Ohio Employee Ownership Center - Ohio Employee Ownership Center

The latest in looking back from the world of books.

First Murdoch and his business models

And Tim Spalding ponders the future of libraries.

This short piece didn't go at all where I expected it to. In fact, its closing point is well-taken:

...Throw in Avatar, the Team Coco late-night wars, the recent return of American Idol—“Pants on the Ground”!—and the upcoming Super Bowl, and it’s actually been a pretty good stretch for mass culture.

Ohio Employee Ownership Center - Ohio Employee Ownership Center

In software engineering, an entity-relationship model (ERM) is an abstract and conceptual representation of data.

The genotype is the genetic constitution of a cell, an organism, or an individual (i.e. the specific allele makeup of the individual) usually with reference to a specific character under consideration.

Translation is the first stage of protein biosynthesis (part of the overall process of gene expression).

Translation is the first stage of protein biosynthesis (part of the overall process of gene expression).

Apparently, moving the WH email to Microsoft Exchange caused them no end of trouble. How astonishing:

Brook Colongelo, the chief information officer for the Executive Office of the President's (EOP's) Office of Administration, said the EOP has used EMC Corp.’s EmailXtender as its e-mail storage system for its unclassified network since Obama took office. Colangelo said in the letter that the system:

* Is a secure, single, centrally managed e-mail archive.
* Automatically captures messages, including those sent or received via BlackBerry mobile handsets in near real time,

POSS == Public Open Source Services
... or User Powered Self-sustaining Cloud-based Services of Open Source Software
 
Infrastructure. Tools. Code that runs as a service over the web that is useful.

The requirements for an application profile to be legitimately termed a Dublin Core Application Profile are defined within the Singapore Framework. In brief, a DCAP is a “packet of documentation” which includes the following elements:

* Functional requirements (mandatory)
* Domain model (mandatory)
* Description Set Profile (DSP) (mandatory)
* Usage guidelines (optional)
* Encoding syntax guidelines (optional)

From the always interesting Warren Ellis:

We’re in the depths of the consumer-society democratisation of the relevant technologies. It is really not hard to be a broadcaster now.

From World Changing:

This article from the L.A. Times covers an interesting proposition: Hantz Farms is buying up abandoned city properties in Detroit, with plans to convert them to large-scale commercial agriculture use.

Manuel Castells gets behind the logic, the inspiration, the history, the progress and the future of Open Source. He argues that Open Source is not anti-capitalist but a-capitalist, meaning that it is compatible with different social logics and values. It is based on a form of social organization that has profound political implications and may affect the way we think about the need to preserve capitalist institutions and hierarchies of production.

People tend to scan pages in F shaped pattern

This is our part of proposal, Steve's framework is here:

http://localfoodsystems.org/framework-usda-scri-grant-proposal

Some interesting criticism of "transition towns" movement from worldchanging:

3) The Dark Side of Transition Thinking

Cascio has a real knack for this sort of thing, and I'm increasingly becoming a fan whenever he does it. A hypothetical, but an interesting one:

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail?

"The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I've watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can't help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web?"

"It's about connecting small and midsize farms in southeast Michigan with a growing demand and strong need for healthy, fresh, locally grown food in urban areas," said Oran Hesterman, president of the Fair Food Network, which has offices in Detroit and Ann Arbor.

1. Don’t go to the government unless you want the most insanely inefficient and time-consuming result possible.

2. Tell everyone as soon as possible.

3. Distribute 3D printers and open source survival pod designs.

4. Kill the monetary system ASAP.

---

If this dude can water his whole village with a library book and some shit that was laying around in the yard, you can make a survival pod. Trust me.

http://twitter.com/PaulBHartzog/statuses/6313307049

http://ping.fm/YluKo - Rushkoff and Hartzog in 2004 on a trajectory finally realized by http://squareup.com/

This is a growing selection of useful classes created for mostly computational design projects, but which might be helpful for others too.

A decent sketch of the principle legal issues faced by institutions considering cloud computing in their daily business. While these don't necessarily rule out the use of open-source software, for example, they do impose serious constraints on other options they might consider.

A post related to Bruce Schneier's post offering a 'taxonomy of social networking data.'

Schneier's list :

1. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number.

2. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

"...Try not to pay attention to the eye-crossing, jaw-dropping irony of the argument I make that the very nature of expertise and credibility have changed, all the while acting as if I were an expert on the issue of expertise.

This is a growing selection of useful classes created for mostly computational design projects, but which might be helpful for others too.

A brilliant, illustrated discussion about the importance of pretending and how immersive videogames are really not very good for encouraging and fostering it. Along the way Davies points out the perils of being too obvious and makes a case for 'barely games.' He also offers the first step in what could be made a constructive critique of augmented reality.

Lots of potential for interesting digressions here. The distinction between 'bubble building' and 'world building', etc.

The Times Labs blog takes a hard look at the data on music sales and live performances and concludes that while the labels' profits might be falling, artists are taking in more money, thanks to the booming growth of live shows. The Times says that they'd like more granular data about who's making all the money from concerts -- is there a category of act that's a real winner here? -- but the trend seems clear. The 21st century music scene is the best world ever for some musicians and music-industry businesses, and the worst for others.

This is a growing selection of useful classes created for mostly computational design projects, but which might be helpful for others too.

 
ServerName domain.com
 
DocumentRoot /home/path/to/railsapp/public
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
RailsEnv development
 

This is a growing selection of useful classes created for mostly computational design projects, but which might be helpful for others too.

This is a growing selection of useful classes created for mostly computational design projects, but which might be helpful for others too.

The following is an attempt to acquaint the reader with a fractal object called the Sierpinski gasket. The gasket was originally described in two dimensions but represents a family of objects in other dimensions. This family of objects will be discussed in dimensions 1, 2, 3, and an attempt will be made to visualise it in the 4th dimension.

The easiest way to understand how extensions work in Wave is to build a Wave robot. Robots are applications that interact with a Wave through the Wave protocol (HTTP interface). Currently, we only support robots hosted with Google App Engine. In the future, we will support any client architecture that implements the Wave protocol.

In computer science, the Boolean or logical data type is a primitive data type having one of two values: true or false, intended to represent the truth values of logic and Boolean algebra.

In programming languages that have a built-in Boolean data type, such as Pascal and Java, the comparison operators such as '>' and '≠' are usually defined to return a Boolean value. Also, conditional and iterative commands may be defined to test Boolean-valued expressions.

Received in an email from Michel

Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

My god, Paul, what fools we were to see a bright new day for storytelling in the new century.

Fortunately, here's someone to set us right, not only about the death of story but also the incredible feat that in a mere forty years the net has managed to decimate global, centuries-old traditions of storytelling.

A cry from the wilderness (or from Twitter anyway):

"either there is no API or there is one API for everything. different APIs = fail. also, there is no metadata, it's all data. #apiworkshop"

[apiworkshop = http://niche-canada.org/node/8024 = "On 16-17 October, the NiCHE Digital Infrastructure will be hosting a SSHRC-funded workshop on Application Programming Interfaces for the Digital Humanities." ]