# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

[It's] fascinating to find that many powerful capabilities of Firefox 1.0 are still difficult to find and little known. For example, typing the following strings into Firefox's Address Bar (which the new browser calls the Location Bar) and pressing Enter brings up a wide variety of novel applets

The LIS faculty at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa lost teaching and research materials in the devastating flood that hit Hamilton Library on October 30, 2004. Below you will find the names of individual faculty members, the materials they are seeking, and their contact information. If you can provide any of the resources they are seeking, please contact them directly. Thank you for your assistance.

Look, I’ll make this very simple for everyone. If you’re trying to figure out what browsers to support (or not) in terms of layout consistency on a given site, then the answer is very easy. Whatever the site’s access logs tell you. End. Of.Story!

[RSS] can more generally be interpreted as a kind of network connector—or glue technology—between disparate applications. Syndication and annotation are the order of the day and are beginning to herald a new immediacy in communications and information provision. This paper describes the growing uptake of RSS within science publishing as seen from Nature Publishing Group's (NPG)

This type of control is particularly insidious because there is no panopticon. Control is diffuse and we can't locate - or fix - responsibility and accountability long enough to affect change. And it's particularly dangerous because it allows each of us to play the victim of an imaginary structure.

Plone is an out-of-the-box ready content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope Application server. It requires minimal effort to set up, is deeply flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities and intranets.

Abstract: A community computer network facilitates civic participation by providing pervasive local resources online and by connecting people to local communication and discussion channels, public and non-profit organization leaders and members, and many other civic resources. We present findings from longitudinal data (two rounds between 2001 and 2002) of a stratified random survey of 100 households in a mature community network, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). We offer exploratory and confirmatory analyses, including a ‘civic effects’ model, that show demographic characteristics (education, age) and psychological factors (extroversion) explain staying informed, collective efficacy, group membership, activism, and using the Internet for civic and political purposes. The model further explains differences in respondents' involvement in local issues once they go online. Informed activists with multiple group memberships become more involved in local issues once going online, whereas informed non-activists become less involved once online. Our study suggests that in order to play a constructive role in creating a more civil society, community networks should explicitly pursue strategies that encourage community activism. One way to do this, given the strong role of association membership in activism, is for ISPs to offer bundled standard Internet applications at low cost to non-profit community groups (e.g. email for leadership, online discussion for members, web space). Community networks should also promote and support the use by local groups of innovative tools for non-experts, such as easy collaborative web-based tools for information production and collaboration.

Mr. Sukharev has tracked the Russian outsourcing boom of the last two years, one he hopes will mirror the success of India's technology parks and outsourcing. He has little fear of the backlash in the United States against offshoring.

[...]

"I had a meeting recently with the U.S. deputy secretary of commerce, and he said offshoring is good for the United States," he said. "I think it's bad for small groups of people who suffer a lot, particularly outsourcing of white-collar jobs. But the Democrats made it a major campaign pillar, which was simply populist. The world is too simply about globalization now. Outsourcing is unstoppable."

"The first test in almost two years of the planned multi-billion dollar US anti-missile shield has failed."

"The ... Construx Knowledge Areas (CKAs) ... are Construx's way of organizing the software engineering universe. The CKAs are based on the SWEBOK knowledge areas."

"Harvard Business School has just celebrated the 10th anniversary of its Initiative on Social Enterprise, a program that aims to prepare M.B.A.'s like Mr. Kuziev and Mr. Kanalosh to manage nonprofit enterprises, oversee philanthropic activities or start scrappy companies that attack social ills."

"They have been told they were fired for national security reasons that remain secret. When their lawyer requested the documents used to justify the action, he was told none existed. When he asked for copies of the agency's policies relating to the background checks, he received a generic personnel handbook."

"This guide is the third patterns release in the pattern & practices series from Microsoft. Building on the application patterns presented in Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET, this guide applies patterns to solve integration problems within the enterprise."

Lenovo will take ownership of IBM "Think" trademark family, including its ThinkPad notebook brand and its ThinkCenter desktop line.

"The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect."

Pricing ranges from $59.95 per month for five seats to the corporate rate of $2,500 per month for 500 users. As expected, there’s no ramp-up time, nor any IT involvement, making the service ideal for ad hoc project teams. As administrator, in less than a minute I created user accounts and notified individual participants, who could immediately access the site...

"Something keeps directing me to wonder if this question of "not enough time" is a common-sense answer that we are using because the real issue is more problematic?"

"In the culture I grew up in you did your work and you did not put your arm around it to stop other people from looking—you took the earliest possible opportunity to make knowledge available."

"I can afford spending quite a lot of time blogging only because it's so integrated with my regular activities that it's not an add-on anymore."

"So after an hour of talking about Kant and Bentham and Rawls—and tying this back to some professional ethical dilemmas from my own experience—I turned to the topic of plagiarism, and what was an appropriate way to deal with it.

I was blown away by the response. In retrospect, I don’t know why. Students seemed to think that a warning or a slap on the wrist was an appropriate way to deal with plagiarism. Why?"