τεχνοσοφια

One of my Windows 2003 servers began exhibiting very strange behavior a few months ago.  That a Windows server behaves badly isn’t strange, of course, but I’d never before encountered precisely this problem.  I searched and searched for solutions on Google, but could not find one that worked for me (though I did discover that a handful of others reported having very similar issues).  Since I’ve gotten so much help from the web (via Google) before, I figured I would pay back my debt by posting the solution I found this afternoon.  Your kilometerage may vary.

Problem

Services which log on as LocalService*, as opposed to LocalSystem and NetworkService, die repeatedly and at regular intervals.  In my case, it was every 90 seconds give or take 5.  I believe Windows 2003 and XP use the LocalService and NetworkService accounts for running services, so this may not apply to Windows 2000 or other versions of Windows. 

* Some of these services are Windows Time, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper, Remote Registry, Application Layer Gateway Service, Alerter, Smart Card, SSDP Discovery Service, Universal PnP Device Host, WebClient, and Windows User Mode Driver Framework. 

Solution

Disable WINEXIT.SCR screensaver within any relevant user accounts, e.g., Default User, All Users, or any service account.  You can run a search in regedit for the string “winexit.scr” to turn up all such values and determine which are relevant.  The value I needed to delete was in HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop/SCRNSAVE.EXE.

Explanation

The server in question is to be used for public terminal services, so I intended to use the winexit.scr screensaver as a relatively lightweight, easy way to ensure that users get warned about idle time and subsequently logged off after a preset period of time.  There are other ways of accomplishing this, to be sure, but I’ve always had good experiences with winexit.scr.  At any rate, while watching the list of processes in Task Manager, I noticed that about every minute-and-a-half, a winexit.scr process popped up and, more interestingly, was running in the LocalService context.  Lightbulb!

Services running under LocalService are all launched via the svchost.exe binary that is included with Windows, and it turns out that the winexit screensaver kept shutting down these services (as I unwittingly instructed it to do) when they took advantage of their ability to log on as a service.  Why every 90 seconds?  I had winexit configured to allow only 60 seconds of idle time, and it gives the user 30 seconds of warning before killing a session. 

It’s almost as though computers are logical.  I just love when problems make sense.

I noticed Dan Chudnov’s earlier note about the launch of the unAPI website and noted in particular the the unAPI revision 1 specification.  I decided to give Technosophia a run through some error cases and some of the errors came up as 400 where they should have been 404 or 406.  I made a few minor tweaks to pbinkley’s unAPI WordPress plug-in and I believe Technosophia is now fully compliant with unAPI revision 1. 

Here are the test cases I used:

• /unapi.php
  200 Ok
• /unapi.php?uri=oai%3Alackoftalent.org%3Atechnosophia%3A25
  300 Multiple Choices
• /unapi.php?uri=oai%3Alackoftalent.org%3Atechnosophia%3A25&format=mods
  200 Ok
• /unapi.php?uri=oai%3Alackoftalent.org%3Atechnosophia%3A25&format=BADFORMAT
  406 Not Acceptable
• /unapi.php?uri=BADURI&format=mods
  404 Not Found
• /unapi.php?format=mods
  400 Bad Request

Woohoo?

With widespread digitization of printed materials and steady growth of “born-digital” resources, there arise certain questions about access and discoverability. One such question is whether the full-text of this content, produced by advanced optical character recognition (OCR) techniques, is sufficient as a descriptor of the content. Will the model of mass digitization and full-text searching enable users to find the information they need? Or will we need to continue employing the classification skills of highly qualified human beings in order to ensure information is discoverable? The latter model seems to have worked well for the library community, with trained indexers and catalogers summarizing documents according to established standards and widely used thesauri or controlled vocabularies. The predictability of these techniques has some obvious benefits, such as consistency across different systems, the ability to construct browse interfaces in addition to search ones, and reduction of common errors such as differences in case, punctuation, spelling, and so forth. The process of human classification has thus proven to be quite effective in our endeavors to organize information.

The question of whether we will continue to classify digital content in a similar manner ought to be asked. Is there any hope to keep up with the dizzying pace with which documents are digitized? Classification is a costly, time-consuming process, requiring highly trained individuals to consume a large amount of information and summarize it. If the goal is to continue digitizing and making accessible information at the current rate, it is improbable that human catalogers and indexers will be able to keep up without sacrificing some of the quality that results from their considerable skills. Yet the goal of enhancing access and discoverability of digital content is one that ought to be pursued, and will likely not be realized through full-text searching alone. Indeed, why should we put so much time and effort into the process of digitization if it does not benefit our users?

Fortunately, the process of automatic extraction of keywords is one that has received much attention. As implied by the phrase, automatic keyword extraction is a process by which representative terms are systematically extracted from a text with either minimal or no human intervention, depending on the model. The goal of automatic extraction is to apply the power and speed of computation to the problems of access and discoverability, adding value to information organization and retrieval without the significant costs and drawbacks associated with human indexers. Research is taking place in numerous fields across the globe, and there is no clear frontrunner among the technologies and algorithms. This paper explores five approaches to keyword extraction, as presented in research papers, to demonstrate the different ways keywords may be extracted, to reflect commonalities between the approaches, and to evaluate the results thereof. Each paper is presented in a different section, for ease of organization.

… Read the paper in its entirety.

NOTE: This article has been revised and published in the Library Student Journal.

Even a cursory review of social science literature reveals a wealth of research into the role that skepticism plays in the forms of information behavior studied within communication, consumer psychology, education, journalism and media studies, and public policy, to name only a handful of disciplines. In much of this research, the effects of skepticism are found to be strong and numerous, and yet it seems that skepticism has not been studied to a great extent within the body of human-information behavior research. The goals of this paper are two-fold: the first being to establish skepticism as a factor which ought to be considered in cognitive-affective models of human-information behavior, via a large-scale overview of social science research; and the second being to show that a rational form of skepticism is a healthy trait to cultivate among information-seekers.

I am interested in the role of skepticism – defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object” – in human-information behavior (HIB), i.e., in information needs, seeking, evaluation, and usage. An operational definition of skepticism will be derived from a broad range of research in the social sciences, primarily in communication, psychology, marketing, media studies, and education, and will be expressed within the parlance of the cognitive viewpoint as a knowledge structure. Skepticism is established as a significant issue in the research of other social science disciplines, and it will be argued that HIB research would benefit from examining as well the role of skepticism. The many facets of skepticism will be explored and then applied to HIB with suggestions as to how the issue might be approached in future research. A skeptical attitude may initially be seen as a drawback to information behavior; after all, how may one seek and use information from
the multitudes of sources that one has not yet come to trust as authorities? There may, however, be important and unexpected benefits of skepticism. Finally, it will be argued that rational skepticism is beneficial, and methods of cultivating skepticism are discussed.

… Read the original paper in its entirety (though, really, you should read the published version instead).

Broadly defined, open access makes scholarly materials accessible to users at no cost. More specifically, the term is used to describe a model of scholarly communication in which users may freely view, download, copy, and print scholarly articles, books, conference proceedings, squibs, and so forth. Such a model is in stark contrast to existing models of scholarly communication in that many of the most widely-used peer-reviewed journals are accessible to libraries primarily through expensive bulk package plans, forcing libraries to pay top-dollar for the resources their faculties require. In so doing, libraries add to their collections a number of rarely-used journals of minimal impact and value simply because they were bundled in with the journals they could not do without: a model not unlike those provided by the local cable company – i.e., if one wants the Food Network, one is also saddled with the Golf Channel.

In actuality, there are a number of different models of open access that adhere more or less to the principle of providing scholarly materials free of charge. Tenopir (2004) explains that open access:

“includes many publication and distribution schemes. E-journals that are published, distributed electronically, and subsidized by universities, government agencies, and volunteer organizations are the most common. In addition, collections of separate articles or research reports could fit the definition, including e-print servers such as arXiv.org, institutional repositories, and author web pages.” (p. 33)

The numerous models of open access may typically be categorized under one of the two rubrics proposed by open access champion, Steven Harnad. In the “gold” open access model, materials are freely and immediately provided in universally accessible electronic journals. The “green” open access model might be seen as an intermediate phase between current fee-based access models and the gold model, in which authors continue to publish in journals, whether they be print-based or electronic, but deposit copies, perhaps pre-prints, into an institutional or subject repository (Crawford, 2005b).

There are thus many forms that open access publications may take, each having its own costs and benefits. What they share is the very general principle which is poignantly stated by Harnad; “the objective of open access is to maximize research impact by maximizing research access.” While the benefits are many and clear, the issue of cost is one that has to be agreed upon.

Open access publishing typically implies that the user is able to freely access scholarly materials because the price of publication has been assumed by another party, usually the author of the material, the author’s institution, or the grant which funded the research (Tenopir, 2004). One can see that open access publication is not, therefore, a completely cost-free endeavor. Indeed, the costs have merely been shifted from the consumers of information to the producers, or those who fund them (Wren, 2005), which applies equally to both the gold and green models of open access.

It is observed in this paper that all flavors and forms of open access impact the roles filled by academic libraries, but it is worth noting that these may vary. For instance, while the green model of open access will undoubtedly benefit scholars by globally providing scholarly material at no cost, with no access restrictions, other benefits such as budget relief may not be realized (Crawford, 2005b). In fact, it may strain budgets that are already being stretched by commercial journals.

The scope of this paper is limited to academic libraries primarily because of the close relationship they have with university faculties, i.e., those who both contribute the most to scholarly journals, and have strong needs for access to same. Many of the impacts discussed in this paper might also apply to public, school, and special libraries, but the scope is limited due to the proximity academic libraries have to the world of scholarly communication.

It is not the intention of the author to paint a simple, rosy picture of the issues surrounding open access, nor to advocate a radical, wholesale shift thereto. Rather, it is suggested only that the issues surrounding open access be brought out into the open and discussed. While there are reasons academic libraries might be cautious about modifying the ways they support scholarly communication, there are myriad reasons to consider how they might best serve their communities with open access.

… Read the paper in its entirety.