Caveat Lector

Point.

Counterpoint. (Link is not directly to resource because resource is not OA.)

I hold considerable sympathy for both viewpoints, but my sense still is that in the social-scholarship world, the marketing function of journal publishers will diminish considerably in importance. (Besides, if uni presses had been so good at that stuff, would they be in the dire straits they’re in now?) I also think that librarians are better at nurturing writing and research talent than we’re often given credit for.

So we’ll see. Fascinating debate, isn’t it?

I moved Thursday’s driving lesson up a few hours to avoid the severe weather (which didn’t actually happen, but I’m not objecting). I can’t be doing too badly if my instructor takes me out on the interstate my second trip out, can I?

My left turns are better now, I don’t mess up my lane position, and I can handle that bizarre median at Tokay and Segoe just fine. I could use a bit more practice merging into interstate traffic, because my instinct to slow down in order to be safe is just exactly wrong, but I’ll get it right next time.

Can’t say enough about how good my instructor (”Drew” of Four Lakes, ask for him by name!) is. He’s been doing this for umpteen years and is very laid-back about it without letting me get away with stuff. I never got my license the first time because driving with my mother freaked me out. Her screams are being replaced in my head with Drew’s calm litanies, and that is all to the good.

I might just pass my road test in late July. I might just. And then, ph34r me, all you drivers! Maybe we’ll do another southern-Wisconsin road trip in August…

Well, well, well. I’m a Dreamhost customer. Have been for almost two years.

Yep. I’m one of the ones that got hacked.

They don’t seem to have done any damage to CavLec or yarinareth.net proper. You folks whose blogs I host, please check your front pages with View Source to be sure you didn’t get damaged either (the link above tells you what to look for). I have changed passwords on the account, of course.

I’m hacked off. My account with Dreamhost expires in a couple months, and I think I’ll (ugh ugh UGH) be moving. Pair Networks has a nice deal this month…

When everything about me is remarkably random, why just eight? Nevertheless.

1. Despite considerable unfondness for the Harry Potter books, I just agreed to play Hermione Granger in a (rather deconstructionist, or I wouldn’t have done it) HP RPG. I am still wondering whether to have my head examined.
2. I appear to have gone up a second dress size. This is annoying, because I don’t really want to go clothes-shopping. It was, however, probably inevitable.
3. I’m still waiting to hear about the potential paycheck-enhancing activity I applied for. Latest news is that I may hear sometime this week.
4. I am liking the CSA thing so far. Anything I don’t manage to use up generally makes good soup stock.
5. I’m in a bit of a book doldrums at the moment. Nothing seems interesting enough to yank me away from the laptop. The fantasy-authors research guide may be partly at fault here, in which case I’ll get over it.
6. I’m considering a Netflix or Greencine subscription; there isn’t a good video store in anything like walking distance from our apartment, and with the demise of University Square 4, it’s even hard to see movies on the big screen.
7. I don’t like mushrooms. I can tolerate most uses of portabellas if I have to, but those slimy button things? Ugh. And black olives are a bit strong for me, though I cook with olive oil regularly.
8. Aside from a year or so during which I cut my hair short, I haven’t really changed the ways I wear my hair since high school. Sometimes I wonder about this, but really? What I’ve got is cheap (because my husband can trim it), functional, and good enough—what’s the point of slathering lipstick on this particular pig?

You’re tagged if you wanna be. Ipsa dixi.

The second wave of open-access and institutional-repository–related journal articles is a good deal less optimistic and a good deal more grounded in faculty practice than the first wave, which was all about “how we done it good (but we’re having trouble anyway).” Since I’m quite bullish on open access and institutional repositories (broadly viewed) but generally bearish on self-archiving in IRs (at least in the short term in the United States), I’m finding it healthful to see my views expressed by others.

This article is likely to feature prominently in the Roach Motel article I am slowly starting to work on. I have no particular opinion about their methodology, but their conclusions ring true to me: it genuinely is silly and pointless to ignore the entire composition process and then waltz in at the end demanding the final product.

Some things (she said vaguely) are happening at MPOW respecting this problem; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see something RepoMMannish eventually appearing. I’m all for it, as long as I get to hook up the IR to its back end; I don’t see how I make inroads without a better value proposition than I’ve got currently.

In other news, the OAI-ORE folks have got a whitepaper out. I got no particular religion on graphs (although I do wonder why nobody on the group seems to have heard of METS or DIDL, which operate in the compound-objects space and don’t have the brain-shattering overhead of RDF and other graphlike mechanisms), but I dearly hope the group drops the entire “trust mechanism” business before OAI-ORE vanishes into a warehouse-sized can of worms.

I know faculty want to privilege their own mashups, even to prevent other people from creating mashups at all. I know this, because the aforementioned “some things” happening at MPOW involved talking with faculty about such matters. That’s just too bad, you ask me. The Web doesn’t work like that, and all the trust mechanisms in the universe won’t make it work like that. If you need that much control, you need to stay off the Web altogether.

And everything I’ve read about trust mechanisms indicates that they’re fragile, obtuse, easy to game, and difficult-to-impossible to model. I believe these problems are intrinsic and insoluble. An object cannot force me (or my mechanized agent) to trust it; it can only tell me enough about itself and its provenance for me to make that determination on my own—and it can tell me that much without any of these fancy-dancy “trust mechanisms.” Don’t go there, OAI-ORE. It’ll bury you, and compound objects are much too important to get buried in ill-conceived thought experiments.

Edited to add: See also the APSR’s conference presentations. $DEITY love the Aussies—they’ve quit handwringing over the self-archiving situation and are actively looking for ways forward. This lets those of us in less forward-thinking societies go to our local management and say plainly, “This is what it takes to populate an IR. Fish or cut bait.”