David Akin’s On The Hill

You should be.
The blogosphere is all excited because this is the first big presidential debate that will be blogged in real-time. Who cares what a bunch of yo-yos like me sitting on their couch with a Wi-Fi connection and a laptop think? Watch the debate. Turn off your computer. Go to the source and pay attention.
Tomorrow, we'll get back to our blogs and yak all about it.

Researchers who want to make a big splash with their work might want to consider open-access publishing. [What's that?] Now, a new study in a journal called College and Research Libraries concludes that journal articles published under an open-access system are cited more frequently than those published through subscription-only services.
But will scholars get that message? Apparently not:
“[Scholars] want the imprimatur of quality and integrity that a peer-reviewed, high-impact title can offer, together with reasonable levels of publisher service. Above all, they want to narrowcast their ideas to a close community of like-minded researchers. . .”, says a new study authored by Ian Rowlands, Dave Nicholas and Paul Huntingdon. Those three conducted an international survey of scholars and report that more than 80 per cent of researchers have not yet heard about open access publishing and, in any event, hardly any of them would be willing to pay the $500 (U.S.) or more it costs to have their work made available under an open access system
For now, it seems, the world's scholarly knowledge will remained locked up in ivory towers where it does little good to anyone but the academic priesthood.
Why else is open-access publishing important? Some say reform of scholarly publishing is vital because the current system is bankrupting university and research libraries. Some research libraries are paying what are literally millions of dollars a year in journal subscriptions. Many are finding that burden to be too high. Their choice is to either pass these costs on to students — which raises the costs of education and makes a post-secondary education even more elitist — or to cease subscribing to some of these subscriptions — and that reduces the information or knowledge flow which, of course, is part of the core mission of most libraries.

Sounds like this will be an interesting collection when it's finished:

Call for Papers
Between Reality and Fiction on Canadian
Television
Historically in Canada, the focus of television studies has been on its
role as a technology of public policy and nation building. Studies
focus on either the public mandate or political economy of Canadian
television. Little work examines the content of Canadian television and
how it functions in everyday life in Canada. Our collection aims to
fill a sizable gap in scholarship about Canadian television content.
In his book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Raymond
Williams noted that television produces hybrid forms- from the blurring
of domestic and public spheres to the blending of current events and
drama. Canadian television has been a particularly fertile realm for
such hybridization. According to David Hogarth in Documentary
Television in Canada (2002), that is because much of Canadian cultural
funding is traditionally allocated to current events programming, as
well as education and other public services. Given this funding
climate, media professionals weave their dramas and other creative
projects somewhere between reality and fiction. The resulting hybrid
realism that seems so much a part of Canadian television is something
this collection wishes to explore.
We invite proposals for scholarly articles that are case studies,
either historical or contemporary, of programs made for broadcast on
Canadian television. We welcome cases from English-, French- and other
language programming. We encourage a broad range of approaches
including textual analyses, audience/reception studies, and studies of
the conditions for creativity.
The topic-between reality and fiction on Canadian television- invites
cases that could include but are not limited to:
… Historical Costume Dramas
… Docudrama/Drama-docs/Re-enactments
… Real Crime Shows
… Popular Genres in News Narrative or Documentary
… Mockumentary/Parody
… Reality Television
… Lifestyle and Travel Shows
Please email abstracts of 500 words and a brief biography (in English)
to Dr. Zoë Druick, School of
Communication, Simon Fraser University (druick@sfu.ca) and Patsy Kotsopoulos, Film Studies Program,
University of British Columbia.
Deadline: November 30, 2004
—
Dr. Zoë Druick
Assistant Professor
School of Communication
RCB 6228
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC
V5A 1S6
Phone: 604-291-5398
Fax: 604-291-4024

When Shaun and Kathy Shivers moved from Mississauga to Oakville, Ont., four years ago, it took just two days to sell their home.
They were happy about the speed of their sale but wondered why they had to pay $9,000 in commissions to the real estate broker that handled the transaction.
“The real estate agent wasn't even there for the sale. She was away for the weekend so a partner of hers that we'd never met came and did the close,” Mrs. Shivers said.
“There was no advertising done,” Mr. Shivers said. “The only thing we got for nine grand was the sign on the front lawn and the . . . listing. We found it very hard to justify that kind of money when we only met the realtor once. That was it. It was, thank you very much, and there's nine thousand bucks.”
So this summer, when they moved from Oakville to a home just outside London, Ont., they decided to sell the Oakville property on their own, saving what they figured might have been more than $15,000 in commissions they would have paid a broker.
Each year, thousands of Canadian homeowners are doing what the Shivers did: Selling their own home without the services of a licensed real estate agent . .. [Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail and watch this story on tonight's CTV National News]

After more than three years, chief executive officer Pat Brockett's work at Zarlink Semiconductor Inc. of Ottawa is starting to pay off.
This summer, he announced the company's first quarterly profit since he took over and analysts have been generally impressed by Mr. Brockett's initiatives, even if investors haven't.
“This . . . is a turning point for this company,” he told analysts. “We're beginning to see the results of three years of hard work.”
The company reported profit of $7.5-million (U.S.) or 6 cents a share on sales of $55.8-million for the fiscal first quarter ended June 25. Despite the improving financials, the stock has drifted down through the back half of the summer, off about 35 per cent from where it was at the end of June.
Brian Piccioni, Toronto-based semiconductor analyst at BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., raised his rating on Zarlink to “outperform” from “perform” in the wake of the first-quarter results. He said Mr. Brockett and his team have “worked a miracle” to cut the company's costs and set it on what Mr. Piccioni believes is a good long-term strategy . . .
[Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail]

A terrific column by Tina Brown in the Washington Post on the Dan Rather/CBS thing:
“…Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes [and their blogs]. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time …”
That sounds about right.

In the Just-What-We-Need category:

Siemens Mobile said that a new breed of phone will have a tiny chip that measures less than a millimetre to detect unpleasant odours.
It will examine the air in the immediate vicinity for anything from bad breath and alcohol to atmospheric gas levels. She didn't say what the phone would do if it found you too smelly, it might ring you or send out a high pitched scream that shouts bad breath to anyone who might want to get close to you.
[Read the rest of the story]

One day, when I have time to explain all the sordid details, I will write about my book lists. There are two: One for fiction and one for non-fiction. They are both lists of books I want to read and each book on the list — there are close to 2,000 titles on each list — is awarded a certain number of points based on a tremendously complicated scoring system I've developed over the years. As I said, I'll write up the details one day when I have time. One big influencer, though, in the scoring system are literary awards. In Canada, the biggies are the Governor-General's awards and the Giller Prize. Internationally, it's the Man Booker Prize and a variety of others like the Orange Prize.
Books get on my list in a variety of ways but one key way is by being named to the shortlist for these and other literary awards. If the book is already on my list, it and every other work by the short-listed author also gets mucho points.
The point of the points system is: First, it's a nice way to spend the time while having a coffee on Saturday morning and Second, it helps determine what I'm to read next. (I have a slightly less complicated way of choosing what to read next that involves these lists and other things, but that's another story).
All of this is to say that for those of us who watch literary awards for one reason or another, it was a big day today because the finalists for the Man Booker prize was announced. Every literary award has its own flavour but for my money, any book shortlisted for the Booker (and, in Canada, for the Giller) are the kind of books I like. The tastes of the Booker juries over the years and my own seem to be in sympatico.
Here, then, are the authors up for this year's Man Booker Prize:

• Achmat Dangor
• Sarah Hall
• Alan Hollinghurst
• David Mitchell
• Colm Tóibín
• Gerard Woodward

Read the full press release with all the titles and more info about the Booker.
The Guardian newspaper also has a report on the announcement.
And what am I reading now? Finally getting around to Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy, a 1996 winner of a G-G. So far, terrific. The non-fiction book du jour is Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Interesting but it seems I will have to start all over again with it once I've read Vico and Michelet.

I've not tried 'em all, but among the RSS aggregators/newsreaders I've tried on both Windows and Mac platform, Ranchero Software's NetNewsWire is my favourite. Like most Mac apps, it's intuitive and easy to use; has a neat notepad; a decent collection of AppleScripts exist; and had its own Weblog editor.
The folks at Ranchero just announced that they have a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 available. I downloaded and gave it a quick look-over. Nice. Biggest and best improvement is the speed at which it and the content you access loads. It's a lot faster.
The other big thing: The Weblog editor within NetNewsWire is gone. Now, when you want to blog something you're reading in NetNewswire, NetNewsWire will hand off some content, with pre-formatted HTML, to your favourite blog editor. (Mine happens to be Ecto on the Mac and on the PC I'm using BlogJet until Ecto for Windows gets some legs.)
The folks at Ranchero are also getting into the blog editor game, with the beta release of MarsEdit. Looks more than a little bit like Ecto's user interface. Haven't tried it yet but will fire that up over the next few days. Love to hear your thoughts on either one of those apps or your other favourite newsreading app or blog editor.
And the other big thing: In NetNewsWire 1 or most other aggregators I've used, you get a headline and a few grafs from the RSS feed. If you want to read me more you click on a link within the aggregator, and presto, you're whisked off to your browser where the Web site loads. In NNW 2.0, though, you get the Web page popping open with NNW. I'm undecided if I like that or not. I think I'll have to get used to it. If you do open the Web page within NNW, it's a simple click or keyboard combo to jump to your default browser and have the Window open. I like that flexibility.

This blog is published using the Blogware publishing platform developed by Tucows. The developer bees over there have been busy putting together a new version and Ross has the lowdown on everything that's new (see below). I've just fired it up using the latest version of Apple's Safari on the most recent build of OS X. I'm sad to say that the admin/posting pages render so poorly that they are almost unuseable. (Happily, I've got Ecto for my post creation.) Looks very clean, however, on IE 5.2 for the Mac. Don't have my Windows boxes fired up tonight to check it on that platform. (I'm thinking, incidentally, of moving off IE on Windows to Mozilla.org's Firefox browser. After three days of use, it runs cleaner and faster than IE and, the geeks tell me, it's a little more secure than IE.)
Here's what Blogware leader Ross had to say at his blog and I'm hoping v 1.2.1 or even 1.3 comes out darn soon:

We shipped v1.2 today. Probably the biggest single revision that we've ever done to the Blogware code base.

In my mind, this is the v1.0 that we *should* have shipped. Users syndicating with RSS 2.0 now get to drop ENT metadata into their feeds – the UI has been cleaned up a *ton* (I've started calling it “the useful version” – Useful Interface instead of User Interface? Hmmm…sounds like a whole different post unto itself) and we've nailed down user profiles pretty substantially as well – check me out here.

The feature I'm most proud of? The new picture posting tools in the Rich Text Editor… [Read the rest at: Random Bytes]