Thursday, July 29, 2010

THESIS Retro tops & I Love Soweto hoodies @ Thesis Concept Store








Hi there winter babies! Braving the chill is the “in” thing this winter, so I hope you buckled up well for the season storms; hitting the southern hemisphere like crazy! If not here’s a couple of what we call: the Retro tops The I love Soweto hoodies from THESIS @ the THESIS Concept Store. The tops came in black with red trimmings & there were red tops with black trimmings. The hoodies in beige & navy with red trimmings.

Then an inspiration of hosting the most massive tournament on the planet; bit us & we decided to honour our flag with the last edition of the tops. While we everyone 100% behind bafana bafana: the boys hopes were dashed after just two innings! We at the concept of instilling hope back into the people & reminding them that we are still South Africans. These ones were done in the spirit of Pride & honour! In black; laced in red; blue; green & yellow trimmings. Green in red; yellow,green & black trimmings...

THESIS Concept Store
Mashaba Drive
173 Mofolo village, Soweto

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

TSJS Two Years Anniversary Session...!





Hip Hip Hoooray! Thesis Social Jam Session is turning two years. Yes it’s only been two years it feels like we’ve been jamming a life time. From the early days when we jammed inside Thesis Concept Store, to yesterday when we jammed outside and braving the winter blues, to today when we are lounging in couches with heaters and stretch marquees with the “never compromising” good music. It’s been a great journey.

Happening every first Sunday of the month, at Mofolo Village in Soweto with music as the foundation, The DJ booth has been endowed by big guns and prominent contests from DJ Oil(France), Kid Fonque, The Wedding DJs, DJ Mdoo, Nathi Quwe, Music At Last, Paledi; The Layders; PO(US) and now Khenzero. Live performances; breed intensity between the crowd and performers. The best performances by Motlatsi; Future History; The Name Is Taken; Dirty Paraffin; Babu; P2DHI(US); Reebirth; Mnandi Blues & the list goes on and on and on...

TSJS is setting the world on fire on The 1st of August, to celebrate its second birthday. DJ Khenzero will be our guest, also on the guest list is DJ Nana; Deep Soweto will be in the space; very large regular; feeding you home-grown kasi hip hop. Nature will be coming back to make us glad to be here: listening to the music. For the second time; on our 2nd birthday. Our resident DJ’s keeping the residential suite sweet as they welcome you and our guest performers to arrive. Springer; Omi and Wireless G deserve their own sentence of sweet melodies.

Omi has been with us from the beginning, since 3 August 2008. Known to the TSJS crew as historian DJ. He plays a sound with soul & the knowledge of its history. What ever you want to know about what he’s playing: he’ll tell you; just listen to his mix and his biggest influence is Giles Peterson (another great historian). Wireless G has been a great part of the residence. His play is fresh and futuristic. I’m not even saying playing futuristic stuff; but he illustrates a new point of about the DJing concept; conceptual and a hard core brand manager. Springer on the other hand has been a playing friend for a while now since the jams started. Took several months to get ready to join our ship of reverberates. His new, fresh and a break beat or two.

Liquid Gamz will be gaming on them PS3 consoles for your entertainment. Nyambose’s kitchen; next door; will food us till we close; we know how hungry the sounds of TSJS can make us.

I can’t wait to see you there...:)







Thursday, July 15, 2010

Reflections from OR2010: Part 2

Another activity I was involved in at OR2010 was the Developer Challenge as a ‘non-techie’ judge. Organised by the DevSci project (managed by UKOLN, funded by JISC), this year’s challenge was to ‘create a functioning repository user-interface, presenting a single metadata record which includes as many automatically created, useful links to related external content as possible.’

The winning entry was from Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl, University of London Computer Centre, who enhanced the records of the Linnean Collections, held on EPrints, which the ULCC are responsible for. As many of the metadata fields in the record as possible linked out to external sites- some general such as Google and Wikipedia and some more subject specific such as horticultural indexes. Although only one metadata record was demonstrated, the links which appeared in the record were determined by the entries on a master sheet (an excel spreadsheet) and therefore, would apply to all records within the repository. This development came out top as although the links weren’t truly automated, they were managed externally, it was felt that this was actually advantage for a non-techie repository manager could update for themselves rather than calling on the support of a tame developer.

Coming in a narrow second was ChEsis, presented by Sam Adams, University of Cambridge, which created links to enhance Chemistry e-thesis records. Links were available to show chemical structures of molecules/ crystals used/ created along with their mass spectrums. Fun links were also included such as the Last FM playlist of the student when their thesis was submitted and the BBC headlines for the day.

Another entry utilised OpenCalais to automatically create links from their created repository record. OpenCalais is a free to use service which automatically creates links from open content to other open content sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr etc. It can be used to add a bit of fun to any open source web content such as a blog but be warned the links are automatic and you can’t necessarily restrict what content it links to!

A full write-up and videos of all the Developer Challenge entries is available via DevSci blog.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Reflections from OR2010: Part 1

Last week Antony and I attended the 5th International Conference on Open Repositories in Madrid. The conference boasted a fully packed, 4 day programme including ‘General’ presentation sessions, User group sessions, working groups and forums. Nearly 500 delegates were in attendance, representing countries from all across the globe.

One of the reasons Antony and I were in attendance was to present a Poster, authored in conjunction with Glen Robson and Ioan Isaac-Richards from the NLW, about the work of the Welsh e-theses harvesting service. A copy of the poster is available from the Aberystwyth University repository CADAIR.

With parallel streams running for the majority of the programme there were too many sessions for one person to attend- let alone comment on- so below I’ve discussed the sessions I found of most interest and relevance to the work of the WRN.

The first couple of interesting sessions related to nationwide open access/ repository support networks: the first located in Germany; the second located in Australia. The OAN (Open Access Network) initiated by the DINI (German Initiative for Network Information) and funded for a two-year term by the German Research Foundation (DFG), has created an over-arching infrastructure between quality certified German IRs to act as a single interface for research promotion and to support other DINI Open- Access projects. DINI certification, a certificate of IR quality, denotes that an IR utilises international standards, such as DRIVER for metadata, has determined and makes its policies regarding use clear and available, and is well-positioned within both its own institution and the greater open access arena.

The OAN harvests data from the DINI certified repositories within Germany, aggregates the data and puts it through a number of value added modules such as data clean-up, FT link finding, OCR, and citation tracking. The aggregated data is then presented within a single search interface, and acts as a single point for data export and further harvesting. It also acts as a single point for the other OA projects, some of which were presented at OR2010, such as OAS (Open-Access Statistik) and OAFR (OA Subject Based Repositories).

The OAN is also responsible for increasing the number of certified repositories and offers support to repository managers in order for their repository to achieve certification. The alignment of WRN repositories, specifically in the area of policies, is an area of focus for the WRN team this autumn so the process of DINI certification will work well as a basis for this process.

Caroline Drury, University of Southern Queensland presented on the ANDS (Australian National Data Service), a service looking to inform and influence national policy on the curation of data. ANDS has created Research Data Australia, a central collection of curated data sets produced by Australian academics. ANDS also offers the following services: Publish my data; Register my data; Identify my data; which are related to this central collection. Also based at Queensland is Tim McCallum, the technical support half of the CAIRSS repository support team (the team resembles that of the WRN team with one technical and one organisational support officer). Piggy-backed on to a CAIRSS repository survey, ANDS has been investigating the data management practices at Australian Universities. This survey found that there was a low-level of repository manager involvement within the University in regards to data management, a trend that ANDS are looking to change with Senior Management intervention, in conjunction with CAIRSS. Data management is a new area of interest for the WRN so we will be watching the progress of ANDS with interest.

The other session of direct relevance and interest in regards to the work of the WRN, and more specifically the poster presented e-theses harvesting service, was from Nikos Houssous, National Documentation Centre (EKT), Greece. Nikos was describing the National Archive of PhD Theses developed at EKT, a single search interface presented within DSpace. Like the NLW in Wales, the EKT have a historic role in the collection of Greek PhD theses, a role they were looking to extend to the digital realm. The EKT are undertaking a digitisation project of the PhDs currently held in print form, as well as encouraging institutions to submit theses electronically. Records are held in a bespoke theses admin system and then pushed to both the DSpace system (via SOAP in ETD-MS (a metadata standard for e-theses devised by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)) and to the EKT Library Catalogue (via Z39.50 in UNIMARC). The DSpace collection also forms a central harvesting point for DART Europe, a service aggregating PhD theses records for the whole of Europe. I was unaware of NDLTD and ETD-MS before Nikos’ presentation and their relation to DART is of interest to the next stage of the Welsh e-theses harvesting service.

Through other sessions and networking I became aware of two other national aggregation services: NARCIS in the Netherlands and RCAAP in Portugal. Whereas RCAAP is an aggregation of IR content, NARCIS is an aggregation of IR and National information, such as DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services). There are also plans to incorporate the data from METIS the Dutch national CRIS, which will provide much richer information about researchers and their projects. Anecdotally, the NARCIS presenter reported that theses and dissertations were the most frequently retrieved items through the system, perhaps as NARCIS provided the only central point of discovery for these types of items.

It’s certainly nice to know that the work of the WRN parallels that carried out within other countries and that we have an extended network to call upon when in need of best practice advice.

aspro collection


crafts collection

click to enlarge

cubic collection

patina collection

Monday, July 12, 2010

2010 Ranking Web of Repositories

The second edition of 2010 Ranking Web of Repositories has been published:
http://repositories.webometrics.info/

Close to 1000 repositories have been analyzed this year and the top 800 are ranked here according to their web presence and visibility. The aim of this ranking is to support Open Access initiatives and therefore the free access to scientific publications in an electronic form and to other academic material. The web indicators are used here to measure the global visibility and impact of the scientific repositories. Two lists are available - top 800 and top 800 institutional.

I've done a bit of trawling and number crunching on the institutional list extracting both a ranked list for UK only institutional repositories, and a subset of those Welsh repositories that appear in the list. Of the top 800 institutional repositories globally the UK has 82 entries and Wales has five entries from those. Details:

International rank (UK rank in brackets)

257 (18th in UK) Aberystwyth
601 (62nd in UK) Bangor
696 (73rd in UK) Glamorgan
730 (78th in UK) UWIC
752 (80th in UK) Trinity

Bits and bobs

Over the past week or so I've collected together a few random repository related items that might be of interest to our partners. Enjoy!

Copyright Workflows
Ann Hanlon and Marisa Ramirez. "Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories" 2010
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/marisa_ramirez/14

This poster details the results of a US survey about copyright workflows and was presented at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, Washington, D.C. in June 2010. Exploring staffing, resources, activities and tools employed to clear copyright for published work, with the intent to deposit into an IR, this nicely summarises their preliminary findings. In 2008 a survey was undertaken in the UK on the same topic:

Jones, Mark. Intellectual property rights survey, University of East Anglia, 2008
http://www.uea.ac.uk/is/digitalrepository/heiprsurvey

New Team Digital Preservation Film
WePreserve and Planets have released their fourth Team Digital Preservation film. Team Digital Preservation and Arctic Mountain Adventure is available to view at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGFOZLecjTc.



Digiman is baby-sitting his niece and nephew for the weekend, but things go horribly wrong when he sends them out on an arctic mountain adventure. Never fear trusty viewers, PLATO, the Planets Preservation Planning tool, comes to the rescue to show Digiman the error of his ways.

Other editions of these popular videos are available here http://www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve

Metadata Forum
At the Open Repositories Conference 2010 last week in Madrid the Metadata Forum was officially launched. A new initiative, run by UKOLN at the University of Bath and funded by JISC, the Metadata Forum is planning four face-to-face meetings throughout the UK and ongoing conversations online where anyone who has an interest in metadata can ask for help, share experiences and learn from others. The Forum is open to everyone, from novice to expert and anyone in between who deals with metadata in their day-to-day work.

Get involved by following the Forum blog - http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/themetadataforum or following the Forum on Twitter – @MetadataForum

SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle white paper
http://sword2depositlifecycle.jiscpress.org/

The aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion around introducing more complete treatment of "deposit lifecycle" management of objects in digital repositories, and to propose the next small steps in this direction. Abstract:

"SWORD is a hugely successful JISC project which has kindled repository interoperability and built a community around the software and the problem space. It explicitly deals only with creating new repository resources by package deposit a simple case which is at the root of its success but also its key limitation. This next version of SWORD will push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles by using update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases."

Friday, July 9, 2010

Mpho Skeef



Holla!

Prolific jammers & members
back in the days it was all Goapele and Now I present to you:

Mpho Skeef: (her name meaning gift in South Sotho ) was born of a mixed couple in South Africa at the height of the struggle against apartheid. She then spent her first birthday in jail when her mother was arrested. Her biological father is none other than renowned South African musician Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse. Mpho or should I say "Mphoza" grew up listening to a wide variety of artists from Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and John Coltrane, to Parliament, Prince and Fela Kuti. Alongside this premier list her parents encouraged her love of World Music (modern electronica and pop music, a staple diet including hip hop and R&B artists from KRS1 to NWA, Chaka Khan to Mary J as well as Rock) and Electronica from Daft Punk to Kate Bush.

In the 80's, her mother and stepfather (percussionist Eugene Skeef) fled to South of London; Brixton where Mpho still lives. After leaving secondary school she joined the newly opened Brits Academy. Fellow students during the two-year period included the late Lynden David Hall, and Floetry. She has appeared alongside artists such as Ty, The great: Eska, Terri Walker as well as mainstream artists like Ms Dynamite and Natasha Beddingfield. Most recently she provided the lead vocals for the Bugz In The Attic smash “Booty La La”, (voted record of the year 2004 by listeners of Giles Petersons World Wide show ) She is also featured on the ColdCut album “Sound Mirrors”. In 2005 she released the “Don't Like You” EP to critical acclaim, and this year she follows up with her debut.

sky is no limit for this wonderful song bird.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

trans-automa-sytosis- THE BOOK!

some pages are still missing, I promise to upload soon. This is part of the "book" we developed last semester in Milan, at Politecnico


enjoy!











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Friday, July 2, 2010

ah aha ah! la finale!!!


i needed some days of breaking away from this last project... but you need an update and closure.

hah!

  • my Politecnico di Milano WAS INTERESTING and is now FINALLY OVER!
I finished the semester on the 25th of jun. and I'm very very satisfied with the results... as were my professors!
  1. an essay on "my fashion philosophy"/thoughts on 20th century style and fashion lectures with marvelously radical BENEDETTA BARZINI!
  2. a spring summer knitwear collection "book"
  3. my first completely knitted garment
  4. a book on knitted swatches and samples of creative stitches and knitwear techniques on coppo and bother machines
IT WAS HEAVY STUFF TO PREP. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SUMMER IN DRY AND HOT MILAN- while not getting much sleep and starting to feel the far-awayness of anything i could maybe categorize as "home"
That last week I was exhausted. Finals week is always devastating but tiredness has accumulated since.. boh!- i was born- I was just falling into pieces- but we did it!
  • to make matters just shockingly amusing...i lost my FLATS.ai FILE! around FRIDAY THE 18TH of june... project deadline: the 25... needed to print... THAT FRIDAY. I had spent so much time making those flats and put so much passion into them- i was lucky enough to have finished them "early" and all of a sudden- POOF!=GONE! just like the wind-oh-well leaving no trace. I had been blogging, and posting and sharing information (because it was providing me with constant constructive criticism and positive communication with the somewhat "human world"(even though through a reality more virtual than warm blooded) but SANITYWASVERYNECCESSARY!
and yet in the middle of the madness- i could only save this file on my EXTERNALharddrive due to its IMMENSITY and still i made a stupid crazy frenetic error of deleting the file from the hard disk and the trash can of my mac... lets just leave it at that- and with the great satisfaction that my genius computer programer uncle- HELPED ME RECOVER IT!!!!
and i was back on full throttle...
  • HANDED IN THE BOOK ON MONDAY,

  • AND A TEST ON TUESDAY
...even when in the middle of the week:
  • We went to ATMOSFERA-
a tram that takes you around milan while you have a fancy dinner inside. FANCY- i mean 3 forks and 3 knives 3 glasses. WE DRESSED UP FOR IT! then at 11pm got home, made some coffee and pulled the...
  • LAST ALL NIGHT-ER OF THE SEMESTER... IN WHICH:
  1. I finished my TERM GARMENT: which meant trying to crochet together pieces of knitted "moss" and attaching the moss to the "yellow stuff hanging", and then I attached the bulky white straps...
  2. not to forget that I also had to prep a sample book, from scratch.. which meant: assembling it and ironing and sticking ... NUF(read that backwards)
I SAW THE SUN RISE- got ready and "pretty"- for my last day of school and an evening of ushering the graduates' fashion show- HEELS AND EVERYTHING! WOOHOO . off i went ...
ps: my bus ride to school was incredibly ridiculously-INSANE- because my bags were to big and too full to fit (with me) in the FULL Bus!

  • the day was long, but okay- in the evening we had an exhibition at the entrance of the fashion show so our garments- shone!
  • and meanwhile- i worked as an usher- to guide people towards the correct building.meanwhile....
  • ITALY was CRAZY- this was the day they played their last game at world cup - ITALY VS SLOVAKIA... they are such FANS( or tiffosi as they call them here)can you believe that at the POLITECNICO they opened a garage and put a huge projector screen to show the game- people sat in the middle of the lawn and yelled like crazies- and then - they lost :(...



  • halfway into the fashion show we went inside and saw the marvelous creations of our colleagues. Once the Fashion Show was over- we realized that it was all over... it was time to say goodbye- to our professors to the graduates, to this chapter- everyone who had not left yet- was about to do so- and THE FIRST TEARS STARTED TO COME OUT.
i feel accomplished, but I AM SO SCARED- this feeling of belonging evrywhere-and nowhere at the same time and wanting to go "home" but not knowing where that is... is pretty invasive...
  • 3 DAYS LATER...LONDON . 7days later and I am blogging AGAIN...
july '10:
  • TUESD 6TH- FIRENZE, for pitti filati n.67
  • 9th-MILAN.... i need to ship my house back to my not yet found apartment in NYC
  • 17-20TH: belgium
  • then milan
  • AUGUST 5TH- nyc...
THE END...
FOR NOW....









<<-I'll catch ya' later alligator->>