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22 Oct 09

THE ELECTRONIC BOOK BURNING by Alan Kaufman (Evergreen Review No. 120, October 2009)

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book e-book

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

13 Oct 09

Why don’t scientists share data? « O'Really?

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data datasharing science_2.0 o'really

- Some funding bodies do not adequately support the research projects they sponsor in sharing data properly, both before and after publication.
- Many scientists lack awareness, incentives and knowledge of data sharing which can be compounded by a fear of being “scooped”.
- Public databases, often a more natural home for data than traditional publications, are frequently undervalued by a publish or perish culture [6].
- Traditional scientific publishing is frequently (and ironically) a really inadequate method for sharing data. Important data and metadata routinely gets damaged or destroyed in the process of publishing [7].
- The technical infrastructure for long term data sharing either does not exist or is not understood by those who should be providing and using it. This can lead to empty archive syndrome.

11 Oct 09

The Colbert Report

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Colbert information knowledge_management France absolutisme

we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand
While the extreme availability of information today should presumably have highlighted its relative paucity in earlier periods, historians--most notably Ann Blair--have in fact extended the concept of "information overload" all the way back to the sixteenth century, arguing that while we now associate the phenomenon with the internet, the printing press had a comparable effect.
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- As Francis Bacon famously remarked: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, with diligence and attention."
- anyone who identifies Wikipedia with the end of civilization should be reassured to learn that early modern Europeans already possessed an impressive arsenal of intellectual crutches and shortcuts, some of them quite dubious.
- Ann Blair has shown that many of the greatest Renaissance thinkers had no compunction about attacking their books with scissors, cutting and pasting what they considered the crucial passages into commonplace books or card files for easy reference.
- "The ministry is a world of paper," wrote Saint-Just at the height of the Terror. "I don't know how Rome and Egypt governed without this resource." Saint-Just also identified the problems that arose as a result: "Government is impossible with too many words . . . the demon of writing makes war on us, and government stops." In short, early modern government needed information management just as much as early modern scholarship did.
- the attempt by the French monarchy under Louis XIV to establish a new sort of political pre-eminence over its large, diverse, and notoriously fractious nation: what historians today call the project of absolutism. In this process, Soll argues convincingly, officials began consciously to treat the generation, the control, and the management of information as a central instrument of power.
- Colbert, as Soll shows, took inspiration from the humanist scholars who longed to create a usable universal library, but he sought to direct his own information management system toward the single goal of strengthening the French monarchy. He would not collect information in general, but information of use in governing. And instead of making it available to all interested readers, he would hoard it as a valuable commodity, deploying it publicly only when it served the purpose of the state.
- Colbert brought together two very different European traditions: not just the forms of information management developed in the humanist Republic of Letters, but also the reporting and accounting systems developed by Europe's great merchant houses.
- In his early years, this mercantile background brought Colbert a great deal of scorn, both from the grand aristocrats who dominated the French state and the humanist scholars who advised them. They mocked his vulgar manners, his bourgeois dress (especially his "merchant's collar"), and his literary ignorance.
- While treating Colbert as a sort of glorified servant, Mazarin nonetheless made him his principal accountant and trusted adviser, and then, most crucially, his librarian. The cardinal possessed the largest and best-kept library in France, which would become the core of the royal library, and thus the direct ancestor of today's Bibliothèque Nationale.
- Since the Middle Ages, the French monarchy had allowed layer after layer of institutions, laws, and practices to accumulate, often in competition with each other, and each possessing their own royally guaranteed privileges and responsibilities.
- In this context, the single most valuable sort of information for the government concerned precedents.
- If the crown controlled the sources of information on such questions, it could resolve disputes in its own favor without incurring the charges of arbitrary rule and despotism that might destroy confidence in the system altogether.
- In the 1660s, he began to train, and send throughout the country, a cadre of "professional state observers" to put together what amounted to a political fact book of France: population numbers; information on land holdings, regulations and laws; sketches of important personalities; data on economic activity.
- look at . . . its situation, its military forces, the number of its peoples, the greatness of the state, the number and size of cities, towns, and villages, the quantity of the peoples that compose the whole; the form of State government, and if it is aristocratic . . . of the names and status of noble families that have taken or will take part in governing the Republic; their different functions; their general and particular councils; who represents the State,
  
  in whom the sovereign power lies and who resolves peace and war, who makes laws; etc . . . the suffrages collected and the results taken and pronounced; the particular councils for the militia, the admiralty, justice, for the city and for the rest of the State; the laws and the customs under which they live; in what consist the militias meant to guard the main square. . . . Visit the public works, maritime and on ground, all the palaces, public houses, and generally all that is remarkable.
- Not surprisingly, Colbert's long-term goal proved impossible to realize. Soll defines it as the idea that "all knowledge, formal and practical, could be used together in one archival system to understand and master the material world." Colbert could no more complete this system than the Renaissance humanists could complete their ideal universal library.
- In 1683, after Colbert's sudden death (probably from a kidney stone), the king dismantled the system, and spread the responsibilities of information collecting and management among different ministries.
- Yet Colbert did accomplish a great deal. He bought whole libraries and archives, and by the time of his death, the royal library had tripled in size, housing some 36,000 books and 10,500 manuscripts. His aides produced by far the most systematic and detailed descriptions of the country ever attempted, and for the first time in history the "nation" of France began to come into focus as a social unity that could be managed and transformed by political action. Colbert trained a cadre of talented officials to implement all these projects. He also enlisted some of the most gifted intellectuals of the day to help, including Charles Perrault, the famous author of fairy tales, and the academician Jean Chapelain. And he made excellent use of the information that he harvested, particularly against the principal sources of domestic resistance to the king's absolutist project: the parlements and the Catholic church. In 1682 he deployed his vast erudition to ensure wide support for measures subjecting the church to an unprecedented degree of state control.
- Colbert also worked to restrict the public flow of information, and here he set particularly long-lasting precedents. He made secrecy his byword, and insisted that no one outside government had any right to a knowledge of its workings--particularly its financial workings. Soll depicts him at work ensuring that no Paris printer could learn Greek or Latin without official approval, so that potentially seditious classical scholarship would remain under close surveillance. He shows Colbert striving to suppress Richard Simon's pioneering critical treatment of the Old Testament--one of the first attempts to treat Scripture as a historical text--and promoting the idea that "history should serve only to conserve the splendor of the King's enterprises." While Louis XIV abandoned other elements of Colbert's information system, he happily retained all of these.
- What Galileo and Newton strove for in natural science, and Hobbes and Montesquieu in political science, Colbert, we now see, pursued in the less glorious but still vital realm of management and paperwork.
- Following the French historian Roger Chartier, Soll suggests that the more the absolute monarchy became associated with secrecy, the more its opponents deployed the banner of "publicity" to resist it, seeking to promote both the free circulation of information and free debate about what that information meant. The antithesis of Colbert's philosophy of state secrecy came in the visions of a public sphere of free, rational, critical debate developed in the eighteenth century by writers such as Malesherbes, Condorcet, and Kant. As Soll astutely points out, this dialectical relationship between secrecy and publicity makes the state a much more important actor in the development of the early modern public sphere than most of its historians (who have principally studied the institutions of the sphere itself, such as salons and coffee houses) have recognized.
- "Even for the most open of democracies," he writes, "the culture of state secrecy is necessary and potent, but at the same time, in its very essence, perverse and dangerous." True enough, but while such sentences conjure up images of a malevolent Dick Cheney,
  the true modern heirs of Colbert's information system did not work in the office of the American vice president, but in Hitler's Chancellery, in Stalin's Kremlin, and in the East German Ministry of State Security, infamously known as the Stasi. It was in the bulging files that the Stasi insanely tried to compile on each and every East German citizen, enlisting a substantial proportion of the population to spy on the rest (and each other), that Colbert's dream of encyclopedic information came closest to realization. Since the collapse of communism, the spirit of Colbertism lingers on in such places as Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran. And it is in such places that dissidents are now deploying the tools of the current information revolution, from e-mail to Facebook to Twitter, to establish a new public sphere in defiance of state secrecy.
- What distinguishes democracy from authoritarian rule, on the level of information systems, is that in democracy such systems have the double purpose of informing the state about its citizens and its citizens about the state.
- The mercantile perspective the minister brought to bear on statecraft and scholarship was, despite the mirage of universal knowledge it came bound up with, deeply utilitarian. When trying to understand and to evaluate the information that he so assiduously collected and organized, Colbert applied a single clear criterion: its practical use-value to the French state.
- Colbert may have been a quintessential figure of the Old Regime in his attachment to royal power and noble privilege, but in his utilitarian and empirically minded way of thinking he was nothing less than a precursor of the Enlightenment. Soll notes that the great Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert made reference to Colbert no less than 143 times.
- How does our relationship to formal knowledge change when we do not read through a book from start to finish, submitting ourselves to its logic and authority--when we impose our own organizational scheme on it through sophisticated forms of note-taking and the use of reference guides? The suddenness and completeness of the shift from one form of reading to another should not be exaggerated, but the phenomenon still has clear importance to the development of what we call, however imperfectly, modernity. The still more radical challenge to reading posed by the electronic dissemination of texts likewise promises, in the long run, to have profound effects on our broader intellectual universe.

21 Sep 09

Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science

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science_2.0 scholarly_communication

when Robert Hooke discovered his law in 1676, he published it as an anagram, “ceiiinossssttuv”, which he revealed two years later as the Latin “ut tensio, sic vis”, meaning “as the extension, so the force”. This ensured that if someone else made the same discovery, Hooke could reveal the anagram and claim priority, thus buying time in which he alone could build upon the discovery.
How could you measure the different sorts of contributions a scientist can make on a blog – outreach, education, and research? These are not easy questions to answer. Yet they must be answered before scientific blogging will be accepted as a valuable professional scientific contribution.
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- “Work. Finish. Publish.”
- From the outside, scientists currently appear puzzlingly slow to adopt many online tools.
- In 1999, Garry Kasparov, the greatest chessplayer of all time, played and eventually won a game of chess against a “World Team” which decided its moves by the votes of thousands of chessplayers, many rank amateurs; instead of the easy victory he expected, he got the most challenging game of his career, a game he called “the greatest game in the history of chess”.
- there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments
- In April 2008, Cameron Neylon, a chemist from the University of Southampton, used FriendFeed messaging to post a request for assistance in building molecular models. Pretty quickly Pawel Szczesny replied, and said he could help out.
- The contrast between the science comment sites and the success of the amazon.com reviews is stark.
- Nature’s 2006 trial of open commentary on papers undergoing peer review at Nature. The trial was not a success.
- making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services.
- Wikipedia is a second example where scientists have missed an opportunity to innovate online.
- The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.
- In April 2008, Cameron Neylon, a chemist from the University of Southampton, used FriendFeed messaging to post a request for assistance in building molecular models. Pretty quickly Pawel Szczesny replied, and said he could help out.
- Einstein’s greatest contribution to science was his theory of gravity, often called the general theory of relativity. He worked on and off on this theory between 1907 and 1915, often running into great difficulties. By 1912, he had come to the astonishing conclusion that our ordinary conception of geometry, in which the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, is only approximately correct, and a new kind of geometry is needed to correctly describe space and time. This was a great surprise to Einstein, and also a great challenge, since such geometric ideas were outside his expertise. Fortunately for Einstein and for posterity, he described his difficulties to a mathematician friend, Marcel Grossman. Grossman said that many of the ideas Einstein needed had already been developed by the mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It took Einstein three more years of work, but Grossman was right, and this was a critical point in the development of general relativity.

04 Sep 09

Le Figaro - France : L'ordinateur n'a pas réussi son entrée à l'école

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école TIC pédagogie

Premier constat, les collégiens se servent de leur ordinateur à 80 ou 90 % pour des activités ludiques, la raison principale étant que 6 professeurs sur 10 ne donnent pas de devoirs à la maison. Jeux pendant l'étude, téléchargement de films pornos… : la charte d'utilisation signée en début d'année se révèle une faible barrière. Quant aux recherches sur Internet, elles sont rarissimes.
«cela vient du fait qu'aucun professeur ne se sent concerné par l'éducation à l'information, l'analyse des sources… Et ce n'est pas une heure passée au CDI (centre de documentation) de temps en temps qui suffira.»
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- le discours des enseignants sur l'usage pédagogique des nouvelles technologies. Ils ne sont que 45 % à estimer que l'outil offre de nouvelles possibilités d'enseignement. Et les plus friands sont les professeurs de matières à faible horaire, musique ou arts plastiques, et les sciences. Les matières traditionnelles se passent d'ordinateur.
- «Le principal problème est la maîtrise de la langue française, expliquent les enseignants interrogés. Les élèves ont de plus en plus de mal à comprendre les consignes en général, et l'ordinateur n'y peut pas grand-chose.»

03 Aug 09

Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns

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scholars reading e-journals citations serendipity

Readings from library-provided electronic journals has increased substantially, while readings of older articles have recently increased somewhat. Ironically, reading patterns have broadened with electronic journals at the same time citing patterns have narrowed.
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- While the average number of article readings per scientist is increasing, the average time spent per reading is declining. In the 2005 surveys, scientists reported spending an average of 31 minutes per reading, down from 48 minutes in 1977. Multiplying the average time spent per reading by the number of article readings shows that the total commitment to reading by U.S. science faculty increases from approximately 120 hours annually in 1977 to 144 hours annually in 2005. It appears that the amount of time available for reading scientific articles may be reaching a maximum capacity.
- The number of readings increased by an estimated 130 readings per scientist from 1977 to 2005. The "other sources" increased by about 20 readings (from 23 to 43), which might be attributable to open access initiatives since the current 43 readings are 11 from preprints; 19 copies provided by authors, colleagues, etc.; 4 from an author website and 2 from other websites (plus 7 from an unspecified source). Reading from personal subscriptions decreased about 27 readings per faculty scientist. Some of the decrease represents a drop in personal subscriptions, but most is attributable to less reading per subscription (i.e., about 21 readings per subscription in 1977 to 15 in 2005). Most remarkable is that readings from library-provided articles increased by 137 readings, which is comparable to the net increase in readings overall (130 readings). Much of this increase is due to electronic journal or aggregation collections in libraries.
- Over half of readings in 2005 are from electronic sources (59.5% vs. 40.5% from print sources). However, as shown in Figure 3, personal subscription readings frequently continue to be from print issues. On the other hand, most library-provided articles and other sources are read from electronic versions.
- The most frequent principal purpose of reading is research (48.5% of readings), followed by teaching (22.5%), writing (articles, reports, proposals, etc. – 10.8%), and current awareness/keeping up (8.0%).
- Articles published in 2005 (prior to October/November when the surveys were done) were largely identified through browsing (52.6%), but as the articles became older, readers more frequently became aware of them by other means. Articles published prior to 1996 were mostly identified through citations (46.9%) and searching (32.8%).
- While citing patterns may be narrowing, reading patterns are not. This is due to several differences between why scientists read and why they cite articles.
  
  Reading is done for many purposes: current awareness, teaching, and administrative in addition to research and writing. Only those readings for research and writing are cited.
  Scientists read many articles for every one that they cite. Choosing the best article to cite may be subject to peer pressure in the form of choosing more often to cite those that are cited by others. Following citation links in electronic journal articles may have proportionately more influence on citation behavior than reading behavior.

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship -- Evans 321 (5887): 395 -- Science

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e-journals scholars citations serendipity

The forcedbrowsing of print archives may have stretched scientists andscholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship.Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinksquickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, butthis may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findingsand ideas built upon.
the three most common practicesused by scientists and scholars who publish. First, most expertsbrowse or briefly scan a small number of core journals in printor online to build awareness of current research (6). Afterrelevant articles are discovered online, these are often printedand perused in depth on paper (7). A second practice is to searchby topic in an online article database. In recent years, thepercentage of papers read as a result of browsing has droppedand been replaced by the results of online searches, especiallyfor the most productive scientists and scholars (8). Finally,subject experts use hyperlinks in online articles to view referencedor related articles (6). Disciplinary differences exist. Forexample, biologists prefer to browse online, whereas medicalprofessionals place a premium on purchasing and browsing inprint. In sum, researchers peruse in print, browse in printor online (9), and search and follow citations online.
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- Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journalarchives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely,citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available,more recent articles were referenced; as more articles becameavailable, fewer were cited and citations became more concentratedwithin fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shiftfrom browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidanceof older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinkingthrough an online archive puts experts in touch with consensusabout what is the most important prior work—what workis broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, expertsonline bypass many of the marginally related articles that printresearchers skim. If online researchers can more easily findprevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leadingto more citations referencing fewer articles.
- Agents viewothers' choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—andfactor them into their own reading and citation selections.By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailingopinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. Buthaste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive:Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly willbe forgotten quickly.
- This research ironically intimates that one of the chief valuesof print library research is poor indexing.

Open Reading Frame

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e-journals evans serendipity

What this suggests to me is that the driving force in Evans' suggested "narrow[ing of] the range of findings and ideas built upon" is not online access per se but in fact commercial access, with its attendant question of who can afford to read what. Evans' own data indicate that if the online access in question is free of charge, the apparent narrowing effect is significantly reduced or even reversed. Moreover, the commercially available corpus is and has always been much larger than the freely available body of knowledge (for instance, DOAJ currently lists around 3500 journals, approximately 10-15% of the total number of scholarly journals). This indicates that if all of the online access that went into Evans' model had been free all along, the anti-narrowing effect of Open Access would be considerably amplified.
A great deal of work was done in the 1970s, which is now completely ignored. Researchers rediscover wheels again and again, when a search of the earlier literature would have revealed that what they think of as novel, was novel 50 years ago!

Are Online and Free Online Access Broadening or Narrowing Research? - Open Access Archivangelism

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e-journals evans open_access serendipity

If I had to choose between the explanation of the Evans effect as a recency/bandwagon effect, as Evans interprets it, or as an increased overall quality/selectivity effect, I'd choose the latter (though I don't doubt there is a bandwagon effect too). And that is even without going on to point out that Tenopir & King, Gingras and others have shown that -- with or without OA -- there is still a good deal of usage and citation of the legacy literature (though it differs from field to field).

I wouldn't set much store by "skimming serendipity" (the discovery of adjacent work while skimming through print issues), since online search and retrieval has at least as much scope for serendipity. (And one would expect more likelihood of a bandwagon effect without OA, where authors may tend to cite already cited but inaccessible references "cite unseen.")

Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker / Nicholson Baker

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e-reader kindle book

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.
Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.
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- He didn’t want to walk off the beach to get another book, and he didn’t want to lie on the beach and dig moist holes with his feet, thinking about the algorithmic beauty of seaweeds. What he wanted was to push a little button that would swap the words in the book he held for the words in some other book somewhere else. He wanted the book he held to be infinitely rewriteable—to be, in fact, the very last book he would ever have to own. He called it “The Last Book.”
- A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.
- The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.
- Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go.
- The iPod screen’s resolution, at a hundred and sixty-three pixels per inch, is fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not a reflective surface, is, I’ve come to believe, what people need when they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace.

06 Jul 09

La Science au XXI Siècle

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politique cnrs france recherche

Précisément, le rôle des institutions fédérales, à la fois dirigeant, de financement et de réalisation de la recherche, constitue le véritable fondement du système de recherche aux Etats-Unis. A la place, Nicolas Sarkozy et Valérie Pécresse cherchent à instaurer un système à façade concurrentielle basé sur des campus contrôlés par quelques grandes multinationales. La seule question à résoudre étant, à leurs yeux, celle de la « capitalisation » de ces campus.

03 Jul 09

Israel: The Alternative - The New York Review of Books

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In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.

Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

27 Apr 09

Internet Users in Developing Countries Drag on Sites’ Profits - NYTimes.com

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internet web_2.0 profitability business facebook youtube

“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”
Facebook said last month that it was on track to become profitable next year. But as it did, Gideon Yu, Facebook’s experienced chief financial officer, left the company. Three people familiar with the internal maneuverings at Facebook said Mr. Yu objected to such a rosy projection as the company was struggling to finance its expensive global growth.

affordance.info: L'université de demain.

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medecine higher_education management

"En médecine comme en management, tout ne se contrôle pas et le risque existe." Eeeeeet oui. C'est ça ce qu'on appelle la force de l'évidence. Le point commun entre la médecine et le management : c'est le risque. Nooon, vous êtes taquins. Pas le "capital-risque", le risque. (éclats de rires) Bon vous me direz qu'avec ce genre d'arguments on pourrait tout aussi bien former des médecins-trapézistes (point-commun : le risque) ou des plombiers-trombonistes (point commun : le tuyau) ou encore des opticiens-soudeurs (point commun : les lunettes) ou encore des guichettières-profs de français (point commun : la princesse de Clèves) ... m'enfin

Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals - NYTimes.com

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medecine costs higher_education

The need for more doctors comes up at almost every Congressional hearing and White House forum on health care. “We’re not producing enough primary care physicians,” Mr. Obama said at one forum. “The costs of medical education are so high that people feel that they’ve got to specialize.” New doctors typically owe more than $140,000 in loans when they graduate.

24 Apr 09

Le blog Marcel Gauchet: L'autonomie veut dire la mise au pas des universitaires

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universités

Ce partage universités/grandes écoles pèse très lourd. Partout ailleurs, le problème de l'université est vital puisqu'il y va de la formation des élites. Mais pas chez nous, la bourgeoisie française disposant d'un système ultra sélectif de grande qualité pour la formation de ses rejetons, qui a de surcroît l'avantage unique d'être gratuit. Mieux : on peut même y être payé pour apprendre - voir Polytechnique ou Normale Sup. L'université de masse, en regard, tend à être traitée comme un problème social. Nos gouvernants viennent de découvrir qu'elle était aussi un problème économique. Mais leur regard reste conditionné par le passé : ils veulent des résultats pour pas cher.

The wiki principle | The Economist

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Wikis Wikipedia

Wikipedia's numbers actually make it an anomaly among wikis. Joe Kraus, the co-founder of JotSpot, a provider of wiki software, reckons that most of the millions of wikis already in existence are designed for small, well-defined groups of people. Team members in a company, for instance, might use wikis to collaborate on presentations or project calendars. Wikis are communities, and “communities require trust,” says Mr Kraus. Trust comes most easily when the people involved know one another or are accountable for their contributions. Given that the optimal group size for humans may be less than 150 members (see the article on blogging earlier in this survey), most wikis might be expected to be small.

Extreme Programming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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programming

Proponents of Extreme Programming and agile methodologies in general regard ongoing changes to requirements as a natural, inescapable and desirable aspect of software development projects; they believe that adaptability to changing requirements at any point during the project life is a more realistic and better approach than attempting to define all requirements at the beginning of a project and then expending effort to control changes to the requirements.

20 Apr 09

Edge: THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY: A Talk with Yochai Benkler

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prospective cooperaton networking science_2.0

The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, "My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong." For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.
In economics, we see a substantial work in experimental economics, like Ernst Fehr's group in Zurich and Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis in Santa Fe, starting to do experiments that show that people deviate from selfish rationality. That people systematically and predictably behave in ways that are much more cooperative than would be predicted by the game theoretical impact.
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- One of the worst performing GM plants in 1980 closes down, opens up two years later under Toyota management, almost the entire same employees said the entire union leadership. Within a couple of years it becomes the most productive plant in the U.S.
- A) that people systematically do not behave according to the traditions of selfish rationality under controlled conditions; B) that when you set up systems with different assumptions, you get different behavior, and you get actually better results. There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers. Knowledge work is one of the hard things to get precise in contracts. How do you tell somebody, "How creative have you been at 11:00 in the morning?" And so that's a classic place where having precise contracts to precisely monitor what you do and what you don't do becomes very difficult.
- They use chunks of time, particularly chunks of time that they used to spend watching passively finished goods as entertainment, in an activity that's a social activity and a creative activity and an expressive activity on a very large scale. This is tilting all of our information, knowledge and cultural industries something between a quarter and two-thirds of the way around. Because in addition, government will continue to fund some science, some arts, et cetera. Commercial organizations will continue to do the same thing. Individual selling in markets will, but also social production now comes in as a major force. And that re-aligns in different industries more, in different industries less.
- But the decision point is essentially which of these worlds we go. And it's a decision point we're making through law. The copyright wars are a classic instance of trying to set up the technology and the legal environment in such a way that you can keep the horse in the barn, and rent it out for rides, as opposed to having all the horses out. Situations where you get digital rights management and criminalization of breaking or distributing things that overcome digital rights management.
- the non-fungible is the human relationships. That's where the talks come from, that's where the services and teaching come from, that's where the live performance for the musician comes from.
  
  In some cases the spectacle is really the equivalent of the rock star live performance. It's not at all about the human relation, it's about the unique experience. Which in some sense is somewhere between the human connection and the artifact.
- The Berkman Center is now quickly becoming very interdisciplinary, and part of what we are doing is to build open research platforms that will allow any social scientist to use web-based tools to conduct both controlled experiments and large-scale, computationally-supported observational studies.

17 Apr 09

Etudiants et professeurs adoptent volontiers une "Wiki attitude" - Savoirs - Le Monde.fr

www.lemonde.fr/...iki-attitude_1181034_3328.html - Preview

wiki learning tice

En 2008, l'université a décidé de créer iCap. "Réunir les services de pédagogie et des TICE était devenu naturel, car il existe une réelle proximité. Les TICE doivent avant tout permettre de faire évoluer la façon d'enseigner de nos professeurs", résume Daniel Simon, vice-président du conseil des études et de la vie universitaire (CEVU).
Reste que la plate-forme sert à autre chose qu'une simple mise en ligne de cours. "Depuis 2008, j'organise une partie de mon cours en Wiki. Je demande aux étudiants, réunis par groupes, de rédiger en ligne une partie du cours. Pour les aider, je leur ai donné en début d'année une méthodologie de recherche, explique Philippe Lalle, enseignant de biochimie. En fin d'année, si un chapitre est bon, les étudiants peuvent l'utiliser pour réviser leurs examens. S'il ne l'est pas, j'y ajoute ce qui manque ou je le reprends."
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- "Aujourd'hui, tous les savoirs sont en ligne. Il faut donc se concentrer sur les processus d'apprentissage pour aider les étudiants à digérer ces connaissances et à développer les compétences dont ils auront besoin pendant leur vie active."

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