August 31, 2011
The Patent System Is The World's Biggest Threat To Innovation Today
How Google Dominates Us
The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
Resilience vs. Sustainability: The Future of Libraries
Getting first sale wrong
College Students: The Gadget Generation
Our kids' glorious new age…
August 29, 2011
The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the…
August 26, 2011
this is all kinds of funny: Beloit College Faces Accusations that "Mindset List" Really the Drunken Ravings of Old Man.
I tend to find the Beloit College list on the one hand kind of lame and the other kind of irrelevant.
And The Cronk knocks it out of the park:
Beloit, Wis. In a statement that…
August 26, 2011
What with the latest round of departures seemingly immanent with the new "no pseudonymous bloggers" policy, I thought I'd revisit the list I did last year at about this time.
With a few exceptions, I'll call blogs dormant if there hasn't been a post in 2011.
2010 World Science Festival Blog (…
August 24, 2011
Whoa. Now that was a intellectual reset button hitting if there ever was one.
From July 31 to August 5 I attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) in Boston. It was a one-week, intensive, immersive course not so much on how to be a…
August 22, 2011
It's a very sad day today all across Canada as Jack Layton, leader of the Federal NDP and Leader of the Official Opposition, has died of cancer.
A widely respected career politician -- a rarity these days -- his passion for social justice and commitment to the people of Canada will be greatly…
August 19, 2011
All week I've been planning to feature Tor.com's Noir Week series here today. Somehow it's fitting that my slightly dark mood right now is matched by the subject matter of the Friday Fun.
From the introductory post:
Welcome to Noir Week at Tor.com! Join us as we escape from the sweltering dog…
August 19, 2011
According to DrugMonkey's recent post, ScienceBlogs' new overlords The National Geogrpaphic Society will no longer allow pseudonymous to continue blogging here.
I have just been informed that ScienceBlogs will no longer be hosting anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers. In case you are interested,…
August 18, 2011
The New York Review of Books has a great group review of some recentish books on everyone's favourite Internet behemoth: Google.
And they all look pretty interesting! (And I may have featured a couple of these before.)
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (…
August 17, 2011
I'll be speaking at the upcoming Science Online NYC event on September 20th.
Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (ET)
New York, NY
Weiss 305
Rockefeller University
E66th and York Ave.
New York, NY
Enhanced ebooks and tablet…
August 16, 2011
I just got an email from the administers of this award:
$10,000 Lane Anderson Award Shortlist AnnouncedCelebrating the Best Science Writing in Canada
The six finalists competing for the 2010 Lane Anderson Award were announced today by Hollister Doll and Sharon Fitzhenry, Directors of the Fitzhenry…
August 16, 2011
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy
The Children They Never Had (regrets about not having kids among mostly female science faculty)
Why We Inflate Grades
Search: How Libraries Do it Wrong
Faculty inertia and change in scholarly publishing
Blogs: face the conversation
No Offence, But…
August 15, 2011
As I ease myself back into the swing of things after a couple of weeks off and start to pay attention again to what's going on in the online world, I thought I'd bring this post to the attention of as wide an audience as possible.
It's The importance of language and framing, part eleventy-thousand…
August 12, 2011
Sometimes The Onion is so funny it hurts: USSR Wins Space Race As U.S. Shuts Down Shuttle Program.
MOSCOW, USSR--Less than a week after the return of the Atlantis orbiter marked the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, the crowded streets and textile factories of Moscow erupted in celebration as…
August 5, 2011
Believe me, there are days when I think I'd like to be sold for scrap.
Anyways, Student Takes Tenured Professor to Antiques Road Show.
Archeology major Wendy Markell packed Professor Mary Louise Grandy into her car last Saturday and took her to the most recent filming of the PBS program "Antiques…
July 30, 2011
Let's talk about Plagiarism
Who Is Punished for Plagiarism?
NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again--and Faces a Backlash
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
What Tech Do You Bring to Conferences?
Overeducated, Underemployed: How to fix humanities grad school
Know Your Value
"I…
July 29, 2011
I usually don't feature too many Cracked posts here because, well, they can tend to be a little on the NSFW for a family blog like this one.
But this one is very funny and very true. Fortunately, I don't seem to qualify as any of the worst kinds of blogs, but I guess I'm not the best judge of that…
July 28, 2011
No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera.
However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians…
July 27, 2011
As anyone who's a regular reader of my Friday Fun series will know, I'm a huge fan of The Cronk, that paragon of higher ed satire. In fact, you could call me the grand high poobah of Cronk fandom with the Cronk as the Sultan of Satire!
You can see some of my posts here, here and here and even more…
July 25, 2011
My previous post was about Brian Mathews moving his blog to the Chronicle, a non-librarian blog network.
So for this post I thought I'd list all the academic and research librarians I know of that are embedded in non-library blogging communities.
On the one hand, it's a pretty short list. On the…
July 25, 2011
As I have in the past, I'd like to point out a librarian embedded in a faculty-focused blogging network.
Brian Mathews recently moved his blog, The Ubiquitous Librarian, to the Chronicle Blog Network run by, you guessed it, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The new URL for Brian's blog is here.…
July 23, 2011
The Cornucopia of the Commons
Discouraging EDU Lessons from Netflix Streaming
A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic
Setting the Agenda: Key Issues for Scholarly Publishing
Of Hybrarians, Scholar-Librarians, Academic Refugees, & Feral Professionals
An ex-Googler's…
July 22, 2011
Or is that Auto Cucumber?
For those of you who own iphones and text a lot, you'll know what I'm talking about here.
As you type the phone tries to guess what you really mean to say and often you can inadvertently say the wrong thing if you acknowledge the phone's suggestions too soon.
And there's a…
July 21, 2011
Reference librarians, of course!
I'm reading Last Car to Elysian Fields by mystery writer James Lee Burke and came across this rather nice passage on pages 141-142.
So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the…
July 20, 2011
Come work for me!
We have an 11 month opening here at my library for a reference assistant. The position doesn't require the library degree but a science background will be necessary.
The posting is here.
Posting Number: YUSA-7393Position Title: Reference AssistantDepartment: Steacie Science…
July 19, 2011
Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post.
Anyways...
We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS…
July 15, 2011
The world of fantasy genre fiction is finally happy this week. An incredibly long-awaited event has finally taken place.
George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, fifth book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire series has finally been published.
With over five years since the last one, with much…
July 15, 2011
The latest D-Lib has a bunch of really interesting articles:
Services for Academic Libraries in the New Era by Michalis Gerolimos and Rania Konsta
Digital Librarianship & Social Media: the Digital Library as Conversation Facilitator
Article by Robert A. Schrier
Building a Sustainable…
July 14, 2011
As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL:
Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York
E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman,…
July 13, 2011
A few weeks ago I answered the daily thought leadership countdown questions that were posed by the TEDxLibrariansTO conference. I enjoyed the process, forcing myself to respond to thoughtful and interesting questions every day, even on busy challenging days where I wouldn't normally make an effort…
