Accept no substitutes

Month: February 2007 (Page 1 of 4)

Does the Political Bent of Your Friends show Your Own Politics

Ask Fred’s Facebook API trick about “Your True Self”.

I broke myself a bit by claiming that I am Very Conservative but I was found out and ended up with this reading from Fred’s True Self oracle:

Your True Self: Very Liberal
Your friends say a lot about you. In your profile, you list yourself as being Very Conservative.

However, it looks like the political views of your friends might be telling you something! Indeed, most of your friends are very liberal. Don’t worry about this too much, it’s good to get exposed to different political views, even to those which you may not agree.

The scary part is that 25% of my friends claim to be Apathetic/Other.

Bob Sutor – IBM VP for Open Source – March 14

Bob SutorBob SutorBob Sutor
Who: Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President for Open Source and Open Standards
When: 3 pm Wednesday, March 14
Where: 116 Murphey Hall UNC-Chapel Hill
What: a public talk by and conversation with Bob about IBM and Open Source and Open Standards

More: Bob is involved in the Open Document Format standard, Eclipse and WebSphere, Second Life, The IBM Open Patents Pledge and more. See his very active personal blog.

Sponsors: ibiblio.org, School of Information and Library Science, Carolina Open Source Initiative, IBM Centers for Advanced Studies

April 14 Privacy with Schneier, Smith, Harper, Cowell and others TBA

April 14 Saturday – Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility presents (with some help from ibiblio)

  • Bruce Schneier internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a “security guru,” Schneier is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.
  • Privacy Journal’s Robert Ellis Smithrecognized as the leading expert on the right to privacy in the U.S. He is an experienced journalist, a lawyer, an author of several essential books on privacy. Twice he has been asked to write the definition of privacy for the World Book Encyclopedia.
  • Jim Harper of the CATO Institute a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee. Recently, Harper wrote the book Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood. Harper is the editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based think tank devoted exclusively to privacy, and he maintains online federal spending resource WashingtonWatch.com.
  • Sen. Janet Cowell

More details at the date approaches.

Two Places at Once! Digital Curation and HASTAC

I’m on the planning committee for DigCCurr2007, an international symposium on Digital Curation, April 18 – 20. Naturally I’ll be there and I’m looking forward to it.

But as I posted earlier, Duke, a nearby educational facility, will be running the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface thingy billed as “an unprecedented three-day mashup of ideas, demos, art, and conversation, driven by digital visionaries and practitioners from across domains and disciplines” on April 19 – 21.

Yikes! At least Steve’s Theremin concert will come after the DigiCur reception. I might can get to that. Friday is the real problem though.

Harry Halpin slides

I had to miss out on Harry Halpin‘s talk at Duke recently. Not to worry; he sent a link to his slides. He’s into the Semantic Web, Microformats, Folksonomies vs taxonomies, and gives a great overview and discussion.

Harry being a web guy doesn’t use PPT; these slides are a lovely read right in your browser with no ugly download or proprietary reader required. There is one wonderful link to a YouTube video about Trust which relates to Harry’s work.

The talk is titled “The Next Generation of the Web” but there is more there there than in most talks of that name.

NOTE: Harry is an ibiblio contributor.

Still processing: Henry Copeland, Cory Doctorow, Bob Bradley, Steve Buttry, Nan Lin

Among the interesting and inspiring people that I was able to spend time with over the past 36 hours were:

Henry Copeland of BlogAds.com who took time off to come and talk to my class about his experiences doing start-ups and the current state of advertising on blogs. (Thanks Henry. There’s no substitute for real world experience when it comes to entrepreneurship and you showed us a lot in a short time).

Cory Doctorow, who was generous with his time at UNC and at Duke — we did sell out of Overclocked — and with Red Hat Magazine — see articles below for more on Cory’s visit and see the ibiblio Speakers page for a video of his UNC talk soon. Cory’s Salon article “Steve Jobs iTunes Dance” is worth going through the obligatory commercial to read.

Bob Bradley, “Rock and Roll Poet,” who took time over coffee this morning to talk about his plans for a multistate multimedia project that I am proud to say that ibiblio will try our damnest to be a part of. Bob’s working out of Tennessee State University on this.

Steve Buttry of American Press Institute who stopped by the UNC J-School to talk about the Newspaper Next project with my brilliant colleagues: Richard Cole, Phil Meyer, Frank Fee, Morris Rosenberg and Louise Spieler. A wonderful conversation.

Nan Lin
, whose work on Social Capital I’ve taught for several years now, was here at UNC to meet with the TRLN Fellows. I can’t believe that he’s been only 15 miles away, at Duke, and we’ve never met. A couple of hours with him is sure to have uplifted all of our ideas and conceptions of Social Capital and will I think move our Social Software researching groups in the School of Information and Library Science forward in a big way. Great colleagues there too. (Again I was on the run today and had to hog the first few minutes of questions and then run. Better questions were in the offing as Fred was talking as I ran out).

Who is the more closely related to E. L. Doctorow?

Cory Doctorow was here at UNC and at Duke yesterday speaking. Don’t worry if you missed the UNC talk; it’ll be online at the ibiblio speakers site early next week (Thanks, Joey).

Today we shot some video for Red Hat Magazine. One thing we didn’t talk about is: Who in the room is most closely related to E. L. Doctorow? Several folks have made the claim for Cory including his Wikipedia entry. I confess as you may have guessed; I am much more closely related to Uncle Edgar than Cory. E. L. “Uncle Edgar” Doctorow is married to my Grandmother’s sister. They met at Kenyon College. She from Hickory, NC and he from New York City.

Watch for the videos soon (I’ll post as soon as I learn they are available).

Shhhh It Happened Here First

Another first for Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina (via Duncan Murrell on OrangePolitics.org with links added by me):

From this week’s The New Yorker, Louis Menand summarizing an entry in the recently published Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred Shapiro:

“It is extremely interesting to know, for instance, that the phrase “Shit happens” was introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as “UNC–CH Slang” (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983.”

My Timeless Verse

Every poet aspires to write at least one poem that someone will remember and think good after a number of years. We usually don’t live to know whether we’ve accomplished that. But e-mail today gave me some hope and confirmation.

In 1980, I won or was finalist in The Cold Mountain Review Poetry Contest. As a result, I was invited to Boone, NC and to Appalachian State University for a dinner, a panel and a reading and later, as was the style of the period, late night drinking.

I met the editors, R. T. Smith (now at Washington and Lee University editing Shenandoah) and Charles Frazier (later known as the author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons). I was even more amazed that the home of the Department Head (I think) who hosted the late night party had central vacuum connections. Little portals that suck in each room. Much delight was obtained.

Now 27 years later the poem that took me up the mountain, “Feet,” [JPG of the poem] has been selected by 35th anniversary issue editor Joseph Bathanti to represent 1980.

Thanks, Joe and Rod and Charles.

Closing the Digital Divide in the Indy

A number of good friends are credited for their good works by Fiona Morgan in the current Independent. (The paper is online as I write this. I added the links to the articles at the page numbers).

Greg DeKoenigsberg
and the One Laptop Per Child (Page 19)

Judy Hallman and RTPNet (page 23)

Jane Smith Patterson and e-NC Authority (Pages 20 – 21)

And Cory’s Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present is/are reviewed with a short notice about his talks here at UNC and at Duke TOMORROW!
(Page 34)

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