All of today's tidbits are from one blog! Well, all but one.
- David Rosenthal on digital preservation. I had this bookmarked to blog about, but…
- Chris Rusbridge beat me to it, saying everything I would have. Yes, online-versus-offline. Yes, research data in uncommon, niche, and/or proprietary formats. Yes, metadata! And yes, thinking for ourselves.
- Semantic Web of Linked Data for Research? In all honesty, my reaction to "Linked Data" can be summed up in Chris's question mark. I am not a fan of RDF, I remain to be convinced that even small, constrained Semantic Webs are feasible given how slippery human reality-representations are and how fraught the attempt to render them in computer-understandable terms. Chris makes me reconsider, though.
- My backup rant. No, not mine—Chris's again. But I have the same rant! I would add to it that I have heard many graduate students mourn that their labs push backup chores onto them without the least effort to provision them with appropriate technology. Those labs that think about backups at all, that is…
Chris, I haven't gotten around to reading the latest International Journal of Digital Curation yet; it's sneering at me from Bloglines. I will get to it, though!
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There's been about 90 or so significant nuke accidents. That's a lot considering that there are only some 400-500 or so facilities involved. But it's OK. Nuclear power is totally safe. We have backups on backups on backups. Nothing can go wrong. ... go wrong ... go wrong..
Don't sleep with feminists. And if you do, have a backup plan.
Everyone has heard by now that there is a catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not an oil expert, so I won't discuss this much here. There is a lot of information already in the media.
I would have taken Bérubé's Transhumanist test seriously, but when I hit the last option my brain locked up and crashed hard. It took hours to download and restore the backup.