Dallas, Tex.: If elected President, what are your plans for NASA and the Space Program? Do you think it's time to retire the Shuttle and move on to bigger and better things, such as a human mission to Mars, or returning to the moon?
Howard Dean: I am a strong supporter of NASA and every government program that furthers scientific research. I don't think we should close the shuttle program but I do believe that we should aggressively begin a program to have manned flights to Mars. This of course assumes that we can change Presidents so we can have a balanced budget again.
I think that some librarians would like at least the option of censorware, but the available options are unacceptable. Plus, a government mandate rankles the souls of librarians who want otherwise.
Like anyone else, libraries have limited bandwith and a limited number of computers. Every library I've been to has time limits and sign-ins for the use of internet stations. There lines and waiting lists in the evenings when people are back from work and kids are back from school. From a public interest perspective, it behooves librarians to prioritize "legitimate" research purposes over pure entertainment pursuits.
The main criticisms of current available censorware are that they block sites that are not pornographic in nature and that they keep secret which websites they block, resulting in claims of potential hidden agendas.
An open source censorware project could eliminate these objections. It would also free up monetary resources that a library might spend on censorware. It would also provide competition that might drive untrustworthy censorware companies out of business.
For those who believe in the open source movement, this creates an open source solution to a highly visible _perceived_ problem, which will lead to greater publicity for and trust in such software.
In the current political climate, it should not be a big shock that the CIPA might be upheld by a court of law, however chilling that might feel. An open source blocking program would allow librarians interested in upholding freedom to provide minimal compliance to the law without betraying the public trust those individuals hold.
I am not a programmer. I am not a technical person. Such a project is currently beyond my means to even begin to participate on more than a philosophical level. Although the idea of any censorware disturbs some, this proposal has several merits as listed above.
I am probably one of the few people out there who has ever leafed through academic journals for fun. Still, those things are incredibly boring.
The issue here is that people expect articles to have a certain shape, form, and style, including a literature review. And a lit review can be a pain. You don't want to read an article more than is required to get the basic gist of its relevance to your work. Sometimes, that can be done by reading just the abstract.
The suggested rate of non-reading articles is also possibly overstated. That one has mis-cited a work does not necessarily mean that one has not read it. I can, for example, read an article ten years ago and remember the basic meaning I need to take out of it, and include it in my own references upon seeing it in the references of another's work without refreshing my knowledge of the work. Or I could just use another work's references as a reading checklist and not bother to correct it (or be unaware of the mistake if I sent a poor grad student or some other lackey to the library to copy the journal for me).
I assume the full article by Simkin and Roychowdhury probably states the likely sources of commonly copied errors. I'm a tad curious to se whether the authors of those progenitor articles propagated their own mistakes in future articles or if they corrected them.
While the article claims that "a billion different versions of erroneous reference are possible," in practice that may not be as true. With the errors being volume, page, or year, the most likely errors are transposition of two digits, deletion of a digit, insertion of a digit, or replacement of a digit. In the latter two, the error will most likely be the use of a neighboring number on the keyboard. A one is much less likely to be replaced by a nine than by a two. That is unlikely to lower the probably number of copied citations to below 50%, but it is still a possible source of error that may or may not be accounted for.
The best way for Open Source to truly become mainstream is for it to become THE place to get an application for a highly-visible task that is not just being geeks for geeks (i.e. not something relatively hidden like web servers).
I think the ideal project would be to create an open source web filter that would do a much better job than NetNanny and similar software.
1) It doesn't require as much in the way of user interface.
2) Say what you will about censorship, but parents have a legitimate concern in determining what their children can access, they just don't have parental control over other people's children or over people who are not children.
3) It fulfills a highly visible area of concern in computer use whose concerns are not fully met by current software.
4) It erases concerns that "censorware" uses secret proprietary ban lists that may have hidden agendas.
5) It establishes a precedent for a more open solution for similar problems facing society.
On other hand, there are several problems. Chief among them is whether or not an open source solution would allow websites to easily defeat filtering attempts and whether or not any programmers would be so selfless as to use their time to work on an open source project which probably has little benefit for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that some librarians would like at least the option of censorware, but the available options are unacceptable. Plus, a government mandate rankles the souls of librarians who want otherwise.
Like anyone else, libraries have limited bandwith and a limited number of computers. Every library I've been to has time limits and sign-ins for the use of internet stations. There lines and waiting lists in the evenings when people are back from work and kids are back from school. From a public interest perspective, it behooves librarians to prioritize "legitimate" research purposes over pure entertainment pursuits.
The main criticisms of current available censorware are that they block sites that are not pornographic in nature and that they keep secret which websites they block, resulting in claims of potential hidden agendas.
An open source censorware project could eliminate these objections. It would also free up monetary resources that a library might spend on censorware. It would also provide competition that might drive untrustworthy censorware companies out of business.
For those who believe in the open source movement, this creates an open source solution to a highly visible _perceived_ problem, which will lead to greater publicity for and trust in such software.
In the current political climate, it should not be a big shock that the CIPA might be upheld by a court of law, however chilling that might feel. An open source blocking program would allow librarians interested in upholding freedom to provide minimal compliance to the law without betraying the public trust those individuals hold.
I am not a programmer. I am not a technical person. Such a project is currently beyond my means to even begin to participate on more than a philosophical level. Although the idea of any censorware disturbs some, this proposal has several merits as listed above.
I am probably one of the few people out there who has ever leafed through academic journals for fun. Still, those things are incredibly boring.
The issue here is that people expect articles to have a certain shape, form, and style, including a literature review. And a lit review can be a pain. You don't want to read an article more than is required to get the basic gist of its relevance to your work. Sometimes, that can be done by reading just the abstract.
The suggested rate of non-reading articles is also possibly overstated. That one has mis-cited a work does not necessarily mean that one has not read it. I can, for example, read an article ten years ago and remember the basic meaning I need to take out of it, and include it in my own references upon seeing it in the references of another's work without refreshing my knowledge of the work. Or I could just use another work's references as a reading checklist and not bother to correct it (or be unaware of the mistake if I sent a poor grad student or some other lackey to the library to copy the journal for me).
I assume the full article by Simkin and Roychowdhury probably states the likely sources of commonly copied errors. I'm a tad curious to se whether the authors of those progenitor articles propagated their own mistakes in future articles or if they corrected them.
While the article claims that "a billion different versions of erroneous reference are possible," in practice that may not be as true. With the errors being volume, page, or year, the most likely errors are transposition of two digits, deletion of a digit, insertion of a digit, or replacement of a digit. In the latter two, the error will most likely be the use of a neighboring number on the keyboard. A one is much less likely to be replaced by a nine than by a two. That is unlikely to lower the probably number of copied citations to below 50%, but it is still a possible source of error that may or may not be accounted for.
The best way for Open Source to truly become mainstream is for it to become THE place to get an application for a highly-visible task that is not just being geeks for geeks (i.e. not something relatively hidden like web servers).
I think the ideal project would be to create an open source web filter that would do a much better job than NetNanny and similar software.
1) It doesn't require as much in the way of user interface.
2) Say what you will about censorship, but parents have a legitimate concern in determining what their children can access, they just don't have parental control over other people's children or over people who are not children.
3) It fulfills a highly visible area of concern in computer use whose concerns are not fully met by current software.
4) It erases concerns that "censorware" uses secret proprietary ban lists that may have hidden agendas.
5) It establishes a precedent for a more open solution for similar problems facing society.
On other hand, there are several problems. Chief among them is whether or not an open source solution would allow websites to easily defeat filtering attempts and whether or not any programmers would be so selfless as to use their time to work on an open source project which probably has little benefit for them.