By Stephen Downes
August 19, 2003
World Squirms as Sobig Returns
I'm
sending today's newsletter a little early (and a little
incomplete - do take the time to visit James Farmer's site today, and CETIS too)
to get it in before the resurgent Sobig virus takes down
everybody's email server. *sigh* Folks, if you don't know
what the attachment is, don't open it. By CNETAsia
Staff , CNet News.com, August 19, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Editorial: The Public's
Research
An endorsement, in a traditional
publication no less, of free and open access to scientific
and academic literature: "A new journal making its debut in
October, PloS Biology, has a refreshingly different
outlook: If the public paid for a study, then it is the
public's to review on the Internet for free." Why should
content paid for by the taxpayer be reserved only for those
with the means to pay a subscription? Of course. It
shouldn't. By Bee Editorial Staff, Sacramento Bee, August
19, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The ''Other'' Knowledge
It's hard
to know what to say about this item. One thing is that it
taps into some important underlying truths about cognition
- that we think in images and symbols, that there are
habitual and instinctual elements to intelligence, that
these are sometimes manifest as what we would call a
'hunch' or an instinct. But mixed in with this is some of
the worst of pop psychology. That distinct cultures
'recognized the need to manage (or control) the way the ego
and the will interact" is less evidence of a collective
unconscious than of a common physiology. Indeed, such
slicing and dicing of mental processes in such a cumbersome
(and unenlightening) fashion does not advance our
understanding. I really don't think we can (or should)
distinguish between the conscious and the unconscious
portions of our mind: it's all part of a single system, as
are the so-called 'will' and other pseudo-mental entities.
The mind is a complex layering of tapestries the patterns
which are in a constant flux and intermingling, an
interplay only the surface features of which we are aware.
The design of a knowledge management system ought to
reflect this reality, not some arrangement of internal
homonculi that explain nothing. By John David Balla,
Knowledge Management, August 14, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
SCO Means Business on Linux
Licenses
ZD Net offers comprehensive coverage of
the SCO lawsuit against Linux distributors. And it says
outright what many have been thinking: SCO (or its silent
backers and licensees) wants to kill open source
completely. "SCO is planning to respond that the GPL itself
is invalid, SCO's lead attorney, Mark Heise of Boies
Schiller & Flexner, told the Wall Street Journal."
John Paczkowski's coverage in Good Morning Silicon Valley is equally
good. He writes (with links),
It's free as in speech, not as in beer: If you
happened to be in Las Vegas Monday and wandered into the
SCO Forum 2003, you might have thought yourself at an
anti-Linux rally, not a trade show. Such was the
posturing and
showboating that kicked the event off. SCO execs spent so
much of the day discussing the company's legal battles over
Linux that when they finally got around to talking about
product plans, it seemed little but an afterthought. In a
two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, marked by
chest-pounding worthy of WWE cage match, SCO CEO Darl
McBride painted the company's intellectual property battle
against IBM and the Linux community as a struggle for the
future of proprietary software itself. The Free Software
community wants all software to be free, and "that will
have a negative impact on us all," McBride said. "When the list price is
zero, the margin doesn't matter. SCO is fighting for the
silent majority, and what happens here will affect you all.
... At the end of the day, the GPL (the copyright agreement
at the core of the free-software movement) is about making
software free;
it's about destroying value." McBride's
interpretation of "Free software" as defined by the Free
Software Foundation (FSF) couldn't have been
any further off. The FSF clearly states: " 'Free software'
does not mean 'non-commercial.' A free program must be
available for commercial use, commercial development, and
commercial distribution. Commercial development of free
software is no longer unusual; such free commercial
software is very important." Text message to McBride:
RTFM.
Though a major annoyance, this is a turning point, a rite
of passage open source was bound to face sooner or later.
If it prevails here - and I have no reason to think that it
won't - then open source will have established itself in
law as well as in fact. That can only be good.
By Various Authors, ZD Net, August, 2003
[
Refer][
Research][
Reflect]
Freedom of Access to
Information
Issues of public security,
censorship, protection of children and democracy all swirl
around this central issue of the Information Age, freedom
of access. Most people still depict freedom of access in
legislative terms - what are we allowed (or not allowed) to
view by our governments. Schools and libraries are given
extra treatment in this report. I think that questions of
freedom of access ought also to look at the social and
economic side: freedom of access is pretty useless if you
cannot afford to pay for it. But market economics would
never be used to hinder freedom. Would they? By
Graeme Daniel and Kevin Cox, Web Tools Newsletter, August
18, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
For Those Needing 32 More
Bits
Just another nudge for those looking at
what's coming down the pipe in the next two or three years.
The bad news: all your computers will become obsolete. The
good news: the new 64 bit computers will be significantly
better. But there are some issues to resolve: for example,
will our use of 64 bits also require our use of 'trusted'
computer environments? Watch for this question to be swept
under the rug in the months of hype to come, to emerge
again only when it's too late. By John Markoff, New York
Times, August 18, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Children’s Internet Protection Act: Study of
Technology Protection Measures in Section 1703
This U.S. government report on the use of
technology to protect schoolchildren from harmful content,
though it does cite a measure of satisfaction with the
products, recognizes that technological measures alone will
not solve the problem. "Commenters emphasized that
technology protection measures are most effective when
teachers and educational institutions can customize
technology and use it in connection with other strategies
and tools" Additionally, "NTIA made two recommendations:
(1) additional training on the full use of technology
protection measures, and (2) new legislative language that
would clarify CIPA’s existing 'technology protection
measure' language to ensure that technology protection
measures include more than just blocking and filtering
technology." Additionally, the authors observe that there
should be more local control over the implementation of
technological measures.
It is interesting to read Distance-Educator.Com's interpretation of
the report. It paints a much more positive picture, giving
the impression, not really justified by the report's
contents, that technology actually will solve the
problem. I suspect that Distance-Educator's coverage is
based on the press release, but of course the link (to what
- PR NewsWire?) is not provided. A reading of the report
provides a much more nuanced view, as I describe above. I
think it's time Distance-Educator.Com stopped quoting
word-for-word from unattributed sources, and started
properly indicating source and context. This coverage is
very misleading, and it's not the first time. At the very
least, it would be nice were they to actually read the
resources they pass along to prevent this sort of
misinterpretation.
By Nancy J. Victory, et.al.,
Department of Commerce, August, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
CaribHRForum · The Caribbean HR
Collaborative
This new group is forming at
Yahoo! Groups for Caribbean human resource interests. "This
group is designed as a location in cyber-space where the
community of HR professionals can converse, share and
network about the challenges facing companies in the
Caribbean." By Various Authors, August, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Learning and Training
Innivations
George Siemens turned me to toward
this new online learning magazine. Well, not new - this is
volume 4, number 5. But the format is definitely worth
nothing. I really like the page-turner, slide-bar, and
table of content tabs. The magazine actually feels like a
magazine, even when I read it online. But it's an
all-or-nothing thing: I cannot link to individual articles
within the magazine. And the company that designed the
format, NXTbook Media, keeps tight control over
the format, meaning it won't be widely ised. Just as well.
As Siemens says, "For now it's neat...if everyone does it,
it may be irritating." By Various Authors, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Budding Buddy Business
This trend
is already evident in the world of venture capital and it
is likely to storm to the forefront in education as well:
"Venture capitalists are opening up their wallets with
caution to hot 'social networking' start-ups, or those
companies that help you connect with friends to help get
ahead in romance or work." What will people look for in
education? Someone who will tecah them, of course. By Matt
Marshall, San Jose Mercury News, August 17, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Online Learning a Virtual
Revolution
"I have to have a piece of chalk in
my hand to make any sense, the way Thomas Aquinas did 800
years ago. If I can't see the faces, I can't know anything
about them." So says a philosophy professor at the College
of Notre Dame of Maryland who, despite his learning, does
not yet fathom the many dimensions of knowledge. Oh well.
This (still) obligatory dismissive remark is only a minor
annoyance in an otherwise competent overview of the rise of
online learning today. Worth noting: "Enrollment in
distance education courses nationally has more than doubled
since 1997, to 3 million, according to the U.S. Department
of Education." be sure to follow the links in this story:
there's more - for example, the link to theUniversity of Maryland University College
doesn't just take you to the institution's home page, but
to a side-bar article. By Mike Bowler, baltimore Sun,
August 18, 2003 8:19 p.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Aggregators Attack Info
Overload
I'm going to stop running these 'intro
to RSS' stories soon (obviously not today) because OLDaily
reader will have had more than their fill. This item (and a
second, see below) looks at the potential of RSS as a means
to handle information overload. It's not quite so
straightforward as the articles depict - how does one pick
which of 30,000 feeds to subscribe to, for example? Neither
of these items mentions Userland, arguably the first and
certainly the most important blogging software, a point
founder Dave Winer complains about. Winer has a point -
exactly the same point made by critics of the BlogCon
conference (see below). What goes around... By Ryan Singel,
Wired News, August 18, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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