De ooggetuige [The eye witness],Simone van der Vlugt
Posted: June 29, 2012 Filed under: Notes, Reading, Reviews | Tags: de ooggetuige (book), dutch literature, simone van der vlugt, thrillers Leave a comment »Just finished reading De ooggetuige [The eye witness], the gift given to customers by booksellers in the Netherlands as part of “Thriller Month.”
These gifts are a lovely part of the Dutch literary scene: the most famous is the Boekenweek geschenk, an annual gift during “book week”; they are usually short works (ca. 90 pp. in a small format paperback) by authors of note. I’d never heard of Maand van het Spannende Boek (Month of the Thrilling Book) before, but I do like the idea of there being more times for getting free books in the year. Read the rest of this entry »
Visualising grades: An interesting idea from the Globe and Mail
Posted: June 29, 2012 Filed under: Notes, Reading, Teaching, Universities | Tags: digital pedagogy, learning management systems, pedagogy, testing 2 Comments »The Globe and Mail ran what looked like a genre piece this morning about badly-written and hard-to-understand report cards–an annual rite it seems to me. But it ended with a side bar that I found quite thought-provoking: what a better-designed report card might look like:
The Globe and Mail’s proposal for a more visual report card.
Siva Vaidhyanathan on the value of public research
Posted: June 27, 2012 Filed under: Digital Humanities, General, Notes, Reading, Research, Universities | Tags: economic, humanities, netscape, Research, unicode, universities, university of virginia, xml Leave a comment »A great statement today in Slate by Siva Vaidhyanathan about the value of public research:
We Americans take these institutions for granted. We assume that private enterprise generates what is so casually called “innovation” all by itself. It does not. The Web browser you are using to read this essay was invented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The code that makes this page possible was invented at a publicly funded academic research center in Switzerland. That search engine you use many times a day, Google, was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation to support Stanford University. You didn’t get polio in your youth because of research done in the early 1950s at Case Western Reserve. California wine is better because of the University of California at Davis. Hollywood movies are better because of UCLA. And your milk was not spoiled this morning because of work done at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
These things did not just happen because someone saw a market opportunity and investors and inventors rushed off to meet it. That’s what happens in business-school textbooks. In the real world, we roll along, healthy and strong, in the richest nation in the world because some very wise people decided decades ago to invest in institutions that serve no obvious short-term purpose. The results of the work we do can take decades to matter—if at all. Most of what we do fails. Some succeeds. The system is terribly inefficient. And it’s supposed to be that way.
Along the way, we share some time and energy with brilliant and ambitious young people from around the world.
Important to realise this is also a selective list. Other things generated in whole or in part by publicly funded researchers and institutions include Unicode and XML.
Can anybody think of others?
This time it’s different: “ever since Plato” department (short)
Posted: June 25, 2012 Filed under: Notes, Reading, Universities | Tags: business school, economics, funding, plato, public no more (book) 1 Comment »From Public no more: A new path to excellent for America’s public universities, in which two business school deans explain how following the b-school model will improve higher education:
The belief that higher education should be funded by society dates back at least to the fourth century BCE, when Plato’s academy offered free admission to selected students–a philosophy that prevailed throughout most of history. Today we face a different and challenging environment… (3).
Talk about the need for transformative change!
“It’s fantastic that you are getting thoughts from this paragraph”: Greatest comment spam
Posted: June 22, 2012 Filed under: About, General, Notes | Tags: Computers, spam, wordpress 1 Comment »One of my fun tasks every day is emptying the comment spam. There’s always something worth reading. Until now, I’ve been trashing them. But I think I’ll start preserving the better ones here. This is a post that should be updated a lot! Read the rest of this entry »
Fixing a problem with broken stylesheets in OJS 2.3.6
Posted: June 18, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Digital Humanities, OJS, Research, Scholarly publishing | Tags: html, OJS, Open Journal Systems, proofing, scholarly publishing, Tips, workflow Leave a comment »In recent days, we have encountered a problem at Digital Studies/Le champ numérique that has resulted in problems with the display of a number of our articles.
The symptom is that the article breadcrumb and menu bar appear below rather than beside the right navigation bar, as illustrated below.
Screen shot showing layout problem. Article on left shows the broken style; article on the right has had the problem corrected.
After some investigation, we narrowed the problem down to an issue with how OJS handles HTML-encoded articles. Read the rest of this entry »
Chasing the (long) tail: Was the Readabilty subscription model really a failed experiment?
Posted: June 15, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Digital Humanities, Essays, Research, Scholarly publishing, Universities | Tags: charity, digital humanities, economics, readability (app), reading experience, scholarly publishing Leave a comment »More on the changing business models (see my earlier entries, “Won’t get fooled again: Why is there no iTunes for scholarly publishing” and “Does Project Muse help of harm the scholarly community…“).
Readability is an app developer whose main product is software for improving the long-form online reading experience. I’ve not used it (yet), but it seems to involve a combination of applying an optimised style to existing content and suppressing the surrounding ads and navigation clutter (contrary to the comment feed on their blog, Readability doesn’t seem to extract and resell content without producer’s permission: it seems to be more like a specialised kind of browser plugin for viewing content you already have access to).
The original business model appears to have involved collecting subscription money ($5/month) from users who wanted a better reading experience and then distributing that money (minus a commission, I imagine) to the publishers who registered with them. There are aspects of this that you might quibble with–for example, had they thought they could communicate with the owners of every site their user base tried to read using their app? But on the whole it seems like an interesting and innovative idea: extracting some part of the capital required to produce content by selling a better experience in its consumption. And since I’d have thought they probably didn’t need to offer to share the money with the publishers (given that they were only reformatting the content), this is a business model that actually seems to have been constructive rather than purely exploitative.
And apparently one that doesn’t work. Read the rest of this entry »
Testing if a list is empty in textpattern
Posted: June 14, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Technical Notes, Textpattern | Tags: Computers, conditional statements 1 Comment »Let’s say you have a section on a webpage like the “current courses” section in the right menu bar my teaching webspace.
This draws its list from articles in the section “teaching” that have “current_interest” as a category.
The problem comes between semesters while I am preparing my syllabi. If no course has a category “current_interest” you end up with a header and no content.
What you need is something that checks whether there is content to display and then presents different material based on the outcome of that check. You might delete the section entirely, or, as I have done, display a placeholder message. Read the rest of this entry »
Installing Zotero in Ubuntu
Posted: June 14, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Linux, Technical Notes, zotero | Tags: Computers, gnome, Linux, zotero Leave a comment »See the excellent post here.
http://anterotesis.com/wordpress/2011/11/installing-zotero-standalone-on-ubuntu-11-10/
To install the .desktop, I used the application launcher under system>preferences>main menu.
How to draw a circle in GIMP. Seriously.
Posted: June 14, 2012 Filed under: Applications, GIMP, Linux, Technical Notes | Tags: Computers, GIMP, graphics, Tips Leave a comment »I use GIMP, the free graphics software package, all the time. But boy it can be awkward at times. Here’s how to draw a circle or elipse (like the one in the photo below):
Ellipse select tool > Start selecting > Hold down shift > Click on the circle to select it > Edit (Menu) > Stroke Selection – Voila!
Alternative method: Select a circle again > Fill it > Select (menu) > Shrink few pixels > Delete
Seriously?
“And in conclusion, funding for further research will be required”
Posted: June 14, 2012 Filed under: News, Notes, Scholarly publishing, Universities | Tags: scholarly publishing, short clips Leave a comment »Globe and Mail reporter Anna Mehler Paperny reported today on research that is pointing to a new treatment for people infected with the Ebola virus. After explaining how the treatment works and its implications, she concludes:
On a pragmatic level, getting this research published in a well-regarded journal could make it easier for Dr. Kobinger to ask for continued government funding in a cash-strapped environment.
What a pleasingly blunt statement about the economics of publication!
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