Just pulled it off my shelf. "The Internet Companion" by Tracy LaQuey, introduction by Sen. Al Gore, Addison-Wesley 1993. Was one of the best general introductions in its day, and had a brief section on the WWW.
A few days ago, the Washington Post ran a somewhat unconventional travel article on Tucson as a destination for skygazers, and mentioned the influence of the ISDA and the local astronomy community in creating the local ordinances limiting light pollution:
I wouldn't have guessed that 240 comments could be posted, on Slashdot no less, in connection with the employment prospects of Ph.D's in literature without the phrase "digital humanities" having cropped up once. For folks with advanced degrees in the humanities plus the appropriate tech cred and skills, there are jobs out there. Most not tenure-track, but generally rewarding, and often in settings where one's colleagues are less ego-driven than in conventional academic departments.
Of course, earning a Ph.D. in say the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough without having once touched a computer keyboard isn't the route to one of those.
I wouldn't posit this as the best way, but it's what I do. I keep my archival mail on a local filesytem arranged in directories, stored in the old-school mbox format. I run Dovecot under OS X for IMAP access to those messages from anywhere; when I need to search through the whole collection, I use mairix (an indexing and retrieval system).
oops, s/Verizon/CenturyLink/ -- Verizon is the company that provides me with the cell phone that insists on racking up data charges even when I'm not using it, CenturyLink is the company that provides me with DSL that slows down predictably when the masses return home from work.
You don't live up the hollow from me, do you? Because your description fits my situation to a T, apart from my nominal 6 mbps speed. The rural DSL supplier in these parts, Verizon, did take some action in response to a well-publicized community meeting of residents in another part of my county who lobbied a year ago to get DSL extended to their neck of the woods. I think one of the county supervisors attended, and it seems that Verizon decided that it was in their public-relations interest to make a commitment to providing service, which they did in fact implement fairly quickly. In the meantime, Verizon has told me that the notorious evening slowdowns are the result of known "bandwidth exhaustion", which is supposed to be fixed Sometime Soon, for the usual values of "soon". Whether getting all the neighbors together to hold a bandwidth exhaustion protest would do any good is an open question.
It has long been known that Mark Twain dictated part of his novel The American Claimant onto Edison cylinders. It was an experiment that he never repeated. Strangely, for someone whose manner of speaking was celebrated and often described during his lifetime, no one else ever thought to record him for posterity.
The American Claimant cylinders have long since gone missing. Keep your eye out for them in antique shops or your relatives' attics—if found, they would be worth who knows how many thousands or millions of dollars on the open market.
As some who wrangles XML on a daily basis, my first thought was the oXygen XML software program (http://www.oxygenxml.com/). Which I have in fact been using since one of the earliest releases.
"Big government" aka the local post office in my central Virginia hamlet consists of a 400 square foot post office built by sectioning off the local country store. Along with the country store, it's the primary place to go to learn or pass along news, or to meet your neighbors. Of course it's kind of insane from a purely economic standpoint to maintain it, with a full-time postmistress, when there is a medium-sized PO five miles away in the next big town and a full-service PO a dozen miles away. But when that branch closes, and I suppose it will, it will mean one less point of human contact for folks around here, and some not insignificant additional burdens for people without a lot of money or with health problems for whom a trip to retrieve a package at a distance is not trivial.
Let's see... do Virginia rednecks whose great-great-grandaddies undoubtedly fought for the Confederacy count as owning third-world mentalities? Because I'm in a rural service club in central VA that puts up a Nativity scene every year, and granted a couple of years ago when someone stole the baby Jesus doll and replaced it with a bottle of beer it was a Corona beer, but I'd still bet pretty good money that it was a Morris or a Shiflett who did it rather than a Gonzales or a Gomez...
Absolutely. This is far and away my biggest gripe with recent-model cars. It's not just absolute size of the rear window, it's the slant and curving of the rear styling that cuts down on visibility.
Nothing new under the sun. This dates me, but when I was in high school the local branch of the John Birch Society advertised an upcoming presentation called "Pot, Rock, and Revolution" that was going to expose how the jungle beat of rock & roll stimulates primitive brain responses and was part of a Communist plot to turn the youth of America into zombies. They seriously cited the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" as propaganda piece, clueless to its status as a parody of "Back in the USA", etc. So a group of long-haired kids went to the meeting, attracting nervous stares but surprisingly little outright hostility, and amazed the crowd by noting that several of us had straight-A grades despite a life-long diet of rock music.
The Australian researcher quoted in the story was co-author of a paper involving forensic use of C-14 dating of wines published in 2004:
U. Zoppi, Z. Skopec, J. Skopec, G. Jones, D. Fink, Q. Hua, G. Jacobsen, C. Tuniz, A. Williams, Forensic applications of 14C bomb-pulse dating, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, Volumes 223-224, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, August 2004, Pages 770-775, ISSN 0168-583X, DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.04.143. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJN-4CDWMNK-F/2/b2a003d44396872bd06d5c80443167cd)
and I'm nearly certain I saw published research in the 1990s using C-14 dating to establish wine adulteration, but as it's 3:40 in the morning insomniac me is not going to run down the reference
Another story on the lawsuit currently circulating on the wires includes this nugget: "Through a spokesman, Delta denied that it was involved in any hacking. 'Obviously, the idea that Delta would hack into someone’s email is clearly without merit,' spokesman Trebor Banstetter wrote in an email."
Without prejudging the facts in the case, I'm not sure that "clearly" and "obviously" are adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of a huge corporation.
I have a first-generation iPod Nano. Yesterday (the 31st) after I had downloaded an audiobook to it, it crashed totally. Was around 1500 my time, 2000 GMT. iTunes restore wouldn't fix it until I had reformatted the drive. Never happened before.
Probably just coincidence--but kind of spooky. FWIW I have time/date set to display in the menu bar, which is not the default.
First-generation iPod Nano, bought two years or so ago. Never had a problem with it before. After downloading an audiobook to it today, it suddenly displayed the iPod BSOD, namely "Use iTunes to Restore". So I tried that... no joy, iTunes error "Cannot Restore". Finally had to reformat the iPod drive using Disk Utility before the restoration process would work. Seems to be okay now
So what is this? Some arcane spill-over effect from all the dying Zunes in the force field?
Not to harp too strongly on this, but reading Rowling, or Tolkien, actually doesn't do much. Reading Pratchett exposes people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, psychological and sociological ideas.
Well, now: reading Tolkien certainly does expose people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, and sociological ideas, it's just that they all date back to around the 11th century...
If I had time I could probably come up with reasons 9 through 20, but an anecdote from a couple of days ago, when I was using Alpine beta 0.999./ME: sends off a reply to someone's last 4 emails using Alpine's Select-Apply-Reply command (3 keystrokes) /
ME to Eudora-using colleague: Say, with Eudora can you send a reply to an arbitrary number of emails? Like gather someone's last 4 emails and reply to them all with one message?
COLLEAGUE (thinking): No. No, that would be a really nice feature.
ME: Okay, you don't get to tease me about still using Pine any more.
For several thousand years biology has proven remarkably consistent, but if you were to come up with evidence tomorrow that showed biology was different at some point in the past, you'd win the Nobel Prize. No faith required.
This is exactly what happened with radiocarbon dating, for example. When Willard Libby developed the technique, his hypothesis was that 12C/14C isotope ratios in Earth's atmosphere had been constant over time. That turned out not to be the case, as was proven by dating of items (historical wood, tree rings) of precise known age. The "faith" that isotope ratios were constant was promptly abandoned, and 14C dating protocols were revised to include calibrations taking known variations into account.
I don't understand the impetus behind removing all tactile controls from a portable audio player.
The iPod is already harder to use than many other brands with buttons if you're driving, cycling, jogging, or walking and want to be able to adjust volume or start/stop without looking at the device. With a fair amount of practice you can learn to orient the iPod and manipulate the scroll wheel without looking at it. Is this even theoretically feasible with an iTouch? Or am I going to have to dodge imbeciles swerving all over the road while scrolling through their playlist even more than I do already?
First thing I did on the site was pull up an entry for a book my university press publishes. It had no "Buy" option. I edited the metadata to add the ISBN-10 number for it, and voila, a Buy option.
It then took a certain amount of self-control for me not to go into various titles dealing with George W. Bush and enter the ISBN-10 of the storybook containing "My Pet Goat". Purely as a proof of concept, you understand.
This is simply the Wikipedia vandalism problem writ large. What controls will OpenLibrary put in place to guard against it?
This is the worst kind of micromanaging by people who apparently don't understand research or teachers.
No matter how poor a source Wikipedia may be (and in a moment I'll address that), it should be the decision of the classroom teacher whether and how to accept it as a legitimate source, just as the classroom teacher is the arbiter of whether a citation from Weekly World News counts for as much as one from the New York Times. It is the classroom teacher who should be the one explaining the difference to the students.
Second, we all know that Wikipedia is often an excellent first source of basic information on a topic. Me, I've got a Ph.D. and a book published with a university press, and I constantly refer to Wikipedia to ground myself in things. Which is not to say I'd cite it as an authority. Again, it's the classroom teacher whose responsibility it is to explain the difference.
I expect this is the first of about 1000 comments that will make essentially the same points. I hope that some sense of this can be conveyed to the school board in question.
Slashdot Mirror
Just pulled it off my shelf. "The Internet Companion" by Tracy LaQuey, introduction by Sen. Al Gore, Addison-Wesley 1993. Was one of the best general introductions in its day, and had a brief section on the WWW.
A few days ago, the Washington Post ran a somewhat unconventional travel article on Tucson as a destination for skygazers, and mentioned the influence of the ISDA and the local astronomy community in creating the local ordinances limiting light pollution:
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/seeing-stars-in-tucsons-brilliant-night-sky/2013/08/22/5bc4d34e-05e2-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html
I wouldn't have guessed that 240 comments could be posted, on Slashdot no less, in connection with the employment prospects of Ph.D's in literature without the phrase "digital humanities" having cropped up once. For folks with advanced degrees in the humanities plus the appropriate tech cred and skills, there are jobs out there. Most not tenure-track, but generally rewarding, and often in settings where one's colleagues are less ego-driven than in conventional academic departments.
Of course, earning a Ph.D. in say the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough without having once touched a computer keyboard isn't the route to one of those.
I wouldn't posit this as the best way, but it's what I do. I keep my archival mail on a local filesytem arranged in directories, stored in the old-school mbox format. I run Dovecot under OS X for IMAP access to those messages from anywhere; when I need to search through the whole collection, I use mairix (an indexing and retrieval system).
oops, s/Verizon/CenturyLink/ -- Verizon is the company that provides me with the cell phone that insists on racking up data charges even when I'm not using it, CenturyLink is the company that provides me with DSL that slows down predictably when the masses return home from work.
You don't live up the hollow from me, do you? Because your description fits my situation to a T, apart from my nominal 6 mbps speed. The rural DSL supplier in these parts, Verizon, did take some action in response to a well-publicized community meeting of residents in another part of my county who lobbied a year ago to get DSL extended to their neck of the woods. I think one of the county supervisors attended, and it seems that Verizon decided that it was in their public-relations interest to make a commitment to providing service, which they did in fact implement fairly quickly. In the meantime, Verizon has told me that the notorious evening slowdowns are the result of known "bandwidth exhaustion", which is supposed to be fixed Sometime Soon, for the usual values of "soon". Whether getting all the neighbors together to hold a bandwidth exhaustion protest would do any good is an open question.
It has long been known that Mark Twain dictated part of his novel The American Claimant onto Edison cylinders. It was an experiment that he never repeated. Strangely, for someone whose manner of speaking was celebrated and often described during his lifetime, no one else ever thought to record him for posterity.
The American Claimant cylinders have long since gone missing. Keep your eye out for them in antique shops or your relatives' attics—if found, they would be worth who knows how many thousands or millions of dollars on the open market.
As some who wrangles XML on a daily basis, my first thought was the oXygen XML software program (http://www.oxygenxml.com/). Which I have in fact been using since one of the earliest releases.
I'm guessing you don't live in a rural community.
"Big government" aka the local post office in my central Virginia hamlet consists of a 400 square foot post office built by sectioning off the local country store. Along with the country store, it's the primary place to go to learn or pass along news, or to meet your neighbors. Of course it's kind of insane from a purely economic standpoint to maintain it, with a full-time postmistress, when there is a medium-sized PO five miles away in the next big town and a full-service PO a dozen miles away. But when that branch closes, and I suppose it will, it will mean one less point of human contact for folks around here, and some not insignificant additional burdens for people without a lot of money or with health problems for whom a trip to retrieve a package at a distance is not trivial.
Let's see... do Virginia rednecks whose great-great-grandaddies undoubtedly fought for the Confederacy count as owning third-world mentalities? Because I'm in a rural service club in central VA that puts up a Nativity scene every year, and granted a couple of years ago when someone stole the baby Jesus doll and replaced it with a bottle of beer it was a Corona beer, but I'd still bet pretty good money that it was a Morris or a Shiflett who did it rather than a Gonzales or a Gomez...
Absolutely. This is far and away my biggest gripe with recent-model cars. It's not just absolute size of the rear window, it's the slant and curving of the rear styling that cuts down on visibility.
Nothing new under the sun. This dates me, but when I was in high school the local branch of the John Birch Society advertised an upcoming presentation called "Pot, Rock, and Revolution" that was going to expose how the jungle beat of rock & roll stimulates primitive brain responses and was part of a Communist plot to turn the youth of America into zombies. They seriously cited the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" as propaganda piece, clueless to its status as a parody of "Back in the USA", etc. So a group of long-haired kids went to the meeting, attracting nervous stares but surprisingly little outright hostility, and amazed the crowd by noting that several of us had straight-A grades despite a life-long diet of rock music.
The Australian researcher quoted in the story was co-author of a paper involving forensic use of C-14 dating of wines published in 2004:
U. Zoppi, Z. Skopec, J. Skopec, G. Jones, D. Fink, Q. Hua, G. Jacobsen, C. Tuniz, A. Williams, Forensic applications of 14C bomb-pulse dating, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, Volumes 223-224, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, August 2004, Pages 770-775, ISSN 0168-583X, DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.04.143.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJN-4CDWMNK-F/2/b2a003d44396872bd06d5c80443167cd)
and I'm nearly certain I saw published research in the 1990s using C-14 dating to establish wine adulteration, but as it's 3:40 in the morning insomniac me is not going to run down the reference
Another story on the lawsuit currently circulating on the wires includes this nugget: "Through a spokesman, Delta denied that it was involved in any hacking. 'Obviously, the idea that Delta would hack into someone’s email is clearly without merit,' spokesman Trebor Banstetter wrote in an email."
Without prejudging the facts in the case, I'm not sure that "clearly" and "obviously" are adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of a huge corporation.
I have a first-generation iPod Nano. Yesterday (the 31st) after I had downloaded an audiobook to it, it crashed totally. Was around 1500 my time, 2000 GMT. iTunes restore wouldn't fix it until I had reformatted the drive. Never happened before.
Probably just coincidence--but kind of spooky. FWIW I have time/date set to display in the menu bar, which is not the default.
First-generation iPod Nano, bought two years or so ago. Never had a problem with it before. After downloading an audiobook to it today, it suddenly displayed the iPod BSOD, namely "Use iTunes to Restore". So I tried that... no joy, iTunes error "Cannot Restore". Finally had to reformat the iPod drive using Disk Utility before the restoration process would work. Seems to be okay now
So what is this? Some arcane spill-over effect from all the dying Zunes in the force field?
Not to harp too strongly on this, but reading Rowling, or Tolkien, actually doesn't do much. Reading Pratchett exposes people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, psychological and sociological ideas.
Well, now: reading Tolkien certainly does expose people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, and sociological ideas, it's just that they all date back to around the 11th century...
You left out those of us who bought VMWare Fusion and an XP license (well, okay, used my university site license) just to run Quicken for Windows.
If I had time I could probably come up with reasons 9 through 20, but an anecdote from a couple of days ago, when I was using Alpine beta 0.999. /ME: sends off a reply to someone's last 4 emails using Alpine's Select-Apply-Reply command (3 keystrokes) /
ME to Eudora-using colleague: Say, with Eudora can you send a reply to an arbitrary number of emails? Like gather someone's last 4 emails and reply to them all with one message?
COLLEAGUE (thinking): No. No, that would be a really nice feature.
ME: Okay, you don't get to tease me about still using Pine any more.
This is exactly what happened with radiocarbon dating, for example. When Willard Libby developed the technique, his hypothesis was that 12C/14C isotope ratios in Earth's atmosphere had been constant over time. That turned out not to be the case, as was proven by dating of items (historical wood, tree rings) of precise known age. The "faith" that isotope ratios were constant was promptly abandoned, and 14C dating protocols were revised to include calibrations taking known variations into account.
Good analysis of the TV show. Webmistress Alison Smith's Skepticality interview is also worth a listen.
Yes, but I wouldn't bet good money on its being produced indefinitely.
I don't understand the impetus behind removing all tactile controls from a portable audio player.
The iPod is already harder to use than many other brands with buttons if you're driving, cycling, jogging, or walking and want to be able to adjust volume or start/stop without looking at the device. With a fair amount of practice you can learn to orient the iPod and manipulate the scroll wheel without looking at it. Is this even theoretically feasible with an iTouch? Or am I going to have to dodge imbeciles swerving all over the road while scrolling through their playlist even more than I do already?
First thing I did on the site was pull up an entry for a book my university press publishes. It had no "Buy" option. I edited the metadata to add the ISBN-10 number for it, and voila, a Buy option.
It then took a certain amount of self-control for me not to go into various titles dealing with George W. Bush and enter the ISBN-10 of the storybook containing "My Pet Goat". Purely as a proof of concept, you understand.
This is simply the Wikipedia vandalism problem writ large. What controls will OpenLibrary put in place to guard against it?
No matter how poor a source Wikipedia may be (and in a moment I'll address that), it should be the decision of the classroom teacher whether and how to accept it as a legitimate source, just as the classroom teacher is the arbiter of whether a citation from Weekly World News counts for as much as one from the New York Times. It is the classroom teacher who should be the one explaining the difference to the students.
Second, we all know that Wikipedia is often an excellent first source of basic information on a topic. Me, I've got a Ph.D. and a book published with a university press, and I constantly refer to Wikipedia to ground myself in things. Which is not to say I'd cite it as an authority. Again, it's the classroom teacher whose responsibility it is to explain the difference.
I expect this is the first of about 1000 comments that will make essentially the same points. I hope that some sense of this can be conveyed to the school board in question.