Study at UC Berkley ... with Google Video

EN: The University of California in Berkley has started to make videos of lectures available at Google Video. I can also warmly recommend the Google TechTalk videos.

Great that the video web services are not only places to find (more or less) funny videos and music clips (what I also appreciate a lot), but can serve as distributors of educational media.

Eben Moglen on software, sharing, and society

EN: Eben Moglen gave a great talk about the sharing of knowledge and its benefits at the OSCON 2006. It's now available on O'Reilly's Distributing the future as an mp3 file.

It has come back from the grave as a belief that only exclusive property rights in ideas will produce creativity, inventiveness, discovery. You have proven that's wrong [...]. It is instead the sharing of knowledge and ideas which produces creativity, which enables invention, which produces innovation.

Happy OneWebDay!

EN: There is a celebration for nearly everything. Here a new date for your hungry calendar: Today is the first OneWebDay. Time to meditate and think how the web has influenced our live.

[Via lessig blog]

Wikipedia fork announced

EN: Larry Sanger announce on the Wizard of the OS 4 in the "Quality Management in Free Content"* (ogg-audio, mp4-video) session a fork of Wikipedia named Citizendium. It will be much more expert based and limited regarding participation:

Where Wikipedia shares the culture of anonymity found in the broader internet, Citizendium will have a culture of real world personal responsibility.

The fork will be based in the beginning of the English Wikipedia project only and will use the same software and licence as Wikipedia. It might be already implemented until end of September 2006.

[via Rough Type]

* The talk of Ulrich Pöschl the editor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journal, known for its very open reviewing process, is a nice introduction to this new ways of publishing in science.

Update: Clay Shirky posted an entry with his doupts of this expertise based concept and Larry Sanger fought back.

New Banksy artworks

EN: Shhhhhh! Sneak into the newest Banksy exhibition!

(The first picture are just photos of celebrity so just scroll down to the real art).

[Via Boing Boing]

Interview with Yochai Benkler

EN: Yochai Benkler, a key-note speaker at the ongoing Wizard of the OS 4 conference and author of the book “The Wealth of Networks”, gave an interview (mp3) at netzpolitik.org. It deals with the decentralisation of power induced by the internet and it's impact on economy, politics, and society.

The central questions in biology

EN: Interested in a Nobelprize*? Maybe you should focus on one of the fundamental questions in biology [1] to get one. PloS Biology started a series of essays discussing these - the Challenges Series. The first essay [2] is about cooperation.

[1] Simon A. Levin, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040300
[2] Ned S. Wingreen, Simon A. Levin, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040299

* Yup, I know there is unfortunately none for biology ...

Google Earth for spotting environmental damages

EN: The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Google started a collaboration to show hot spots of environmental damages in Google Earth. Here is an article about that in NewScientistTech.

Two postgenomic mashups

EN: The are two cool Greasemonkey scripts for postgenomic-mashups at Flags and Lollipops. The first one adds links of related postgenomic topics to entries in Connotea, the second script show those links in PubMed.

No censored Wikipedia in China

EN: Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, announced that he will not accept a censored version of the wiki encyclopedia for China. The access from China to Wikipedia is blocked (Great Firewall of China) since October 2005. Read the report in the Guardian and have a look at Irrepressible.info - a campaign fighting for freedom in the internet and against censorship.

[Via boinboing]

Postgenomics improved

EN: As Pedro mentioned, it seems as postgenomics (a scientific meta-blog) has quietly done a upgrade.

The pirates have landed

DE: Am gestrigen Sonntag wurde in der beliner c-base die Piraten Partei Deutschland (PPD) gegründet:

Diese soll Meinungsfreiheit und Privatsphäre aller Menschen in Deutschland erhalten und die fortschrittsbehindernden Auswüchse des Urheber- und Patentrechts zugunsten einer freien Wissensgesellschaft neufassen. (aus dem Wiki der PPD)

Beim Datenschutz möchten wir den gläsernen Staat und nicht den gläsernen Bürger. (Interview mit Zeit Zuender)

Ich begrüsse es sehr, dass nun auch in Deutschland eine Partei mit diesen Zielen die politische Bühne betritt. Allerdings habe ich die Befürchtung, dass der Name viele potentielle Wähler abschrecken wird (dazu gibt es auch ein Thema im Forum (Dank für den Link an Bernd). Aber vielleicht ist das nur ein Frage der Gewöhnung.

[via heise online]

Knowledge dropped

EN: Last Saturday the answer session of the dropping knowedge project took place in Berlin. Famous intellectuals gave their answers to questions ask by the web community in the months before. Around 3.8 TB of data was recorded and will be soon available for download under a Creative Commons licence.

Ewan Birney about open-access publishing

EN: Ewan Birney (EBI) gives in this short video (at BioMed Central) his statement on publishing in open-access journals.

[Via bioninformatics.org]