Zzzoot

I have to break from the usual content of this blog to point out to all the bagpipers who read this blog - there is at least one - my Montreal / Black Watch / 78th Fraser Highlanders friend Jeff McCarthy's new book of pipe music called " The Thistle Amongst the Lilies : A Collection of Original Compositions by Montreal Pipers For The Great Highland Bagpipes ". I'm going to order one. You should too! :-)

The Pomegranate Phone has a great campaign: make sure you look at all of the features before checking out the release date. And yes, I do want one!

I just read this happened earlier this month (more at the BioMed Central Blog ) via Peter Suber's Open Access News . I must admit I am rather surprised by this turn of events.

I have just discovered that the Ukraine passed a law[ 1 ] in January 2007 mandating Open Access to publicly funded research. This was done after extensive consultation and lobbying[ 2 , 3 ]: "Since January 2007 Ukraine has a law mandating open access to publicly funded researches. It was widely supported by most of the Parliament members. And it is already the second parliamentary inquiry mandating the Cabinet of Ministers to take actions on creating favorable conditions for developing open access repositories in archives, libraries, museums, scientific and research institutions with open access condition to state funded researches." [ 4 ] [ 1 ]Law of Ukraine On the principles of developing information society in Ukraine (in Ukrainian). [ 2 ]Kuchma, I. 2007. Developing National Open Access Policies: Ukrainian Case Study . Proceedings ELPUB2007 Conference on Electronic Publishing . Vienna, Austria, June 2007. [ 3 ]Kuchma, I. 2008. Open Access, Equity, and Strong Economy in ...

Wow! This is so very cool: "To commemorate the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the University of Cincinnati has recreated the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin conducted some of his famous research, in Second Life. The project is part of the university’s 2009 Darwin Sesquicentennial Celebration. By January 2009, all avatars will be able to retrace Darwin’s steps — from his 1832 journey to South America aboard the Beagle to his tours of the islands — with the help of a wind-surfing tour guide. Archived audio and video clips, as well as live events, will be available in the Darwin Celebration Theater and Gallery." From: Darwin's Famous Journey Is Recreated in Second Life , The Wired Campus, October 16, 2008

The FP6 CINeSPACE project, Experiencing Urban Film and Cultural Heritage project ( article ) creates an augmented reality by combining GIS information with semantic technology. The results are a location-/ orientation-aware binocular-like device which overlays multimedia information based on - among other things - what the user is looking at: This is a great concept and prototype, but could we take it a little further and generalize it? Say, to semantically enhanced reality goggles that allow you to select a particular semantic view of the world, including scientific and social views? Put them on and toggle the " Biological taxonomy " semantic view while you are walking through the rainforest and you have species names overlaid on your enhanced reality; identified poisonous plants and animals are marked with a bright red " Do not eat " and " Avoid ", respectively; identified endangered species are marked with an " Endangered: Do not step-on / tou...