How exciting! I got a padded white envelope today with the RIAA logo on it, and it was not some kind of lawsuit notice. In it was the Protect Yourself. Do It Legally video and with two copies of their propaganda poster:

I have it hanging in my office and am still deciding what to draw on it :-)

As announced on Kairosnews by Editor David Blakesley, Parlor Press in conjuuction with Glassbead Books has published Looking for a Fight: Is There a Republican War on Science? under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Go Dave! I think this may be the first CC licensed book put out by anyone in my field. Note that you can download the PDF version now for free or help support a progressive press like Parlor by buying a print copy.

This past week, I worked with a couple of other members of the Writing Department at GVSU to prepare a position statement on plagiarism detection software. GVSU only recently acquired a subscription to Turnitin, and myself and the other teachers were concerned that teachers in other disciplines would be unware of the issues surrounding plagiarism detection services. The following is the full text of the statement which has been distributed on our campus.

Note: CCCC-IP has begun a resource page on plagiarism detection services.

Issues Raised by Use of Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Software

Overview

Recently, Grand Valley State University purchased a site license to plagiarism detection service Turnitin.com. Faculty members who use this service can require students to submit writing assignments electronically to Turnitin, which compares student texts against Turnitin’s database of Internet sites, academic journals index, and previously student submitted papers and prepares a report indicating where in the text plagiarism has been detected. Writing submitted to Turnitin is maintained in the database for comparison against future submissions by other students.

Scholars and teachers in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, as well as other academics, have discouraged the use of plagiarism detection services. We recommend that before using this service, faculty members consider several important issues raised by the use of Turnitin.

From Linux Watch's report on IDC's Open Source in Global Software: Market Impact, Disruption, and Business Models:

The study, which analyzed IDC surveys from over 5,000 developers in 116 countries in the spring of 2006, found that developers worldwide are increasing their use of open source. IDC found that open source-software is being used by 71 percent of the developers in the world and is in production at 54 percent of their organizations. In addition, half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increasing in their organizations.

I expect this number to grow even larger. The whiz kid programmers and technologists of 20-30 years ago all fought to create and sell the ultimate proprietary software app. Legends Bill Gates and Steve Jobs grew out of this generation. The new generation is no longer thinking hide the source code in binary format, own it, and sell it, but sees the value of collaboration through open source for creating the latest, greatest software. That is, if software patents don't get in the way (sigh!).

The older I get, the more my eyes complain that they are past 40 now. I'm having more trouble reading on the screen these days than I did ten or even five years ago, and somehow I suspect it is not going to get better (lol).

Thus, I've become more sensitive to readability issues in regards to font size. There are two instances in particular where designers really should pay more attention to accessibilty:

I guess I'm a geek :-)