Accept no substitutes

Month: November 2007 (Page 1 of 2)

We’re baaaaack! Net Neutrality to live again in Congress

This just in from CNet (full story here):

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of a House of Representatives Internet and telecommunications panel, is readying a new version of his Network Neutrality Act […]

Markey plans to introduce the new effort, which will “closely follow” the old one, during the next two to three weeks, shortly before Congress adjourns for the year, a spokeswoman told CNET News.com on Tuesday. Further action, including hearings, is expected in the new year.

[…]

Daze of meetings

I spent today in a series of interesting conversations. First with Historian of Science and Duke “recycle” Fellow Andrew Russell who works on the construction of standards for technologies. Later a lunch to talk about Media Law, Privacy, Defamation, and Libel and the like with Lolly Gasaway, Mike Kautsch, and Deb Aikat. And lastly (not counting email, phone and other discussions) a talk about Facebook and privacy and secrecy with Kelly Davies, a student doing social network research for a class in the J-school.

Although, I’m complaining a bit; this is the best part of my job. If the University is one long conversation, then I’m feeling a part of it all today. I get to listen to smart people thinking about a variety of issues and challenges — if I can keep my own mouth shut long enough ;->

Thursday: Meet Congressman Brad Miller and talk about blogging and blog about talking

Brian alerts us to this event that he will be co-hosting at the border of Chapel Hill and Carrboro on Thursday.

Join Rep. Brad Miller for a discussion hosted by Ruby Sinreich of OrangePolitics.org and Brian Russell of Yesh.com about the impact of blogging on today’s political environment.

When:
Thursday, November 29, 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Where: Mill Town Restaurant, 307 E Main St, Carrboro

Suggested Donation: $10
Cash Bar

Congressman Brad Miller is currently serving his third term representing North Carolina?s 13th Congressional District. He has often blogged on many progressive sites, including the DailyKos and Blue NC. Congressman Miller serves on the House Financial Services Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, and Science and Technology Committee where he chairs the subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.

RSVP by calling 919-834-2343 or e-mail andy@bradmiller.org or just stop by www.bradmiller.org

Time off to Ocracoke

Took some time off the mainland and off the blog to spend on Ocracoke with friends who are now living on the island most of the year. We’ve been going down there since I was a kid. After about 2 decades off for bad behavior, Sally and Tucker and I started going down at Thanksgiving about 10 years ago. The brief report is that Ocracoke is as beautiful and as isolated as ever. Some things have changed this year.

Restaurants closed by Thanksgiving were: the Jolly Roger, Creekside, the Atlantic, Captian Ben’s, Flying Melon and the Mango Loco. Open were: Back Porch, Pelican (with a sparse winter menu), Thai Take Out, Pony Island (some meals), Jason’s, and Howard’s

At Howard’s, some changes notable — more tables and booths inside, games including the ring swing moved outside, pool table to the porch area, not open to 2 am any more and shocking to locals and regular visitors alike — Howard’s will close this winter! The reason ostensively is that all of the creek bridges to the north on the island will be replaced between December and January. Howard’s will use this time to remodel. But locals say that they fear that Howard’s will not longer be the community refuge and center of activity that it has been in the past.

The Ocracoke Coffee Shop however has filled the role as community center and it shows no sign of shutting down for winter or anything else.

On the beach with our friend, Peter, we discovered a young harbor seal pulling itself out of the surf. It let me get rather close before barking and striking at me. We were all looking to see if it was injured and later reported it to the rangers. This is the first seal that any of us had seen on the island. A couple of folks claimed to have seen one in the Sound many years back. Peter took some good pictures and will be publishing this one with a write up in the Ocracoke Observer’s next issue.

On the way to the Swan Quarter ferry in Hyde County, a bear lumbered across the road in front of us.

On the geekier side of things, we installed Damn Small Linux on an old Dell Pentium III for Michael, Peter’s son. We had to leave before getting gcc installed for him. That may be too great a challenge for a guy who has never used command line. I did download the *.deb files but I didn’t get any further.

I should write a whole separate entry on the wonderfully local and generally wonderful OcraFolk Festival fund-raiser especially Capt. Rob Temple’s piratical turn on “The Night Before Christmas”

Sally has a note and a sunset picture here.

You have been poked: Brett in First Monday

Brett Bumgarner’s UNC Honors Thesis on the uses and gratifications of Facebook is now published on/at/by First Monday (Volume 12 Number 11 – 5 November 2007). This is a groundbreaking study with a very high N:

You have been poked: Exploring the uses and gratifications of Facebook among emerging adults
by Brett A. Bumgarner

Abstract

The social networking site Facebook has become an inescapable phenomenon for college students, but little systematic research has studied why these students use Facebook. I conducted an online survey among Facebook users at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (N = 1,049) to examine why they use Facebook and how it fulfills their needs. The most prevalent use of Facebook was as a social activity – students reported using Facebook with friends to view and discuss other people’s profiles. Essentially, Facebook appears to operate primarily as a tool for the facilitation of gossip.

Note: Fred and I were Brett’s advisors. Jane Brown was the lead advisor and a great one.

Minjeong in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication

UNC PhD and Hawaii Pacific University professor Minjeong Kim has a part of her dissertation published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. It’s “The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses.”

Please reference as: Kim, M. (2007). The Creative Commons and copyright protection in the digital era: Uses of Creative Commons licenses. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html

Note: I was on Dr. Kim’s dissertation committee.

Friday: Don on Open Content Alliance

What: Open Content Alliance: 2007 Meeting Report
Who: Don Sizemore
When: Friday Nov 16 12:00-1:00pm
Where: Manning Hall, room 208

“What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.”[1]

In 2005 a small group met at the Internet Archive offices to establish The Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.[2]

Kirill Fesenko, Richard Szary, Simon Spero, and Donald Sizemore represented UNC at this year’s meeting. Discussion topics included updates on the OCA’s Scan on Demand, Print on Demand, and Open Library initiatives, over recurring themes of Open Standards and Open Access.

The OCA was recently in the New York Times for adhering to its open principles:

[1] The Open Library:
[2] The Open Content Alliance:
[3] The Open Library CardCataWiki:

The United Nations and the New Media/Information Age – Friday

In Austria — but also online –, ibiblio alum Mark McCarthy will be a panelist at the conference The United Nations and the New Media/Information Age: Education for the Next Generation of “the People of the United Nations”

Mark’s panel, “New-Media Mediated Peace Building & Societal Development”, will take place between 4 pm and 6 pm Austrian time or 10 am and noon US Eastern Time. I tried their video test stream and it looks like it will work just fine (it’s on the conference home page; give it a try)>

Mark will be talking about his work with ReliefWeb.int in “ReliefWeb and the Role of Information in Humanitarian Response”

Perils of Public Homage: WUNC and Conference

Sally Greene, who was recently reelected to the Chapel Hill Town Council by a very large margin, and Blogger and Law Professor Eric Muller will be featured on WUNC’s State of Things at noon on Thursday (November 15) talking about the subject of their upcoming conference “The Perils of Public Homage: Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann in History and Memory”.

The conference to be held on Friday November 16 from 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. in the Dialectic Chambers of the Di Phi Society atop of New West, Cameron Ave., UNC-CH Campus is described below and at the Center for the Study of the American South. A complete schedule with speakers biographies and other material is here.

The memory of antebellum North Carolina Supreme Court Judge Thomas Ruffin looms large both on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where a dormitory bears his name, and in the state’s capital, where a statue of the judge greets visitors to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

Across North Carolina, Ruffin, who served as chief justice from 1833 to 1852, is considered the greatest jurist in the state’s history. Remarkably, in the popular mind his reputation has not appreciably suffered for his authorship of State v. Mann (1830), the most notorious judicial opinion in the history of American slave law. In that decision, Ruffin held that North Carolina law insulated the renter of a slave from criminal prosecution for shooting her in the back. “The power of the master must be absolute,” wrote the judge, “to render the submission of the slave perfect.”

On Friday, November 16, experts in the law of slavery and the study of public memory will gather on the UNC campus to reconsider the position of Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann within our historical legacy. Convening in the restored Dialectic Chambers of the Di Phi Society in New West, these scholars will take the judge and his work as points of departure for exploring the difficulties of remembering prominent people who supported systems of oppression.

Speakers will include legal scholars Sanford Levinson, Mark Tushnet, Al Brophy, Adrienne Davis, Sally Greene, and Eric Muller, historians Laura Edwards and David Loewenthal, philosopher Bernard Boxill, and North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge James A. Wynn, Jr.

The event, which will get under way at 9 a.m. and continue until 4:30 p.m. with a break for lunch, is jointly sponsored by the University of North Carolina School of Law, the Center for the Study of the American South, and the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities. It is free and open to the public.

Sally, Eric and Sanford Levinson “Rethinking Ruffin” on State of Things here.

SunSPOTs – Demo and talk (Small Programmable Object Technology)

What: SunSPOTS talk and demo (not a sale pitch they promise)
Where: Sitterson 014
When: Thursday November 15th at 3:30
Who: Sun Labs’ David Simmons

More: David has hands-on experience in building applications for SunSPOTs and was instrumental in its design and development, will be on hand to offer his insight into this amazing product.

The SunSPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) was developed in the Sun Labs and represents the future of embedded systems. Already used throughout academia, students and professors alike are finding new and interesting uses for SunSPOTs. Each SunSPOT comes equipped with a processor, memory, eight external tri-color LEDs, light sensors, temperature sensors, an seemingly countless practical uses.

At its core, a SunSPOT is an embedded system. But, unlike other embedded systems that must be programmed using a low-level language such as assembly or C, SunSPOT applications are developed in Java. By allowing Java applications to be uploaded and run on an internal Java Virtual Machine, Sun is not only opening up SunSPOTs to more users than many other embedded systems, it is also leaving the final function of each SunSPOT up to the end user. By following a simple API with which to interface the SunSPOT, developers nationwide have created unique uses for SunSPOTs – everything from animal research to rocket testing and much more!

Tomorrow: YouTube, WeTube, TheyTube

Gary Marchionini tests our/your/their joint command of personal pronouns as he shoots the video rapids in HisTube tomorrow

Tuesday, November 13 at 11 a.m. in the Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library:

YouTube, WeTube, TheyTube: How the new video revolution changes everything
Led by Dr. Gary Marchionini
Panel members: Paul Jones, Cal Lee, Terrell Russell, Chirag Shah, plus (maybe) surprise guests

The YouTube phenomenon has changed the way people create, display, and watch video on the Web. Video is now being integrated into the Web experience on a more fundamental level than ever before, cropping up everywhere from Facebook walls to blogs to podcasts. Now that the two have been enmeshed, what challenges and opportunities do this new hybrid medium present? And with all that non-text information out there, how do we adjust our notions of metadata, indexing, and searching so that we can actually find what we need?

Wed @ Wootini – Onionhead Monster meets SteveB

Steve B writes to let us know that he’ll be “using open source software (GPL’d Audacity sound editor) as a required component of [his] music for this show”:

Onion Head Monster and Subscape Annex invade Carrboro, 14 November

Paul Friedrich of Onion Head Monster and Hellcar fame is holding a reception this Wednesday evening at Wootini. Around Paul’s presentation, I will perform an improvisational live looping set of my audible vision concept, taking Paul’s posters for the exhibit and processing the graphic images as sound files, chopping and looping the samples.

See and hear Paul Friedrich speak.
See and hear Paul’s artwork.

For an introduction to audible vision, see HERE

When: Wednesday 14 November, 7-10pm.
Where: Wootini, Carr Mill Mall, Carrboro NC.

Jones @ NCSU CS Graduation

40 years of NCSU CS
39.5 years after I went to Raleigh to take classes in something brand new called Computer Science at North Carolina State University, I’m headed back — at least for one day. I’m giving the graduation speech for the Winter grads on December 12. The Department is only one year older than my experience with it so while I’m not from the very first cohort to graduation after a full 4 years, I’m very early in the program.

I only get, thankfully the grads to be are probably saying, about 10 or 15 minutes to excite, inform, educate and amuse the grads.

What would you tell today’s Computer Science grads before they go out into the world?

Silence of the Jones

I took a little time off the blog this week, for the first time in years really, busy working on balancing work and attention to Sally’s re-election bid with my other projects. Much of my time was spent pounding signs into very hard ground and then in the past two days finding them and pulling them back up. Yikes! I’m best at that level of politics.

The good news is that Sally was reelected handily only out of first place overall by about a dozen votes. ibiblio is doing very well. Many interesting things are happening in the social networking area. Our seminar is becoming immersed in social capital theory and I think in a good way.

I’m reading poetry with Jerry Eidenier and Marielle Prince on Sunday afternoon at 4 pm at Saint Matthews Church in Hillsborough. More on that here.

The Carolina Union Activities Board just wrote to say that they would join in sponsoring DJ Spooky’s visit to UNC on February 8th. Watch the ibiblio home page for details.

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