jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
jdupuis | March 2, 2010Continuing the ongoing discussion about the publication habits of computing researchers that I've recently blogged about:
Time for computer science to grow up?
ACM responds to the blogosphere
The Association for Computing Machinery on Open Access.
Conferences vs. journals in computing researchThis time around, we have Moshe Vardi Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research in the latest Communications of the ACM.
The May 2009 editorial and the August 2009 column attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. The reaction has been mostly sympathetic to the point of view…
jdupuis | March 1, 2010The inaugural Canadian Engineering Education Association Conference will be held this year from June 7-9 at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) is a new organization whose mission is to "enhance the competence and relevance of graduates from Canadian Engineering schools through continuous improvement in engineering education and design education." This first annual CEEA conference will integrate and grow on the previous efforts of the Canadian Design Engineering Network (CDEN) and the Canadian Congress on Engineering Education (C2E2…
jdupuis | February 26, 2010Via Boing Boing, this is my kind of prize!
You can vote for the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year.
The shortlist:
Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Cromptons (Glenstrae Press)
Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A Yannes'(Trafford)
Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina (A K Peters)
Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots by Ronald C Arkin (CRC Press)
The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Maria Dubinsky (SLACK Inc)
What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua? by Tara Jansen-Meyer (Mirror) More related…
jdupuis | February 25, 2010My Lakehead University colleague Janice Mutz and I reprised the session I did at OLA two years ago this morning for an active and engaged crowd of about 50 librarians -- a great crowd for the very first session of the conference since a lot of people are still trickling in after arriving and registering.
This time around, we really put the emphasis on engagement and conversation, running the session like a combination Information Literacy and unconference session. Overall, we were really pleased with how it went and enjoyed the input from so many great librarians. Of the 20 or so "…
jdupuis | February 24, 2010Queen's University engineering librarian Michael White runs The Patent Librarian's Notebook, a very important resource for anyone interested in finding and making sense of patent information.
He's done a very comprehensive review of the important 2009 developments in public patent databases and related websites.
An example:
Canadian Patents Database (CIPO)
The Canadian Patents Database, which is maintained by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, contains more than two million Canadian patents and published applications from 1869 to the present. Full-text images are available from 1920…
jdupuis | February 22, 2010Here's what they're about:
The first draft of Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK, just down from the Chemistry Faculty where Peter works.
They were then refined with the help of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science and were officially launched in February 2010.
Here they are:
Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.
For science to effectively function…
jdupuis | February 19, 2010John Scalzi is one of my guaranteed Friday Fun go-to guys. Always amusing, always entertaining and occasionally controversial and provocative.
He's definitely in the controversial and provocative mode here in a 2006 blog post entitled The Lie of Star Wars as Entertainment.
The post is scathingly funny, cruel and vicious and sarcastic and brilliant. And spot on.
So let's not pretend that the Star Wars series is this great piece of entertainment.
Instead, let's call it what it is: A monument to George Lucas pleasuring himself. Which, you know, is fine. I'm happy for Lucas; it's nice that he…
jdupuis | February 19, 2010On Thursday, February 4th, I attended the Social Media and the Modern Day Classroom session that's part of Social Media Week Toronto. It was hosted here at York and most of the presenters were local faculty or staff.
It was a very interesting session in which all the speakers brought something different and valuable to the table.
Neel Joshi moderated and gave an overall shape to the session, asking provocative questions and mostly focusing on Twitter as a learning and community building tool. Laura D'amelio is the Manager of Print & E-Media Content here and she talked about how York…
jdupuis | February 17, 2010A bit of self-promotion. Forgive me. I'll be brief.
My TAIGA fisking post from a while back is featured prominently in Walt Crawford's most recent Cites & Insights (March 2010) (pdf, html) with quite a bit of value-added comment from Walt on TAIGA, the Darien Statements and other topics. Thanks, Walt.
I'm flattered to be mentioned in Graham Lavender's presentation at the recent Web2.You conference in Montreal. His very fine presentation was on Blogs and Twitter for Individuals and Institutions. No doubt referring to my 2008 presentation at Web2.You, on slide 3 he mentions that "…
jdupuis | February 17, 2010I've always been a huge vampire fan -- I watched my first Dracula movie when I was about 8-10 years old, on TV, one of the vintage Hammer films with Christopher Lee. I read the original novel when I was a teenager and was a fan of the Marvel comic versions as well. Since then, I've read a zillion vampire novels, read more comics and watched a ton of vampire movies and TV series -- Dark Shadows, Buffy and more. My favourite Dracula will always be Lee though I've also appreciated Lugosi, Louis Jordan and especially Jack Palance. The more romantic versions by Gary Oldman or Frank Langella…
jdupuis | February 16, 2010As a follow up to my previous posts about the situation at Canada's national science library, NRC-CISTI, here, here and here, this was in the Ottawa Citizen today, NRC to lay off 86 workers in April.
The National Research Council is laying off 86 people as part of cuts announced last year to reduce costs at the country's leading research organization.
The layoffs begin in April and will affect employees at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), the country's national science library and leading publisher of scientific information. By the time it is over, CISTI…
jdupuis | February 12, 2010Following up on my Onion post a few weeks back on a Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet I thought I'd do an update on The Onion's article Apple Finally Unveils iPad.
Here's most of what they say:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's new tablet computer, the iPad, during a presentation in San Francisco last week. Here are some of its features:
Awkward name enables Twitter users to make the same joke over and over and over again
Super slick design makes it impossible to hold, pick up, or stop from sliding down the street
Softly whimpers if left alone for too long
Photo…
jdupuis | February 5, 2010Continuing my strange obsession with lists of books...
Locus Magazine is the bible of the sffh business -- both in print and online. Every year they poll their reviewers and various other industry people and come up with a pretty extensive recommended reading list for the year. Their categories include: sf novels, fantasy novels, YA books, first novels, collections, original anthologies, reprint anthologies, best of year anthologies, non-fiction, art books, novellas, novelettes and short stories.
I'm obviously not going to reprint all their lists here -- just the sf novel one to give you a…
jdupuis | January 29, 2010I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far.
In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original commentary on the topic. Fortunately, I have an post from way back in June 2008 expressing many of the same sentiments, though probably neither as well nor as succinctly as Bonnie has.
I'll also not that the post was excerpted in The Library Leadership Network.
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I saw…
jdupuis | January 29, 2010So far, I'm pretty iPad-agnostic -- mostly curious to see if it can burst out of it's obvious niche applications and become a mass device like the iPod or iPhone.
However, The Onion's article just before the big announcement day really struck a funny bone:
Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple's new tablet computer. "Come on, Steve, just think--think, dammit--you're running out of time," the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate…
jdupuis | January 27, 2010Oddly and interestingly, Amazon.ca has a different list that the US parent.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity & Hope by William Kamkwamba
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Green Metropolis by David Owen
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin
Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis by Alanna MitchellThis is one of the last lists I'll do for 2009 --…
jdupuis | January 26, 2010I thought I'd combine a couple lists that only have a couple of relevant items.
January Magazine
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman
The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants by Wolfgang Stuppy
Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim
Planet Ape by Desmond Morris with Steve ParkerNational Book Critics Circle
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation…
jdupuis | January 25, 2010It's been a while since I did one of these fairly general entries in the "Five songs I love" series:
Forget about Me by Mem Shannon. A great blues/soul/R&B singer, Mem Shannon is terribly underrated. I love his great story-telling ability, of which Forget about Me is a great example. Live: A Night at Tipitina's and I'm From Phunkville are both really terrific.
Suite Madame Blue by Styx. The obligatory cheese. Anyways, Styx was the first rock band that I really loved as a young teen, way back in the early-mid 1970's and Suite Madame Blue was the song that did it for me. I still have…
jdupuis | January 22, 2010Horror author Cherie Priest has a very nice post from a couple of days ago called Control. It's basically about what mass market fiction authors do and don't have control over in the book production process. Now, the mass market fiction publishing niche is hardly the main concern on this blog, but I also think it's interesting to see what she comes up with and compare it with the list of things academic authors both do and don't have control over.
On some points it's strangely the same but mostly starkly different.
It's also worth contemplating how this list would be affected by an…