August 4, 2010
This past Monday morning a new science blogging community came online: Scientopia! From their Vision:
Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write,…
August 2, 2010
T. DeLene Beeland (Twitter) contacted me last week and was kind enough to offer to interview me for an honest-to-goodness print newspaper -- The Charlotte Observer: Find the future at a 21st-century science library. It;s part of a series of interviews she's done with science bloggers.
Here's an…
July 30, 2010
Yeah, last Friday I threatened a sequel and here it is.
Too much fun. And once again, looking in the mirror is a bit tough on this one. I did do a quick search on my blog posts and none of the offending phrases shows up per se. But, some seem a little too familiar.
I'm not done with the…
July 29, 2010
A few of us are proposing this session at the upcoming Science Foo Camp at Google HQ this coming weekend:
The Joys and Sorrows of Blogging on a Network
What with the recent Pepsigate crisis at ScienceBlogs and some rumblings at Nature Network not to mention a bunch of new players on the blogging…
July 27, 2010
A few months ago I posted a fairly long essay on how I was approaching the challenge of thinking about the future. I modelled myself on a few articles by futurist Jamais Casico and focused on why thinking about the future matters, finding the right questions to ask about the future and recognizing…
July 26, 2010
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I pay quite close attention to the InsideHigherEd web magazine. They cover lots of library issues and issues that are relevant to libraries, their blog network is pretty good with solid coverage of higher education issues and Joshua Kim's…
July 26, 2010
Bora Zivkovic for several years has been doing interviews with the attendees at the annual ScienceOnline conferences.
The latest interview is with my longtime blog buddy Stephanie Willen Brown, AKA The CogSciLibrarian!
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in…
July 23, 2010
This is soooo funny. So funny it hurts. Ok, so maybe I've been guilty of one or two of these. Ok, maybe you have too. The more you're guilty, the funnier it is.
To many, the Internet is a world full of promise.
To others, a ripe field ready to be harvested by douchebags.
Both are true.
I think…
July 22, 2010
A great article in last Friday's Globe and Mail, Will the last bookstore please turn out the lights?
The main thrust of the article is that while there's a lot of doom and gloom in the industry, there's also some hope and, more importantly, some innovation.
One source of Bleumer's optimism is the…
July 20, 2010
What with the recent blogospheric developments, I thought it would be a great idea to reprint a post from a couple of years ago where I turned the tables on Bora and interviewed him about science blogging, science and ScienceOnline. The original post is from March 13, 2008. I'd also like to point…
July 19, 2010
The fallout of the Pepsigate scandal continues.
Bora's recent relative blogging silence left me with a bad feeling, an ominous feeling. A feeling like the other shoe was about to drop.
Well, it did. Bora is leaving ScienceBlogs.
As with most of Bora's giant summary zeitgeist posts, you just…
July 16, 2010
So, it appears that Batman is on Twitter.
From the newly renamed Blastr site, I give you a selection of Batman's 34 greatest tweets:
Watch out criminal scum, I'm trying to kick caffeine again. And we all remembered what happened last time, don't we? DON'T WE!!!
Going to help with the clean up…
July 15, 2010
When we think of outreach and recruitment, we don't usually think of using the library as a tool to attract students to our institutions. Here at York I do occasionally take part in Faculty of Science & Engineering outreach activities -- mostly when the library is included in high school…
July 14, 2010
Usually every day brings one or two interesting things at InsideHigherEd, but today is a bonanza.
The Ed Tech Sonic Boom
Today, we are able to leverage a set of well-developed and stable technologies to build in pedagogically advanced active learning methods into a wide variety of courses and modes…
July 12, 2010
For now, at least.
My natural inclinations about this whole mess are probably closest in nature to either Chad Orzel's or Jason Rosenhouse's, so reading them will probably give you a pretty close idea of where I stand. Bora, not surprisingly, has collected a lot of the reaction.
I also really like…
July 12, 2010
As if Pepsigate wasn't enough to get people riled up, this could be even move apocalyptic!
H. Steven Wiley takes a close look at the real Two Cultures, Scientists vs. Engineers!
In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. I don't see a lot…
July 10, 2010
Following up on my first post a while back, All aboard the York University Space Elevator!, the York University Earth and Space Science and Engineering research team of Raj Seth, Brendan Quine and George Zhu have published another paper, this time in The Journal of the British Interplanetary…
July 9, 2010
I love Wikipedia. I probably use it every day. It's become an indispensable part of the modern information landscape.
But.
A few months ago, I was doing a session in our lab with a bunch of high school students. When I do these sessions I try and illuminate how the modern information landscape…
July 7, 2010
So, PepsiCo has started up a new blog here on ScienceBlogs called Food Frontiers.
From the profile:
PepsiCo's R&D Leadership Team discusses the science behind the food industry's role in addressing global public health challenges. This is an extension of PepsiCo's own Food Frontiers blog.
This…
July 6, 2010
Nice article by Vit Wagner in Sunday's Toronto Star, Tough times, but some bookstores have a different story.
A couple of different independent bookstore owners/managers in the Toronto area talk about some of the challenges faced in surviving and even thriving in what should be a period of death…
July 5, 2010
Ok, ok, this is the last zombie post, I promise.
Here are some exmples of my favourite OTT, badass, crazy zombie fiction!
The Book of the Dead is a classic collection of short stories that's well worth reading.
Monster Island: A Zombie Novel is the first in a trilogy. It's one of those trilogies…
July 2, 2010
Noted zombie novelist Jonathan Maberry as a two part post on his blog, Why Zombies? and Why Zombies? - Part 2.
The second post, btw, has one of the classic blog sentences of all time: "When I reached out to the zombie community to ask 'WHY ZOMBIES?' I got so many terrific responses that I broke the…
June 30, 2010
Rather like a normal Friday Fun post, I'm going to highlight some fun stuff I've found around the web on zombies in higher education. And I'm not talking about undergrads at 9am classes either. Note that a couple of these I've highlighted before.
BTW, first I thought I'd point out a couple of pop…
June 29, 2010
Following up on my post from a few days ago, a short appreciation of Alan Turing by noted sf author Frederik Pohl:
The close of Pride Month seems an apt time to talk about Alan Turing, inventor of the famed Turing Test for identifying independent intelligence in computers, worked for the British…
June 25, 2010
Sometimes it's only through humour that we can understand just how serious an issue is. This is one of those cases. Heartbreakingly sad yet somehow ringing very true, this one is from The Onion: Suffering Blue Whales Plead With Environmentalists To Let Them Go Extinct Already.
NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN…
June 24, 2010
First of all, the conference program is here. All the paper versions of the presentations will eventually be deposited in Queen's IR, QSpace, but don't seem to be there yet. I posted about my presentation here: Using a Blog to Engage Students in Literature Search Skills Sessions.
Now, If there…
June 23, 2010
Nice post by Stephen Wolfram on the Wolfram|Alpha blog, Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:
He was in some respects a quintessential British amateur, dipping his intellect into different areas. He achieved a high level of competence in pure mathematics, and used that as his professional base. His…
June 21, 2010
Yes, that David Gilmour.
Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums.
Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record…
June 18, 2010
From McSweeney's, a glimpse into the future perhaps...
7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream
And that's only the first half of them...head on over to…
June 17, 2010
This list is usually the very, very last of the best books lists of the year. It's a good list, but since it's UK-based there are a number of books that we probably won't be seeing on North American shores for another year or so. I'll probably get around to updating my 2009 summary list later…
