jdupuis | October 7, 2009Here Comes Science by the alt-rock band The Might be Giants is a delightful CD/DVD set of kids music and video about...Science! The set comes with both a CD with all the music and a DVD with all the videos wrapped into a show with animated, light-hearted commentary and introduction by the two Giants, John Linnell and John Flansburgh.
Here's a list of the tunes, so you can get an idea of the breadth of topics covered. TMBG has a channel on YouTube where you can find many of the videos.
Science Is Real
Meet the Elements
I Am a Paleontologist w/Danny Weinkauf
The Bloodmobile
Electric Car w/…
jdupuis | October 2, 2009Yes, it's the IgNobel Awards for 2009!
Let's take a look at a couple of the more amusing ones:
PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining -- by experiment -- whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of…
jdupuis | October 1, 2009In a reputation economy, social media can provide a powerful set of tools for establishing and enhancing your reputation. An enhanced reputation can lead to enhanced opportunities, in the form of job offers or other professional opportunity.
Academia is a reputation economy, of course, but really any knowledge economy/creative class job is going to be easier to get if you have a good reputation. Which brings us back to social media.
It seems to me that in a competitive job market, students can really make their own applications stand out if they can refer potential employers to a really…
jdupuis | September 30, 2009It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson session.
Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008.
Yes, I've been at this for a while, but to no avail. My main point in all this is to make clear that I don't believe that the Nobel prizes are chosen on the basis of citation count. Sure, there's going to be a correlation between the two, but the causation is extremely weak. Thomson's constant hawking of their "Citation Laureates" is, in my opinion, self-serving and wrong-headed.
And yes, they do get them right occasionally, but that's because…
jdupuis | September 28, 2009Here's an amazing and fairly unique opportunity for a research-minded librarian who wants to significantly advance her or his research program. The appointment is for up to three years and the starting date is somewhat flexible.
Here's the terms of reference for the position:
Each appointment to the Chair will be a limited term appointment for up to three years.
A committee will be established to undertake a search for the Chair.
The selection will be based on the quality of the proposed research program along with evidence for the successful completion of the research proposal.
The…
jdupuis | September 28, 2009Those of you with long memories may recall that I was on the jury for the 2009 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
Well, the names of the winners have just been released:
Adult: The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
Young Adult: Little Brother by Cory DoctorowYou can check out the shortlists and recommended reading lists here.
The two winning books are both amazing examples of fantastic fiction, both well worth reading. The rest of the shortlists and recommended reading lists are also worth checking out. Congratulations!
I would also like to say at this point that being on…
jdupuis | September 25, 2009God, I love The Onion: Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.
An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.
"From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance," said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing…
jdupuis | September 24, 2009Predicting the future is tricky business. Trust me, I know.
But there's two ideas I always like to keep in mind when I put my futurologist's hat on:
The future will be at least as diverse as the present, probably more so. But not likely less.
There's no guarantee that things will change for the better. There's also no guarantee that things will change for the worse. The only thing you can be sure of is that it'll be hard to get any agreement on which is which.These two ideas are closely connected in my mind, compelling me to (hopefully) think realistically and honestly, if not always…
jdupuis | September 23, 2009If you feel the need to socially network with ScienceBlogs and any of us various SciBlings, you can do so on Facebook and Twitter. I suspect that most of us who are on those services are fans/followers of ScienceBlogs.
The main places I hang out are Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook. Drop by and say hi!
(I don't know if it exists, but it would be interesting to see a list of all of our various handles on those and other services.)
jdupuis | September 21, 2009That's the question asked by Lance Fortnow in a recent Communications of the ACM Viewpoint article (free fulltext).
Fortnow's article continues a discussion about scholarly communication patterns in computer science that's been going on for a while in the "pages" of the CACM. I've blogged about it a couple of times here and here.
Fortnow's main idea is that CS needs to get past the youthful stage of using conferences as the main vehicle for disseminating new ideas and move to a journal-based model, like most of the rest of scientific disciplines. In the end, it's all about peer review:…
jdupuis | September 18, 2009As many have not doubt noticed over the months and years of my blog's existence, I am a hardcore science fiction fan. And just as with the science/librarian world, there are countless blogs and other sites about the science fictions/fantasy/horror worlds. And of course, I have trouble keeping up with all the happenings in that particular blogosphere.
To make it a bit easier (and more enjoyable) on myself, I created a Friendfeed group and added a bunch of feeds to it -- a smallish assortment of reviewers, authors, publishers and news sites. I created it a few weeks ago and it's really made…
jdupuis | September 18, 2009I'm talking about the new-to-me Wolfgang's Vault! Among other things, it includes a Vault Store, where you can buy prints and other swag; the Concert vault with 2859 concerts, the Crawdaddy magazine & archives. The concerts material can be sliced & diced into playlists and radio shows.
The concerts are by, among others: The Allman Brothers, The Band, Black Sabbath, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt, Lynyrd Skynyrd, MC5, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Van Morrison and The Who.
As I type this, I'm listening…
jdupuis | September 16, 2009I haven't done one of these in a while, so there's quite a backlog to clear.
Reports
Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends
Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Strategic Outsourcing and Cloud Computing: Reality Is a Sober Adversary
Library Storage Facilities and the Future of Print Collections in North America
XC User Research Preliminary Report (Extensible Catalog)
Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology
Beyond Scientific Publication: Strategies for Disseminating
How Teens Use Media: A Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen…
jdupuis | September 11, 2009No, I don't mean the werewolf entry in Wikipedia, I mean the use of Wikipedia by werewolves.
You see, I recently received a review copy of The Werewolf's Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten by Ritch Duncan, Bob Powers and Emily Flake.
As you can imagine, it an imaginary non-fiction book helping new werewolves to cope with their newly transformed lives -- it talks about work, romance and all the rest. I'm not quite finished it yet, but it's very amusing and definitely worth a look if you like that kind of thing.
What struck me, though, is something from the entry on figuring out when…
jdupuis | September 10, 2009I've always thought the born-digital, high-quality review articles (called "lectures") that Morgan & Claypool publish as part of their Synthesis product are one of the best products out there. They really get publishing scholarly and professional materials in the digital age.
One of their most interesting lecture series is the Synthesis Lectures on Engineers, Technology and Society.
Three new lectures in that series look to be perfect texts for a broad range of Engineering & Society-type course. In fact, I think a pretty good course along those lines could use nothing but the…
jdupuis | September 9, 2009Just yesterday I posted on preserving the the history of the computing field, musing at the end that digitization projects could save a lot of documents.
Well, what comes along today in the latest What's New @ IEEE for Students is a note about the IEEE-USA History Project:
Digital Archives, Organization's Four Decades of Service Unveiled
IEEE-USA is building a digital archive featuring documents and photos of its 36-year history of promoting the careers and public policy interests of U.S. IEEE members. Part of the IEEE-USA History Project, the archive features:
An overview of the first four…
jdupuis | September 8, 2009An interesting article from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Preserving Records of the Past, Today by James W. Cortada. In concerns the difficulty that scholars of the history of computing have in finding primary materials to work with, mostly in the form of documents.
Scholars examining the history of information technology run into many practical, nuts-and-bolts problems more frequently than historians in other fields that
have existed for considerable periods of time, such as diplomatic and political national history. Problems with the history of information…
jdupuis | September 4, 2009I just love those articles that turn up every once in a while that make fun of the typos and factual errors students make on their exams and term papers. I know it's cruel but I can't help myself. Best Wank and Gaza: this year's top exam howlers is a pretty good example of the form.
Meanwhile, a biology student spent an entire paper telling Kevin Reiling, from the Faculty of Sciences at Staffordshire University, about the science of gnomes.
"It took me a while to realise she was referring to genomes," Dr Reiling remarked.
jdupuis | September 3, 2009Keywords of a Librarian is the title of a new blog by academic librarian Mary W. George. What's very interesting about the blog is where it's being hosted.
It's part of InsideHigherEd's BlogU community so Mary George is a fellow academic library blogger embedded within a faculty blogging community. This is a great development as I think it's incredibly important to raise librarians' profile within the broader faculty/academic community; so having regular blog posts bring our perspectives and concerns to that audience is great. A hearty congratulations to Mary on her new post!
She's taking…
jdupuis | September 3, 2009It looks like ScienceBlogs will be getting a lot more community-like and a lot less we-talk-you-listen -- and that's a very good thing.
Since we're listening, we'd also like your feedback on how we should set up our community.
As you may have heard from one of our bloggers, ScienceBlogs will soon be introducing an optional user registration program. We hope that this will help you, as readers, connect with one another, keep track of the posts and discussions you are interested in, and control how you interact with the site.
To that end, we'd love to hear what you think would most improve your…