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"Kaj Sand-Jensen, un professore danese di ecologia, ha scritto un articolo intitolato "How to write consistently boring scientific literature" dove enuncia un decalogo di regole per scrivere articoli scientifici veramente noiosi. In maniera ironica e divertente mostra come una scrittura spersonalizzata possa servire alla fin fine a mascherare un contenuto modesto. Nella conclusione, osserva che ci sono movimenti di scienziati e anche editori che tendono a recuperare il valore di una scrittura più personale e viva. Sostiene inoltre che, sebbene l'articolo scientifico così come lo conosciamo rimarrà il veicolo principale della comunicazione scientifica, è auspicabile che gli scienziati si impegnino maggiormente in una comunicazione più ampia e speculativa, che possa eventualmente anche contemplare humour e poesia. Una comunicazione in grado di far circolare maggiormente le idee fra campi diversi e di attrarre più facilmente i giovani allo studio delle scienze. È un paradosso, ma è vero che la letteratura scientifica predominante, bulimica, ridondante, assolutamente grigia, selezionata con un processo di peer review sempre più affrettato e sommario, costituisce non l'unica ma una notevole causa di scarsa innovazione dando la preferenza ai maggiori e più consolidati filoni di ricerca. Lascio qui sotto l'opportunità di leggere il paper di Kaj Sand-Jensen, ne vale la pena. View this document on Scribd - [1] More about Fisica e filosofia "Ricordo delle discussioni con Bohr che si prolungarono per molte ore fino a notte piena e che ci condussero quasi ad uno stato di disperazione; e quando al termine della discussione me ne andavo solo a fare una passeggiata nel parco vicino continuavo sempre a ripropormi il problema: è possibile che la natura sia così assurda come ci appariva negli esperimenti atomici?" Werner Heisenberg in Fisica e Filosofia, Il Saggiatore, 1961, p. 55) * Share this: * Stampa * Email * Facebook *

By Claude Almansi and Jan Schwartz October 3rd, 2011 "Scoop.it is a new application that is still in beta, although it's fairly easy to get an invite to join. Claude Almansi found the app, sent an email about it to a list serv, which prompted Jan Schwartz to join. We've only been at it for a month or so, but already both of us have found some good information that we otherwise would have missed, and we are helping to spread the good work about education technology and change. First, some information about Scoop.it that Claude dug up. The web service was conceived in France, launched in December 2010 and its web site is in English. It's a social site for sharing news events and articles via subscription. Even if you don't subscribe, Scoop.it can be used to look for information items selected by others on a given theme via its public search engine. You do need to subscribe if you want to create and curate your own topic on a given theme or subject. For example, Jan was particularly excited to find a blog written as a result of a live chat sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which talked about the topic of Cathy Davidson's recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn. There were four panelists and 1500 participants on the chat and one of them, David Palumbo-Liu, wrote a blog about his experience, which was very different than Jan's and so an interesting read for perspective. She would not have found that blog if not for Scoop.it. Claude curates a site for Multimedia Accessibility. Currently Jan is 'scooping' under the title Technology for Teaching and Learning . You can curate as many different topics as you like."

ReadWriteWeb is a popular weblog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis. It is the lead blog in the ReadWriteWeb Network, a growing network of blogs about web technology - the other sites are last100 (a blog about Digital Lifestyle), AltSearchEngines (about search) and ReadWriteTalk (a podcasting show about the people behind the Web)

"Fry talking about monopolies in the tech world and how he feels about being one of the most influential names in tech." I love his reflection at the end about the contribution of technology towards the human spirit, open source software etc.

"Created by Gerry Bayne (EDUCAUSE) on October 29, 2007 In this 40 minute podcast, we feature a speech from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled "Tomorrow's Students: Are We Ready for the New 21st-Century Learners?". The presentation is by Julie Evans, Chief Executive Office for Project Tomorrow - NetDay. Video and slides for this speech are also available here. Abstract: The national Speak Up initiative annually collects and reports on the authentic, unfiltered viewpoints of K-12 students, teachers, parents, and school leaders about education technology and 21st-century learning environments. Learn about the expectations of today's K-12 students (the higher ed students of tomorrow) for technology use and their new aspirations for learning as uncovered in the most recent survey data. "

Here's the world's shortest, fairest, and simplest licence agreement: "Don't violate copyright law." If I had my way, every digital download from the music in the iTunes and Amazon MP3 store, to the ebooks for the Kindle and Sony Reader, to the games for your Xbox, would bear this - and only this - as its licence agreement. "Don't violate copyright law" has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: "You are not about to get screwed."

A site advocating use of Open Source Solutions in UK Schools

Open Source Schools is here to share information about open source software in schools. Our aim is to help you decide whether open source software might offer benefits for learning, teaching, engaging pupils and parents, managing information and resources, or school administration. The website provides information and articles about open source software, advice on getting started, case studies of its adoption in schools, a directory for exploring what is available, and a glossary.

Alternate text is not meant to be used as a tool tip, or more specifically, to provide additional information about an image. The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element. That information is displayed as a tooltip by most graphical browsers, though manufacturers are free to render title text in other ways. Thanks to Alexis Antonelli http://uxconsultant.com/ for the reference

"An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on either issue." (Reading Rights protest about disabling TTS and people grumbling about books over $9.99)

Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online. I think there's plenty not to like about the Kindle -- the DRM, the proprietary file format, both imposed on authors and publishers even if they don't want it -- and about Amazon's real audiobook section, Audible (the DRM -- again, imposed on authors and publishers even if they'd prefer not to use it). But if there's one thing Amazon has demonstrated, it's that it plans on selling several bazillion metric tons of audiobooks. They control something like 90 percent of the market. To accuse them of setting out to destroy it just doesn't pass the giggle-test.

This initiative originated in the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). The coordinators of this initiative are Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters

"Legislators around the world are demanding more information on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. French Deputy Nicolas Dupont-Aignan raised ACTA questions in the National Assembly late last year, expressing concerns about a global three-strikes and you're out approach, increased costs for medicines, and the lack of transparency associated with the process."

Closely aligned to the DRM issue is that there are a multiplicity of e-book formats, many of which cannot be read on other devices. As with DRM, consumer frustration is bound to arise if readers have to jump through hoops to read legally purchased books. This is perhaps not a problem at the moment, when the bulk of e-reader owners are early adopters, yet it will become more acute when the devices are more widely disseminated among less tech-savvy users. As Kassia Krozser, co-founder of medialoper.com who writes widely on digital entertainment issues, blogs on her publishing site Booksquare.com: "DRM, as implemented now, does not deter piracy. It does deter reading." She later reminds publishers that "your customers (again: the ones who give you money) don't read on one device, on one operating system, in one location. As you move forward with your digital initiatives, think about how real people read books."

Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here. Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this. My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

"Crossing the Boundaries of Ning * Posted by Badan Barman on August 22, 2010 at 2:28am in Best Practices and Lessons Learned * View Discussions I am a Library and Information Science Professional from India. I developed a Network "LIS Links : A Virtual Community of Indian LIS Professionals" (http://lislinks.com/) over Ning. I dont know whether I will be able to survive with all of you or not. But here, I would like to share something about my site. There nothing special to its design, since I am dealing with information, I gave much emphasis to content rather than the look. But I think I have included some thing special in my network. I request you all to have a look. Here are my specific points ..."

Article Last Updated: 3rd Apr 2009 Posted by Ruhani Rabin "Firefox is always been the favorite choice for the developers for debugging and developing web applications. The extension architecture allows anyone to add powerful add-on to the browser for robust enhancement on many different development needs. I use Firefox everyday like I need to take my lunch and dinner. So here are the most useful Firefox extensions I use that I want to share with everyone. I have to admit, many of these extensions won't come as a eye opener to developers those who are already so deep with Firefox extensions, but hopefully there will be some you've yet to know about."

"Your Last 3 Options If you chose a new Ning plan: We're thrilled you'll be sticking around! As you may have noticed, we're rapidly releasing new features, so stay tuned to Creators for what's coming next. If you aren't able to continue, we've put together this page to explain your three options. John McDonald VP, Advocacy"

" * Posted by amilla on September 14, 2010 at 2:26pm in Improvements to Ning Creators * View Discussions About the exclusion of the music player in the package "ning plus" I would like to inform the management of Ning that I demand from Ning administration to send me an e-mail with all the tracks that are blocked in order to protect the copyrighted material that now is blocked by the company Ning which has no right to withhold them. For these reasons I ask from Ning to send me the music files that was loaded up until the day that Ning music player was free for uploading for all networks. There is need for appropriate administration of music files with responsibility for all of the musicians members of my network. So I demand from Ning to send me all that music files. I am giving to Ning a period of two months to send me all the songs as attachments in the e-mail amilla.gr@gmail.com. Otherwise I have to inform the official intellectual property protecting organization of Greece for unauthorized restriction of intellectual property from the Ning. The same reasoning applies if the music files are deleted from Ning. Thank you and wait for response from Ning. Best regards The administration of www.amilla.gr"

"OCR Terminal is an online OCR service that can do PDF OCR, JPEG OCR and other image formats Convert PDF to Word online, JPEG to Word online or any image format to searchable text Convert PDF to Word in 4 easy steps The desktop client allows multiple file uploads and simplifies workflow [Find out more about OCR Terminal] "

A wonders about free networks being stull online. Exchange with Thunder X. Eric Suesz:\n"Hi, Alex. All free Ning Networks are now locked and can't be accessed. At some point, the space the data takes up on our servers will be overwritten. There's no plan to send you an email when that happens."

A very odd affirmation by Ning's Eric Suesz