Curious.Judith

Mr E

Originally uploaded by Elaine with Grey Cats

Our little neighborhood is run by the Orange Cat Mafia, tough guys strutting the sidewalks night and day, occasionally getting into fights, offering us “protection.” First there was Marty (a short hair, with a lovely swirl on his torso) and Burt (a long hair). Marty wasn’t content to stay with his owners, and, when we visited them to see if they knew he’d lost his collar, they let us know that Marty just wouldn’t stay in. Burt, owned by the same folks, did stay at their place more often, while Marty eventually took up with the woman who lives at the end of our building.

Then Franklin and Molly moved in below our unit. Molly, a longhair tortoise-shell, stays put, but Franklin (longhair, white tip of tail) roamed, getting into occasional squabbles with Marty. Franklin keeps loosing collars, ends up wearing Molly’s ,and looses those, too.

Our neighbor across the landing took in an orange stray she found cowering in the shrubs in the complex. He’s Luigi, another short hair, bright orange stripes, and he escorts our neighbor and us to the parking lot and the laundry, rambles all over the roof, and taught our neighbor’s well behaved black and white cat to roam on the roof as well.

This spring another orange cat showed up: a faded orange, like he’d been washed one too many times. This fellow was skittish, and in conferences with various neighbors, we discovered we all knew the sound of his pleading to be let in in the dark of night, and no one knew anyone claiming him. We began referring to him as the mystery cat.

Christine began to work on earning his trust, food nibbles provided on the roof or in the shrubbery, sitting and talking to him in the dark. Finally, this past Wednesday, the trust paid off, and she was able to scoop Mister E up and bring him into a bathroom as an isolation ward. Thursday we got him off to a vet for care so that we aren’t worried about the health of our cats.

We’ll be posting flyers around our neighborhood, hoping that if someone else had been caring for him, perhaps they could be convinced to keep him in. If no one claims him, he seems like he’d make a sweet addition to someone’s family. I’m not sure Mr M would like to see him join our family — and i don’t know if we could keep him contained. (The last thing we want is for him to teach our cats to roam!)

An article about proposed changes in the EPA regulations of cement plants and mercury emissions ran in the San Jose Mercury News.

Notes from a SPCWC participant after the cut.
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If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve been talking with a friend and they’ve been enthusiastic about something they’ve watched, or heard, or read and they’ve offered to lend you the video tape, DVD, record, audio tape, CD, or book. The First sale doctrine or Right of first sale allows your friend to loan or sell a purchased copyrighted work.[1]

It’s quite likely you’ve watched or listened to their media on their equipment — watched a DVD, listened to an album. With recent movies on DVD, there is a clear statement that this sort of sharing is to be private, not a public performance. In the music world, if you’re a public space like a coffee house, you need to acquire the public performance rights (most “easily” through ASCAP or BMI).

So, from experience, it would seem that loaning an ipod with music on it or a Kindle with books on it should be the same as loaning a vcr player and video tapes (something i remember an academic library being willing to do in my past). That’s what Howe Library in Hanover, NH thought. Library Journal reports mixed feedback from Amazon when discussing certain issues with Amazon: is it permitted or not? LJ cites the “the potential ambiguity of the Terms of Service, which bar a user who wishes to “sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party.””

This brings up one of the threads from the end on of the last Plenary panel session at JCDL 2009: Gretchen Hoffman’s questions of licensed content vs copyright, about how contract law on top of the copyright basis creates ambiguous terms of service and the problem of too many different rules and individuals not knowing when they’re doing something unreasonable.

[1] Wikipedia adds the note, “The doctrine of first sale does not include renting and leasing phonorecords and certain types of computer software, although private nonprofit archives and libraries are allowed to lend these items if a notice that the work may be copyrighted is on the copy.”

The series of GIS lectures at Foothill where local governments’ GIS managers came in and spoke about what the GIS could offer their cities and counties and also about the difficulties of changing slow entrenched systems informed my eye when i glanced upon this title in today’s (err, Tuedsay’s) list of Harvard Business School papers. Informed and Interconnected: A Manifesto for Smarter Cities (PDF), by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School and Chair/Director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University) and Stanley S. Litow (Vice President of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs at IBM Corporation and President of the IBM International Foundation).

“We need to convert the social safety net into a social safety network through the creation of smarter communities that are information-rich, interconnected, and able to provide opportunities to all citizens.” — the abstract

Skimming through the paper i note it is a manifesto, high level vision. GIS isn’t mentioned explicitly, but much of the visualizations and search capabilities all stem from geospatial relationships. Notes, including the “Eight challenges facing cities and the communities they encompass” after the cut.

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My friend @footnotesrising (Susan Garfinkel) was attending the Digital Humanities conference this past week; i followed the hash tag to attend what i saw called #DH140 (albeit i had very little attention to spare).

Today, i’m taking the day off from work, and i’ve had a chance to look at the closing tweets. Just like i did with JCDL, i note a number of folks, including @jcmeloni (Julie Meloni), @samplereality (Mark Sample) archiving the conference tweets. @sshreeves tweeted to @footnotesrising “I believe @Alan_Wolf did the twapperkepper #dh09” What is Twapperkeeper? A tool which “[a]llows you to archive and organize your tweets based upon hash tags.”
There was already one for JCDL and Iran.

@sgsinclair (Stéfan Sinclair) tweeted about a visualization tool called Voyeur populated with #dh09 tweets. I loaded in the JCDL09 tweets in the five XML documents for poking at. Caveat about both of these links: “Please note that this corpus may be removed after a couple of days of inactivity or may be invalidated by an update to Voyeur.”

I note someone else points to problems with the DH09 twapperkeeper: the start date is after the conference began. They refer to “Save Your Tweets from Computers and Writing 2009 – source/literacy.” It describes essentially the same method i used for JCDL, but limiting to one’s own tweets. “The reason this is necessary is that Twitter will only return 1500 results for a given search (like #cw09), and it will only return results that are less than roughly a week old. So that’s why we have to do this individually, and do it fast. After sometime on Thursday of this week, the Tweets from during the conference will rapidly begin to disappear from the searchable Tweet stream.”

I pulled down the fifteen pages of one hundred tweets each from Twitter using the dh09 hash tag and the earliest was 2009-06-23T20:57:09Z — mid day Tuesday. That’s many more tweets than the JCDL crowd!

Presumaly, twapperkeeper will poll twitter periodically and keep all the tweets so it will be complete from that time forward.

Digitial Humanities 2011 is at Stanford. It’s a pity DH10 is in London, because i won’t be going to JCDL10 in Australia.

Finally DH09 live blogging (which look forward to reading): http://digilib.bu.edu/blogs/digilib/category/dh09/

This is the Apple Help message i sent Sunday. They couldn’t have anyone call me back yesterday, and i’ve not had time today. I am watching twitter for iDisk, and i speculate that Apple is changing how iDisk is mirrored, due to the imminent release of some iPhone ap.

This morning the iDisk mirror seems to have changed from a disk image that uses all the allocated space at once to a sparse image. It gave me quite a scare as all my files seemed missing for an hour or so. When i thought to connect via web browser, i deleted all my backups as it seemed my iDisk was just over the 5G of my family pack share.

I rebooted my laptop and now it *seems* everything is back.

in /Volumes/ i see

lrwxr-xr-x   1 blondie  admin    19 Jun 21 11:30 iDisk -> /Volumes/me.username
drwx------  15 blondie  staff  1190 Jun 21 11:30 me.username
drwx------   1 blondie  staff  2048 Jun 19 07:38 me.username-1

df -k shows:

http://idisk.mac.com/me.username/     5212160   901404   4310756    18%    /Volumes/me.username-1
/dev/disk1s2                         5161480   808280   4353200    16%    /Volumes/me.username

QUESTIONS:

1. Did the mirrored iDisk change from a dmg file to a sparse bundle some time in the past year or so? I know under 10.4 the mirror was ~/Library/Mirrors/[random]/[me.username].dmg. There’s

% ls -dl Library/FileSync/0017f2c54835/me.username_iDisk.sparsebundle/
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 login-name  staff  204 Mar 15  2008 Library/FileSync/0017f2c54835/me.username_iDisk.sparsebundle/

2. What is the difference between /Volumes/me.username (iDisk points to this; mountpoint /dev/disk1s2) and /Volumes/me.username-1 (mount point http://idisk.mac.com/me.username/)?

3. What could have caused the view of an empty iDisk i saw earlier? I’m used to the mirror being present when i’m off line. This morning i had a failure to mount because the iDisk could not be reached, and when i did get back online, the iDisk was empty.

One of the recurring topics at JCDL 2009 was the question of how to archive participatory media. Twitter was mentioned, as well as Facebook and virtual worlds. It seemed easy enough to collect tweets for the limited case of JCDL & JCDL2009 mentions: once i did that it occurred to me there were some simple questions that could be answered.

The data gathering and extraction is described in the previous post , and it’s available to play with in a topic center at Many Eyes. Since it’s a topic center, i think anyone can add more social media data and analysis. There’s more networking data regarding twitter and the interconnections that could be extracted (although one can’t see how the whole network changed with the conference, i don’t think. There’s no API function to get friends & followers at a specific point in time). While @dchud already posted visualizations of mallet keyword extractions (in tweeted discussion with @band), that might be interesting to add to Many Eyes, along with text of blog posts….

For @HCIR_GeneG and @gingdottwit, top Tweeple at JCDL, the question of how the behavior split — reporter, disseminater, commentator — was raised. I suppose a reporter would not mention another twitter handle, a commentator might, a disseminator would be someone who retweeted, and then there are replies. The data file to play with is Types of Tweets, by handle.

Here’s a few example visualizations:

The full collection of atom format tweets and data extraction is here, the BSD licensed gawk script here.

This is a preliminary post about a simple data analysis of JCDL tweets.

At 12:48 pm PDT on Friday 19 June, i ran the command

curl http://search.twitter.com/search.atom\?q=jcdl+OR+jcdl2009\&rpp=100 >\
TweetsJCDL01.xml

iterating until i ran out of tweets, and thus producing five Atom format files of JCDL tweets.

I wrote a simple gawk script (it’s not JCDL specific) which produced the following data files, suitable for visualization at Many Eyes:

AuthorTweetCount.html - see below
Tweets.txt - Tweet text
CleanTweets.txt - Tweets without handles & tags
HandleTweetCount.txt - Count of tweets, replies, retweets, & mentions
Handle_Cited.txt - handle & the handle of a RT’ed user
Handle_Mentioned.txt - handle & any handles mentioned in the tweet
Handle_RepliedTo.txt - handle & the replied to handle
Handle_Epoch.txt  - handle and the tweet timestamp in epoch

The script will be available, for what it’s worth, with a BSD license, which i hope means that it can be improved freely and made far more useful.

Once i confirm the visualizations work, i’ll post about the results, and i’ll also provide the tweets in atom format, the gawk script, the results, and links to the places to play at Many Eyes.

The most preliminary result is below the cut: a list of all the twitter users who had tweets about JCDL or JCDL2009, ranked.

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This was the first conference where i posted all my notes in a timely fashion. I still have notes from this conference season sitting around to be posted: the copyright conference will be posted, for certain. MarsEdit was a help: it was my first time using a tool that allowed offline writing (other than general text editor) and it certainly helped. The pervasive power and wireless also made a significant difference: the lack of wireless at the Vancouver JCDL 2007 still rankles. Daniel Tunkelang (@dtunkelang ) is collecting other live blog sources at this post on The Noisy Channel.

And, OH!, having the proceedings on a USB drive: delightful!

Twitter, too, was a delight, although this may have been because it was a small crowd and not overwhelming. I didn’t interact as much as i’d like because i was madly blogging. Today i read back through the tweets and see interesting threads: I wish there were ways to comment directly back. I used TweetDeck for the first time (finding, to my horror, some direct messages from some weeks ago). Some folks tried live twittering the conference: Gene Golovchinsky (@HCIR_GeneG), whose text i quoted once or twice when he quoted verbatim and i simply caught the concept, writes about his experience here. I note that he had a hard time tweeting Cathy Marshall’s talk,
No Bull, No Spin: a comparison of tags with other forms of user metadata. I had concluded, “Live blogging Cathy’s narratives is very hard because she is such a good speaker.”

I did think about my preference for asynchronous communications as i tried to interact with the Second Life presentation of the poster sessions. [Screen shots, SL URL address, announcement PDF] Since next year’s JCDL is Australia, maybe i’ll practice my SL social skills to be prepared to participate at a distance. The Second Life poster demo was awarded third place in the Best Poster/Demo Awards: all the awards are listed on the conference site and i’ve annotated my notes on the Best Paper session with the award winners.

As a final note, here’s the “social media venn diagram” Frank McCown used in his “What happens when Facebook is Gone?” talk. It’s available on a t-shirt.

Mike Lesk essentially derailed the topic from Google to the Kindle and digital books. This made me sad, even though i’ve been reading books on screen for pleasure since ‘96 or so. The convergence questions (digital books being read, etc, etc) did became copyright related. (Hoorah)

Next conference is in … OMG Australia! The Gold Cost. JCDL and ICADL. A Joint joint conference! (Wondering if there’s a chance i’ll get to go.)

Brisbane is an international airport, with temps 10-20°… centigrade, a location for those into nature, hunting, and hedonism.

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