I encourage people to apply for this call from JISC. JISC put out some good calls, although at times I worry that they they do not understand the difference between ‘skilled work’ and ‘research work’. There is a big difference. Research is not necessarily ‘promoted’; it is cited within the authorial arguments of the academic monologue. It doesn’t matter how heavily research is advertised and promoted; if it is crap research it is still crap research. It may have a poor evidence base, the questions may be trivial, it may be poorly contextualised within a field, it may not be convincing, well argued, nor conclusive. A well-endowed research team may place advertisements on all the EasyJet planes in Europe that announce their research to ‘broad audiences’; however if it is crap research it is still crap research!

The JISC invites tenders to conduct a study of Online Communication and Promotion of Research Expertise.
The aim of the study is to establish how institutions are promoting their research expertise online, and whether this is effective, and to describe practices that contribute to its effectiveness in meeting the needs of the different parties involved, especially research users outside higher education.
Total funding of up to £100,000 (including VAT, travel and subsistence) is available for this project.
The deadline for proposals is 12 noon UK time on 14 December 2009.
A full version of the ITT can be found here http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2009/11/researchexpertiseitt.aspx

EngageMedia is a video sharing site about social justice and environmental issues in the Asia Pacific, located in Melbourne in Australia, just a few doors up from my old house in Napier Street, Fitzroy. They also distribute their own developed plug-ins. This is a sophisticated crew that know their social software.!

EngageMedia uses the power of video, the internet and free software technologies to affect social and environmental change. We believe independent media and free and open technologies are fundamental to building the movements needed to challenge social injustice and environmental damage, as well as to provide and present solutions.

EngageMedia works with independent filmmakers, video activists, technologists, campaigners and social movements to generate wider audiences for their vital messages and move people to action (link).

I have experimented with YouTube’s new annotation system on this video so feel free to annotate it (but please be kind) (link)

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA – an anti-abortion website (link).

U-Compare is an integrated text mining/natural language processing
system based on the UIMA Framework, which provides access to a large
collection of ready-to-use interoperable natural language processing
components.

U-Compare is currently the world’s largest UIMA component repository. It
allows users to build complex NLP workflows via an easy drag-and-drop
interface, and makes visualization and comparison of the outputs of
these workflows simple.

U-Compare is the result of a collaboration the Tsujii Laboratory at the
University of Tokyo, the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the
University of Colorado, and the National Centre for Text Mining at the
University of Manchester.

For more information, please see the U-Compare website:
http://www.u-compare.org/