From the Aggregator - Week of 2/12/07

Sharing links to various things that struck my fancy from reading the 100 feeds in my blog aggregator.

1. Nanoquest: a game to learn about nanotechnology (Thanks Ewan): I've always been interested in nano and this might be a way to get my kids interested as well. If not them, at least I can learn something.
   
2. Call Me (from Inside Higher Ed): I love this one. The academic name game that some of the high and mighty take far more seriously than the teaching and learning process. And some of them wonder where the concept of the ivory tower comes from. Sheesh. Reminds me of my grad studies at ASU when a particular pretentious Assistant Professor was first hired while ABD. After he successfully defended his dissertation and earned his PhD (or maybe it was a DBA) the first thing he did was to get new bank checks with his name at the top - "Dr. Mucky Muck." I assume he thought being a doctor would get him better seats in restaurants, or some such nonsense.
3. Tragedy of the FOSS Commons (Thanks Stephen): article by Schweik and English - "we noted that a key difference between environmental commons and FOSS commons is the kind of “tragedy of the commons” they face. In environmental settings it is over-harvesting of the resource. In FOSS commons, the tragedy is an under-production or maintenance problem." I find Stephen's question the most interesting: "Both papers highlight the role companies are playing in the development of open source software. The implication, it seems to me, is that the companies are using the developers, and therefore, changing the FLOSS culture. But I wonder whether the reverse isn't true, that it's the developers who are using the companies."
4. The High Price of College Textbooks: A Contemplation and Possible Solution (from XplanaZine by Susan Smith Nash). XplanaZine is an excellent resource, but I think she misses the mark on this one. (More later on that.) Interestingly, our state system office is currently gathering information from the 32 schools about the level of profits earned by the campus bookstores. I'm thinking that something is up at the Board of Trustees or the student associations, or some where like that.
   
5. Free Microsoft Photo Info (Thanks Allan Ogg): Microsoft released a new free Microsoft Photo Info 1.0 tool, where Windows XP and Vista users can edit metadata properties for digital photographs using Windows Explorer.
6. Internet Policy: What Congress Should Do is the outline of a series of short presentations outlining arguments for six Internet-related proposals that Lawrence Lessig believes should be enacted by Congress in the near future. I'm very much looking forward to this, now I only wish we could get the elected officials to pay attention as well.

That's half of the links I have, but all of the time.