As a professor, I write programs, papers and am currently working on a book. All these activities involve creating copyrighted content. The people of my State pay me to do this, as I work for a State university. So, you are probably thinking that my situation is a bit like Bono and the other 'creative' sorts? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Once I have written a paper, it needs to go through peer review, via the blind referee process. This is all good and stops me publishing silly stuff. The next step is where the copyright problem arises.
Once I have a paper accepted, it is necessary for me to assign the copyright to the publishers of the journal. No copyright assignment, no publication. It is as simple as that. So, who gets the fruits of my labors? Big multi-national corporations. What did they do to get this intellectual content? Absolutely bugger all, other than rigging the system! What about the people of my State who paid for my hard work? They get nothing. If they want to read my papers, they have to buy them from the journal (at $15 per paper and up), or visit a library. Libraries have to pay for a journal subscription ($750 per annum and up).
Thus, all this 'creativity' and copyright bleating is clearly bollocks. It is just a case of the powerful folks using rhetoric to fight for their monopoly 'rights'. I don't care to participate, but am forced to. Of course, I also run an e-journal where the authors retain copyright, but that is another story. My little act of subversion.
Don't fall for all this 'starving artist' rubbish. My bet is that we professors in our professional bondage produce more per year than the people represented by the members of both the RIAA and the MIAA, put together. I wonder what those crooks, or their mouth pieces, would have to say in response to that claim? I bet we will never hear.
"We are led by fools who waste our lives". Copyright is a good idea which has now been subverted into a scam and it sucks.
I often do something fairly similar. I'll go to pick up something and end up cruising in the stacks. There I will browse. When browsing I'll often see something I want to read. The question then is do we have it? With the Opera Browser loaded into my Nintendo DS, I can login to the WiFi link and pull up the catalog. When I'm done, I shut the DS, drop it into a pocket and move on. It works like a dream! Also, even if the kit is bought new, it is pretty cheap too. I bet with second hand equipment, it could be got for under $100. Oh yes, the few students who have seen me do this seem to think that it is pretty cool too.
I remember Muddog well. It was my first mud and burned up many hours of grad school there. Wells2k, thanks for many a good time there! I am still in touch with Kane, Labatt, Semtex, Taylor and a few of the old crew. Many of them moved on to VargonMud, when the place shut. Not only was it one of the funniest muds of all time, with some bizarre twists (who can forget the Spy shades, or the Bucket O'Love!), it was also an amazing community. This is one of the things that modern visual games lack.
Not only that, Muddog spawned a whole interest in muds for academic uses. The Maud (Multi-Academic User Domain) architecture came about from Muddog discussions. It was used for a while as a distance teaching tool. I'd love to hear from some of the Muddog old timers, should any be on here and not posting as anon.
I used to know the systems at Carleton pretty well, although I have never studied there, or been on the faculty. However, I have participated at a number of events there that have involved technology and their networks. The first thing to know about Carleton's systems is that network access from there is horribly slow. This is due to the way that their data is routed. It might also explain why this individual worked on local systems -- it took too damn long to connect elsewhere! The second thing I have noticed about the Carleton systems is that they are an odd mixture of old and clunky technology of the not entirely secure kind, allied to some super-oppressive and paranoid policies. It is neither a very helpful combination, when it comes to getting things done, nor is it especially secure. Of course, all this being said, my knowledge of their systems is now a few years out of date. Perhaps things have improved? However, my guess is, based on this story, they have not got much better. One final thing to keep in mind is that this kind of approach by University sys admins is quite common. When I was in grad school at another major Canadian University, on the one hand some of the computing people were helping me get access to large and powerful machines that were usually off-limits, so I could get my research done. However, on the other hand, other computing people had me on the security watch list, as I once posted a facetious comment to the alt.2600 newsgroup.
The whole 'why don't they abandon New Orleans' thread here is both incredibly silly and rather offensive. It is worth keeping in mind that N.O, was the site of a revolutionary war with the Brits, back in the day. This is evidence of the importance of the place, both then and now. Nobody ever seems to suggest that San Francisco should be abandoned, due to earthquake potential. Also, New York is hit by hurricanes too, but nobody suggests abandoning it either.
People also forget that what happened to N.O. in 2005 had far less to do with Katrina than it had to do with faulty levees. When Katrina hit N.O. back then, it was effectively a category 1, not more. The claims from the Corps of Engineers about cat 3 protection were just wrong.
My guess is that the 'abandon New Orleans' crew are just ignorant of the facts, or politically motivated. In 2005, we heard such comments from a n umber of politicians, mostly Republicans. For those of us who live in Louisiana and who know and visit N.O.on a regular basis, we know that it is a wonderful, vibrant and unique city. Yes, 2005 was a huge trauma, but as a tee-shirt that produced at the time said the city was 'bent, but not broken'.
So, rather than carping about things which seem to be poorly understood, why not do something useful? For instance, I will be riding out the storm up the road in Lafayette. The two TV stations KATC and KLFY will be broadcasting live to the web. As we have generators, we should be able to see what is going on by watching these feeds. However, guess what, we cannot see the KATC feed (generally, the better of the two, especially for weather) due to the fact that they have decided to go the Silverlight route and this is a Linux only household. If people want to do something useful, please take a moment and e-mail them a complaint at webteam@katc.com. This would be much more useful than carping on about New Orleans, when the whole issue about that place is so poorly understood.
Although this is undoubtedly stupid and moronic, what most commentators overlook is that teachers in Louisiana will be responsible for teaching this silliness. Although some of our teachers are excellent, many are not. The people in Louisiana are forced to get a real education in our Universities. Last semester, I had a freshman class in which only one person got the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 correct! By the time they graduate though most students are (mostly) numerate and literate. Given the confusions that school teachers have, it is quite possible that students in schools will end up learning the exact opposite of what it intended by the framers of this Bill. 'Praise the Intelligent Very Big Powerful Thingmy' is what I say!
The general topic of skepticism is one that is treated at length in Philosophy. A great Philosophy resource page is Epistemelinks.com. A search under 'Epistemology' could be fruitful. However, one of the best texts on skepticism is The Outlines of Pyrrhonism, by Sextus Empiricus. The first book especially is a great read, even if is is nearly 1,500 years out of date. The text of the book can be found on-line (scroll down) here. This is the best resource I know to teach skepticism to students.
The original post asks,
"There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals? What do they offer our society? Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
First off, most 'other venues for peer review' (at least the ones that are any good) are frequently associated with journals. Second, there are many ways to evaluate the 'productivity of professors' and peer reviewed publications are only one, but an important one.
As many other people have noted, the crucial issue with journals has to do with quality control. It really does matter. Speaking as an academic with with a bit of seniority, journal publications are the first thing looked at by tenure and promotion committees and by job search committees. In the words of a very famous and senior person in my field(s), "The refereed publication is the one form of academic gold that can never be debased." As academic journals are the usual place to find refereed publications, this alone is one reason why they still matter.
That being said, there are some caveats which are in order. The first is to realize that not all 'refereed' journals are equal. A journal which has a blind refereeing process, but publishes almost anything submitted, despite this, will have a low impact rating. A publication in one of these places will not count for much. By contrast, a journal that has a 99% rejection rate will almost certainly have a high impact rating and will thus be much more impressive.
It is also the case that, having served as a journal editor, many submissions to journals are far from perfect. As a rough estimate, I would see 10-20% of submissions that came from people who were simply nuts. Without some kind of editing and refereeing process, a great deal of plain rubbish would have been in print.
Currently, academic journals are undergoing a transitional process. The turn around times are getting better, but there are still problems. For instance, as a faculty member at a State university, I am employed by the people of my State. Yet, when I have a paper accepted for publication by a journal, I have to sign over the copyright of the paper. If the people of my State, or even my students, want to read my work, they then have to pay the publishers for the right to do so. This is simply wrong and a system that will hopefully be replaced soon. Naturally, I provide anyone who asks for a copy of a paper of mine, one for free. The system is still defective though.
However, the bottom line is that peer review, and the academic journals that maintain this, are crucial for quality control. Just do a hunt on the blogs and you will see the reason why. There are quite a few 'professor' bloggers, but it is also clear that at least some of them are either frauds, or failures. Some time ago, I saw one who claimed that they could not get a paper published in any refereed journal, either good, or bad, because their paper was too 'insightful'. This is patent silliness. A better explanation was that the paper was simply unoriginal, or bad in some other way. A further reading of the same blog suggests either outright fraud, mental illness, or both. This is one of the reasons why, for all their faults, we still have academic journals. I say Thank Goodness!
Of course, if you talk to archaeologists, they will tell you that the best evidence about Stonehenge is to be found in the Aubrey Holes. Unfortunately, many of these were destroyed when English Heritage and their 'culture as tourism' friends built the new car park and the underground tunnel. Given the way that the BBC behaves these days, we can expect minimal real research work, with maximal hype. This is a damn shame. Yet more Wiki-Science...
It is unequivocally true that the current copyright system is badly broken. However, I am not certain that any of the proposal made, especially in the comment threads, will handle all situations. Consider the following:
As a Professor, one significant component of my job is to do research and write it up for publication. At root, this is a process which involves the production of copyrighted material. I can post my work to a web page somewhere, but that does not really count -- the quality control step of the blind refereeing process is crucial too. This catches any mistakes I may have made and (hopefully) stops people publishing rubbish. Thus, I need to send my work to reputable academic journals. What happens next is where the difficulties arise:
1) If I should pay a fee on my text, when should I pay it? Should it be on the first draft, or on the second, or on the nth? Most serious academic papers go through multiple revisions before they are ready for submission.
2) Should fees (no matter how small) be paid on submission? This too is unworkable. Depending on the journal, it may take over a year to hear back from the referees. Then, of course, it is common for referees to suggest further changes to the paper. It can also take many months for a paper to actually appear.
The problems do not end there, at least, with the current system. Once a paper has received final acceptance, it is common for publishers to require the author (i.e. me) to simply sign over the copyright to them as a condition on publication! This part, at least currently, is utterly mad. After all, as with many academics, I am ultimately employed by tax payers. They have paid for my work. Yet, I apparently initially hold the copyright (universities have not currently caught on to the 'work for hire' scam). However, to get my work out, I have to give it away to a third party who has contributed nothing to its creation.
Finally, to add insult to injury, should anyone (including me, or the tax payers) wish to read my work, then they must pay this third party for the honor! I have papers of my own which I cannot access, because our library does not subscribe to the relevant journals (a subscription can be nearly $1,000 for four issues a year). Of course, in such a crazy system, there are all sorts of dubious back channels (e.g. e-mailing.pdf files, etc.) whereby these restrictions can be got around. However, I hear nothing in any of the proposals made here which could fix such a fundamentally broken system. To make matters worse, the big publishing houses have the cash to lobby the politicians and the lawyers to go after folks (just like the RIAA).
So, in conclusion, if anyone can come up with proposals that could handle this kind of situation, then I will be all ears. Until then, I'll just send out my papers to anyone who asks by e-mail.
A few years back, we had Blackboard on our campus. It was horrible and I refused to use it [Techie aside: Take a look at some of their JavaScript, it is bloated and beyond ugly]. However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas.
The students proposed a 'Blackboard is mandatory' motion that went through all the relevant committees. Fortunately, the Faculty Senate were rational enough to amend the motion to advocate not just Blackboard, but also 'equivalent technologies'. This left the way open for people to even use simple web pages.
Then the next thing you know is that Blackboard suddenly wanted a HUGE amount of money for the new version -- much more money than we could ever afford. The techs basically told them to go to hell, kept on using the older version while they could and began to experiment with Moodle. As one of of the more technically sophisticated people on our campus, I was one of the beta-testers for our Moodle implementation. It is always a fun job trying to break software! Although early versions of the implementation had quite a few rough edges, pretty soon, Moodle was up and running in a slick manner. Thus, for a short time, we actually had both versions. Also during this period, negotiations with Blackboard continued, largely without much progress. Eventually their greed was too much. Blackboard was just scrapped. It was not just the cost of the software, but also the hardware requirements that were ridiculous, which killed the system for us. We have now moved entirely to Moodle, which is doing very well, even if a few people were initially unhappy about the change. Hopefully, more schools will be inspired by the predatory nature of the Blackboard people to get that monkey off their collective backs.
In a final irony, just before the decision was made to pull the plug on Blackboard was made, one of my students demonstrated to me a method by which he could crack Blackboard and change the grades of assignments with relative ease. The main point here though is that behaving like bastards can ultimately have a business cost. I say to hell with Blackboard, support Moodle instead -- after all, it is open source!
While I am a little uncertain whether the University would be liable under the things cited here, there action almost certainly violates Federal law. The Family Education Rights Protection Act (1974, if I recall correctly), or FERPA to it's friends, makes revealing almost any information about a student impermissible. Literally, I have had to refuse to talk to a judge about their child, due to FERPA. I wonder whether the Feds will get huffy about this, or whether they can be bothered (or perhaps they like the RIAA?). It sounds like this story could get fun.
Many years ago, word went out over the mailing lists and (then very junior) newsnet about how packets were being dipped and 'The Powers That Be' were recording/snooping/doing all that bad stuff. It turned out that a few people had been playing with the wonderful and useful tracert command (now less useful, due to finger command paranoia). They had noticed nodes which only seemed to have IP numbers, not addresses. They concluded this must be the NSA.
The point here is that none of this paranoia is especially new. Each time I hear it come round again, I enjoy having been on the 'net since before it was the 'net (any old BITNET refugees still out there?). Been there, seen it, got the t-shirt, dyed the t-shirt pink, ripped the arms off the t-shirt and then lost the t-shirt.
Back in the day, folks figured out a response: give the snoopers what they want. Many people (me included) put words like 'bomb' etc. into our.sig files, so that even mundane e-mails about boring crap would trigger the sensors and get recorded. I am certain that Uncle Sam really enjoyed my discussions with my room mate about laundry and coffee ("Take out your laundry you freak, and buy some coffee!").
So, these days there is all this new fangled interweb stuff [engage full fogey/old fart mode], including Second Life, IRC, blogs and god knows what else. If a few public spiritied citizens would send Uncle Sam some more rubbish, he might get bored again. That is assuming he was ever really that interested.
Of course, there are two caveats: First, in the initial instance I mention, there was probably only paranoia and smoke. Second, these days one has to be a little careful about what one says, just in case one gets 'disappeared' on a 'Cuban holiday'.
The thing to keep in mind is that a few buzz terms, 'terrorists', 'communication', in conjunction with a recent technology makes the whole thing no less plausible than it was back then. I'm sure that Osama's folks send their 'secret plans' in Excel files [remember, Calc is better] that are password protected and then encrypted in PGP anyhow. This can all be done with products available at Office Depot anyhow. So, Chill!
A close look at the silly lawyer letter reveals that is comes from the "Dozier Law Firm". The name seems apt. Their web site at http://www.cybertriallawyer.com include a YouTube video on the front page. Let us hope that they have the correct release for that. Of course, I would encourage eveyone to take a look at their web site, for informational purposes only of course! It is also worth noting that one of their people has the nickname 'Bull'.
I guess I will continue my profound dislike of BestBuy. Their loss is Circuit City's gain.
This post will almost certainly get modded into the basement, but what the hell.
I have been watching the blogs and noticed an interesting phenomenon that arises there, as a function of the lack of moderation, quality control, or anything like that. The fact that bloggers can post what they wish and also delete comments that might challenge their positions can lead to some pretty unhealthy outcomes.
Although I hate it when folks post commercials for their blogs as much as the next person, I am going to suggest that interested folks might want to look at a couple of recent posts that deal with these issues. My post Poison Girls describes in detail the kinds of things that can go wrong when there is no quality control. Another post, Blogs and 'Community Solipsism' also deals with this issue. Both posts offer concrete examples.
I am an academic and thus have some investment in the blind refereeing process. It is far from perfect, but it keeps some of the worst excesses of 'anything goes' at bay. Hopefully, something like the slashdot system will get implemented for blogs too.
What really concerns me is seeing people who lack competence in a field, still pontificating at length on topics. People who do not know better tend to get sucked in by the more manipulative types. They end up listening to worthless advice, yet taking it as gospel. For instance, I have a colleague who is pretty much a failed academic. They have had nothing appear in print for over six years (however, they are tenured). Yet, they are currently offering apparently sagely advice on being a scholar. The putative advice is bad and misleading. Yet, there is nothing that can be done about it.
My best response is to remind folks that, as the Bard said in the Merchant of Venice, "All that glisters is not gold" and that is especially true in the world of blogs, yet it seems that the problems appear to continue. Any comments or suggestions on this matter would be very welcome. I live in fear of the day that a high school kid starts claiming to be a cancer physician and offering bad advice to people with serious health issues. In the blog arena, it appears that it is likely to be believed by some. This is a very scarey thought.
I have posted this before, but I will post it again. Election theft is easy. However, beware of the 'obvious' targets.
People like to yell about the voting machines. This is a distractor. The machines have a bunch of problems, but cheating at that level is simply inefficient. What works better is to go for the tabulators. Take a look at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/. There I have run and photographed some studies on tabulator software and found out things that were beyond scarey. Sure, suppress the vote, initimidate voters, but if the ultimate counter cannot be trusted, neither can the outcome of the election.
Should there be an election 'surprise' in November, this could well be the reason why.
When will it be time for that armed insurrection?
Dr_Ish [Just asking questions and causing trouble, as usual -- see you all in the Cuban 'holiday camp']
When I was first appointed as a faculty member around 1996 I immediately started using web pages with my classes. Many of my pages had alot of the features that Blackboard now claim to have a patent upon (discussion forums, etc.). I have even published an academic paper on this stuff, as I was an 'early adopter'.
Eventually, my school bought into the Blackboard thing. I refused to join in, because my web pages provided all the functionality I needed, without needing the huge computational overhead and without the security concerns. The necessity of JavaScript is a particular concern. Then Blackboard made a big marketing move: we had to sign up for an expensive new version. As a State school, we could not afford it, so we had to quit Blackboard. We moved to Moodle.
The move to Moodle produced a whole new pile of problems. It seemed that some faculty, having learned how to do things with Blackboard, appeared incapable of learning Moodle! They bitched and complained. One idiot from the English dept. even suggested in our Faculty Senate that we should try and develop a Moodle interface that emulated Blackboard! Fortunately, common sense prevailed and this was not approved.
However, here is the problem: techno-phobic faculty members are now hooked on Blackboard. In our case, they are being forced to wean themselves to Moodle. All this being said, much or most of the functionality available with these systems can be provided in plain HTML, with a few tricks, to enable passwords and the like. With good modern HTML Editors (like Nvu), once these are set up correctly, plain web pages can be created without the user realising that they are doing anything too much different from writing an MS-Turd document. However, it seems impossible for me to convince other faculty to do this. We all have PhDs, so at least some of us should be smart. After all, my 11 year old daughter can make web pages! Yet, the luddites still abound. These are the people Blackboard are relying upon to make them their millions. I think that it is just sad.
This may all seem a bit silly, but it is worth putting into context. Of course, rebuilding shattered economies, school systems and fixing levees is just too boring for these goons. In addition to this ridiculous game legislation, in the recent session, they also considered implementing a ban on cockfighting. This is still legal in Louisiana, as chickens are not animals under State law, as a matter of definition. However, in the end it was decided that cockfighting could remain legal, because to ban it would be too much of a hardship on rural economies. Then, towards the end of the session they passed a bill that made abortion illegal in Louisiana, under almost any circumstances (including rape and incest). Needless to say, this law has no effect, due to Roe vs. Wade, but clearly this legislation was a good use of their time. In the light of these other legislative initiatives, the game legislation is small beer by comparison. As we say in Louisiana, "we have the best politicians money can buy"!
Bravo!! Bravo for Elm and vi. To this day I use this combination when connecting to our servers from home. Of course, it does prevent all those 'Click on this link to see a sexy virus wreck your machine' style games from working properly. Elm is also very good at showing you html as text, so it is easy to spot the Pishers. I love the combination of elm and vi -- it is a fast, powerful and elegant. I am pleased to say that we do not even have Pine or that horror Pico installed on any of our Sun boxes.
Well, I am facinated by the comments of the Anonymous cowards. They are very silly. Some of us have responsible jobs which makes moving out of Louisiana a little difficult. We could abandon the people of Louisiana, but that would be disloyal. This State is full of good people. We/They do not want to move to New York, or where ever (even though many thousands have been forced to by the storms and FEMA). If the anonymous cowards even read this, I just ask that they come to Louisiana and meet some people. They will find strength, pride, resiliance, and (as they say in Quebec) a distinct culture. This culture is worth preserving. Hurricanes are bad for this. So, this is the reason I wish that they could avoid us in the future.
Well, as a resident of Louisiana, I can attest that more hurricanes are a bad thing. We were not hit by Katrina, but we had the refugees staying in our houses. New Orleans is still on hell of a mess.
On the other hand, we did get hit somewhat by the hurricane everyone forgets, Rita. That really trashed our coastal parishes and poisoned the land with salt (for details see here).
A warmer Gulf means the risk of more storms and stronger storms. From where we sit, we really do not give a proverbial 'rats arse' about the politics. We just do not want hurricanes. If ANYTHING can be done to lower the temperature of the sea and thereby reduce the risk, I am for it. The politicos like to carp on about the causal link not being proved -- this was the line used by tobacco companies for years. Anyone who knows anything about the philosophy of science knows that it is almost possible to prove causation. What matters is strong correlation. This we seem to have, although I am sure whilst Haliburton runs the Whitehouse, nobody will pay any attention.
Sorry, I needed to vent on this...
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, discusses the term 'game' at length. He argues that whilst is is clear that the term lacks a precise boundary (para. 69-71), we can still meaningfully use the term in most cases. It seems that many of the observations here are just noticing what Wittgenstein noticed back in 1953. It was examples such as the term 'game' that led him to famously formulate his doctrine (para. 43) that "...the meaning of a word is its use in the language".
Although I am no legal scholar, it does seem pretty unequivocally the case that the Bush spy program is illegal. The Whitehouse bases their claims of legality on their interpretation of the war powers agreed by Congress. This interpretation is 'novel' in so much as Congress specifically rejected amendments from the Whitehouse that would have explicitly allowed such actions.
In the meantime, until this matter is ruled on, it seems to me that another concern with this program that nobody has mentioned is the cost. It cannot be cheap for the NSA to caputure all that e-mail and all those phone calls. To this end, it seems appropriate that we should all 'help' the NSA by automatically sending them copies of all the e-mail we send. We should probably let Bush know too. So, may I politely suggest that all/.ers automatically CC all their e-mail to
I teach at a State University in the Southern U.S. My classes started for this semester on Wed. In my critical thinking class, as it is a large class, I ask students to jot down a few notes about themselves. One of the questions I asked students to answer in this class this week was 'What do you hope to learn in this class?'. One of my students wrote the following in response to this question:
"I hope to learn skill that will be detrimental to my life and job".
I am pretty sure that this wasn't a joke. This is scarey!
It seems that BellSouth are hell bent on becoming the new SCO, or Micro$oft. In addition to this latest 'antic', they continue to behave badly in all sorts of other ways. In New Orleans, as people will recall, they decided not to give a building that they had promised to the N.O. Police dept, when the city started to offer free wi-fi. Also in Louisiana, the small town of Lafayette's utility system, L.U.S. has proposed laying fiber to every home. BellSouth forced a referendum, that they massively lost. Despite this, they keepfighting L.U.S. in the courts, trying to slow the project and cause as many problems as possible.
These activities have not been without consequences, however. People in Louisiana are figuring ways of fighting back. For instance, many people now have their phone service with AT and T, or Eatel (both of which are cheaper). Another good trick is that people in appartments are having a single BellSouth DSL subscription, that they then share with their neighbours, using a cheap wireless box from Wal-Mart. BellSouth don't seem to realise how their actions are influencing their revenues. Perhaps in the light of this latest silliness, people in other parts of the country should take similar steps against BellSouth, especially in cases where they are a monopoly, or duoploy broadband provider.
Slashdot Mirror
As a professor, I write programs, papers and am currently working on a book. All these activities involve creating copyrighted content. The people of my State pay me to do this, as I work for a State university. So, you are probably thinking that my situation is a bit like Bono and the other 'creative' sorts? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Once I have written a paper, it needs to go through peer review, via the blind referee process. This is all good and stops me publishing silly stuff. The next step is where the copyright problem arises.
Once I have a paper accepted, it is necessary for me to assign the copyright to the publishers of the journal. No copyright assignment, no publication. It is as simple as that. So, who gets the fruits of my labors? Big multi-national corporations. What did they do to get this intellectual content? Absolutely bugger all, other than rigging the system! What about the people of my State who paid for my hard work? They get nothing. If they want to read my papers, they have to buy them from the journal (at $15 per paper and up), or visit a library. Libraries have to pay for a journal subscription ($750 per annum and up).
Thus, all this 'creativity' and copyright bleating is clearly bollocks. It is just a case of the powerful folks using rhetoric to fight for their monopoly 'rights'. I don't care to participate, but am forced to. Of course, I also run an e-journal where the authors retain copyright, but that is another story. My little act of subversion.
Don't fall for all this 'starving artist' rubbish. My bet is that we professors in our professional bondage produce more per year than the people represented by the members of both the RIAA and the MIAA, put together. I wonder what those crooks, or their mouth pieces, would have to say in response to that claim? I bet we will never hear.
"We are led by fools who waste our lives". Copyright is a good idea which has now been subverted into a scam and it sucks.
I often do something fairly similar. I'll go to pick up something and end up cruising in the stacks. There I will browse. When browsing I'll often see something I want to read. The question then is do we have it? With the Opera Browser loaded into my Nintendo DS, I can login to the WiFi link and pull up the catalog. When I'm done, I shut the DS, drop it into a pocket and move on. It works like a dream! Also, even if the kit is bought new, it is pretty cheap too. I bet with second hand equipment, it could be got for under $100. Oh yes, the few students who have seen me do this seem to think that it is pretty cool too.
I remember Muddog well. It was my first mud and burned up many hours of grad school there. Wells2k, thanks for many a good time there! I am still in touch with Kane, Labatt, Semtex, Taylor and a few of the old crew. Many of them moved on to VargonMud, when the place shut. Not only was it one of the funniest muds of all time, with some bizarre twists (who can forget the Spy shades, or the Bucket O'Love!), it was also an amazing community. This is one of the things that modern visual games lack.
Not only that, Muddog spawned a whole interest in muds for academic uses. The Maud (Multi-Academic User Domain) architecture came about from Muddog discussions. It was used for a while as a distance teaching tool. I'd love to hear from some of the Muddog old timers, should any be on here and not posting as anon.
Nomad of Muddog
I used to know the systems at Carleton pretty well, although I have never studied there, or been on the faculty. However, I have participated at a number of events there that have involved technology and their networks. The first thing to know about Carleton's systems is that network access from there is horribly slow. This is due to the way that their data is routed. It might also explain why this individual worked on local systems -- it took too damn long to connect elsewhere! The second thing I have noticed about the Carleton systems is that they are an odd mixture of old and clunky technology of the not entirely secure kind, allied to some super-oppressive and paranoid policies. It is neither a very helpful combination, when it comes to getting things done, nor is it especially secure. Of course, all this being said, my knowledge of their systems is now a few years out of date. Perhaps things have improved? However, my guess is, based on this story, they have not got much better. One final thing to keep in mind is that this kind of approach by University sys admins is quite common. When I was in grad school at another major Canadian University, on the one hand some of the computing people were helping me get access to large and powerful machines that were usually off-limits, so I could get my research done. However, on the other hand, other computing people had me on the security watch list, as I once posted a facetious comment to the alt.2600 newsgroup.
The whole 'why don't they abandon New Orleans' thread here is both incredibly silly and rather offensive. It is worth keeping in mind that N.O, was the site of a revolutionary war with the Brits, back in the day. This is evidence of the importance of the place, both then and now. Nobody ever seems to suggest that San Francisco should be abandoned, due to earthquake potential. Also, New York is hit by hurricanes too, but nobody suggests abandoning it either.
People also forget that what happened to N.O. in 2005 had far less to do with Katrina than it had to do with faulty levees. When Katrina hit N.O. back then, it was effectively a category 1, not more. The claims from the Corps of Engineers about cat 3 protection were just wrong.
My guess is that the 'abandon New Orleans' crew are just ignorant of the facts, or politically motivated. In 2005, we heard such comments from a n umber of politicians, mostly Republicans. For those of us who live in Louisiana and who know and visit N.O.on a regular basis, we know that it is a wonderful, vibrant and unique city. Yes, 2005 was a huge trauma, but as a tee-shirt that produced at the time said the city was 'bent, but not broken'.
So, rather than carping about things which seem to be poorly understood, why not do something useful? For instance, I will be riding out the storm up the road in Lafayette. The two TV stations KATC and KLFY will be broadcasting live to the web. As we have generators, we should be able to see what is going on by watching these feeds. However, guess what, we cannot see the KATC feed (generally, the better of the two, especially for weather) due to the fact that they have decided to go the Silverlight route and this is a Linux only household. If people want to do something useful, please take a moment and e-mail them a complaint at webteam@katc.com. This would be much more useful than carping on about New Orleans, when the whole issue about that place is so poorly understood.
Although this is undoubtedly stupid and moronic, what most commentators overlook is that teachers in Louisiana will be responsible for teaching this silliness. Although some of our teachers are excellent, many are not. The people in Louisiana are forced to get a real education in our Universities. Last semester, I had a freshman class in which only one person got the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 correct! By the time they graduate though most students are (mostly) numerate and literate. Given the confusions that school teachers have, it is quite possible that students in schools will end up learning the exact opposite of what it intended by the framers of this Bill. 'Praise the Intelligent Very Big Powerful Thingmy' is what I say!
The general topic of skepticism is one that is treated at length in Philosophy. A great Philosophy resource page is Epistemelinks.com. A search under 'Epistemology' could be fruitful. However, one of the best texts on skepticism is The Outlines of Pyrrhonism, by Sextus Empiricus. The first book especially is a great read, even if is is nearly 1,500 years out of date. The text of the book can be found on-line (scroll down) here. This is the best resource I know to teach skepticism to students.
First off, most 'other venues for peer review' (at least the ones that are any good) are frequently associated with journals. Second, there are many ways to evaluate the 'productivity of professors' and peer reviewed publications are only one, but an important one.
As many other people have noted, the crucial issue with journals has to do with quality control. It really does matter. Speaking as an academic with with a bit of seniority, journal publications are the first thing looked at by tenure and promotion committees and by job search committees. In the words of a very famous and senior person in my field(s), "The refereed publication is the one form of academic gold that can never be debased." As academic journals are the usual place to find refereed publications, this alone is one reason why they still matter.
That being said, there are some caveats which are in order. The first is to realize that not all 'refereed' journals are equal. A journal which has a blind refereeing process, but publishes almost anything submitted, despite this, will have a low impact rating. A publication in one of these places will not count for much. By contrast, a journal that has a 99% rejection rate will almost certainly have a high impact rating and will thus be much more impressive.
It is also the case that, having served as a journal editor, many submissions to journals are far from perfect. As a rough estimate, I would see 10-20% of submissions that came from people who were simply nuts. Without some kind of editing and refereeing process, a great deal of plain rubbish would have been in print.
Currently, academic journals are undergoing a transitional process. The turn around times are getting better, but there are still problems. For instance, as a faculty member at a State university, I am employed by the people of my State. Yet, when I have a paper accepted for publication by a journal, I have to sign over the copyright of the paper. If the people of my State, or even my students, want to read my work, they then have to pay the publishers for the right to do so. This is simply wrong and a system that will hopefully be replaced soon. Naturally, I provide anyone who asks for a copy of a paper of mine, one for free. The system is still defective though.
However, the bottom line is that peer review, and the academic journals that maintain this, are crucial for quality control. Just do a hunt on the blogs and you will see the reason why. There are quite a few 'professor' bloggers, but it is also clear that at least some of them are either frauds, or failures. Some time ago, I saw one who claimed that they could not get a paper published in any refereed journal, either good, or bad, because their paper was too 'insightful'. This is patent silliness. A better explanation was that the paper was simply unoriginal, or bad in some other way. A further reading of the same blog suggests either outright fraud, mental illness, or both. This is one of the reasons why, for all their faults, we still have academic journals. I say Thank Goodness!
Of course, if you talk to archaeologists, they will tell you that the best evidence about Stonehenge is to be found in the Aubrey Holes. Unfortunately, many of these were destroyed when English Heritage and their 'culture as tourism' friends built the new car park and the underground tunnel. Given the way that the BBC behaves these days, we can expect minimal real research work, with maximal hype. This is a damn shame. Yet more Wiki-Science...
It is unequivocally true that the current copyright system is badly broken. However, I am not certain that any of the proposal made, especially in the comment threads, will handle all situations. Consider the following:
As a Professor, one significant component of my job is to do research and write it up for publication. At root, this is a process which involves the production of copyrighted material. I can post my work to a web page somewhere, but that does not really count -- the quality control step of the blind refereeing process is crucial too. This catches any mistakes I may have made and (hopefully) stops people publishing rubbish. Thus, I need to send my work to reputable academic journals. What happens next is where the difficulties arise:
1) If I should pay a fee on my text, when should I pay it? Should it be on the first draft, or on the second, or on the nth? Most serious academic papers go through multiple revisions before they are ready for submission.
2) Should fees (no matter how small) be paid on submission? This too is unworkable. Depending on the journal, it may take over a year to hear back from the referees. Then, of course, it is common for referees to suggest further changes to the paper. It can also take many months for a paper to actually appear.
The problems do not end there, at least, with the current system. Once a paper has received final acceptance, it is common for publishers to require the author (i.e. me) to simply sign over the copyright to them as a condition on publication! This part, at least currently, is utterly mad. After all, as with many academics, I am ultimately employed by tax payers. They have paid for my work. Yet, I apparently initially hold the copyright (universities have not currently caught on to the 'work for hire' scam). However, to get my work out, I have to give it away to a third party who has contributed nothing to its creation.
Finally, to add insult to injury, should anyone (including me, or the tax payers) wish to read my work, then they must pay this third party for the honor! I have papers of my own which I cannot access, because our library does not subscribe to the relevant journals (a subscription can be nearly $1,000 for four issues a year). Of course, in such a crazy system, there are all sorts of dubious back channels (e.g. e-mailing .pdf files, etc.) whereby these restrictions can be got around. However, I hear nothing in any of the proposals made here which could fix such a fundamentally broken system. To make matters worse, the big publishing houses have the cash to lobby the politicians and the lawyers to go after folks (just like the RIAA).
So, in conclusion, if anyone can come up with proposals that could handle this kind of situation, then I will be all ears. Until then, I'll just send out my papers to anyone who asks by e-mail.
Sorry about the rant.
A few years back, we had Blackboard on our campus. It was horrible and I refused to use it [Techie aside: Take a look at some of their JavaScript, it is bloated and beyond ugly]. However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas.
The students proposed a 'Blackboard is mandatory' motion that went through all the relevant committees. Fortunately, the Faculty Senate were rational enough to amend the motion to advocate not just Blackboard, but also 'equivalent technologies'. This left the way open for people to even use simple web pages.
Then the next thing you know is that Blackboard suddenly wanted a HUGE amount of money for the new version -- much more money than we could ever afford. The techs basically told them to go to hell, kept on using the older version while they could and began to experiment with Moodle. As one of of the more technically sophisticated people on our campus, I was one of the beta-testers for our Moodle implementation. It is always a fun job trying to break software! Although early versions of the implementation had quite a few rough edges, pretty soon, Moodle was up and running in a slick manner. Thus, for a short time, we actually had both versions. Also during this period, negotiations with Blackboard continued, largely without much progress. Eventually their greed was too much. Blackboard was just scrapped. It was not just the cost of the software, but also the hardware requirements that were ridiculous, which killed the system for us. We have now moved entirely to Moodle, which is doing very well, even if a few people were initially unhappy about the change. Hopefully, more schools will be inspired by the predatory nature of the Blackboard people to get that monkey off their collective backs.
In a final irony, just before the decision was made to pull the plug on Blackboard was made, one of my students demonstrated to me a method by which he could crack Blackboard and change the grades of assignments with relative ease. The main point here though is that behaving like bastards can ultimately have a business cost. I say to hell with Blackboard, support Moodle instead -- after all, it is open source!
While I am a little uncertain whether the University would be liable under the things cited here, there action almost certainly violates Federal law. The Family Education Rights Protection Act (1974, if I recall correctly), or FERPA to it's friends, makes revealing almost any information about a student impermissible. Literally, I have had to refuse to talk to a judge about their child, due to FERPA. I wonder whether the Feds will get huffy about this, or whether they can be bothered (or perhaps they like the RIAA?). It sounds like this story could get fun.
Many years ago, word went out over the mailing lists and (then very junior) newsnet about how packets were being dipped and 'The Powers That Be' were recording/snooping/doing all that bad stuff. It turned out that a few people had been playing with the wonderful and useful tracert command (now less useful, due to finger command paranoia). They had noticed nodes which only seemed to have IP numbers, not addresses. They concluded this must be the NSA.
.sig files, so that even mundane e-mails about boring crap would trigger the sensors and get recorded. I am certain that Uncle Sam really enjoyed my discussions with my room mate about laundry and coffee ("Take out your laundry you freak, and buy some coffee!").
The point here is that none of this paranoia is especially new. Each time I hear it come round again, I enjoy having been on the 'net since before it was the 'net (any old BITNET refugees still out there?). Been there, seen it, got the t-shirt, dyed the t-shirt pink, ripped the arms off the t-shirt and then lost the t-shirt.
Back in the day, folks figured out a response: give the snoopers what they want. Many people (me included) put words like 'bomb' etc. into our
So, these days there is all this new fangled interweb stuff [engage full fogey/old fart mode], including Second Life, IRC, blogs and god knows what else. If a few public spiritied citizens would send Uncle Sam some more rubbish, he might get bored again. That is assuming he was ever really that interested.
Of course, there are two caveats: First, in the initial instance I mention, there was probably only paranoia and smoke. Second, these days one has to be a little careful about what one says, just in case one gets 'disappeared' on a 'Cuban holiday'.
The thing to keep in mind is that a few buzz terms, 'terrorists', 'communication', in conjunction with a recent technology makes the whole thing no less plausible than it was back then. I'm sure that Osama's folks send their 'secret plans' in Excel files [remember, Calc is better] that are password protected and then encrypted in PGP anyhow. This can all be done with products available at Office Depot anyhow. So, Chill!
A close look at the silly lawyer letter reveals that is comes from the "Dozier Law Firm". The name seems apt. Their web site at http://www.cybertriallawyer.com include a YouTube video on the front page. Let us hope that they have the correct release for that. Of course, I would encourage eveyone to take a look at their web site, for informational purposes only of course! It is also worth noting that one of their people has the nickname 'Bull'. I guess I will continue my profound dislike of BestBuy. Their loss is Circuit City's gain.
This post will almost certainly get modded into the basement, but what the hell.
I have been watching the blogs and noticed an interesting phenomenon that arises there, as a function of the lack of moderation, quality control, or anything like that. The fact that bloggers can post what they wish and also delete comments that might challenge their positions can lead to some pretty unhealthy outcomes.
Although I hate it when folks post commercials for their blogs as much as the next person, I am going to suggest that interested folks might want to look at a couple of recent posts that deal with these issues. My post Poison Girls describes in detail the kinds of things that can go wrong when there is no quality control. Another post, Blogs and 'Community Solipsism' also deals with this issue. Both posts offer concrete examples.
I am an academic and thus have some investment in the blind refereeing process. It is far from perfect, but it keeps some of the worst excesses of 'anything goes' at bay. Hopefully, something like the slashdot system will get implemented for blogs too.
What really concerns me is seeing people who lack competence in a field, still pontificating at length on topics. People who do not know better tend to get sucked in by the more manipulative types. They end up listening to worthless advice, yet taking it as gospel. For instance, I have a colleague who is pretty much a failed academic. They have had nothing appear in print for over six years (however, they are tenured). Yet, they are currently offering apparently sagely advice on being a scholar. The putative advice is bad and misleading. Yet, there is nothing that can be done about it.
My best response is to remind folks that, as the Bard said in the Merchant of Venice, "All that glisters is not gold" and that is especially true in the world of blogs, yet it seems that the problems appear to continue. Any comments or suggestions on this matter would be very welcome. I live in fear of the day that a high school kid starts claiming to be a cancer physician and offering bad advice to people with serious health issues. In the blog arena, it appears that it is likely to be believed by some. This is a very scarey thought.
I have posted this before, but I will post it again. Election theft is easy. However, beware of the 'obvious' targets. People like to yell about the voting machines. This is a distractor. The machines have a bunch of problems, but cheating at that level is simply inefficient. What works better is to go for the tabulators. Take a look at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/. There I have run and photographed some studies on tabulator software and found out things that were beyond scarey. Sure, suppress the vote, initimidate voters, but if the ultimate counter cannot be trusted, neither can the outcome of the election. Should there be an election 'surprise' in November, this could well be the reason why. When will it be time for that armed insurrection? Dr_Ish [Just asking questions and causing trouble, as usual -- see you all in the Cuban 'holiday camp']
When I was first appointed as a faculty member around 1996 I immediately started using web pages with my classes. Many of my pages had alot of the features that Blackboard now claim to have a patent upon (discussion forums, etc.). I have even published an academic paper on this stuff, as I was an 'early adopter'.
Eventually, my school bought into the Blackboard thing. I refused to join in, because my web pages provided all the functionality I needed, without needing the huge computational overhead and without the security concerns. The necessity of JavaScript is a particular concern. Then Blackboard made a big marketing move: we had to sign up for an expensive new version. As a State school, we could not afford it, so we had to quit Blackboard. We moved to Moodle.
The move to Moodle produced a whole new pile of problems. It seemed that some faculty, having learned how to do things with Blackboard, appeared incapable of learning Moodle! They bitched and complained. One idiot from the English dept. even suggested in our Faculty Senate that we should try and develop a Moodle interface that emulated Blackboard! Fortunately, common sense prevailed and this was not approved.
However, here is the problem: techno-phobic faculty members are now hooked on Blackboard. In our case, they are being forced to wean themselves to Moodle. All this being said, much or most of the functionality available with these systems can be provided in plain HTML, with a few tricks, to enable passwords and the like. With good modern HTML Editors (like Nvu), once these are set up correctly, plain web pages can be created without the user realising that they are doing anything too much different from writing an MS-Turd document. However, it seems impossible for me to convince other faculty to do this. We all have PhDs, so at least some of us should be smart. After all, my 11 year old daughter can make web pages! Yet, the luddites still abound. These are the people Blackboard are relying upon to make them their millions. I think that it is just sad.
This may all seem a bit silly, but it is worth putting into context. Of course, rebuilding shattered economies, school systems and fixing levees is just too boring for these goons. In addition to this ridiculous game legislation, in the recent session, they also considered implementing a ban on cockfighting. This is still legal in Louisiana, as chickens are not animals under State law, as a matter of definition. However, in the end it was decided that cockfighting could remain legal, because to ban it would be too much of a hardship on rural economies. Then, towards the end of the session they passed a bill that made abortion illegal in Louisiana, under almost any circumstances (including rape and incest). Needless to say, this law has no effect, due to Roe vs. Wade, but clearly this legislation was a good use of their time. In the light of these other legislative initiatives, the game legislation is small beer by comparison. As we say in Louisiana, "we have the best politicians money can buy"!
Bravo!! Bravo for Elm and vi. To this day I use this combination when connecting to our servers from home. Of course, it does prevent all those 'Click on this link to see a sexy virus wreck your machine' style games from working properly. Elm is also very good at showing you html as text, so it is easy to spot the Pishers. I love the combination of elm and vi -- it is a fast, powerful and elegant. I am pleased to say that we do not even have Pine or that horror Pico installed on any of our Sun boxes.
Well, I am facinated by the comments of the Anonymous cowards. They are very silly. Some of us have responsible jobs which makes moving out of Louisiana a little difficult. We could abandon the people of Louisiana, but that would be disloyal. This State is full of good people. We/They do not want to move to New York, or where ever (even though many thousands have been forced to by the storms and FEMA). If the anonymous cowards even read this, I just ask that they come to Louisiana and meet some people. They will find strength, pride, resiliance, and (as they say in Quebec) a distinct culture. This culture is worth preserving. Hurricanes are bad for this. So, this is the reason I wish that they could avoid us in the future.
Well, as a resident of Louisiana, I can attest that more hurricanes are a bad thing. We were not hit by Katrina, but we had the refugees staying in our houses. New Orleans is still on hell of a mess. On the other hand, we did get hit somewhat by the hurricane everyone forgets, Rita. That really trashed our coastal parishes and poisoned the land with salt (for details see here). A warmer Gulf means the risk of more storms and stronger storms. From where we sit, we really do not give a proverbial 'rats arse' about the politics. We just do not want hurricanes. If ANYTHING can be done to lower the temperature of the sea and thereby reduce the risk, I am for it. The politicos like to carp on about the causal link not being proved -- this was the line used by tobacco companies for years. Anyone who knows anything about the philosophy of science knows that it is almost possible to prove causation. What matters is strong correlation. This we seem to have, although I am sure whilst Haliburton runs the Whitehouse, nobody will pay any attention. Sorry, I needed to vent on this...
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, discusses the term 'game' at length. He argues that whilst is is clear that the term lacks a precise boundary (para. 69-71), we can still meaningfully use the term in most cases. It seems that many of the observations here are just noticing what Wittgenstein noticed back in 1953. It was examples such as the term 'game' that led him to famously formulate his doctrine (para. 43) that "...the meaning of a word is its use in the language".
In the meantime, until this matter is ruled on, it seems to me that another concern with this program that nobody has mentioned is the cost. It cannot be cheap for the NSA to caputure all that e-mail and all those phone calls. To this end, it seems appropriate that we should all 'help' the NSA by automatically sending them copies of all the e-mail we send. We should probably let Bush know too. So, may I politely suggest that all /.ers automatically CC all their e-mail to
nsapao@nsa.gov, and
presaident@whitehouse.gov
Surely this would be the most patriotic slashdot effect ever! ;)
"I hope to learn skill that will be detrimental to my life and job".
I am pretty sure that this wasn't a joke. This is scarey!
These activities have not been without consequences, however. People in Louisiana are figuring ways of fighting back. For instance, many people now have their phone service with AT and T, or Eatel (both of which are cheaper). Another good trick is that people in appartments are having a single BellSouth DSL subscription, that they then share with their neighbours, using a cheap wireless box from Wal-Mart. BellSouth don't seem to realise how their actions are influencing their revenues. Perhaps in the light of this latest silliness, people in other parts of the country should take similar steps against BellSouth, especially in cases where they are a monopoly, or duoploy broadband provider.