The Cats
After a number of days of silence (no purrs, no meows) it is now chaos here in Downes manor as on Saturday we became the new home of three (yeah, count 'em) kittens: Bart, Polly and Nadia. Pudds is, of course, never forgotten. But is is so nice to hear the pitter patter of tiny feet tearing around the living room. More...

Penn State Trustee and RIAA Lawyer Denies Conflict of Interests
As the headline suggests, conflict of interest allegations have surfaced in the recent Penn State deal to provide its students with access to music through Napster, even though Penn State trustee and RIAA legal counsel Barry Robinson denies any involvement in the decision. More...

Education and Innovation
Interesting set of PowerPoint slides from this session at Net*Working 2003. The author describes the need for innovation and sketches some key requirements. Via a series of examples, he outlines the role of education in innovation. More...

Can Personal Appetite for Learning be Fed by Today's Organisations?
This set of slides is a bit disjointed, so it's hard to grasp the author's overall point. But there are some good bits, especially the data presented in the first half about changing attitudes between generations in Britain. The author suggests that there is an increasing trend toward personalized learning, and that a major driver toward this is personal self-fulfillment. More...

Living in Parallel Worlds: Blogs and Course Management Systems
This interesting article asks the question of whether blogging software should be incorporated into course management systems. Most of the discussion involves giving students access to blogging systems. More...

More Elsevier Cancellations
Cornell's website is not responding as I write, but this summary captures the gist: "The Cornell University Library is cancelling "several hundred" Elsevier journals and has explained the reasons why in a public letter. Excerpt: 'We can no longer subscribe to so many Elsevier journals (including duplicates) that we no longer need.'" What's interesting is this: "We have tried in these discussions to broker an arrangement that would allow us to cancel some Elsevier titles without such a large price increase to the titles remaining --but Elsevier has been unwilling to accept any of our proposals." Personally, I don't see why they bother subscribing to any Elsevier titles - they could take the money saved and set up an institutional archive to publish their own professor's works. More...

Phoenix
Photos from my time in Phoenix, Arizona. Tomorrow is flight day, so there will be no newsletter. In the meantime, enjoy these pics. More...

Responses to Thoughts on PSU/Napster
Summary of commentary on Penn State's agreement to purchase Napster access for its students. More...

Looking Back with an Eye on the Future
Slides from Stephen Marsh's presentation in Moncton Friday, which I unfortunately missed. PPS format, which means it won't run in Firebird (ran fine in Internet Exploder). More...

Web Search: How the Web has Changed Information Retrieval
The author sent me a nice note and this, a link to his most recent paper on the semantic web, which I pass along. The underlying premise is that a web page isn't an appropriate medium for metadata - a web page should be thought of, at best, as a 'snapshot' of an information resource. More...