Many Norwegian universities today have their own open access repositories. The University of Bergen has BORA (shared with HiB and NHH, the University of Oslo has DUO, NTNU uses DIVA – and there exists a search engine to search though all of them (I’d never heard of it before though..): Nora. While this is good, the large majority of the work produced are never published in these repositories. Vox Publica reports that only 33 of 9868 peer-reviewed articles produced in 2006 are available!
One reason is that they are all based on an opt-in model. It’s therefore interesting that Harvard University decided that all scholarly publications by employees at the university must be made available online in an open access repository. The proposal uses the opt-out model instead, where all articles must be submitted to the repository and scholars who don’t wish their work to be openly available must apply for a waiver. I would love Norwegian universities to follow suit! NTNU has already taken a small step in the right direction, by deciding that all master’s and phd theses will follow the opt-out model.
In the future, open access might lower the barrier between academic publications and the “informal web”. Maybe blog comments on academic publications one day will be a common phenomena?
I’m Swedish no more. This spring I’m studying quantum mechanics and molecular modelling at the University of Oslo. Together with Maria Dyveke we’ve found a cozy old apartment we’re renting. We’re living together for the first time, which is both very exciting and a bit scary :)
More and more ads nowadays contain the word “green”. The world has woken up, environmental-friendly products sell, and advertisers understand that. Which is all good. But “green cars”? What is a green car?
Manfred Braunl, head of marketing in Germany for BMW, says that rather than try to impress TV viewers with ads about new fuel-saving technologies BMW is experimenting with “metaphorical” ads that aim to put viewers in a positive mood about the company and its approach to reducing fuel consumption (via Environmental leader).
And most green car ads are highly metaphorical. If a car company has developed one car that is “greener” than the others, they use this for all it’s worth to promote themself as a green and idealistic company. Like this ad for Toyota Prius.
In Norway, the producers of the electric car Buddy complained about these ads in April last year. What I didn’t know before today what that new guidelines were set into force in Norway in October that states that no car can be called “green”, “clean” or “environmentally friendly”. “Cars cannot do anything good for the environment except less damage than others,” Bente Oeverli, a senior official at the office of the state-run Consumer Ombudsman, told Reuters.
… or a single can of dissolvent can pollute millions of litres of water. Effective message from the World Wildlife Fund:
Via Sensibilid (where one more ad from Tokyo is shown). Norwegians wondering what to do with their paint remnants should check out this recycling guide.
The American photographer Noah Kalina has taken a picture of himself every day for the past seven years. I think that’s the most narcissistic art project I’ve heard of, but no matter, the video he has composed from some of the images from the first six years is really hypnotic to watch. And you can see his face ages…
It may seem like banning internet sites is in the wind. Now Turkey do it too. To weeks ago, the creationist Adnan Oktar filed a court order where he claimed that a number of blogs on Wordpress were libellous to him and that the whole site should be banned. And he won!
An interesting point is that the order was carried out almost immediately, because there’s in practice only one broadband-firm in Turkey. This shows the need for several internet providers in a country – and for responsible internet providers. My internet provider here in Sweden, Bredband2, clearly states that they won’t give away personal details or accept to bee cencored.We might take that for granted here, but why should we? Every internet provider should state this.
Let’s say you need to import timber for some reason. Although there are a lot of timber in Norway too, there are not very many species, so certainly some branches need to import their timber. Well, where should you import it from? From one of the few remaining rainforests that contains the largest biodiversity on the planet? Hmm… is that a good idea? Well, so you just decided to import your timber from a rainforest because you had to have that color (and you couldn’t fix it with funny chemicals :)). So what rainforest do you choose? Maybe that in Burma? Hmm.. is that a good idea? The military dictatorship there has monopol on selling rainforest timber, so that means you don’t just destroy the rainforest, but you also support a military dictatorship. That’s killing two birds with one stone, you might think – if you are one of the Norwegian companies that import rainforest timber from Burma… or probably you didn’t think?
I got a surprise the first time I opened iTunes while connected to the internet at my new room in Lund. A feature in iTunes is that it searches for shared music on the local network. Back in Bergen, local network meant the house I lived in, with three other appartments and no other iTunes-users. Here local network means, well, I don’t know if it’s just this block or all the blocks, but at least there’s always around 10 shared libraries available. It’s really interesting to browse around and I’ve actually discovered some new artists this way. But of course the title is a bit misleading.. I do need my own music too!
It was certainly time to move out, but renting a room in Bergen, where I have lived since 5, didn’t tempt me so much. So I went for exchange :) This fall I study at Lund University in southern Sweden, and I have not yet decided where I will be when the spring comes. Lund is a small and charming medieval city and I have got myself a nice, light room where I feel really comfortable. In the beginning, I used MyMaps to make a little map of Lund. Have a look at it if you want to know where I live and what my neighborhood looks like.
The first two weeks we had a swedish course. I attended an advanced level, as Swedish and Norwegian are very similar. The other attendees were mostly Germans and Finn, but there were also on Italian, one American, two from Denmark and one Norwegian. It was actually really useful, also because I was forced to think about how I use the language and compose sentences.
After that I’ve studied analytical chemistry. Nothing goes in parallel here. The semester is divided into two part-semesters, with one course in each. And in each course, you first have all the lectures, then labs and finally some time to read on your own before the exam. The positive is that you can concentrate on one subject at a time, the negative is that the progress in the lectures is very fast. The first three weeks we had four-hour lectures every day. Then it’s a pity if you’re sick for three days – which I luckily weren’t.
Dan Michael O. Heggø
It's 2007. I'm living on a strange, vulnerable planet called Earth. I'm studying chemistry at the University of Bergen, Norway, maybe getting a chance to understand it better..
I got a surprise the first time I opened iTunes while connected to the internet at my new room in Lund. A feature in iTunes is that it