jdupuis | June 11, 2012John MacCormick's new book, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers, is very good. You should buy it and read it.
Among all the debates about whether or not absolutely everybody must without question learn to program (pro, con), it's perhaps a good idea to pause and take a look at exactly what programs do.
Which is what this book does. It starts from the premise that people love computers and what they can do but don't have much of an idea about what goes on inside the little black box. And then, what MacCormick does is take nine general types…
jdupuis | June 9, 2012
Academic Librarians As Campus Hubs
Intellectual Freedom and the Library as a Workplace
MLA Shift on Copyright
Book Beat 2012 (on university presses at BEA)
Commencement Address to Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School (Laurence Lessig on political corruption)
How to Fail When Using Internal Social Media
The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (by Cory Doctorow)
Reaching Out: Why Geeks Need a Manifesto
How journals once facilitated and now hinder scientific progress.
Top Libraries in U.S. and Canada Issue Statement Demanding Better Ebook Services
How President Obama could really lead on open…
jdupuis | June 8, 2012This past week one of the true giants of fantastic literature died: Ray Bradbury.
I like what Gregory Benford had to say on the Tor.com blog:
Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings. By writing of futures that echo our nostalgias, Bradbury reminds us of both what we were and of what we could yet be.
Like most creative people, he was still a child at heart. His stories tell us: Hold on to your childhood. You don’t get another one. In so many stories, he gave us his childhood—and it…
jdupuis | June 6, 2012
Real cost of the smartphone revolution
The rise of libre open access
25,000 signatures and still rolling: Implications of the White House petition
Technology Review Goes Digital First
Journalism: The best of times, and the worst of times
Publishers' Fallback Position (GSU decision)
What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?
2012 top ten trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education
Value of Academic Libraries Summit White Paper
Andrew Keen: 'Social media is killing our species'
Tor Books Announces E-book Store: Doctorow, Scalzi…
jdupuis | June 4, 2012Apologies to my loyal readers for the rather inside-baseball library and Canadian politics focus of my recent posts, but that unfortunately is where I'm at right now. It will probably continue for a least a little bit.
Onward.
The Canadian Library Association held its annual conference in Ottawa last week and one of the highlights was certainly a keynote by Daniel Caron, the head of the Library and Archives Canada. Which has been quite controversial recently in Canadian library circles due to the drastic cuts going on.
According to reports on Twitter, the keynote itself wasn't too…
jdupuis | June 2, 2012
Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims
What data can and cannot do
I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.
Why Library and eBooks Issues Matter
Sports Subsidies and Library Spending
Improving Research Skills
RUK: The Maturing Threat of Open Access
Letter from Books of Wonder to DOJ about ebooks lawsuit
Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"
Reaching Out: Why are scientists trapped in the ivory tower and what can be done to escape?
What the Forbes model of contributed content means for journalism
Open Access:…
jdupuis | June 1, 2012It's unseemly to revel in the misfortunes of others. Words to live by, ones I usually take very seriously. Of course, all bets are off for my Friday Fun posts, so let's revel a bit in the misfortunes of Facebook and the man seated at the throne in King's Landing.
As its share value continued to plummet towards zero in its first week of trading, social media giant Facebook has seen off a major revolt by thousands of furious shareholders by issuing a series of heartwarming and whimsical posts featuring kittens and other adorable internet memes.
*snip*
A number of disgruntled investors used…
jdupuis | June 1, 2012
#scholpub , Maxwell and the Laws of Acadynamics
Please Don't Learn to Code
Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer
The Radical New Humanities Ph.D.
The Classroom Is Obsolete: It's Time for Something New
Dead-Tree Luddites
Open Access and the Future of Academic Scholarship
Helping Students Think About Thinking
Why the Facebook IPO Matters to Ed Tech and Higher Ed
Unglue.it: A Crowdfunded, E-Book Liberation Project
Unglue.it Launches on Thursday
Future U: Library 3.0 has more resources, greater challenges
Playing the Role of MOOC Skeptic: 7 Concerns
Don’t mention income…
jdupuis | May 30, 2012Come work instead of me!
Below is a posting for a 3-year contractually limited appointment in my unit. I'm chair of the search committee, so feel free to ask away with any questions about the position. I'll answer them to the best of my ability given the limitations of being on the committee.
As it happens, I'll no longer be the department head of Steacie Science & Engineering Library during the three year period of the appointment. For the first year, the successful candidate will be replacing me while I do a one-year acting Associate University Librarian appointment. The second year, I'…
jdupuis | May 25, 2012Christopher Lee -- long one of my absolute favourite actors -- is celebrating his 90th birthday on Sunday May 27.
I have fond memories of Lee as Dracula in the Hammer films of the 1950s and 1960s which I watched on TV as a very terrified little tyke. In fact, I can't imagine that today's parents would indulge their kids as much as mine did when it comes to watching extreme horror on tv. I mean, I was probably 7 or 8 when I started watching those old Hammer and other horror films.
Anyways, I seem no worse for wear.
And of course more recently I've really enjoyed his roles in the Star Wars and…
jdupuis | May 25, 2012I've been posting quite a bit recently on the disastrous record of the current Conservative government here in Canada, especially in regards to how they treat information, science and the environment. Sadly, I have way too many posts in the works along these lines.
The other day a post I saw on the Deciphering Science blog that really blew me away. It perfectly captures every important detail about the Harper government and their total contempt for science and disregard for the environment.
And with the author's kind permission I'm reposting it here, from May 18, 2012: An Open Letter to the…
jdupuis | May 21, 2012Today is #OAMonday.
It marks the launch of a petition on the Whitehouse web site to "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."
Here is the text of the petition:
We petition the obama administration to:
Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would…
jdupuis | May 18, 2012Yes, it's been that kind of day.
"Fussy" dung beetles refusing to eat shit any more
To zoologists, they are nature's great recyclers, the 5,000 or so species that feed on faeces and maintain the ecological balance of the deserts, farmlands, forests and grasslands of the world. However, this may be about to change, as a younger generation of dung beetle tell their parents they 'are not eating that shit'.
The generation gap has truly struck in the Scarabaeoidea world. Older dung beetles point out that millions of generations before them have been happy to eat shit and they are lucky not to have…
jdupuis | May 17, 2012My union, the Library chapter of The York University Faculty Association (YUFA) has released a couple of open letters to The Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages in the current Canadian government.
The letters protest the current cuts to staff and programs at Library and Archives Canada. The letters do sketch out the context but you can read more here, here and here.
I completely support these letters. You can consider them to be related to my series on the Canadian War on Science, perhaps under the title of The Canadian War on Library and Archives. In…
jdupuis | May 17, 2012
Future U: The stubborn persistence of textbooks
Daunt: library e-lending "disruptive" to high street
A "License to Read": The Effect of E-Books on Publishers, Libraries, and the First Sale Doctrine
Inside the Georgia State Opinion
The GSU decision -- not an easy road for anyone
The GSU decision
E-Reservations
The Greatest Threat to Amazon May Just Be Libraries
Technology is a Double-Edged Sword
In Defense of the New York Public Library
Colloquium on Rethinking the Future of Scientific Communication
Why Nikola Tesla is the greatest geek who ever lived
OLA Statement on Copyright for the…
jdupuis | May 15, 2012
Universities have been taken over by administrators
Making Our Ideas More Accessible (by blogging, twitter, etc)
University Of Toronto's Lawyer In Access Copyright Deal Also Advised Access Copyright On Related Legislation
NLLA advising universities & colleges not to sign AUCC's proposed model license with Access Copyright
Motion for Senate concerning Access Copyright (8 May 2012)
Why Investing In Faculty Is the Best Method To Promote Innovation
RUSQ, Open Access, and Me
HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record 'Game Of Thrones' Piracy
Periodicals Price Survey 2012
Research Blogs and the…
jdupuis | May 12, 2012
The ugly underbelly of coder culture
Used-Book Stores in the Digital Age
The Massive Open Online Professor
Leave only footprints: how Google's ethical ignorance gets it in trouble
The Arrogance of Publishers vs. Academic Culture - Why the Outcome Is Virtually Certain
Becoming Prof 2.0
Library Journal Design Institute, Denver
The New York Public Library Central Library Plan and its Critics
The academic ethics of open access to research and scholarship
You have to share
Has Second Life Lived up to Expectations?
Communications, Social Media, and Technology Are Not Synonyms
If online education…
jdupuis | May 11, 2012Longtime followers of this blog will know that I'm a fan of genre fiction, and the more genres the better: science fiction, fantasy, horror, hard boiled and noir. And in a lot of ways those genre boundaries are fluid, and sometimes the authors themselves embody that fluidity.
Walter Mosley is one of those authors, writing with great success in both the mystery and science fiction genres.
Here's what he had to say recently in the Tor.com blog: The Case for Genre.
In my opinion science fiction and fantasy writing has the potential to be the most intelligent, spiritual, inventive, and the most…
jdupuis | May 10, 2012I'd like to extend a huge science librarian blogosphere welcome to Information Culture, the newest blog over at Scientific American Blogs!
This past Sunday evening I got a cryptic DM from a certain Bora Zivkovic letting me know that I should watch the SciAm blog site first thing Monday morning. I was busy that morning but as soon as I got our of my meeting I rushed to Twitter and the Internet and lo! and behold!
Information Culture: Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
I'm always happy to see librarians invading faculty and researcher blogs…
jdupuis | May 5, 2012
It doesn't matter what e-books cost to make
EdX: A Platform for More MOOCs and an Opportunity for More Research about Teaching and Learning Online
The Problem With EdX
How Should Your University Respond to edX?
Resisting the Robo-Assignment
The Immersion Method -- I & II (intensive "great books" courses)
Reconsidering Academic Careers
Libraries as Indoctrination Mills
The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity
Pay up, Yochai Benkler (the Benkler-Carr wager on the nature of the web)
The economics of digital sharecropping
Open letter to college graduates
A revolutionary new approach…