Social Networking - Where the cool kids are

"The rapid growth of 'social networking' Web sites, such as http://www.myspace.com/ , continues to soar, according to the most recent numbers from Nielsen-NetRatings, released Thursday." Peer-to-Peer Networking For Podcasts and People

Royal Soc. attacked on open access

"A group of 46 senior scientists accused the Royal Society this week of putting its own considerations above those of science by adopting a negative stance on the issue of open access publishing, in which scientific literature is made freely available via the Internet. The letter-writers argue that the Royal Society is disparaging open access to protect the interests of for-profit publishers – including the Royal Society itself -- while the Society accuses petitioners of harbouring their own conflict of interest."

Stephen Pincock, Royal Soc. attacked on open access : Leading scientists criticize the UK's national academy of science for its negative stance, The Scientist, Daily News, Dec. 9, 2005 http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20051209/02

Towards the Visible Web

Gerry McKiernan, the blogging, theoretical, visual librarian sent this to the digital library list:

John Markoff, Your Internet Search Results, in the Round, The New York Times, May 9, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 - For decades, computer researchers have experimented with the idea of displaying textual information in visual maps, but the concept has been slow to find practical applications. Now, one of the pioneering companies in the field is hoping that by making its software available as part of a standard Web browser it will be able to wean surfers away from the simple ranked lists of search results offered by Google and Yahoo. Groxis, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001, has converted its desktop Grokker software program, which displays a Web search as a series of categories set in a circular map, to run as a Java plug-in for browsers. On Monday, the company will begin allowing computer users to view Yahoo search results with its visualization technology at http://www.groxis.com . [MORE at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/technology/09yahoo.html

Gerry McKiernan's post includes links to good historical papers: [1] Gerry McKiernan, New Age Navigation, Innovative Information for Electronic Journals, The Serials Librarian, Vol. 45(2) 2003. p. 87. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf [2] Gerry McKiernan, The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases, Cyberstacks, March 21, 1999. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm

Humble Pi : Are the digits in Pi Random ?

The Christian Science Monitor published a editorial today touching on a fundamental tasks of academic computing - understanding numbers.

Pi's presumed infinite nature has absorbed mathematicians - and others - for centuries. According to "That Book...of Perfectly Useless Information," newly published, actress Melissa Joan Hart can actually recite pi from memory to 400 decimal places - not quite as good as a modern computer, which can take pi to more than 200 billion digits, but it's still pretty impressive.

But students young and old might not be aware of news generated by physicists at Purdue University that suggests pi, or 3.14159...., might not be as truly random as once believed.

The scientists just completed a study (published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics) comparing pi's "randomness" to that produced by some 30 different machines that generate random numbers. Though they found that the sequences derived from pi are an acceptable source of randomness (a big factor in producing hard-to-decrypt code, or solving particular physics problems), pi's string doesn't produce that randomness quite as effectively as the machines. Call it a case of deus ex machina.

For now, pi's integrity appears safe. "We do not believe these results imply anything about a pattern existing in pi's number set," says Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue physics professor.

The Monitor's View, Humble Pie, The Christian Science Monitor, April 29, 2005. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0429/p08s03-comv.html

Purdue University News, Pi seems a good random number generator – but not always the best, April 26, 2005. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2005/050426.Fischbach.pi.html

Spotted by GCD's Brain, Math Tidbits.

Open Source Content Mangement

opensourceCMS.com was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

Why some systems are here and others are not? Below are the main system requirements.

1. Root access to the server is not required for installation.

2. The system must be php/mysql based.

3. opensourceCMS is not just for "open source" systems.

4. We may not know of the system.

5. Some systems we couldn't get installed.

OrangeGuava

OrangeGuava is focused on allowing people to get their work done without needing to think like a computer.

OrangeGuava Desktop updates the desktop metaphor which has remained mostly unchanged for the past decade. A real world desktop has stacks of paper arranged informally in such a way that you always know where to find a piece of information, simply by knowing which side of the desk you always put that kind of information. This is combined with the functionality of a large pad of paper, to take notes in a similarly informal structure. http://www.orangeguava.com/

Edward Felten, The Freedom to Tinker

Viola Huang. Fighting for the 'freedom to tinker,' Daily Princetonian, March 1, 2005 writes:

"The world is an imperfect place, and Edward Felten likes to tinker with it.

"In December, Felten released the world's smallest peer-to-peer file-sharing program — 15 lines of code he named tinyP2P — to prove that such programs could not easily be banned. Felten wrote tinyP2P with his graduate student Alex Halderman '03.

"It isn't the first time the duo has caught the eye of the media. In 2003, Halderman discovered a way to bypass the copy-protection technique in CDs by pressing the Shift key. He was soon threatened with a lawsuit.

"For Felten, the opportunity to work with students like Halderman is what keeps him in the classroom. Felten finds that teaching enhances his ability to do his security research.

"Students are part of the key," he said. "If you're in the technology field and want to stay current, you need to have people around who know about the latest things . . . This is one of the big benefits of being at a university — there's always a constant stream of smart students coming through."

"Felten speaks out through a daily blog, http://freedom-to-tinker.com, which he started to advocate "freedom of ordinary users to adapt technologies to their cause."

[1] Viola Huang. Fighting for the 'freedom to tinker,' Daily Princetonian, March 1, 2005. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/03/01/news/12196.shtml

connotea : online collaboration

Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group.

Connotea stores your reference list online, and that provides many advantages: it's readily accessible, it's linked directly into the literature and it's easily shared with colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you.

Liquid Information

How did we go from using computers with punched cards, where you'd have to wait a day for the results of your calculations - to sitting around in coffee shops with a laptop ?

Liquid Information is a research project at UCLiC in London in cooperation with Doug Engelbart in California. We are aiming to make text more interactive - turning words into hyperwords.

Why? Most electronic communication has focused on the production of information, not the digestion of information. In order to make informed decisions in our work, it's not enough to rely on automated systems - we need to get the right information into our heads.

URLs:

[1] http://www.liquidinformation.org

[2] Douglas Engelbart, Invisible Revolution, the Doug Engelbart & the history of interactive computing. http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/

Disruptive Scholarship

Gerry McKiernan has announced the launching of the "disruptive scholarship blog". at http://disruptivescholarship.blogspot.com/.

I have begun to speculate further about the Wiki as *the* platform for The Next Generation e-Journal [1] and the transformation of the review process. I hereby invite Any and All of my Web Colleagues to Critically Review the scenarios outlined below in which I sketch the probable future [:-)] of scholarly communication, review, and publishing ['Disruptive Scholarship'] in the WikiWorld.

[1] [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/0408/0173.htm]