July 25, 2016
How climate change may be fueling Canada’s fire season
Environmentalists, automakers applaud Ontario's $8.3B climate change plan
Views from people on the frontlines of climate change
How B.C.'s Climate Plan is Being Co-opted by Big Oil
Once a climate doubter, Tory leadership contender Maxime…
June 22, 2016
One of the key faults of the Harper Conservatives' science policy was their emphasis on applied research to the detriment of basic, curiosity driven research. Obviously there needs to be a balance between any government's approach to those two kinds of research, neither polar opposite is…
June 10, 2016
The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation?
“We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope.
>When is the Library Open? and the PS
Scholarly Communication and the…
May 30, 2016
I'll be attending upcoming Canadian Library Association National Forum, a kind of sunset conference as CLA reimagines and recreates itself. The idea is to take the pulse of Canadian librarians on the important issues in the library-related landscape. I'll be curating the session on Canada's…
May 24, 2016
The record exec, his massive record collection and a future where records won’t matter
What an opera review spiked by the National Post really tells us
Open Letter to YouTube, “Pushers” of Piracy
I’ve sold all my CDs. Can I live without those cracked plastic cases of magic and memories?
Apple…
May 18, 2016
Main event. Definitely.
Elsevier's acquisition of the open access journal article and working papers repository and online community Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is definitely a case of Elsevier tipping their hand and giving us all a peek at their real long term strategy.
Much more so…
May 6, 2016
The town of Fort McMurray, Alberta and it's surrounding region are experiencing a horrific wildfire. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate.
The absolute most important thing in the short and medium term is to take care of the people of Fort McMurray. Yes, Fort McMurray is the hub…
May 3, 2016
I have a son who's currently a fourth year physics undergrad who is headed more the direction of math rather than physics for the possibility of grad school. As you can imagine, I may occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think they might find particularly…
April 29, 2016
And by blame, I mean "blame."
Yesterday the flagship journal of the AAAS, Science, published a series of feature and editorial articles on Sci-Hub, the unauthorized article sharing site.
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
The frustrated science student behind Sci-Hub
My love-hate of Sci-…
April 28, 2016
The math the planet relies on isn’t adding up right now
Reframing The Economics Debate Could Lead To More Action To Fight Climate Change
Abandon hype in climate models
The Future Role of Economics in the IPCC
Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study
The Unsexy Climate…
April 16, 2016
Or at least a certain corner of Canadian politics. For some definitions of "blow up."
For those not followong Canadian politics, our more-or-less socialist party, The New Democratic Party, recently held a policy convention where they also held a leadership review vote. The current leader, Tom…
April 15, 2016
Magma, the strangest rock band of all time, needs you to help finance a documentary film about their life and work.
So here goes. Up until a year or so ago I'd never heard of the French prog rock band Magma, or at least their music had never penetrated my consciousness. But last year while spending…
April 1, 2016
Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post.
It's been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it's small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the…
February 29, 2016
Rall, Ted. Snowden. New York: Random House, 2015. 224pp. ISBN-13: 978-1609806354
For those that have watched Citizenfour or read Glenn Greenwald's No place to hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. surveillance state, there's not much new or shocking in Ted Rall's excellent graphic novel,…
February 26, 2016
Yeah, you have to figure good old Indy wasn't much of an academic colleague. Too flashy, never around to sit on a search committee, never willing to take his turn as chair, always blowing up the wrong building or disrupting the wrong classroom. And then there's the ghosts and arcs and demons and…
February 22, 2016
The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing.
What's the story, in a nutshell?
Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free…
February 5, 2016
Oh, The Onion. You are so wonderful and your take on the world of patents is so spot on that it hurts.
What are patents for, anyways?
Here's a bit of an excerpt from their 11 Step Program. Drop by the site to see the rest. Brilliant.
Step 1: First, come up with something really cool, like a cheese…
January 28, 2016
We have a Steacie Library Hackfest coming up and our there this year is Making a Difference with Data. And what better area to make a difference in than the environment and climate change?
I am far from an expert on this topic, so suggestions for additions (and deletions if I've added anything…
January 25, 2016
Donald R. Prothero's The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution has a bit of something for everyone. It's a great introduction to the history of life on the planet Earth, it's a solid primer on why evolution is true. It's a fun read with lots of…
January 13, 2016
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
January 12, 2016
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
January 11, 2016
Kristin Briney's Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success is a book that should be on the shelf (physical or virtual) of every librarian, researcher and research administrator. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists -- anyone who's…
January 10, 2016
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
January 3, 2016
John Horton Conway is a great mathematician, certainly one of the greatest living mathematicians. Polymathematical in his mathematical interests (game theory, geometry, group theory, topology and more, not to mention the Game of Life), he's also one of the most eccentric, and that's saying a lot in…
January 1, 2016
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
December 22, 2015
(OK, Music Monday one day late...)
Science books are an abiding, long term passion, one which has been reflected here on the blog by my compulsive listing of the Best Science Books of the year, 2015 included. This year I'm expanding the obsessive listing franchise to include another abiding…
December 21, 2015
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
December 20, 2015
This is the first popup book I've ever reviewed and I certainly hope it won't be the last.
David Macaulay's How Machines Work: Zoo Break! is a wonderful, whimsical, delightful and beautiful book that will charm and fascinate anyone who picks it up.
Aimed at younger children and told through the…
December 18, 2015
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
December 15, 2015
As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my…
