Reading

Made my day

Professor Conor Gearty writes in “Can Human Rights Survive?” (2006):

These kinds of issues are difficult but they are what set the ethical framework for the future. Books like that edited by Mathias Klang and Andrew Murray on Human Rights in the Digital Age, should be required reading for all those interested in the future good health of our subject. It is the future battlegrounds that Human Rights supporters should be identifying and occupying, not wasting valuable time and energy re-fighting old wars. (p 146)

That just about made my day. I really should just leave my work and drink coffee, feeling good about myself for the rest of the day. Why not the whole weekend…

Posted on by mklang

Fear and Courage

Naturally no one can live life through quotations but there are some quotations that kind of manage to capture a sentiment of importance. These also tend to stick in my mind – not that I remember the exact quote, more the general idea. While in Kalmar I came across a second hand bookshop and found a philosophical book on the topic of courage. I am looking forward to reading it.

One of the more curious quotes that I like is from Camilo Jose Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria

Sometimes one has frightening sensations of well-being, strong enough to move mountains; one must fight them courageously, as one would fight an enemy. And then, with the passage of time, they leave something like a drop of gall in ones heart…

Contentment is one of the more dangerous enemies that prevent our development. When we arrive in a situation of contentment we occasionally do not dare to take a risk that may help us develop. Not really sure about the “drop of gall” part.

Part of the problem is the fear of failure or the fear of losing out. But, to quote another writer, there is another way of looking at this problem:

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I’ll tell you a secret about fear: its an absolutist. With fear, its all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes like a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despots fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage’. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

This is from Salman Rushdie’s “The Moors Last Sigh” and it hits the exact point that the fear of fear is more serious than the thing we fear itself. Overcoming our fears are as Rushdie puts it not really a matter of being overly courageous but more a need to get on with our lives…

Posted on by mklang

Travel is a waiting game

Sitting in an airport looking at other people I realized that the whole thing with travel is all about the ability to wait. To make yourself relaxed and comfortable in unnatural, artificially priced environments. It’s easy to forget about this with all the exotic adventure propaganda being published.

Good travelers are not those who have stocked up on the latest air-sickness tablets and tourist-tummy pills but those who bring more than a magazine on a five hour flight, those who begin flights by politely ignoring people who are, in reality, sitting way way to close to each other. Seriously we don’t let people come this close unless they are family, lovers or medical staff.

Airport boredom can be relieved in many ways (one is blogging), work is another good method, reading, watching movies or simply counting the number of people who have white or red shoes. The only thing you don’t really want it is someone who is too bored to amuse themselves and therefore strike up conversations…

Posted on by mklang

Turkey tomorrow

Tomorrow I am off to Turkey to attend and teach on a course called Legal Aspects of the Information Society in Sile on the Black Sea. This is a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and to travel but there is one thing that really annoys me. Since I have just started on a new job I don’t really have the time to stay in Turkey. This means that I will not have time to explore Istanbul which is one of the cities that I have always wanted to explore.

Turkey, Istanbul, the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, Marmara Sea – all this evokes the exotic region to be explored. I have been totally fascinated by the region and its history since I read Michael Psellos‘ histories of the Byzantine emperors and lots of crusader literature. This fascination continued and I almost wrote my masters thesis in maritime law on the transportation of oil through the narrow straights of the Bosphorus. But in the end my thesis was on IT law – despite this my fascination remained.

Despite the fact that I will have no time to spend in Istanbul I cannot help myself. I have bought an Istanbul guidebook and I am reading Orhan Pamuk’s amazing book Istanbul –

Reading about a city which I will be crossing but not exploring is a peculiar form of masochism but I think the root lies in the desperate hope that somehow I will find time to see something of the city.

Posted on by mklang

For the children…

A recent AP-Ipsos poll in August showed that Americans don’t read much. One in four Americans did not read books at all. The poll shows that they tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious. While polls such as these may be interesting or indicative they are hardly the stuff of serious science.

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” (pdf) found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade.

So is reading important? Well you can find plenty of people who would argue that reading books is not an essential skill. But after looking at a video of Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen USA South Carolina I think that the most people would agree that reading is important.

She is attempting to address the issue of why most Americans cannot find their own country on a world map. I think her solution is to help the rest of the world to become just as dumb as Americans.

miss.jpg

Please avoid the temptation to make obvious blond jokes!

Update:

After her answer became an online & offline sensation Lauren Caitlin Upton was a guest on Tuesdays Today show and gave this answer:

Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t. And if the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn how to read maps better.

You can watch that video here.

Posted on by mklang

The Revolution is Now

The current edition of CTWatch Quarterly (August 2007) is themed The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure.

My only problem is when does a revolution stop being coming, approaching and imminent and actually appear to be here. The Open Access movement should not be discribed as a coming event. It is here and it is spreading. But never mind my splitting of terminological hairs just read the journal. Its table of contents includes an interesting array of articles and authors. It’s available both in html and in pdf.

 

The Shape of the Scientific Article in The Developing Cyberinfrastructure Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Next-Generation Implications of Open Access Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University
Web 2.0 in Science Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing
Reinventing Scholarly Communication for the Electronic Age J. Lynn Fink, University of California, San Diego
Philip E. Bourne, University of California, San Diego
Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory Carl Lagoze, Cornell University
Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web Tim Brody, University of Southampton, UK Les Carr, University of Southampton, UK Yves Gingras, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Chawki Hajjem, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, UK; Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Alma Swan, University of Southampton, UK; Key Perspectives
The Law as Cyberinfrastructure Brian Fitzgerald, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Kylie Pappalardo, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing John Wilbanks, Scientific Commons
Trends Favoring Open Access Peter Suber, Earlham College

Posted on by mklang

God Bless You

Ok – I will confess. Sometimes, only sometimes, I read spam. Not always and not all of it but enough. My reason for reading it is that I often find it fascinating. My favorite spam is not the helpful tips for member enlargement or the false degrees (even though the latter is kind of amusing considering how much time I have spent at university), no my favorite is the Nigerian 419*

Today I was reading one of these and was amused that people fall for these things. Naturally people do. I had a boss many, many years ago when I worked in a pet store who used to say:

Remember, people are not as stupid as you think – they are much stupider!

Words of wisdom from the bottom of the fish tank. Anyway badly written online scams amaze me. They make me think of the poor stupid saps who fall for them. Today for example I received an email from a Mr Harry Thomas, the Director of Operations for Barclays Bank in London. He naturally wanted me to email him all sorts of information about my account:

Do update me back in Details so that we can proceed further how to Transfer your funds Directly to your Bank Account, and you will have to come Down to our Bank so that you can make some Signing so that your funds will be wired to you.

Your Reply is Needed.

Beyond the bad grammar and the fake email address (who would fall for: barclaysbankmails@i.ua) – the thing that really gave it all away was the way in which he ended the letter

God Bless you.

No Way! A bank was all of a sudden concerned about my spiritual well-being 🙂

Obviously I should not read spam. But I do feel a desire to correct there most glowing errors. I don’t know why – its just that a pathetic attempt to do anything kind of cries out for help.

—-
*Online scammers pretending to be deposed presidents or corrupt oil company employees often contact people in an attempt to establish contact for a future scam. The reason this is called a Nigerian 419 is that many of these scammers were traditionally based in Nigeria and 419 is the fraud section of the criminal code.

Posted on by mklang

Toothbrushes, Manuals and Design

Most people seem to dislike manuals. Some dislike them because they are too technical, some are just too lazy or eager to read, while others feel that technology should be intuitive enough to be understood without the need of a manual. I must admit that I lean towards the latter argument.

But sometimes I like to read manuals. In particular I enjoy reading the labels on simple things. It amuses me to think that some large company has actually employed someone to write a text for a simple everyday object. And also others to translate the text. It is, in my opinion, a good example of how we are over-stressing the importance of design. Design is important, but it should only be noticed when it is absent not spoken about constantly.

Back to the texts on the back of everyday objects. When I changed my toothbrush I could not stop myself from reading the text on the back:

Experience a whole new dimension of freshness with the cool textured tongue freshener on the back of the brush head that powers away odour-causing bacteria.

Multi-height, multi-angle bristles penetrate deeply between teeth to clean away bacteria and plaque.

What language! What heavy sentences – you can almost hear the music in the background. Heavy classical or maybe even rock and roll. The toothbrush itself is highly designed to fit ergonomically in the hand. It has bright (dare I say fresh?) colors. This object has been subject to a serious extreme makeover, product development and marketing hype. It just want’s o make me shout out loud:

Hey guys get over it – It’s just a toothbrush!

Posted on by mklang

A room of one's own (in Lund)

When Virginia Wolf wrote the long essay A Room of One’s Own in 1928 (published 1929) it was a call for the need for authors to have a physical and mental space within which they would have the possibility and acceptance to create. It was also a criticism against the male dominated society and the way in which women were denied such a room. Naturally there is an online version under CC license – it is well worth reading.

Since I will be beginning a new job at the University of Lund in September I really need to find such a room (in Lund).

So if anyone knows where I can rent a room or an apartment in Lund – please let me know.

Posted on by mklang

Harvard Thesis Repository

With so many discussions on Free Culture, Open Access and the problems connected with making academic publishing available outside academia it is surprising how few good places there are to find thesis’ online.

This is why I was happy when Peter Murray-Rust pointed me towards the Harvard College Thesis Repository (a project of Harvard College Free Culture).

Here Harvard students make their senior theses accessible to the world, for the advancement of scholarship and the widening of open access to academic research.

Too many academics still permit publishers to restrict access to their work, needlessly limitingâ??cutting in half, or worseâ??readership, research impact, and research productivity. For more background, check out our op-ed article in The Harvard Crimson.

If you’ve written a thesis in Harvard College, you’re invited to take a step toward open access right here, by uploading your thesis for the world to read. (If you’re heading for an academic career, this can even be a purely selfish moveâ??a first taste of the greater readership and greater impact that comes with open access.)
If you’re interested in what the students at (ahem) the finest university in the world have to say at the culmination of their undergraduate careers, look around.

The FAQ explains much of the process. It is also good to see that they are applying Creative Commons Attribution License

Q. What permissions do I have to grant to free my thesis?

A. To make sure your thesis is always available for scholars to build on, we ask that you give everyone permission to do the things you’d want to be able to do with a scholarly work you liked: download the work, read it, keep copies, share it with other people, and adapt it into fresh works. The specific legal permission we ask for is the Creative Commons Attribution License, the same one required by the world’s leading biology journal PLoS Biology and the other journals of the Public Library of Science.

My only (small) complaint is that I wish the repository was clearer in showing the license terms for their content. I only found it in the faq. Normally I would not bother reading the faq. To increase the usability of the site the terms should be on the download page and preferably on the essay file.
Despite this I think this is an excellent initiative and I would hope that the fact that Harvard has taken a step such as this would work as an incentive for other universities to follow suite.

Posted on by mklang