October 28, 2011
With The Onion implementing a new paywall with non-US users, I'm forced to look for a new source of cheap amusement.
Yes, I'm too cheap to pay for The Onion online. For a paper copy, I'd easily pay $5 per week but online infotainment has no monetary value for me, and I suspect for anyone else.…
October 28, 2011
As reported here and elsewhere, Amazon is actually dipping its toes into the world of publishing.
Which of course is an interesting challenge and threat for traditional trade publishers. And who knows, maybe academic publishers too, if Amazon decides it wants to disrupt that market as well.
In any…
October 26, 2011
Ah, #OccupyScholComm.
The perfect Open Access Week topic!
And just like the broader Occupy protests movement, the aims and policy pronouncements of the "movement" are perhaps not as vague as they might seem to the casual observer.
Basically, #OccupyScholComm is about scholars rejecting profit-…
October 24, 2011
For your reading and collection development pleasure!
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are…
October 21, 2011
I like to think of Nobel Week as stretching through the entirety of October and certainly The Cronk has made that much easier this year with a fun little article, Nobel Prize Committee Snubs Professor Huckman's Bigfoot Research Again!
For the thirteenth time in thirteen years, Professor Mikael…
October 20, 2011
Social Media for Scientists Part 1: It's Our Job
Social Media for Scientists Part 2: You Do Have Time
Social Media for Scientists Part 2.5: Breaking Stereotypes
Social Media For Scientists Part 3: Win-Win
The economics of science blogging
The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre…
October 19, 2011
I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of…
October 14, 2011
The science fiction news site blastr has a very entertaining series going for the month of October, 31 Days of Halloween.
As you would imagine, every day this month they are featuring a post about Halloween. And fortunately the topics range from the bizarre to the ridiculous all the way to the…
October 12, 2011
Waaaaay back on September 20, I flew down to New York City to take part in one of the Science Online New York City panel discussions, this one on Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils (and here).
Ably organized and moderated by David Dobbs, the other panelists were Evan Ratliff,…
October 8, 2011
Inspired by John Scalzi, I thought I'd poll all my readers out there and see what you are reading this weekend.
Books, magazines, blogs, whatever.
I'm reading Ross Macdonald's Meet Me at the Morgue for fiction, Gotham Central Book 1: In the Line of Duty by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark…
October 7, 2011
Leave it to The Onion to put it all into perspective. A couple of articles on Wednesday's passing of Steve Jobs.
Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies
CUPERTINO, CA--Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what…
October 6, 2011
As I'm sure everyone who's spent anytime exposed to any media at all over the last day knows that Steve Jobs has died. The death of anyone so young and with so much left to give is a tragedy to their immediate circle of family, friends and co-workers and they certainly have my sincere sympathy for…
October 6, 2011
A real straggler of a list for your reading and collection development pleasure.
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the…
October 2, 2011
It's time for my annual post taking issue with Thomson Reuters (TR) Nobel Prize predictions.
(2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2010)
Because, yes, they're at it again.
Can the winners of the Nobel Prize be correctly predicted? Since 1989, Thomson Reuters has developed a list of likely…
October 1, 2011
10 Reasons Why Your (EDU) Boss Should Tweet
The digital scholar - which way to go?
Facebook is scaring me
#ArsenicLife Goes Longform, And History Gets Squished
Science Online: London 2011 - Keynote, Michael Nielsen - Video & Storify
Op-Ed: Stop Feeding Facebook, It's Time for Moderation…
September 30, 2011
w00t!
It's Ig Nobel Prize season again!
A brief description:
The Ig® Nobel Prizes
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science,…
September 27, 2011
Computer science and computer science education are a couple of my evergreen topics here on this blog, as you can see by perusing the computer science tag.
And of course, my trip to Harvard for LIAL this past summer perhaps has that institution on my radar a bit more than usual.
So how wonderful is…
September 26, 2011
My 2011 summer reading was pretty meagre this year. For various reasons too boring to go into here, there wasn't much actually much vacation for me this summer. I think I'll probably have a better December/Christmas reading list than summer. Such is life.
Anyways, what I did read was pretty good…
September 24, 2011
The Future of Libraries
The Guardian's 9/11 mistake shows we're still learning the boundaries of Twitter
Feeling pointy
A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste: A review of Gamification by Design
Stop the Internet, we want to get off!
Open Access Is Infrastructure, Not Religion
Internet Ruffles Pricey…
September 23, 2011
There's this weird phenomenon on Twitter of HULK accounts, where some secret individual or cabal creates an online persona to criticize the status quo in some area of human experience, but in the lively patois of the old school Marvel Comics character, The Incredible Hulk.
Feminist Hulk, Adjunct…
September 20, 2011
A project I heartily endorse on a topic near and dear to my heart, launched by the Library Society of the World, Librarianship by Walking Around:
The Library Society of the World is putting together an online and print-on-demand anthology of weblog posts, essays, articles, and other material…
September 17, 2011
I announced the short list for the Lane Anderson Award a little while back and now the winners were announced here in Toronto a few nights ago:
Adult Titles Winner
The Ptarmigan's Dilemma: An Ecological Exploration into the Mysteries of Life by John Theberge and Mary Theberge. (McCelland &…
September 16, 2011
How do no one every tell of this NewsBiscuit before? It's fantastic, kind of a UK version of The Onion, but dryer and more polite. Or something.
Anyways, here's a recent one, my introduction to this fantastic site: Homeopathic leak threatens catastrophe.
An accidental release of highly dilute…
September 15, 2011
As a former IT person and a current librarian, I've got to say that this article,Want Good IT Customer Service? Visit Your Library, has a lot of truth in it -- I definitely see the differences between my former profession and my current one. And as the article points out, many of those differences…
September 13, 2011
Academically on Course
Journal Submissions
Asking the right questions
Inger Mewburn - Is There a New Digital Divide Brewing?
The case for libraries' use of social media: a how-to
Social Media - Oversold and Undervalued
15 Case Studies to Get Your Library Director On Board With Social Media
(Moral…
September 12, 2011
I'm a huge Eric Clapton fan, particularly of his blues output, always have been, always will be. There's only one artist I've seen in concert more time that EC, but more on that later.
One of the things I've always found interesting and admirable about him is his desire to collaborate with other…
September 9, 2011
The Onion nails it on this one: We Need To Do More When It Comes To Having Brief, Panicked Thoughts About Climate Change.
The problem with solving all our climate change-related problems is basically that all the people on the planet are human.
Indeed, if there was ever a time when a desperate call…
September 8, 2011
Another issue full of interesting articles:
E-Science Librarianship: Field Undefined by Elsa Alvaro, Heather Brooks, Monica Ham, Stephanie Poegel, and Sarah Rosencrans, Indiana University
Comparison of the Contributions of CAPLUS and MEDLINE to the Performance of SciFinder in Retrieving the Drug…
September 7, 2011
Seniors, Women Embracing Tablets, E-Readers
Open access to scientific knowledge and feudalism knowledge: Is there a connection?
I Got the Wrong Request from the Wrong Journal to Review the Wrong Piece. The Wrong kind of Open Access Apparently, Something Wrong with this Inherently...
Do More, Own…
September 2, 2011
I have fond memories of reading the Asterix graphic novels as a kid, both in the original French and especially in the absolutely brilliant English translations -- I'm told quite reliably by my wife, who's a translator, that they are the best she's ever seen. My own kids also really loved them and…
