Zzzoot

NSF Cyberinfrastructure Vision Document Available National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Council's Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery document has been released. It is revised from the 2006 draft document but appears to have mostly the same content. I haven't read it yet, but it is beautifully designed with some amazing photographs and visualizations. This is a very significant document, basically a blueprint for cybersinfrastructure for science over the next five years, with implications beyond this time. From the document, it is focusing on: ...a vision for cyberinfrastructure in four overlapping and complementary areas: 1) High Performance Computing, 2) Data, Data Analysis, and Visualization, 3) Cyber Services and Virtual Organizations, and 4) Learning and Workforce Development.

AAAI2007's workshop on Semantic e-Science CFP deadline extended I see that the CFP for this workshop at AAAI 2007 (in Vancouver, July 22-26) has been extended until April 12 2007.

Leslie Weir gave a presentation on the new U of O School of Information Studies at Library Association of the National Capital Region (LANCR) meeting on February 27 2007. There is an excellent write-up in the CLA Montreal Chapter executive blog ...

Free Software Magazine has an excellent point-by-point response ( Edward Macnaghten's blog ) to the ECMA's response to the contradictions (ISO standards term roughly for 'objections') of JTC1 members (twenty: a record) to the submisssion of OOXML (I'm out of breath!). For anyone wondering whether the objections were real and substantial (and whether the 6000 page standard was a disaster or not), this is an excellent examination of the points of contention with a good understanding of past (good) standards and the impact of standards on the real world. A couple of the objections point-out tags such as: footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement) useWord2002TableStyleRules (Emulate Word 2002 Table Style Rules) Macnaghten also highlights some of the spin that is being spun by the submitter OOXML, Microsoft: the claim that the resistance to OOXML is actually a " proxy for product competition in the marketplac e" and that the object...

I have been closely following the incandescent light vs. compact fluorescent light (CFL) debate ( BBC , /. , ABC , The Hindu ) which has moved into the legislatures of many provinces (here in Canada: Ontario , New Brunswick ), states (in the U.S.: California , ), countries ( Australia ) and regions ( EU ). I find this debate has interesting parallels to the software world, in particular the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. The light bulb debate has been focused on (banning) a particular implementation technology (incandescent) when it should be focused on metrics (i.e. the proposed "standards" say something like " any light bulbs except incandescents "). Instead of banning a particular technology you instead want to put in place sensible, reasonable metrics and apply these as your standard. In this case, the standard should be some combination of energy/light output efficiency (light output per energy input, perhaps in lumens / watt) and lumino...