-
I blog less often here than I used to... This is exclusively UBC-related stuff now. For other items, you are welcome to drop by abject.ca 
In-Flux- Shapeways"Ideas made real with 3D printing." […]
- Yelling it like it is | Alchemical MusingsHer interviews with [Eben Moglen] should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time. […]
- Soundmachines"Three units, which are resembling standard record players, translate concentric visual patterns into control signals for further processing in any music software. The rotation of the discs, each holding three tracks, can be synced to a sequencer." […]
- Apache considered harmfulGitHub is truly a system of anarchism, in the most classic sense of the term. It is a system of communication and contribution that is without a central organization or institution of governance. Sure, it is hosted, developed, and maintained by someone but they do not enforce any set of governance or process over the users of the system. […]
- Should you boycott academic publishers?"Elsevier has committed too many sins to give an exhaustive list: they have created fake academic journals so that pharmaceutical corporations could claim that certain facts appeared in a journal, they have sponsored evil regulations, and they have restrictive views on what constitutes fair use. Unbelievably, they were also involved in arms trade. They […]
- Why Education Publishing Is Big Business"The biggest publishers in the world today are education publishers." […]
- Scripting News: Why apps are not the future"The great thing about the web is linking. I don't care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can't link in and out of your world, it's not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don't need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent arou […]
- "Commons in a Box" & the Importance of Open Academic Networks"...open source versus proprietary technology isn't the only thing at stake. Nor is it simply that Commons in a Box supports an open ecosystem versus a "walled garden." It is that latter piece that seems particularly noteworthy, however, as the project is part of a larger movement on campuses to open up academic scholarship itself -- not […]
- Access? Copyright! | Ariel Katz" The already dire situation of Canada’s school libraries should serve as a good reminder. Moreover, in post-secondary education, it has been well documented that the consolidation of the academic publishing industry over the last few decades and the licensing practices of the major commercial academic publishers has led to an escalation in the price of […]
- No Copyright Intended"For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay." […]
- Shapeways
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Unsound reasoning
When MP3 blogs emerged a few years ago, I remember thinking “this can’t possibly go on, the record companies will squash these people.” Then again, the most popular musicbloggers more or less voluntarily adopted a fairly reasonable code of conduct. … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
9 Comments
Forever is a long time. Divshare going going gone?
I had always been bemused by the bold-type claim on Divshare’s site that they would host unlimited amounts of my media online for free, forever. Indications are they will come up a few trillion eons short of the goal. In … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
8 Comments
Another wave coming in…
I got some great comments on my apocalyptic Waves post (one from an experienced body surfer) — and special thanks to Bob for pointing me to this zefrank video which does a lovely job of playing out the metaphor on … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
1 Comment
Not all that dreary…
So there’s been a definite negative tilt to my posts lately, but it hasn’t been all bad. Last Friday I co-facilitated a workshop pushing social software on a group of students who are leading Student Directed Seminars next semester. This … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off
This whole syndication thing is sucking me down the drain…
RSS Fountain, originally uploaded by Orin Optiglot. It was more than four years ago that Stephen Downes whipped up a custom version of his edu_rss application for the Merlot conference being held here in Vancouver. It scanned the posts of … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
17 Comments
What is online content worth?
That question is a huge issue at stake in the ongoing Writers Guild strike. I am well short of the information threshold required to express a meaningful opinion. But it’s clear the writers of the Daily Show didn’t lose their … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
5 Comments
The Upside of Down
If my recent post riffing on Waves seemed unduly alarmist (and I worried that it was, until I picked up my newspaper), you might want to check out someone who covers this ground with considerably more authority. I listened to … Continue reading
Moose in the headlights: we’re doing Northern Voice in 2008!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } UBC Forestry Building, originally uploaded by D’Arcy Norman. Just came out a planning meeting for Northern … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
7 Comments
Waves
this is radio nowhere shared CC by onkel_wart The tourist amenities and the beaches in San Juan are first-rate, so with the meetings complete, and my own workload in only a modest state of disrepair, I decided to take a … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
13 Comments
Call it a moment of Zen
At night, sections of old San Juan are transformed into something like a giant open air nightclubopolis… with every form of party music imaginable, salsa to rock to electronica (Pete Tong will mix there soon) throbbing out of bars all … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off
Brian