Paul Levinson’s, Cellphone; The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! is a breezy book on the mobile phone that raises interesting points without doing much else. For example, it doesn’t systematically tell you the story of the development of the cellphone or tell us about the market for cellphones. The book has a good annotated bibliography.
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Month: August 2004
Wired Styles
Two stories in Wired News A Matter of (Wired News) Style and It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now are about the style guidelines of Wired and changes. Tom Long, the author of both and the Wired News’ copy chief, set standards that have an effect. That the internet and web are now lower case says something about their perception as generic rather than named entities. The e-mail article, however, is more interesting, because Tony talks about the shift in style as the web became commercial, main stream and then dropped. Style reflects attitude and community. This is courtesy of StÈfan Sinclair.
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Toronto FIS Academic Plan
In a previous blog on Information Studies at the University of Toronto, Information Studies, I looked at the Chartreuse paper created by the dean there. Now that has been developed into an academic plan, see Faculty of Information Studies home page and the FIS Academic Plan. Note the three major thrusts of their proposal and the way they plan to model an electronic university for the rest of U of T. Will anyone listen when they do?
McLuhan’s Way
The Globe and Mail reports that a Street named after ‘rogue scholar’ McLuhan
was designated in a celebration yesterday. A portion of St. Joseph’s street in St. Michael’s college was named, Marshall McLuhan Way. Now we need a median so we can say, “the median is the way of the message.”
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Ancaster Woods
Three pictures from the woods in Ancaster in June.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
The Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting in 2002 was the start of the open access movement according to Jean Claude Guedon. For something to qualify as open access it has to be licensed to the user in an open fashion and it must be archived. (See the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing or my previous entry on the Berlin Declaration..) The Creative Commons organization founded in 2001 provides language for open access licenses.
Classic Texts on Computer Science
Classical Computer Science Texts is a list by Jason Kottke of online classics. As he notes, not one is authored by a woman. I particularly like Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years which reminds me of my Slow Code manifesto.
Maisonneuve
maisonneuve :: eclectic curiosity is a newish (starting in the Winter of 2002) magazine that tries to be like the New Yorker or Harpers. This is the second such magazine in Canada along with The Walrus Magazine. The MediaScout is their blog that comments on the national media every day.
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U of Waterloo new School of Pharmacy
Cities and municipalities, which have become a hot issue, in Canada, have become interested in developing universities. A university brings the right sort of knowledge people into a neighborhood so we are seeing a lot of interest in moving universities and setting up new campuses of existing ones. McMaster is in discussion with Burlington and I am helping with this. (See, McMaster Daily News – July 29: A McMaster presence in Burlington?.) As I am helping you will see blog entries on subjects around the development of university activities.
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ACM Queue: Virtual Machines
The recent issue of ACM Queue is about virtual machines and has some excellent articles that explicitly look at the drift in the concept of a VM from the 60s when a VM was a hardware simulation for sharing to today when the a VM, like the Java VM, can simulate a machine that does not really exist.
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