From the site: "Yesterday we discovered the Mac OSX "challenge" was not an activity authorized by the UW-Madison. Once the test came to the attention of our CIO, she ended it. The site, test.doit.wisc.edu, will be removed from the network tonight. Our primary concern is for security and network access for UW services. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused to the community."
This Page @ The CBC has the video in Real or Quicktime. In the video some "octopus expert" said "could've been lookin' for a girlfriend, could've been senile". Sounds like some kind of oceanographer joke: Why did the octopus attack the sub? "could've been lookin' for a girlfriend"
The House of Representatives last month held hearings on a preliminary draft by two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan, that would give the telecom companies the freedom to establish premium broadband services. The telecom bill is due for action early next year. If your rep. is on This List be sure to drop them a line.
To actually RTFR you'll need to be a "JupiterResearch client" but here's a link to more than just that press release: Municipal Wireless.
There's not much there, though a few other places have picked up bits, no one has the actual important parts that could tell us is this report is worth the bits its printed on. We're supposed to trust research "reported on" in a press release?
A few thoughts first. 1. Ol' boy must have a full inbox this morning 2. This will no doubt be the most popular story ever on LJ.com 3. From what I was told this piece was meant as humor. I do see evidence of that, regardless, I'd be willing to bet he'll be using the "I was kidding" defense. From the first paragraph he comes out swinging calling what we do unpalatable, and untrammeled by editors. This was meant to be an insult? In some ways I suppose these are legitimate complaints, but in other ways these are some of our greatest strengths. It's no doubt an ugly neologism, but I don't think I've ever pulled anything out of the drain resembling a blog. Though he provides no reason why it's absurd to give us press credentials, is it so hard for us to believe that someone would think this way? Especially someone who believes a computer that is able to search well over 8billion documents in less than a second is notoriously inefficient. This no doubt is meant to be humor, right? His response to Google is nothing more than typical librarian thinking that leaves us shackled to vendors that provide us with what we want, and leave out users hanging. This line of thinking continues to make us less relevant and expose the ugly curmudgeonly underbelly of our profession we've all seen in meetings. That's not to say we should be rushing into every crazy new idea out there. But not being able to see the value in what Google does now, and what it'll be capable of in a few years is not just short sighted, it's dangerous for our profession. Going on to attack the quality of writing on blogs is like shooting fish in a barrel. No kiddin', we ain't got mad skillz when it comes to gramer and spelinng. Speed kills. The funniest lines I must just quote:
"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. "
That is simply a classic quote. For my money, probably one of the funniest things I've seen written about bloggers, ever. Something tells me this did little to stem the tide of email and comments that say "Michael Gorman is an idiot" Worse yet, this will work to alienate more of us from the ALA at a time when they probably don't need to push more people away. This coming from the president is simply terrible PR at the very least, and I'd guess will lead to people calling for him to resign.
They don't come out and say it, but it sounds like it's just a big ol' LSI System. It works really well for some types of searching, but I'm not sure if such a thing would out perform google for a general purpose search engine.
"Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent."
Your local library. Unless you're really in the middle of nowhere and your library has no budget at all, go to the library. Heck, you might not even have to go to the library, many libraries now do chat reference, ask-a-librarian, and all libraries have a phone.
There's more, MUCH more, to doing research than using google. Paid databases have it all over google for finding current and historical news information.
If you can't find something local, try the Library Of Congress, they do online chat reference.
One interesting quote down near the end of that article caught my eye: " One project, called News Junkie, sifts through articles on the Web and presents to you only the ones you haven't seen before." Sounds like a neat idea, though isn't that why we all read slashdot?
John McPhee wrote about this in The New Yorker, 29 January 1996, 52:60. It's a really neat story on how Geologists figured out where exactly in Japan the balloons were being produced based on the sand used in the ballast the ballons held to make the long float across the Pacific. This is how we first learned about the jet stream as well.
I'm pretty sure the story is in Annals of the Former World, a 1996 book by McPhee, all about geeky geology stuff, but it's a really interesting read.
From the article: "Kelly Shannon, spokeswoman for the State Department's consular affairs office, said the Logan Airport results would not affect plans to use face recognition to enhance passport security"
So it doesn't work, won't help, and might even end up hurting more that a few people, but it's going to enhance passport security?
And Apparently OZ thinks it's a good idea too? "We now have an international standard established, which is the adoption of facial recognition as the international biometric, and that has left us well placed to move to implementation."
The author, Michael Kanellos, says: "Remember that this is corporate America and the U.S. government with which we are dealing. The chance of their gathering data correctly, let alone devising a way to use it to their advantage, is remote. "
This is an excellent point, and it is exactly part of the problem. It's not just when they use this information correctly it's when they screw it up as well. It's when they confuse me for a terrorist, or make connections in my data that aren't really there. So this remote problem is only one thing to worry about, it's also the rest of the time they get it wrong.
If you've read Code you probably already know why this kind of regulation by code is bad, but Lessig also wrote on this over At The Atlantic Monthly. He says the picture of a world where one needs a license to read is discomforting.
Current laws represents a choice made by our democratic processes, and with copyright as code it's not clear how the same balance can be struck. The problem with regulation (And Law) through code is that there is no place for such a collective choice. If one kind of "trusted systems" software protects rights of fair use, a competing version will promise more control to the owner. This makes fair use a bug, not a feature.
A story from LLRX.com from a couple years back says, amoung other things, On the positive side, this strength of protection offered by trusted systems could have the beneficial effect of encouraging authors to make all of their work available electronically. This would, at least, increase the availability of content, if pricing is reasonable. In this new universe, however, libraries would have to completely rethink their existence.
"In information society, the scarcest resource for people on the supply side of the economy is neither iron ore nor sacks of grain, but the attention of others. Everyone who works in the information field - from weather forecasters to professors - compete over the same seconds, minutes and hours of other people's lives. Unlike what happens to physical objects, the amount of information does not diminish when one gives it away or sells it."
From, "Tyranny of the Moment" Thomas Hylland Eriksen
It doesn't appear to be the "real" transcript, but rather a reconstruction from memory:
"Thanks to some friends, I've been able to get a copy of the Eldred case transcript. I've cleaned it up, added the names of the justices where possible (searching my memory, the responses in the text, and press reports) and HTMLized it."
From the article, which kind of put it into perspective for me:
"The truth is that there are a lot of IBM mainframe systems out there, and they're very important," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. "The truth is that this is not really for IBM's benefit, it's for IBM's customers' benefit. And I think that's fair. An international standard shouldn't change for the benefit of a company's future project, but it's clear that end-of-line characters are not a strategic business strategy for IBM."
From the article: "There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline. The customer just has to be connected to the internet, then they can automatically restore their licenses just by playing the music files in question."
Of course it may not really be that easy, and it still is a pain, but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal, IF what they say is true in this case. Yes, this is a pain, but it could've been worse. If that's the future, it doesn't look as bad as I thought it did.
"After being embarrassed on an almost regular basis by security flaws in its products -- including a debilitating problem found in its latest Windows XP operating system just days after its release -- Microsoft began a companywide training program on security issues earlier this year."
Yep, good point, I'm certainly not advocating for that. Mine was more of a comment that seeing (and touching if possble) something in person is much better in person. Not always, and most things would just get destroyed if eveyrone could touch it and use it, but it's always good to see the real thing, alot of people seem to be forgetting that.
"The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets."
Uuuh, well, the interesting part will be to see if these digitized images of the actual tablets will be still used in 5/10/100 years, while in another 4,000 years the rocks will most likely still be readable.
Gene Gragg, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute says "It's like being able to walk into the tablet room of a museum and pick up the actual tablets", which I've read alot on these types of projects.
That's like saying if you've seen the Grand Canyon on TV there's no need to go there, or if you've seen pictures of the top of Mt. Everest there's no need to try and climb it.
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
from the article "Because making movies is so expensive, only two in 10 films ever retrieve their production and marketing investment from domestic theatrical exhibition."
That is not true, check out Studio Accounting Practices in Hollywood By Joseph F. Hart, Esq. and Philip J. Hacker, C.P.A. if you want to see how they do their accounting. It seems like many more than 20% are making money, they just use "funny" accounting, ala enron.
My last job at a dying dot.com has left alot of us as dot.refugees. We didn't hang out much while we worked together, but now we remain "close" through ICQ.
It's an odd sort of closeness we've retained, we don't email, talk on the phone, hang out at the bars, or even live in the same states any more, but I feel we're all still quite close.
I wonder if this is more common now that there are so many of us who spent long hours working together, and have now gone our seperate way?
There was quite a bit of social interaction when we did all work in the same office before though.
Slashdot Mirror
From the site: "Yesterday we discovered the Mac OSX "challenge" was not an activity authorized by the UW-Madison. Once the test came to the attention of our CIO, she ended it. The site, test.doit.wisc.edu, will be removed from the network tonight. Our primary concern is for security and network access for UW services. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused to the community."
This Page @ The CBC has the video in Real or Quicktime.
In the video some "octopus expert" said "could've been lookin' for a girlfriend, could've been senile".
Sounds like some kind of oceanographer joke: Why did the octopus attack the sub? "could've been lookin' for a girlfriend"
The House of Representatives last month held hearings on a preliminary draft by two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan, that would give the telecom companies the freedom to establish premium broadband services. The telecom bill is due for action early next year. If your rep. is on This List be sure to drop them a line.
To actually RTFR you'll need to be a "JupiterResearch client" but here's a link to more than just that press release: Municipal Wireless.
There's not much there, though a few other places have picked up bits, no one has the actual important parts that could tell us is this report is worth the bits its printed on.
We're supposed to trust research "reported on" in a press release?
1. Ol' boy must have a full inbox this morning
2. This will no doubt be the most popular story ever on LJ.com
3. From what I was told this piece was meant as humor. I do see evidence of that, regardless, I'd be willing to bet he'll be using the "I was kidding" defense.
From the first paragraph he comes out swinging calling what we do unpalatable, and untrammeled by editors. This was meant to be an insult? In some ways I suppose these are legitimate complaints, but in other ways these are some of our greatest strengths. It's no doubt an ugly neologism, but I don't think I've ever pulled anything out of the drain resembling a blog.
Though he provides no reason why it's absurd to give us press credentials, is it so hard for us to believe that someone would think this way? Especially someone who believes a computer that is able to search well over 8billion documents in less than a second is notoriously inefficient. This no doubt is meant to be humor, right? His response to Google is nothing more than typical librarian thinking that leaves us shackled to vendors that provide us with what we want, and leave out users hanging. This line of thinking continues to make us less relevant and expose the ugly curmudgeonly underbelly of our profession we've all seen in meetings. That's not to say we should be rushing into every crazy new idea out there. But not being able to see the value in what Google does now, and what it'll be capable of in a few years is not just short sighted, it's dangerous for our profession.
Going on to attack the quality of writing on blogs is like shooting fish in a barrel. No kiddin', we ain't got mad skillz when it comes to gramer and spelinng. Speed kills. The funniest lines I must just quote:
That is simply a classic quote. For my money, probably one of the funniest things I've seen written about bloggers, ever.
Something tells me this did little to stem the tide of email and comments that say "Michael Gorman is an idiot" Worse yet, this will work to alienate more of us from the ALA at a time when they probably don't need to push more people away. This coming from the president is simply terrible PR at the very least, and I'd guess will lead to people calling for him to resign.
They don't come out and say it, but it sounds like it's just a big ol' LSI System. It works really well for some types of searching, but I'm not sure if such a thing would out perform google for a general purpose search engine.
"Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent."
Your local library. Unless you're really in the middle of nowhere and your library has no budget at all, go to the library. Heck, you might not even have to go to the library, many libraries now do chat reference, ask-a-librarian, and all libraries have a phone.
There's more, MUCH more, to doing research than using google. Paid databases have it all over google for finding current and historical news information.
If you can't find something local, try the Library Of Congress, they do online chat reference.
One interesting quote down near the end of that article caught my eye: " One project, called News Junkie, sifts through articles on the Web and presents to you only the ones you haven't seen before." Sounds like a neat idea, though isn't that why we all read slashdot?
I could find anything on that on the MSFT Research Site, nor On Google.
John McPhee wrote about this in The New Yorker, 29 January 1996, 52:60. It's a really neat story on how Geologists figured out where exactly in Japan the balloons were being produced based on the sand used in the ballast the ballons held to make the long float across the Pacific.
This is how we first learned about the jet stream as well.
I'm pretty sure the story is in Annals of the Former World, a 1996 book by McPhee, all about geeky geology stuff, but it's a really interesting read.
"Kelly Shannon, spokeswoman for the State Department's consular affairs office, said the Logan Airport results would not affect plans to use face recognition to enhance passport security"
So it doesn't work, won't help, and might even end up hurting more that a few people, but it's going to enhance passport security?
And Apparently OZ thinks it's a good idea too? "We now have an international standard established, which is the adoption of facial recognition as the international biometric, and that has left us well placed to move to implementation."
The author, Michael Kanellos, says:
"Remember that this is corporate America and the U.S. government with which we are dealing. The chance of their gathering data correctly, let alone devising a way to use it to their advantage, is remote. "
This is an excellent point, and it is exactly part of the problem. It's not just when they use this information correctly it's when they screw it up as well. It's when they confuse me for a terrorist, or make connections in my data that aren't really there. So this remote problem is only one thing to worry about, it's also the rest of the time they get it wrong.
If you've read Code you probably already know why this kind of regulation by code is bad, but Lessig also wrote on this over At The Atlantic Monthly.
He says the picture of a world where one needs a license to read is discomforting.
Current laws represents a choice made by our democratic processes, and with copyright as code it's not clear how the same balance can be struck. The problem with regulation (And Law) through code is that there is no place for such a collective choice. If one kind of "trusted systems" software protects rights of fair use, a competing version will promise more control to the owner. This makes fair use a bug, not a feature.
A story from LLRX.com from a couple years back says, amoung other things, On the positive side, this strength of protection offered by trusted systems could have the beneficial effect of encouraging authors to make all of their work available electronically. This would, at least, increase the availability of content, if pricing is reasonable. In this new universe, however, libraries would have to completely rethink their existence.
From, "Tyranny of the Moment" Thomas Hylland Eriksen
It doesn't appear to be the "real" transcript, but rather a reconstruction from memory:
"Thanks to some friends, I've been able to get a copy of the Eldred case transcript. I've cleaned it up, added the names of the justices where possible (searching my memory, the responses in the text, and press reports) and HTMLized it."
That is a quote from the site it's posted on Here
"The truth is that there are a lot of IBM mainframe systems out there, and they're very important," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. "The truth is that this is not really for IBM's benefit, it's for IBM's customers' benefit. And I think that's fair. An international standard shouldn't change for the benefit of a company's future project, but it's clear that end-of-line characters are not a strategic business strategy for IBM."
Of course it may not really be that easy, and it still is a pain, but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal, IF what they say is true in this case. Yes, this is a pain, but it could've been worse. If that's the future, it doesn't look as bad as I thought it did.
Houston Chronicle has the story available with no register.
"After being embarrassed on an almost regular basis by security flaws in its products -- including a debilitating problem found in its latest Windows XP operating system just days after its release -- Microsoft began a companywide training program on security issues earlier this year."
D'Oh!
Yep, good point, I'm certainly not advocating for that. Mine was more of a comment that seeing (and touching if possble) something in person is much better in person. Not always, and most things would just get destroyed if eveyrone could touch it and use it, but it's always good to see the real thing, alot of people seem to be forgetting that.
"The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets."
Uuuh, well, the interesting part will be to see if these digitized images of the actual tablets will be still used in 5/10/100 years, while in another 4,000 years the rocks will most likely still be readable.
Gene Gragg, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute says "It's like being able to walk into the tablet room of a museum and pick up the actual tablets", which I've read alot on these types of projects.
That's like saying if you've seen the Grand Canyon on TV there's no need to go there, or if you've seen pictures of the top of Mt. Everest there's no need to try and climb it.
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/fcra.htm here's an FTC FAQ on credit reports.
Experian , Transunion and Equifax are the big 3 for reports.
from the article "Because making movies is so expensive, only two in 10 films ever retrieve their production and marketing investment from domestic theatrical exhibition."
That is not true, check out Studio Accounting Practices in Hollywood By Joseph F. Hart, Esq. and Philip J. Hacker, C.P.A. if you want to see how they do their accounting.
It seems like many more than 20% are making money, they just use "funny" accounting, ala enron.
My last job at a dying dot.com has left alot of us as dot.refugees. We didn't hang out much while we worked together, but now we remain "close" through ICQ.
It's an odd sort of closeness we've retained, we don't email, talk on the phone, hang out at the bars, or even live in the same states any more, but I feel we're all still quite close.
I wonder if this is more common now that there are so many of us who spent long hours working together, and have now gone our seperate way?
There was quite a bit of social interaction when we did all work in the same office before though.
Well, Here it is.
Holds 1000 songs
Weighs 6.5 oz
10 hour play time with skip protection
uses fire wire to charge and transfer
nice scroll wheel for interface
5 gig hard drive that doubles as a firwire drive
Yipee