swissmiss: Smoothly navigate and analyze the most recent Democratic Debate

Wired Campus: Will Open-Access Publishing Free Enslaved Academics? - Chronicle.com

Is the movement toward free and open access to published material a human-rights issue? Richard Smith says it is. The former editor of the British journal BMJ is on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes journal articles online and makes them freely available to the public.

 Feature: Give an Old Laptop New Life with Cheap (or Free) Projects

Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don’t just throw away a laptop because it’s banged up a little. Even if it seems outdated and underpowered, most any laptop is still small, quiet, and relatively low on power consumption, making it a seriously valuable spare to keep handy—even without a working screen. With some free software, a little know-how and some creative thinking about your home network, nearly any old laptop can find its second wind, and today I’ll run through some of the best ways to get it there.Photo by daveynin.

Wired Campus: U. of Texas Professor Praises Wikipedia - Chronicle.com
David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, writes that students need to become familiar with new and non-static forms of communication. He encourages his students to read Wikipedia’s “history” and “discussion” pages, saying they explain how articles were produced. And he says the online encyclopedia’s entry on global warming does a good job of explaining both the controversy and the science surrounding the issue.

Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement - Chronicle.com
Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

I read this article this weekend…but was quite supprised, naively I suppose, at the attention that it has been getting on the intertubes.  We all know that “paperless” quickly degenerates into the cliche, but there seems to be a  deeper view of the cost of the paper gaining a foothold in our everyday discourse.

Pushing Paper Out the Door - New York Times

CHRIS UHLIK’S children can be found in their home computer lab almost every morning. Nicole is writing a story about her two lizards. Tony is playing an interactive spelling game, while Andy is learning multiplication tables. Even 5-year-old Joceline is clicking away at a storybook game.
Mr. Uhlik, an engineering director at Google, and his family live a practically paper-free life. The children are home-schooled on computers. Other sources of household paper — lists, letters, calendars — have become entirely digital.

This looks like a really interesting news site. It allows you to browse US newpaper headlines through an interactive map. What a wonderfully intuitive way to explore regional variations in news reporting. Living in the Gray Lady’s backyard often limits our familiarity with other news papers. How many New Yorkers had ever read a Times Picayune headline before Katrina?

Newseum | Todays Front Pages | Map View

Make sure Word, OpenOffice.org Writer play well together | Workers’ Edge - a productivity blog from Dennis O’Reilly - CNET Blogs
The first few times I worked on Word files in the OpenOffice.org Writer program, I was satisfied if the documents opened at all. That’s a long way from being able to trust the open-source app with a Word file from your boss that you need to work on and return with all functions and formatting intact. These steps won’t guarantee trouble-free file transfers between Word and OOo Writer, but they’ll help you prevent some of the most common conversion glitches.

Podcasts Taking Off Again: eMarketer
According to eMarketer, the total podcast audience in the United States was 18.5 million in 2007 and will rise to 65 million in 2012. “Active listeners” defined as people who download more than one podcast were 6.5 million in 2007 and expected to be 25 million in 2012.