Academia

Back in the office

It’s kind of creepy. Back in the office my Far Side calender is on 23 January, some of the plants are almost dead, there is a pile of snail mail and little tasks which seem to have been ignored under the principle: “since he isn’t here…” Despite the fact that the temperature is -3 and there is an unseemly pile of work to be done – it’s good to be back in the chair.

While unpacking and organising yesterday I discovered that I had managed to buy “only” these books while in India (in part this was due to a book sale we were take to): The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (by Louis Fischer) this was recommended to me as the authoritative biography. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (by Amartya Sen) I have not read enough of Senâ??s work but I do like his work. After reading the preface I know that I shall enjoy this work very much. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (by Amartya Sen) another of Senâ??s works, this one argues for a better understanding of multiculturalism against violent nationalism.

Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason by Michel Foucault, I do not have my own copy so when this popped up at an Indian book sale: say no more! Inside the Wire: A military intelligence soldier’s eyewitness account of life at Guantanamo (by Erik Saar & Viveca Novak) not sure about the depth but it is a subject of great importance.

Wars of the 21st Century: New Threats New Fears (by Ignacio Ramonet) the nice thing about ending up buying books in India is that the focus shifts from the usual suspects that populate my local stores. Ramonet seems to be very relevant to my interests. Democracy’s Place (Ian Shapiro) simply could not resist this. War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7 (edited by Daya Kishan Thussu & Des Freedman) a exciting anthology on the subject of war & media. The Art of the Feud: Reconceptualizing International Relations (by Jose V. Ciprut) this is an exciting fresh look which I just happened across at the sale.

Simply from the point of view of new input the trip was very rewarding.

Posted on by mklang

Oh, Shit

I cannot believe it. It’s 28 degrees in Mumbai and I have managed to catch a cold. A summer cold is tiring thing to have but this is made worse by the fact that we have several days worth of meetings left and a conference at the end. Not to mention the long flight home.

The meeting today is particularly lively moving from philosophy of copyright (and in extension property), learning and teaching. The crux of the discussion is what is it we are attempting to achieve. Purity for purities sake or striving for higher principles.

The settings of the day are the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR Colaba) at the most southern end of Mumbai. The research center is set within the Naval base which therefore increases security but it also has a beautiful garden by the sea.

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Free and open access to European research results

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles.  In particular, the first recommendation called for ‘Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication’.

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to convey the overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC study.

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: ‘Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.’

One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: “Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don’t know where the cutting edge is?”

The petition is available at: www.ec-petition.eu

The EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe is available here.

The petition is sponsored by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Posted on by mklang

The academic importance of a cheese sandwich

This is the second full day at the meeting and it is actually hard to stay sharp during the meeting. It is soon six pm and my brain is grinding to a halt. My theory is that my body is suffering from a cheese sandwich deficiency. Since arriving the food has been exciting, exotic Indian food. But the problem with artificial stimulants such as these is that they do not provide a stable base for harsh academic work. Oh, the all day meeting is among the harshest of academic work. It vaguely resembles Vogon poetry*.

So I think this trip really proves the thesis that academic work requires cheese sandwiches.

This may be a controversial statement and some radical academics may claim that the results have been effected by the new experience of Mumbai, 30C heat, lack of sleep and residual jetlag, or the fact that my rss reader does not work here (proxy problems) so I have not read blogs for a week.

The fools! What do they know?
—

*If you donâ??t understand the reference try this

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Coffee Break Peacemaker

Amongst technical discussions on platforms, systems and semantic webs (making my head spin) we slipped into the more general dangerous philosophical question of what is knowledge? This was sparked off by a discussion on the concept of the learning object as the smallest indivisible learning base. Is it the fact, the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter or the book?

The discussion of what is knowledge and how small the learning object can become turned into a lively discussion, probably since it was a nice break from the technology side of the project.

The main thrust of the argument (well more of a disagreement) was the disagreement with the proposition that all learning objects should (and therefore could) be broken up into more palatable parts. The idea was to include a 500-word (approximate) limit for each such part.

Some of us disagreed that such a thing was possible. That such a normative formal approach could be taken in relation to learning objects. Knowledge can be too complex to always be able to be broken down into a fixed limit.

We shared ideas and put forward metaphors, philosophers and concepts. But in the end we had to agree to disagree since neither side could convince the other. The argument could have continued but we broke up for coffee.

During coffee we were no longer on different sides of the table but on neutral ground – the discussions relaxed but we remained in fundamental disagreement on whether knowledge could or could not be subdivided  – but we all agreed that it was a good argument. Once again the importance of the coffee break  was proven.

Posted on by mklang

Work Begins

Today the real work begins. We have installed ourself in a conference room and drawn the curtains. OK so I know this is the reason why we are in India but it does somehow feel wrong to ignore the country. The good news is that the SELF project is an exciting project and its going really well.

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Emerging Patterns

I cannot believe it! The &%#â?¬&%â?¬#&%â?¬#&%â?¬ web has been down since Friday. Once again proving that the technical support seems to be close to useless. Thus far in January the web has been down 20% of the time. Do we pay this people? If so – WHY? I would probably have a better level of service with blogger but what &%&#â?¬ would I do with my non-blog stuff.

Sorry about venting my frustration like this but I am incapable of understanding what the technical bods seem to be thinking about when they turn of the web before going off home for the weekend.

BAH!

Posted on by mklang

Train day 2

Yesterday included a six hour train ride from Stockholm and back again. The point was to go meet some people and organise my visa for the Indian trip next week. Today was another six hours on the train. This time it was off to Linköping to give a Creative Commons presentation. The journey was with Jonas �berg who was presenting the third draft of the GPLv3 which is about to be officially released in a matter of hours.

Interesting stuff and an enthusiastic audience made the brief stay in Linköping worthwhile. Unfortunately the last train home left at 8pm so we were pressed for time.

On the train home and I have just bugged Jonas to put his presentation online – download the pdf here.

Posted on by mklang

Databases and international protest

At an informal meeting of European Union ministers of justice and ministers of the interior Wolfgang Schäuble proposed

…that the Prüm Treaty be transposed into the legal framework of the EU. The treaty, which was signed by Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria and Spain in the town of Prüm in Germany in March 2006 provides for enhanced cross-border cooperation of the police and judicial authorities, especially with regard to combating terrorism, cross-border crime and illegal migration. The purpose of the treaty is not only to facilitate prosecution, but also to aid the crime prevention efforts of the authorities. (Heise Online – I added the bold)

So what? It sounds good, almost boring.

The whole point of this is to create a network of national databases and increase the exchange of information. Those who sign the treaty will give each other access to their DNA and fingerprint data.

Pointing to this “added value provided by the treaty” Mr. Schäuble spoke out in favor of adopting the system throughout Europe: “Our aim is to create a modern police information network for more effective crime control throughout Europe,” he said. Apart from allowing for cross-border police raids and patrols the treaty permits “the authorities to exchange information on traveling violent offenders, such as hooligans, in the context of major events (for example football matches, European Council meetings or other international summits) in order to prevent criminal acts.” (Heise Online – I added the bold)

So even though the database is originally for the prevention of “combating terrorism, cross-border crime and illegal migration” the database will also be used in preventing protesters in traveling to other countries. This is particularly interesting since the political level is now supra-national but the protesters will not be allowed to be.

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BSD license question

Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written and posted an interesting article on Groklaw. The article posits that this is a broad misconception about the freedoms granted by the BSD license. In particular that code licensed under the BSD is not re-licensable (after modifications to the code) under “closed source” licenses as commonly believed (article in pdf).

From the arguments presented four consequences may be drawn

(a) the BSD appears to require that modifications be distributed only under the terms of the BSD, and that this requirement therefore cascades down to subsequent generations of code;

(b) the license does not appear to permit the relicensing of BSD code under the terms of any other license, at least in so far as any restrictions in other licenses would seem not to be binding;

(c) there may be some scope for arguing that the term â??modificationâ?? to the code is restricted or limited in some fashion. However, as the license only permits redistribution of â??modificationsâ?? the BSD does not permit the redistribution of any derivative work which is not a modification;

(d) the BSD does not have a requirement for the distribution of source code. It is not clear whether this means there is a deficiency in the Open Source Definition.

Posted on by mklang