jdupuis | September 1, 2009A bunch of recent journal & magazine issues to catch up on. There's lots of cool stuff to highlight, so I'll only list a couple of articles from each issue. Unfortunately, most of it will be behind the IEEE paywall.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2
Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, J.W.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, D.IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v28i2
K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A.
Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by…
jdupuis | August 31, 2009"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression.
This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced.
Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…
jdupuis | August 28, 2009John Scalzi has a couple of very amusing posts at the AMC TV website, John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design:
Stormtrooper Uniforms
They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view ("I can't see a thing in this helmet!" -- Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don't just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.
And John Scalzi's Guide to Epic SciFi Design FAILs - Star Trek Edition:
V'Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a…
jdupuis | August 27, 2009Apparently inspired by the occasional Five Songs I Love posts I've been doing (here, here and here), Ava at Jemsite asked me if I wouldn't mind coming up with one for their blog.
Well, it sounded like a cool idea -- so here's what I came up with.
It was a fun experience so I hope to do more guest posts as time and inspiration allow.
Thanks, Ava!
jdupuis | August 27, 2009And speaking of reading, a couple of the books on the summer reading list I posted yesterday were actually purchased at the World Science Fiction Convention dealers' room! We were lucky that this year the con was in Montreal, my home town and very near Ste-Agathe, where we spent most of our vacation time. The whole family came down to Montreal for the Friday of the con, while I stayed for Saturday and Sunday as well.
Overall, the con was a blast. I had a fantastic time! Of course, since I lived in Montreal for 38 years and was quite involved in Montreal sf fandom for a few years (I was on…
jdupuis | August 26, 2009My annual summer blogging break has officially come to a close. I returned to work Monday after a very nice four week vacation. Yes, I use my whole annual vacation allotment all at once and go the rest of the year without any significant break except for Christmas.
The first three weeks we spent most of our time at a cottage we rent every year near Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, about 90 minutes north of Montreal. The weather was mostly pretty good, so a great time was had by all -- swimming, canoing and just lounging around reading books. For my part, let's just say a lot of BBQing and drinking…
jdupuis | August 21, 2009Oooh. I love lists of books!
And, hey, I'm on a blogcation, you're probably on vacation too. So here's some reading material for the beach, backyard or cottage!
SCIENCEDarwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones (Little, Brown £20) Enthralling life leads us through Darwin's entire 40-year career after the Beagle's return from the Galapagos islands.
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (HarperPerennial £8.99) Brilliantly debunks faddy scientific "breakthroughs" and exposes the barefaced fraudulence of fringe medicine; read this book and you won't get fooled again.
13…
jdupuis | August 20, 2009During my summer 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 3, 2008. There was some nice discussion on Friendfeed that's worth checking out.
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Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues:
First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions:
So I'm asking and proposing that e-science is
grid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio,…
jdupuis | August 18, 2009During my summer 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 January 13, 2009. It ended up being pretty popular and was the reason that ALA Editions initially contacted me about doing a book.
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This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site?
First of all, a brief note…
jdupuis | August 14, 2009One of the most important things librarians do to manage their book collections is weed. That involves removing the really old, useless stuff to make way for the shiny, new, useful stuff. Shelf space is limited, of course, but you also don't want to clutter your shelves with items that are too outdated to be useful to your patrons.
Academic libraries have a slightly different mandate in this area than public libraries -- we often serve patron communities that study the history of various disciplines so for them the old stuff can also provide valuable insight into the history and culture of…
jdupuis | August 12, 2009During my summer 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 October 10, 2008. It provoked a bit of angst out in the library student blogosphere, which is kinda what I was hoping.
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It's interesting times in the world out there.
And not surprisingly, the world of the internet is thinking about the implications. One of the big implications is that it's going to be harder to get a job, and that's going to be true librarians as much as anyone else.
As it happens, I've been collecting some…
jdupuis | August 7, 2009Via BoingBoing, this looks like one hell of a cool book: The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive! (O'Reilly page).
With this unique traveler's guide, you'll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world's largest science museum, watch Foucault's pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton's apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information…
jdupuis | August 5, 2009During my summer 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 July 3, 2007. It's one of the most popular posts I've done, and it was linked quite widely in the science blogosphere. The interview series has lapsed a bit this year, but that's mostly due to a couple of the people I was approaching just not working out. I will definitely relaunch the series in the fall and try to do one every other month or so.
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Welcome to the most recent installment in my occasional series of interviews…
jdupuis | July 31, 2009My son Sam is a budding scientist and blogger. He came to the ScienceOnline09 conference in North Carolina with me this past January and had a great time.
Needless to say, Bora has tracked him down and interviewed him here.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? How much will they in the future?
In Grade 9, I had a science project to do that was supposed to be about anything that had to do with the curriculum. They were pretty loose on this definition: if it in any way had to do with space, biology, physics, or…
jdupuis | July 31, 2009Most of these look odd, interesting, weird, useless or some combination of the above.
Here's a couple of examples:
Underwater Basket Weaving
Philosophy and Star Trek
Joy of Garbage(Via Ask-Dr-Kirk.)
jdupuis | July 29, 2009During my summer 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 November 7, 2007. It generated quite a few interesting comments, so you might want to check back at the original post. My feeling on a lot of these points has shifted a bit with time, so I'll probably revisit the topic in the fall.
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This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, as we (at York and as a profession) start to move in a coordinated way to making ebooks an important part of our collections. What's the…
jdupuis | July 24, 2009Yes, it's here. My annual summer blogging break. A time to recharge my blogging batteries.
Time to pack up my virtual bags, hop on my ePlane and take a posting holiday. As usual, I'll be offline for the next four weeks or so, probably back the week of August 24th. I have scheduled some posts for my absence, however: four Friday Fun posts as well as four items I'm reposting from the old blog.
As for the summer reading poll, I guess it's now time to declare the two winners:
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick with 44% of the vote.
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth…
jdupuis | July 23, 2009Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out.
Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere.
Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing.
The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…
jdupuis | July 21, 2009My traditional summer blogging break is fast approaching. It's the time of year when I take a 4-6 week break away from it all and recharge my blogging batteries. It's something I've done for years and it really works for me.
One of the things I do during my break is try and read a lot of books. I mostly read fiction during the break, but this year I'm going to mix in a science auto/biography and a social media/new technology book. The trick is, I'm going to let you all choose which ones.
Below I have a couple of polls where you can vote on which book you want me to read. All the books…
jdupuis | July 18, 2009That's four librar* blogs here at ScienceBlogs, of course, with hopefully more to come. We're taking over!
I'll let Dorothea introduce herself:
I'm very pleased to welcome you all to The Book of Trogool, a brand-new blog about e-research. My name is Dorothea Salo, I'm an academic librarian, and I am fascinated with the changes that computers have wrought in the academic-research enterprise. I hope to explore those changes, and particularly library responses to them, in the company of the wonderful ScienceBlogs community. My thanks to John, Christina, and Walt for paving the way, and to Erin…