- Notelets
- Disciplinary perspectives on scholarly communications
- Something to aspire to in our software
- Limitations on metadata
- Scary!
- Getting back to GTD and the desire to be visibly productive all the time
- Open Threads
Notelets
![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Fast Company | The 6 Myths Of Creativity is a good article for those interested in fostering creativity in organizations they manage.
For those of us who love the trees on the UcBerkeley campus, go read: 1.26.2004 - Going out on a limb for Berkeley’s venerable trees: "Take away the lecture halls, the brilliant students, the Nobel laureates, even take away the Campanile and the tie-dye, and there'd still be a unique feel to Berkeley. Where to find it? Try the trees."
Every so often, I keep hearing about the unexplained and disquieting electoral irregularities in Ohio. Salon.com News | Investigating Ohio seems to be still timely.
-
The word "hapa" is now used in the mainland United States to describe a person of partial Asian ethnicity. However, some Hawaiians dispute this usage, claiming that the word should only be used to describe people of partial Hawaiian ancestry.
I decided to subscribe to the Code4LibList.
I wonder how the OclcOrg/RecombinantMetadataProject went.
-
The City of Timmins presents you with Timmins Web-Cam; there are two (2) cameras taking live pictures from City Hall and from the Mattagami Region Conservation (MRCA) Building at Gillies Lake.
I've been using Paintshop Pro version 9. There is PythonLanguage based scripting available in PSP. But can I invoke PSP from an external Python script? Maybe says Python scripting with Paint Shop Pro 8.0. But instead of messing PSP programming, maybe I should stick with getting back to Python Image Library.
If I ever have to read MARC with PythonLanguage, I'll look at textualize: pymarc:
-
The pymarc module provides an API for reading, writing and modifying MARC records from python. MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) is a metadata format for bibliographic data.
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet:
-
But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings.
Disciplinary perspectives on scholarly communications
CliffordLynch wrote Mailing List CNI-ANNOUNCE@cni.org Message #112953:
-
Last week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held a two day convocation on the changing shape of scholarly communications in the digital world. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend part of the meeting. As background for the convocation, a number of members of the campus community developed white papers to help inform the discussion.
These include a number of superb and rather unusual papers written by faculty and taking a very valuable disciplinary perspective on the evolution of scholarly communication. These papers are available at
http://www.unc.edu/scholcomdig/
I learned a great deal from reading these papers, and I believe that they may be valuable not just to readers interested in scholarly communications developments, but perhaps specifically as resources and sources of ideas for other institutions planning similar campus-wide discussions.
Something to aspire to in our software
Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: A Hullistic approach:
-
They support the general emergent pattern, which sees recombinance of finer grained service elements across library, learning and admininistrative environments. Of course, this is something that is yet only intermittently supported in our applications.
Limitations on metadata
Just read Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata? by Dick Bulterman. Fun read and good description of the current limitations of metadata schemes, especially for non-textual objects. There's a lot more to say than what I can do here. And a lot more to ponder, especially since I've been in the business of creating tools (like the ScholarsBox) that manipulate metadata.
-
I like his "personal back-to-basics definition of metadata": "Optional structured descriptions that are publicly available to explicitly assist in locating objects".
-
"Now, 10 years later, I’m not sure we’ve learned much that's new about using metadata to locate generalized media except that metadata in the context of electronic processing is probably not nearly as useful as it was in conventional library catalogues."
-
"For nontext data—such as video, images, audio, and so on—direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation."
-
The author does a good job at listing problems with automatic metadata generation systems. I can testify that it's hard to get good automatic metadata after working hard to get it from my own Treo600Phone.
-
"it is totally unrealistic to expect that the devices’ users will spend any time thinking up descriptive filenames or adding extensive captions: They’re too busy taking new pictures!"
I know that MarcDavis is hard at work to change this situation -- and I'm curious to know the state of the art with respect to metadata generation with video and images.
See DigiLib: University of Groningen: Moratorium on metadata, another analysis of Bulterman's article.
Scary!
I'm listening to NPR : O'Harrow's 'No Place to Hide' from Surveillance:
-
Robert O'Harrow, Jr. is a reporter for The Washington Post and an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book is about how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies as part of homeland security. Huge data-mining operations are contracted by the government to gather information on our daily lives. Information technology has enabled retailers, marketers, and financial institutions to gather and store data about us. O'Harrow's new book about this security-industrial complex is No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society.
I'd like to learn more about David Brin's Official Web Site, and his book Amazon.com: Books: The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. He wrote Salon.com Technology | Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!. See also 4.12: The Transparent Society.
Getting back to GTD and the desire to be visibly productive all the time
In spite of the many, many, many things happening in my life, I feel that I've still managed to be productive and mostly focused. That's not to say that I don't feel a teensy bit off-balance. OK, sometimes way off balance.
Last year, I found the GettingThingsDone system very helpful in getting me on track. I will focus some hours on getting my GTD system back on track. Since I'm often using how much of sustance I can write publicly as a measure of productivity, I'm loathe to work too much on activities whose outcomes are invisible or should be made invisible to the public. That's so funny, since so many good things in life are private. At any rate, I might not be producing much stuff here today. Trust me, though: I'll be busy and productive.
(It was nice to be reminded by The New York Times: To Do More. Or Less. Or Something, that in the end, I should not take any system, letting alone the very useful GettingThingsDone approach too seriously!)
Open Threads
-
....
