April 12, 2010
A nice interview with Jimi Hendrix's sister Janie on the Bravewords.com site. It's talking about the latest collection of unreleased Hendrix material to hit the stores, Valleys Of Neptune.
Janie Hendrix: "He's probably laughing."
BraveWords.com: Yeah, he must be laughing, going, "how can I be…
April 9, 2010
This is sick, sick stuff. But actually quite funny, really, in a very black humour sort of way.
It's a web comic about the creatures from the Alien films invading the Hundred Acre Wood and basically turning all our most beloved childhood characters into monsters. The comic probably goes on a tad…
April 7, 2010
Not me actually, but Joshua Kim on the blog Technology and Learning. Kim's blog is easily the most relevant to libraries of the Inside Higher Ed BlogU stable, even more so than the apparently defunct Keywords from a Librarian which always seemed bizarrely stuck in 1979.
Anyways, Kim's latest piece…
April 3, 2010
OK, so Friday Fun a day late.
Anyways, April Fools day was a couple of days ago and I thought that the ScienceBlogs home page was the funniest science-related prank of the day.
So, for those of you that missed the headline and the little story that went with it, here goes:
CERN Scientists Awaken…
April 1, 2010
From the news release:
Google to Digitize Lost Library of Alexandria
by Paoli du Flippi
-- posted @ 4/01/2010 12:01:00 AM PT
Today at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, Executive Dan Clancy, head of the Google Books project, announced plans to digitize the contents of the Lost…
March 31, 2010
From the April Communications of the ACM, the Kode Vicious column is on The Data-Structure Canon.
The reader question is:
In most areas of science there are a few basic underlying laws that inform the rest of the study of a given subject. Physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering all have…
March 30, 2010
The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference.
What's it about?
What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading,…
March 29, 2010
Another list of songs I really love, this time leaning a bit on the heavy side.
I by Black Sabbath (performed by Heaven & Hell). This is one of my favourite Dio-era Sabbath songs, from the underrated Dehumanizer album (Dio/Sabb box set). This sizzling live version is performed by the…
March 26, 2010
Wednesday was Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.
The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more…
March 26, 2010
Interesting little slideshow article, one that makes you think about the transformation we've seen in the last century or so: The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations.
Here's the list -- note that each page in the slideshow has an audio interview with someone that used to do the job in question…
March 24, 2010
Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to…
March 22, 2010
For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just extracted the science-related books. From science publications, I've included most or all…
March 19, 2010
John Scalzi's latest AMC column Why Hollywood Always, Always Gets the Future Wrong is, as usual, very smart and right on target.
And pretty funny too.
Everybody gets the future wrong. It's not just Hollywood or science fiction writers. When it comes to the future, no one knows anything. At the…
March 18, 2010
I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd…
March 17, 2010
An interesting and provocative article in The Scientist by Steven Wiley iof the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, To Join or Not to Join.
The thrust of the article is that scholarly societies are having trouble offering true value to their members in the Internet age, that their business…
March 15, 2010
ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.
Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open…
March 12, 2010
Oh, I love The Onion. Oh so funny and yet oh so directly on target.
So funny it hurts. In reference to the Great Buzz Privacy Boondoggle, this is what they have to say: Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology.
The whole piece is brilliant -- go and read it right…
March 11, 2010
A big list of 35 titles in various categories: Astronomy, Biography, Biology, Climatology, Environmental Science, Evolution, Geology, Health Sciences, History of Science, Mathematics, Natural History, Neurology, Oceanography, Paleontology, Physics, Psychology, Science, Technology, Zoology.
This…
March 9, 2010
Yesterday was International Women's Day and since I'm a firm believer in International Better Late Than Never Day, I thought I thought I'd add my little contribution to the celebration. Or at least highlight a great post from someone else.
Computer Scientist Amy Csizmar Dalal's recent blog post…
March 5, 2010
The Huffington Post has a couple of posts featuring the most amazingly beautiful libraries in the world, Part One here and Part Two here.
Here's the text from the two posts:
Times are changing for libraries everywhere. But even as many libraries build their digital collections and amp up their…
March 4, 2010
I'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…
March 2, 2010
Continuing 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 research…
March 1, 2010
The 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…
February 26, 2010
Via 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…
February 25, 2010
My 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…
February 24, 2010
Queen'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…
February 22, 2010
Here'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…
February 19, 2010
John 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…
February 19, 2010
On 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…
February 17, 2010
A 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.…
