DigitalKoans

Opposing Views' "Should We Support Net Neutrality?" page offers contrasting views of net neutrality. The Open Internet Coalition, Public Knowledge, Save the Internet argue for it, while the CATO Institute and Hands Off the Internet argue against it.

In August 1983, Hurricane Alicia struck the Houston/Galveston area causing 21 deaths and $2 billion dollars worth of damage.

Here an excerpt from the National Weather Service Houston/Galveston's account of the storm:

After forming just south of Louisiana on the 15th, the storm drifted westward and intensified quickly into a Category 3 hurricane before making landfall on the west end of Galveston Island in the early morning hours of the 18th The highest winds recorded on land were 96 mph sustained, and gusts were up to 127 mph. . . .

23 tornadoes were reported during Alicia. 14 occurred between Galveston and Houston as the storm made landfall, and the other 9 touched down the next day between Houston and Tyler. All but 2 of these were small, with winds between 40-72 mph. . . .

21 persons died as a result of Alicia. 25 others were hospitalized and 3,094 were injured or became ill. The Red Cross provide shelter or food for 63,000 people. A total of 2,297 dwellings were destroyed and another 3,008 suffered major damage. 18,660 families suffered losses from Alicia. The $2 billion in damages made Alicia the costliest hurricane in Texas history.

Some memorable features of Alicia included the final destruction of the Brownwood subdivision, a victim of subsidence, which had experienced almost annual flooding. . . .

Also, the loss of trees in the Houston area was staggering. The area had received soaking rains during the previous week and the soil was so saturated that the trees were easily blown down by the high winds. It is estimated that the trees and limbs blown down by the storm would have covered a football field to a height of 1,200'.

In downtown Houston, shards of glass became deadly missiles when hundreds of window panes were broken out of skyscrapers by gravel blown from nearby rooftops. The windows were designed to withstand hurricane winds but not impact from debris. The result was huge piles of broken glass in the streets below.

On Galveston's West Beach, Alicia moved the public beach boundary back an average of 150'.

Read more about it at "Hurricane Alicia," "Hurricane Alicia: Our Story," and "Hurricane Alicia: Your Story."

For the true diehards, read this detailed report: Hurricane Alicia: Galveston and Houston, Texas—August 17-18, 1983 (1984).

On October 1, 2008, Comcast will implement a new 250 GB monthly Internet use limit for residential customers, and it will suspend Internet service for one year if customers exceed it twice.

Read more about it at: "Comcast Caps Highlight Lack of Broadband Competition," "Comcast to Cap Internet Usage for Customers," and "Comcast to Cap Monthly Consumer Broadband Starting Oct. 1."

The Fedora Commons Wiki has been re-launched using Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise Wiki software.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The new Fedora Commons Wiki provides a stable environment for developing Fedora software, documentation and communities. The new wiki features additional personalization and development tools for communication and tracking including a feature long-requested by the community–automated account registration with "Capcha." So it’s easy to join our community while making it difficult for spammers.

Please note that you do not need an account to read the Fedora Commons wiki—it’s open to everyone. You must register at the new wiki, however, if you want to add comments, articles, ask for help, or participate with other members of the community.

The Repositories Support Project has launched The DSpace Course, which has 20 modules that include workbooks and presentation slides. A Live CD is also available that has a version of DSpace that runs without requiring that it be installed on a server.

Below is a list of operational institutional repositories at Texas university and health science academic libraries.

Texas has 35 public universities, 9 public health-related institutions, 39 private universities, and 1 private health-related institution; however, only eight institutional repositories could be identified (one repository, the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library, serves multiple health-related institutions).

The list was composed by consulting the following resources and then accessing repository sites to verify their existence: DSpace Repositories—Alphabetical, Fedora Commons Community Registry, Institutions Using the Digital Commons Platform, OpenDOAR, ROAR, and Repository 66.

Texas also has the Texas Digital Library.

The Digital Curation Centre has released DCC Methodology for Designing and Evaluating Curation and Preservation Experiments V1.0.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this document is to describe a Digital Curation Centre (DCC) testbed methodology which will serve as a workflow framework for designing experiments to validate the effectiveness of curation and preservation strategies. The methodology is grounded in the following general principles: the methodology must

• conform to the fundamental standards of a scientific methodology,
• be easy to follow and implement, i.e. accommodate experimenters of all levels of technical expertise,
• be general enough to accommodate future changes and the evolution of ideas in curation and
• preservation theory and practice,
• be specific enough to provide concrete guidance in the immediate short term,
• be sufficiently flexible and extensible to allow for technological advances and the evolving
• complexity of available resources

SHERPA's RoMEO service has made available "Publishers Allowing the Deposition of Their Published Version/PDF in Institutional Repositories."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SHERPA has analysed its records to determine which of the 414 publishers listed allow authors to deposit the publishers' version or publishers' PDF of a journal article into the author's institutional repository. 50 publishers allow immediate, un-embargoed deposit into repositories—even more allow use in restricted circumstances. This means that there is a large volume of work which can be deposited directly into repositories even if the author has not retained their own final draft. . . .

We have separated the publishers into sub-sets, indicating any restrictions that are imposed by the publishers on the use of their versions. The sub-sets are: no restrictions, embargos, fee required and embargo & fee required.