Survey of of general public from six countries and library directors from the U.S. examining the values and social-networking habits of library users, sponsored by the Online Computer Center. It’s not surprising that the respondents have security and privacy concerns: identity theft, ads/spam and protecting personal information are among the top concerns.
What is Browsing – really?
Browsing is the act of engaging in a series of glimpses, each of which exposes you to objects of potential interest; depending on that interest, you may or may not examine more closely one of the objects. What’s interesting is that browsing is not a smooth scan, but rather iterative fits and starts. A worthwhile read that in fact never mentions web browsing specifically.
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Trust in Digital Repositories
Trust in Digital Repositories provides material for managing intellectual property rights in e-learning for institutions who want to update their policies in e-learning programs. Everything someone in an institutional context would need to set up digital rights management systms in repositories of learning objects: policies, infrastructure, risk, evaluation and opportunity.
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Not Just a Pantomime
Did language evolve from manual gestures and then shift to vocal mode? Fox makes the case that the hands provide a more natural signaling system than the voice, and Armstrong and Wilcox propose that speech itself is a gestural system, which places language in the domain of cognition and biology.
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Remember This
A brain can recall almost everything, practically nothing, or something in between. If nothing else, this month’s National Geographic reaffirms the utter weirdness of human memory. Truth is indeed a memory.
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When Educational Resources Are Open
Judy Breck anticipates an open education future will let knowledge form, ideas emerge and understanding to be shared. A good summary of what open education aspires to be: a golden swamp with all sort of treasures found there in.
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Apologies All Around
Today’s tendency to make amends for the crimes of history begs the question which horrific acts deserve apologies and which ones get the other cheek? Our often unbearable history should do more than generate vacuous, egotistical apologies; it also “chastens, tempers, rigorously instructs. The more we know of it, the better.”
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Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality
Two physicists use science to point out the inconsistencies associated with the idea of ghosts, vampires and zombies depicted in Hollywood movies. Heat always moves from a hotter to colder objects. Bring out your basic science and critical thinking skills the next time Halloween apparitions seem a little too real.
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In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms. Life of course is problematic to define. But the search for aliens hiding in plain sight is forcing us to broaden our ideas of what is biologically possible.