The other day, I lamented the fact that any new idea I developed about museums apparently was preempted by Nina Simon (or so it felt when I read she had already suggested the notion of the ’slow museum’). I felt like Professor Otto Lidenbrock who exclaimed “Arne Saknussem, always Arne Saknussem”, every time he succeeded to reach a new outpost on his way through the underworld and found that the Icelandic medieval alchemist had already been there (in my favourite Jules Verne novel A Journey to the Centre of the Earth; now in a new translation with a scholarly introduction by Jane Smiley).
Well, my Lidenbrockian feeling of beeing scooped has now shifted object of transference, from Nina Simon to Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, who has just opened, of all things, an art exhibition on steampunk.
Well? Didn’t we have a discussion about steampunk in museums on this blog in early September? And now Jim opens an exhibition about it!? “Parallel trajectories, as usual”, Jim replies when confronted with this remarkable coincidence.
But of course he’s right — and generous, since we all know that exhibitions take months, sometimes years to prepare. So Jim and his colleagues were there long before us. Jim Bennett, always Jim Bennett.
Anyway, the new exhibit at the Museum of History of Science in Oxford is titled “STEAMPUNK — the first museum exhibition of steampunk art”. It opened Tuesday and will run until 21 February, 2010. See further: www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/steampunk, www.steampunkmuseumexhibition.blogspot.com, and www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/broadsheet9.pdf
Can’t wait to see it.
Excellent article from the Internet Archive on the Orphan Works issue, and whether Google is going to grab the role of Superman-to-the-rescue, and by the way make money from it, or if a more traditional and kosher legislative solution is needed.
“At a Computer History Museum event last week in Silicon Valley, [Google's Dan]Clancy suggested that the best way to address the orphan books issue is for Congress to pass legislation, and that Google is not only supportive of this effort, but is pushing for it.
“Well, we’d like to take Google at their word and hope that they live up to that commitment. And we hope that they do it in a way that is honest and forthright, not self-serving and diversionary. At the Internet Archive, we believe that the right way to gain access to orphan books is to not break the law while you are doing it, and to work through Congress to ensure that the people’s voice in copyright is articulated the way the system was designed to work, not through a private, secret deal that we’re being assured is in our best interests by Google. For the browsing, lending, and vending of digital books, the Archive is seeking an open and competitive market with appropriate safeguards for readers, not a monopoly bookstore created by the biggest online advertising company in the world.
“No one elected Google to write copyright law for America.
And the Author’s Guild and American Association of Publishers simply do not accurately represent the diverse cross-section of those communities. If Google is really interested in honoring that legislative process, let’s acknowledge that Congress is the path that our government chose to make copyright law and codify its exceptions — instead of crafting secret deals through class action settlements. ”
http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/08/04/google-at-their-word/
Share:BioSystems — the blog of a new venture-capital supported biotech upstart Plectix that specializes in representing cellular signalling — reinforces my impression over the last couple of years that privately employed scientists too can use the blog medium to say increasingly interesting things about what used to be the turf of public university scholars in the social sciences and humanities (’science studies‘ and ‘philosophy of science‘). For example, last December, Isha Antani addressed the perennial problem of the trade-off between competition and co-operation among life scintists.
BBC and Neil Gaiman Launch Collaborative Storytelling Experiment on Twitter — This week the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) teamed up with Neil Gaiman (author of Neverwhere and other latter day science fiction and fantasy classics) and thousands of Twitter followers to draft what will become an original audiobook. Gaiman tweeted the first line yesterday and invited followers to continue the story with replies to @BBCAA and hashtag #bbcawdio. When approximately 1000 tweets are logged, editors at the BBC will compile and edit the accumulated tweets into an audiobook script and recording.
If you’ve wondered what an academic trying to podcast while on Google Wave might sound like, you need listen no farther than the latest Digital Campus podcast. In addition to an appraisal of Wave, we cover the FTC ruling on bloggers accepting gifts (such as free books from academic presses), the great Kindle-on-campus experiment, and (of course) another update on the Google Books (un)settlement. Joining Tom, Mills, and me is another new irregular, Lisa Spiro. She’s the intelligent one who’s paying attention rather than muttering while watching Google waves go by. [Subscribe to this podcast.]
Longtime readers of this blog may remember that one of my first posts examined the potential role for APIs (application programming interfaces) in the humanities. It’s also been a long-running theme in this space that APIs can play a critical role in digital research and tool-building. So I’m very much looking forward to this weekend’s workshop on APIs for the digital humanities in Toronto sponsored by NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. Like others, I’ll be tweeting the conference @dancohen using the hashtag #apiworkshop.
I’m currently on paternal leave with 1-year old Johanna — which means that my blogging activities are structured after her sleeping schedule. And to save time we share lunch table and working desk:
While Dan is distracted and rendered unintelligent by his first experience with Google Wave, Mills, Tom, and newcomer Lisa Spiro manage to have a cogent discussion of whether Wave will have any (positive) impact on education, update the ongoing Google Books saga, examine Chrome within Internet Explorer, highlight the Kindle underperforming on campus, debate the FTC’s ruling on bloggers accepting gifts (including university presses giving free books to bloggers), and look at advance of net neutrality. Picks of the podcast include a wiki for seeing into the future, an assessment of collegiate internet use, tools for Twitter and RSS, and a time-waster of a blog.
Links mentioned on the podcast:
Horizon Report wiki
Everyday life, online: U.S. college students’ use of the Internet
Twitter Feed
RSS Digest (WordPress Plugin)
Futility Closet blog
Running time: 43:45
Download the .mp3
I received an invitation to add a photo of a “TRAFF-O-MATIC” detector cover to a Flick pool about O-Matic Mania. Looking at the pool of photos begs the question where “o-matic” as a suffix came from.
Last Friday, Medical Museion participated, as usual, in the annual Copenhagen Night of Culture. We had 1326 visitors — a little fewer than last year — passing through the entrance door to view our permanent and temporary exhibitions. The decrease in the number of visitors is not a bad thing though — because it gave us better time to speak with them as individuals. Below are a few images from Friday night (taken from Bente’s post in Danish on Museionblog, therefore the Danish captions):
ArchivesNext on Modes of Social Media Interaction — Kate Theimer at ArchivesNext has an excellent post detailing four approaches archives and other cultural heritage institutions can take in inviting users to interact with their collections via social media. The four interactive modes or “places” are described according to their relative openness and the kinds of social behaviors they explicitly or implicity support, the “social contracts created by them.” Written partially in response to some worries I voiced about Footnote.com’s use of social media in connection with its NARA Holocaust collection, Kate’s provides a much more nuanced, much more firmly grounded analysis of the question than I could hope to do. I’m eagerly awaiting her promised thoughts on the broader issue of NARA’s private digitization partnerships, the other issue I raised in an embarrasingly off hand manner in the same post.
Email: Dead or Alive? — An article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The End of Email” is making the rounds this morning. The piece argues that social media services stand ready to displace email as the “king of communications.” Not so fast, argue many other observers, including Dwight Sliverman of the Houston Chronicle, who points out that 54 percent of companies still ban the use of social media. Indeed, in general the commentary on the story is better and more balanced than the story itself, which—with its hyperbolic title—seems designed more as link bait than as thoughful analysis.
Trust the Cloud? Better Backup — The interwebs were alight this weekend with news of how T-Mobile and Microsoft lost data their Sidekick smartphone users had stored with the companies in “the cloud.” According to T-Mobile “the likelihood of a successful [recovery] is extremely low.” I use Google’s cloud services as the primary location for all my email, contacts, and calendar data. I am downloading Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Sunbird as I type and will be backing up everything locally anon.
During a discussion of e-book readers on a recent episode of Digital Campus, I made a comparison between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPod which I think more or less holds up. Just as Apple revolutionized a fragmented, immature digital music player market in the early 2000s with an elegant, intuitive new device (the iPod) and a seamless, integrated, but closed interface for using it (iTunes)—and in doing so managed very nearly to corner that market—so too did Amazon hope to corner an otherwise stale e-book market with the introduction last year of its slick, integrated, but closed Kindle device and wireless bookstore. No doubt Amazon would be more than happy with the eighty percent of the e-book market that Apple now enjoys of the digital music player market.
In recent months, however, there have been a slew of announcements that seem to suggest that Amazon will not be able to get the same kind of jump on the e-book market that Apple got on the digital music market. Several weeks ago, Sony announced that it was revamping its longstanding line of e-book readers with built-in wifi (one of the big selling points of the Kindle) and support for the open EPUB standard (which allows it to display Google Books). Now it appears that Barnes & Noble is entering the market with its own e-book reader, and in more recent news, that its device will run on the open source Android mobile operating platform.
If these entries into the e-book market are successful, it may foretell of a more open future for e-books than has befallen digital music. It would also suggest that the iPod model of a closed, end-to-end user experience isn’t the future of computing, handheld or otherwise. Indeed, as successful and transformative as it is, Apple’s iPhone hasn’t been able to achieve the kind of dominance of the “superphone” market that the iPod did of the music player market, something borne out by a recent report by Gartner, which has Nokia’s Symbian and Android in first and second place by number of handsets by 2012 with more than fifty percent market share. This story of a relatively open hardware and operating system combination winning out over a more closed, more controlled platform is the same one that played out two decades ago when the combination of the PC and Windows won out over the Mac for leadership of the personal computing market. If Sony, Barnes & Noble, and other late entrants into the e-book game finish first, it will have shown the end-to-end iPod experience to be the exception rather than the rule, much to Amazon’s disappointment I’m sure.
ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for example, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.
Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A new study by psychologists at Purdue University now lends more weight to this, by providing evidence that success rate in American football field goals affects how the size of the goal posts is perceived.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Last week, I was part of a group of amateur astronomers who attempted to capture NASA’s LCROSS mission impact from Chaco Canyon. As I mentioned in a post early last week, I first tried my hand at astrophotography the weekend before the event.
The photograph below, we taken just after the spacecraft impact early in the morning on October 7th. Unfortunately, the event was not visible from any of our telescopes. (You’ll have to visit NASA’s LCROSS site to see the effects of the impact.)
A full-resolution version of this image is available on Ideum’s Flickr site.
In the last two years, the Office of History at the National Institutes of Health has grown and changed into one of the major players in studies of contemporary history of biomedicine. In 2007 the Office got a new director, Robert Martensen who has a combined medical and historical background; last year, historian of 20th century cancer research, David Cantor, was recruited as Deputy Director and Senior Research Historian; and not long time ago they launched a new website (pretty NIH’ish look, but fills the necessary informative function well).
Martensen and Cantor are also expanding the postdoc programme. Currently, seven postdocs are associated with the Office — Eric Boyle (history of alternative and complementary medicine at NIH); Todd Olszewski (history of risk factors in terms of cholesterol and cardiovascular health); Laura Stark (history of NIH policies in ethics of human subject research); Doogab Yi (history of NIH research in cancer viruses); Chin Jou (history of obesity); Brian Casey (NIH, neurophysiology, and criminal culpability); Sharon Ku (nanotechnology and cancer).
And now they looking for #8, with a nicely vague mandate:
The Fellow will conduct research on topics of their choice under the supervision of senior staff of the Office of NIH History and assisted by contacts in the relevant Institute(s). The Fellow will be expected to participate in historical activities on campus, including presentation of one or more seminars and lectures.
Deadline 31. december — more info here.
(@FTC – I received this book from the publisher)
Richard Brandt’s new book outlines the rise to success of Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the Google founders. The title of the book is, however, misleading. It provides no real insight into the psychology or radical thinking of the subjects, but is rather a flattering account of their trajectory coupled with a sympathetic account of their origins. Missing is any comparative analysis of their competitors, or any criticism of business decisions that would appear un-brilliant (like trying to sell their baby to the first taker before realizing what they were really onto) – missing too is one of my favourite topics: survivor bias
The positive and uncritical approach to the subjects leads to some light weight accounts of their success. For example, page 170 reports:
Google has figured out how to make money off all these new forms of entertainment, while every competitor is struggling with that issue.
Considering YouTube, the first statement is hard to swallow (read technovia’s summary of the $470 million that the site will lose this year). Considering the second, plenty of other companies are making money from social sites, blogging platforms and so on.
One of the distinct advantages of being so slow to finish a book for review is the benefit of reading the reviews of others. Strangely, I can’t find the correct page on Amazon – the page I link to above is to the book with the additional text (Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese Edition). This page has only 1 review which is a collection of review snippets provided by the author.
Traffick’s review has this interesting paragraph:
As someone who has watched the ad auction and the search products, in particular, emerge, I'm struck once again by just how far behind and how dismissive Yahoo and Microsoft were at various stages of innovation, on key areas like how the paid search auction worked, but also, in how much to prioritize search and paid search in overall company priorities.
This seems to be missing the innovation that was going on at Overture, well known to be the inspiration behind quite a bit of Google’s approach. As TechUser.Net summarizes:
Google always had excellent search engine indexing technology, but Google's search technology by itself never generated profits for the company. Google's profitability comes from its search technology combined with text ads and an ad placement mechanism that allows advertisers to bid for the placement of their ads (bid-for-placement mechanism). From a profitability perspective, the bid-for-placement mechanism is as valuable as Google's indexing technology. In the absence of the bid-for-placement mechanism, ad pricing can at best be inefficient. The bid-for-placement mechanism frees up extensive resources that would otherwise be required to set ad prices, and it allows Google to charge ad sponsors in proportion to the value Google is delivering to the sponsors.
The bid-for-placement mechanism was pioneered by Overture, a paid search specialist company. In July 2001, the US patent office issued Overture a patent covering the mechanism. Patent 6,269,361 also known as the '361 patent was bad news for Google: it threatened Google's core business model. It was imperative for Google to have access to the '361 patent, but Google never managed to negotiate a satisfactory licensing agreement with Overture. Consequently, in April 2002 Overture sued Google over patent infringement.
Brandt has (page 96):
A company called GoTo.com (later renamed Overture) had come up with the idea of an online Yellow Pages system, where users would type in search words and be taken to advertisers who bid to have their ads appear when people searched for those words. (In 2002, after Google started showing the way, Microsoft and yahoo both considered buying Overture. Yahoo won the bid).
Silicon Beat has very positive things to say about Brandt at the expense of Janet Lowe’s Google Speaks.
As a result, Brandt gets a number of things right. Most notably Brandt, manages to avoid easy cynicism, which is the first trap of any newbie reporter or book writer who takes on the company as a subject. And as a long-time technology writer, he knows the difference between cloud computing and client computing and doesn’t let technical details get in the way of his story.
In contrast, the newly published “Google Speaks,” by Janet Lowe, appears to be based almost entirely on other articles, which led the veteran author to such bizarre assertions as the patently wrong claim that Flickr was bought by Google and the more puzzling statement that Hewlett Packard once owned the Altavista search engine. (Flickr was bought by Yahoo, and Altavista was created by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was sold to Compaq in 1999, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2002. In 2003 Altavista was sold to Overture which was then bought by Yahoo. So Lowe is technical correctly about the chain of ownership while simultaneously appearing totally confused about which facts are relevant in Silicon Valley’s complicated corporate histories.)
Well, now I’ve read a good number of reviews of the book (by searching for it on Google, of course) and the strange thing is, like the book on Google, I can’t find anything but glowing, uncritical comments. With Occam’s razor in hand, I have to assume that this is something to do with me, not the book! Perhaps I’m the wrong audience, or perhaps I took too long to read the thing. At any rate, I’ll make two final comments. The first is that I’d recommend John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture for those interested in a (slightly dated) account of how we got here. The second is the final paragraph from Brandt’s book:
With Google and their sudden wealth at their disposal, Larry and Sergey now have enormous power to [change the world], and they will continue to do so for decades to come. They’re like Harry Potter after he discovered he was a wizard and got his wand. you can expect great things from them.
Yup.
