Accept no substitutes

Month: September 2010

Jones receives IBM Faculty Research Award

From the School of Information and Library Science news site:

IBM logo from WikiCommons

IBM logo from WikiCommons

Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has received a 2010 IBM Faculty Award for $29,000. The Faculty Awards are competitive international awards that recognize full-time professors who have made significant contributions in their field.

Jones is one of 95 award recipients worldwide and one of only two recipients from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Patrick Dreher, chief domain scientist for cloud computing at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), was the other.

“It is an honor to receive this award and to see the School and the University receive industry support and recognition,” Jones said. “Keeping a good relationship with IBM helps provide faculty members opportunities to collaborate, gives graduate students opportunities for research and internships and gives graduates from our programs job prospects.”

The IBM Faculty Awards are given annually to foster collaboration between IBM and researchers at leading universities worldwide and to stimulate growth in the areas of computer science and technology. Candidates must be nominated by an IBM employee with common interests.

SILS Dean and Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor Gary Marchionini was the last person in the School to receive the award in 2006. He said he used the money for video-retrieval research, which also helped support a doctoral student with her dissertation.

“They don’t give these awards to just anyone,” Marchionini said. “It is a feather for the School and a feather for the research team. It is an honor, and I’m thrilled for Paul and ibiblio. He has been doing this work for years now, and it is great to see him earning greater recognition.”

Jones said the award money will be used to hire graduate research assistants to help with the virtualization of ibiblio.org, and to help with travel expenses related to conferences and trainings for research advancement.

“This is essential because virtualization is in a big time of turmoil, and we need to maintain strong collaborations with our partners,” he said. “Typically I can send people to important meetings, but this is a time when the state budget money is not there. It is very important to show up once a year and present the results of our work at conferences.”

Net Neutrality on WUNC this Tuesday at noon


WUNC Logo

Listen to the show here.

At high noon on Tuesday, September 28, James Boyle (Duke Law and The Public Domain author) will be discussing Network Neutrality on WUNC’s The State of Things. The crux of the discussion will be over whether all bits, servers, protocols etc are equal as Vint Cerf (inventor of the Internet Protocol) has said or whether carriers and ISPs should be able to offer tiered services giving higher priority to certain sites, protocols, services, etc as Bob Kahn (inventor of the Transmission Control Protocol) has held.

One way that the debate has broken is that services like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc are pro-NN (in many cases) and ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable would like to sell you and the servers different rates of access at differing prices.

Rather than argue here — time for that is Tuesday — I’m posting a few resources:

Please feel free to suggest additional (non-astroturf sources).

These from Fiona Morgan:

Word Detective – Cackalacky

For some time now, I’ve been part of a loose group of seekers trying to find the origin of the word Cackalack or Cackalacky or Kackalack or some variation thereof.

Calalacky Hot Sause sticker

@radiomayonnaise alerts me that Word Detective is now on the case. Here. Dr. Connie Eble, Dr. Glenn Hinson, and in particular Bonnie Taylor-Blake offer good information but no final answer.

Bonnie pushes the documentation date back to Kathleen Kimball’s play “The Meat Rack” in 1972. It should be noted that although the line in the play refers to South Cackalacky and Charleston in particular, that Kimball was living in Asheville, NC when she wrote it.

One thing that Dr Eble and Bland Simpson and I were able to recall but not document is that during the mid-1960s both Bland, who was living in Coastal NC, and me, living in Charlotte, heard the term Cackalack used. Those who used the term in both cases were enlisted men — Marines from Jacksonville or Soldiers from Fayetteville — who were unhappy about being stuck down here in Cackalack.

I’ve seen no written evidence of this usage, but would love to hear/see anything anyone finds.

Upcoming panels and talks

I’ll be speaking, panelling and/or moderating at these events in the near future.

Thursday September 23- Preservation North Carolina 2010 Conference

The Future of Online Preservation
Learn how the web and social media are influencing the way we do the work of preservation — and what changes may be ahead — at this round-table panel. Glenn Perkins, PreservationNC.org; Paul Jones, iBiblio.org/UNC-Chapel Hill; Gary Kueber, Endangered Durham; John Morris, Goodnight Raleigh; and George Smart, TriangleModernistHouses.com.

Monday October 4 – How Computers Changed My Life series at Carol Woods Retirement Community

Monday October 18 – Open Access Week at UNC

Panel on Images, Access and Copyright

Thursday October 28 – Carolinas Chapter: American Society for Information Science & Technology

Panel on social networks uses and misuses

Friday October 29 – Elon Law Review Symposium on Transparency, Secrecy and the Internet

Several of the nation’s top scholars in Intellectual Property law, technology and the Internet will gather on October 29 at Elon University School of Law to explore how the Internet impacts public access to information and how society balances the desire for increased access to information with the need for secrecy, privacy, and control.

ibiblio receives $50,000 donation

ibiblio, the public’s library and digital archive, has received $50,000 from the Beal Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation on behalf of Lulu.com. Lulu.com is an open publishing resource that helps authors distribute their work for profit and helps buyers find the content they need. The gift was made to support ibiblio’s continued growth as one of the Internet’s largest public libraries.

“Public libraries serve the needs of our society that can’t be served through the markets,” said Robert Young, founder and CEO of Lulu.com. “The value of ibiblio is that it stores content and cultural icons that people don’t know how to monetize. Without storing such content, they may disappear from human experience.”

ibiblio.org, which will celebrate its 18th birthday in October, was one of the first Web sites on the Internet. It historically has been a pioneer in a number of areas, including Internet radio. Today, ibiblio is home to one of the largest “collection of collections” on the Internet and hosts nearly 2,500 non-software related projects.

“All the giving to ibiblio helps us reach out further and touch more people,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We process anywhere from 12 to 16 million transactions per day on ibiblio.”

Jones said the $50,000 gift will be used to help ibiblio staff with upcoming projects, including a recent move in data centers and a shift to cloud computing.

“This gift comes at a very pivotal time for us since it will assist in our transition to a new, more affordable data center, which will ultimately save us thousands of dollars every year,” Jones said. “We are grateful to Lulu.com and to the Foundation for the generous support they’ve provided.”

 

About ibiblio:

ibiblio.org is one of the world’s first Web sites and largest “collections of collections” on the Internet. It is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio.org was formed as a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, and the Center for the Public Domain in September of 2000. At UNC at Chapel Hill, ibiblio is supported by the School of Information and Library Science, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Information Technology Services, the UNC at Chapel Hill Libraries, and the Office of the Executive Chancellor and Provost. ibiblio is housed in the School of Information and Library Science located in Manning Hall on the UNC at Chapel Hill campus.

 

Follow-up stories:

Lulu’s Young donates $50,000 to ibiblio by Alan Wolf in .biz blog at News & Observer

Young Helps ibiblio aim for the Clouds. by Alan Wolf in News & Observer (Technology Section print edition text).

Online Library Receives Major Grant by Aaron Keck of 1360 WCHL

NC’s Triangle Community Foundation awards $50K to ibiblio by Alan Maurer of TechJournal South.

The Social Network (preview)

Last night — Thanks to Columbia Pictures and the Carolina Union Activities Board — about 400 UNC folks, mostly undergraduates, got a preview screening of The Social Network. Afterwards, I moderated a Question and Answer session with the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, the lead actor Jesse Eisenberg and two part player Armie Hammer. The audience was enthusiastic and responsive to the movie and the panel.

Our second question was: “Is it okay if I come onto the stage and hug all of you?” Then she did. Okay not all of us on stage — all but me. Sorkin smiled as the hugger returned to her seat and said “Nothing like that happened at any other schools.” “We’re very friendly here and we love you,” I told him (off mike).

The movie tells the story of the founding of Facebook through the eyes (mostly) of ousted co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Mark Zuckerberg, the coder the idea man the one still holding a 51% stake in Facebook, is seen as a highly flawed and tragic character. Most tragic toward the very end.

I can’t say much more without spoilers, but the dialog, the pacing, the well-drawn characters are what you would expect from a writer like Sorkin and a cast like the one assembled and directed by David Fincher. I will say that Justin Timberlake does an outstanding acting job as Sean Parker.

Later I imagined a different and truer movie. Not one that was informed by Saverin who constantly made wrong business choices (I can say no more), but one that looked at the most interesting character in life and in the movie — Sean Parker. Many things could have sunk Facebook — in fact Parker mentions a few in this interview with Ashton Kutcher:

But Parker managed several things almost unheard of in tech startups: he secured $1/2 million angel investment while keeping Zuck at 51% ownership, he managed to keep adverts off then added only in relatively unobtrusive ways (putting privacy issues aside. timing here is everything), he took the site international, he gave Zuck confidence to drop out of Harvard and more.

This interview from Vanity Fair (October 2010) with Parker gives you a taste of the complex successful and iconoclastic character that could have been in the movie.

The movie was a great, smart and often funny drama and well worth seeing — beginning October 1 in most theatres.

See also: The New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg (September 20, 2010). No tragedy here.

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