Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, March 13, 2004
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Fix those windows
Lee LeFever:Visiting a social web site with broken links, misleading navigation,
missing images, etc. is like visiting a neighborhood with broken
windows- you get the feeling that no one cares. Broken windows do not
promote return visits.
Which makes me think I may have some broken windows of my own on this site. If so, please tell me!
 10:39:36 AM
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Friday, March 12, 2004
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"Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard
for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances
are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it."
5:56:38 PM
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Information axioms
A fascinating set... I especially like the Kevin Kelly quotes in Axiom 10.
This working document distills "information axioms" for emerging policy networks.
We culled these information axioms from a variety of analysts whose work examines
primarily - but not wholly - emerging commercial information networks on the Internet.
These "axioms" do not necessarily apply to non-profits, or true communities, but rather,
are to serve as a starting point in understanding the role of information and information
technologies in the policy process.
- axiom 1 - metcalf's law
- axiom 2 - early entrants win the field
- axiom 3 - significance precedes momentum
- axiom 4 - standards as power
- axiom 5 - producer and consumer utility
- axiom 6 - gatekeepers, intermediaries, and the attention deficit
- axiom 7 - positive feedback loops
- axiom 8 - differentiation of products and pricing
- axiom 9 - switching costs and lock-in
- axiom 10 - free information: cooperation in a competitive environment
(link found here)
5:55:07 PM
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Thursday, March 11, 2004
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"We owe almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed, but to those who have differed".
(G.C. Colton; Lacon)
(found here)
8:43:42 PM
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Google as context renderer
 Martin Terre Blanche:
"I suspect that most Google searches have as much to do with getting a
feel for context as with locating something specific."
Great examples
in there of how search engines and related tools help us sense the
landscape surrounding a term in an impressionistic manner. (Recall is another tool in that constellation, which Martin didn't mention.)
By the way, Martin has just pushed out a very interesting manifesto on social science research in the knowledge economy, "an attempt to make good ol' research methodology _less_ boring by dousing it in
a mix of lefty politics and techno-triumphalism."
12:04:35 PM
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Peaks and valleys in group cohesion
Ross points to Christopher Allen's very interesting piece on the relationship between group scale and cohesiveness or satisfaction.
His observations derived from several different domains concord with my
personal experience, and the implications in coping with business
growth are worth thinking about.
(Note that if this graph is accurate, jury duty (n = 12) must be pretty nerve-wracking!)
Update: Christopher writes back in the comments:
I hadn't even thought of Jury Duty as an example, and I just recently was
foreman of one.
With only one example my experience is purely anecdotal, but I think the
value of 12 in a jury is that that the group isn't cohesive, and has a tendency
to break into two groups, i.e. guilty and innocent. Then it is up to those two
groups to persuade each other one way or another.
Also, a smaller jury pool might allow for someone's personality to win over
some else's judgement. Not that this don't happen anyhow, just that with 12
people you are more likely to find someone with a like opinion and you'll be
able to stand with them against the strong personality.
9:28:03 AM
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Welcome, David, ePortfolio researcher!
Following my referers this morning led me to David Tosh's newly created blog. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of
Edinburgh, focusing on ePortfolio research. From there I found the site for ePortfolio Canada 2004, "The First Canadian
ePortfolio Working Forum", which will take place in Vancouver in mid-April. It's nice to see this area of interest getting organized here in Canada.
I'm pretty sure the interest in ePortfolios is going to boom over the
next one or two years. Here's a recent document from Berkeley U. that explains
the concept and its possible relevance to the future of education. It offers the
following definition of ePortfolio:
An ePortfolio is a highly personalized, customizable, web-based
information management system, which allows students to demonstrate
individual and collaborative growth, achievement, and learning over
time.
I don't know about you, but to me this sounds awfully close to a weblog
tool... the document also lists five practical uses for ePortfolios
once they are in students' hands, which won't come as a surprise if
you've been following eLearning/KM bloggers' discussions (Lilia you're going to love this!):
- Storage
- Information management
- Connections
- Communication
- Development
And while I'm speaking of ePortfolios, I should mention Alan Levine's recent announcement of an experimental ePortfolio initiative at Maricopa.
9:12:00 AM
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Track eBay items in your aggregator
eBay2RSS:
Generate RSS Feeds for your favorite eBay Search. Build it once and enjoy.
Especially usefull if you are continously Searching for the same Items on eBay.
By Using eBay2RSS with your favorite News Aggregator you will see your
favorite items when they get listed on eBay.
Neat. And you can have the feed include images of the items.
8:21:10 AM
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004
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Journeyman
Nice (if a bit long-winded) article on getting into and out of academe by Alex Pang, a history of science Ph.D. who made the leap into the corporate world, becoming the deputy editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. These two sentences capture the essential points concisely:
The world of learning is a big place; the
number of worlds that will find good uses for young scholars is
far larger than you think; and the limits your advisors think
you live under don't really exist. It's time to find out how to
live differently.
Useful advice for young scholars, especially as the academic "job market" seems quite crowded these days. (Why?
Let each Ph.D. train about a dozen others; lather, rinse, repeat. How
many Ph.D.'s do you have after a few generations? And what happens if
none of them can readily envision becoming something else than a
professor?)
(via EEK)
11:27:42 AM
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Monday, March 08, 2004
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Blogging is the proverbial elephant
What is blogging to you? There's a great exchange on Mathemagenic on the nature of the beast. Lilia writes,
I'm not very interested in how
many people are reading my weblog, but much more in who are
they and what do they say.
If you ask me why, the answer is simple: for me blogging is about conversations.
Conversations are different from publishing, they require listening
to others, require investment of attention and energy. My morning check
is my way to find out who is talking to me and what they are saying. I
don't do it to find our how famous I am, this is just a very human
thirst for a feedback and my respect to those who spend time answering
my questions, finding flaws in my arguments or developing my ideas in
new directions...
and Stephen replies in the comments:
I don't feel like it's a conversation. Conversations are restrained,
they're based on language, they're communicative, designed for a
purpose. I feel more like I am immersing myself in an environment. I
reach out and touch many things. [...] The blogs tell a story that is non-linguistic. They are like the tracks
in the mud, the sounds of birds in the trees, the rustle of a large
animal in the underbrush - each a different aspect, a different sign.
Obviously they are both right. Which brings up Clay's statement that blogging can only be defined locally.
I really like Stephen's idea that the essence of what we do in weblogs
resides between the lines and cannot be articulated in words. I feel
that way much of the time. Very often I feel like I'm this close to
being able to verbalize "what I'm about" and am awfully tempted to go
and do it, only to feel moments later that any attempt at capturing it
in writing would inevitably come short of the real thing, and that I'd
probably better simply focus on "being myself", letting it unfold,
rather than on "describing myself".
And yet at other times, I sense some kind of therapeutic value in being
able to describe myself, even if only approximatively. There are
identifiable patterns to what I think and do, most of which remain
tacit until I decide to dig them out. Knowing them, identifying them
and naming them might allow me to reinforce the good ones and escape
the bad ones. As if drawing the box I was in made it easier to move
outside of it.
8:56:01 PM
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Handy "show referrer" bookmarklet
Readers of Many-to-Many my recall a post I wrote in January about the issue of giving link discovery credit. Now, thanks to Simon Willison's new bookmarklet, there's one less excuse not to give credit for your links.
When you click it while viewing a page, Simon's bookmarklet shows you
where you were just before you landed there. As with other bookmarklets, all you have to do is drag the link to your links toolbar -- it works right out of the box. Try it on this page! Writes Simon:
One problem that I used to have with attributing interesting links, described here
by Meri, is that when you browse with multiple tabs or browser windows
it's easy to lose track of how you got to a certain page thanks to a
"broken" back button. Thankfully there's a simple solution to this: the
show referrer bookmarklet (adapted from a similar bookmarklet by Jesse Ruderman) which shows the page that referred you to the current page in an easily copy-and-pastable Javascript prompt.
2:12:46 PM
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Open Source and Free Software Conference
 UToronto's Knowledge Media Design Institute is organizing a big conference on Open Source and Free Software in May. There's a long list of speakers
(including Red Hat co-founder Bob Young and Brian Behlendorf,
co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project); note that the conference
will be webcast (for a fee).
The concepts of Open Source and Free Software represent international movements in the collective
development of knowledge media. Open Source is the practice of sharing the source code of software and
other knowledge media with a community that is encouraged and empowered to read, comment, amend and
augment it. Free Software is the belief that software should be open and must remain open when
redistributed, which tends to imply that only related services and not the software itself should cost
money.
These two intertwined movements are arguably two of the most important forces shaping today's knowledge
media industries. They relate to artifacts as diverse as computer software, educational content, and
digital music, but also social practices, institutions, and infrastructures of our knowledge-based
economy. Because they threaten the boundaries between production and consumption, these movements
challenge established economic interests and often encounter serious opposition. This can be seen in
recent events such as the decision by the City of Munich to go open source and the lawsuit against IBM
by SCO.
The University of Toronto's Knowledge Media Design Institute
is therefore hosting a major symposium to address the critical issues surrounding the Free and Open
Source initiatives. The symposium will be webcast worldwide over the Internet, and the living record of
the event will be available through the web archives for a limited time thereafter.
9:26:12 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:18:11 PM.
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