In the last Month, some activities and changes worth to mention have been undertaken.

A proposal of the domusBITae initiative was submitted on November 23rd, represented by a consortium of 14 institutions of Europe, America and Asia (some of them recently integrated). As in the stylusBITae site can be observed, we further plan presenting the initiative to other calls of European Support Programmes (see announcement).

The BITrum sites have been renewed in two main aspect aimed at facilitating navigation: 

(a) The access to the main BITrum areas (public and private areas, glossarium, stylusBITae, contributions archive and BITagora) is now provided by tabs at the top of every page, and dropdown menus from these tabs -which are mouse sensible- allowing a more direct access to the different sections; while now the navigation board located at the left column only refers to pages within each BITrum area; 

(b) The search engine is now configured to allow finding contents within the whole system (Todo-BITrum), though more specific searches can also be selected limiting retrievals within particular areas. Any comment, suggestion or critic to this respect will be welcomed.

We wish to give our warmest welcome into our Scientific Committee to: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Søren Brier, and Igor Gurevich. Most of you are already aware of the participation and support provided by Gordana and Søren to several activities undertaken by BITrum (in both the glossary and domusBITae). With Igor, we got first in touch at the 4th International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science, Beijin, August 2010. Later on, he brought some challenging proposals concerning cooperation, and finally his participation has been substantiated opening an article of the glossary on “information as heterogeneity”, and his partaking in domusBITae. The expertise of Gordana in information and computation theories and her original info-computational approach; the expertise of Søren in the complexity of communication and cognitive systems and his original cybersemiotic approach; and the expertise of Igor in theoretical and physical informatics, as well as in classical and quantum computing undoubtedly strengthen the scientific groundings of our interdisciplinary strive to understand information (see welcome note including short biographies).

We wish to congratulate:

1) The recent publication of books from our colleagues Rafael Capurro, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Luciano Floridi, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Manuel Liz and Mario Pérez-Montoro (see announcement including short reviews). 

2) The appointment of our colleague Christian Fuchs as Professor of Media and Communication Science at the Uppsala University, Sweden (see video of the inaugural lecture: “Prolegomena to the Study of Media and Communication in the Information Society”)

Finally we wish you all a cheerful Christmas holidays and a happy new year, for which we have prepared a greeting cube –you can easily embody- representing the activities of BITrum on past year (a pdf file is attached for those encouraged to cut and paste non-virtually). Cheers!