jdupuis | January 22, 2010Excellent post with a lot of great comments. Let's take a look at what Scalzi doesn't miss:
Stupidly expensive long-distance charges.
Crappy old cars.Which cars qualify as crappy old cars? In my opinion, pretty much all of them. Pre-catalytic converter cars were shoddily-constructed, lead-spewing deathtraps, the first generation of cars running on unleaded were even more shoddily-constructed 70s defeat-mobiles, the 80s were the golden age of Detroit Doesn't Give a Shit, and so on. You have to get to about 1997 before there's a car I would willingly get into these days. As opposed to today,…
jdupuis | January 20, 2010The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association has released it's list of 2009 Notable Books.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
jdupuis | January 19, 2010A pretty extensive list from The London Times, across multiple categories: science, stocking stuffers, biography, graphic novels and nature.
Mad Science: 100 Amazing Experiments From The History Of Science by Reto Schneider
How To Make A Tornado: The Strange And Wonderful Things That Happen When Scientists Break Free by The New Scientist
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik
Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery Of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor by Neil Shubin
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard…
jdupuis | January 15, 2010This one is pretty funny, from McSweeny's:
INT. UNIVERSITY FOOD COURT. SUNDAY AFTERNOON. JULY 15TH, 1945.
HANS BETHE, EDWARD TELLER, and ROBERT SERBER sit at a table. There are notebooks, laptops, and expensive coffees arranged on the table. All three wear hoodies, basketball shorts, and flip flops. Serber is texting on his Blackberry Storm. Teller checks his own cell phone for the time.
EDWARD TELLER: Where's Oppenheimer?
HANS BETHE: I've got Chapter at six.
TELLER: Serber.
ROBERT SERBER: (keeps texting) Yo?
TELLER: Did you hear anything from Oppenheimer?
SERBER: (keeps texting) Nah.
BETHE:…
jdupuis | January 14, 2010Following along in the tradition of Bora's introductions of the various attendees for the upcoming Science Online 2010 conference, I thought I'd list all the library people that are attended. I'm not going to try and introduce each of the library people, I'll leave that to Bora, but I thought it might be nice to have us all listed in one place.
I did a quick list in my post a while back, but I revisited the attendee list after it closed and noticed a couple of people that weren't in the first list.
As I said in the earlier post, there's been a good tradition of librarians and library people…
jdupuis | January 13, 2010I was chatting with a colleague during the long commute home the other day and he noticed I was reading this book. "What's it like?" he asked.
"Clay Shirky lite," I replied.
And that's about right. In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel comes to grips with the effects of social media on marketing, media, sales and promotions, he covers a lot of the same ground as in Clay Shirky's classic Here Comes Everybody (review). Glib, conversational, fast-paced bite-sized -- an easy read for sure -- Joel does a solid job of translating Shirky's more scholarly approach to a business audience.
Which…
jdupuis | January 12, 2010Or not. You can also feel free to subscribe. Or not.
Yes, my library has entered the Twitter age. I'll probably be the main tweeter but hopefully a couple of the other reference staff here will chip (chirp?) in from time to time.
It took me a while to decide whether or not it's worth it to join Twitter. When I do IL classes, I often poll the class informally to see who uses which of the various social networking software sites. Facebook is around 90%. Twitter is around 5-10%, although somewhat more than 50% seem to have at least heard of it. So, it's a fairly small percentage of…
jdupuis | January 11, 2010Two items in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's list.
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care by T.R. Reid
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution And The Birth Of America by Steven Johnson
jdupuis | January 11, 2010Bravewords.com is featuring their annual top 30 hard rock & heavy metal albums of the year. It's a pretty good list from a very good year. I like their list because it mixes mainstream and extreme very nicely, with Cheap Trick & Kiss on the same list as Immortal and Napalm Death. It was a pretty good year for me as I have 5 of the 30 albums listed (Chickenfoot, Mastodon, Heaven and Hell, Slayer and #1 Megadeth with Heaven and Hell as my favourite of the bunch) and I'll probably end up getting a few more as well.
Let's take a look at the top 10, in descending order to #1:
VOIVOD -…
Christensen, Clayton M. The innovator's dilemma. New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2006. 286pp.
jdupuis | January 8, 2010This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when the confront certain tyupes of market and technological change. It's not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies -- the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute....It is about well-manged companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance. (p. xi)
Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma isn…
jdupuis | January 8, 2010This amusing little gem from The Onion, published December 3rd, seems particularly relevant in the post-Christmas consumer orgy period.
With the holiday shopping season officially under way, millions of consumers proceeded to their nearest commercial centers this week in hopes of acquiring the latest, and therefore most desirable, personal device.
"The new device is an improvement over the old device, making it more attractive for purchase by all Americans," said Thomas Wakefield, a spokesperson for the large conglomerate that manufactures the new device. "The old device is no longer…
jdupuis | January 7, 2010Nice list of coffee table books, biographies and other books from Scientific American.
Galápagos: Preserving Darwin's Legacy edited by Tui de Roy
Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle by Michael Benson
The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton, and Antarctic Photography
by David Hempleman-Adams, Emma Stuart and Sophie Gordon
No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale by Felice C. Frankel and George M. Whitesides
Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century by Masha Gessen. (A biography of Grigory Perelman)
The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the…
jdupuis | January 6, 2010A nice list from the SF Chronicle:
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David…
jdupuis | January 5, 2010The New Scientist's CultureLab blog asked a whole slew of editors and contributors to name a notable 2009 book. It's quite an extensive list.
Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham
Codes of the Underworld: How criminals communicate by Diego Gambetta
The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
Confabulation: Views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy edited by William Hirstein
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Reading in the Brain: The science and…
jdupuis | January 4, 2010The New Zealand Listener has a few good suggestions from two different categories: Science and Journalism & Essays.
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
Innocents in the Dry Valley: An Account of the Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Expedition, 1958-59 by Colin Bull
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd
The Best of New Zealand Geographic: Exploring our Land and Culture
jdupuis | January 4, 2010Burn down the library. C'mon, all the books in the world are already digitized. Burn the thing down...Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already.
-Adrian Sannier (via)
Optimism seems like a strange thing for a librarian to have at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. There's no shortage of people who seem to think that we'll be completely replaced by Google, that everything is available online for free, that students don't read.
And we've all had experiences where we tell someone at a party what we do for a living and the person just gets a puzzled expression on their…
jdupuis | January 1, 2010Ok, I promise, this is the last Lovecraftian Friday Fun for a while. I double promise. It's also possible that I can't be trusted in this matter.
Anyways, to celebrate the the fresh possibilities of the new year, let's mosey on down to Tor.com and see how S.J. Chambers is doing -- a horror fan who's never read Lovecraft coming to his works for the first time! "The Alchemist" and "The Outsider" are up first.
I have a dark confession to make. For all my love of the Gothic and weird, for all the Stuart Gordon movies I've seen, and for all the issues of Weird Tales and Innsmouth Free Press I'…
jdupuis | December 31, 2009I did this last year and the year before and it seemed like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year.
Trends in my reading this year? An increase in books on social media and a bit down in terms of science and fantastic fiction. A lot of that has to do with working on the My Job in 10 Years book and the reading I've been doing for that. A lot of it also has to do with the reading I did for the Sunburst Award. I was on the jury for the 2009 award (winners!) and so I did a ton of reading for that in the first half of the year. That didn't leave me that much time for…
jdupuis | December 30, 2009A nice quote from Rick Salutin's most recent Globe and Mail column, In praise of words, not books, which I actually read in a print edition of the newspaper this morning. Yes, we get two daily print newspapers, The Globe and The Toronto Star. My teenaged sons read them too.
Anyways, the point Salutin is making is that true knowledge and wisdom aren't communicated by static media like books or articles, but by human interaction -- conversation is key in that human culture is essentially oral. Of course, you can define oral culture to include a lot of technologically mediated forms of…
jdupuis | December 30, 2009During my winter blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 24, 2007. This post follows up on my initial 2007 post which I reposted yesterday.
It's worth noting that the blog has evolved such that it's hardly about or for engineering or computer science students at all; it's more for the sessions I do for "science for non-science students" courses. Also, the use of Meebo has been a huge hit for me, really creating a new way for me to interact with students.
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Way back in…