Science Library Pad

reports from 2007 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences

The National Post is running a series of reports from the 75th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.  There doesn't seem to be a central page listing all of the articles, but here are some of them.

Academics feed on our guilty pleasures

Our week-long 'Oh, the Humanities' series explores some of the most interesting research of academics...

• Is your family vacation fun?
• Academics debate role of 'play' in education
• She answers to Miss and looks pretty in pink
• Hairdressers touted as witnesses to femininity
• Harry Potter and the ivory tower
• Between pop and esoterica

Previously:
November 22, 2005  Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Congress 2006 - CFPs

Air Canada carbon offset

I am amazed at how quickly offsets have taken off.

Front page of the Globe today was Passengers face the cash, credit or carbon tax question

Air Canada passengers can now ease their guilt over global warming by buying carbon offsets, meaning a clear conscience for less than $20 on a return fare on popular routes.

On busy transatlantic routes such as Toronto-London, it will cost $19.20 to offset a passenger's share of a plane's carbon emissions. Domestically, a Vancouver-Montreal return flight will mean an extra $12.80 tacked on the ticket price.

Zerofootprint is their offset provider.

http://www.aircanada.com/en/travelinfo/traveller/zfp.html

Previously:
March 20, 2007  Globe on Canadian offset services

Linnaeus and his passion for order, in National Geographic

This month's National Geographic has an article A Passion for Order, by David Quammen (author of the excellent The Song of the Dodo).  The article details the life of Linnaeus and how he came to create his classification system.  Linnaeus was born 300 years ago, and is therefore a bit in the news this year.  Don't miss the beautiful photo gallery that accompanies the online article.

It seems odd that classification and categorization, which most of us outside of libraries had never thought much about, is all the rage this year as a topic for books, articles, working groups and more.

publicationslist.org

Seems to me that this is a niche within a niche, but it is nevertheless a real need.

PublicationsList.org exists to let researchers and research organizations maintain a reliable web-based record of their academic output without any fuss.

They will also provide (for a fee) space for hosting self-archived papers (although I would imagine you have to check your publisher rights, usually it says something like "on your work web site or in your institution's repository").

They do have a number of options for embedding the generated list in your own website / blog etc., which is very nice to see.

via HubLog

cyberinfrastructure for the humanities

In Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond, Cathy Davidson discusses many aspects of how cyberinfrastructure can and is transforming teaching and research

That brings me to another point, which may appear tangential but which is at the heart of the matter. New ways of thinking need support. If, at present, academic rewards go to the author of a monograph, especially one that posits a different analytical or interpretive hypothesis, for Human Sciences 2.0 we need to think of ways to reward teams of scholars working cross-culturally on collaborative projects. Collaborative work should count, and here humanists can use models that scientists have developed for determining credit in co-authored projects with multiple investigators.

...

We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.

CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 2, May 2007.

As a side note, the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) blog relaunched on May 25, 2007.

Previously:
March 25, 2005  Cyberinfrastructure Tech Watch Blog operational

GeoCommons goes live

You can upload KMZ files, describe data elements, and then create maps.

You cannot, as far as I can tell, directly use external data sources (e.g. GeoRSS).

http://www.geocommons.com/

Previously:
December 13, 2006  FortiusOne open geodata mapping

while individuals scrimp, the world burns and chops

Feeling virtuous about the carbon offsets you've purchased for your transatlantic flight?

In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change. So why are global leaders turning a blind eye to this crisis?

The Independent - Deforestation: The hidden cause of global warming - May 14, 2007

Switched to clean-burning natural gas?  Too bad oil fields around the world simply burn "useless" natural gas directly into the sky.

150 billion cubic metres of gas is burnt off or `flared’ every year - before it even leaves the gas fields.

That’s $20 billion worth - enough to supply the whole of the United States for three months. Flaring sends 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – more than cancelling out the proposed annual reductions under Kyoto.

TVE - Billion Dollar Bonfire

BBC - Billion Dollar Bonfire

The World Bank, not exactly a historical friend of the environment, does at least perhaps recognize wasted wealth when it sees it.  The have a programme called Global Gas Flaring Reduction (GGFR).

http://www.worldbank.org/ggfr

meta: in which I make a claim

Just a posting to try yet again to claim the 2nd URL that Technorati sees for my blog

Technorati Profile

In other news, Technorati now presents a single search box, to search for tags specifically you'll have to go to advanced search.

UPDATE: It's working for both TypePad blog URLs now.  An interesting reminder about basing any decisions on a particular Technorati ranking result.

Science Library Pad      

Rank: 74,734 (84 links from 63 sites)

• URL: http://scilib.typepad.com/science_librar...

Science Library Pad

Rank: 56,727 (174 links from 82 sites)

• URL: http://scilib.typepad.com

Previously:
July 6, 2006  Technorati rank, updating, and multiple blog URLs

Assault on Reason: a review

A disappointing book.  Starts out strongly with quite an erudite examination of American history, but then descends into a long, long list of factual yet useless critiques of the policies and actions of the 2000-2008 US federal executive branch, and concludes with a call for Internet Net Neutrality.

Network neutrality has many merits, but I don't think singlehandedly saving the United States of America from unreason is one of them.

I'm afraid I am quite the literalist.  I expect a book to be about the topic stated in its title.  For example, I expected Laura Penny's Your call is important to us : the truth about bullshit to be about businesses and the false language they use.  The phrase "to serve you better," for example, deserves an entire chapter, since it almost always translates into "we are inconveniencing you, our bothersome customers, in order to make more money for our shareholders".  But instead, Penny's book is a long, long rant about how the B-C administration sucks, and the American right sucks, and big corporations suck.  Which, as I've said, even when true, is not illuminating.  A much better book is Death Sentences, which actually is about the assault upon our capacity to reason with language that is "business speak".

I therefore expected Gore's book to be about the systematic undermining of reasoned thinking in the United States, and its deliberate replacement with appeals to emotion and faith.  Similar books in this genre are Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, Schneier's Beyond Fear, or Glassner's The Culture of Fear.

And indeed, Gore's first chapter, "The Politics of Fear," (available free online from ABC News) explores this terrain quite well.  But as he progresses through the next seven chapters, I'm afraid Mr. Gore's passions gradually over-ride his reasoned discourse, so that we go from the misuse of religion (and the current executive and his party), through the misuse of wealth (and the executive), to chapters that, well, are all anti-current-administration, all the time.

In Al Franken's book Lies and the lying liars who tell them, he had two chapters amusingly titled "Ann Coulter: Nutcase" and "You Know Who I Don't Like? Ann Coulter".  Gore's book has rather more reasonable-sounding chapters, but in the middle section, they could be fairly accurately retitled "Worst. President. Ever.", "You Know Who I Don't Like? President #43" and so on.

This is unfortunate for two reasons.  One is that this meaty diatribe in the midst of a book about reason is going to be the main section that many partisans seize upon.  The second, and more important, as I stated in my opening paragraph, is that it is factual yet irrelevant.  The entire section could have been replaced with a reference saying "See factually documented issues with current executive in (selected list of books, articles, and websites)" with Gore's formidable intellectual energies then going into analysis.

Because reason is not about listing facts, it is about analyzing them to come to useful conclusions.  Yes, all these things happened.  The war.  The Kyoto situation.  But WHY.  Why aren't the American people reacting?  Why aren't the American people informed?  Why do they fear the wrong things and draw the wrong conclusions?  Why are the people in power making certain choices?  Unless we can understand why people are doing things, we can't start to develop a strategy to address the situation.  This book needs to be less case for impeachment, more What's the Matter with Kansas? writ large.

And I find it odd that Gore does not take a global view.  This is a man who as I've said is very intelligent, with a particularly incisive understanding of how to separate local, regional, and international concerns (demonstrated by his environmental analyses in Earth in the Balance).  Yet not once does he step outside America to ask why, if other Western nations also have television and corporate power, two of the key threats to reasoned discourse he identifies, yet those other nations still have populations that participate in their political processes and that demonstrate a reasonable understanding of science and current affairs.

I'm also a concerned that, rather than being a reasoned argument starting with facts and using analysis to draw conclusions, Gore has decided on his conclusions in the same way that he accuses his opponents of doing, and then chosen his examples to support his conclusions.

Fundamentally, his conclusion is that active two-way Internet participation will re-invigorate American democracy.  I will have lots more to say about that, but to start with, in order to draw this conclusion, he then has to construct two eras: the print era, in which there was reasoned bidirectional discourse, and the radio/television era, in which there is not.  In the print era, he argues, barriers to entry were low, so that differing ideas could circulate and be debated.  I will state clearly I am no expert, but I don't believe such a golden era existed.  There was, to be sure, a time of vigorous pamphleteering, but surely never more than a tiny percentage of the population was ever involved in actually writing and circulating pamphlets.  Surely the more defining characteristic of that time period was that people who engaged in democratic discourse were often deeply educated (whether formally or self-taught) in the world's classics of literature and thought, and expected to engage in the Enlightenment ideal of active, informed debate.  They knew much, they were richly adept with the English language, and they both cared and acted.

Certainly it's true that television is a one-way visually-driven reactive medium, versus the imaginative, reflective medium of print.  But as I said above, since pretty much everyone in the  Western world has a television, there has to be more to the change in American discourse than just a change in communications technology.

What exactly, I can't say, since it's a topic that needs someone to study deeply and write a book about, a book that sadly this is not.

After his long listing of the current administration's sins, Gore devotes just a single chapter, chapter 9, to his proposed solutions.  Outrageously, he discounts somewhat the value of education in addressing the failures of reason

Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient.

Hmm.  If one may venture, as Ghandi Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western civilization, that "it would be a good idea", similarly perhaps before dismissing the possibilities of American education, it would be a good idea to, well, actually have some.  Some education that at least leaves students upon graduation clearly understanding how America's constitutional democracy works (which Gore demonstrates with various poll statistics that they currently don't) and also able to read and write well enough to understand the power and limitations of language and, as a bonus, maybe know some science and basic techniques of logical reasoning as well?

Alas, Gore's prescription for debate amongst an informed citizenry consists instead of:
- broadband Internet ideally able to stream television-quality video continuously
- advocacy web sites
- blogs
- wikis and particularly Wikipedia
- "Web 2.0 social networks"
- most important of all, Network Neutrality

Err, yeah, good luck with that.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Internet has a role to play in reasoned discourse.
A small role.  A useful tool for pointing attention to falsehoods and referencing inconvenient truths.
But electronic communications have a fatal allure of virtual action.

Concerned about the environment?
No need to go outside and walk in the woods,
or clean up a polluted lot in your neighbourhood,
or knock on your representative's door and explain the urgency of your position.

No, instead you can just fire off an email, write a blog posting, and then turn up the air conditioning and the lights and stretch out on the couch and read a good book.

You want to make things happen?

GO OUTSIDE, DO SOMETHING AND TALK TO PEOPLE IN PERSON

the Borgbook: an integrated development platform

It was not obvious to me how to easily get Facebook status updates into Twitter, and like most computer scientists, I found duplicating status entries in two places unbearably inelegant.

But if Twitter won't let Facebook in, Facebook is now quite happy to do the reverse

http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/

This is just fine with me.  Bring on the integration.  I don't need 4,000 different social networking platforms.
Resistance is futile.  (See LibrarianInBlack: Sarah's social network presences, and the dilution thereof.)

It was at this point that I realized that the Borg are an integration-based open civilization development platform.

I do have to say, while I don't need thousands of social networks, I do need three: work, friends and family.  Facebook unfortunately won't let me keep them separate.  Don't they know about worlds colliding?

Amaznode related book visualization

Amaznode uses Flash and the Amazon API to extract and visualize related books for a search.

See e.g.

paris

and

gps

Note: it will continue pulling in results for a while (about a minute).

Via BlogSchmog.

Quebec budget released on USB keys

Quebec Finance Minister Monique Jérôme-Forget
displays an example of a USB key that contains
a copy of the provincial budget.
(Jacques Boissinot/Canadian Press)

Image from High stakes riding on Quebec budget - CBC News - May 23-24, 2007

The keys cost $8.50 each, as opposed to the $25 cost of a paper budget.

"You save a lot of trees, you save a lot of paper and it is environmentally friendly," she said.

Provincial budget tabled today - The Montreal Gazette - May 24, 2007

future of tech and libraries

The Shifted Librarian has lots of blogging from the "Future of Technology and Libraries" meeting.  You can start at

"The Future of Technology and Libraries" Meeting - Thursday May 17, 2007

and read forward.

IASSIST and open data

Reminder: there are notes from the recent IASSIST conference "Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data", as well as other thoughts on that topic, in the IASSIST blog

http://iassistblog.org/

via Open Access News

Previously:
November 14, 2006  IASSIST open data blog and conference

not too much response, too little

Most of my dear readers will have either noticed or written about the lack of comments on scientific articles, for instance at the BMC journals and most notably at PLoS ONE, which was designed for interaction of author and reader.
At this point, there’s not too much to add to the conclusions: It’s takes to much time to comment on a scientific article properly, there’s no incentive (can’t put it in your CV) or honor to be gained (no one asked me to review this) and they are not written to be discussed (open/pragmatic) but supposed to discuss the results thoroughly themselves. However, despite all the comments on the matter, trying to study the phenomenon on the web is difficult due to the lack of strong keywords: Searching for “comments on publications” does not take you to very informative resources.

Notes from the biomass: Warnock’s dilemma

In the online world, we often face one of two opposite commenting challenges.  Sadly, more common is the above, where one's insights simply don't generate any response.  I have often heard people say in response to the common question "how do we manage wiki edits and blog comments" that it's a problem one should be glad to have (other than spam) as more often wikis and blogs stand empty, not overflowing.

Above dilemma via Peer-to-Peer blog.

On the other side is How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community.

We're still at the stage where either one is an art - writing posts that will engender comments, as well as managing comments so that they don't turn into flamewars.

Everything is Miscellaneous: a review

Everything is Miscellaneous could be, at a very crude level, described as "Folksonomy explained for librarians".

This is to me the core of the first 100 pages, and a topic of substantial value.  Although I don't think Weinberger ever states this explicitly, our schooling and our concepts of the world help to shape our understanding of what is possible.  I am not a librarian, but I have to assume, at least until recently, that library school is a great deal about the physicality of books, their need to be classified so that they can be shelved in their one-and-only-one location.  The lessons one learns from that kind of thinking, the implicit understanding of "information" and how it can be used, can lead one to have a set of assumptions that are so fundamental they are probably almost invisible, difficult to expose to self-examination.

Weinberger explores the reasons for the classification systems used by libraries, helping to make explicit the choices and trade-offs involved.  Then he leads one into the possibilities opened up by the unconstrained world of electronic information.

After this strong start, I found the book drifted a bit, touching on, well, various miscellaneous topics.  There is a useful section on the importance of standardized, universal, unique identifiers, a fair bit of The Usual Discussion of The Usual Suspects (WikipediaFlickrDelicious etc.), a brief pondering of the popular topic "will we filter ourselves into a reflective bubble of self-reinforcing beliefs",  then quite a bit of philosophizing about the nature of knowledge.

The last element left me a bit wary, as it edges into relativism, knowledge as an individual construct.  Yes, it is true that there are many areas where things are "fuzzy".  What is this book about?  Well, it's to some extent "about" whatever the percentages in the tag clouds associated with it say

It's "information organization internet folksonomy tagging classification".  But it is nevertheless a book, a physical object, published in 2007 and located in my house.  I think there is a lot of danger in overstating the flexible nature of understanding; nature itself is not so understanding.  All the belief in the world will not get a rocket into space, only a very precise agreement of your design with the real physical constraints of the universe will do so.

There was a good, albeit brief section where he discusses the challenges of the Semantic Web, I would summarize his conclusions as "too big and ambitious to ever work, but whatever they come up with will be a useful addition to the web of knowledge".

The book has a few minor errors when it touches on technology, for example it says you can enter a book into LibraryThing by uploading a photo of the barcode, perhaps this is some confusion with Delicious Library or with the operation of the CueCat scanners.  It also says you can look up libraries at LibraryLookup dot com, the actual URL for Jon Udell's tool is http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/LibraryLookup/

Librarians, library bloggers, and cataloging concepts are all well-represented here, I learned some interesting things about Dewey (he was obsessed with the Metric system, and had originally specified metric dimensions for the ubiquitous "3x5" card). 

If you're already familiar with the concept of folksonomy, or quite willing to accept that a book might be reached through many different paths of full-text search, blog entries, tags and catalogue metadata, this book may not add a lot for you.  But I know that there are still those out there who don't quite get it, rejecting full-text search and yearning for some nostalgic yesteryear of controlled OPAC Glory Days.  So if you're a librarian who is open to, but doesn't quite get this whole folksonomy thing, or if you're a cataloger who thinks full-text search is the devil's work, this would be a good book for you.

The one area I would have liked to have seen addressed - if only in the form of a pointer to other references, is an explanation of the fundamentals of how web pages and web servers work.  This fundament is what all the other linkages are built upon, and a lack of understanding of this technology leads, in my experience, to many fundamental misconceptions about link resolvers and the web in general.

I find myself wishing I could give two ratings on LibraryThing, with different semantic context.  For people who already know about folksonomy, or who have read similar books, I would say three stars.  For librarians, catalogers, businesspeople and others who want to understand how the digital world of unlimited categories and tags differs from the physical world of one object, one location, I would say four stars.

For me, I am waiting for the next generation of tools that exploit even more information about and within books.  As an example, I'm guessing that very few tools would be able to tell you that both in this book

It was Jean-Baptise Lamarck--unjustly remembered primarily for being wrong about how giraffes got long necks--who not only sorted out Linnaeus's worms but changed the basic shape of Linnaeus's tree.  As Gould recounts the story, Lamarck loved invertebrates so much that when he was almost fifty, he was appointed professor of insects and worms at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

and in Paris to the Moon

The entrance to the paleontology museum at the Jardin des Plantes is graced by a statue of Lamarck, with the engraving "The Father of Evolution," in giant letters, on its pedestal.  Darwin, on the other hand, is nowhere in sight.

two books which could not have more different topics, we yet converge on a location in Paris, a location where I happened to be just weeks ago.  When we start to develop tools that help us make these kinds of unexpected connections, I will know that we are finally starting to mobilize the information in the containers our libraries have so carefully catalogued.

UPDATE 2007-05-27: There is a good video of Weinberger presenting about his book at Google.  Via Thingology.  ENDUPDATE

Misc: I read this book because it was mentioned in the LibraryThing blog.  The dedication of this book is "To the librarians".  There is a review in the ALA Techsource blog.  The book has a blog at http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

ISBN-13: 978-0805080438

link resolver issues studied by UKSG

The UK Serials Group report Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain (May 21, 2007) covers the components of the OpenURL resolving equation - OpenURLs, resolvers, Knowledge Bases, and a critical component: the data provided by publishers.

In a perfect world, automated and entirely correct data would flow from publishers directly into our resolver knowledge bases.  It is not a perfect world.

The report discusses some of the major issues and proposes some solutions as well as areas for further research.

One of the main things I get from it is that everyone involved needs to understand how resolvers work, and how correct data benefits everyone in the "serials supply chain," from publisher to end user.

via LiveSerials blog
with more info in LiveSerials blog posting Framework for Improving Link Resolver Systems

PM Harper announces Canadian Science and Technology Strategy

“Our strategy will seek to expand government and business partnerships so new investments can move quickly out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. We will focus our efforts on Canada's inherent strengths and Canadians' primary interests, including preserving the environment, improving public health, developing natural resources and producing new information and communications technologies.”

The money that will pay to keep Canada's science and technology competitive was announced in the March federal budget. It amounts to $9.2-billion in this fiscal year — $1.9-billion of that is new and the rest was carried over from previous years.

PM puts spotlight on funds for science - Globe and Mail - May 17, 2007

He was speaking at the Perimeter Institute, you can view of video of the announcement (if you want to skip the intro and get right to the Prime Minister, he starts at 4 minutes in).

The strategy is available from Industry Canada:

Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada's Advantage

- Full text (HTML, 110 pages)

- Summary (HTML, 14 pages)

A more streamlined external advisory system, with a broad and clear mandate, is required to strengthen the voice of external science advice and help the government address complex S&T issues. In order to achieve these objectives, the federal government will consolidate the roles and responsibilities of the Advisory Council on Science and Technology, the Council of Science and Technology Advisors, and the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee into a single new council. The new Science, Technology and Innovation Council will provide policy advice to the government on S&T and innovation issues and benchmark Canada's S&T performance against international standards of excellence.

the French National Library and more

You may have the impression that I'm a technophile, but I'm actually an appropriate-technology-phile.  People, paper and pens can be appropriate for some activities, for example, voting.

Here's a passage about the Bibliothèque nationale de France that I enjoyed from Adam Gopnik's essay "Lessons from Things, Christmas Journal 3", in his book Paris to the Moon.

Then you search, among consoles set off near the walls, for an empty, operating computer terminal on which to make your book requests.  Most of the terminals are out of order, and when you insert your identity card, they sigh and say that they are initializing.  After fifteen minutes you give up and walk up and down the great hall, looking for a terminal that works.  When you find one, you can penetrate the catalog fairly quickly; then you claim the page and demand the book; the computer registers that you have made the demand and tells you to go sit back down.  The entire library is, in principle, served by, or subject to, the same vast, single computer system, which knows who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and what you want, can track you from visit to visit, and anticipate your interests, etc.  This of course means in practice that any tiny bug in one part of the system destroys the entire operation of the library.  The latest bugs are posted on photocopied sheets Scotch-taped to the terminals: Please, don't ask to "resee" your list, they say, just ask to "revise" it, etc.

...

On the desks there is a single red light that is supposed to illuminate when your books arrive, but these lights have never been known to work.  Or, rather, they have been occasionally known to work.  So you have to get up regularly and check your computer terminal again, to see what's up.  The light may be off because the books haven't arrived yet, and it may be off because it's not working.  ...

It's quite a long essay, covering diverse topics, and I recommend it.  I was interested to read in it about the exhibits in the Jardin des Plantes, since I have recently been there (I photographed some of the buildings, but I didn't go in, I just had time to walk in the garden).  I suppose I have progressed, considering that when I was there in 2004, I didn't even know there was a natural history museum at all.

More about this book

Chapter One, courtesy of the New York Times

Excerpt chapter "A Tale of Two Cafés", courtesy Random House

ISBN-13: 978-0375758232

Photos from the Jardin des Plantes

2007:

2004:

library conferences on a map

It seems to me it would take such a thin layer of widely-used microformats to be able to plot library conferences on a timeline and on a map, but for now the reality is conferences tend to be listed on static, hand-created web pages, all with widely-differing formats, and every single conference has its own static, custom web site.

It's therefore fairly remarkable that Google is able to make anything at all out of this mess, in order to plot a few library conferences on a US map

From Google experimental search

library conferences view:map

http://www.google.com/views?q=library+conferences+view%3Amap

open analysis of open data - climate change challenge

Business Objects is a powerful but expensive business intelligence tool (NRC uses it).  Therefore I was surprised to see that

Business Objects, a company that focuses on helping businesses make the most of the information they already have, is announcing an effort to foster a new community around open data analysis. The project will be called Insight and to help draw participants to it, they're announcing the first of what they hope will be a series of challenges: use the available data to help cities approach the problem of climate change.

...

The first challenge is being unveiled today at the Large Cities Climate Summit, happening right now in New York City.  The city of Toronto has worked with the environmental group zerofootprint and Business Objects to create what they term the GoZero Footprint City Calculator. At the press conference announcing the effort, Toronto's mayor, David Miller, expressed very high hopes for it: "Climate change is the issue of our time and it’s up to all of us to do our part to minimize the impact of day-to-day activities. Zerofootprint Toronto is going to help make my city not only one of the greenest on the planet, but one of the most innovative as well."

Via Ars Technica.

The Insight site bears the rather provocative banner "Can Open Data Save the World?"

It's interesting to contrast this with thw recently-launched Yahoo Green site, which takes a more traditional hectoring-you-into-conservation approach.

P2P: prospects for Open Science

Prospects for Open Science - P2P Foundation blog

also discusses Citizen Science

citizen journalists - Scoopt photos

You send your news-worthy photos (or videos) to Scoopt, they try to sell them to the media.  (Err, and they also are the media, now that they're owned by Getty Images.)

Interestingly there is a cross-promotion with the Sony Ericsson K800/K790 cameraphone

If you buy a new Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot cameraphone – that's a K790i or K800i with a cracking 3.2 megapixel camera - check out the Internet link on the main menu. There you should find a link straight to Scoopt!

Note: Phone menus will differ depending on cellphone provider and country.

2007 IATUL and ELPUB programmes - open access and beyond

The ELPUB 2007 and IATUL 2007 programmes are up.  Both will feature topics in the areas of open access and scholarly communication.  It's interesting to me how much the technology and interests of the scholarly publishing community and the academic library community seem to be converging.

At ELPUB 2007, CISTI's Judy Best will be presenting

Challenges in the Selection, Design and Implementation of an Online Submission and Peer Review System for STM Journals

about time

Clifford D. Simak entitled a science fiction book Time is the Simplest Thing

Unfortunately, in the realm of science reality, time turns out to be not simple at all.  Indeed, it turns out to be even political, even to the point of a conflict between universal time and our observations of the universe.

Harper's Magazine has an interesting article with a rather dramatic title: "Clash of the Time Lords" (December 2006, page 46).  Unfortunately it is subscribers-only.

It describes a conflict between the computer time people, some of whom would like our atomic time to tick along without any adjustments, and the astronomical time people, who benefit from having leap seconds inserted into the time stream, so that measured time accords with the Earth and the Sky.

To make things even more complicated, some computer-based systems already ignore the leap seconds.  For example, GPS time is ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by 14 seconds.  GPS time has no timezones, it is a single, fixed, world-wide time.

leapsecond.com has a nice Java-based clock that shows the different time "standards" - but it relies on your local computer clock to be correct

http://www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm

Assuming you have a newer operating system with network time feature enabled, your computer's clock is probably quite close to UTC (+/- timezone offset), whether directly from a national time agency like NIST or NRC, or indirectly through secondary time servers.

You can also see the official times directly on the web, e.g.

http://www.time.gov/

http://time5.nrc.ca/webclock_e.shtml

This raises a question of synchronizing one's camera with the correct time, for the purposes of GPS location matching by timestamp.  Should one sync to UTC or GPS time?  Are there any cameras that even keep time to within 14 seconds?

Why can't our cameras just get their locations and times directly from internal or external GPS units, without this roundabout method of capturing two separate files (photo and track log) and later matching them?  Or why can't my camera ask my phone what time it is?  (I assume the cell phone provider is sending me updates with accurate UTC time and offsets.)