Attention Economy – August 13, 2012

[I definitely never had an employer who would lift a hand, let alone hold it, to help solve accessibility problems.] “If you look closely at people who are succeeding in this new digital world of work, you’ll notice they have something in common: they’re fast learners and they’re willing to adapt. If you want to grow as a person and a worker and if you want to gain skills that will help you take that next step in your career, you’ll probably have to learn those skills on your own. In the post-recession workplace, your company probably isn’t going to send you to a conference so you can learn that new skill that will make you an even more valuable employee. (And if your employer DOES send you to that conference, we all want to know who you work for.) Your boss probably doesn’t have time to hold your hand as you figure out how to use a new tool that will make your team more efficient. And it’s unlikely you’ll be encouraged to spend your workday focusing on forward-looking, innovative projects that will really help you grow.”

[People with #disabilities need to occupy the new buzzwords. The work of #accessibility is personal knowledge management. In gead school 20 years ago I called it hidden curriculum...] “//
you’re reading…] “But there’s more to it than just using Twitter or Facebook! The most effective workers are using Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) techniques, to manage this process and get things done. Here’s a short presentation by Harold Jarche that explains PKM and his Seek-Sense-Share PKM framework. So whilst most organisations focus on training their people for specific jobs within their own organisation, ensuring they remain compliant and meet statutory regulations, and managing the whole process, the real learning of most knowledge workers is taking place outside the organisation in their own “personal knowledge management”.

Dave Winer: “There’s this great service called EC2 run by Amazon, the same Amazon you can buy books and refrigerators from. EC2 allows you to create your own server in Amazon’s server farm located somewhere “up there” in the clouds. It could be in Montana or New Jersey or Europe. You don’t have to know or care where the server is. You also don’t have to talk to anyone to create a server. And when you’re done with it, just shut it off. You only pay for what you use. And it doesn’t cost very much. If you run a server for 8 hours it costs about $1. Update: For some people it’s free for a year! If you’ve ever purchased anything at Amazon, you’re all set. And if you haven’t, all you need is a credit card.
I think any reasonably knowledgeable user could set up a server this way. You might have to scratch your head, or read the instructions two or three times to get past the hardest parts. But you don’t have to be an math major to pull it off. That’s why it’s called EC2 for Poets. ”

Dave Winer: “I make software for poets, and myself. That means my stuff stretches the boundaries of what’s possible, which makes it a mystery for many of the people I would like to have use it. My goal has been to chip away at the mystery. One step at a time. That’s why a few years ago I started working on EC2 for Poets, a tutorial that proposed to show non-geeks how to set up their own server in the cloud at Amazon. There have been three versions of the tutorial. And in the interim Amazon has dropped the price for the server that you set up to $0 for one year. So with it being so easy, and free for a year — there shouldn’t be any reason that anyone who knows about it isn’t running a server. The problem is that it isn’t all so easy. Yet.”

To run ThinkUp, you’ll need a web server running PHP and MySQL. Some providers offer easy ThinkUp launchers.

Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. A memo from Harvard Library to the university’s 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year. The extraordinary move thrusts one of the world’s wealthiest and most prestigious institutions into the centre of an increasingly fraught debate over access to the results of academic research, much of which is funded by the taxpayer.

Harvard librarian Robert Darnton challenges high cost of academic journals: “We the scholars do the research, write the articles, referee the articles, serve on the editorial boards — all of this for free — then we have to buy back the product of our own labor at a ruinous price.”

Australian BMX cyclist Caroline Buchanan, one of the Olympic Village’s many athletic residents, sparked one of the Olympics’ many copyright-protection investigations when she tweeted a photo of a bucket of free condoms. A sign over the bucket reads “Kangaroo Condoms: For the Gland Down Under.” Putting aside the egregious violation of Olympic rings copyright (Olympic authorities have put a halt to bakers, florists, and little old ladies using the rings without paying for the right), the big problem here is that the bucket contains a handful of non-Durex condoms. The Ansell and Pasante brand condoms are being handed out in violation of sponsorship rules, the authorities explained, and so must be stopped.

Paper.li is a content curation service. It enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they like and treat their readers to fresh news, daily. We believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this “massive content world” we live in. We’re here to help! Every day, around the world, millions of articles are featured on Paper.lis, benefiting millions of readers. We are just at the beginning of an exciting new adventure and we think we’re on to something good. We love the semantic web, we respect our content creators, we strive for simplicity, and we thrive on feedback.

Do we want Steve Jobs to act as a de facto V-chip for users of Apple products? Adult users of Apple products? Radiolab host Jad Abumrad and DailyFinance media columnist Jeff Bercovici weigh in.

The idea that “information wants to be free,” says Michael Hirschorn in the current issue of the Atlantic, has been the most powerful meme of the past 25 years. But in the mall-like app era of Apple, he argues, that meme is moderating.

The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself? | By Michael Hirschorn

‘Greening IT’ is an interntionally collaborative, non-profit, creative commons licensed book dedicated to the preservation of the most important resource – planet earth itself. As the book details, our approach to preservation is not accomplished via pure environmentally focused policies, but instead by leveraging the most important and potent enabler of the Low-Carbon society – Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

One process, called scanning electron microscopy, allows them to create elemental maps of manuscripts, identifying the chemical nature of inks and pigments, or the paper itself. Imperceptible changes made by artists appear plain as day when viewed using x-rays.X-rays, however, aren’t easy to work around. One new technique, hyperspectral imaging, offers similarly revelatory results in the darkroom: ultra-high resolution scans of documents, imaged under sharply restricted wavelengths of light, show details denied to the naked eye. Viewed at sharp angles, old documents even reveal data about the woodblocks used to impress them onto the page.

It’s not all about moldy maps and tomes: thanks to poor quality of consumer media, techniques are already being developed to recover information from damaged examples. Researchers already understand, for example, why using sticky labels increases the likelihood of failure in CDs and DVDs. (LightScribe etching has no apparent negative effects).

Acceptable Use: Our PDFs are DRM free because we trust our customers to do the right thing. Reasonable sharing, as you would do with a print book, is allowed. You are free to copy and paste and print the document for your personal use. You are not allowed to place the content on a server for downloading, and you should purchase a site license if you wish to share the PDF with a group of developers on an Intranet.

“Informal, spontaneous interactions give the modern city its vitality, so Whyte’s enemies are urban planners who evince disregard and even contempt for street life. Part meditation, part design manual, this marvelously observant tour of cities will please anyone who cares about urban livability.”—Publishers Weekly

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.”[1] The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”[2] and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.

Blocking access to content from Canada is part of the growing use of what are called digital locks and geographic screening to protect mostly entertainment products from being copied and pirated.Lawyers specialized in technology and licencing say that could eventually change if Parliament moves forward and adopts Bill C-32, the proposed Copyright Modernization Act tabled this week by the federal government to protect digital works and beef up enforcement measures.

Remnick believes “we have a say in the texture of our identity” – e,g,, Obama as an African-American, or Remnick as a Jew. I think the same with respect to disability and “blind” as an identity.