Berkman Buzz: October 18, 2012

Gathering together recommendations on drafting, adopting, and implementing OA policies, the guide is based on policies adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and a couple of dozen other institutions around the world. But it's not limited to policies of this type and includes recommendations that should be useful to institutions taking other approaches.

The guide is designed to evolve. As co-authors, we plan to revise and enlarge it over time, building on our own experience and the experience of colleagues elsewhere. We welcome suggestions.

There’s an excellent paper by some of my favorite Virtual World researchers that sheds a little bit of light on the “women play healers” stereotype. It’s called “Do Men Heal More When in Drag? Conflicting Identity Cues Between User and Avatar” by Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mike Yao and Les Nelson. Putting aside the slightly problematic notion that men who play female avatars are “in drag”, what the authors found is super interesting.

First – there are game specific differences between the number of players who “genderbend.” From the paper, “For example, the EQ2 study found that 17.4% of men genderbended, whereas in the WoW sample, 53.3% of men genderbended.” Like the authors, I’m sure there’s some confounding factor here – perhaps the number of alts (alternative characters) allowed in each game? Or the ease of creating additional characters?

.@Max_Fisher, in WaPo, traces the success of Gangam Style in the US as a viral video, rather than musical crossover: http://is.gd/umtbWC
—Ethan Zuckerman (@ethanz)

Our findings reveal two sides of the same coin. The basic online search skills new college graduates bring with them are attractive enough to help them get hired. Yet, employers found that once on the job, these educated young workers seemed tethered to their computers. They failed to incorporate more fundamental, low-tech research methods that are as essential as ever in the contemporary workplace.

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2012, I write about the only female winner of the Lovelace Medal awarded by the British Computer Society for “individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding or advancement of Computing”. Karen Spärck Jones was the 2007 winner of the medal, awarded shortly before her death. She also happened to be a leader in my own field of computational linguistics, a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Because we shared a research field, I had the honor of knowing Karen and the pleasure of meeting her on many occasions at ACL meetings.

Onion parodies of TED talks at least as good as most originals http://youtu.be/hEzMNp2d6Bk Happily, TED-folk love them.
—Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor)

Boloco CEO John Pepper sent a Tweet yesterday saying, "After 14 yrs as their faithful advocate, Nutella's lawyers have sent us an immediate cease & desist on the use of their name." According to subsequent reporting by the Boston Herald, the dispute appears to be over the use of the word "Nutella" in the name of the milkshake, because, according to Pepper, "[t]hey don’t endorse the use of Nutella or the Nutella brand in frozen beverages." Nutella says that Boloco can continue using the product, but cannot use the name.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union (EU) has sparked a lively debate in the media and on social networks in Europe and the rest of the world.

On October 12, The Nobel Committee announced the EU as this year's winner. It came as a surprise because the EU had not even been among the favorites for the award.