Jason Griffey

The many-storied making of the film Watchmen evidently took another turn today. Darren Aronofsky was attached to the film, which I thought was brilliant. Now it appears that he has some conflict and Paul Greengrass has taken over. Greengrass directed The Bourne Supremacy, which was a fine action film, but didn’t convince me that he can do Noir Superhero.

That said, I do sincerely hope that whoever makes this film does it some justice. Hollywood has gotten better at the superhero movie (see: Spiderman I & II, Hellboy, and hopefully the upcoming Batman Begins) in recent years, but Watchmen is a different beast. For anyone who hasn’t read it, go pick it up. It’s one of the most compelling stories ever told in the comic medium, full of darkness and despair and real characters rather than archetypes (ok…we’ve still got archetypes in Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias).

In a related note, I just checked the Wikipedia entry on Watchmen, and the director had already been changed. Amazing.

…about the new Google services: Keyhole and Scholar.

Indeed they do…indeed they do. Get on that, will you, Google?

It appears that Google has launched a new beta project: Google Scholar.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

I’ve done some test searches, and the results are really interesting. I googled myself to see what would come up, and indeed my Master’s Paper was the first result. Not only that, but instead of linking to it from the UNC Library Science Master’s Paper Index, it linked directly to my local copy on my own webspace. How did it know that it was a “scholarly paper”?

In addition to searches by topic, keyword, author (and combinations of those) it also ‘tags’ the results so that you are told when a result is a book, citation, pdf or other identifiable object, and if it is a book, there’s a library search (powered by OCLC) that will check to see if it’s in your local library.

There are issues, though…when I did a search for “Lawrence Lessig” I obtained a TON of results (obviously) but they weren’t grouped in a logical manner. For example, two of his books (Code and The Future of Ideas) were the first results. His book Free Culture, however, didn’t show up until page 4, and even then the link wasn’t to the freely downloadable version or even the webpage associated with it.

In the FAQ, Google addresses many of the questions I think that librarians will have about this service from patrons…things like:

My university subscribes to the Journal of Prosimian Dialectical Reasoning. How do I read the full text of their articles?
Please check with your university library. You may need to do searches from a campus computer or use a library proxy.

and

Is there any way I can read the full text without being a subscriber (to the journal in question)?
Check a nearby academic library, which will likely have a copy. For books, click on “Library Search” next to the title to find a library near you that has a copy of the work in question (this service is provided courtesy of OCLC).

I’m incredibly excited about this. The next step, in my mind, is to include Creative Commons metadata in the results list, so that we can see from the first search which are “open” and which are not. If Google and CC work together on this, it could potentially pressure more and more academic presses into using a CC model (if most people are finding articles using Google Scholar, and CC content is listed or ranked differently, there could be a pressure towards that model).

Any way you go, we’re talking about exciting possibilities for scholars. Esp. if the Google API is released for this specific area, and universities can tailor it to their own uses. Branded library search pages! This could be very cool.

Web Comic that made me laugh out loud.

A couple of interesting perspectives on The South, a geographic area near and dear to my heart, having been born in Kentucky, married in New Orleans, graduated from North Carolina, and currently living in Tennessee. The South as a culture has taken a beating since the election, painted red with the anger of liberals and the joy of conservatives both. It’s no secret which side of the line upon which I fall, but way down deep I keep believing that the South’s reputation for bigotry, hate, and fundamentalism is simply a public face or mask, and that in private the hospitality and warmth of the people is the real story.

But I really wish that we could get rid of the fucking mask.

The South vs. The South.

In the parlance of 1337 speak: OMFG.

I want these so bad I can taste it.

Hill House Publishers (beware shoddy web design) has made deals with two of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson to publish limited signed and numbered editions of some of their works. And what editions…boxed, silk-bound, and in Gaiman’s case often with the “author’s edition” text, with sections that were cut from the published editions. Their edition of American Gods has 12,000 words that weren’t in the previously published editions.

They are also doing the amazingly cool “Neil Gaiman Author’s Preferred Limited Edition Series” subscription service, where you not only get the books in the series, but limited edition one-time printings of Gaiman stuff not available anywhere else, like the recently published “Screenplay” (a slight-of-hand way of referencing a screenplay he did for Good Omens). They appear to be doing the entire Stephenson Baroque Cycle in these limited edition versions…my mind boggles.

Unfortunately, so does the pocketbook. These will run you around $200 each, so it appears that they will remain a distant dream. On one hand, I’m sure they will appreciate in value…on the other hand, you’re talking about $200 for books that I already own. But what books….the bibliophile in me weeps.

I don’t believe that I spend time doing this today. But I did, so…

B6 d+ t+ k s u- f i+ o x+ e+ l- c-

Code / Decode

In a post on election day, I suggested that we put Bruce Schneier in charge of the national election process here in the US. His recent post on why electronic voting is currently broken, and how to fix it, is among the most succinct I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample:

We need to start treating voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the U.S. is significantly more meticulous than what is done to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.

He breaks down the issues with voting in general, the specifics in regards to electronic voting, and makes suggestions on how we can improve said e-voting in the future (since it is apparent that we will be headed that direction whether or not it’s best). He says that everything comes down, more or less, to two propositions:

1. We need paper trails for audit purposes.
2. The software in question must be open source.

No surprises here…now can we make it happen?