Chris' Rants and Internal Debates

I haven't laughed this hard at a comic in ages!

This comic perfectly summarizes the coming spring season for myself and other victims of nature. Toronto understands the need to capture nature in concrete - why can't the rest of Canada?! :P


(Source)

One of the (many, many, many) ways that global currencies retain value is by being seen as reliable currencies to conduct international business in. Currently, this means that the Euro and American Dollar are central currencies that are used in international agreements (though certainly not the only currencies). Recently, Brasil and Argentina have moved away from conducting their trade agreements with one another in US dollars - they're switching to local currencies.

One (of many) reasons why the US dollar has been hammered in the long-term has been the gradual movement away from setting local currencies based on the US dollar, and because along with the shift to breadbasket-style currencies there has been a move away from solely trading in American dollars. South America has been gradually working to get away from the US dollar; if Brasil and Argentina are successful in the long-term, it could mean a continuing shift in the region from American dollars and, as a result, an American dollar that continues to face external pressures.

As someone who doesn't terribly like macro-level changes, my hope is that the US can rebalance their economy and get their currency stabilized, though such a hope is predicated on the requirements that the US doesn't 'rebalance' their economy by rebuilding their empire of dictators who solely take orders from Washington.

Technorati Tags: politics

Black Surveillance T-Shirt

US citizens are supposed to be protected from unconstitutional search and seizure. This means that in order for government officials to search a person's belongings or dwellings they must have a probable cause. Now, for something to constitute a search the US Supreme Court has established a two-prong test; first a search occurs when government action would contravene or intrude upon a subject's subjective expectation of privacy, and second that expectation of privacy must be reasonable, insofar as society generally would recognize it as such.

Do you expect that whenever you're passing along a street that you will be being searched? When if comes to a new surveillance camera, that examines people's electromagnetic signatures it means that you won't be touched, by everything that you are carrying will be scanned and cross-referenced with contraband material lists. This is a significant shift from needing to receive some kind of judicial grant to conduct a search; it empowers persistent and affordable social surveillance.

Now, as of this writing these cameras are only intended for British airports, but I can't imagine something this useful staying in Britain. Given the Western world's growing adoption of CCTV, I expect that it will only be a matter of time until they cross the Pond and are mounted on street corners near you. But don't worry - it's for your security...

Source: Privacy: New Camera Can Tell Exactly What's In Your Pockets From 80 Feet Away

Technorati Tags: Privacy, Surveillance

A Ryerson engineering student is facing expulsion because he created a digital study group on Facebook. He's been accused of over a hundred academic charges for being the administrator of the group, which mimicked an analogue environment (the Dungeon) where students would go to assist one another. While the University is giving him a hearing and, based on the public outcry, will likely overturn the charge of expulsion, this whole things just seems silly. Chris Avenir's only mistake was going digital - he used new technologies that are easily indexable and searchable, which meant that the actions he undertook were easier to detect. I've never met a professor in the sciences or in engineering that didn't know and expect this kind of stuff to happen, but it was 'out of sight, out of mind'. I have family members in engineering, and these sorts of groups are required to survive - not necessarily excel, just survive - these sleep-deprivation programs. In a time when students are living in hybrid environments, it seems patently unreasonable to expect them to abandon key technologies just to maintain professorial illusions.

Source: TheStar.com | GTA | Student faces Facebook consequences

Technorati Tags: facebook, learning, academic misconduct, puppy

I've had many friends who have gone to the Netherlands. They have nothing but good things to say about the weather. They loved the people. They enjoyed deep breaths of air in various and sundry bars.

What they didn't mention is that the Dutch appreciation for leather wrapped speaker systems. Perhaps this is one of those things that you experience in its fullest in the Netherlands, and an experience that stays in the Netherlands?
Source: Bbudd Speaker System: Looks Like a Bondage Fetish Gone Horribly Wrong

Technorati Tags: Dutch, Speakers

Academic journals are ‘interesting’, to say the least. They often contain vast swathes of incredibly wonderful material. Material that inspires you to write, and that sometimes drives you to drink (not because it’s bad, but just depressing topic matter).

These same journals are often locked up – scholars contribute to them, often acting as editors and reviewers for honorariums at best (more typically for free), and the journals publish the scholarly work. To gain access to those journals you have to pay reasonably substantial fees, and when authors publish their work they tend to lose most or all of their copyright.

As someone who is: (a) anal retentive when it comes to controlling my work; (b) thinks that philosophical discourse is most useful when made transparent and publicly available; (c) moderately techno-savvy and young (which I’ve often heard used derogatorily when I talk about these things, so I might as well include it for those that ignore the rest of this post based on their technophobia and ageism), I would love it if there were more recognition given to Open Access Journals. 

Open Access? What’s That?

To begin, open-access articles are typically research articles published in peer-reviewed journals, where the authors retains a significant degree of control over the copyright, and where the articles are available for the public at large to read, review, and download. There are two forms of Open Access – Open Access self-archiving and Open Access publishing. When archiving, the academic places a copy of their paper in an online repository. The paper is subsequently made available to the public, whereas when publishing the journal is made available to the public (often digitally). When talking about digital repositories, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other major search providers will index that article so it can be found using their respective search engines.

Open Access doesn’t involve Digital Rights Management schemes that might give your readers only 24 hours with an article they paid $15 to the publisher to download. It doesn’t mean that you give your hard work away to another group to profit by. It doesn’t mean that you have to ‘suck it up’ and publish in places that the public will never be able to see it. It means that you can have previous versions of the work available on your website without entering into a breech of contract.

In essence, Open Access means that your work is made available to anyone who is even moderately interested in what you have written while letting you retain some rights to you document.

Sounds Great. Why Should I Care? 

Well, this is really the question that you’re asking: Why do you care about open access?

I’d suggest it’s actually more fruitful to start with another question, posed by me to you: When was the last time that you used Google scholar to track down an article, or to find an article that related to a current research interest? Personally, I use gScholar on a reasonably regular basis if only because Google does search incredibly well (and breathtakingly better than anything I have access to through my university). If you’re publishing in Open Access journals that are being archived by Google people can not only search and find your work, but they can access your article. This is important – in many cases when searching using gScholar you find what looks like it would be a great article to read  . . . only to find that the university doesn’t subscribe to that the journal. In lieu of that locked journal article, I have to find another one for my research.

When you publish in an Open Access journal you increase the chances that people will find what you’ve written and reference you in lieu of the journal that they can’t access. As more and more people access your article you rise in the Google search index, which gives prominence to your article and increases the number of hits it receives. In essence, Open Access is a great way to increase the likelihood that others will reference you.

It's Not a Big Name Journal, So It's Not Worth Using

Yeah. This is really the 500lb. gorilla in the room. This is the ‘It’s not Mind (or other major leading research publication that is specific to my field), so there really isn’t any real value in publishing to some Open Access journal.’ That’s a fair stance to take, I guess, especially if your sole drive is to achieve tenure. I’ve read enough about how tenure works in some departments to know that a major publication in a prominent journal is worth more than publishing in dozens of smaller journals/presenting at smaller conferences.

I guess, when it comes to this, it depends on whether you want to publish for tenure, or publish to spread your knowledge. (Yeah, that simplifies things way too much, but I’m OK with that at the moment because of my youthfulness and therefore naive ignorance and all.) I ‘freely contribute’ what I write wherever I can because I see that the role of academics is to move beyond exclusive philosophical clubs and give the public the option to at least watch what I write. But, then, I’m the person (along with every other person who freely contributes content online) that creates some kind of a paradox for Digital Rights Management proponents – I don’t get paid for what I write, so then why do I do it?

Because I love to do it. Why are you writing?

Here is a series of interesting recent posts from Brian Leiter:

Are you interested in/involved in ethics at the moment? Wondering what are the ‘hot’ topics according to some academics? If so, hit the link and see what some people have to say.

The same goes for those interested in epistemology. Beyond the link lie some answers, though I’ll leave the question of whether what is discussed is really hot or not to experts (i.e. not me).

In a set of recent posts Leiter identifies (a) some concerns surrounding funding in the UK (hope that if you’re applying/going off to study there that it won’t affect you); (b) the policies departments have in place for when faculty receive external funding. (b) in particular was eye-opening; I hadn’t really thought about what would happen when faculty received additional funding, and it’s good to keep in mind for the future.

You might want to take a wander over to Academic Careers [philosophy]. It's a wiki that's been set up to track the 2007-08 hiring cycle. If you know of jobs that are open/available, edit the wiki and ADD THE JOB INFO. The more that gets put there, the better a chance that all people will have in finding places to apply to.

(As a note, I'm not maintaining the wiki, I just found it recently.)

The below link is to Leiter Reports, so take it for what you will, but there are some decent comments about what is expected/looked for when preparing a SOP for PhD programs in our discipline. Your mileage may vary, but it can't hurt to spend the two minutes and see what is said.

Link

I'm in the process of wrapping my head around (and trying to speak) Brazillian Portugese. I've got some books, some podcasts, and now a perfectly sweet online tool for basic conversational B-P. The online source? Mango. Edit: Link now works properly.

In addition to Brazillian Portugese, it has:

1. Spanish
   
2. Russian
   
3. French
   
4. Italian
   
5. Mandarin Chinese
   
6. German
   
7. Japanese
   
8. Greek
   
9. English for Spanish Speakers
   
10. English for Polish Speakers
    

Thus far the course have been pretty good - hit it up if you're looking to have some basic conversational language skills in the above mentioned languages.

I've found wine from most areas of the world that I really like. I've founds some nice (though sweet) German wines, some delightful Australian and Italian reds and whites, and quite a few North American wines that regularly live in my wine rack. That said, I can't seem to find a French wine that I really like.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that I've had an actively *bad* French wine, just not one that I feel compelled to buy again and keep around. Anyone know of some particularly compelling French wines that I should try?

I'm currently using Office 2007 - it's a nice package, though the more I learn and experience the angrier and angrier I'm getting. I'm not talking about Open Office XML right now, but about their absolute failure to implement ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) in their .pdf extension.

This ISO is intended to identify a profile so that the document can be reproduced on screen in forthcoming years. This requires all elements of the document to be self-contained, which includes the fonts, images, text, and colour information. As a result, .pdf files that accord with this standard tend to be bulkier that normal.

Now, in the options for saving to .pdf files in Office 2007 you can either bitmap the text for when fonts are not included OR you can be ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) compliant. Microsoft defaults to the former, which causes all kinds of problems if you choose to save to a .pdf using the Calibri font that Word defaults to because when you open a .pdf file in a web browser without ticking the latter option the file doesn't open properly. The second that you select ISO 19005-1, you can make .pdf files web friendly.

I understand that Microsoft wants to replace .pdf. with XPS, but wanting to replace an existing standard with your own should not mean that you just break the competitor's file formats!!!

It's been a while since I've posted an update - it's not that I've not been working, but that I've been doing a whole lot of work!

(1) Thesis Proposal (done)
(2) Draft Outline for MA Thesis (done)
(3) Draft One of completed MA thesis (completed as of today)
(4+) Other completed and revised drafts of the MA thesis (unfinished; revisions begin tomorrow)

I'm locked into a Window's platform of some ilk for at least a few months while I write my thesis. Then I say 'good bye' to MS as my personal OS and go over to one where I can be exceptionally productive.

Not that I'm bitter after spending 30 minutes fighting with Vista's UAC to update Thunderbird. Really. It has *nothing* to do with my rage. Especially not when it took me under 5 seconds to do the same thing in Ubuntu.