August 12, 2009
During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from October 10, 2008. It provoked a bit of angst out in the library student blogosphere, which is kinda what I was hoping.
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It's…
August 7, 2009
Via BoingBoing, this looks like one hell of a cool book: The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive! (O'Reilly page).
With this unique traveler's guide, you'll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or…
August 5, 2009
During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from July 3, 2007. It's one of the most popular posts I've done, and it was linked quite widely in the science blogosphere. The interview…
July 31, 2009
My son Sam is a budding scientist and blogger. He came to the ScienceOnline09 conference in North Carolina with me this past January and had a great time.
Needless to say, Bora has tracked him down and interviewed him here.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social…
July 31, 2009
Most of these look odd, interesting, weird, useless or some combination of the above.
Here's a couple of examples:
Underwater Basket Weaving
Philosophy and Star Trek
Joy of Garbage
(Via Ask-Dr-Kirk.)
July 29, 2009
During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from November 7, 2007. It generated quite a few interesting comments, so you might want to check back at the original post. My feeling on a…
July 24, 2009
Yes, it's here. My annual summer blogging break. A time to recharge my blogging batteries.
Time to pack up my virtual bags, hop on my ePlane and take a posting holiday. As usual, I'll be offline for the next four weeks or so, probably back the week of August 24th. I have scheduled some posts…
July 23, 2009
Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out.
Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8…
July 21, 2009
My traditional summer blogging break is fast approaching. It's the time of year when I take a 4-6 week break away from it all and recharge my blogging batteries. It's something I've done for years and it really works for me.
One of the things I do during my break is try and read a lot of books.…
July 18, 2009
That's four librar* blogs here at ScienceBlogs, of course, with hopefully more to come. We're taking over!
I'll let Dorothea introduce herself:
I'm very pleased to welcome you all to The Book of Trogool, a brand-new blog about e-research. My name is Dorothea Salo, I'm an academic librarian, and I…
July 17, 2009
Those of you with long memories may recall that I gave a presentation at the Ontario Library Association conference in 2008 based on the My Job in 10 years blog posts.
Shortly after that presentation, I was approached by Cecile Farnum, the OCULA divisional editor for the OLA magazine Access about…
July 16, 2009
This is a great looking afternoon here in Toronto on Wednesday July 29th, organized by Greg Wilson and taking place at the MaRS Centre: Science 2.0: What every scientist needs to know about how the web is changing the way they work.
The event is free, but registration is required. Here's an…
July 13, 2009
Between the fact that I'm still not completely recovered from my epically awful day last Friday and the blogging lethargy that always comes as my summer blogging break approaches, all the blogging-related brain cells I have left are completely fried.
Fortunately, Chad comes to the rescue with a…
July 10, 2009
Bookgasm is one of my favourite book blogs, if not THE favourite. They have a regular feature by Bruce Grossman called, rather luridly, Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs which gives brief reviews and descriptions of tons of cheesy old paperback originals: mostly adventure, noir, hardboiled,…
July 7, 2009
Yes, as promised I'm going to start workshopping the book I'm working on: My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Librarianship. (Note title tweak.)
First of all, this is all just provisional; I'm at a point where I need to stop tinkering if I just going to get something out the door. Some…
July 3, 2009
Via BoingBoing, BBG and Make, Paul Fryer makes some pretty cool chess sets.
Links to the pics on the Gallery site are here, here, here, here.
July 2, 2009
Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access:
First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (…
June 29, 2009
One fall to the finish, no count-outs, no disqualifications, for the World Heavyweight Guru Championship of the World. Two gurus locked inside a steel cage.
Malcolm "Outlier" Gladwell reviews Chris "Long Tail" Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in the New Yorker.
There are…
June 29, 2009
Simon Owens interviews Scott Rosenberg over at Bloggasm.
Lately, there has been no shortage of journalists that have announced- usually as a form of link bait -- the "death of blogging" as social news and microblogging continue to grow in market share, but Rosenberg's book is a tribute to the…
June 26, 2009
Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better…
June 26, 2009
Rush on over to Feminist SF -- The Blog and read this very funny -- and thought-provoking, to boot -- post: How to know if you're reading a bad book.
Here's a couple of the short ones:
5. Does anyone lurk? If someone's lurking, you might be reading a Bad Book.
11. Does the book begin with some…
June 24, 2009
A thought experiment.
It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times:
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the…
June 22, 2009
Although I didn't blog about it at all (I did Twitter and Friendfeed about it a bit), many of you are probably aware that my work place, York University (Wikipedia) in Toronto, had a very difficulty time this past academic year with a strike, student protests and unrest as well as some disturbing…
June 22, 2009
Yesterday was Father's Day, of course, always a fun occasion for us dads. I'm generally not a huge fan of fake holidays but I usually find a way to make peace with them if they're all about presents for me.
In any case, I thought I'd share my take for this year as I think at least some of the…
June 19, 2009
This is the third in my informal trilogy on engaging in social media. The first two are here and here.
I left off last time with this sentiment:
It seems to me that one possibility if we want to engage these groups, is that we have to figure out where they already are and how we can fit into and…
June 19, 2009
From McSweeny's, this is both very funny and very poignant. A working day's worth of tweets from a public librarian.
Boy wants book on how to make paper airplanes. I challenge him to a paper airplane contest.
about 3 hours ago from web
*snip*
Ask patron not to talk on their cell phone. They…
June 18, 2009
Some highlights from the IEEE's very fine Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2. You'll need a subscription to the magazine to access it on the IEEE's site.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, Denis
Biographies: Tom Kilburn: A Pioneer of Computer…
June 17, 2009
Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. It isn't built yet.
But if York space scientists and engineers have anything to say about it, it sure will be.
Check it out from our internal newsletter, Space elevator designed at York University would reach 20 km above Earth:
"For decades, scientists have been…
June 16, 2009
Some highlights from the IEEE's very fine Technology and Society Magazine, v29i2. You'll need a subscription to the magazine to access it on the IEEE's site.
Those in academic settings might want to especially take a look at Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety.…
June 13, 2009
It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca)
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson…
