Interview with Francis Muguet on OA at WSIS. Eric Goettmann, Le libre accs au Sommet mondial de l'information, Captain Doc, December 2003. An interview with Francis Muguet, chairman of the Scientific Information Working Group of the WSIS, on the WSIS endorsement of open access, its negotiation and significance. Read the original French or Google's English. […]

Bon Anniversaire Tintin!. My first Tintin album, The Blue Lotus, was given to me for my 6 year birthday. It was one of the darker and more exotic albums, a story where our hero fights international drug smugglers set in 1931 Shanghai under a difficult political situation (the unpleasant presence of the International Settlement and […]

Cass Sunstein on the echo chamber (Clay Shirky). Cass Sunstein piece on NASA’s culture and the stifling of dissent, which may have ramifications for the weblog world. My research shows that on a three-judge panel, a Republican-appointed judge is often far more likely to vote conservatively when sitting… [Many-to-Many] Like-minded people, talking only with one […]

Schwarzenegger proposes billions in cuts Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled a $99.1 billion budget plan Friday and proposed cutting billions of dollars from public health and welfare programs to help pay for it. A Republican wants to slash public health and welfare budgets? Now there's a shocker. Schwarzenegger did not include any new taxes in his […]

Ê The reality, however, is far grimmer. State funding for Virginia Tech, whose situation is typical, falls 300 positions, or $40 million, short of the 60th percentile in faculty-student ratio. It falls an additional $45 million short of the salary standard; Tech is not at the 60th percentile but the 19th.

this is great! i'd like to see more of the same, as appropriate.

Friday reading. PV Comics has hundreds of pages of free comics from a dozen talented artists. Friday reading fun! [MetaFilter]

Wikipedia timelines. Whoa. Wikipedia — the free, user-edited, almost-3-years-old, 191466-article-strong, encyclopedia that's just raised more than 30,000 dollars from surfers like you — features a truckload of hyperlinked timelines, many of them quite detailed. Astronomy, biology, chemistry… [Seb's Open Research]

Tongue-mounted vibrators [bOing bOing]

Marginalia and Other Crimes. Marginalia and Other Crimes: I‰¥úve always had an intense hatred for people that deface books, and if they're my books, the intensity is doubled. But imagine the atrocities the average librarian faces every day‰¥Ï Witness this display of damaged and defiled books from the Cambridge University library, with attached sarcastic commentary. […]