Curling Ice King Hospitalized
July 4, 2008
In this 2007 photo by David Rollins, above, Shorty is seen whooping it up – or being whooped up, it would seem - with his squad at the Heart to Heart Charity Bonspiel in Sudbury.
“He has all these secrets about icemaking he’s never told anyone,” remarked Jo-Ann Rizzo, who skipped a squad at the last Canadian Olympic Trials and happens to be Shorty’s niece.
“He taught Dave Merklinger, for example, as much as he thought Dave should know, but not everything. He’s going to take many secrets to the grave.
“Somebody should sit with him and write a book. He’s had such an interesting life.”
Actually, there is a full chapter on Shorty in the 2007 book The Roaring Game: A Sweeping Saga of Curling. An essential part of any curling fan’s library, you can read a review – a shameless endorsement, really – on this archived page.
Author Doug Clark briefly traces the life of “The King of Swing” from when he asked his parents if he could leave and join his brothers at an orphanage – he was nine years old – to his air force career and eventually his life as a curling rock star; immortalized in the national Curling Hall of Fame, in a legendary Tim Hortons TV commercial, and in a cameo appearance in the film Men With Brooms.
He’s even got a World Curling Tour cashspiel named after him, which at one time boasted pink house rings – but of course.
“Shorty was a huge part of my enjoyment in writing the book,” said Clark.
“When he started talking about his life story, I knew this was the closest I could get to a biography of a classic Canadian character in just one chapter.
“Even if you don’t love curling, you’ve gotta love Shorty Jenkins.”
Jenkins is expected to return home from hospital in the next two weeks. On some days, he is unaware of his condition – short-term memory being one of the first things at risk with this progressive disease.
“We are really not sure what the near future holds, unfortunately we do know what the distant future will be,” wrote Rizzo in an email to friends.
And so, curling fans who want to send best wishes to Shorty and his wife Johanna are encouraged to do via:
183 Reid St.
Trenton, Ontario
K8V 5W4
“A curling rock is smarter than a human being.”
– Shorty Jenkins
• World Mixed Doubles: a stunning debut
• Curling Manga: Japanese cartoons draw the button
• Levelwear and TCN want to sponsor your team!
• Club Corner: Curling back into schools
• Collingwood builds wheelchair elevator
• Event preview: the final three
• Rodger Schmidt: Germany, France are keys
• Edmonton gets the Olympic Trials
• Dominion events rake in 200K
• Frenchmen train for nine weeks in Toronto
• They Said It: featuring Martin, Stoughton, McCusker and more
• Team Glenn Howard: the Fantasy Camp
• Mark Spector on the “regular people” of curling
Wildfires Burn Along California’s Central Coast - Washington Post
July 4, 2008
Wildfires Burn Along California’s Central Coast - Washington Post
BIG SUR, Calif. — A pair of out-of-control wildfires roared along California’s central coast Friday, chewing through opposite ends of a parched forest and threatening more than 4,500 homes. While flames from the stubborn fire in the northern flank of the Los Padres National Forest inched closer to
Statue of Liberty’s crown may reopen to public - San Francisco Gate
The National Park Service is considering reopening Lady Liberty’s crown for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to documents a congressman released on July Fourth. The park service requested bids last month to study what it would take to safely open the Statue of Liberty’s
Sen. Jesse Helms Dead at 86 - ABC News
Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, an ideological firebrand with a reputation as one of the Senate’s most conservative lawmakers, died early this morning of natural causes in Raleigh. He was 86. The former five-term senator, Jesse Helms, died in North Carolina. He was 86. (AP/ABC News) Helms was
Eat-off settles Coney Island hot dog contest - Detroit News
July 4, 2008
Eat-off settles Coney Island hot dog contest - Detroit News
NEW YORK — Joey Chestnut reclaimed the top spot at the annual hot dog eating contest in Coney Island on Friday after first tying with archrival Takeru Kobayashi in a 10-minute chow-down and then beating him in a five-dog eat-off. The men tied at 59 frankfurters in 10 minutes, before being made to
Oil prices fall more than $1 a barrel - Detroit News
Oil prices fell more than $1 a barrel Friday from record levels set a day earlier on hopes that tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program could ease and cut the chances of American or Israeli military action against OPEC’s second-largest oil producer. Iran on Friday gave an undisclosed response to
Bush welcomes new US citizens on 4th of July - San Francisco Gate
President Bush invoked the memory of Thomas Jefferson Friday in welcoming new U.S. citizens at a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, saying “I’ll be proud to call you a fellow American.” On his final Fourth of July as president, Bush told an audience at the home of the Declaration of Independence
Federer, Nadal back in Wimbledon final - Baltimore Sun
WIMBLEDON, England - Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal will meet in their third consecutive Wimbledon final after commanding semifinal victories Friday. Federer outplayed Marat Safin 6-3, 7-6 (3), 6-4 with a nearly flawless performance, leaving him one win from his sixth consecutive Wimbledon title and
Worlds apart
July 4, 2008
Worlds apart
I’m a UMKC student - sort of.
If you saw me walking on campus and stopped me to ask for directions, I couldn’t point you in the direction of Cockefair Hall. I might even giggle at the word “Cockefair.” I’ve never studied or checked out a book at Miller Nichols library and I didn’t even know we had something called a “quad.
Some Announcements
President Brodhead’s Review
Just a reminder that you still have a couple of days to send your comments regarding President Brodhead to the committee conducting his performance review for the Board of Trustees. The deadline for submitting comments is October 29.
If you do not have enough time to write a letter, send a postcard or send an e-mail. Make your voice heard.
Tell them that Duke can do a lot better.
In formation on how to participate is here.
Another group has taken the lead in rallying the Duke community to participate in the comment phase for President Brodhead’s review. They are called Friends for a Better Duke or FABDU and they want a Duke to be a fab place once again. You can check out their website here.
Stuart Taylor
Our other friends at Duke Students for an Ethical Duke have are hosting a book signing and lecture by Stuart Taylor, the co-author of Until Proven Innocent at Duke on November 2. The book signing will be at 6:00 and the lecture will follow at 7:00. Details, including directions to the venue, Love Auditorium are here.
Stuart is an excellent speaker and his lecture will be every bit as interesting and informative as KC Johnsons’s a few weeks ago. Incidentally, DSED informs us that Stuart originally signed on to debate any of the book’s critics who wished to come forward. However, there have been no takers so far so he will give a lecture instead.
DSEDuke’s new blog and Stuart Taylor
July 4, 2008
DSEDuke’s new blog and Stuart Taylor
Duke Students for an Ethical Duke has a new blog. Be sure and check it out.
They also have a link to video of Stuart Taylor’s excellent speech at Duke on Friday. The video is low resolution and they are working on putting up one with a higher resolution. However, Stuart’s speech is good enough that you might not want to wait.
Science 2.0
July 4, 2008
Science 2.0
Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?
Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not / M. Mitchell Waldrop
The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business.
Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers–and not just the younger ones–have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement–yet–their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0″ is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive.
“Science happens not just because of people doing experiments, but because they’re discussing those experiments,” explains Christopher Surridge, editor of the Web-based journal, Public Library of Science On-Line Edition (PLoS ONE).
[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2007/12/plos-one-post-publication-peer-reviewed.html]
Critiquing, suggesting, sharing ideas and data–communication is the heart of science, the most powerful tool ever invented for correcting mistakes, building on colleagues’ work and creating new knowledge. And not just communication in peer-reviewed papers … [snip].
The technologies of Web 2.0 open up a much richer dialog, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and the author of a three-part survey of open-science efforts in the group blog, 3 Quarks Daily [http://www.3quarksdaily.com/]. “To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day. That’s an immense leap forward in clarity. [snip]
Of course, many scientists remain highly skeptical of such openness–especially in the hyper-competitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. From that perspective, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: using blogs and social networks for your serious work feels like an open invitation to have your online lab notebooks vandalized–or worse, have your best ideas stolen and published by a rival. To Science 2.0 advocates, however, that atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust is an ally. “When you do your work online, out in the open,” Hooker says, “you quickly find that you’re not competing with other scientists anymore, but cooperating with them.”
Rousing Success
In principle, says PLoS ONE’s Surridge, scientists should find the transition to Web 2.0 perfectly natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by “crowd-sourcing” the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate. “Web 2.0 fits so perfectly with the way science works, it’s not whether the transition will happen but how fast,” he says.
[OpenWetWare]
The OpenWetWare [http://openwetware.org/] project at MIT is an early success. Launched in the spring of 2005 by graduate students working for MIT biological engineers Drew Endy and Thomas Knight, who collaborate on synthetic biology, the project was originally seen as just a better way to keep the two labs’ Web sites up to date. OpenWetWare is a wiki–a collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone who has access to it; it even uses the same software that underlies the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. [snip]. But then, users discovered that the wiki was also a convenient place to post what they were learning about lab techniques: manipulating and analyzing DNA, getting cell cultures to grow. “A lot of the ‘how-to’ gets passed around as lore in biology labs, and never makes it into the protocol manuals,” says Jason Kelly, a graduate student of Endy’s who now sits on the OpenWetWare steering committee.
[snip]
[snip] Instead of making do with a static Web page posted by a professor, users began to create dynamically evolving class sites where they could post lab results, ask questions, discuss the answers and even write collaborative essays. “And all stayed on the site, where it made the class better for next year,” says Shetty, who has created an OpenWetWare template for creating such class sites.
[snip] “I didn’t even know what a wiki was,” recalls Maureen Hoatlin of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where she runs a lab studying the genetic disorder Fanconi anemia. But she did know that the frenetic pace of research in her field was making it harder to keep up with what her own team members were doing, much less Fanconi researchers elsewhere. “I was looking for a tool that would help me organize all that information,” Hoatlin says. “I wanted it to be Web-based, because I travel a lot and needed to access it from wherever I was. And I wanted something my collaborators and group members could add to dynamically, so that whatever I saw on that Web page would be the most recently updated version.”
OpenWetWare, which Hoatlin saw in the spring of 2006, fit the bill perfectly. “The transparency turned out to be very powerful,” she says. “I came to love the interaction, the fact that people in other labs could comment on what we do and vice versa. When I see how fast that is, and its power to move science forward–there is nothing like it.”
Numerous others now work through OpenWetWare to coordinate research. SyntheticBiology.org [http://syntheticbiology.org/], one of the site’s most active interest groups, currently comprises six laboratories in three states, and includes postings about jobs, meetings, discussions of ethics, and much more.
In short, OpenWetWare has quickly grown into a social network catering to a wide cross-section of biologists and biological engineers. It currently encompasses laboratories on five continents, dozens of courses and interest groups, and hundreds of protocol discussions–more than 6100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. A May 2007 grant from the National Science Foundation launched the OpenWetWare team on a five-year effort to transform OpenWetWare to a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT. The grant will also support development of many new practical tools, such as ways to interface biological databases with the wiki, as well as creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that can be used by other research communities such as neuroscience, as well as by individual investigators.
Skepticism Persists
For all the participants’ enthusiasm, however, this wide-open approach to science still faces intense skepticism. [snip]
Unfortunately, this kind of technical safeguard does little to address a second concern: Getting scooped and losing the credit. “That’s the first argument people bring to the table,” says Drexel University chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, who created his independent laboratory wiki, UsefulChem [http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/] in December 2005. [snip]
However, the Web provides better protection that the traditional journal system, Bradley maintains. Every change on a wiki gets a time-stamp, he notes, “so if someone actually did try to scoop you, it would be very easy to prove your priority–and to embarrass them. I think that’s really what is going to drive open science: the fear factor. If you wait for the journals, your work won’t appear for another six to nine months. But with open science, your claim to priority is out there right away.”
[snip] “A simple wiki makes an almost perfect lab notebook,” he declares. The time-stamps on every entry not only establish priority, but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.
Bradley concedes that there are sometimes legitimate reasons for researchers to think twice about being so open. If work involves patients or other human subjects, for example, privacy is obviously a concern. And if you think your work might lead to a patent, it is still not clear that the patent office will accept a wiki posting as proof of your priority. Until that is sorted out, he says, “the typical legal advice is: do not disclose your ideas before you file.”
[snip]
Blogophobia
Although wikis are gaining, scientists have been strikingly slow to embrace one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications: Web logging, or blogging.
“It’s so antithetical to the way scientists are trained,” Duke University geneticist Huntington F. Willard said at the April 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference [http://scienceblogging.com/], one of the first national gatherings devoted to this topic. The whole point of blogging is spontaneity–getting your ideas out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or incomplete. “But to a scientist, that’s a tough jump to make,” says Willard, head of Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. “When we publish things, by and large, we’ve gone through a very long process of drafting a paper and getting it peer reviewed. [snip]
Still, Willard favors blogging. As a frequent author of newspaper op-ed pieces, he feels that scientists should make their voices heard in every responsible way possible. Blogging is slowly beginning to catch on; because most blogs allow outsiders to comment on the individual posts, they have proved to be a good medium for brainstorming and discussions of all kinds. Bradley’s UsefulChem blog is an example. Paul Bracher’s Chembark [http://blog.chembark.com/] is another. “Chembark has morphed into the water cooler of chemistry,” says Bracher, [snip] … .
[snip]
The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. [snip] Once again, however, the technology itself may help. “Nobody believes that a scientist’s only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes,” Hannay says. “People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It’s just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too.”
Collaboration the Payoff
The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. “I don’t see the disappearance of the formal research paper anytime soon,” Surridge says. “But I do see the growth of lots more collaborative activity building up to publication.” And afterwards as well: PLoS ONE not only allows users to annotate and comment on the papers it publishes online, but to rate the papers’ quality on a scale of 1 to 5.
Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. “Our real mission isn’t to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication,” he says. “We’ve recognized that the Web can completely change the way that communication happens.” Among the efforts are Nature Network, a social network designed for scientists; Connotea, a social bookmarking site patterned on the popular site del.icio.us, but optimized for the management of research references; and even an experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment.
Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock [http://scienceblogs.com/clock/], and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. “It’s a Darwinian process,” he says. “About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread.”
“I wouldn’t like to predict where all this is going to go,” Hooker adds. “But I’d be happy to bet that we’re going to like it when we get there.”
[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0-great-new-tool-or-great-risk]
Edit This - 2008
Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.
[This] article … is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment [as it is a] … feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.
[snip]
ThoughtMesh: An Innovative Scholarly Publishing and Discovery Model
July 4, 2008
ThoughtMesh: An Innovative Scholarly Publishing and Discovery Model
ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.
Add your essay to the mesh, and ThoughtMesh gives you a traditional navigation menu plus a tag cloud that enables nonlinear access to text excerpts. You can navigate across excerpts both within the original essay and from related essays distributed across the mesh.
So let’s say you are reading an essay on Modern art. You can pick a single word out of that essay’s tag cloud- -say Picasso- -and view a list of all the sections from that essay that relate to Picasso. Or you can view a list of sections of other articles tagged with Picasso, and jump right to one of those sections. You can also combine tags to narrow your search, such as Picasso + Cubism + 1900.
As an author, you can choose to post your essay in a central repository hosted by the Vectors program at USC, the sponsor of this project. Or you can self-archive your essay on your own Web site. [snip]
Features
Innovative Search Options
- Use tags to find text blocks within the current article
- Use tags to find related blocks in outside articles
- Use search-as-you-type lookup to find words in current article
Expandable Navigation Menu
- Offers more traditional navigation
- Breaks long essays into easy-to-read screen-sized chunks
- Can be used interchangeable with tag-based navigation
Automated Tag and HTML Generation
- Paste in your essay sections and easy-to-use software generates a ThoughtMeshed version
- Software can auto-generate tags for each text block
- Or author can assign custom tags
- Overall tag cloud gives quick sense of article’s themes
Meshes (Features For Future Releases)
- Users can view a map of where the current article fits in the larger mesh.
- Publications and groups of authors can define and administrate their own meshes.
- Users can choose only lexias from current mesh, or from all meshes
FAQ
What’s a tag cloud?
A bunch of keywords in a box. Click on one to see text excerpts related to that theme, or click on several to see excerpts tagged with all of those keywords.
What’s a lexia?
A text excerpt from a longer essay or Web site–usually a couple of paragraphs. Lots of blogs and newspapers have tag clouds. How is ThoughtMesh different?Most of these sites are data-base driven collections of text blocks run off a single server. ThoughtMesh’s tag registry (or mesh) can connect articles on different servers across the Internet.
Is this the “Semantic Web”?
Yes and no. Like the long-term vision of the Semantic Web, ThoughtMesh treats every page on the Web as a potential “database record” to be searched. Unlike the conventional XML-powered vision of the Semantic Web, however, ThoughtMesh’s data are only minimally structured in the page itself; instead, a registry of tags housed on a remote host serves to connect all the individual pages. But it’s still a model of distributed publication, since in principle the same pages can be navigated via independently operated registries.
So it’s like del.icio.us?
Sort of. Del.icio.us’s global folksonomy of tags is great, but it only indexes entire pages, which is less efficient for finding relevant passages in long academic papers. ThoughtMesh helps trace thematic connections between particular sections of online essays. And ThoughtMesh’s tags (and the meshes that connect them) are determined (or at least validated) by the authors of the pages.
Is this “Web 2.0″?
ThoughtMesh exploits participatory media, remote scripting, and lateral navigation. So yeah, you can call it that.
Demos
How to Navigate Essays[http://thoughtmesh.net/media/thoughtmesh_preview_alpha.mov]
How to Tag an Essay[http://thoughtmesh.net/media/thoughtmesh_how_to_add.mov]
People
Jon Ippolito
Conceptual architect, client-side designer, and client-side engineer
Craig Dietrich
Designer and server-side engineer
John Bell
Telamon.js author and remote scripting contributor
Chirag Mehta
ThoughtMesh uses Mehta’s Tagline software
[http://chir.ag/tech/download/tagline/]
Article
/ ThoughtMesh” Tag Your Writing. Join the conversation / Jon Ippolito & Craig Dietrich / Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular / Volume 3 Issue 1, Fall 2007 /
[http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=84]
White Papers
/ New Criteria for New Media / New Media Department, University of Maine / Promotion and Tenure Guidelines Addendum: Rationale for Redefined Criteria / Version 2.2, January 2007 /
ABSTRACT: An argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today’s universities.
[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html]
ThoughtMesh Author’s Statement
[http://three.org/ippolito/thoughtmesh_author_statement.html
ThoughtMesh Forum
[http://vectors.usc.edu/forums/]
Technical
[http://thoughtmesh.net/media/thoughtmesh_author_flow@m.pdf]
Related Work
/ New Age Navigation: Innovative Information Interfaces for Electronic Journals / Gerry McKiernan / The Serials Librarian, Vol. 45(2) / 87-123 / 2003 / DOI: 10.1300/J123v45n02_06 /
ABSTRACT. While it is typical for electronic journals to offer conventional search features similar to those provided by electronic databases, a select number of e-journals have also made available higher-level access options as well. In this article, we review several novel technologies and implementations that creatively exploit the inherent potential of the digital environment to further facilitate use of e-collections.We conclude with speculation on the functionalities of a next-generation e-journal interface that are likely to emerge in the near future.
[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf]
Duke Settles With Indicted Players
July 4, 2008
Duke Settles With Indicted Players
Breaking News: The Chronicle is reporting that Duke University reached a financial settlement with formerly indicted lacrosse players. Here are more details:
Online Advertising Trends Toward Social Media
July 4, 2008
Online Advertising Trends Toward Social Media
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Your Media Mix Is Essential
July 4, 2008
Integrated marketing is your key to success. By combining multiple media formats, your message is more powerful and your marketing more effective. In this post Michael Hubbard, CEO of Media Two Interact give us great insight into the power of a diversified media mix.Determining the right mix of search and display buys must be determined on a client-by-client basis. Often, as a media buyer or agency, you are faced with a client who wants to raise the search budget because he or she thinks spending more money on search will lead to better search results. The reality is that spending a larger chunk of your budget by buying up all the related keywords may increase clicks, but it is unlikely to have a significant effect on conversions because that big mix of keywords is no more targeted than before.
For instance, if you’re Apple, you’re catering to a very specific segment of online electronics shoppers. Basic keywords like “mp3 player,” “computer,” “processor” or “laptop” may technically apply to the products you carry, but the audience searching for those terms could be looking for something entirely different. If you’re looking for Mac users, not just anyone in the market for a computer, why waste the search dollars?
A better technique is to spend a portion of your marketing budget on the most targeted search keywords and then dedicate a good portion of your budget to display advertising to support the search programs, sending more qualified buyers to the search engines. You do this with demographic/geographic and behaviorally targeted ad buys and more brand-based placements to really ensure you’re reaching the shoppers with the most potential to buy your specific product or service.
After seeing display ads while browsing, users will often go to their favorite engine and search for the brand they saw in the ad. The reason for this may be because people don’t like to click on banner ads as a rule, but once they’ve seen enough ads to establish brand recall, they will go to a channel they’re comfortable with to find it. The point is, there’s nothing to brand on search engines alone; something else is always driving you there, and display is one of those big drivers of traffic.
The great part of multiple media is that the strategy is two-pronged because in addition to supporting search, display has its own ROI objectives, which means double the benefit for you. Search is a powerhouse to be sure, but display can be the wind beneath its wings.
Post by Michael Hubbard, CEO, Media Two Interact
