Digital Divide: Definition and Dialogue

From Humanist, two interesting links on the “digital divide”. The first is a report from the Morino Institute, From Access to Outcomes: Digital Divide Report and Dialogue. The report has 10 sensible premises starting with the obvious, “Focus on narrowing social – not digital divides”.
The second is from an issue on “The Digital Divide” (Spring 2001, Vol. 1, No. 2) which has articles of interest on, TCLA:. The Digital Divide:. Politics & Education:. Framing the Digital Divide. In particular there is an article by Randall D. Pinkett, Redefining the Digital Divide.

Fallis: The Mission of the University

A column in today’s The Globe and Mail by John Fraser titled, “Universities need money, yes, but a social mission, too” (Saturday, March 26, 2005, Page F9) drew my attention to a longish submission to the Rae commission by George Fallis from York. Titled “The Mission of the University” this report is available on the COU Think Ontario ª Resources ª Documents page. The report is a good overview of the history of the university, the uses and expectations of the university leading into the current mission of the Canadian university.
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New Communications Blogzine

New Communications Blogzine is a blog structured like a newsletter that focuses on new forms of communication like podcasts and blogs. It is aimed at communications people in media and business. It is associated with “blog university” which is mounting New Communications Forum events. (You can see pictures from one in Europe posted to Flickr.
The blogzine has some good short stories about new developments.
This thanks to Terry Flynn.

Ritchie: Evolution of Unix Time-sharing system

gt.gifI’m reading around the history of programming in Go To and was intrigued by the connection between Unix and time-sharing.
This connection is made explicitly in the title of a paper by one of the developers of Unix, Dennis M. Ritchie,
The Evolution of Unix Time-sharing System (PDF). As an interesting aside, the key proposal by the development group that got them a PDP-11 to work on proposed to develop a text editing system and their system ended up supporting the word processing of the patent group. Unix and Electronic Textuality! I knew it.

In early 1970 we proposed acquisition of a PDP-11, which had just been introduced by Digital. In some sense, this proposal was merely the latest in the series of attempts that had been made throughout the preceding year. It differed in two important ways. First, the amount of money (about $65,000) was an order of magnitude less than what we had previously asked; second, the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified) operating system, but instead to create a system specifically designed for editing and formatting text, what might today be called a `word-processing system.’ The impetus for the proposal came mainly from J. F. Ossanna, who was then and until the end of his life interested in text processing.

For more on Ossanna and the history of troff see The GNU Troff Manual – 2 Introduction.
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Michael Geist: Canadian plans for copyright

Michael Geist, a law prof at the University of Ottawa, has a good summary of the copyright plans of Industry Canada and Canadian Heritage on his site, www.MichaelGeist.ca.

Unlike the US legislation there is no sign that anti-circumvention provisions will apply to devices. There is also a more fair ISP provision.

Geist concludes, “The devil will be in the details but this represents a major shift away from the embarrassingly one-sided Canadian Heritage Standing Committee recommendations issued last May. While that report clearly pushed the agenda forward, the governmentís response has certainly recognized the need for some balance.”
This is from Slashdot.org

lomography: photography without education

don’t think, just shoot

lomo.jpgThe lomographic Society International is dedicated to a style of random and immediate photography. The site is fascinating, even if the results are intentionally pedestrian, everyday, and strangely composed.
See THE.10.GOLDEN.RULES_. It is like automatic writing with a Russian camera.
Note that word is a commercial trademark – a company has pushed the technique and their LOMO camera which is available for sale on the site. This camera in turn has been licensed from a Russian company that originally made them. See Lomography: Information From Answers.com. I love the name and idea, but smell a cult.

Electronic Textual Editing: Preview Copy

Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Unsworth, O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Burnard, is now available online in a preprint (or “preview”) form. It has been marked up in TEI XML and is available through the tei-c.org site. Note the new cocooned look of the TEI site!
The Table of Contents has links to the preview copies of the chapters. I note, for example, a chapter by Dino Buzzetti and Jerome McGann on Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon which includes stuff from Buzzetti that I heard at the Brown conference where I heard Buzzetti and Renear on markup.

Large organizations don’t have a single culture

There is no such thing as a corporate culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of which are a result of local conditions.

Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem is a story about the research of marcus Buckingham into corporate culture or the lack of it. For various reasons I have been reading about management, and this is one of those rare stories that made me think. I suspect the same is true of universities – they don’t have one culture, but many (called departments) and we don’t know what makes one healthy and another problematic.
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