jdupuis | July 26, 2014I have some theories about both children's books and about science-themed graphic works.
There are basically two kinds of children's books: those that are designed to please children versus those that are designed to attract the adults that buy most children's books. There are also basically two kinds of science-themed graphic works: those that are essentially regular information dump-style textbooks that mix in some funny pictures and light-hearted banter as kind of a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down and those that truly take advantage of the strengths of the graphic medium to…
jdupuis | June 30, 2014The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats
Facebook's massive psychology experiment likely illegal
Facebook and Engineering the Public
College graduates earn more, but that doesn't prove college is worth it
Mirrortocracy: The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture
Google’s latest empire-building tactic: cheap phones
How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine
Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media
Education’s war on millennials: Why everyone is failing the “digital…
jdupuis | June 26, 2014I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments.
I've done similar compilations recently here and here.
MOOCs: Expectations and Reality: Full Report
Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers
Sustaining the Digital Humanities
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians
A Guide…
jdupuis | June 17, 2014There's been a lot around the intertubes the last few months about journal pricing and who pays what and why and reactions all around. I thought I'd gather a bit of that here for posterity, starting with the Timothy Gowers post on the UK Elsevier Big Deal numbers up to the most recent item in PNAS about US numbers. In both cases, they authors dug up the numbers using Freedom of Information requests to the various institutions.
Needless to say, I'd love to see these kinds of numbers for Canada and if anyone out there is interested in working on such a project I'd love to hear from you.
The…
jdupuis | June 4, 2014There are two very strong competing emotions at work here in this post: delight versus depression.
Depression that the government-funded research landscape here in Canada can sink so low that the premier freshwater research facility likely in the world is reduced to putting its hand out and asking for spare change just to fund its core research program.
But there's also a kind of delight in acknowledging that we've reached a place in the evolution of open public science that regular people like you and I can participate directly in making sure important research happens and continues to…
jdupuis | May 28, 2014I have a son who's currently a physics undergrad. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog.
By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media for outreach and…
jdupuis | May 26, 2014Faithful readers of this blog may recall that back in March I posted a set of slides I had prepared for a presentation to a class of undergraduate computer science majors, basically outlining what open science is and challenging them to use their talents to make science work better.
Usually I don't post the presentation slides I use for my everyday work as a librarian, when I appear in classrooms to talk about how to find and evaluate sources in science or when I talk about science communication. But in this case I spent a fair amount of time preparing and revising this particular iteration…
jdupuis | May 21, 2014Extremophiles are fun! Basically, they're the biggest, smallest, hardiest and definitely the oddest bunch of beasties to be found anywhere on this planet. The Palumbi father and son team -- one scientist and one writer -- bring us this fun little book on the extremophiles of the sea.
And literally, the book covers all the various sea creatures from the oldest to the smallest, to the ones that live in scalding hot conditions to those that live in the coldest conditions, so cold that the blood of normal creatures would freeze. We see the ones with the craziest migration patterns, the oddest…
jdupuis | May 2, 2014Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world
Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?
In One Stunning Graphic, NASA Shows Us What Climate Change Will Do to Earth by 2099
Exxon Mobil's response to climate change is consummate arrogance
We Should Be in a Rage
Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why
Paul Krugman: Why We’re in a New Gilded Age
Surviving the post-employment economy
The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street
Revealed: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees
Tech Workers,…
jdupuis | April 28, 2014Two recentish entries into the growing field of graphic novel scientific biographies, both very good, both suitable for a wide audience: Darwin: A Graphic Biography by Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr and Mind Afire: The Visions of Tesla by Abigail Samoun and Elizabeth Haidle.
If I had to count one of these a little bit better than the other, I would give that edge to the Byrne & Gurr's Darwin biography. It has a very amusing "Ape-TV" wrap around story conceit where an ape television program tells the life story of that strange human, Charles Darwin. As a result, the story never sags, the main…
jdupuis | April 25, 2014I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments.
I did a similar compendium about a month ago here.
NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition
Technology to the Rescue: Can Technology-Enhanced Education Help Public Flagship Universities Meet Their Challenges?
Policy…
jdupuis | April 21, 2014Publishing may be a button, but publishing isn’t all we need
The Vacuum Shouts Back: Postpublication Peer Review on Social Media
bioRxiv: The preprint server for biology
Debt, Pensions and Capitalisation: Funding schol comms innovation
How to maximise usage of digital collections
Librarian, Heal Thyself: A Scholarly Communication Analysis of LIS Journals
How to energize scholarship for the digital age
Why universities should care about Altmetrics
Some Things Last A Long Time (How long does it take to publish a paper)
Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations?…
jdupuis | April 17, 2014Up to Here With Trolls?
This Is What It’s Like To Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meet-up
An Open Letter to Brogrammers
So You’ve Got Yourself a Policy. Now What?
Technology’s Man Problem
Why the ‘Open’ Internet Is So Closed to Women
The Brutal Ageism of Tech Years of experience, plenty of talent, completely obsolete
Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
New Study: Internet Trolls Are Often Machiavellian Sadists
Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
Something’s Wrong When Sarah’s Quiet
The Brogrammer Effect: Women Are a Small (and Shrinking) Share of Computer Workers
Hey Silicon Valley! Not every…
jdupuis | April 14, 2014As part of the celebrations for Canada's upcomming 150th birthday, the Canadian federal government has released its Digital Canada 150 strategy paper, and while it`s not all bad, at the same time there is not an awful lot to recommend it. Especially considering it was four years in the making.
My sense is that its main purpose is for the Harper Conservative government to be able to say it has a digital strategy during the next election campaign in 2015. The most telling thing about the strategy, of course, is which department it originated in: Industry Canada. Not Culture, not Heritage, not…
jdupuis | April 11, 2014Oh, Cracked, you are so funny. So funny it just really hurts sometimes. And these so definitely apply to the pickle that libraries and other cultural/content institutions and industries find themselves in as we try and find our place in a future that is very different from the past.
5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.
A Star Trek-Style Utopia is Already Here ... Sort Of
To Stay Afloat, Businesses Have to Pretend Unlimited Goods are LimitedTo keep all that stuff up and running, the publisher is resorting to what experts call FARTS--Forced ARTificial Scarcity. Or they would call it that…
jdupuis | April 2, 2014Yesterday was April Fools' Day, a day I enjoy immensely. I even contribute to the fun every now and then. This year the crop among the science/scholcomm/library community seemed especially strong so I thought I'd share.
Science, Nature Team Up on New Journal / Science
PeerJ now requires authors to deposit ‘selfies’ in a data repository prior to publication / PeerJ
Publish or Perish: Is Publishing the Career it Once Was? / The Scholarly Kitchen
Oxford Commas to Perform at ALA Meeting / The Scholarly Kitchen
Announcing a better way to measure your value: the Total Impact Score / Impactstory…
jdupuis | April 1, 2014Added: Please note the date this post was published on.
After a couple of years of implementing some really amazing and progressive change at Elsevier, I've decided to refocus some of my advisory efforts over the next few years. As a result, I'll be taking on a senior advisory role for the Government of Canada. I'm thrilled to announce I'll stepping into a new position created just for me: Chief Advisor on Science Libraries.
In this capacity I'll be reporting directly to our brand new Minister of State for Science & Technology Ed Holder and one of my chief roles will be liaising with…
jdupuis | March 27, 2014I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments.
Shaping the Future of Monograph Publishing in the Liberal Arts: Results of a survey to Oberlin Group Faculty
2014 Planning Guide for Data Management
ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013
Higher Education's Top-…
jdupuis | March 17, 2014York University mathematician and civil rights activist Lee Lorch died February 28, 2014 at the age of 98.
A few years ago I posted on the 2007 Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans Lee Lorch where Lee was awarded the Yueh-Gin Gung and Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics.
The citation read:
Lee Lorch's mathematical research has been in the areas of analysis, differential equations, and special functions. His teaching positions have included the City College of New York, Pennsylvania State University, Fisk University, Philander Smith College, the University of…
jdupuis | March 15, 2014Trope or fact? Technology creates more jobs than it destroys
Will robots steal our jobs? The humble loom suggests not.
The technology and jobs debate raises complex questions
Chasing Entertainment
Thinking the unthinkable: a library without a catalogue
You're not going to read this
The OPAC is Dead
Concordia rethinking its downtown library
Libraries are community assets
Think We No Longer Need Libraries? Think Again.
Students, faculty decry Penn plan to cut math and science libraries
Saving the Library
Reference Library Unveils 3D Printers, Is Cooler Than Indigo