Accept no substitutes

Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 7 of 38)

Jane G (and others at M$ conf) say Goodbye Keywords

Metadata Maven Jane Greenberg reports from Seattle:

greetings and hello from Seattle (here at MS faculty summit)

among the a.m. highlights is “A Farewell to Keywords: The reigning obsession with search technology has elicited new ways of using images to track down information on the Web” by Gary Stix in the July 2006 Scientific American. [not freely available despite being listed as a “Free preview.” the preview is the first two brief paragraphs- pj]

“A picture may be worth a kilo of words, but typing into Google Image the single word “rosebud” returns about 60,000 pictures. [actually 58,500 at Google; MSN Search only gives you 20,224– pj]

The power of an individual keyword is both good and bad. It can find a virtual stack of Web pages. But it is unable to differentiate between the flower in bloom and legendary film director Orson Welles’s scowl. Ideally, an Internet user should be able to use the likeness of a rose to tell a search engine to find others like it….”

see:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000F16A0-10E3-1493-906183414B7F0162
[stuck behind a paywall – pj]

sorry, i don’t have a blog, or i would have put this message there instead. [No problem, Jane. I blogged it here for you. – pj]

Long Tail Party in NYC and JJB

I couldn’t get up to NYC for the great book party for Chris Anderson‘s Long Tail so’s JJB took my invite and represented ibiblio by doing some serious partying. CNet has the story in which JJB gets the last words:

The crowd was an enthusiastic one. “It’s beautiful,” said John Bachir, an engineer for the online information archive Ibiblio. “It’s dangerous to say that it’s the ideal of Marx, but it is the ideal of Marx. [sic] In a controlled way.”

After saying that, Bachir glanced at this reporter’s notebook and added, “Make sure you mention that I’m not a Marxist, okay?”

Tucker the DJ

Tucker guest DJed on WCOM yesterday and will do his own show as a substitute DJ next Sunday from 2 pm til 4. The show is called “Dance Jam (dance .music from around the world).” The world has mostly been India and the Carribean with some English and a little French music. If you have suggestions, send them on or call in while Tucker is on the air next Sunday.

Jacques Menache at Panzanella

One of the best artist’s bios I’ve read comes from Jacques Menache in this announcement of his show (now up) and reception (tonight) at Panzanella in Carrboro.

ART: Currently at Panzanella:
Jacques Menache-A Retrospective: 1972 – present
Acrylic Paintings and Multi-media Artworks
June 19 through August 20
Artist Reception: Monday, July 10th, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Most pieces are for sale; some are on loan from private collections.

Jacques Menache was born in Paris, France in 1948. He moved to Mexico City in 1955 with his family and attended the University of Mexico’s Academia San Carlos where he studied under Siqueiros and other Mexican muralists. In Mexico, he met Amy Abernethy, a native Chapel Hillian, and moved here in 1969. Jacques first attended NC Central University, then UNC, where he earned a Masters in Fine Arts, graduating in 1973.

In search of a job, Jacques founded the ArtsCenter in Carrboro in 1974. During his 15 years at the ArtsCenter he caused havoc in the community and resigned in the midst of controversy. He became an electrician to make a living outside the arts field.

Looking for more trouble, in September 1999 Jacques Menache opened a Mexican restaurant/Latin-American Cultural Center. He had his first artist retrospective there among the enchiladas, tacos, and salsas. The restaurant closed in September 2002 after three years of drunken fights and excellent dance parties.

In search of a different type of trouble, Jacques and Ruffin Slater (legendary Weaver Street Market General Manager) founded WCOM, a low power, all volunteer community radio station. Who knows where that might lead?

With very little time to keep out of trouble, Jacques manages to create three or four new pieces of art each year. His favorite format is large abstract paintings with complex weaving of lines, often creating moiré patterns and deep layers. On the more playful side Menache likes to create small pieces with found objects, always searching for a social comment.

For inquiries on commissions, sales, or electrical work call: 919 306 2749

Squirrels are proof that God is not entirely good

They pulled all the perches out of my old Droll Yankee cylinder feeder. I’ve managed to keep one in after all these years.
They ripped the “squirrel proof” feeder from its hanger. It had worked pretty well. It’s a small cylinder enclosed in a spherical cage. But they threw it to the ground and ripped the lid off of it.
Then when I left for vacation and didn’t fill the feeders, they ripped a hole in the screen of my porch. They came in and tossed seed all over.
So I went down to Wild Birds Unlimited on MLK Blvd. WBU is run by a long lost friend Carl Delamar. When I was in college, I shared a house on Park Ave in Raleigh with Carl. Later he worked at UNC for a while. Now he is a happy bird accessory peddler — a very nice life.
Carl has a nice little selection of squirrel bedeviling feeders, baffles, hangers and the like. I was originally hot for a battery powered Yankee Flipper or a Yankee Whipper. Each of these spins the squirrels off the feeder with a nice degree of force (for the bird lover not so nice for the squirrel) and into space. The Yankee Tipper which also looks like trouble for squirrels has a seed pan/perch that tips over with the weight of a squirrel — no batteries required.
We ended up buying Wild Birds Unlimited’s own Eliminator. It doesn’t send the squirrel to meet his maker, but it does close down when a squirrel grabs the perches.
It’s up now and full of seed and waiting to feed bird and to cut off all squirrels.

Mr Sugar on State of Things (WUNC)

The ever active Anton Zuiker aka Mister Sugar writes:

I’ve posted the details of tomorrow’s State of Things show on WUNC. Listen in on 91.5 FM at noon to hear a discussion about diaries, journals and blogging. I’ll be on in the third part of the show to explain how blogging is similar to and different from written diaries.

It’s a call-in show so call in with smart questions.

You can listen on the net, thanks to ibiblio, at WUNC.org and even pick up the show as a podcast or from the archives (also on ibiblio), but you can only call in if you listen whilst it’s happenin’.

AsheCivility

Car – Saturn place here cleaned out the carbon left over from before the EGR (exhaust gas recirculation) valve was replaced. You would think that the replacers would have done that. It works great now.

Politics – nice chats this morning with local Council people. Mostly by Sally. While David McConville, Tucker and I talked about computer visualization and electronic story telling and the like.

Food – Last night Zambra‘s wonderful tapas. Breakfast – City bakery. Lunch – Indian buffet at Mela’s with black and white Bollywood playing soundlessly on a large plasma screen.

Break from the heat – An Inconvenient Truth. David has put together a panel of experts to talk about the movie and solutions for next weekend. Lots of people were picking up his flyer about the panel today at the Fine Arts Theatre.

Lyceum in Reference Services Review

Fred and Jeff, Stutzman and Pomerantz, have a new article “Collaborative reference work in the blogosphere.” Reference Services Review 34, No. 2 (2006): 200-212.

Abstract: Purpose This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform forproviding reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose.

Design/methodology/approach The following topics are explored: the evolution of libraries’ uses of blogs, the advantages of conducting the reference transaction as a collaborative effort, and the use of blogs as an environment that fosters collaboration. The argument is made that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services

Findings It is argued that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services. Lyceum, an open source blogosphere application, is discussed as an environment for blog-based reference service.

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