Monthly Archives: August 2007

K-Day x 2

I popped into Google Analytics, and noticed that my old K-day post from last year was getting some traffic.

I have kept a Katrina category on the blog. You can look at all of my Katrina-related posts here.

I may be on TV tonight

Our lab was interviewed for the 2nd anniversary of Katrina’s landfall. It will be on Baltimore’s Fox45 at 22:00 EDT. My TV card is not currently set up, so if you manage to catch it on your DVR, please let me know.

Comcast is in the doghouse

This is being posted via the data uplink on my Treo, because we’ve had no cable internet service (nor TV service, my roommates tell me) all day. Several calls to Comcast, in which they said it would be fixed at progressively later times, have not yielded a working connection.

I’ll just have to do my internetting at work tomorrow.

PRISM Bullshit and Hypocrisy

I’m not the only one harping on about open access to scientific journals. I’ve linked to at least two other blogs discussing the issue, and I’m sure there are hundreds more.

I wrote in January about an article in Nature that highlighted the PR offensive being launched by the major science publishers.

That effort has apparently borne fruit. The issue is well-covered by John Dupuis. A sad but interesting twist, which made the front page of Slashdot, is that these organizations bent on protecting their copyright lock-in stole images from Getty Images for their web site. As the post in that last link notes, the onslaught of complaints subsequent to hitting the Slashdot front page convinced them to go buy the images properly from Getty.

Just as Microsoft started the FUD machine as Linux gained prominence, watch for a truckload of FUD from PRISM in the days to come.

ADDENDUM: There’s a good summary post that quotes my statement just above (and those of many other science bloggers) here.