think the natural tendency is for producers to worry too much about protecting their intellectual property. The important thing is to maximise the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection. If you lose a little of your property when you sell it or rent it, that’s just a cost of doing business, along with depreciation, inventory losses, and obsolescence.’’ — Information Rules, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, page 97.

Words to live by!

Tags:carl shapiro drm hal varian intellectual property ip open culture open source property

This post was written by Justin, source: Maximise value, not protection (fwd)

Only a week at home before I leave again. This time to Banff, for the ACM Computer-Supported Collaborative Work conference (also known as “CSCW”).

I leave Saturday, and on Sunday I’ll be doing a tutorial on folksonomies with David Millen from IBM Research. Then two days of conference-going, and a redeye flight home Tuesday night (ugh) so I can be in class on Wednesday.

Happily, the conference I was supposed to speak at next Thursday in Toronto has been postponed until the spring, so once I’m back from Banff I’ll have some breathing room.

source: more conference travel

Although I first blogged news about Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) in December 2005, the project didn’t officially launch until yesterday.  From the announcement:

In an effort to help reduce great disparities in scientific capital between developed and developing nations, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers launched today a new collaborative initiative to make global scientific research in the environmental sciences available online to tens of thousands of environmental scientists, researchers, and policy makers in the developing world for free or at nominal cost.

Through Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), more than 200 prestigious publishers, societies and associations will offer one of the world’s largest collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed environmental science journals to over 1200 public and non-profit environmental institutions in more than 100 developing nations of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Each and every institution enrolled in OARE will receive resources with an annual retail subscription value in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Over 1000 scholarly scientific and technical journal titles…will be provided through a portal presented in English, Spanish and French. OARE will also provide important Abstract and Index Research Databases….

OARE aims to contribute to the development of expert professional and academic communities and an informed public, encourage scientific creativity and productivity, and facilitate the development of progressive science-based national policies. It will help enable countries to build their own higher education programs in the environmental sciences, educate their own leaders, conduct their own research, publish their own scientific findings, and disseminate information to policy makers and the public….

A complete listing of collaborating institutions is available at [the OARE web site].

Eligible institutions include universities and colleges, research institutes, ministries of the environment and other government agencies, libraries, and national NGOs. Access for institutions in the 70 poorest countries will be free. Access for institutions in 38 lower middle income countries will be at a nominal charge, which will be reinvested to support continued training and outreach activities in eligible countries….

source: Launch of OARE

Michele Barbera and Francesca Di Donato, Weaving the Web of Science: HyperJournal and the impact of the Semantic Web on scientific publishing, in Bob Martens and Milena Dobrova (eds.), Proceedings ELPUB : International Conference on Electronic Publishing (10th : 2006 : Bansko), Bansko (Bulgaria), 2006, pp. 341-348.  Self-archived October 30, 2006.

Abstract:   In this paper we present HyperJournal, an Open Source web application for publishing on-line Open Access scholarly journals. In the first part (sections 1, 2 and 3) we briefly describe the project and the software. In sections 4 and 5, we discuss the weaknesses of the current publishing model and the benefits deriving from the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, outlining how the Semantic Web vision can help to overcome the inefficiencies of the current model. In the last two sections (6 and 7), we present two experimental applications, developed on top of HyperJournal, with the purpose of demonstrating how the technologies can affect the daily work of scholars. The first application is a tool for graphically visualizing the network of citations existing between articles and their authors, and for performing bibliometric measurements alternative to the ISI Impact Factor. The second is a tool for automatically extracting references from non-structured textual documents, which is part of a tool-chain for the extraction of hidden semantics.

source: Profile of HyperJournal

Wikipedia now has an article on Open Data.  (Dive in and help expand it.) 

Peter Murray-Rust has blogged some notes on how it got off the ground.

source: An open access article on open data

Wikipedia now has an article on Open Data.  (Dive in and help expand it.) 

Peter Murray-Rust has blogged some notes on how it got off the ground.

source: An open access article on open data

Steve Hitchcock, Revamped Google service prompts new wave of repository search, Eprints Insiders, October 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

Google’s Custom Search Engine has realised immediate results in the area of repository search services. Although not the first such service, and not even the first such service from Google, this one seems to have hit the mark where previous attempts to provide search that could be customised and directed to a specified range of repository sites ultimately proved unsatisfactory.

• OpenDOAR was the first repository directory to take advantage of the new service, followed by
• ROAR Search Engine, searching the sites listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories
• SHERPA Search all UK Repositories
  Search SHERPA Repositories, a subset of UK repositories that are part of the SHERPA network
• AuseSearch, covering all the OA repositories in Australia and New Zealand.

The sudden proliferation of these services will clearly put more pressure on formal national repository search services such as DAREnet and ARROW, and on OAI search services such as OAIster, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) and the new ScientificCommons. All of these would have known from the outset they would be operating in the shadow of Google, but through OAI have some claim to index the ‘deep’ Web unseen by popular services….

If Google could support a simple quality control “refereed material” tag then according to Les Carr we could get by without OAI and without repositories: “Well, it doesn’t” Carr continued “and so OAI still seems our best hope. However, even with five years of OAI our repositories are not doing a very good job of sharing metadata that helps a service to comprehend the status of the holdings that it harvests (is this a published, refereed journal article or equivalent? Is this a paper from an unrefereed workshop? is this a chemical data file?) Too much is still down to interpretation and subsequent data mining of the web pages.”

While Carr highlighted the need for improved metadata standards for repositories, other correspondents placed responsibility for improving services with the repositories and with Google. Andy Powell blogged the results of a rough-and-ready test of OpenDOAR search against native Google:

“Overall, what I conclude from this (once again) is that it is not the act of depositing a paper in a repository that is important for open access, but the act of surfacing the paper on the Web - the repository is just a means to en end in that respect….[O]ur ‘resource discovery’ efforts should centre on exposing the full text of research papers in repositories to search engines like Google and on developing Web-friendly and consistent approaches to creating hypertext links between research papers.”

Peter Suber argued that Google will need to do more before OAI becomes redundant:  “Google (and Google Scholar and Google Custom Search) could neutralize some of the remaining advantages of OAI if it would (1) label peer-reviewed articles as peer-reviewed and (2) label OA articles as OA. It could make strides toward the first if it used, instead of discarding, the metadata it found in OA repositories. To make strides toward the second it would have to produce an OA-detecting algorithm that could distinguish an abstract from a full-text article. Authors could help by using machine-readable CC licenses, since the Google advanced search page already has a “usage rights” filter to limit results to CC-licensed content.”

source: Google Custom search and the OA repositories

Creative Commons has posted the latest drafts of its 3.0 licenses.

source: Creative Commons 3.0 licenses still evolving

The October issue of Ariadne is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles:

• Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim, Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?
• Suzuki Masako and Sugita Shigeki, From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project (PS: The title refers to the growing volume of content in the Hokkaido University institutional repository.)
• Heleen Gierveld, Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository
• Yan Han, GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal
• Marieke Guy, Wiki or Won’t He? A Tale of Public Sector Wikis
• Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley, and Michael Daw, e-Collaboration Workshop: Access Grid, Portals and other VREs for the Social Sciences
• Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley, and Caroline Ingram, Workshop on e-Research, Digital Repositories and Portals

source: October Ariadne

eIFL has posted a report on its Open Access Workshop (Poznan, September 21-22, 2006).  Excerpt:

Sponsored by eIFL and the Poznan Foundation of Scientific Libraries, newcomers learnt about the driving force behind open access; the work of academic authors cannot be seen by all their peers, researchers cannot access all the necessary literature and libraries cannot meet the information needs of their users. The global movement for change that has resulted from the dissatisfaction at all levels has garnered support from prestige funding institutions, legislators from the UK to the Ukraine and most recently, the introduction in the U.S. Senate of a draft bill requiring free online access for federally funded research results in peer-reviewed articles.

The scientific publication system has become a key issue for European research policy. One of the most startling findings of the European Commission funded study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe, is that between 1975 and 1995 the price of print journals rose by 300% above the cost of inflation….

Two key projects related to open access and institutional repositories were featured during the one day event. Participants were treated to the first steps towards a pan-European digital repository infrastructure from the Warsaw University partner of the EU funded “Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for Europe” (DRIVER). The name of the new counterpart to the UK-based SHERPA/RoMEO service was revealed as none other than “Juliet”! Juliet is a database of funders’ open access mandate policies and it is hoped that it will expand to countries beyond the UK.

Finishing the day with a roundtable discussion on institutional repositories, and the role of librarians in their development, participants debated the critical issues for the successful implementation of a repository as well as the merits of institutional versus subject-based repositories….

Two concrete outcomes were reported. A handy tool provided by the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) to help repository administrators formulate and/or present their repository’s policies is being translated into Polish. Jan Andrzej Nikisch, Poznan Foundation of Scientific Libraries reported “I have been invited by the Conference of Polish University Rectors to speak at their forthcoming conference in Wroclaw about open access, new models of scholarly publishing and institutional repositories….”

This workshop is part of a series of eIFL-sponsored open access workshops which have taken place in Serbia, Ukraine, Lithuania, China and Southern Africa under the eIFL Open Access program. Participants from Botswana, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique and Swaziland were represented at the South Africa event.

source: Update on OA in Poland

Blackwell has updated the list of journals participating in its hybrid journal program, Online Open.  The new list (an Excel spreadsheet, November 1, 2006) contains 115 titles.

source: 115 Blackwell journals in Online Open program

Petra Bartosiewicz has an excellent article in the October 30 issue of Salon on the closing of the libraries at the US Environmental Protection Agency and how it will diminish research access by agency scientists, external scientists, and citizens.

source: More on the library closings at the EPA

The presentations from the ARL’s 149th Membership Meeting (San Diego, October 18-19, 2006) are now online.  Note especially the two presentations in Session III: Faculty Assessment of New Publishing Models.

• Martin Osborne, speaking on Theoretical Economics and the State of Scholarly Publishing in Economics, concluded (1) that “Access to research [is] limited, even though the cost of providing such access to an additional person is virtually zero”, (2) that “Open Access is efficient” and (3) that “Most established Society journals unlikely to convert to Open Access because of entrenched cost structures.”
• Scott MacDonald, speaking on Medieval Philosophy and Theology, cited four reasons for converting his journal to OA:  (1) “no subscription management”, (2) “little copyrights management”, (3) “best meets needs of everyone” and (4) “Duh!”

source: Two journal editors assess OA

There are so many good solid reasons for the modern world to opt into hypercubic tele-computing that it is near impossible to enumerate them all, but if we ever needed one more from a purely business point of view, Joe Sharkey at the New York Times has found us a goodie. According to Joe, business travellers these days have a lot more to fear than just accidentally leaving their laptop on the shuttlebus:

“One member who responded to our survey said she has been waiting for a year to get her laptop and its contents back, … She said it was randomly seized. And since she hasn’t been arrested, I assume she was just a regular business traveler, not a criminal.”

Appeals are under way in some cases, but the law is clear. “They don’t need probable cause to perform these searches under the current law. They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations …”
[ At U.S. Borders, Laptops Have No Right to Privacy ]

And suddenly there they are, no computer, no idea what is happening to their computer or who is scanning it for what, no assurances at all; they could be looking for anything from child-porn to al qaeda plans to state secrets to political incriminations to RIAA bootlegs …

Now … in a tele-dynamically omni-access infospacial hypercubic world?

source: Hypercubism for Travellers