Perl based open source products
Gabor Szabo, Perl Maven, January 31, 2014
Sometime people wonder why I use Perl when there are so many new languages available. Part of it is habit, of course, but part of it is that Perl is an excellent language for building web-based applications. The proof is in the progeny. More...

Opening Science
Sönke Bartling, Sascha Friesike, Springer, January 25, 2014
I think we've known for quite some time that science is not a set of facts that can be amassed but rather a network of interconnected perspectives or points of view. As Michael Polanyi said in 1962, "This network is the seat of scientific opinion which is not held by any single human brain, but which is split into thousands of different fragments … each of whom endorses the other´s opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods." So what does that mean for science today. More...

Global OER Remix Challenge: STE{A}M
January 22, 2014
I found this site really frustrating. The idea is really good, on the surface: to provide a bunch of OERs, maybe some remix tools, and encourage people to use these to make something new (and in particular, "a standards-aligned, integrated STE{A}M lesson that incorporates various media, draws on existing open resources, and supports inquiry-based learning"). But none of the links ever seems to take me where I want to go. More...

Is Massive Open Online Research the Next Frontier for Education?
Doug Ramsey, Jacobs School of Engineering, January 10, 2014
'MOOR' stands for 'Massive Open Online Research' and is the latest in the list of MOOC-inspired algorithms. In this case, a MOOR is a natural (especially for a cMOOC), as the idea of research is to develop new knowledge, and a network environment is just the environment to do that. More...

Create a Personal Publication Archive with Open Journal Systems (OJS)
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, January 4, 2014
Apropos of the post on research profiles (see below) this item on the use of Open Journal Systems to create a personal publications archive is intriguing. One of the advantages is a very standardized representation of personal publications, which can be shared. OJS also provides a lot of administration features, so you can store drafts, get people to review your work, and more. More...

Reed Elsevier Interim Results 2003
From the Open Access News, Peter Suber writes, "Elsevier has put some PowerPoint slides on the web summarizing its interim results for 2003. Slide #16 shows that there were 4.5 million full-text articles in ScienceDirect on June 30, 2003, and slide #15 shows that there were 124 million article downloads in the 12 months preceding that date. More...

Open Archives Initiative and Project RoMEO Initiate OAI-rights
Something to keep a close eye on: the Open Archives Initiative is investigating the question of how to express digital rights in a harvesting environment. More...

OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?
The author points out that the eBook market is becoming increasingly fragmented. "I am troubled," he writes, "by the large and growing number of essentially incompatible, proprietary consumer ebook formats and associated ebook reading applications and hardware." In response, he proposes that publishers adopt The Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) as a universal eBook language. More...

OpenAI built gaming bots that can work as a team with inhuman precision
Dave Gershgorn, Quartz, 2018/06/26

The set of five AIs had a lot of time to practice, and this made all the difference. More...