Group items tagged

Clay Shirky's look at the current Amazon/Publisher wars: "The legacy system is mainly characterized by a refusal to deal in small-batch authorship, a model that made sense when the unit price of a book was any number above zero, but makes no sense today. If ten million people think something is dreck, and fifty people like it, those fifty should get what they want."

Amazon-Hachette war & Orwell: http://www.idealog.com/blog/amazon-channels-orwell-latest-blast/

Does Amazon kill a revenue channel for open access monographs? https://www.martineve.com/2014/09/03/does-amazon-kill-a-revenue-channel-for-open-access-monographs/

An in depth documentary in to parts, that unveils the development that lead up to the Snowden leak.

I found this documentary very interesting even though I'm not an American. Especially the second part is very disturbing.

"Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes: In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones - many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - with examples of each in action"

The 20 fallacies: "ad hominem - Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously) argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out) argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives) appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to

Wonderful post, Kim! These are great guidelines alongside which to test ideas.

Helping researchers do research and making a difference with your time.

Helping researchers do research and making a difference with your time.

As throngs of pro-democracy protesters continue to organize in Hong Kong's central business district, many of them are messaging one another through a network that doesn't require cell towers or Wi-Fi nodes. They're using an app called FireChat that launched in March and is underpinned by mesh networking, which lets phones unite to form a temporary Internet.

While attending another work-related webinar, I heard about this web site and thought about this class. On the surface, this site looks like a portal to many, many other image and video repositories about the history and geography of the United States. Many are contributed by local public libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies. What caught my attention and connect to this course is that all the metadata of the repositories are open access, so that developers can take advantages of the metadata and create additional apps. In this sense, this site becomes a platform. The contents from the various repositories have different degrees of rights and restrictions for reuse, some are under CC, some are protected by copyright, but the metadata is all open!

Reuters / Eric Thayer Internet giant Twitter is suing the Department of Justice in hopes that the United States government will let the web company publish more details about requests made for user data. The complaint, filed in federal court on Tuesday this week, asks the Justice Dept.

An interesting read. Freedom of speech is allowed as long it does not relate to the US government. One important thing to understand here is that the flow of information can never be stopped or banned (at least only temporarily.) There is no such thing as good or bad information - it all depends on who interprets the information and what point of views these people have.

The "manifesto" for the open access movement, written by Aaron Swartz from 2008. Only 6 years old, but already, it carries a historical value. "Will you join us?" Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0 United States

Great resource and very relevant to this weeks' module! Thank you for sharing. The idea of "Guerilla Open Access" is something I had really hoped to cover more in depth in the lecture materials. Yes, there's a tension -- or a "balance", as many of the lecturers said -- between protecting creators vs. protecting consumers, but there has not been nearly enough discussion on the power dynamics and implicit within our current system. I am taking this class partly in person through UBC, and I will be sharing this resource with my seminar group this week.

Open Access Resources aims to remove constraints in access to articles and knowledge for academic-intellectual world community, particularly in the developing countries. Scientists from these countries still have trouble posting their works due to limitations of network access, institutional economic difficulties and lack of information about solutions available Open Access. It is expected that the Open Access increase understanding of educational and research opportunities to unite the world.

You could be interested in this too: http://sdu.ictp.it/index.html SDu is developing also a videocapture integrated system so that for a small investment lessons can be recorded and shared online http://www.openeya.org/ ...even infrastructures must be open....

This site explains why people choose to illegally downloads, even if some people know that they are breaking the copyright law.

Interesting read as I'm guilty of illegally downloading/streaming TV and music. Very surprised to see that the rich are the ones who illegally download on a regular basis.

"I'd have to wait too long to see it on TV" is the reason I hear the most about when it comes to illegal downloading. Those people generally do make an effort to watch it when it does officially come out on TV though, to off-set their piracy. The way companies will show something in one country and then sit on it for five months before letting someone in another country watch it seems silly to me at this point, though. Yes digital piracy is illegal, but it seems to be getting to the point of the Prohibition Era in the United States: yes, it's illegal, but everyone's doing it anyway. I think somebody's going to need to change things up here, and it seems doubtful that the companies producing these shows can alter the cultural norms without a lot more work than it seems they're willing to put in.

Website that publishes the 'news that did not make it onto mainstream media'. There are pretty cool alternatives to certain news that take on an interesting perspective alternate to mainstream framing and broadcasting.

OA possibilities in my country - Estonia

By: Thomson Reuters Foundation Nairobi - Mobile phones and other technological innovations can be "game changers" in securing children's rights, the United Nations children's agency Unicef said at the launch of its first crowd-sourced report on Thursday.

On data sharing in computational drug discovery and the need for data notes [v1; ref status: not peer reviewed, http://f1000r.es/4qi] Author affiliations Department of Life Science Informatics, B-IT, LIMES Program Unit Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Dahlmannstr, Bonn, D-53113, Germany Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.