A Day for Open Access

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC, Students for FreeCulture (SFC) and The Public Library of Science (PLoS) are putting together the First Open Access Day, October 14, 2008.

“Making full use of the Internet to share and reuse content without restriction is pushing scientific communication into the future." - Peter Jerram, PLoS CEO.

More here.

Max

Voter education in Florida

Florida held local/state elections yesterday. Poll workers collapsed from boredom as turnout was "lite." Every voter who was ok to vote had to practice the new system, which replaced the simple old touchscreen systems of yore. Before you were allowed to proceed to a voting booth, you had to take up an object called a pen, and fill in an oval, completely, under the watchful eyes of a poll worker. I don't recall ever having had to practice before exercising citizenly duties on the oldfangled Diebolds (now Premier) and other electronic devices.

(Image is not actual repro of supersecret FL technological breakthrough)

FL

New from Paris: A virus-eating virus

Virophage

County Fair (and balanced, red mascara snake)

County Fair - the newly minted Media Matters blog of mediacrit - just arrived is up and at 'em:

The Times says MSNBC "turns left" -- but somehow forgets to mention that former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough hosts a show on MSNBC. Or that the channel is home to Pat Buchanan. And the paper avoids any mention of sexist commentary from Chris Matthews and other MSNBC figures.

It's by Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser. NYT, CNN, Time, Fox and sundry other faerilyunbalanced asshatic elites will surely be glad.

geek dream / color-coded / laff trak

~ James Kobielus ~

In many ways, the database as we know it is disappearing into a virtualization fabric of its own. In this emerging paradigm, data will not physically reside anywhere in particular. Instead, it will be transparently persisted, in a growing range of physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications.


Database virtualization will enable real-time business intelligence through a policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching memory grid that permeates an infrastructure at all levels.



As this new approach takes hold, it will provide a convergence architecture for diverse approaches to real-time business intelligence, such as trickle-feed extract transform load (ETL), changed-data capture (CDC), event-stream processing and data federation.

Pull quote

Twitter et uber all us isn't about what the units that make it up think it's about, anymore than what the church is is defined by the congregation. #

Clouds and walls

Amazon's Cloud:

"We routinely send people monthly bills for 17 cents," Bezos said. "If you store a gigabyte of data for a month, we'll send you a bill for 15 cents."*

But you'll pay JSTOR or Projectile(vomit) MUSE $10, $15, or more for an article for dated research on some rarified academic subject...

Gavin Baker of SPARC has a podcast on changing the scholarly publishing market:

"The DOAJ is growing at a remarkable rate" - over 3,300 journals with total open access. See the DOAR.

*The 2008 annual subscription price for the journal Brain Research is $21,744.

Scientific Exactitude of Hurricane Models

We know one thing for pretty sure: where Fay has been.

Tracking Fay thru TwitScoop

Two hours ago I thought we were safe but now...

NewsPorn

The US media has apparently learned nothing from the hot anal action it provided leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in view of its Pre-K-level coverage of the conflict in Georgia/Ossetia.






A couple of salubrious correctives:

CounterSpin - Interview with Helen Cobban. (See also this earlier bit).

Informant here, here, here, here, and passim.

Minor blemish on an otherwise sterling record of public service

The brilliant folk whose MBA-smarts eviscerated the economy



- are foreclosing on servicemen on active duty.

Freedom from Information will not be Televised

The equipment and integrated security systems used to detain Olympic protesters will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this surveillance boom are US hedge funds and corporations, including Cisco, General Electric and Google. DN

segue sociale

thanks Joe

Cool 2008: A farthing for your thoughts

The Gartner "2008 Cool Vendor in the High Performance Workplace" is:

SEATTLE, Aug 13, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Visible Technologies, a leading provider of social media monitoring and engagement solutions, today announced it now analyzes more than 100 million social media conversations -- from blogs, wikis, forums, Twitter, social networks and other online hubs -- to help brands engage with consumers online, enabling the company to quadruple its sales in 2008.

They gain actionable intelligence for "brands":

Visible Technologies captures and analyzes the entire conversation thread, including comments, where 70 percent of social media conversations occur. By allowing customers to listen to, learn about and engage with customers online, Visible Technologies has seen sales rise 300 percent this year, compared with the second half of 2007.

They are "analyzing":

Visible Technologies analyzes an average of 425,000 unique pieces of social media content per day on behalf of its clients.

For what clients?


Relevance inside Chatter:

With a broad view of the online landscape, Visible Technologies enables brands to focus on relevant content within the chatter and gain actionable intelligence in order to interact effectively with consumers. Industry validation continues to provide proof of the critical nature of accurate social media-tracking.

Quotes

"Companies are increasingly trying to determine how to embrace social media strategically and tactically. Clients who want to get actionable intelligence from the full thread of conversations choose TruCast for its comprehensive analysis of both the original content and ensuing comments. Our extensive data and work with leading brands show clients how and where to engage when they want to address customer-service issues, gain insight for media buying or drive community activation in a campaign. We are pleased with the momentum we've built as brands continue to invest in this channel for engaging with their customers." - Adam Selig, CEO of Visible Technologies. link

“Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation management system. Online reputation is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable...”- Clive Thompson $

Hello?

Does anybody making much of Friendfeed, Seesmic, Qik, Pownce, twhirl, Phrazit, fire eagle, Dopplr, etc., make anything of this?

Are our innocent joies de Tweet enabling market impetus for deep, always-on, persistent and panoptic commodification, archiving and monetization of what used to be considered our interiority -- motions of the soul?

Take the survey - they want to help

Curiously tantalizing text found next to an article I am not currently authorized to access:

Denied access to an article in JSTOR?

We want to help!

Please take this 5 minute survey to help us understand you and your needs. We would like to provide you with access to articles in the future.

Most hopeful sign yet. Take the survey. Tell them.

whew

Got knocked offline by weather here. Glad to get back (still limping along) in time to not miss this in-depth report courtesy of

Q. Are the characters in “Tropic Thunder” deliberate exaggerations, or do you know people in the industry who are really that fatuous, that self-important, that vulgar?

Mimicries of Arrested Development

The World is a looong film about dysfunctional development in its characters as well as in their place and moment in time. Stories of arrested development tend to be somewhat plotless, adrift, tending to the lyrical, as opposed to the dramatic, mode. Slow, strangely ominous in the implications of the Beijing we see, and trivial in its use of cell phones, animations, and the replica of "the world," found in Beijing. "Simultaneously" brooding and reductive, unable to begin and already past any present dignity, a curious use of a moving picture to represent immobility, caricature.


Stranger, more arrested, more deserving of absurdism: McCain's theory of invading USian neighborhoods.